The Daimon and the Soul of the West

Finding Identity, Meaning, and Purpose in a Sacrificial Life

By: Bernardo Kastrup

Narrated by: Asa Siegel

We, Western minds, have forgotten who we are, despite having never once stopped being who we are. We've lost touch with the impersonal, Daimonic forces that give us direction and the sacrificial nature of our existence.

No longer do we realize that our lives aren't, have never been, and will never be about ourselves. Consequently, we've lost our ability to sense the immanent context that couches our lives in meaning and purpose. Our alienation from our own inborn nature and role has led to a tragic schism: a divorce between essence and narrative, being and action.

This book is an effort to help heal this schism. It's about re-encountering our natural selves and guiding Daimon, retuning into the archetypal dispositions we embody, and relearning how to navigate the choppy waters of life in a spontaneous and fulfilling manner.

©2024 Bernardo Kastrup (P)2024 Tantor Media

Good book.

The reader was kind of robotic. But I was still inclined to come back and finish the book.

What the heck is this about?

I thought this book was going to be about the concept of the daimon because the word "daimon" is in the title. But I found out that it's actually an autobiography with frequent digressions and philosophical musings, mostly about the meaning and purpose of life. There's nothing wrong with any of that per se but still it was frustrating for me because I wondered how all of this was going to tie in to the concept of the daimon. There were brief allusions to it but by Chapter 5 the author hadn't really delved into it, not as far as I could tell, and so I started skipping ahead. I still couldn't tell where it was going and abandoned ship.