Guido Mina di Sospiro, the award-winning, internationally acclaimed author of The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong: Table Tennis as a Journey of Self-Discovery, is our guest in podcast episode 159. Listeners may recall that Mina di Sospiro co-authored The Forbidden Book: A Novel with scholar of esotericism Joscelyn Godwin, featured in podcast episode 121.

To spin or not to spin? – that is the metaphysical question.

When a mortifying defeat to his teenage son rekindles his lifelong passion for table tennis, keen philosopher Guido Mina di Sospiro sets out to learn the game properly.

Guido’s love for spinning a feather-weight ball takes him from his local ping-pong club, populated by idiosyncratic players with extraordinary stories to tell, to training drills with a world-class coach. This seemingly harmless game also leads him into sticky situations in the CIA headquarters and the ganglands of Washington, D.C. Woven throughout his ping-pong epiphany are philosophical ruminations on Plato and Aristotle, metaphysicians and empiricists, Jung’s dark shadow, Sun Tzu’s war tactics, the I Ching, and much more.

As Guido’s journey takes him from Big Sur to a nail-biting showdown in China against a string of elite players, he finds ping-pong can teach us a surprising amount about life.

“Down the centuries Taoism, Zen, and Sufism have created a large repertoire of short and seemingly mundane stories whose goal is that of violating logic and challenging our assumptions. Twentieth-century traditionalists have done much of the same by turning received notions upside down. Ping-pong, as i will show, has so many baffling and refreshingly illogical qualities about it that, whenever I happened to play an occasional game, somehow it echoed inside me in a new and increasingly more resonant way. And as a result, I marveled all the more at how magical it was that little ball and make it fly and bounce on the table and off the opponent’s racket in mysterious ways.” – Guido Mina di Sospiro, Prelude to The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong, p. 7

Guido Mina di Sospiro has been fascinated by table tennis since childhood and regularly plays competitively. An award-winning, internationally acclaimed author, he has written four books published worldwide.