The 100 Best Books of All Time: 70-61!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ส.ค. 2024
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Bravo, Steve, for your passionate advocacy of animals' rights.
I second this
Amen
What fantastic commentary on Huck Finn, Steve. Thank you.
Thank you for touting Carl Sagan....
Is Steve finally coming out as a philosopher?
He won't admit to it but he does have strong philosophical tendencies
Btw I mean that as a complement 😀
Given his summary of Candide I would say no…
I'm not sure I could bear to read Animal Liberation. I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals last year and it made me cry a couple of times, and I know it isn't nearly as brutal. But it did finally make me decide I had to give up meat which I had contemplated for years.
Thank you... 🙏🏾🥰
It's nice to see Sophocles make the cut
I recently reread Huckleberry Finn. I always found the something lacking but couldn't quite figure out what it was. Definitely, an unfinished feeling.
I just got The Way We Live Now in the mail! keep it up!
I love Candide and Plato's Republic. The Secret History sounds fascinating.
I have been meaning to read Carl Sagan for a long time now. I will be searching for a copy tomorrow at my favorite book shop.
I read Sophocles in high school and I loved it. I need to read Oedipus the King again.
I have not read Huck Finn since junior high. I am due up for a re-read.
fascinating selection
Thank you Steve, excellent
I've had people screw up their face at me when they find out I read books on logic and philosophy but I consume them because they are essential to cultivating critical thinking skills. When you can recognize logical fallacies you start to see them everywhere especially in politics
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is the greatest book of all time. If you say different, you're ignorant.
" Plato is simply a record-keeper - he has not a single idea of his own! He is a devoted lover of Socrates, and whatever Socrates says, he goes on recording it, writing it. Socrates has not written anything - just as no great master has ever written anything. And Plato is certainly a great writer; perhaps Socrates may not have been able to write so beautifully. Plato has made Socrates’ teachings as beautiful as possible, but he himself is no one. Now the same work can be done by a tape recorder. And Aristotle is merely an intellectual, with no understanding of being, or even a desire to search for it. These people are taught in the universities. I was constantly in a fight with my professors. When they started teaching Plato, I said, “This is absolute nonsense, because Plato has nothing to say of his own. It is better to teach about Socrates. Plato can be referred to - he has compiled it all. But Socrates’ name has become almost a fiction, and Plato has become the reality”
Plato’s allegory is of slaves who, working in a cave, see only their shadows on the walls and believe that what is happening on the walls is the only reality. They don’t know of any other reality except those shadows… they don’t even know that those shadows are their own. They know nothing about the outside world, outside their cave; it doesn’t exist for them. This is one of the most beautiful allegories - of tremendous importance. It is our allegory. Translated into our life, it means we are living in a certain cave and we are seeing shadows on a certain screen and we know nothing else about the screen. We know nothing about there being a world beyond the screen; we know nothing about these shadows on the screen, even that they are our own. Looked at rightly, it is the allegory of our mind.
What do you know of the world? Just a small skull is your cave; and just the screen of your mind… and the things which you call thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, are all shadows - they don’t have any substance in them. And you get angry, you get depressed, you are in anguish - because you have learned to be identified with those shadows. You are projecting them; they are your own shadows. It is your own anger that is projected on the screen of the mind. And then it becomes a vicious circle: that anger makes you more angry, more anger projects more anger, and so on and so forth. And
we go on living our whole life without ever thinking that there is a world of reality beyond the mind, on the outside, and there is also a world of reality beyond all these sentiments, feelings, emotions - beyond your ego. That is your awareness.
The whole art of meditation is to bring you out of the cave so that you can become aware that you are not those shadows but that you are a watcher. And the moment you become a watcher, a miracle happens: those shadows start disappearing. They feed on your identity; if you feel identified with them, then they are there. The more you identify with them, the more nourished they are.
When you are just a watcher - just seeing, not judging, not condemning - slowly, slowly those shadows disappear, because now they don’t have any food. And then there is such a tremendous clarity, perceptivity, that you can see the world beyond - the world of sunrise and the world of clouds and the world of the stars; that is your outside. And you can become aware of your inside, which is far more mysterious.
The outside world is so beautiful, but the inside world is a thousand fold more beautiful.
Once you are somehow capable of getting out of the cave you become part of a universal consciousness.
Inside, you have the whole eternity; you have been here forever and you will be here forever. Death has never happened and cannot happen. And outside there is a tremendously beautiful existence. And now to call them `outside’ and `inside’ is not right; those are the old words when the skull was dividing them in two. Now it is one. Your consciousness and the beauty of a sunset and the beauty of a starry night, your consciousness and the freshness of a rose - they are no longer separate because the principle of separation is no longer there. It is all one cosmic whole. And I call this experience the only holy experience.
To experience the whole is the only holy experience. It has nothing to do with churches, temples, synagogues; it has something to do with you coming out, slipping out of the clutches of the mind. And it is not difficult, it is just that you have not tried it.
Plato’s allegory rightly depicts the situation which we are in. But Plato never went further than that. Plato himself was never a meditator; the allegory remained a philosophical idea. If he had interpreted this allegory and had given it a turn towards meditation, the whole Western mind would have been different. This allegory would have changed the whole Western mind and the history that followed Plato - because Plato is the founder of the whole Western mind.
Socrates never wrote anything; he was Plato’s master. Whatever we have about Socrates is from Plato’s notes of him talking with others - the famous Socratic dialogues. As a student he was just taking notes on them. Those notes have survived. In those notes is this allegory. It is difficult to know for what purpose Socrates was using the allegory, but it is certain that Plato misused it - he was not a man who was in search of truth, he was a man who wanted to think about truth. But to search for truth is one thing and to think about truth is totally different: thinking keeps you within the cave. It is only non-thinking that can take you out of the cave."
That is because we know Plato existed and we do not know that Socrates existed. We also do not know if they are two different people or not, for all we know Plato is a pen name for Socrates. As far as I understand, most historians believe that the first few dialogues were actually accounts of Socrates, but the later ones, including the republic, were written way after Socrates died and those dialogues are only using him as a character. The Socrates of the majority of Plato's dialogues are no more real then Spiderman. The ideas in the republic are from Plato, not Socrates. One of the great things about Socrates is his humility, when dubbed the wisest man of all, he spent the rest of his life disproving that nonsense. You gave a vary surface level popculture overview of eastern philosophy and you seem dead set that it is true. I think you need to be more skeptical of your wild assertions that "death has never happened". I think your thoughts about meditation are not much different then Platos shadows on a cave, you don't understand what you are saying but its all you know, so you believe it to be true. The world is much greater then what you have dreamed in your philosophy.
tf are you blabbering about