Anonymous asked: What are a few of your favorite books? And who is your favorite philosopher?
that is not a simple question for me.
books are the path that chose me.
i read everything i could, i devoured libraries.
i skipped school not to run to the beach and get high, but to hide out in the used book stores and talk with people who were “alive”.
i longed for inspiration.
for me books became living entities.
i read mostly philosophy, psychology, and “religious”, sometimes “new age” texts. as well as the ancient sacred texts. i read the great classics of literature, back from when writers were artists.
and still i wanted more.
a few of my favorite books? well there are thousands.
The Dragons of Eden, Carl sagan
Reason and Revolution, Herbert Marcuse
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly Palmer Hall
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico
The Complete Works of Frank Herbert
The First and Last Freedom, Jiddhu Krishnamurti
Mind is a Myth, U.G. Krishnamurti
Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, Ervin Laszlo
The Book of Genesis
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (Unabridged)
The Diamond Sutra
Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead
Tertium Organum, Ouspensky
The Holotropic Mind, Stanislav Grof, Hal Zina Bennett
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
The Principles of Psychology, William James
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
The Idiot, Dostoevsky
Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise, Laing
anything Wilhelm Reich
anything Raymond Kurzweil
and that isn’t even a very decent beginning to a list that i could work on for the rest of my days.
A favorite philosopher?
you may know from some of my past posts that i studied philosophy to the doctorate level at Leeds, and completed everything except dissertation.
well, i completed it but i never turned it in. my very thesis was rejected from the beginning. it was more important to me to be satisfied with what i had settled on myself, and so i dropped the battle with the powers that were.
i had no need to prove anything to anyone anymore, and even though i sometimes still explain things, it is not out of an inherent need to explain myself or my conclusions about philosophy to anyone. it is not to ‘prove” anything.
i am just sharing with friends who inquire.
that being said, i interact with philosophy as an art-form.
the fine-art of speculation.
the art of attempting the impossible.
to reduce into mere words, to systematize, institutionalize, and methodize, this thing called life.
it is a ludicrous attempt.
and it is beautiful.
i have respect for any philosopher, and we are all philosophers, trying to find our way.
for me it is not about agreeing.
it is the struggle.
the beauty that comes out of the struggle.
not the struggle to get along with someone else.
the struggle to get along with yourself.
to lose all hope at the end of the search, and find what had been there right in front of you the whole time. inside of you.
to know yourself and to “no” yourself.
there was nothing there, for me.
and the show goes on.
yes, philosophy is a dangerous sport. you might lose yourself. and gain everything else in the process
my favorite philosopher is the one i happen to be talking with at any given moment.
whoever i may be engaged with in a paripatetic way.
just walking and talking.
“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.” -George Moore
