The Nectarium

A library of Alexandria for the nature of life

Every book, thinker, idea, story and practice from Nectar of Time, catalogued and cross-linked: 1,602 entries across 12 conversations.

The halls

59ThemesThe RotundaReading, Self-Knowledge, Authenticity, Healing282ConceptsThe LexiconShadow work, Brain as Operating System, Ghosting, Shadow Integration145BooksThe StacksTroll, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Recursion248PeopleHall of VoicesTamir Barzilai, Grant Shipway, Haruki Murakami, Ian Coll231QuotesThe ScrollsLines from the show213InsightsThe DistilleryGet to know someone before you motivate them, Resistance, not desire, creates suffering, The best authors are invisible, Greatness includes painting the picture93PracticesThe GymnasiumMoment-by-moment yoga, Daily No-Agenda Sitting, Grief Dinner Parties, Die complete tonight169StoriesThe Storytellers' CourtSatisfied Customer excerpt from Troll, Lucid dream in the grocery store, Facing the mental hospital in a dream, Immigrant child discovering her roots54Films, music and artThe GallerySeinfeld, Eli, The Princess of Kashi, I Know You19CharactersThe GalleryPeter Riley, Gollum, Albus Dumbledore, Ushikawa43PlacesThe Map RoomVancouver, Canada, Budapest, Squamish46Organizations and movementsThe Map RoomRajneesh movement, Apple, Oracle of Delphi, Nectar of Time

Nectar of Time is a long-form conversation show hosted by Tamir Barzilai, recorded mostly in Vancouver since August 2024. Across twelve episodes, about seventeen hours in total, his guests are a barber who reads Kafka, a book YouTuber, a men's-work facilitator (twice), a dream coach, a grief researcher, a criminologist-novelist, an entrepreneur-musician, Osho's former secretary, a shadow worker and a Murakami devotee. One New Year special is Tamir alone.

Under every conversation sits one question: how do you upgrade your own operating system? The answers pull two ways. One is the toolkit: the self-help lineage from Emerson through The Master Key System and Napoleon Hill to 75 Hard and writing your own eulogy. The other is the mirror: fiction, dreams and the shadow. The show's settled view, set out in the very first episode as the fiction and non-fiction polarity, is that a life needs both. On its own, the toolkit becomes a hamster wheel.

The threads that run through it

  • Murakami is the house novelist. Haruki Murakami comes up in 7 of 12 episodes. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki frames Tyler's ghosting, and the well in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle closes Nevena's episode: the darkness stays the same, but your relationship to it changes.
  • Alan Watts is the house philosopher. Alan Watts appears in 8 episodes. His wonder is offered as the antidote to fear dressed up as logic.
  • Jung's shadow. From Ian's Gollum to Nevena's existential kink to Murakami's shadows, Carl Jung (6 episodes) supplies the vocabulary for the parts of us we hide.
  • Confusion over certainty. The show opened with don't pretend you aren't confused, and keeps returning to the idea that certainty calcifies the brain and that the unknown is a feature, not a bug.
  • Fiction as a tonic for empathy. Ian, Mia, Logan and Grant reach the same conclusion independently: people who read less fiction lose practice at living inside other minds.
  • Love and grief as one coin. Mia Cosco calls grief love's shadow, while Ma Anand Sheela insists love has no dark side, only doubt does.
  • Masks. Logan Macnair asks whether the internet has grafted our masks to our faces, and Colin Gerrard answers with authenticity as action and the cracks of kintsugi.
  • Massive desire, complete detachment. Kipling's If— (4 episodes) and the Gita meet in Ian's pinball metaphor: want everything, cling to nothing.