The greatest scholar of world mythology, and one of the greatest scholars of world religion, Joseph Campbell, introduced me to the Gospel Of Thomas, and made clear its monumental…
Favourite tv shows, anyone? Post your favourites below. I do hate tv, but I love documentaries and history shows, and I make an exception for certain things, like Star Trek,…
No to medical martial law. Fascism is never in the true interests of public health or safety, nor is it ever justifiable. Must we be reminded of this? Authoritarianism always…
What did Sumeria ever do for us? Invented writing, our concepts of time, irrigation, cities, created the first literature…little stuff like that. Sumeria predates ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and…
Thinking about questions of human society and what is “civilized” or “civilization” makes me realize again how much I agree with Chomsky, Gandhi and Thoreau. They have all been deeply…
Civilization? Technology does not define it. Morality does. That makes all empires uncivilized, because they are based in conquest, plunder, mass murder and theft. Amazing… Scholars still talking about…
Sometimes you have to be a little bit bad-ass – just to be a decent person, and do what must be done to help and protect others. Gandhi was…
Thoughtful commentators to the Smithsonian and BBC recently “recommended limiting video calls to only those that are necessary. Petriglieri adds that positioning the video screen to your side may make…
This morning when I got up, feeling exhausted again from the on-going 30-year stint of sleeplessness and insomnia, I thought, I should take a day off – considering I pretty…
Important, extremely useful books here. A brain washing, in the sense of clearing away the fog and gaining some clarity and perspective, is critically needed, now more than ever. What…
What a delightful bridge Montaigne has been, and is: not only between the present modern world and the Renaissance, which is stupendous treasure enough, but also, in another short span,…
“The causality of the One was frequently explained in antiquity as an answer to the question, ‘How do we derive a many from the One?’ Although the answer provided by…
Both deism and orthodoxy are cloudy. Experience, in terms of inner experience, outweighs both reason and so-called empirical evidence, since the former can conjecture or rationalize anything, and the latter…
~*~ Angkor Wat is the crown jewel of a 400 square kilometer set of temples and holy sites, set in the jungles of Cambodia. Built as a Hindu temple in…
Here are a few thoughts on writing and verbal communication, and all forms of communication. As an author, writer, reader, lover of books, and philosopher, I believe I have some…
Montaigne said of fear, “There is no emotion which more readily ravishes our judgement.” That would seem to be the best explanation of our current mass social psychology: the great…
I am officially in love with Montaigne – as well as Etienne de La Boitie, Thoreau, Emerson, Blake, Boethius, Plotinus, Aristotle, Socrates, Heraclitus, Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Kropotkin, Jesus, the…
A Review of Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda Of Modernity, and, A Reading List For Thoughtful People Slow to get going, then increasingly fascinating, Toulmin’s Cosmopolis is a…
Again and again, I am reminded of the need for humility, as well as dignity and confidence. I am reminded not only by my own faults and errors, which are…
“Science”
“I believe science.” Sure, so did the followers of Ptolemy. But the social consensus was wrong; the majority were wrong – including those who claimed to be scientific in…