I have tried to express MY thoughts for years: here are some folks who do it perhaps a bit better than I.

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A Free Human Being--

True education is to learn
how to think,
not what to think.
If you know how to think,
if you really have that capacity,
then you are a free human being;
which is the beginning of self-knowledge
ð it is only such a mind
that is a revolutionary mind.
And a revolutionary mind
is a mutating mind
is the religious mind.

J. Krishnamurti
Think on These Things

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Why then does one want truth? Above all we want to triumph over falsehood and deception. What is most humiliating about custom and convention is that they appear inseparable from ignorance, misinformation, and hypocrisy. To have to accept a whole world of beliefs, forced on us by our environment, without the chance to choose or build our own world of beliefs would mean a thousandfold frustration even if all that is forced on us were based on painstaking research. But soon we find that people lie to us complacently, whether they know the facts or have not bothered to determine them. The power that constrains our freedom is seen to be arbitrary and indifferent, a slothful despotism of surpassing cynicism. Every truth we discover makes this tyranny unsafe and is a blow for freedom, and the more our previous so-called knowledge it affects, the better!"

Walter Kaufmann
Critique of Philosophy and Religion
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"Nowhere is the disproportion between
effort and result more aggravating than in
the pursuit of truth: you may plow through documents
or make untold experiments or think and think and think,
forgo food, comfort, and distractions, lie awake
nights and eat your heart out -- and in the end
you know what can be memorized
by any idiot.

What is the alternative? To suffer the tyranny of
arbitrary falsehood and deception. Many truths cease to seem
trite as soon as one views them as triumphs over prejudice,
indifference, and dishonesty. To teach a truth without
giving others some experience of the quest,
the passion, the heartbreak is a crime."


Walter Kaufmann
Critique of Philosophy and Religion

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Groping among Dry Bones


Our age is retrospective.
It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.
It writes biographies, histories and criticism.
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature
face to face; we, through their eyes.
Why should not we also enjoy
an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy
of insight and not of tradition?
Why should we grope
among the dry bones of the past?


From the introduction to Emerson's Nature, published in 1836

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It should be borne in mind,
of course, that there is an inevitable discrepancy
between the truth of the matter and what one thinks,
even about himself.


Henry Miller

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Human Being


                         N O T
                  Christian or Jew or
                   Muslim. Not Hindu,
                Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.


                  Not any religion
             Or cultural system. I am
                not from the East
                or the West, not
             out of the ocean or up
               From the ground, not
             natural or ethereal, not
            composed of elements at all.


                I do not exist,
          Am not an entity in this
             world or the next,
            did not descend from
             Adam and Eve or any
            Origin story. My place is
            the placeless, a trace
               of the traceless.


            Neither body or soul,
          I belong to the beloved,
             have seen the two
             worlds as one and
                that one
             call to and know.


       First, last, outer, inner,
       only that breath breathing


          H U M A N B E I N G.


            Jelaluddin Rumi

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