Distraction Therapy: carving space in the global noise. The mediascape is sprawling and incessant. Feeds fragment attention and pull it outward. Meaning is not given. It must be made.
Isolation, in this context, is a threshold, not an exit. It is boundary-setting for reflection. By quieting the signal field, we create a room for listening where intuition can work. Music then acts as counterweight to dispersion, holding attention in coherent patterns rather than shards.
Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic contemplation helps to name this shift. In listening, we set down striving and attend without demand. Music does not copy the world; it discloses its ground. Even briefly, this posture restores orientation in a landscape built to distract.
The practice is active. Artists, DJs, and listeners must compose refuges inside the stream: mixes as temporary architectures, sequences as wayfinding. These forms stitch fragments into resonance. They invite return to the world with steadier focus and a larger field of meaning.
In a world where overwhelm is ordinary, the creative act becomes navigation. Carve the room. Keep the listen. Let intuition map what comes next.
Notes

* On aesthetic contemplation and the will: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/
* Primary text: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (public-domain scans). https://archive.org/details/arthur-schopenhauer-the-world-as-will-and-representation-2-volumes
* On music as “copy of the will itself”: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “History of Western Philosophy of Music since 1800.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hist-westphilmusic-since-1800/

Distraction Therapy: the latest mix takes solitude as method. Not absence but a clearing. Step out of the outward world and a different light appears. Attention steadies. Breath lengthens. The inner room brightens.
Isolation becomes a working space for imagination. With the signal field quiet, a single tone can widen into a horizon. Rhythm loosens its grip, so intuition can map new routes of awareness. What looked like retreat becomes reconnaissance.
Schopenhauer named this shift. In aesthetic contemplation, the self puts down its usual striving and attends without demand. Music, for him, does not copy things. It discloses their ground. In listening, we are briefly free of the will’s tug, present as a clear witness to what is.
This mix holds that space. Fewer jolts. More suspension. Long fades and patient harmonics invite a posture of inward looking. Let the tracks do slow work. Let solitude do civic work too, preparing a steadier return to the world.
Withdraw to hear. Hear to return.
Notes

* On aesthetic contemplation and the will: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer-aesthetics/
* Primary text: Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (public-domain scans). https://archive.org/details/arthur-schopenhauer-the-world-as-will-and-representation-2-volumes
* On music as “copy of the will itself”: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “History of Western Philosophy of Music since 1800.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hist-westphilmusic-since-1800/

Broadcast radio is often dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of news bulletins, jingles, and chart rotations. Yet, its potential as an artistic medium remains vastly under-explored. Radio is not bound by walls or devices alone—it moves invisibly through cities and landscapes, enters homes and cars, and merges into the background of daily life. This omnipresence gives radio qualities that make it uniquely suited to challenge cultural uniformity and creative inertia. It can be more than format: it can be atmosphere, disturbance, encounter.
In a world marked by cultural homogenisation—where algorithms flatten our tastes and playlists recycle the same predictable moods—radio offers an alternative. Its broadcast character means that a single signal floods entire regions, unfiltered by personal preference, indifferent to demographic segmentation. This very indifference is what grants it artistic force. It allows heterogeneous expression to pass through the cracks of daily life: soundscapes that rupture routine, fragments of experimental music, unfamiliar voices that resist easy categorisation. Radio can insert difference into sameness, opening space for perception to be unsettled.
Arthur Schopenhauer argued that art provides a momentary escape from the ceaseless striving of the Will, lifting us into states of disinterested contemplation where individuality dissolves, and we perceive something beyond ourselves. Radio has this capacity in its very nature. A transmission drifts in, unsummoned, not as a possession but as an encounter. Its ephemerality mirrors the fleeting transcendence Schopenhauer described: a temporary suspension of desire, a glimpse of something beyond the routine, the uniform, and the expected. When radio functions as art, it doesn’t simply entertain—it creates conditions where transcendence can occur in the ordinary flow of life.
The challenge for artists is to resist formula. Commercial radio thrives on repetition, identity slogans, and homogenised sound. But artistic radio can disrupt rather than affirm, placing the strange beside the familiar, turning a kitchen or a car into an improvised gallery. Where new media platforms often promise diversity but deliver narrow echo chambers, radio’s overlooked quality is its capacity to surprise and unsettle. To broadcast is to seed the air with the potential for difference, to release signals that cannot be contained by algorithmic logics.
To reconceive radio as art is not nostalgic. It is a call to reclaim broadcast as one of the few truly collective media—able to reach widely, to fade into the background or seize attention, and to open fleeting moments of transcendence. In Schopenhauer’s sense, such moments are not resolutions of suffering, but temporary reprieves, revelations of truth through sound. In the midst of cultural sameness, radio remains a canvas waiting to be worked anew, a signal that refuses to conform, and a medium that invites us to step outside the closed circuits of the Will, even if only for a while.

Consumer culture has reduced media to distraction and metrics. The metamodern task is reconstruction: reshaping media as a space where creative expression dislodges us from certainty and opens new horizons. Radio Lear embraces this work, treating sound and art as symbolic labour rather than commodities. Reconstruction is not a return to the past but a renewal of depth and resonance, where media becomes a threshold to meaning and transcendence.
If the disintegration of symbolic reference points leaves us suspended in the slipstream of signs, then the next step is to ask how we might re-anchor meaning. This is the ground of reconstruction, and it is here that media, when approached as art and practice, becomes essential.
For decades, consumer culture has reduced media to a marketplace of attention. The value of a song, a broadcast, or a post is measured only in metrics—likes, clicks, revenue. In this reduction, the media environment itself has become one-dimensional: an endless circulation of content designed to reaffirm the predictable, to lock us into the comfort of certainty.
The metamodern task is otherwise. Having passed through the deconstruction of postmodernism, we now face the responsibility of renewal. Reconstruction requires us to restore media to its role as a bearer of meaning, not merely as a commodity. The goal is not affirmation or distraction, but dislodgement: to be shifted from the inertia of our routines, to encounter what is unexpected, to be called into dialogue with what transcends.
Art and media, in this sense, are not about reinforcing what we know but about opening us to what we do not yet know. They create a horizon where the numinous can return. They resist the flattening logic of consumer metrics by insisting that value is found in resonance, in disruption, in the shock of recognition.
Radio Lear steps into this work as a platform for emergent sound and symbolic reconstruction. It is not a channel for distraction, but for re-attunement. By experimenting with sound, voice, and music, we seek to re-root media in the soil of creative expression, so that it may once again serve as a threshold to meaning rather than an engine of consumption.
Reconstruction is not nostalgia. It does not seek to restore the old symbols uncritically. Rather, it means weaving from fragments new constellations, grounding them in lived experience and creative imagination. It means giving form to the transcendent dimensions that make life bearable, even beautiful.
The work of artists and media practitioners now is to engage in this reconstruction consciously. To treat the media not as a product, but as a field of symbolic labour, where what we make together reshapes how we see, how we feel, how we live. In doing so, we begin to fashion the cultural infrastructure of a society that values depth over distraction, meaning over metrics, resonance over repetition.

The collapse of shared symbols leaves us adrift in a world of empty signs. For Radio Lear, this dissolution is an opening. Postmodern irony exhausted itself; metamodernism invites renewal. Artists can restore the transcendent and numinous dimensions of life by re-rooting our symbolic experience in depth, myth, and aesthetic practice. Schopenhauer saw art as a momentary escape from the restless Will, a glimpse of eternity. Today, radio, music, and performance can serve again as thresholds of meaning. Radio Lear exists to nurture this reconstruction—tending the fragments, reimagining the symbolic, and shaping new constellations of meaning that speak to both the emergent and the eternal.
We live amidst dissolution. The once solid markers of meaning—rituals, traditions, institutions, even the symbols of our shared language—are now scattered like fragments in a slipstream. Detached from their symbolic roots, they float free, endlessly circulated through the machinery of global consumption. A sign is no longer anchored to what it once represented. It is a surface without depth, a gesture without ground.
For artists and creative practitioners, this is not merely a predicament but a rare aperture. When the old reference points have disintegrated, we are granted the space to redefine them. To weave new systems of meaning. To give back to our communities not stale affirmations of what we already think we know, but the surprise of the emergent and the transcendent.
Postmodernism trained us to doubt, to ironise, to strip every sign of its authority until nothing remained but the echo of nihilism. Yet metamodernism begins where that scepticism exhausted itself. It holds the capacity to overturn the void left behind by consumer culture’s endless cycle of signs without substance. It invites us to reawaken the numinous dimension of our symbolic life, to dare once more to look for transcendence in the aesthetic, the mythic, the archetypal.
Arthur Schopenhauer understood this possibility. Art, for him, offered a way to slip the grasp of the blind Will—a glimpse of eternity beyond the restlessness of desire. Today, in our dislocated media-saturated age, artists must re-enter that terrain. Music, poetry, performance, and radio can renew their power as thresholds to the infinite, places where signs become rooted again in lived and felt truth.
Radio Lear exists in this space of renewal. It is a practice of reconstruction, a sounding of what is yet possible. To tend the fragments, to realign the broken symbols, to make of them a new constellation of meaning. The task is not to restore the past, but to imagine into being the symbolic worlds that can sustain us through what comes next.

In the age of constant notifications and algorithmic playlists, it is easy to overlook the peculiar power of broadcast radio. Unlike streaming services that respond to our every click, radio flows outward, covering whole regions with its signal, indifferent to whether we are listening closely or only half-aware. This quality gives radio an artistic dimension that challenges how we perceive sound and music. It is not a personalised service but a shared atmosphere, a sonic weather system that we inhabit.
As Schopenhauer once suggested, art offers a reprieve from the endless striving of the Will, lifting us into states of contemplation where time and ego fall away. Radio, with its capacity to merge into the background of daily life, achieves something similar. It allows sound art and music to slip past our conscious defences, to enter us indirectly. The medium’s very ephemerality—the fact that a sound is here one moment and gone the next—reminds us that art can be less about possession and more about encounter. What is heard is not owned, but experienced.
For artists, this opens new possibilities. Radio can be more than a vehicle for commercial tracks or news bulletins. It can be used as a canvas of airwaves, carrying experimental compositions, fragmented narratives, or immersive soundscapes that alter our sense of time and space. Its reach allows art to be dispersed widely, not confined to galleries or concert halls, but present in kitchens, workshops, and car journeys. The listener, often unwittingly, becomes part of a collective audience bound by the same frequencies.
To think of radio as art is to embrace its dual nature: it can command attention with a striking broadcast, yet it can also retreat into ambience, becoming part of the unnoticed fabric of life. In this lies its transformative potential. It unsettles our routines, not with spectacle, but with quiet insinuation, placing sound in contexts we did not expect. It is an art of transmission and reception, of distance and intimacy, of both background and foreground. In the slipstream of radio, sound art and music gain a fresh capacity to disrupt habit and invite transcendence.

This Distraction Therapy episode explores how artists can respond to cultural reconstruction without relying on lectures or manifestos. Drawing on Schiller’s call for art to challenge rather than affirm, the post considers how Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jung each positioned art as a space for freedom, value creation, transcendence, and archetypal depth. Schopenhauer, in particular, saw art—especially music—as a means of temporary transcendence beyond the restless Will. The blog argues that in a metamodern age, art should nurture the emergent and the transcendent, creating conditions for audiences to encounter the unexpected. Rather than explaining intent, artists are urged to make space for resonance, surprise, and new sensibilities to form.
What should artists do when culture moves from deconstruction to reconstruction. Not lecture. Not reassure. Create conditions in which the emergent appears, and the transcendent can be sensed.
Galleries often turn into classrooms of doctrine. Walls explain intent. Panels fix meaning. Audiences are told what to feel and which position to adopt. The work becomes commentary. Strangeness drains away. Risk is avoided. Encounter is replaced by compliance.
Schiller warned against this. In his letters on aesthetic education, he argues that art must be formative, not affirmative. It should unsettle the already known and invite freedom through play. Aesthetic experience educates by expanding capacity, not by dictating conclusions1.
The reconstructive task does not abandon thought. It refuses reduction to position-taking. Kant shows how judgement opens a space where understanding meets something more than concepts. Free play signals a beyond that cannot be captured by instruction alone2.
Nietzsche asks for creation rather than comfort. Values are made in the act of shaping a life. Art becomes a testing ground for new forms of meaning rather than a manual for belief3.
Schopenhauer points to attention as relief from restless will. In aesthetic contemplation, especially in music, the grip of appetite loosens and a larger order can be heard. Explanation cannot substitute for this mode of knowing4.
Jung charts how symbols carry psychic depth. A work that engages symbol invites participation from the unconscious and the body. Identity is met rather than preached to. The image works because it is lived, not because it is explained5.
For Distraction Therapy, the response is practical. Programme by feeling and thought in tandem. Let pieces converse without moral signage. Hold dissonance until a new harmony forms. Favour encounter over exposition. Trust listeners to bring meanings to term.
Reconstruction needs artists who host difficult freedom. Challenge what is already assumed. Nurture forms where the emergent can arise. Leave enough unsaid for the transcendent to speak.
Endnotes

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Public‑domain translations available via Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive; overview in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Friedrich Schiller” entry.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement. Public‑domain text at Project Gutenberg; overview at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Kant’s Aesthetics” entry.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Public‑domain editions at Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive; overview at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Friedrich Nietzsche” entry.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Public‑domain editions at Internet Archive; overview at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Schopenhauer’s Aesthetics.”
C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9i). Scholarly overviews at Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and related archives.

This episode of Distraction Therapy explores the tension between existential and spiritual identity. Existentialists frame identity as a negotiation of meanings, while essentialists root it in archetypes and symbols. Drawing on Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Jung, the post shows how metamodernism seeks a reconstruction after deconstruction, holding semiotic play and symbolic depth in creative tension.
Identity today is argued over in two tongues. One says we are made in the traffic of meanings, ourselves negotiated in the marketplace of signs. The other says we are shaped by deeper patterns, the symbolic and archetypal roots that press up through dream and myth. The first is existential and semiotic. The second is spiritual and essential. Metamodern life asks us to keep both in view and to work with their tension rather than erase it.
Kant framed the split. We never meet reality as it is in itself, only as it appears within the forms of our sensibility and understanding. Identity becomes a practical synthesis: we organise experience and act within its bounds. Yet Kant also leaves a remainder. Freedom and the moral law signal a beyond, a noumenal pressure that will not fit inside the play of signs. In this space, a spiritual dimension enters, not as dogma, but as limit and summons1.
Nietzsche tears down certainties, then hands us a task. With the old guarantees gone, we must become authors and artists of ourselves. Zarathustra calls this a crossing: “man is a rope,” stretched and shaking, yet still dancing. Here identity is created in the open, tested in relation and risk. But the creativity Nietzsche demands also feels like devotion. Value‑making is a spiritual exercise by another name, a vow to shape life as art2.
Schopenhauer hears beneath this a darker engine: the blind Will that drives all striving and suffering. He offers, not consolation, but a lucid interval. In aesthetic contemplation—above all, in music—we become “will‑less” knowers who glimpse an order not chained to appetite. This is not escape from the world so much as a re‑tuning of attention. Identity loosens its grip, and something larger sounds through us3.
Jung turns that sounding into a cartography. Myths and images carry the recurrent forms of psychic life. Persona and role belong to the existential street, where meaning is negotiated and validated. Archetype and symbol belong to the temple, where meaning is received and deepened. Individuation asks us to move between street and temple without getting trapped in either. Psyche is embodied throughout; there is no tidy split between mind and body, sign and flesh4.
After deconstruction, metamodern practice begins the imaginative reconstruction. Not a return to fixed essences, not a surrender to pure construction. Rather, an oscillation that treats semiotic negotiation and symbolic depth as complementary instruments. We learn to read the room and the dream. We test meanings in dialogue while honouring the images that arrive unbidden. We become translators between the marketplace and the sanctuary.
This episode of Distraction Therapy stages that translation in sound. Tracks chosen for their semantic play sit alongside pieces that work like archetypal signals. You hear the argument of the street and the murmur of the temple. The aim is not resolution as final verdict, but resolution as musical practice: tuning, blending, holding dissonance until a richer harmony appears.
In metamodern terms, identity is a craft. We compose ourselves with others through signs. We root ourselves through symbols that have carried human meaning across centuries. Likewise, we do both at once, iteratively. And when the mix lands, you feel it. Not a slogan. Not a system. A shape your life can move to.
Endnotes

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

This episode of Distraction Therapy explores Carl Jung’s vision of the Pleroma and the Seven Sermons to the Dead. It considers how differentiation and imagination give shape to the soul, and how Abraxas symbolises the unity of opposites. Framed through metamodern thought, the episode reflects on music and sound as early practices of perception and aesthetic experience, helping us navigate beyond postmodern fragmentation toward new forms of meaning.
When Jung turned to the voice of his inner depths, he composed what he called the *Seven Sermons to the Dead*. These strange, visionary writings framed the human soul in relation to the Pleroma—the fullness in which all opposites dissolve, where every distinction is undone and nothing can be grasped. In this place, there is no light without darkness, no life without death, no spirit without matter. The opposites are swallowed in the totality. To lose oneself entirely in the Pleroma is to be reduced to formlessness.
But Jung’s sermons do not leave us there. They insist that to live as a human being is to draw lines of distinction. Out of the fullness we must shape a self. The act of separating, differentiating, and distinguishing is not hubris but necessity: it is the birth of the soul out of the abyss. Each imagination, each creative act, each aesthetic gesture is a thread spun from the fullness into form. The Pleroma remains the background, but we are called to live as figures that stand forth against it.
To orient this task, Jung introduces the figure of Abraxas, a power greater than gods and devils, who holds together the union of opposites. Abraxas is the symbol of that which cannot be captured by moral categories alone, the dynamism that fuses life and death, creation and destruction. Where the gods of light and order insist on purity, Abraxas insists on wholeness. This, Jung suggests, is closer to the truth of the human condition. We are not meant to dissolve in perfection, but to struggle with and hold together the tensions of opposites.
The challenge of metamodernism resonates here. Postmodern critique showed us the fragments, the deconstruction of all grand narratives, the endless relativity of meaning. Yet when relativism becomes an ideal in itself, it collapses into a sterile return to the Pleroma, stripped of its living mystery. Metamodern life asks something different: to oscillate between the fragments and the whole, to recognise the flux of meaning while still daring to weave forms of sense that can guide our living. It is an Abraxas-like act, combining what seems irreconcilable.
Music and sound mark this practice at its earliest level. Long before speech, we learn to distinguish rhythm, tone, and resonance. To listen is to begin the work of differentiation, of separating harmony from chaos, pattern from flux. Aesthetic experience is not trivial: it is how we practise being souls who both belong to the fullness and also stand apart. In listening, we are reminded of the archetypal dance of opposites. Each beat affirms time and silence. Each melody affirms form and dissolution. In this sense, sound is an early sermon of its own, teaching us how to live amid contradiction.
Schopenhauer, who called music the most direct expression of the Will, saw in it a disclosure of life’s essence. Jung, through the Sermons, pointed to the same root: the hidden dynamism of existence where gods, devils, and Abraxas contend. Both recognised that aesthetic experience offers a way of shaping the self without losing touch with the source. To listen is to be drawn close to the Pleroma, yet to remain distinct enough to create meaning.
In this episode of *Distraction Therapy*, the music mix is offered as a modern sermon. Not a dogma, but a resonance. A chance to hear the fullness and yet carry back a thread of form. To listen is to participate in the metamodern art of oscillation—between dissolution and distinction, chaos and coherence,

This Distraction Therapy music mix blog explores Carl Jung’s idea of the Pleroma and Differentiation as a creative process. Drawing on Jung’s Red Book and Seven Sermons to the Dead, it reflects on how new forms emerge from the unconscious when opposites are distinguished and given form. Using metaphors of water arising from hydrogen and oxygen, it shows how metamodern aesthetics embraces transcendence and transformation, producing art and music that is more than the sum of its parts. The post invites listeners to experience the mix as a contemplative space where inner images, symbols, and emotions emerge into form.
Carl Jung, in his visionary writings, speaks of the Pleroma—the undifferentiated fullness from which all arises. It is the ground of being, without form or measure, where all opposites coincide and dissolve. Yet from this fullness comes the necessity of differentiation. Without distinguishing light from darkness, sound from silence, self from other, nothing could come into existence. The creative act, whether in psyche or art, requires a cutting-apart of what was once boundless.
Jung puts it starkly: “Whoever wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There he would learn to know himself.”[1] This wandering is a process of differentiation, of allowing the unconscious pleromatic sea to crystallise into symbols, feelings, and visions that can be grasped and lived.
To create from the unconscious is therefore not to impose control, but to allow form to emerge. Just as hydrogen and oxygen contain no whisper of rivers, seas, or storms, yet water arises from their union with properties irreducible to either, so too do our dreams, images, and fragments combine to produce something more than their parts. In this lies the paradox of emergence: the whole cannot be foreseen by analysing the elements, yet the whole depends on them for its being.
Metamodern aesthetics, unlike the irony-soaked reflexivity of postmodernism, embraces this dynamic of emergence. It recognises that art is not merely deconstructing or parodying fragments of culture, but an attempt to draw new constellations from them. It is an orientation toward transcendence and transformation, where music, painting, or poetry is not only reflective but generative. Each note in a mix is a fragment, each texture a molecule—but the experience that arises is more like water, flowing with qualities no single sound could predict.
In this light, the Distraction Therapy mix becomes an act of differentiation. Sounds, textures, and rhythms are drawn out from the pleromatic continuum of possibility and shaped into a stream. The listener, too, participates in this differentiation. By giving attention, by letting feelings, thoughts, and images surface, each person’s psyche mirrors the creative process itself. The unconscious offers its fullness, and through listening, something singular takes form.
To listen, then, is to enter the mystery of emergence. It is to remember that newness is possible, that what comes forth from us and into us is not reducible to its components. Music is more than notes, just as life is more than atoms. And as Jung reminds us, the soul is not found in abstractions, but in the differentiated figures and symbols that rise from the depths when we dare to let them live.
Allow this mix to be water. Let it carry you from the pleromatic vastness into moments of form, flow, and transformation. In its sounds you may glimpse how art becomes a vessel of becoming, where the infinite enters the finite and whispers of transcendence are heard.
In the Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung gave mythic body to this process. He describes the white bird, “a half-celestial soul of man… a messenger of the mother,

When Carl Jung entered into the work that became his Red Book, he described it as a confrontation with the soul. He did not set out with a plan or strategy. Instead, he allowed images to rise, gave them voice, and held dialogue with them until they revealed meaning. Jung called this practice active imagination, but he also spoke of it more simply as listening: “I must let myself be carried along by what occurs… it is the path of what is to come.” Here the journey is not outward but inward, and the traveller’s task is to remain present to whatever emerges from the depths.
To do this requires what Jung called amplification: lingering with the images of dreams or visions, connecting them with myth, poetry, and symbol, until they begin to speak in a fuller register. Such images are not solved like puzzles, but lived into. “The soul becomes a personification and can be drawn into life,” he wrote. By cultivating a relationship with this inner presence, we begin to encounter the Self – the centre and totality of the psyche, where opposites are reconciled and wholeness is glimpsed.
Music offers a natural vessel for this work. Unlike language, which divides and defines, music communicates directly with the unconscious. Schopenhauer, who influenced Jung, called music a direct expression of the Will itself – the hidden energy of existence that lies beneath representation. In listening, we may enter a state of what Jung called contemplation, where attention is suspended and the imagination is free to respond. The music mix then becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a ritual space, a container in which images can be evoked, held, and transformed.
Jung himself recognised this symbolic quality in music, writing: “Music reaches the deep archetypal material in us, beyond the personal. It speaks to that in us which is beyond words.” In this sense, a mix can function like the illuminated folios of the Red Book: pages where inner figures, moods, and landscapes come alive through symbol and colour. To listen without agenda is to step into dialogue with these presences, much as Jung did when he painted his visions and spoke with his inner guides.
Our culture, so full of instrumental media, often neglects this inner work. We are surrounded by channels that demand quick reactions, shallow engagement, or endless productivity. What is rarer is a medium that asks us to sit without expectation, to hold space for what is not yet known. Jung warned that without this, “the soul will escape us, and we will become possessed by it in other ways.” The need for contemplative media is not a luxury but a necessity for psychic balance.
This edition of the Distraction Therapy music mix is therefore offered as a kind of modern ritual. Do not listen in order to plan, achieve, or distract. Let the sounds open doors within. Sit with the mix as if with a dream – not rushing to interpret, but waiting for the images that may come. Attend to them as you would a visitor, uncertain yet meaningful. They may be fleeting, fragmentary, or difficult. They may also carry a truth that no conscious striving could manufacture.
To contemplate with the soul is to enter into relationship with one’s own depths. It is to accept that the journey inward is no less vital than journeys outward. Music can hold this space, carrying us through moods of shadow and light, through loss and release, through silence into renewal. As Jung discovered in his Red Book, “If you do not speak to your soul, you lose her. If you find your soul again, you will find her in the images of your dreams.”
Let the mix be an invitation to such speaking, such listening, such discovery. Not a strategy, not a plan, but a vessel for imagination – an open page where the symbols of your own inner book may write themselves in sound.

To live in our contemporary world is to stand on a rope bridge stretched across a deep ravine. On one side lies the rock of tradition, firm but immovable; on the other, the shifting sands of relativism, unstable and endlessly dispersing. If we clutch too tightly to the stone, we become rigid statues, trapped in inherited dogma. If we sink into the sand, we are swallowed by endless uncertainty. What remains is the dance upon the bridge—the two-step between opposites that keeps us balanced in motion.
Nietzsche saw this with remarkable clarity. He spoke of dancing not as entertainment but as a symbol of freedom. The dance is the refusal of heavy-footed dogmatism, the breaking of chains forged by the rigid truths of the past. To dance is to move lightly into the future, like a flame flickering yet never extinguished, shaping new forms of ethical and aesthetic life. The dancer accepts chaos yet turns it into rhythm, creating beauty out of tension. In Nietzsche’s vision, to dance is to say yes to life, even when it trembles on the edge of catastrophe.
Carl Jung offered another vision of this same movement, but directed inward. He taught that the psyche itself is a theatre, filled with actors wearing masks: the shadow, the wise old man, the anima, the trickster. To silence these figures is to deny half of ourselves; to let them speak is to allow the inner stage to come alive. Through active imagination we converse with these characters, turning their conflict into dialogue, their discord into choreography. This inner dance between figures of the soul mirrors the outer dance of opposites in culture and history.
It is here that Zarathustra steps onto the stage. Nietzsche’s prophet descends from the mountains not with commandments carved in stone, but with riddles and dances. He is the figure who dares to say that the old gods are dead, and yet instead of despair, he offers a song. Zarathustra tells us that we must learn to walk a rope stretched over an abyss, transforming our trembling into dance. He does not hand us a map, but teaches us to move—sometimes stumbling, sometimes soaring—towards new forms of life that affirm rather than deny existence.
Art, and music above all, becomes the place where this dance is rehearsed. As Schopenhauer reminded us, music speaks the language of the Will itself, bypassing words and reason. It is the tide that carries us out of ourselves, allowing us to glimpse patterns too vast to be seen by the eye alone. In a melody, contradiction becomes harmony; in rhythm, conflict becomes movement. Music does not choose between opposites—it turns them into steps in the same dance.
Our latest Distraction Therapy mix is created in this spirit. Each track is a step on the rope bridge, a gesture of balance, a refusal to freeze or to fall. It is a score for learning how to move within contradiction, for turning weight into rhythm, for weaving chaos into beauty. Listening is itself a form of dancing, where the body may remain still, but the soul sways to the rhythm of becoming.
This is the two-step of meaning in metamodern times. Not a march into certainty, nor a collapse into fragmentation, but a dance that carries us forward—light-footed, attentive, and alive—guided by Zarathustra, who whispers that life is not a riddle to be solved, but a dance to be performed.