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My Year with Montaigne: Montaigne, the Traveler pt III
We glean from studying the travel journals a man who sloughed off his national and cultural trappings with aplomb. He was open minded and interested, willing to go out of his way, sometimes to the dismay of others in his party, to investigate something that struck him as interesting. His ancient hero, Socrates, considered himself… Continue reading
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My Year with Montaigne: Montaigne, the Traveler pt II
“Monsieur de Montaigne drank of the said water eleven mornings, nine glasses each for eight days and seven glasses each for three days, and bathed five times. He found the water easy to drink and always passed it before dinner.” The first third of so of the travel journals were written by Montaigne’s secretary, an… Continue reading
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My Year with Montaigne: Montaigne, the Traveler
“It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.” II.6 Imagine: Western Europe, the year is 1580. Plague is rampant; war is ceaseless; roads, such as they are, are not only dangerous, but muddy, without signage, and peppered with dubious lodgings; traveling alone is too dangerous to risk;… Continue reading
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My Year with Montaigne–On Mindfulness
“Montaigne practiced a form of what we today call mindfulness through his essay writing. His quest in writing was to find out how to be ‘fully human” (sic) he tried to recognize when his thoughts went to ‘extraneous incidents.” He would then work to bring this thinking back to the here and now and the… Continue reading
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My Year with Montaigne–a “Spiritual Teacher”
“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.” To recap: My use of the word spiritual: the means by which the individual strives to be a better human being. To recap: Montaigne’s discipline of attention is extraordinary, especially related to self-reflection. Nietzsche said that all philosophy reflects the philosopher’s biography.1. One of the aversions… Continue reading
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My Year with Montaigne–a Spiritual Teacher?
“A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.” I was recently talking with a dear friend, a person on a deep spiritual journey with whom I have shared many books and ideas. We see one another only a couple times a year, but one of our standard catch-up questions is, “How is your… Continue reading
About doug
A philosopher in the classical sense–“One who loves knowledge”–Doug Bruns has spent his life chasing questions. He has delved deeply into wisdom traditions both ancient and modern, including the philosophical schools of Existentialism, Pragmatism, and the ancient Greeks, as well several of the Eastern traditions, principally Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Admittedly, he is no expert on anything, just a curious pilgrim.
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