Freeing the Mind: Why Philosophy Is Important
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- Published: Tuesday, 10 May 2022 17:16
Cary Gardner – USA
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A beautifully and carefully designed "spiritual".garden
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It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods
Quote Margaret Fuller
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them
Quote Henry David Thoreau
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Freeing the mind.
There is a wonderful scene in The Matrix film when Morpheus, a teacher of secrets, is taking Neo out for one of his first training programs after being painfully liberated from the illusion of the “Matrix”. They have entered the “Jump Program” and find themselves standing on top of a high-rise building. Morpheus turns to Neo and poses this challenge, “Free your mind”, and then proceeds to leap impossibly several hundred yards to the nearest building, suggesting that Neo follow behind. Neo’s response: “Whoa.”
Philosophy rightly understood is about freeing the mind. It is about the “clarification of ideas and the removal of muddles”. Before we can grasp how we can free the mind, it is imperative to first understand how the mind is manacled in the first place. We are, all too often, strangely unaware of what ideas are coloring our perceptions. Like a set of colored glasses, our perceptions are all tinged with blue or red or green, depending upon the lens. These ideas we hold to be true are often adopted without inspection or evaluation.