Guardian’s Thoughts

One of my favourite philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard, wrote about choice.  He said that most people live their lives like drunken peasants on a cart, letting the horse wander where it will.  They make no real choices in their lives.  For Kierkegaard, the process of becoming a realised, authentic self is the act of choosing to base one’s life on one principle, and then letting other choices follow on from that.  He wrote about “stages on life’s way”, and gave different examples of what one could base one’s life on.

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This question was asked of me yesterday by Dayve.

I said I would consider it. I think the first answer that comes to mind is: you know you can see when you remember yesterday, and you realise that things looked different then. Or: when you find yourself comparing your accounts of the world to those of other people around you, and you can tell that you’re talking about different things. Continue Reading »

1. Be ready to welcome beauty.

Beauty is the human perception of rightness. It is an unconscious reference to the Truth that we all know, but have forgotten. To find something beautiful is to recognise that it is without conflict, that it is simple, and thus that it is in some way right. Every encounter with beauty is an opportunity to learn some aspect of the Truth.

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I have mentioned, from time to time, the concepts of the light and dark sides of the Truth. It is time I expanded this thread.

Given that the Truth is constant and it is only the individual’s experience of it that changes, how can there be light and dark sides of the Truth? I can best sum this up with the following image: Continue Reading »

First, let me say that I celebrate life. There are some philosophies and religions that do not – they say that suffering is a part of the process of living, so must find a way of altering the way we live to escape from suffering. Many thinkers and teachers have devised many ways, and they generally involve the suppression of the will and the putting of emphasis onto things beyond the visible realm. Continue Reading »