A very well-read US shrink who blogs on philosophy, spirituality; and sometimes their connections to politics. (watch out for his withering critique of the left if you are of that temperament). I speed read his stuff as some of it is quite esoteric, but he has quite a few striking ideas. he quotes from the indian vedas, buddhism, christianity, gnostics and many others.
quotes:
Pride is to overestimate oneself and to underestimate others; and this is what the cynic does just as much as the hypocrite, in a blatant or a subtle way as the case may be.
In both cases, the outward and horizontal ego displaces the vertical spirit and the inner light, thereby misappropriating “what belongs to the spiritual soul.” Nature abhors a vacuum, while Spirit requires one. If God does not fill our existential void, then pride (among other things) necessarily rushes in to take its place. After all, it is what came before the fall -- it is what the ego tripped & felon. It was ineveateapple.
Where then the proper place for self-confidence as opposed to its faux substitutes, pride and the dreaded self-esteem? Self-confidence is faith that we can succeed and achieve a deiform excellence that transcends us, while self-esteem is the self-satisfied attitude that we already have. Confidence results from perfecting one’s God-given talents, while pride results from inflating and overestimating their value, and then claiming them for our own.
His blog:
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/
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I checked out OneCosmos a couple of days ago. I got through about a fifth of his screed and all I gained from it was a headache.
I consider myself somewhat of an intellectual, even somewhat of a writer, and I admit that I enjoy playing around with the English language by the use of metaphors, anagrams, palindromes, clever plays on words and such; but I am not a linguistic contortionist, a term I just invented to describe OneCosmos. His writing would be a lot more comprehensible and digestible if he used conventional English (after all, conventional English has more subtly different ways of expressing an idea than just about any other language); and his heavy sarcasm does nothing to help soothe one’s soul.
He (I assume it’s a he!!) has a very good command of the English language, yes; and he’s obviously very sharp – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that his ideas are the best ones…
After reading, as I said, about a fifth of his Web-page (which was a heck of a lot), the strongest impression he left me with was not the expression of his deepest beliefs, but the display of an egotistical self-aggrandisement through the use of clever transformations and contortions of words…
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