Philosophy's Bad Rap and a Slightly Better One

Philosophy has a bad reputation as remote from the world—arcane, esoteric and impractical. And you can certainly philosophize in that way. But I don't recommend it. In my view, the best philosophy searches out and embraces the deepest wisdom for living and working in the world.

My new philosophy friend Ryan Stelzer, co-founder of the Boston based philosophical consulting firm Strategy of Mind, just posted a nice piece on LinkedIn about how the top fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli uses philosophy and great literature to enhance the life of his business, by sparking the lives of his associates. Cucinelli started his firm with an investment equal to about $550 US dollars and now has a personal wealth of over a billion. And he does things the right way. His success displays the wisdom of good philosophy, well applied. In fact, he often cites the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as among his favorite philosophy books.

In a fun reply to Stelzer's nice essay, I did a quick rap recommending philosophy. And just now, I augmented my silliness to make it clear that I'm not puffing just any philosophy, but only the good stuff. I've blogged poems, essays, book reviews, quotes and tweets before. So here's my first rap. Do this in the voice of Wyclif Jean or your favorite kindred performer, for full effect. So Ok then. Turn up the speakers, and go:

Cucinelli style philosophy is, you know, a part of me, even more than luxury, a necessity in complexity if you see the humanity of a wisdom trip, better than a cool sip of bubbly Moet down in hot San Tropez, live another day with the insights of the ages and the thoughts of all the sages, if you look in the book that has the right hook you can throw out the crook who might have shook you and be shocking you and blocking you with his big Mercedes—go and tell the ladies that the tonic is Platonic and you can please with Socrates every day that you play with philosophy to make the rules and leave the fools who think it’s all just numbers don’t you ever wonder what kind of thunder will come from going deep with thoughts that keep coming at us all these years, overcoming fears, wiping tears, and making for careers—whatever you’re selling, whether grape jelly or Brunello Cucinelli.

Word. When I plug philosophy it’s the best and not the rest I use to feather up my nest but it’s sad how the bad sometime gets prime whether you’re a penny or a dime and takes the heart outa you and what you do since it got a wrong start with old Descartes who put that horse before the cart and laid it all on me, but with him it was he, the ego don’t you know that cogito where it then ergo starts to blow the whole thing up, and ‘sup with that, I smell a rat and take it to the mat cause that ego ain’t no amigo, just be free go back to Plato and a full throttle OG my man Aristotle—you got to bottle that stuff and be tough with true blue virtue and I’ll just geek and give the Greek, ARATAY is the word for the day and that’s how you say it, live it, give it, play it for Rene and we can see a better way and you know, hey, ditch the Yugo and gimme dubs I’m a Maserati hero wrapped up in Cucinelli. Yo.

How to Argue Well

With kindness, care, and a smile when possible, knowing the world will still turn if you persuade no one at all.

Listen first. Then listen more. Hear beyond what’s said. Empathize. Then make your case with understanding.

Focus on truth, not ego. Let the light shine through your words to illumine and not blind others.

Tell a story that says it all. Reason works best with imagination's help.

Invite others to see things as you already can. Then accept their invitation to perhaps see more.

Raise your voice only when you're in front of a very large group and are without a microphone.

Suggest. Don't insist.

Respect people, regardless of what you think of their positions.

It should never be about winning, just discovering and sharing.

Seek Truth, Beauty, Goodness and, ultimately, Unity.

Use logic and love in equal measure.

Power and Happiness

What's the proper role of power in our lives? How should we think of it? How is it to be used?

A few days ago, I spoke to an amazing group of people in New York City—the Chief Information and Chief Technology Officers from over twenty major companies like 3M, AOL, CITI, NBC Universal, The Bank of New York, DreamWorks, 20Th Century Fox, and Halliburton. It was quite a band of philosophers.
 
In our session, we considered Aristotle’s view that the secret of human motivation is to be found in the fact that, in everything we do, all of us seek happiness, or wellbeing. If we can understand what this means, we have a leverage in our work and in our lives that’s otherwise unavailable.

And so, with this claim in mind, we quickly examined together three basic views of happiness—as pleasure, peace, or participation in something that brings fulfillment. This last contention, I believe, can actually encompass and extend the importance of both pleasure and peace in a life of happiness. Fulfilling work brings pleasure. And it also encourages a measure of inner peace. Fundamentally happy people then tend to be more committed and more creative in their work together. So my suggestion was that it’s important to explore what makes for fulfilling work and fulfilling relationships. That may give us the foundations for a great work culture that will attract and retain top talent, and provide a safe place where that talent can flourish in innovative ways.
 
My initial claim was then that we all encounter the world each day along four dimensions of experience:
 
The Intellectual Dimension, that aims at Truth
The Aesthetic Dimension, that aims at Beauty
The Moral Dimension, that aims at Goodness
The Spiritual Dimension, that aims at Unity
 
Accordingly, we do our best work together when we respect and nurture these four dimensions and these four ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, which then turn out to be Four Foundations of Greatness.

During our session, as we were contemplating these four concepts, one participant asked me an interesting question: “What about Power?” No one had ever asked that before.
 
We were focused on Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. But the philosopher Machiavelli once claimed that the entire goal of human life is the acquisition, use, expansion, and maintenance of power. Regardless of the accuracy of his philosophy as a statement about life, we certainly have to be concerned, in leadership positions, about power in all those ways.
 
So what about power? Is there another dimension of human experience with the target, or ideal, of power? Should The Four Foundations instead be Five? If not, how is power to be understood?
 
Here’s what I think. Power is not to be considered as an equally fundamental and fifth foundation of greatness, largely because, so far as I can see, there is no distinctive and fundamental dimension of human experience whose target or ideal it is. But it’s extremely important in its own way. And it’s related to our framework in a different and fascinating manner.
 
Power determines how the Four Foundations of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity are accessed and managed. Power is what allows to you get to the Truth and then give it to others. Without the requisite power, you often can’t unearth the truth you need, and you can’t make it widely understood, or make sure it's used in the best ways. But then, of course, there’s also a converse implication. Power allows you to obscure the truth and hide it. And this applies in analogous ways to Beauty, Goodness, and Unity.

In all cases, power is about accessing and managing these ideals, and thereby determining whether or how those around you experience them. It's about the possibility of getting things done, in harmony with Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, or not.
 
For a leader, power exists along a spectrum, and at each point, has degrees. That spectrum ranges from Influence to Force. There are degrees of influence just like there are degrees of force. You can be more or less persuasive in inspiring people to do things. That’s influence. And you can be more or less effective in making people do things. That’s force. The type and degree of power you have, along with how you choose to exercise it, can affect deeply the consideration of how you’re able to access and manage, and then respect and nurture Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity in your organization, among your colleagues, and in your life.
 
We also spoke in our session about the famous Golden Rule. When we can create a culture where we all tend to treat others the way we’d want to be treated, with respect to Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, I believe we become better at using and sharing the power we have available. And we can in that way actually expand it well.

As the philosopher Francis Bacon once told us, a bit metaphorically, knowledge (our grasp of truth) is power. It can certainly bring power. The more we expand the available knowledge in our organizations, the more we expand the power we collectively have to do great things. We can then help others to attain, exercise, and maintain their own power in all the best ways. And we then enjoy a vibrant culture where, as leaders, we’re helping others to achieve peaks of performance in our work together that would otherwise be impossible to attain. We’ll attract great people. And we will tend to retain them in a type of enterprise they won’t want to leave. Through the use of philosophical wisdom, we’ll thereby provide the greener pastures that the best people always aspire to find. And that’s a nice result of power, indeed.
 
 

Dan Lyons, "Disrupted," and Startup Culture

I just read Dan Lyons' new book Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Startup Bubble. The first half of the book had me laughing out loud, again and again. The second half had me worrying about current dangers to rational business culture, and our overall economy.

Dan was a senior tech editor and writer at Newsweek, following a stint at Forbes. He had interviewed and met many of the main players in the tech world over the years, and pretty much thought he had a good feel for what was going on in the realm of tech startups. Young people were creating companies with sometimes crazy ideas, making serious money in the early funding stages, and finally real fortunes in taking those companies public, whether they ever made a profit or not. When Dan's job was terminated at Newsweek, he decided to enter into this world where big money could be made. He was hired by a Boston company called HubSpot. And the book is about his surprising time there.

When I first read the great novel Don Quixote, I remember thinking that some people would see the title character as the paradigm of a creative visionary, seeing things that others could never even dream or imagine. They would become Sancho Panzas of the Don, excited loyal followers hoping to get their own little island of fantasy rewards from faithfully following along on the journey. Others, of course, would view Senior Quixote right away as an unhinged madman, a delusional character who will easily ruin the life of anyone crazy or gullible enough to follow him.

Lyons' new book raises some interesting questions about the errant knight-founders of the current technology world. Who is a true visionary and who's just a madman? And, oh yeah, who might be simply an ordinary charlatan, but now with extraordinary tools of deceit? No one is riding an old horse or a small donkey, and "tilting at windmills." They're all riding the wave of the future, and many are getting crazy rich off the gullibility, hopes, and ambitions of others.

What struck me about Lyons' experiences is that he was exposed to grandiosity, silliness, incompetence, petty nastiness, cluelessness, craziness, well disguised cynicism, and even perhaps a real depth of psychopathic and sociopathic evil in the workplace. And it all, rolled together, makes some people rich.

We live in an unusual time, where magical thinking, new age superstition, hyperbole, and good old fashioned cheer-leading mixed in with a cultural expectation on the part of many younger people that everything should be entertaining and fun, all conspire together to allow our current Don Quixotes to become Pied Pipers on a massive scale. And of course, we see the Dons in contemporary politics as well as business, on every level.

The current snake oil salesmen don't work out of the backs of wagons or old trucks preaching the virtues of their elixirs to rubes on the street. They start companies, find VC funding, and create fun places to work where all their carefully selected Sancho Panzas can toil in hopes of "changing the world," or enriching themselves along the way.

I've been writing about the opposite way of running a business since the mid-nineties, in books such as True Success,  If Aristotle Ran General Motors and If Harry Potter Ran General Electric. And I happen to like fun, even silly fun every now and then. But I like even more business cultures that are built on the ancient transcendent ideals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity - not as slogans, but as realities of day to day work. I believe in the Aristotelian virtues, the deepest elements of the Tao, and the Christian core concept, nearly lost today, of the power in humility.

I believe in real wisdom. And I see the slick criminals and grandiose madmen of our time as using faux wisdom, the counterfeits of real insights, and a deceptive rhetoric wrapped around genuine human needs to forward their own agendas and line their own pockets. As a philosopher who has been fighting for the right approaches for decades now, I urge younger thinkers to join me in providing the true knowledge and authentic insight that's needed by modern business, as we swim a sea now of not only sharks, but poisonous conceptual pollution as well.

Dan Lyons' book is an entertaining and eye-opening wake up call to anyone who cares about the deeply positive role that good business can play in the modern world. When you run into a modern Don Quixote recruiting your work, or soliciting your investment, or appealing for your business with sky-high rhetoric, you would be best off running in the opposite direction. Don't be misled.

The Empty Tomb and Plato's Cave

Today I came across a vivid Easter Sunday representation of the Empty Tomb of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. In this depiction, as viewers, we’re inside the tomb and can see that it’s essentially underground and dark, and yet an attractive bright light draws our attention beyond the now open door. Right away some thoughts came to me.

The Christian diagnosis of the human condition turns on a Greek word, hamartia, that’s most often translated as “sin” but that in the original language meant “falling short” or “missing the mark,” as in the case of an arrow shot toward a bullseye failing to make it to the target, falling short, and thus missing the mark.

The Christian claim is that we all naturally fall short of our proper ideal. We fall short of what we’re shooting for as human beings who deep down want a good, meaningful, successful, fulfilling and loving life that makes its best potential impact on the world. We’re all somehow metaphorically buried in a tomb of mistakes and illusions, and the gospel claim is that there is one who has escaped that tomb, leaving it empty, and has invited us all out of it as well, while actually also empowering us to leave it and move into the light that awaits us.

Plato had this image of a cave. He suggested that we’re all like men chained in an underground cave, watching shadows dance across its wall and mistaking those shadows as realities. We fear them or we desire them. We want to chase them or run from them. They monopolize our attention and define our lives. But they aren’t the realities among which we’re meant to live.

The philosopher, Plato tells us, is the person who breaks his chains and leaves the cave, ascending into the light of the true sun outside, to see the realities within which we’re ideally meant to live. But then, this philosopher descends back into the cave to spread the word to the other captives that they, too, can escape these illusions and the darkness that envelopes their lives. The light awaits them all.

The tomb from which Jesus escaped can be viewed as symbolically representing that same cave, where we're cut off from the true light and life that we’re meant to have. The Easter message is that the one who left that tomb empty invites us all to leave the realm of illusion and get out where we can hit the intended mark, following him into the light.

The Philosophical Sensibility in Pursuit of Wisdom

Wonder. Curiosity. Openness. Adventurousness. Creative thinking. Questioning. Analysis. An insistence on precision. A desire to go deep. Empathy. A quest to link the theoretical and the practical. Suspicion of the superficial. Even-handedness. Caution. Boldness. Even courage. A patience for digging endlessly for the true gold that can only be found by persistent effort. A desire for guidance. A desire to be a guide. An optimism about intellectual effort. Hope.

My Evening With Pat Conroy, Prince of Stories

Years ago, I had the amazing experience of greeting a large audience at historic Thalian Hall in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina and introducing the main speaker for An Evening with Pat Conroy, the first of many events held that year to celebrate 100 years of story telling in the libraries of our county. I had the even more unusual opportunity of spending time with the author, just the two of us, for about an hour backstage before the festivities began, where we could talk freely.

He just wanted to talk about me and my time at Notre Dame. And of course, I only wanted to talk about him and his writing. If my wife had been there, we'd probably have spent all our time talking about her. But that's just the kind of man he was—gracious, kind, humble, and friendly.

Born and raised and educated in the south, Pat Conroy was a man who paid attention growing up and stocked his mind and heart with the stories of this distinctive region that he shared with the world for many years. He wrote his first book while he was still in school, and then followed up with a string of best sellers that continued for quite a run. I've read a bunch.

The Water is Wide is an extraordinary account of a heroic year of teaching on a small island off the coast of South Carolina, and the basis for two great movies.

The Great Santini is about growing up in the home of a fighter pilot, and having to fight for a small measure of independence and dignity in the midst of violence, prejudice, outrageous demands, and some surprising sides of love.

The Lords of Discipline gives us the experience of a southern military school and encompasses hazing, torture, friendship, self-mastery, hope, betrayal, and honor.

The Prince of Tides reveals one family’s struggles with tragedy and madness, much of it in the midst of great beauty, along with one man’s attempt at making sense of it all.

Beach Music helps us feel the gravitational force of family and how hard it is to achieve escape velocity from place and blood, no matter what you do. 

My Losing Season is a book where basketball meets the rest of life.

And, yes, I've even looked through the work that many people with culinary talents I don’t have tell me is one of the more compelling cookbooks of our time and place here in the south.

Pat Conroy’s themes were as universal as his sense of place was particular: The experience ofadversity, the power of friendship, the complex cauldron of family in which we’re all formed, the lure of the low country with its rich display of the wonders of nature, here at the edge of America. You can experience shock and trauma on one page, and find yourself laughing out loud in the very next chapter. 

Some of the best reading times I’ve ever had have been in Pat Conroy’s books. Probably like many of you, I’ve read them even when I really should have been doing other things around the house. I’ve relished every one, and I’ve even taken notes. Pat was a good philosopher, an astute diagnostician of human nature.  But, most of all, he was a master of stories.

You’ve likely read his books, you’ve probably seen and enjoyed the movies based on those books, maybe you’ve even cooked his recipes. With his passing, we all have the opportunity now to reflect with gratitude on his life and body of work. He was a southern original, a prince of his craft and a man I wish I could have gotten to know better. He will be missed.

It's a Wonderful, Spooky Life

It’s a wonderful life, and good-spooky, sometimes.

If you’ve been reading my blog recently at TomVMorris.com, you know I’m super excited about the publication of the new books, The Oasis Within and The Golden Palace. Almost every day, I get some nice affirmation that I’ve spent the past five years well, in writing the big series on Egypt that these books together launch. If you're a regular reader, you’ll also know that all this came to me as an inner vision, a movie playing in my head—something that I had never experienced before. An older physician friend asked me the other day, “Did it ever feel scary?” 

I had to smile. I said, “No. It was sort of spooky in its radical difference from anything I'd ever experienced before, but it all came to me with a tonality of goodness and benevolence, and a sense of joy.” Sometimes I think that life has more strange and cool stuff waiting for us than we ever might imagine.

Today, a shiny new black sedan was waiting for me outside my hotel in Philadelphia. I had just spoken to a group of CEOs and CFOs in The Lincoln Financial Field, where the Eagles play football. The driver took my bags and I slid into the comfortable backseat. I asked him how his morning had been so far. And his accent was interesting, sounding a little like some friends who are from northern India. So I said, “Is your accent Indian?”

He said, “No. Egyptian.” I instantly had one of those little spooky moments where you sort of can’t believe what you just heard. 

I said, “I’ve spent the past five years of my life writing a series of novels about Egypt, set in 1934 and 1935.”

He said, “My father was born in 1932.” Ok then. I had hit the jackpot here. So I told him the whole story, the movie in my head, and the feeling that I shouldn’t do any research on Egypt but just write what came to me. But I explained that I had also Googled stuff after writing it, just to see if there was any connection between my mental movie and reality, and that I was amazed at how much stuff had checked out to be true, even though I knew that my stories were about a re-imagined Egypt. I then told him that my main character is a boy named Walid.

He said, “That’s my name.”

“What?” 

“My name is Walid.”

I said, “That’s amazing.” The man pulled out his wallet and handed me his beautiful business card. Walid Omar. I was curious. “Could you pronounce your name really clearly for me?”

“WaLEED,” he said.

“Wow. That’s great. That’s exactly the way the people in my mental movie say the name. And my wife has been dubious. She’s thought I’m surely mispronouncing it, because a lady I know from Morocco had said it differently, as ‘WA-Lid.”

“No. It’s WaLEED. It’s spelled W-a-l-i-d but pronounced WaLEED.”

“Thank you so much for confirming what I heard in my movie.”

“You’re welcome.”

We continued to talk. He’s from Alexandria. And one of the books to be published will feature some events in that ancient city. I almost never carry my own books with me, but on this trip, I had a copy of The Oasis Within inside my computer bag. I was planning to re-read it on the flight home. But at that moment, I was overcome with a very strong conviction that I was supposed to give it to my driver, Walid. So I did. A book about Walid for my new friend Walid.

It’s a wonderful, spooky world in which we live, and a wonderfully spooky life we can have when we open up and step out and talk to people about things that mean something to us—and then listen.

May your day and week and upcoming month be wonderfully spooky, as well.

The Joy of the Deeper Mind at Work

Joy awaits us all. When we work with the ordinary levels of our mind, everything's harder that it could be. When we clear away the clutter and get beyond the chatter of the normal conscious mind, joyous magic can happen.

I recently posted on social media that I had, a few days ago, finished the final major editing of the eight books that now exist in a series of novels that I've been working on for five years, since February 2011. It's the first experience of writing where I wasn't working hard in my conscious mind to think and compose. It was all a gift of the deeper mind, a layer of mentality or soul, if you will, that we all have, but that we don't often enough draw on, day to day.

These books and the stories they convey came to me, as I've said before, like a movie in my head, a translucent screening of an action and adventure story far beyond anything I could ever have created out of my ordinary operating resources. In fact, when I first started reading the manuscripts out loud to my wife, she interrupted to say, "Who are you and what have you done with my husband?" It was all that different from my nineteen previous books, all non-fiction.

One reviewer of the prologue to the series, The Oasis Within, suggested that a series of conversations between people crossing the desert wasn't that big a stretch for me, and not that far out of my comfort zone as a philosopher who is always talking about life wisdom. And he was right. But there are all these little details and plot points in Oasis that I never would have thought to develop. And there's a reason that The Oasis Within is a prologue to the new series and not a numbered volume of it. It's mostly great conversations. It prepares one of the characters for the action that's to come. And it prepared me for it, as well. But a younger reader, or a reader who just loves action can start with Book One of the series, Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, the book that's now recently out by the title The Golden Palace, which is full of action, adventure, mystery, and intrigue and brings us philosophy in an entirely new key. And all the other books are like that one in this regard, too. It's like slowly walking up to a door, and opening it, and what's inside takes you completely by surprise and launches you into an adventure that just won't stop.

Early in the process, when I learned to calm my conscious mind and just relax and release, the magic would happen. With the deeper mind at work, you feel more like a receptacle, or a conduit. I've mentioned here before, I think, Elizabeth Gilbert's new book Big Magic, where she tells several stories about this remarkable kind of creative experience. It's joyous and practically effortless in its level of self-perceived exertion. How often can we say of our job, paradoxically, that "It's the hardest I've ever worked" and "It's the easiest thing I've ever done" and "It's been pure joy" all at the same time?

This is a hallmark of the deeper mind at work. There is amazing persistence of accomplishment and a sense of ease, and an overflowing of joy to match. The joy is wondrous, deep and high, wide and focused, inner and outer somehow at the same time. It animates everything else you do. It's remarkable, and it's maybe meant to be our most natural state—when we've peeled away all else, all the accretions of consciousness and contrary emotion, when we get down, deep to our most fundamental resource, one that's both natural and transformative at the same time.

I heartily recommend working from your deeper mind and experiencing the joy that's there awaiting you. I'm hoping that another book will also come to me the same way. After a million and two thousand and five hundred and more words, I feel like I'm just getting started. And isn't that the way our work should feel?

A Reflection on Valentine's Day

WARNING: You should read this only if you're absolutely sure you have nothing better to do. This is my belated Valentine's Day philosophical gift to you. The warning.

It’s nice to have survived another Valentine’s Day. And I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my history with this holiday.

Let me first ask something. Ladies, have you ever been given a Valentine’s gift that was poorly thought out, inappropriate, or in any way disappointing?

Guys: Have you ever given such a gift?

I’ve had my share of Valentine disasters. And we philosophers like to find wisdom in catastrophe. I woke up recently reflecting on it all. I’ve had plenty of time to think during my lengthy house arrest since the day in question. You’d think I’d know better after 42 Valentine’s Days with the same person.

There’s nothing scary about Halloween. It’s Valentine’s Day that’s scary. You see all the men in our local grocery store the day before in utter panic trying to pick out the right card or bunch of flowers. They’ve got their Game Faces on, but you can almost smell the fear.

My wife likes to tell her friends that she knows when it’s early February each year because right after the groundhog does his thing, I start walking around the house saying what a made up holiday Valentine’s Day is, and how it’s just a crass money grab. And how, you know, I like to show my love and affection every day, not just one day of the year. I’ve got all the standard guy stuff well rehearsed.

I mean, I got my daughter and granddaughter two-dozen roses this year and it was like, Ok there goes the college fund. They should draw Cupid’s arrow going right through your Master Card.

But when my wife and I were first dating I hatched a plan. I’d get her presents for Valentine’s Day whose price doesn’t double or triple for the occasion. But I’d have a really romantic heart-red theme—the color red—and that’s the primary Valentine color. So I’d always get her something red. I'd be golden.

Early in our marriage, she was driving a Volkswagen beetle, and I had seen a couple of those cars on the side of the road with engine fires, smoke coming out of the hoods. So I thought, wow, I can show love for my wife in a deep way with a very special red present. So I got her the extremely loving gift of a … red fire extinguisher. Well, that put out the fire in a way I had not actually anticipated.

So, Ok, it’s a gift you hope you never have to use, like a defibrillator. Maybe that was the problem. So the next year I got her something more hopefully useful, a red Swiss army knife. It was a nice knife. But I was the one who ended up sleeping in a tent and whittling. I’m just kidding. She was simply puzzled.

And I’m not the worst at this—not by a long shot. A banker in town told me that, I think it was for his first Valentine’s Day with his wife, he went to a top department store in town and got her, in his words, “The very best frying pan they had—top of the line” and when he presented it, she started crying. He said it took him a while to realize they weren’t tears of joy.

One of my other good friends just told me that he had realized he’d better explain his first Valentine’s Gift to his wife. So these were his words: “But we’ve really NEEDED a vacuum cleaner.” I’m not making this up.

In case you’re wondering what I got my wife this year, I once again thought I had something unique: Red Hummus and a red and white kitchen spatula. Yeah. I know. But now I get away with stuff like this, because she looks forward to being able to tell her friends, who are suitably horrified. In some strange, transformational alchemy, the worst my gifts are, the better the story is, and that ends up being the gift. But we do have to wash it down with some really good French champagne. I’ve at least learned SOMETHING.

I ended up this year actually looking good compared to one friend, a CPA at our church, God bless him, who’s maybe even more frugal than I am. You want him managing your money but probably not giving you a gift. He waits until there’s a sale at the Dollar Store.

At church Sunday, my wife asked him whether he had risen to the occasion for the special day. Did he get his wife something nice? His first words were “Well there’s this tray she has for serving me breakfast in bed.” And I knew this was going nowhere good. He said, “One of the legs on the tray had broken. So I got her a new tray.”

Many of us should feel lucky to still be walking and talking—and in a relationship that actually survives such choices. And I think there’s a philosophical lesson or two here for the taking, buried within my well-intended failures and the missteps of nearly my entire gender. But maybe I should leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

A Sunday Reflection on Religion and Faith

I've been away from blogging for a couple of months. I first took a break in honor of the holidays. And then I got busy editing my new series of novels for a quicker than normal schedule of publication. I hope you've already seen the prologue to the series, the book The Oasis Within. It's been out for a few months. And just this week, the first numbered volume in the series Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, The Golden Palace, appeared on Amazon. In two or three months, I hope to have volume two out as well, The Stone of Giza. 

I'm almost done in my editing of the eight books I've already written for the series. And today, Sunday, I want to share a passage I just edited. Even though the books are set mainly in Egypt, certain things happen in faraway places, like Tunisia, or Berlin, or New York City. This passage comes from a story line in numbered Book Seven, The Ancient Scroll. The setting is New York City in 1935 at a Methodist Church. The minister, Bob Archdale, is working on a sermon. We get a chance to see into his head and heart as he makes notes. I hope you enjoy this passage.

Bob at the moment was in his office preparing his sermon for the next morning. He was planning to talk on the nature of faith and how it’s more about perception and values and commitment than just belief. He had decided to use as his biblical text the famous meeting at night between Jesus and the Jewish Rabbinical leader Nicodemus, as reported in the Gospel of John, chapter three. At a time when most of the religious establishment either disliked or feared Jesus, this prominent teacher had gone to see him at night, when, presumably his visit would not be public knowledge. He approached the controversial figure and actually said, “Teacher, some of us know that you were sent by God, because no one could do the things you do without divine support.” And then Jesus, rather than acknowledging the scholar’s rare open-minded reasoning and remarkable belief, says something instead that can be very puzzling on more than one level. His words in response were: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus is of course perplexed and says, “How can anyone return to the womb and be born a second time?” And then Jesus answers in such a way as to indicate that his entire ministry and mission aren’t primarily about reasoning and belief, but personal transformation into what’s really a new life, with new perceptions, values, and commitments.

Bob knew that, at almost any time, many of the people in his church were showing up, week-to-week, to make a deal with God. They would believe whatever they needed to believe, and do whatever they needed to do, in order to gain divine favor and everlasting life. Some were likely just hedging their bets and maybe living out the famous Agnostic’s Prayer: “Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if there is a soul.” They were there in an effort to perhaps improve their lot and maybe defeat death. But God wanted them there to defeat spiritual blindness and deafness and idolatry and selfishness. He wanted to see them born anew, raised from the death of alienation and separation and selfishness to a new life of union with him and each other. He wanted an eternal life for them now, which was more about quality than it was about quantity. 

He really wanted to get this point across to everyone who showed up for the service. The faith they were being called to embrace is about new life, new values, and new commitments lived all day, every day. He wanted them to understand that when the insistent felt needs of the untutored ego can be released, its real needs can be met. And then, we can experience the genuine power of humility, compassion, and deep faith. The reverend was hoping to get all this across in a persuasive and illuminating way, so that at least many of the members of his congregation could perhaps see the issues of faith in a new and richer light.

When people approach religion for what they can get out of it, they ironically make it nearly impossible to get the most out of it. It becomes a tool—an instrument the ego is merely using to enhance its own interests, whether those interests are healthy or not. That’s why we’ve had so much war and violence and oppression in the name of religion throughout history. These things have nothing to do with true spirituality, but are perversions or deformations of what faith and the quest of the spirit are supposed to be all about. We often come across people pursuing their own greed, with their own ambitions, and superstitiously seeking to assuage their worst fears under a false patina of religious language, ritual, and sentiment. And this wasn’t just a danger for other times and places, Archdale knew, but it’s a temptation for any of us unless we can come to a true understanding of spiritual things.

Some Good We Can Do Together

I'm hoping you'll join me to make something good happen.

The New Book

Ever since I left Notre Dame in 1995 to pursue the unusual job of being a public philosopher, I've wanted to write a book full of ideas that had been transformative for me and that would also be genuinely life changing for readers. After 19 nonfiction books, I think I've finally managed to do so at a new level with the new novel, The Oasis Within. 

It arrived as the biggest surprise of my life, and as the doorway to - so far - seven other much longer novels that are also now completely written and just awaiting a final edit and publication. The Oasis Within is a prologue to this series of longer books. My granddaughter christened the big series "Walid and the Mysteries of Phi," featuring the name of the main character and a Greek letter that in this context names both a mathematical ratio and a secret society that's unlike any group of people ever written about, and that's profoundly relevant to how we understand our own lives. I've learned more about life and its possibilities from the characters in these stories than I ever would have thought possible. I've also come to love the characters as if they were real: and in a way, they are.

You've most likely heard me tell the story. The first scene came to me uninvited, as a strikingly unusual, vivid daydream one morning in February of 2011. An old man and a boy were sitting in the sand under a palm tree, talking. They were in the desert in Egypt. It was the summer of 1934. I ran upstairs to my study to write quickly what I was seeing and hearing. I continued to transcribe this mental movie for four and a half years, never consciously devising a scene or plot twist or character. I just watched it all unfurl and did my best to describe what I saw and heard.

A Fellowship of the Mind

There's a concept in The Oasis Within that's become especially important to me - the idea that there can be a "Fellowship of the Mind" in our world, a loose collection of people who are fully open to discovering who they most deeply are, and what they can truly do with their talents and energies – kindred souls who help each other learn to see deeper patterns in events and to draw on otherwise neglected powers for creative accomplishment that can make a difference for their own lives and in their broader communities. I have an audacious hope that if this book gets into the right hands, all the stories in it and the subsequent series may help bring readers together into such a fellowship that can be uniquely powerful. 

Our world is full of tangled problems that no one seems capable of solving, and of intransigent politics that rarely appear to rise above the level of schoolyard taunts. We need something superior to what we're already doing. And in a time when more people than ever are telling me they want their lives to really matter, we all need the right ideas and inspiration for the best path forward. 

My Proposal

Here's what I've realized and now want to act on: You, dear reader, know many people I'll likely never meet. You have a sphere of influence that I could never duplicate. If you've read The Oasis Within already and it's touched you, or even if you haven't yet, but are willing to, and you then find it so resonant that you're moved to go even farther and use it to touch the lives of the people around you, I have a proposal.

I want to get this new book into the hands of as many good people as I can. I don't care about Amazon rankings or bestseller lists or author royalties at this stage. I just want this book to have the impact it's capable of having. And the challenge is now mine, since to get it into the world, I've left the realm of established publishers and have "gone rogue" and created my own imprint for all these books. They were too "different" for the literary agents I've worked with in the past. They couldn't be put into an easy genre box for mainstream publication. Or so I was told. And I knew I wouldn’t change them from being what they are. I believe in them exactly as they’ve come to me. So, I've launched my own publishing initiative, in such a way that allows me to offer you a proposal.

If you can commit this month to buying at least 25 copies of The Oasis Within to give to friends, family, and associates, I can provide them for you at a cost of $7 a book, including shipping, for the beautiful paperback that retails for $14.99. Anyone who orders 50 or more at this price will also get, as a gift from me, the first long novel in the subsequent series, a book called The Golden Palace, which will be fully edited and ready before the New Year. Some friends who’ve ordered 25, 35, 50, 65, 100, or even 200 copies of the book to give away as gifts within their own circles sparked this idea. They were excited to pass the book on to their clients or friends, or to others they come into contact with in the course of their daily lives.

What You Can Do

Here's what you can do, if you'd like to partner up with me in this way. By sending an email to TomVMorris(at)aol(Dotcom), let me know how many copies you'd like to order to give to others. It could be 25 or any number above that. Include in your email your best mailing address. I'll place the order for you right away and have the books shipped directly from the printer to you. I'll then email you an invoice that you can pay by check. If your order includes copies for a book club, let me know and I'll make myself available for a short email of Q&A for the members, or even a brief Skype time with them. I've never done anything like this before. But I think the time is right.

During the holidays, you'll likely be giving presents to people you care about and who make your life better. I hope you'll join me in spreading philosophy by giving The Oasis Within to some of those people, inviting them into a fellowship of the mind and heart that can enhance their lives and perhaps even the world around them a little more than would otherwise be possible.

It felt as if the characters of these books chose me to bring them and their lessons into the world. If you can help me share them in your own part of the world, it would be great. If you've already ordered lots of copies, or in case that's not possible right now, or even if you're just not at all moved to join me in this way with such an endeavor, I hope you'll simply help the books find their mission in the world by mentioning them to others. There's a lot of work for them to do in our time.

Thanks so much for considering this distinctive form of partnership! 

Welders and Philosophers

In the most recent Republican presidential primary debate, Senator Marco Rubio said:

“For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” 

First of all, let me ignore the grammatical infelicity here and agree that the senator is absolutely right in his opinion that vocational education is not as appreciated as it should be in our time and place. One of the best books written on this topic is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford, who happens to be a philosopher with a prestigious PhD who makes his living by working with his hands as a motorcycle repairman, and thus demonstrates that the we should beware of false alternatives in our political rhetoric. Crawford argues eloquently for a recognition of the value and dignity of manual labor, with a special emphasis on its skilled varieties. Life doesn’t offer us a stark choice between doing or thinking, and neither should any good system of education. There are different ways by which we can enjoy a life of thoughtful work. Welding can certainly be one of them. So can toiling as a philosopher.

To the claim that welders make more money than philosophers, my first response would be that if it’s true, then, so what? Would it follow as the senator seems to suggest that we need more welders, thereby increasing our available supply and, against presumably equal demand, competitively force their wages down to the level of the sages? Stranger yet is the fact that behind these remarks we can see the exact value assumption that’s gotten us in trouble: The belief that higher wages mean a higher value to our society. That’s precisely the equation that’s led us down the road of valuing college prep vastly more than vocational education, and trying to train everyone for white collar careers, whether that’s the best thing for a particular young person, or for the rest of us, in the first place. A mediocre hedge fund manager may make a lot more money than a great school teacher, or a master welder, but you can’t convince me that this is a good measure of their relative value to society. So even if the welders of the world are out there lighting their cigars with hundred dollar bills and the average philosopher can’t pay the rent, I don’t think that implies anything about the relative value of welders and philosophers. 

When I first went to graduate school at Yale to become a philosopher, I remember seeing a newspaper clipping on a philosophy department bulletin board. It featured a photograph of a construction worker sitting on the ground, eating out of his steel lunch box, his hard-hat by his side, and with a copy of Heidegger open in front of him. I said to myself, “That’s it. That’s the role of philosophy - to help everyone become more thoughtful about their lives.” I spent fifteen years as a professor of philosophy in a great university and my goal was never to turn my students into wage-earning academic philosophers, but instead to help them develop a more robust philosophical dimension of their experience and thought, whether they went on to become doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, or welders.

And in my most recent two decades as a public philosopher working with people across industries and professions, my goal is the same. We need more good philosophy and philosophers in our time, not less of it and fewer of them. But that’s because we need more philosophical practitioners in all walks of life, including politics.

Rodin got it right in his famous sculpture of The Thinker, which I first saw in person many years ago. It surprised me to notice how muscular an individual is depicted in the statue. He’s obviously a man of action as well as of thought. Rodin had expressed a deep insight. The good thinker should ideally be a proficient doer; and the active doer, a careful thinker. Only then will things have a chance to go well.

This is something all our candidates for high office should keep in mind. Doing without thinking is much more dangerous than thinking without doing. And no politician who ignores such philosophical insights can ever take on the fissures in our body politic and stand a chance of repairing our wholeness with good and lasting welds.

Unusual Places to Philosophize

I'm just back from a great national meeting in Orlando for ValMark Securities, where I had the chance yesterday to philosophize with hundreds of wonderful people, thanks to the sponsorship and support of Lincoln Financial. We were in a beautiful ballroom in one of the few top Orlando hotels I had never spoken in before. The Loews Portofino Bay was an elegant and perfect venue for relexing and exploring the wisdom of the ages.

And in the midst of that great environment, a question arose in conversation. Where was the most unusual place I'd ever spoken to an audience as a philosopher? I had to think. And I ended up with an interesting list. I've philosophized in such places as:

A private home in Texas, on the family's third floor, full-size basketball court, to 150 people

The middle of the Baltic Sea, in the ballroom of what seemed to me a titanic cruise ship, that later sank

The Detroit Lions Football Stadium, on the fifty yard line

Outside in a big field in Alabama, in 100 degrees, under a tent, after another big field talk out in the country near Roanoke Rapids, NC 

On a large, private Gulfstream Jet, pictured above, where I used a white board while speaking to 11 company presidents

In the Mecca in Milwaukee, where the Bucks used to play basketball, to 5,000 people

In an old Elk's Club in rural Illinios, where I was given the Key to the City by the Mayor but was told that no one ever locked anything anyway

In Camp Snoopy, inside The Mall of America

In an otherwise regular looking, fairly nondescript room whose most notable feature was that it was big enough that it could accommodate the 10,000 people philosophizing with me that day

In the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, at a rural mountain lodge

In the middle of the East Carolina University Basketball Arena, to thousands of teachers

At a well known New York City Disco, on the dance floor, under the disco lights, and surrounded by an audience of hundreds of people around a balcony and on the floor holding drinks

There have also been many schools, churches, retreat centers, old buildings, glass buildings, high rise, low rise, and no rise locations amid all the ballrooms and convention centers along the way. 

The lesson I take from this when I relfect back over it all is that you can philosophize to good effect almost anywhere, and under nearly any circumstances. For over a hundred years, our culture has too often limited serious philosophy to college and university classrooms, where the discussions can sometimes rise so high in abstraction that they seem to lose all breathable air. But Cicero once praised Socrates in these words, or actually their Latin equivalent:

He was the first to call philosophy down from the sky and establish her in towns, and bring her into homes, and force her to investigate the life of men and women, ethical conduct, good and evil.

It's been my unexpected joy to be able to do something of the same in our own time, on my own level, and in my own way, redoing the job begun by the famous progenitor of public philosophy, a job that needs to be done anew in every century, in every generation. I feel a deep gratitude to all who have invited me to come and do it, in whatever circumstances. And I look forward to the locations yet to come! I hope you get to join me in one of them for some philosophical reflection on our lives. 

Plato's Gym

At the Sports Center gym where I workout every day, there's a cafe or deli. One day this week, when I was walking by the counter, the young lady who works there making sandwiches and ladling out soups, putting together salads, and handing out sports drinks, called out to me. "Mr. Morris, can you help me with something?"

I thought she needed help lifting and carrying something heavy. So I said, "Sure," and turned around to go heft whatever burden she had been struggling with. But she didn't move as if to show me what big box or sack she needed to have repositioned.

Instead, she said, "Can you explain to me virtue ethics?"

That gave me pause. It's not a request for help you often hear in a gym. "Yeah, no problem," I replied, before figuring out how the heavy lifting was going to be done on this one. What angle did I need to take? What leverage could help?

So I explained that Aristotle and a bunch of other ancient philosophers believed that we bring into any situation various personal strengths and weaknesses of character. The strengths, they thought of as virtues. Our word 'virtue' comes from the latin 'virtu' which meant strength or prowess. And that in turn came from 'vir' which meant man. The Greek word was 'arete' which itself could mean excellence or virtue. Aristotle thought it was worth figuring out what strengths or excellences would be universally good to have, and built his conception of ethics (from the Greek word 'ethos' or character) around these virtues.

He identified as virtues such things as honesty - a strong inclination toward truth - and liberality, a habit of giving to those in need what they could well use, and courage - an ability to do what's right rather than what's easy, even if it's quite challenging. He then came to see courage as perhaps the most crucial of the virtues, since you probably won't exercise any of the others in difficult circumstances without courage.

Modern approaches to ethics have focused on rules. Perhaps inspired by scientific laws, or the civic rules and legal regulations that make civilized society possible, philosophers began to hunt for the rules that ought to govern our conduct. The ten commandments are a start. But as important as rules are, you can never have enough, and paradoxically you quickly get too many. Something more is needed. Rules need interpreting. Every rule is general. Any situation is specific. We need discernment. We need wisdom and the habit of acting in accordance with wisdom, which may even be another nice general definition of virtue.

One of my colleagues during my days at Notre Dame decades ago, Alastair McIntyre, almost singlehandedly revived the ancient tradition of virtue ethics, a focus on character more than rules, as being what's at the heard of ethics. For a masterful and difficult account of it all, you might want to consult his book After Virtue.

There are now many qualities you can call virtues. I read an article today about positive passion as perhaps being one. The author mentioned also patience. And that got me thinking. Positive passion is a hot virtue. Patience is a cool one. Passion gets you started. Patience keeps you going. Passion can fuel a journey. Patience can keep it on track. Passion is a youthful virtue. Patience is a mature one. You have to wait for it, appropriately. If your passions bring you too much success too quickly in life, you often never develop the virtue of patience.

My friend at the gym cafe seemed to be sincerely pleased by our discussion. And I was equally pleased at the vigorous workout with weights that followed.

Whenever you're confused by anything, that means it's time to get out of Plato's Cave and get yourself to Plato's Gym. Give yourself the mental workout of thinking things through, carefully and clearly. Or if the issue seems too heavy, just elicit the help of a workout partner of the mind.

Questions and Answers

Buckle up your seat belts. We're going to ponder the role of questions and answers in our lives. Today's blog post has been copied and pasted from the introduction of Chapter Twenty in a book I'm editing, the big novel that follows The Oasis Within, a book called The Golden Palace. Occasionally, a chapter in the book will begin with a philosophical reflection. But more often, chapters open with a stunning plot twist that controverts our expectations. This is book two of what I've written just by watching the mental movie that came to me. So I'm always as surprised as readers will soon be. But onto our reflection, which came to me just as unexpectedly as any dialogue or plot twist. 

Questions are normally easier to arrive at than answers. They can just come to us, unexpected and uninvited. They can sometimes almost force themselves on us. But answers, we normally have to go looking to find. And some will elude us, no matter how hard we look. And yet, there’s a bit of a paradox here. Not all questions are easy. It can take a true genius to come up with the right breakthrough question for any domain of human life or inquiry. That’s not easy at all. In fact, the first secret to pioneering accomplishment in most areas of life is to ask the right questions. This is because, once you’re inquiring in the right direction, your path will almost inevitably lead you to interesting and important new realizations, if you keep at it and don’t give up. Great questions often define the creative spark.

And even before any answers materialize, merely living with the right questions can deepen your life, alter your understanding, and make you a different person. Those who can’t live with unanswered questions can’t function well or dwell at the highest level of existence in this world.

It’s been said that a little philosophy is a dangerous thing. That’s because a modicum of philosophical reflection gives us most of the ultimate questions, but without most of the answers. And many people, learning that the answers aren’t nearly as easy to identify as the questions, get discouraged and then despair of finding the truth, or even of there being any truth about these deepest of issues. It’s only with extended and persistent philosophy that the answers to our most challenging questions can be pursued effectively, and eventually found. They’re hard to dig up, and some of them can seem impossible to attain, as you journey hard in their direction. 

There are many lines of basic inquiry about life that have been pursued for centuries, even millennia. An initial surprise is that the people who have thought about them the hardest don’t often agree. That can be troubling, and even disheartening, because these great thinkers of the past can sometimes even be worlds apart. A conclusion then begins to emerge. The full form of the final answers about the ultimate contours and conditions of life may just elude us, even through the entirety of our earthly adventures. But typically, on any deep subjects regarding the core issues of our existence, the harder the answers are to find, the more important they may be. This means that all the work required to seek them out should, in the end, be worth the effort. Yet, this will be true only if we persist. 

Using our minds well to chase the truth can be an extraordinarily beneficial activity. If we’re open, and genuinely curious, we’ll almost always benefit in some way from the pursuit. And with some lines of inquiry, it may be that the most beneficial result of the quest will be not a propositional answer, a statement of truth realized by the mind, so much as a personal transformation, a new lived understanding felt in the heart. The blinders finally come off, and we see anew.

A Most Remarkable Book Signing

I recently had the great joy of speaking to nearly 600 Indiana judges, hosted by their Chief Justice and the Indiana Supreme Court, pictured above. After a lively hour of philosophy, a lot of the honorables stood in line during their lunch hour, trading food for philosophy, to buy a copy of The Oasis Within and have me sign it. The conversations we had as a result were amazing.

Judges confront daily the most troubling problems of our society, and most often the people causing those problems. They face difficulty, tragedy, and the entire range of human emotions played out in their courts. It has to be emotionally exhausting. And the workload never lets up. They don't have a hard week followed by a light load. It's endless. And the wonderful irony is that, surrounded by the greatest threats to societal disorder, they play such a crucial role in maintaining the order that allows for a flourishing culture. And, as you can imagine, it's never an easy job. Then, in their spare time, as if they have any, they do volunteer work in their communities. I was inspired just being with them.

One man recalled having heard me speak 21 years ago. He said the meeting occurred at the lowest period of his career and life, and that the hour had been just the inspiration he had needed. And now here he was, all those years later, flourishing and loving his work.

Another remembered that same event, all those years ago, and thanked me for in that talk having gotten him excited about philosophy, which he has read now for over twenty years. He works with addicts and tries to impart to them the best wisdom for living. He snatched up a copy of the new book as perhaps just the thing he needed to share with those he counsels.

The judges' enthusiasm for the new book was great to see. The Oasis Within is about inner resilience, outer results, and so much of the wisdom we need in navigating a challenging and often gratifying world. I look forward to hearing from the judges as they begin to read, ponder, and use the ideas in the book. It's a rare book signing where you see so many new books go out the door with so many avid readers who are in a position to use its ideas for great good in their communities and in their lives.

If you have a chance, thank a judge for all that they do! I sure took the opportunity I had to do so.

The Man With the Thousand Dollar Bill

I have a good story and an ethical conundrum for you today.

My father built some of the early radio stations throughout the southeast US in the late forties and early fifties of the last century. He wasn't ever the money guy, just the expert hired help who knew how to set up a radio station, find the right person to put in the electronics, get a guy to build the tower, and then call on all the local businesses to sell ad time on the new station before it went on air.

In the course of working in small towns in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, he met some real characters along the way. One guy he told me about when I was growing up was a man who always dressed very nicely and carried in his wallet only one thing: a one thousand dollar bill. He took my dad out to eat several times in small restaurants and diners and it was only on the second or third occasion that he told my father his special trick.

He never had to pay for a meal. Ever. He had done this for at least a year. He'd go into a local joint, looking like a million dollars in his sharp suit, order a meal, and at the end, when the check came, he'd get out his wallet and open it up, and then exclaim: "Well, my goodness. Would you look at that? All I have is a thousand dollar bill? Can you change it?"

The waitress would be shocked. She'd ogle the bill, and exclaim, "Goodness Gracious!" or some such Southernism, and call the cook, or owner over to see. They'd then continue to exclaim.

The man would be so apologetic. "I usually try to carry something smaller than this! I'm so sorry!" The locals would be simply stunned.

"Is that real?"

"Yes, ma'am, as real as it gets!"

"I've never in my life seen such a thing!" Everyone would examine this rare specimen of US currency. It would be like seeing the Hope Diamond in person. And then whoever was in charge would inevitably say, "Well, it's just a treat and quite an honor to see a greenback like that. I bet you only come across those in New York City or Hollywood!"

"And hardly ever there!" our character would knowingly remark.

"Well, look. Dinner's on the house! We just appreciate you coming in today. I wish my wife was here to see this. It's my treat."

"You don't have to do that."

"Heck. I can't change that anyway. And I'm just pleased to have a fellow like you come into the joint and grab a bite. It's been a great pleasure to meet you and talk to you. Let it be on the house."

"Well, if you insist. That's quite gracious of you. And, next time, I'll try to have a more ordinary collection of bills in my wallet." They'd then shake hands, all around. And the character would leave, with one of the restaurant's mints in his mouth, or a toothpick in his teeth.

Now, the question: Was this guy's action ethical? Was he ethical? Or was what he was doing wrong? Please explain your answer.

I'll have the graded copies back to you next week. Class dismissed.

The Diary of Walid: On Inner Peace

From the Appendix at the end of The Oasis Within, these are excerpts from a diary kept by the thirteen-year-old Egyptian boy, Walid, as he's crossing the desert in 1934 with his uncle Ali. At the end of the day, he writes down things he's learned from what he's heard, seen, and experienced.

An oasis is fun, safe, and relaxing. We can carry an oasis within us wherever we go, an inner place of calm and refreshment, by using our thoughts well.

We all have in our minds something like an emotional telescope. If we look through the end everyone uses, things will seem bigger than they really are. But we can flip it around and look through the other end. That will make things appear smaller and less threatening. So whenever anything looks big and overwhelming, say to yourself, “Flip the telescope!”

Almost anything needs interpretation. That’s where freedom begins.

Whether something is a big deal or not often turns on how we see it. If you think it’s a big deal, it is. But you can change your mind on many things and shrink them down to size.

Wisdom for life is about seeing things properly. It’s about perspective. This gives us power, because it brings peace to our hearts, and then we can think clearly, even in difficult times.

If I live most fully with my heart and mind in the reality of the present moment, I will feel better and be more effective.

Things are not always what they seem. In fact, they often aren’t.

Whenever life brings us a storm, we should use what we have, stay calm, and move quickly to respond well.

An oasis within us is a place of peace and power in our hearts.

We can learn the most from the most difficult things.

We can’t control the day, but only what we make of the day. We should always try to make the best of whatever comes our way.

The Oasis Within

Today I have a great official announcement, unofficially posted on Facebook and Twitter yesterday. A new era has come! And a new way of being a philosopher has arrived with it.

In February of 2011, after a breakfast of toast and coffee, I suddenly had the most vivid daydream of my life. An old man and a boy were sitting under a palm tree, at a beautiful desert oasis, talking. They were in Egypt. It was 1934. And their conversation was really great. I was intrigued. It was all so real, and so different from anything I had ever experienced. I have a robust imagination, but nothing like this. As the movie played in my head, I ran up the stairs to my study to start writing it down. The boy, age thirteen, was with his much older uncle, and it seemed that they were crossing the desert with friends from a small village in western Egypt, on their way to Cairo. I wrote until the vision passed, and I posted the few pages I had written out, as a transcription, on The Huffington Post. Right away, I got lots of enthusiastic emails. "What is this? This is great!" I didn't know what it was.

The next day, the movie started up again. And I wrote down everything I saw and heard. This went on for weeks, and then months. The characters talk about such things as inner peace, the challenge of change, the dynamic nature of balance, how things can help or harm us, the true power of the mind, the hidden structures of our world, the importance of wisdom, the elements of human nature, the necessity of love, the requirements of success, and the world’s strangest gift of all - uncertainty. I could be almost anywhere, doing almost anything, and I'd have to grab a pen and paper and start writing. Pretty soon, I realized that I had an entire book. It was called The Oasis Within. I knew that because I woke up with the title seared in my mind. Yeah, it's all strange. But interesting strange. And it was the most fun, by far, that I've ever had writing - or doing anything as a philosopher.

The story continued. A second book, much bigger, appeared, as if it were already fully formed in every detail and I just had to get it in that movie form so I could write it down, as well. I never had to make up anything. And I never did. It all just came to me, in a rush. It was like drinking out of an open fire hydrant. It was all I could do to type fast enough. Egyptian names, historical references, stuff I didn't know anything about at all - but at the end of each day, I began to research what I had seen in the movie, and all sorts of odd details turned out to be true of the time and the place. How was this happening? I had no idea. The first book, it turned out, was a fascinating conversational prologue to what was now obviously a much longer action, adventure, and mystery novel full of comedy, romance, politics, crime, and, most of all, philosophy. I was seeing a deep worldview developed by the characters in what they did and said.  It really blew me away.

The second book was more than twice the length of the first one. Then, the movie picked up again - there was a third, even bigger, book, and a fourth one, and on and on. Book eight came to a wild culmination, and the movie projectionist, whoever it is, then took a break. I was nearly a million words into the most unexpected adventure of my life, and what I now think of as the culmination of my work as a public philosopher interested in understanding as much as I can about what we're doing in this world, and how we can do it best. I learned more from the movie than I had at Yale, UNC, and Notre Dame combined. But they had all prepared me well for this wild and unexpected journey.

One friend, a former student, who is a highly acclaimed novelist, read the first two books in draft and said, "This is The Alchemist meets Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones." That was encouraging. And the first edition of the first book just came out in its first form - a really beautiful paperback. The hardcover version, and an ebook, are due out within a week or two. But the paperback is now there, waiting for you, at Amazon, hoping you're curious. The hardcover and the ebook will be available through any bookseller, and also very soon. But if you want to see the opening chapters in the new adventure right now, the journey that has changed my own life for the better, please go, click here, The Oasis Within, and read and tell me soon what you think!

To quote one of the characters, "Much is yet to be revealed."