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Poem: Thinking About Thinking
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Thinking About Thinking
by Paul Margulies
For everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking - and with good will every normal human being has this ability - this observation is the most important one he or she could possibly make.... Thinking all too readily leaves us cold in recollection; it is as if the life of the soul had dried out. Yet this is really nothing but the strongly marked shadow of its real nature - warm, luminous, and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world. This penetration is brought about by a power flowing through the activity of thinking itself - the power of love in its spiritual form.
- Rudolf Steiner, 'The Philosophy of Freedom'
You say Confucius is confusing
You refuse to start with Sartre
And you just can’t understand Kant.
Mr. Spinoza really throws ya
Schopenhauer is quite sour
These philosophers rave and rant.
Your brain can’t find the room
For Bishop Berkeley, David Hume
And well may you lament,
That though Plato may be great
Oh, God! It’s difficult to state
Precisely what the hell he meant.
You may think a puff of pot’ll
Help you more than Aristotle,
Heraclitus is quite dense.
Or you substitute for thinking
Just a touch of social drinking
But still you feel quite tense.
If you think that thoughts will bore you
Someone else will have them for you
And that’s the catch, my friend.
Because from thinking you can’t hide
Or someone else will be your guide
From the beginning to the end.
Through thinking, Beauty, Truth, and Good
Can be rightly understood
As light shimm’ring from above.
And when our thinking becomes seeing
We experience pure being
And our thinking turns to love.
Paul Margulies was a famous talent in the advertising world as well as a devoted anthroposophist.