As much as I hate to link to the man with a grudge:

Top White House officials expressed anger after TIME magazine detailed the location of Vice President Dick Cheney's secret bunker...

One White House officials (sic) fumed Monday night: "TIME magazine would have revealed secret the location of Anne Frank, if they knew it."

Can you imagine the outrage that would have resulted from a Clinton administration official comparing Al Gore to Anne Frank? It would have been news for a week.

Quiz time

What do the following thinkers have in common?

(Highlight the space below the list with your cursor for the answer.)

* The Buddha
* Plato
* Plotinus
* Goethe
* Hegel
* Schelling
* Emerson
* Eckhardt Tolle

They all could be called "secular mystics"---they came to mystical conclusions based on logic and experience, not through any religious authority. This is notably true of Tolle, who, despite his Krishnamurtian approach, denies any religious association, and Plotinus. Others, especially Emerson, had a more inclusive approach, and were influenced by religious mystics both Christian and Hindu.
Write to me with any additions to my list.

Today's thought here.

Here, I wrote that Stuart Davis is the poet of Ken Wilber's integral philosophy. Here are some more match-ups that I came up with:>

socrates	aristophanes
plato	sophocles
aristotle	euripides
plotinus	michelangelo
augustine, aquinas	dante
vico	petrarch
machiavelli, bacon	shakespeare
luther, calvin	milton, donne
voltaire, diderot	pope
rousseau	blake,wordsworth, etc.
kant, schelling	goethe
hegel	heine
marx	dickens
emerson, thoreau	whitman, dickinson
nietzsche	kafka, mann, musil
freud	lawrence
james	frost
whitehead	stevens
aurobindo	aurobindo
heidegger	rilke, hesse
wilber	davis

This is not meant to diminish or to highten the reputation of any poet, but to try to notice which major philosophies have been put into poetry, and which haven't.

To a nondualist, a mode of consciousness is a mode of being.

And what is compassion, if not an exercise in moral equivalence?

In the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier examines the warblogger's ethic and comes up a little empty.

Most of the right-wing heresiologists who scream "moral equivalence" at the sight of an inconvenient similarity intend mainly to shore up their own thinking or to shut down the thinking of others. (They had no compunction about comparing Saddam to Stalin.) And what is compassion, if not an exercise in moral equivalence? The care that we feel for people other than ourselves is the result of regarding us all, the subjects of our concern and ourselves, under a single and highly general description, which is the description of the human. There is no way to pursue justice without believing in the moral equivalence of all men and women. The idea that small-town Americans can bring democracy to small-town Iraqis is also a version of this belief. But everyone has their preferred equivalences, just as everyone has their preferred corpses.

I also smoked a cigar at lunch today, a Fire mini corona. Fantastic! A little tiny cigar (4 x 40) that packed a flavorful punch. The big ones must be amazingly full flavored. I think I'll buy a bunch of these.

The Mystery of the Oakbrook Gurudwara

I was looking for a place to meditate while on my lunch break at work. I remembered that there was supposed to be a Sikh temple, called a gurudwara, in Oakbrook. So I looked up the address on the net and drove off looking for it. On Forest Gate Road in Oakbrook, there is only the Oakbrook Park District (1450 Forest Gate) and a luxurious subdivision (from 1 to 75 Forest Gate). A mail lady was stopped there, so I got out and asked her where 1500 Forest Gate Road is. She says: "1500 Forest Gate Road doesn't exist! But we get mail for them all the time! We have to send it back."

Someone must have planned to build the Oakbrook Gurudwara, perhaps where the Oakbrook Park District is now located.

Or maybe a sadhu lives in the large, partially-forested park to the north of Forest Gate Road...

Zen teachers recommend noticing the dream-like qualities of existence, but I wasn't expecting to notice the mystery-novel-like moments.

Hey, if any fellow Wilberians happen to read this, I have a question. On the inside front cover of Integral Psychology, it says: "This is a condensed version of System, Self, Structure, which has previously only been available as Volume Four of Wilber's Collected Works"

Well, I'm looking for this on Amazon, and I can't find it.

I found this, which is volume four, but according to the Table of Contents, that contains Integral Psychology, not System, Self, Structure. A Google Search comes up empty. So does SSS exist? Or was it a twinkling in the bald guy's eye? I want the full treatment!

Email me at: goethean at yahoo dot com.

That About Sums It Up

Laurent Fabius, head of Mr Chirac's governing UMP party, said of Mr Bush: "He represents the exact opposite of everything we admire about America."

Went to Louisville this weekend. Had a good time. It's a surprising cool city. Highlights: betting at Churchhill Downs, the Speed Art Museum. Was surprisingly unsuccessful in finding live bluegrass music. Funniest moment was the hotel desk clerk asking me if bluegrass music was different than Blues.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini

Was reading Aurobindo's The Life Divine last night, and it's fantastic. Will probably post some choice quotations soon.

For the past few months, I've been reading the first volume of Eknath Easwaran's The Bhagavad Gita for Everyday Living. It's quite different for me to read truly inspirational literature rather than intellectual. More of an imperative to act than to think.