Balance
Oy. Sometimes I just want to bury my head in the sand. The state of things is terrifying and grotesque, especially if you understand what is really happening with this…
philosophy
Whose Side Are You On?
What side am I on? I’m with the people. By that, I mean all of humanity, and not just one select group, or my own narrow interests. I’m with humanity…
The Gospel Of Thomas: A Key Text In World Religions & A Gateway To Mystery
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…
Good TV?!
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,…
Authoritarianism & Medical Martial Law
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…
Gender, Hierarchy, Civilization & Collapse: A Few Thoughts
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…
Kindred Spirits & “Civilization”
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…
The end of civilization? I’d like to see its beginning
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…
Bad-Asses Wanted
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…
Video Calls: Communication In A Hyper-Connected & Deeply Dissociated Society
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…
Work and Workaholism: Puritanism, and A Day Off
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…
Unplug: Nine Weeks To Basic Clarity
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…
The Bridge of Montaigne; and The Roots of Our 21st Century Crisis
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 Death of Modern World – Or the Death of the Planet & the Human Species
“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…
On “Natural Religion”
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: Reflections On Our Modern World
~*~ 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…
Rules For Good Communication – Both In Writing, and Verbally, and In The Arts (Along with core points on the philosophy of language, knowledge, perception, consciousness, ontology and epistemology, and the nature of being and reality – and lessons on how not to be long-winded!)
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…
Social Psychology & Meditation On Death
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…
The Consolation of Philosophy
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…
“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…