The Philosophy of Wisdom, Love, and Beauty with Nikos Patedakis

Jennifer Norman: Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. My name is Jennifer Norman, founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. I created this podcast to have open conversations about all aspects of the human experience. After all, when we're curious, kind and courageous, we can evolve powerfully as individuals and thrive as a human race. So take a moment now to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. I'm so glad that you're joining me for today's show.

Now many of you know that I'm a person who always prefers deep conversations rather than the superficial ones, so perhaps that's why I am so drawn to my next guest. Nikos Patedakis is a consulting philosopher and educator who focuses on unleashing wisdom and compassion in culture, leadership, education, creativity, consciousness, and spirituality. He has two master's degrees and a PhD, all in philosophy, as well as certifications in permaculture and specializes in educational practices that enhance human performance.

Nikos sees wisdom, love, and beauty as therapy for the soul, the foundation for excellence and success, and the key to Healing. Now he's here to talk about how philosophy helps us to cultivate and appreciate beauty.

Welcome to the show, Nikos.

Nikos Patedakis: Thank you. It's so good to be here. Whenever I meet somebody named Jennifer, I always think of there's an old poem by Lee Hunt. But he wrote this poem, and it goes like this. Jennifer kissed me when we met jumping from the chair she sat in. I'm you thief who loves to get sweets into your list. Put that in. Say I'm weary. Say I'm sad. Say that health and wealth had missed me. Say I'm growing old, but add Jennifer kissed me. It's a very cute poem. And, actually, I asked you if you if you ever were called Jenny because he wrote it as Jenny Kissed Me. And you can hear how it sounds a little different. But I always think I think of that poem when I meet people named Jennifer.

And then I knew someone when I was young, and he knew that poem, and this is what he would do. Whoever he met, like, if he went to a bar and a woman he would meet a woman and say, what's your name? It wouldn't matter. Samantha. Oh, did you know there's a poem about you? I mean, you can fit almost any names.

Jennifer Norman: What a pickup line!

Nikos Patedakis: Yes. But it really was Jenny, so it really is your poem. Okay. Well, nice to meet you, Jennifer. I won't call you Jenny.

Jennifer Norman: Nice to meet you too. And it's so interesting to talk to a philosopher about names because I always was just puzzled by being named Jennifer. I was adopted, and I thought of all of the names that I could have which might have been exotic or interesting. I was like, Jennifer is just so common. It always kinda bummed me out a little bit.

So I think that's why I've actually put two n's at my name. Like, if people call me Jen, then it's Jenn with two n's. I tried to be a little bit different, but now everybody's doing it. So, oh, well, what can you do?

Nikos Patedakis: No. I think that's wonderful. It's really interesting. Naming itself is so, because my name, since it's Greek, Nikos is related to Nike. That's what the shoe company it's not Nike, But it's "Nee-kay", so it's victory.

Jennifer Norman: Victory.

Nikos Patedakis: That's right. And so a lot of Greek names were like that. Like, there were a lot of horse names, like Hippocrates, Yeah. The famous physician, his name actually means, sort of like I mean, "cratis" sort of means ruled. So you could say he's the master of horses, or you could say he's the servant of horses.

It is how I usually think that name, hippopocrates or hippodamia. But, yeah, so many of those names have meanings, and it's really interesting how some names in sort of like our contemporary milieu, if you go back, you find that it had some kind of a meaning. But a lot of names, it's almost like Bob. What is Bob? That's just the thing that goes up and down. Why are you calling kid Bob? It's like...

Jennifer Norman: Oh, well, I think that this is an interesting segue into what we're going to talk about because if we think about the love of words and the love of wisdom and how we do create meaning out of what is going on in our lives, and so many people struggle with that you have actually made it your life's work to dive into ancient wisdom, even modern wisdom, and now you call it dangerous wisdom, which I'm very curious about why you decided to call your work dangerous wisdom, but I am just really curious about why people think that philosophy is so abstract and how you might break it down for those who are like, that just sounds too esoteric to me and make a little sense out of it.

Nikos Patedakis: Hopefully, no one tuned out already. Oh, no! Jennifer has a philosopher. Let me skip this episode. Wait! Wait before you go, I'll make it interesting! I promise. So, yes, it's really important. The thing is that philosophy is something we cannot I could go through life and you could go through life, Jennifer, without becoming a physicist or without becoming a lawyer...

Jennifer Norman: Thank goodness.

Nikos Patedakis: Without becoming a plumber. But none of those people can avoid being a philosopher because philosophy means how we do things. And everybody, if you're a plumber, you have a philosophy of how to do the work. You also might be a parent if you're a plumber. And so you have a philosophy of parenting. It's not written in some book. It's in your mind, of course, but you have a philosophy of how you could be a friend, how you are a community member. Of course, politics is philosophical inherently. It's about what's the right way to organize a culture and to live together. All of those are philosophies. So philosophy means how we do things.

Wisdom means doing things in accord with wisdom, love, and beauty. So that means doing things in a way that functions. Wisdom is what works, but without negative side effect. If I want to get money, I can rob a bank, that works, but it creates a negative side effect. However, wisdom can direct us into right livelihood and a right lifestyle so that my life works without the negative side effects.

Same thing. If we wanna have a good relationship, if I operate a friendship on the basis of wisdom, then the friendship will work without problems, less problems. That's the idea. Less suffering.

Jennifer Norman: So would you say that the philosophy is guiding principle or is actually inherent in us and causes us to act in certain ways or both?

Nikos Patedakis: Wow. That's a beautiful question. Mhmm. Well, to the extent that we are really made of wisdom, love, and beauty, then, of course, we are just allowing them to presence themselves moment to moment as our life, but we get in the way. We get in our own way.

You I'd say the energy of wisdom, love, and beauty want to flow through us like a a beautiful you can think of it as a hose, and the idea is that the hose gets kinked. And so the wisdom traditions are the way to unkink the hose so that wisdom, love, and beauty are flowing as our life. Mhmm. And but we are often very kinked up. And so the it wants to come through.

We want to experience love. We want to experience beauty, but very often, we have sort of obscurations or instructions. Now that means that the teachings you get kinda seem like they come from the outside. Mhmm. And there is a way in which the teaching is trying to go in, that's the meaning of indoctrination in the good sense is that the doctrine goes into you.

We learn things, like, from our parents and from elders, people we really take that in, and it it goes into the mind and activates something that in turn comes out to meet it. So that's which is to lead out. But the teachings are helping us to let that wisdom, love, and beauty come out, and they are beyond all the words. That's another way that sometimes people say, oh, philosophy. It's a bunch of intellectual things.

Mhmm. It's abstract. Mhmm. But philosophy is about ending our abstractions and having intimacy with ourselves, our world, each other. And so the teachings are not meant to get abstract.

They're meant to say, hey. You are being abstract. Let simplify that and just let yourself be natural.

Jennifer Norman: Mhmm. Now certainly, there are different trainings of thought in philosophy from Nietzsche to the stoics, but I'm just curious then if we have a sense of philosophy and yet we have modern day conditioning, which seems to be getting us kinked up. We tend to step on ourselves or maybe the philosophies that have been taught to us, whether it be unconsciously or consciously, are causing problems in our lives, then how can we use wisdom to make sense of it?

Nikos Patedakis: Mhmm. Yeah. That's right. Sometimes this word is a fancy word called polycrisis. It's to say that there's not one crisis.

There seem to be all these...ecological crisis...

Jennifer Norman: We're in a poly crisis right now.

Nikos Patedakis: That's right. Yeah. And we're talking at a time when war has broken out in the Middle East. We have War in Europe again. These are very disturbing things.

Mhmm. And the thing is that all of this is one crisis. The poly crisis is just a philosophical crisis. You have really bad philosophy. That's what is causing the problem.

Because remember, philosophy is just how we do things. Mhmm. And if you are doing things in a way that makes species thing that pollutes the water and pollutes the air. That's not wise. That's ignorant.

Yeah. And Socrates was always trying to teach us that this is a kind of dominant culture thing. But every cultural tradition has these great sages, great teachers, the peacemaker of the Haudenosaunee, Buddha in the east, and Zhuangzi and Laozi. These are really important beings. Mhmm. And they tried to tell us that we cannot live on the basis of ignorance.

We have to find a way to get in touch with wisdom, love, and beauty, and that's what the teachings and philosophy is for. And so we think we need something cutting edge, like the new technology will save us. But the idea is, no, the wisdom traditions have very old teachings that even our science is beginning to verify. And if we will listen to those traditions within just whatever draws you, you don't have to be like, Look. If you like stoicism, great. There's a lot of good things in it, but there are many good philosophies. And if we find one we can be drawn to, then we can get in touch with real wisdom.

Now this is the place where that word dangerous wisdom comes in. Now the reason I call... I use that when I originally started working, and I left the university system. Because we have a famous philosopher from America, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden. And Thoreau said, there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.

When I was in the university, it was really clear that I wanted to do philosophy, and this is a kind of academic thing now. Mhmm. And so I left. But and when I left, I thought, oh, I'm going to call my project wisdom, love, and beauty because those are the three great things of the wisdom traditions. They go together.

They're totally interwoven. When I was getting a PhD, somebody on my dissertation committee, you have to defend your dissertation and so on. And one of the people on the committee said, "This is really dangerous." But he said this with tremendous respect. He said, this is more a work of philosophy than most of what is produced in academia, but it also feels very dangerous.

And I said to him, I wrote, like, actually a little addendum to the because of this, because it happened after the defense, and he didn't say anything about it. Like, they either will pass you or they'll make you do some corrections. Nobody asked for corrections, but I still added this to say that all wisdom, true wisdom, is dangerous. When Buddha taught, he said, the teachings I'm giving you are poison. You need to handle them the way you would handle a poisonous snake.

Now why would a philosopher say that? Because if you don't handle them carefully, they will bite you, and they will become a new problem. Real wisdom then is dangerous in two senses. This is what I'm trying to get at. Number one, when this person was saying it's dangerous, he was recognizing both.

One is that wisdom will always be dangerous to structures of power and ignorance. What threatens ongoing war in the Ukraine and in Israel is wisdom because you don't fight on the basis of wisdom. You don't kill each other. That has to be ignorant. The same thing with the inequality and injustice in our society.

Where you find inequality and injustice, the greatest threat to those would be wisdom. It would say you can't do that. So when we have a system that is perpetuating itself on the basis of extraction and violence and injustice of any kind, it is threatened by wisdom and therefore must keep it at bay. That's why you don't get philosophy when you're a kid. You don't go to elementary school and learn what compassion means, what wisdom means, what beauty really means.

And so they have to keep it at bay. The second meaning is that if you have a little bit of wisdom, it could seem like it functions because wisdom is what works. The problem is if you didn't listen to Buddha and the other philosophers who said, ah, but be careful, if you don't be really careful with that, it will become a poison. Then you'll take that thing and you'll start to do dangerous things with it. So for instance, hedge fund managers practice mindfulness, and that is not a good thing that it makes it easier for them then to go and rob somebody's pension fund, or it makes it easier to go destroy a corporation that be trying to do good.

I can use the things from the wisdom traditions to do anything at all. So there's a danger, and we have pieces that people talk about mindset, flow states, empathy, these are all pieces, and they end up usually contributing to the mess because they don't have the holism. So wisdom is dangerous in fragments, but when it's whole, it's only dangerous to evil and to ignorance. So those are the two meanings there. And that's why we need it today.

That was your original question. What's that got to do? Well, today, it's wisdom, nobody would say, oh, you know what we should do? Let's try to change the world on the basis of ignorance. I have a really ignorant idea.

Jennifer, I have the most ignorant idea you've ever heard. You're gonna love and it will do it. No one would say that. But yet where do we have access to wisdom? Where are we resourced to say, oh, let's do the wise and compassionate thing and the beautiful thing.

Yeah. Okay.

Jennifer Norman: Why is it that wisdom is so at odds with what society deems as success and progress then? Why do people wish to stay in ignorance, it seems like it is a selective choice by humans to be this way. I mean, animals don't operate this way. I know that you've got horses all around you, and they're the most docile loving creatures that have so much wisdom to share with all of us, but yet humans are just hell bent on destroying each other. Why is that?

Nikos Patedakis: Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. And, you know, horses are actually their wildness. Wildness and wisdom are really not two things. So we've we have domesticated them, but that's one of the things about horses that's very special is they more than I think a lot of our dogs, we still sense the wild in a horse.

Mhmm. And that's important. So wisdom is not necessarily thus being docile, although very often, it certainly means a lot more gentleness than we're used to. But wisdom, remember, it's important to just recognize that it can be fierce. When a mama grizzly protects her babies, it's not ego. She's not angry at you for getting between her and her babies. She's fierce. It's not personal. She doesn't care what you look like. The issue is, that's my kid. That's it. And so that's very, very state of grace sort of fierceness. It's not anger. It's not ego. There's no agenda in the ordinary human sense.

And why is wisdom so antithetical? Well, there are a lot of things that are weird about our human beings. One is that...

Jennifer Norman: Hey. That's the understatement of the century.

Nikos Patedakis: There we go. Yes. I will practice understatement during our dialogue. So, yes, human beings very often would rather cling to the suffering they know than let go and move toward an unknown joy. Mhmm.

An unknown and risky joy because we have to let go. You have to let go of what you are and what you know. We are clinging to the very pattern that is destroying the ecologies we depend on. So that shows that there's an insanity. That's a really crazy thing.

Insanity has us. And how do we cure it? What Plato said is he said, well, there are four medicines, and there are four kinds of madness. And one of them is art, beauty. So he said that it's madness that gives us the best things we have, which is a weird thing for a philosopher to prescribe madness.

But he means not when we're being crazy or egocentric or ignorant. He means, for instance, in the case of art, when inspiration seizes you and the poem just comes out. Mhmm. And you know you didn't really do it. Mhmm.

The poets find its work. They're not gonna say, oh, I did that. That would be ridiculous. They know that it came through them.

Jennifer Norman: I say they were channeling.

Nikos Patedakis: Yes. In a way, yes. So Socrates saw it as the divine. Mhmm. Coming. Okay. Right? That idea. Mhmm. And so we can also see it as the larger soul itself that we just don't realize how vast we are and that the soul knows more than the ego knows. Mhmm.

And so the soul itself is vast and can come through. So either way but so then the other ones are love and initiation and prophecy, having a real vision. Like, we think Elon Musk is a visionary, but Socrates would not say that Elon Musk was a visionary. He would say that somebody like Buddha is a visionary because he is seeing what is possible for wisdom and love and beauty for the whole world. Okay.

But why we cling to it is one part of it is that we hold on white knuckled just to the bloody fingered, we will hold on to what we know even if it is really harming us, and lots of us are have been in life situations like that. We say, well, it's not as bad. Oh, it's you know, he doesn't drink all the time. He's trying to quit. I mean, all the things that we've heard or whatever it might be.

And there is also, for some reason, the larger reality, because it's so vast, it's terrifying to the ego. A lot of people will act like they're so gung ho for truth and for wisdom and for insight and transformation. But when you look at the wisdom traditions and you look at the experience of many people, you will find that a confrontation with reality in an unprepared soul evokes sheer terror. Mhmm. And so I think something in us knows that.

So there's a lot at work, really. A lot of us can't imagine. I went and wrote about, there was a woman who was talking about her Keurig coffee machine, and she said, that thing is my life. I can't live without that. Right? But it's a disaster because of all those cups that it produces. Right? Exactly. So anybody could see that on reflection. And she said, I know it's probably bad for the world, but I need it.

And she was interviewed in the newspaper saying this, and it's such a good example, but it's like that with everything. Yeah. We all have things that we're kind of almost physically dependent on the system that we have. Mhmm. And if you have an addiction and you're physically dependent, you can't just quit.

And you know something in your body goes, oh my god. That's gonna be really hard. And who knows what's on the other side? Will it be better? And the wisdom traditions tell us, yes.

It'll be so much better. You're gonna be so much happier. We can help you be really happy. Okay. So that's that.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah. Is it that we have somehow come to believe perhaps in our industrialization, in our busyness, in our mindlessness that, you know what, it's better if we just make life less complicated and so we'll serve up these conveniences which create the ability to not have to think about those smaller things so that we can therefore put our focus and energy on other things. And so we start gravitating to what's simple rather than thinking about the impact, the ripple fact that it has on the environment and on society. In some cases, the choices that we make, we've been entrained to almost be a bit mindless about it. But now it seems like perhaps there is a movement towards consumerism becoming a little bit more mindful.

It's like, hey. People start actually caring about recycled content, about ingredient toxicity, about waste management, and things like that.

Nikos Patedakis: It's tricky. It's tricky because there is a tendency for the pattern of insanity that has us in its scripts. It has an immune system. So there's a tendency for it to take anything and turn it into the way forward for the pattern, not for us, but for the pattern. So when we have this, like, the idea of mindful consumption is actually an oxymoron.

Mhmm. Can't have it, but we are creating...I did an interview with Derek Jensen about this because he wrote a book called Bright Green Lies. And what I called it in that interview is "solar powered samsara". So "samsara" is the Buddhist philosophical view for our ignorance. When we're caught in a pattern of ignorance, that's seen as samsara, and then the liberation is nirvana.

What we do not see and won't really fully embrace and acknowledge and face is that this is delusion. And if you power it using solar cells, it's still going to be delusion, and it will still cause degradation in ecology. You can't think that human beings should have the right to just go and, oh, well, here, there's nothing here. Let me put a bunch of solar panels. But there things there.

Mhmm. And we're not gonna be able to maintain the same structures that we have. For instance, you don't hear management...so if you go to business, I have not heard of anybody saying, oh, we have a course. The main course everybody has to take is non-growth business.

We still have the idea that there will be growth, but that's not in attunement with what nature understands as growth. Mhmm. It's not that we can't fix it. I mean, we absolutely could change everything radically, and we would all have a better world. It is not hard to get to.

Mhmm. But if we're gonna try to cling to ideas like that, no. It won't work. You can't have mindful consumption because beauty, for instance, when you're talking about beauty and presence and mindfulness, and you were talking about radical self healing and radical transformations, when you experience those, you don't care about the stuff that the culture is driving you to care about. To be present, really present in a moment, you've realized that that moment is perfect and complete.

All the conditions for your well-being and happiness really are there, but that's not what the system wants, because it wants you to buy the solar powered Corvette. Mhmm. I mean, those two things just don't go together. So we could have a world much more rich with beauty and abundance for all of us and real stability, but we have to get over the bad ideas, the bad philosophies.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah. I think to get to where we wish to be and from where we are now, there is going to be some incrementalism, and there's not going to be this dramatic leap to that place. But there can be steps of less imperfection perhaps along the way.

Nikos Patedakis: It could be. It's hard to tell because some changes are really sharp. Even evolution has what's called punctuated equilibrium. I mean, let's still debate. Okay. We don't know exactly. But it does seem that, a lot of evolution can happen in a surprisingly short time, and, historically, that has often been the case as some catastrophe comes along and changes everything.

Jennifer Norman: And humans are created!

Nikos Patedakis: Yeah. I mean, you look at a wildfire. A wildfire is not for the forest a problem. A wildfire is part of the thinking of the forest. And sometimes what the forest needs to do is there has to be high intensity burn, and that is a a place where you have more biodiversity around that burn site than you have anywhere in the rest of the forest, and that place comes back to life.

It clears everything out. Now I'm not saying I wish for that, but it may be, and it may be that we don't have choice, we will either have to make a significant change or we will be forced to make one. So nature may say, okay. You can decide. But if you don't decide, I'm putting a time limit, and then I will decide for you.

But you're right. In the meantime, we can start doing things. We can start creating spaces of sanity and sanctuary for each other, acts of kindness. And I love Mary Reynolds' this idea, she has this thing, if you go to WeAreTheArk.org, the a-r-k is about rejuvenative. They're Acts of Rejuvenative or Restorative Kindness. And that's about taking some portion of whatever land that you are able to have access to, either your own or maybe a community and getting it back to nature and putting some energy and love so that we understand beauty in a broader ecological and spiritual way. Mhmm. Okay. So there are lots we can do. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah. So now I am thinking about the practicality of trying to apply wisdom, and understanding our quest for beauty and love, vis a vis making a living, vis a vis living in culture, vis a vis living in society and the times that we are in.

Nikos Patedakis: Yeah.

Jennifer Norman: I know that you are a big proponent of meditation as we were mentioning and some other practices. How can one bridge that divide between wanting to seek to have wisdom, to be in total community with nature, and also getting paid and making sure that they can put food on the table? That always seems to be...we get to a point where there is a clash and sometimes people will say, "Oh, you're anti-capitalism. It's not patriotic to be that way." Or they may say, "Oh, you've got some sort of blockage against abundance or making money in the 3D sense of making it," even though we are surrounded by abundance. We all know this. So what do you do in order to help clients, everybody who comes to you for guidance, how do you give them counsel as to how to not drive yourself crazy thinking about how to bridge these two?

Nikos Patedakis: Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a big one. It touches on the thing that you were asking about in terms of how consumerism works. Mhmm. I was surprised to read to go back and read Adam Smith's Capitalism. He himself was talking about how he lived in a consumerist society. And it was so shocking to think, wait a minute, back in the seventeen hundreds? And he said that people would sew extra pockets in their clothes in order to put baubles. That's what they called them back then. Little trinkets. Mhmm.

And so he said everybody wants baubles and trinkets, and he said this won't make us happy. He himself said capitalism can't make us happy. It won't do it. Only wisdom and virtue will make us happy. That's the only way.

Mhmm. But he said, well, you know, let's do it because maybe it'll solve the problem of scarcity. But the problem when you talk about abundance and scarcity, the thing about capitalism that people don't understand is that it knows how to create scarcity. It doesn't know how to create abundance. The history of it is that it has created scarcity.

It just moves around where it's creating it. And so there is a huge issue to understand what real abundance is rather than our delusions of what abundance are. Because money, unfortunately, is not linked to ecological or spiritual reality. There's no connection to it. Because I can, all you do is press a button, and more money appears in a bank account.

Right? Nothing happened spiritually or ecologically positive. It could have been horrible on both counts. Right? I mean, so if we pass this bill for a hundred billion dollars for military aid, that is going to benefit defense contractors. So as they just got a bloop bloop, money appears. That's not abundance. It's just digits. Money is disconnected from anything spiritually useful or ecologically useful. War is not ecologically useful. It's not spiritually useful. So we we will have to start to recover that. And how do people get started? Well, the thing is that wisdom says you have to kinda slow down to a place where you don't know. There's a place where we say, I don't know.

Mhmm. Martin Luther King, Jr. touched on that because he was as influenced by Socrates as he was by the Bible. He could quote Plato chapter and verse as he could the Bible. And Plato writes these dialogue where Socrates is talking to people who know what they're doing. Like, he would talk to the Elon Musks of his day or the Donald Trumps.

And he would say, oh, you must really know what you're doing. Oh, of course I do, Socrates. Look how successful I am. And so then he would be in to ask them questions, and they would get to the place where they would have to say, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is.

And that would reveal that they really didn't know, and that place in Greek is called aporia. It means no passage. And Doctor King, when he gave his speech about he said there is a force in the universe that can make a way where there is no way. And he was, I really think he was thinking about that place where you say, I really don't know. Good.

That's what Socrates wants to say. Good. Don't know and let that divine madness come Mhmm. And move you. Mhmm.

Now we have to root that in lifestyle and livelihood that makes ethical and ecological sense. Mhmm. So we really do have to think because now, for instance, everybody thinks they can just become a life coach and whatever, and this won't work. We can't have eight billion life coaches the planet will never the planet won't survive. So we really have to think about what does the world call me to that might scare my ego, And can I begin to listen?

Can I begin to ask my dreams for guidance? Can I begin to turn toward a wisdom tradition and say, well, what does Plato say? Or what does Buddha say? And find guidance because wisdom means I don't know. As I begin to change my life, I become the kind of person who can receive the answer of what to do.

We don't know and then change. We begin to change into the kind of person who could know things that this present person can't know. They're too caught in their ignorance. But this is not easy because, of course, you have kids, you have a mortgage, you have whatever rent. In the meantime, it's just about living with those things as well as you can while you begin to make the changes so that you feel more healthy.

You begin to restore yourself, take care of yourself, and you start to find the sources of wisdom so that they will come and help you take the steps that you need. I hope that makes sense. This should be actionable. The place I always begin with people is compassion practice. It is medicine.

It can heal you from the suffering that you're experiencing. And you put you said something about radical self love. What compassion practice actually does is make self compassion and other compassion together. They're totally, totally together because my ability to have compassion for others, including nonhuman beings, but also other humans, that allows me to have more compassion for myself and vice versa. And the same thing with love.

We have to learn. Love is an action and a skill. Mhmm. It's not just a feeling. I feel that I love you, but no one will accept that if we're being abusive to them.

I feel that I love you. Okay. Yes. But this is not love. It can't be.

So we have to start with things like that, and that's the kind of meditation we need so compassion practice, reflecting on lifestyle and livelihood, finding wisdom traditions to help us, finding sources of inspiration in nature and in our dreams, asking our dreams to teach us asking nature to teach us, all of that is part of how we make a good change. Mhmm. Yeah. And I'll say one thing too about meditation because some people will have the confusion.Yeah. That meditation is like an option.

And meditation is first of all, if your podcast is about beauty, meditation is technically the mind of beauty. So I remember I mentioned wisdom, love, and beauty. Mhmm. So love is our lifestyle, our livelihood, our ethics, and the way we talk and relate with each other, and it is also the real practice of bringing happiness to the one we love. The definition of love from those wisdom traditions is that I help you realize true happiness.

Of course, if you're sad, I make you a cup of tea so you have relative happiness. Then if that doesn't work, I say, well, do you want a foot massage? What do you want? I'll I'll make you your favorite meal. And I keep trying because love involves that creativity of trying to bring at least relative happiness.

But most importantly is to extend myself for your spiritual insight so that you have real happiness. Now wisdom is that insight. And how you get to it usually is you need to cultivate a mind of beauty, a mind that is capable of receiving the insight on what to do next, and that is what we refer to as meditation. It's not just a formal practice, though. Meditation is the quality of our being.

Mhmm. When we have anything, whatever we're doing, we might be a little more distracted, a little more reactive, a little more angry, a little more or whatever it might be, anxious, we could also be more peaceful, more spacious, more calm, more open. Mhmm. Those kinds of minds are a practice, and that quality of being is meditation. This kind of meditation where it's open and responsive and peaceful and oh, that's good meditation.

And when we're being reactive and angry or whatever it might be, that's not so good. You never can avoid it because meditation is the quality of your being, and you always have to have some quality. You're using your mind now, and how are you using it? In a way that's clear and stable and spacious or not? Okay.

So also then you that's why compassion is important because it has built in cultivating the mind of beauty, the mind that can see beauty directly in the world and in the simplest things, but also, of course, in the in the magnificent thing.

Jennifer Norman: Yes. Yes. I have heard someone speak about compassion as being the gateway to the higher realm or to your spirituality because it begins with the heart, and it really takes that physical feeling and converts it and transmutes it into ether and brings it back in the form of active love and willingness to make the world a better place. And I often think of love as a catalyzing energy, in order, like a positive catalyzing energy, wanting to create, wanting to to build, wanting to nurture, wanting to grow. And so you do that with yourself, with your with anything that you wanna cultivate around you.

And the interesting thing about beauty is that as I was thinking about beauty, philosophizing about beauty, as a matter of fact, I thought myself, you know what? There is no beauty without appreciation. You cannot recognize beauty or see something as beautiful or feel beautiful unless you appreciate it and have gratitude for it. The act of appreciation and gratitude is to me very much intertwined with what beauty is. And I love that you've been able to bring all three of these things together, the wisdom, the the beauty, compact and wrapped in compassion as being a more soulful way of presenting life for yourself.

And, yeah, when you've got the chaos of the day to day, sitting back and taking those quiet moments to really think about how you wish your life to move forward, really creating that energy of gratitude, of kindness, of love, compassion, all of those things can help you changed yourself as well as the world around you. To your point, there would not be war if everybody had a compassionate heart filled with love and understanding and beauty.

Nikos Patedakis: You start doing something different. Mhmm. And it can start very small. Compassion practice can be three minutes a day, and it can be it's such a medicine. When I was teaching in the university, I would have sometimes people on the GI bill.

And so these were former vets, And they sometimes have PTSD, and I had some of them come up to me. More than one student would come and say, I did everything the VA offered for my PTSD. See, nothing worked. And then I took a philosophy course, and that worked. Why was it healing?

Because it was really an exercise in wisdom, love, and beauty, and I always grounded all my courses in compassion in particular. So you're right. It's a gateway, and it is about a practice doing things differently. The other thing, the Haudenosaunee are very generous in sharing their gratitude, their what they call the thanksgiving address. And they do the thanksgiving address, every morning.

They might do it for different events, beginning of the school day. And the thanksgiving address is this practice of honoring our interwovenness and really appreciating. So you might begin and you could do this. The reason I'm suggesting is that people I often recommend to people just you get up in the morning, and when you make that coffee, don't drink the first sip. Mhmm.

Take that little tablespoon. And even if it's a planter box in your house or a plant in your house, and offer it to the earth and do that thanksgiving where you say, I recognize that this cup of coffee is only possible because the whole community of life made this coffee and made this water possible. And then you send greetings and gratitude to the earth, to the trees, to the grasses. It could take two minutes. It could take twenty.

Mhmm. But just doing that is it's a change. It's an interruption in the pattern that has us. Mhmm. And we start to find our way back to the world. And nature is really important here because every time we build the connection back to the fuller meaning of our life, at least on this planet, you're here.

You know, I understand. Maybe we're cosmic beings from the Pleiades, but you're here now, and so be here and realize that this is an incredibly sacred place. Mhmm. So, yeah, I really like what you're saying. And it just begins love is a practice by loving differently, and whether it's agape or romantic love, by just loving differently, we begin to change.

And, again, we make ourselves then into the kind of person who could receive an insight that today or yesterday, we couldn't, but tomorrow, we can because of these practices.

Jennifer Norman: Absolutely. You also talk about awakened beings of Beauty. I was curious what you meant by that.

Nikos Patedakis: Ah, yes. well, so there's a couple meanings. There's a word bodhisattva. In Sanskrit, a bodhi is "awakening" and sattva is "a being". So a bodhisattva is "an awakening being".

And there's a kind of double entendre in the sense that you and I could decide to be bodhisattvas, and they're like a cosmic superhero because their super power is compassion and also wisdom and the mind of beauty. So their superpower rather than Superman, he has superpowers. He can beat people up, and he's invulnerable. And these compassion...you could imagine how different comic books would be if there was instead of just Superman, there was Captain Compassion. And what if it was she would fly in, and she would say, Superman, don't worry. I'll just make compassion in their heart, and they'll stop doing what they're doing. It's you don't have to fight them. Don't worry. Give me a second. And then the evil villain would say, I can't do this. It will hurt sentient beings. This is terrible. I have to stop! That would be a very short comic Marvel movie, thirty seconds. Captain Compassion's here! Ah forget it. The movie's over.

So these superheroes, they have, of course, they adorn themselves in various ways. And so an awakening being of beauty, there are two kinds, and I sometimes refer to them. The first one is the bodhisattva, the awakening being of sartorial splendor.

Now the bodhisattva of sartorial splendor, she brings people a feeling of joy and spaciousness by adorning herself most wondrously so that when you see her or him or them, you are just immediately struck. And you say, wow. You just look so wonderful. And it makes you feel spacious and nice. And sometimes I used to practice that bodhisattva, and I would wear, like, a beautiful tie. I would go to the thrift store because you can get...when I lived in San Francisco, if you knew the thrift store to go to, you could get Armani. You could get Dior. I could have, like, a five thousand dollar outfit on, but still be a poor philosopher. Right? So I could show up, and then people would sometimes say, you just look so good, because they're not expecting it.

Right? So but then you have the burlap sack bodhisattva, And they also are trying to seek our liberation, but by helping us be less attached to the external beauty and see the internal beauty. And Socrates was a burlap sack bodhisattva. I mean, he didn't even bathe regularly. So people didn't think he they thought he smelled a little off sometimes, and he was taken to be kind of unattractive on the outside, but people saw his inner beauty.

They were just drawn to him. Now each bodhisattva has a danger because the sartorial bodhisattva sartorial splendor, she can think that because she has so adorned herself that she, also took care of the inner beauty, but maybe she didn't. So it's very easy to get too obsessed with the external thing, and you forgot all about the inner beauty. And your friends may tell you how nice you are and all of this, but really, you know there's not true peace and true joy and spaciousness there.

And so the same thing with the burlap sack bodhisattva, they can feel that, oh, yes. Who cares about appearances? But they're they may be as dumpy on the inside as they are on the outside. So both of them have these challenges to really touch the inner beauty, but real the idea is that they're both trying to allow beauty to be something that wakes us up. When we see something beautiful, that helps us to awaken.

But there too, there's something else here. That is that when we think about beauty, we often make the mistake of thinking about a thing. So we say, oh, that's a beautiful song. Oh, did you look at this beautiful poem? Oh, did you see that beautiful building?

I went to the Taj Mahal and took my picture Mhmm. As if the building is the aesthetic object. But the wisdom traditions actually teach us that beauty is an experience. And it's an experience we can be in touch with at any moment, and that the gift that the artist is trying to do is not give us a thing but an experience that we access through the art. And that's why Rothko, the famous painter, he said, I'm not an abstract expressionist. He would say that. And I've he's the one who did, like, those big, like, Color panels. I don't know if you're you're hello. I'm waving my hands for those of you just listening. But he would do, like, these solid colors or sometimes they'd be, like, A dark red and then a lighter red.

And and I have met several people who have told me my first real aesthetic experience with a work of art was a Rothko. And Rothko himself said, I'm not an abstract expressionist because all my paintings do and ask anybody who could who really stands in front of one and is quiet. You will have the experience that I was trying to give you when I painted, whether it's awe, joy, sadness. Mhmm. And so that's important to understand, and that's what we should do, whether we're the bur burlap sack bodhisattva or the bar bodhisattva of sartorial splendor.

We're trying to help people be in touch with an experience, and we have to try to live it ourselves too.

Jennifer Norman: Wow. That is really interesting. And especially in the realm of what I would call the traditional beauty industry is more about sartorial and about the show and the flash and saying, okay. You'll be able to impress other people. But unless you actually do that inner work, then it's kind of like, yeah. You can look pretty, but are you really serving yourself...

Nikos Patedakis: And serving the world. Right?

Jennifer Norman: I mean and are you serving the world in a greater way, or are you just seeing an image, some sort of fleeting fantasy. Yeah.

Nikos Patedakis: I like that.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah. Or then, you know, the martyrdom is it's not beautiful to feel like, oh, I'm doing this, and I'm rejecting all of society and turning into a hermit. That's not letting your light shine either.

Nikos Patedakis: I know. Yeah. The world is asking for our presence, and we have to find I like what you're talking about with the I was thinking of Anne Waldman's, poem well, now it's just before getting online with you because I thought, oh, yeah. We're gonna talk about beauty. And she has that poem makeup on empty space. Have you ever heard of that one? So Anne Waldman was a famous sort of beat poet. She was really cool. And so I'll just read you just a little few lines there. Okay.

Because she had the idea that, of course, she had the idea that really, everything in the world is a vast openness. And the experience of its solidity is really ultimately an illusion. And so wisdom, Sofia, which philosophers love. Philosophia means to love wisdom. It's the love of wisdom or love wisdom.

It is the also the wisdom of love. So Sofia is, she is really this emptiness, this openness. And so that means that when I'm putting on makeup, I could get deluded in thinking that I'm really putting it on a real thing, and then the people will like me or whatever meant. So here's the thing. Makeup on empty space.

I am putting makeup on empty space. All patinas convening on empty space. Rouge blushing on empty space. I am putting makeup on empty space, pasting eyelashes on empty space, painting the eyebrows of empty space, piling creams on empty space, painting the phenomenal world. I am hanging ornaments on empty space, gold clips, lacquer combs, plastic hair pins on empty space.

I'm sticking wire pins into empty space. I pour words over empty space, enthrall the empty space, packing, stuffing, jamming, empty space, spinning necklaces around empty space. Fancy this. Imagine this. Painting the phenomenal world, bangles on wrist, pendants hung on empty space.

I am putting my memory into empty space, Undressing you, hanging the wrinkled clothes on a nail, hanging the green coat on a nail, dancing in the evening. It ended with dancing in the evening, I am still thinking about putting makeup on empty space.

And then she goes on from there. It's a lovely poem. But and it's cool to see hear her reach sometimes. I think you can find a video of her jamming with a band because the beats left to get with the jazz, and she's there doing her thing.

Jennifer Norman: Spoken word. Yeah.

Nikos Patedakis: Yeah. Yeah. So, anyway, I like that. Yeah. And how can we so the bodhisattva of sartorial splendor ultimately understands that she is of the nature to grow old.

She is of the nature to die, and the appearance, the physical appearance of her is not really real. It's changing every moment. Nevertheless, It's a vehicle for her to provide that experience of the beautiful, the truly beautiful. So, yeah, it's wonderful. Mhmm.

Jennifer Norman: Nikos, what a wonderful conversation. I think about how so much of us can explore a bit more of the wisdom that is available to us so that we can cultivate lives which are more in harmony with nature, more in harmony with our true selves, with our souls, with our rather than feeling like we're chasing after fabrications, which may or may not be serving us in the best interest and how by just opening ourselves up to a daily practice of compassion, we can really be much more in tune with our thoughts or feelings or emotions, the love and the beauty that we have inside of us so that we can spill that out into the world a bit more.

Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and for all of these wonderful things to consider. Thank you so much for being a guest on the show today, Nikos.

Nikos Patedakis: Thank you for the work you do. I really appreciate this movement of beauty that I hope it goes worldwide. The beauty movement. I love the mind of beauty, and I really love what you're doing. Thank you so much, Jennifer.

Jennifer Norman: Thank you.

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