Maria Popova
speaker
931 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, I mean, I say this playfully, but also not, I think, our most rewarding experiences.
You asked about wonder.
Wonder is only possible in a moment of unselfing.
Talk about what that means.
That means, I mean, it's a term I've borrowed from Iris Murdoch, who used it as a kind of aside in an essay about what nature and art do for us.
She called them occasions for unselfing.
where this illusory package of narrative and interpretation and memory that we call a self comes disbanded for a little moment and the world comes in, the world, the otherness of the world, and also the belonging with that otherness.
I think the self is such a tedious place.
We live in it, and especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood.
It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.
I think what we call self is mostly the conscious self, the one doing the narrating of who we are.
And the unconscious self is who governs how we conduct ourselves a lot of the time without us realizing it.
Therapy.
Therapy twice a week.
Wow.
What a beautiful way to put it.
I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we exist as accidents of chance.
And the universe does not hand us down meaning.
There is no meaning.
I mean, this is also about the divinations.
Showing 421–440 of 931 · page 22 of 47
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