Discover the pearls of wisdom of this almost centenary author.
Recently, on July 11, 2023, the brilliant author Milan Kundera died at 94.
And he left us wonderful novels full of mind-blowing thoughts capable of turning your head upside down.
As a small tribute, let me share with you three reflections of mine from three life lessons that I found encrypted in his books so that you can think from another perspective about the reality that surrounds us for a while.
Let’s begin.
On Reality
“Imagine you lived in a world where there were no mirrors. And then, when you were forty years old, someone would put a mirror in front of you for the first time in your life. Imagine what a shock! You would see a completely strange face. And you would know clearly what you are not able to understand: your face is not you.”- Milan Kundera.
Our physical appearance is less important than we are led to believe.
Advertising establishes canons where everyone wants to fit in. And thanks to this, companies dedicated directly and indirectly to physical appearance have generated millionaire markets.
But that same aspirational advertising makes us reject each other.
In the 90s, if you were seen with an overweight person, your friends would laugh at you. But the craziest thing about it was that guys who were fat or short or with glasses or any non-normative physique (my case) excluded each other.
Fat guys excluded fat guys for being overweight.
Ugly, excluded ugly for being ugly.
Short people excluded short people for being short.
And in the end, after living a few decades in this world, you realize that if you meet an attractive person who has a rotten heart, the best thing to do is to run as fast as you can before he screws up your life 🙂
On why to be empathetic
“If you put two photographs of two different faces together, everything that differentiates one from the other is obvious. But when you have two hundred and twenty-three faces together, you suddenly realize that all is but one face in many variations and that no individual ever existed.” — Milan Kundera.
I have been suspecting for some time that you are me and I am you but in different lives.
And therefore, as Marcus Aurelius said, What benefits the bee, benefits the hive.
This is a spiritual principle that I bet my shirt that the great mystics of history discovered—people like Mother Teresa.
That’s why they spent their lives seeking to alleviate the suffering of others.
Because in doing so, they alleviated their own.
As a great alchemical principle of Hermes, Trismegistus says, “As above so below and as within so without.”
Haven’t you noticed that the constellations of stars look like neural networks? (As above, so below)
What if we were part of a whole, a more complex system, a single brain made up of 8 billion people? (As outside is inside is outside)
Collaborating is the only logical sense of life because we are more than brothers. We are the same person in different circumstances.
We are all born in different places and environments but with an empty brain that the circumstances are programmed.
I am sure that if you had been born in my body with the same circumstances and location, you would be me and vice versa.
In the words of rapper Kevin Gates, “Before, when I looked someone in the eye, it was a challenge: you or me. Now I see myself, different versions of myself.”
On feeling special and archetypes of people
“There is no doubt that in the world there are far fewer gestures than individuals. We could put it in the form of a proverb: many people, few gestures.” — Milan Kundera.
They say we all have a doppelganger out there. But beyond physically resembling other people, what blows your mind is the realization that we share many gestures and facial or body micro-expressions that we thought were our own.
And where does that leave us?
We are less special than we think if even our gestures are repeated.
And not only nowadays, surely your way of scratching your hair or winking your eye, or biting your lip when you like someone is more than 2000 years old.
We have not invented the wheel or the gesture.
And this is very wild because if we are, as I said in the previous point, an empty computer programmed when we are born, if deep down you are me, and I am you, and we belong to the same great consciousness. It seems logical to me to think that we are infinite.
We have been born and dying for thousands of years. And every time we are born, we share x number of gestures with other people. Therefore we are like a universal archetype that repeats itself over time.
Just thinking about it makes me dizzy, and I hope it has blown your mind too.
Takeaway
Milan Kundera was a great writer and a wonderful thinker. Hopefully, some of these phrases are true, and wherever he is, he will be reincarnated so we can enjoy him again.
A virtual hug
AG
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