Not to be confused with Boethius's 'Consolation of Philosophy', this book comes with pictures, and lots of them, as it is geared for the digital aged consumer and attending attention span.

But wait. this is no cute little tome begging us to read about white, anglo-saxon nothern european philosophers who truly didn't discover life until they vacationed in the southern climes, this is a nugget of genuine Wisdom!

Eschewing the normal branches of philosophy such as epistemology, ontology, metaphysics and so on (I forget the others), Mr. de Botton corrals his philosophers around such modern topics as 'Unpopularity', 'Not Having Enough Money' and 'Happiness', all day to day pragmatic subjects we all can feel comfortable delving into, as opposed to Occham's razor, which just doesn't sound right to begin with, now does it?

de Botton not only loves the philosophy, but the philosopher as well and in this wonderful book provides slice of life sketches of Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and finally and ironically perhaps the most endearing and engendering, Nietzsche.

Montaigne is the centerpiece of this work and rightfully so. His philosophy of life and urbane language written from the foothills of France, is a good capstone for the entire book, which comes early, leaving the rest to Schopenhauer (and his beloved poodles) and Nietzsche.

The questions of life, there is no end for the sensitive, and this book brooks many of the themes we all deal with on a day to day, minute to minute basis.

From the late greeks Socrates, Aristotle and Epicurus, we learn to think for ourselves in a right-minded fashion. From the late Roman Seneca we learn to withstand the blows of fickle Fortune. Montaigne breaks with tradition (no later than the 1560s, mind you,) in refusing to admire Plato and Aristotle simply because his fellow schoolmen did, and instead chooses a living, breathing philosophy that is couched in terms of the vernacular. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, our two Romantics, provide us with a healthy dose of pessimism, while if one reads between the dark black lines, he can find Hope pouring in at the oddest moments and places.

what a wonderful survey of western philosophy this is, and the pictures are pretty nice as well!

Just got back from Pennyrile Forest State Park, where we spent three days in the lodge. The acreage of deciduous forest is accentuated by a resplendent lake and dam system. 'Pennyrile' is a bastardization of 'Pennyroyal', an herb common to the area. Before we went, we saw my son play the bass drum for the North High Huskies. That is him, second to right in profile. Anyway, back to Pennyrile, while there I listened to my mp3 player a lot. There is this new band I found called 'The National' I dug bunches Other bands included Blonde Redhead, Lisa Gerrard, Dead Can Dance, David Bowie, Interpol, the Rapture, New Order, Electronic, Klaus Schultze, and a slew of others.

night by day - a poem

the cicada song makes it's way to my ear
this croaking chorus of lonely males
desperately seeking mates, longing for immortality
not unlike the song of the mendicant monks
whose lilting voices rise to the buttressed roof
on a plain in a cathedral, heavenly light everywhere

and the lilt of the whipporwhill lifts to the arched limbs
in a forest still where it's mates all dance in unison
on the breath of the humid airs, above the glistening pool
as the first leaf dies and falls from it's tree, trailing
the current of tropical stream, following an impossible path
through an infinitude of space, it takes this way, then that

what law governs this chance, that can be united by similitude?
by what art does the bird of paradise make his way?
dance, dancing now here, now there, the perfect hypnosis?
what first sets this idea into meaning, this notion into reality?
what track does it follow, by what engine is it propelled?
though it has the force of a whirlwind, it is not a train on the tracks

and yet the world moves on in constant cause, in linear fashion
it marches along in step with the clock, the arms moving in precise sweeps
mechanical minutes beating the drum of the already done
while inside, the circular wall makes way round the great floor
light slowly making it's way through shadow, i wonder which came first?
and the fluid motion from thought to thought, free flowing one to the other

belies what lies beyond....

(short) Parable

A fish one day found himself alone for a moment from his fellows and overheard two men talking about 'water.' How wonderful it was. How the light shone through. There were marvelous things to be had there. Upon returning to his school, the young fish announced to the whole of them he was off to find water. How wonderful it was. How the light shone through. Marvelous things were to be found therein. Years later, the questing fish, now old, worn and world weary, returned to his school, and his mates hardly even recognized him. 'We thought you were off to find 'water', " one of the school exclaimed. Did you find it? 'Yes, yes, ' came the reply...you wouldn't believe what I found...as he slowly turned and swam away.

Synchronicity

Throughout his writings, Jung was always asking, there is the three, so where is the fourth? While often referring to the Trinitarian Archetype, Jung seemed at times to eschew it for the Quaternity, where a static state was realized in the symmetrical symbolism of the Four...as realized in the Circle/Square Mandala being a representation of the Self.

Beginning with Erdinger, perhaps, the Three was first illuminated as being asymmetrical and dynamic. This author perhaps grasps the same conclusion, realizing the importance of breaking symmetry in order for emergence to occur.

And emergence into the field is what the subject matter, Synchronicity, is all about.

The argument goes, classical deductive Physics ala Newton, where cause and effect are the two necessary factors against the backdrop of Absolute Space and Absolute Time, was incomplete and more, too fragmentary. The sciences were resolute each in their expression, yet seldom explained or even empathized with one another. The binary aspect of Cause/Effect, Light/Dark, Space/Time carried over into Descartes' radical dualism of the soul and body.

The time was right for a more unitary, inductive worldview to break the now age old deductive reasoning of the previous centuries. Thus the discovery Light was neither particle or wave, but both, there was not Time, or Space, but Spacetime. In Faraday's lab there was the electric, then the magnetic, then the electromagnetic.

Once again, the new physics effected the picture one had of the human soul. Rather than there being a radical difference between Mind and Body, there was found to be a unitary bond between the two...where each were found to be operating differently metaphysically. Synchronistically, one could say. Just as the body could take on many shapes and motions, the mind could take on many meanings and thoughts.

In this nice book, the author doesn't concern himself or us with grandiose themes and examples of Synchronicity, but rather observes how Synchronicity unfolds into our day to day world of Space and Time, Cause and Effect, still the harbingers of popular consciousness. Examples provided include Emergence, Empathy, and Kairos, or 'timing'. Although this tends to elucidate the subject, my one complaint is Synchronicity is looked at from mostly a scientific view, and little to nigh is explained through the psychoanalytic lense.

That said, the book does end with examples both good and evil of Synchronicity where it is shown to be the harbinger of good and ill. Synchronicity, the author warns and reminds, is not all Good all the Time.

A wise, erudite writing on a tough subject we are just beginning to understand, in my humble opinion!

Later in this book, Mr. Edward Erdinger drops a Jungian bomb on me. The Ego, being conscious, the very center of consciousness, is apriori and derives it's existence from the older unconscious, and symbolically has a heavenly origin to which it will return, a Star.

This is just one of the many elucidations Erdinger makes concerning Jungian psychotherapy, and really Kantian phenomenology and Platonic philosophy. Let's face it, Jung was heavily influenced by both these last heavy hitters in Western thought.

Throughout the rest of the book, Mr. Erdinger relates the Ego and Self (Archetype) to us through the use of Christian symbology, Greek mythology, and the dream analysis of various patients. The Ego, upon being confronted with the challenges and vagaries of Life, goes into a natural state of inflation, where it identifies itself with the Self, in order to meet the challenges of gaining a broader consciousness. This is the preparation for the great initiation: Individuation, where the Ego recollects the broken up unconscious complexes and reintegrates them into a new, now unified Whole. The Ego, having weathered the dark night of the soul after the attempted usurpation of the Self, now recognizes it's rightful place in the Psyche and thus attains it's rightful yet limited estate.

Especially useful I found was the explanation of the Sign, an abstract word, picture, etc. that points to the state of the objective, exterior world, while the Symbol, living breathing signifier of the internal, subjective world is understood to provide meaning for the individual. The perfect state of things is to know the difference between the two, to not mix their properties, and to allow deep religious truth to be communicated symbolically as opposed to signally, and vice versa, for the Sign to communicate external factual data of the way things are.

Erdiniger has done a wonderful job of conserving the psychology of Jung while even adding his own flourishes to the picture and carrying the whole thing forward. This, in my view makes him a worthy torch bearer for Jungian thought.

How the Wisdom of Freud can Transform Your World

During the Enlightenment, philosophically and spiritually, authority and the divine rights of Monarchy were overthrown and democracy ennobled the citizen, who now became free. A new Virtue, Liberty, was inaugurated and the enlightened man sought it and preferred death to the loss of it. Whether your leanings are to the crown or to liberty, you now live in a world where your inaliable rights as a human being have been fought for, won, and continue to be ensured.

After the horrors of World War I, however, the shift for many western intellectuals was from the objective to the subjective. Certain towering individuals began to realize the Great War being waged was not necessarily between despots and deprived populaces, but was being waged internally....psychologically.

This is the birth of the modern era.

Auguste' Comte, the social philosopher declared 'man poses endless need and endleess danger'. Man. As in you. Me.

Freud, this article's hero, discovered a dark, uncharted territory, the unconscious, and set about mapping out it's nebulous landscape.

The Shadow.

Freud found that we all, living under largely Victorian values, hid the worst elements of ourselves from ourselves. We repressed. Sexual desires, aggression, unseemly aspects of ourselves that were very real were simply denied, pushed below the surface and ignored. One of the principles Freud discovered about this new unconscious however, was that the psychic energy that had been repressed was not destroyed. It simply remained latent and was residing, festering, growing ever more powerful and remaining within us. The resultant 'person', the negative unconscious 'person' that contained all the traits we abhorred Freud termed the Shadow.

The Shadow made manifest.

Freud began to notice ways the Shadow would seep out from the unconscious and make itself manifest in the world. One way this was done was through Projection. Freud found we would Project our repressed unseemly and unwanted attributes onto others. The faults, sins, and deplorable aspects of our neighbors were in fact aspects of ourselves. We saw ourselves in our neighbors. Freud found that we had found the enemy, and the enemy was us.

'Progress is the harmonious balance of opposites'

Although this maxim was spoken later by another psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud found that the only way to progress as a responsible human being was to make the unconscious, on one pole, conscious, residing on the opposite pole, and then begin to develop methods of dealing with our problems. What was dark and latent had to be brought to the light and made manifest, so it could be resolved.

We are rascally and righteous and need to be whole.

Freud then set about, through psychoanalysis, to allow troubled souls to realize they were rascally and righteous. Freud found that people needed to accept all of themselves, negative as well as positive, in order to become whole and truly healthy. The implications were staggering. Now, rather than finding threat in the surrounding environment, in our neighbor, or those residing in other states, we first needed to look to ourselves and solve those problems raging within us before blaming the world for our ills.

Self responsibility.

If we now matured in realizing we were our own cause for much of our suffering, we could take responsibility for our problems rather than blaming others and truly begin to progress as human beings.

This has not been an exhaustive study into the theories of psychoanalysis or Freud's work. I have not even mentioned the Id, the Ego, and the Superego, the tripartite makeup of our selves, according to Freud.

I have just attempted to honor Freud's wisdom and pass it along.

It is an old wisdom couched in modernist terms.

The worlds great spiritual traditions have always recognized the internal struggle that truly trumps any external obstacles we may encounter.

Freud just modernized, perhaps secularized this wisdom and provided a way for even the unbelieving to become redeemed.

The Quiet Revolution

I rediscovered reading and writing in my mid thirties. I had done nill to none with either for quite sometime. But slowly, I came to the realization, my education wasn't complete and that I was missing something. So I read. And read and read and wrote and wrote. I read greek and roman classics, medieval romances, current fiction, new nonfiction as I had rediscovered a lost world. There was something about going back and rereading certain books, that now having more experience, I understood in a completely different light.

Reading for me has become a quiet protest against the way things are tending. Politics and religion have become so commercialized to the point I find very little that inspires me currently with these two in modern culture. So I started my own mini-revolution which I secretly and personally dubbed 'backwards now', and set my sights on the historic, the, yes I know, romanticized past.

You may read genre fiction, a good science fiction book or the latest mystery novel. Maybe by doing so, you too are silently protesting this current state of things and are escaping to other worlds in order to entertain yourself and even inform yourself, experiencing your own personal enlightenment where experience doesn't necessarily have to prop up the facts.

Whimsys, flights of fancy, dreams, animal imaginations, all these can be just as valid cognitions as logical thinking where the silent protest is concerned.

You may be a closet heretic keeping your mouth shut in hopes you won't be discovered and be burnt at the stake (or worse, ostracized). You may espouse the views of Ann Coulter while enjoying reading 'Living History', or conversely espouse the views of Al Sharpton even as you read from a pile of Edmund Burke's works.

Either way about it, you may be silently protesting like me.

Soldier on, comrade, I say. We'll know when our moment has arrived!

Poetry Break - days of chimera

though hints are to be found at each turn
there is a rumor wind that blows all through

it makes the sun a massive star
the moon a shining crescent

the tales we told as children
ring much more true than our newspaper stories

and the shifting sand by ocean is
much more prescient than any solid ground

lies, lies, and more
chimera wins the day

but the danger lies not in getting sucked in
but to not be sucked in enough

then, in the whorl, one can see the coming and going
that is just grasped at and slowed down
to make them seem more real

you are blind
i am deaf
i do not hear the facts of the day
turning into all tomorrow's legends

but by the breath i own,
i turn the corner and make for home

knowing full well i've already been
and where i run never arrives at a terminus

rather than steer clear of charybdis,
i dove straight in

and on the other end,
brighter than a thousand suns
i reached the shore of the brave

the courage to be
in the face of all possibilities
is the will to keep walking with broken feet

Poetry Break - the star

I look to the churning sea
And I see a star in it
Bursting through the wave
Burning in newborn splendor
Rising above the chaos below
The star burns white like linen
Pure as a newborn soul
And I am not amazed
As it rises to it's heavenly estate
And sets the limits of my course
Announcing my name, my hair color,
The tone of my skiin
The craftsman arm that encompasses my days
The chimera ghost that determines my dreams
And my heavenly mate does sing
In Harmony with other friend-stars
Each orb humming like a finger on a wineglass
The music of Fate rising to the empyrean
Of the Absolute....
And my star sets the wave in it's course
And my blood in motion
And ignites my nerve...
I blaze in unison with my star
I rise and fall with it, yet it beckons to my call
My friend-star and me
Parting the waves of mortality and infinity...

Poetry Break - Is There no End?

Is there no end
The salmon in the stream
The stag above tree line
Each following their star
Remaining where they belong

The fate of the pelican
On Galapagos
the coming of solstice and equinox

I once helped a sea turtle
Make it back to the tide
Beneath the moonbeam
Surrounded by stingray
And the ocean spread wide

On plain bison roamand
the rocks stand so still
islands dotting the current
that runs through the Earth
and unites all at will

there is no end
no tangent from sky to Earth
no boundary really separating
for there is All yet we make difference
and it is the colorless globe that sees color
and the blind that yet dream…

Poetry Break - she

she cries at the doorway,
some world always lost and forgotten
there stands the fatherless child
and no sign of mother

i am leaving the tavern drunk
walking through the policeman's street
knowing i must find my way through the mud
to the home i belong in

i only kiss her when i'm drunk
she a secret mistress, her only hearing me cry
in her arms i seek solace,
find many who have held her before

she waited for me, and for that, she came before
and i thought my star preceded hers
my morning star to her evening,
both obliterated by the sun

and just as the sun melts our stars
so we too will melt in that sun
perhaps as one, perhaps now many
only the sky shall know

Me, Not Buddha

There are just three of us. My wife Mary, my son Dylan Thomas, and me. Mary and I work full time while Dylan attends school and is involved in scouts and band. Be that as it may, we stay quite busy, let me tell you.

Even if I just worked and were single, I would not have the capability to attain the sort of enlightenment pictured to the left.

If not busy on the outside, I certainly am busy on the inside and have only recently learned the art of quieting things down on the inside and obtaining just a little subjective Peace.

As I've heard more than one wise person say, 'Life is short, and the art is long'. At 44 years old, I don't see myself attaining buddhahood anytime soon, if till now, I have not had the time.

Just the drive to work, cars careening around, people behaving badly, and the rushaday morning starts the day off the way my life seems to tend. Fast, chaotic, somewhat out of control at times.

Me not running off to an ashram, or climbing some mountain in Tibet, I am fated to live in the center of the Western experience. Work, mortgage, loans, car payments, and so on.

Peace, Peace, but there will be no Peace, the prophet said, and this I can attest to wholeheartedly. Having eschewed the single life for that of marriage, I chose to live as I am quite consciously, and now am at midlife in the whole thing.

But lest I begin to sound like I am complaining, be assured, my protests are small. I have a loving wife, a son I dote on, and overall lead a very fulfilling life. Perhaps everyone is destined to lead this life at some point, as others, and so why not make the most of it?

My mantra is 'Strength, Wisdom, and Beauty'. These three I have found are available to a man in my shoes, and are well within reach throughout the workday.

But enlightenment? It's like Van Morrison says in his song, er, 'Enlightenment' - 'Chop that wood and carry water, what's the sound of one hand clapping? Enlightenment. Don't know what it is'.

Springtime

Springtime is supposed to be nice, but for some reason, living in a temperate zone, I prefer the Fall. I can't quite put my finger on it. Winter's chill is gone, the Sun is moving back to the Tropic of Cancer, but nothing seems joyous. Around my town, it rains quite often in the Spring, but even this year, being a year of lesser rainfall, with more exhibitions of Sun, I have felt a melancholy. It's as if deep down, I know the seasons should begin with the darker months, where the darkness precedes and is more natural than the Light. Car washes, barbeques, the promise of warmer days, none of them seem to ring true.

Now, when the Summer finally hits, as now, I suppose I accept on some level the Sun has risen, and my somewhat foul mood lifts. No longer a promise, the heat and the lightening bugs have arrived, and the heat is prescient. I get the hair buzzed and throw on shorts, tee shirt and flip-flops whenever possible.

But standing in the Summer Sun, I can still feel a coldness, as if a dark cloud is wrapped around my otherwise happy city. I don't quite know why, but it just seems obvious Summer is more transient than Winter..as if again the proper turn of the Seasons is from Fall to Winter, Winter to Spring, Spring to Summer...where the Sun finally bursts into flames it can't sustain ...

Poetry Break - The Church Stands in the Yard

The church stands in the weeds now,

A little cross and steeple yet remain

Thistles and thorns embellish the yard

Once lush with grass and dandelion

There is inch thick dust on the pew

And the pulpit is splintered plywood

A stained glass window is broken and left

Broke by some rock throwing passerby

A stream now runs beneath the floorboards

Carrying dirty water to the cornfield beyond

To nourish the pasture where lazy cows graze

And to muddy the clean rows of stalks and stems

How ridiculous it would be for a crow to light

On the steep-pitched roof, yet the spring birds

Fly over, meandering unconsciously over the scene

As the smell of dung wafts through the air

‘There is no license on loneliness,

Though your part be larger,

My piece of the pie is plenty to eat

And of course mine has more thumbs in it….’