Greek philosophic term of the week: Eudaimonia (common trans: "happiness, bliss, blessedness"). Though commonly translated as happiness, eudaimonia has all the hallmarks of a symbolic expression  which became an idiom and eventually a stand-alone noun. The expression would have been transparent in its meaning back in a certain epoch, but certainly ( Read more... )

Thomas Jefferson wrote, in 1789, that “wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government;” he backed up that claim by founding the University of Virginia, about which he wrote, in 1820: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth ( Read more... )

"The Great Eastern Sun is wakefulness and genuineness reflected in every aspect of our being. This realization brings a feeling of being a truly human being. Physically, psychologically, domestically, spiritually, you feel a gut sense of health and wholesomeness in your life, as if you were holding a solid brick of gold." -- “The Shambhala Warrior ( Read more... )

"Generally speaking, when we are too desirous of something in life, we’re less likely to attain it. Success seems to increase in direct proportion to the diminution of our desires. The same logic applies to our need for recognition. We might want to be appreciated and respected, but we have only a limited ability to influence how other people ( Read more... )

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"You have said that the irrelevance of Christianity can be overcome only by passing through the darkness of existential despair. You have said that the faith which rises from this depth will embrace its own doubt. It will live as a perennial, unresolvable tension in us. My theory of knowledge takes this as its paradigm. It is shaped by the image of ( Read more... )

Like modern democracies, the ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem. Read the historians, and you will see some things that are not remote: individuals litigating obsessively against people they blame for having wronged them; groups blaming other groups for their lack of power; citizens blaming prominent politicians and other elites for ( Read more... )

“Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History” (1971)[1] is, in my view, one of Eric Voegelin’s five most important stand-alone essays, along with “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” (1967), “The Gospel and Culture” (1971), “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth” (written 1974-77), and “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme ( Read more... )

"The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of "legitimate" thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world's ways of ( Read more... )

Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim. That position ( Read more... )