Athens and Jerusalem, Is it "All Just a Dream"? The Goal of Poetry, How and Why We Should Act

I've been reading Adam Zagajewski, Czesaw Miosz, and Zbignew Herbert - a few of philosopher poets working on some interesting questions. Also I'm reading a new book on Huichol shamanism called "The Shaman's Mirror" that gets pretty deep into some interesting questions as well; this is a short essay on some preliminary ideas in response; "Athens and Jerusalem" refers to reconciling Reason and Western religion, "Is it all just a dream?" is just a common objection or question I hear, Another one of the questions the philosopher poets were addressing was the "great boredom of our times, the Sunday afternoon boredom"; I rode a bus for 20 minutes to a mountain hike yesterday - Sunday afternoon - through some of the most beautiful hills and trees and blue sky in the world, in Bay Area California, and I was the only one looking, the other four people in front of me stared down at the floor of the bus, looking depressed and dejected, "bored", except for the several times they pulled out iPhones to click and swipe a little, and smile, then put it back in their pocket and look dejected again, The Facebook clicks fed them just a few drops, in the ego desert they confine themselves to, while they ignore the divinity all around us, taught, I guess, that you are all about ego, a yang-less yin monster, the beauty out there mocks you, threatens you, and you better hope something pops up on Facebook to help you face this heavy external monster weighing on you called the natural world. So this is a short essay to say, divinity is everywhere, and ego is silly.

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