The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergences of philosophies by it.
Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclu…
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Added by Hal Manogue on November 28, 2009 at 10:15am —
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It is wonderful to move
To a new place every day.
It is wonderful to flow
Without ice and mud
Everything my friends,
Is gone with yesterday.
All the words are gone.
Now is the time to say something new.
Rumi’s words from
Divan-I Kebir translated by Dr. Nevit O. Ergin, capture 21st century thought with 13th century words. It’s wonderful to move in the now. It’s wonderful to flow in this moment of linear time where my spirit meets my flesh. It’s where yesterday and tomorrow i…
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Added by Hal Manogue on November 14, 2009 at 10:30am —
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The hour is striking so close above me,
So clear and sharp,
That all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: There’s a power in me
To grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
Without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come towards me, to meet and be met.
No thing is too small for me to cherish
And paint in gold, as if it were an icon
That could bless us,
Though I’ll not know who else among us
Will feel this blessi…
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Added by Hal Manogue on October 31, 2009 at 12:30pm —
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But the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent the awareness of reality. . .
Every society, by it own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the form of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially conditioned filter; experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. . . I am aware of all my feelings and thoughts whi…
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Added by Hal Manogue on October 3, 2009 at 10:38am —
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We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergences later in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting, as it were, in our modes of thinking, a…
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Added by Hal Manogue on September 26, 2009 at 12:22pm —
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No drives, no compulsions
No needs, no attractions
Then your affairs
Are under control
You are a free person.
Chuang Tzu wrote those thoughts in Chinese over 2300 years ago. The concept that less is more is now age thought at its finest. Just the idea that I could live without feeling the pressure of modern life is a goal worth achieving, for no other reason than to just be. I know I live in a free world or at least that’s what I have been educated to think; the definition of free…
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Added by Hal Manogue on September 19, 2009 at 10:13am —
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The mind is like a crystal ball with no color of its own. It is pure and perfect as it is. But as soon as it confronts the outside world it takes on all colors and forms of differentiation. This differentiation is in the outside world and the mind left to itself shows no change of any character. Now suppose the ball is placed against something altogether contrary to itself and so becomes a dark colored ball. However pure it may have been before, it’s now a dark colored ball and this color…
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Added by Hal Manogue on September 12, 2009 at 10:00am —
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Our faith comes in moments; our vice habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hope of man, namely, the appeal to experience is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. We must explain this hope. We grant than human life is mean; but how did we find out it…
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Added by Hal Manogue on September 5, 2009 at 11:17am —
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If nothing ever changed there would be no butterflies.
That thought has deep roots. Those roots are planted in action which is always constant. I change ever second as my consciousness blinks in and out of different realities. I travel through different mental enzymes to create as well as to experience physical manifestations. My non-physical consciousness creates clusters of awareness for me to experience. I put every person, place and thing in my daily focus, so I can continue t…
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Added by Hal Manogue on August 29, 2009 at 1:16pm —
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The Funny Thing Is . . .
When I want to leave
You hold my feet and won’t let me go
You steal my heart,
And sit on top of it.
Because of the secret You whispered,
And the moon You revealed,
Love’s wind whirls in my head
And my heart loses its hands and feet.
You pass many nights in vigil,
And soar across this sky-dome with the wings of fasting,
In love with flight.
You saw me lost, waving and crying,
And said “I am the guide.
I’ll show you the road
For which you have been searching.”
I…
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Added by Hal Manogue on August 21, 2009 at 9:24am —
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While evidence of our intellectual and technological genius is all around us, there is growing concern that in other ways we have seriously underestimated ourselves. In part because of the blinding brilliance of our technological triumphs, we have distracted and dissociated ourselves from our inner world, sought outside for answers that can only be found within, denied the subjective and the sacred, overlooked latent capacities of mind, imperiled our planet and lived in a collective trance…
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Added by Hal Manogue on August 15, 2009 at 8:02am —
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And a man said, Speak to us of self-knowledge. And he answered saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart’s knowledge. You would know in words that which you have always known in thought. You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must rise and run murmuring to the sea; and the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes. But let there…
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Added by Hal Manogue on August 8, 2009 at 7:00am —
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The Pipe
While I slept it was all over,
Everything. My eyes, squashed white,
Flowed off toward dawn.
There was a noise,
Which like all else, spread and disappeared:
There’s nothing worth seeing, listening for.
When I woke up, everything seemed cut off.
I was a pipe, still smoking,
Which daylight would knock empty once again.
Shinkichi Takahashi the great 20th century Japanese poet has an interesting way of expressing what we all experience. He uses words and images that teeter…
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Added by Hal Manogue on August 1, 2009 at 10:09am —
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So though the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Then by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.
By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from…
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Added by Hal Manogue on July 25, 2009 at 9:00am —
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In your light I learn how to love;
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside of my chest,
Where no one sees you,
But sometimes I do,
And that sight becomes this art.
Rumi, the 13th century poet, is one of my creative teachers. The art of creating is an innate ability I have, but realizing I create in every moment of my physical life seems strange. I use the word creative to describe a great painter or writer while I define myself as a common self. It’s easier to go along…
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Added by Hal Manogue on July 18, 2009 at 9:46am —
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I am a mountain
My words, my sounds are from my beloved
I am a painting
My beloved is my painter
Did you think these are my words?
They are sounds
Which come after the key turns the lock.
The great poet and mystic Rumi wrote those words in 1247. The story of Rumi’s life is an interesting one to say the least. It is filled with human drama as well as a mystical tone that fascinates anyone who studies his work. When I continue to read his vast collection of thoughts, time as I normally experience…
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Added by Hal Manogue on July 11, 2009 at 11:37am —
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As long as we stay in closed rooms
And stiff coats, we were disguised;
But toward the end of winter the carnival
Helps us to play at disguise for a while.
For soon spring will remove all the masks
It wants a clear country, an honest garden;
Already a fully naked air leans on the basin
Where water waits for the shadows of spring.
We'll feel its body, full of sap, stretch,
But have we ever seen its face?
Barely adult, it never takes off
The mask of greenery it completes.
Moment between Masks is…
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Added by Hal Manogue on July 6, 2009 at 8:03am —
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The great sea set me in motion.
Set me adrift.
And I move as a weed in the river.
The arch of sky
And mightiness of storms
Encompasses me,
And I am left
Trembling with joy.
That’s an old Eskimo Song that describes ancient thoughts about physical life. I am a weed in a river set in motion by the great sea and connected to everything around me. My roots are nourished by the sea of consciousness. The Eskimo’s understood and were aware of that sea and lived in it everyday as they experience…
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Added by Hal Manogue on June 27, 2009 at 8:42am —
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There is a cyclic drama inherent in every portion of nature…and all points in that drama are mere stages along the way…whether our perspective is broad enough to perceive that vision or not. Reality is dynamic, subject to many forces that drive it on, and always above all else, it seeks balance. The Greeks called this drama hubris and nemesis, the Hindus the law of karma. It serves the same truth… that arrogance, agitation and domination are not the ultimate way of nature, and they will be level…
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Added by Hal Manogue on November 18, 2008 at 1:55pm —
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You have three choices: keep on fighting, ignore each other, or make up and be friends.
Those words have been said many times over the centuries, yet somehow fighting takes control of a situation and doesn't stop until there is nothing left but broken hearts.
It seems I have been conditioned to think that fighting is the solution to all my problems. I fight over little things in order to maintain control over people and things. I fight over elections and the right to die or the r…
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Added by Hal Manogue on November 15, 2008 at 2:13pm —
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