I received an e-mail from a visitor to my blog a few weeks back that inspired me to a little project. The message read as follows:
Hello heartland. You asked for tips and here they are. You are a former Marine and Christian. Now you are a Buddhist and having trouble "practicing your faith." What you need to do is to read (translation: meditate upon until you know them by heart) various works. Here are some of them: Nietzsche, The Antichrist The works of Chuang-Tzu and Lao-Tzu. The Japanese Art of War by Thomas Cleary (you were a Marine.) Attack on Christendom by Kierkegaard. (Please find a translation that is easy to read. If Kierkegaard is obscure, it is the fault of the translator.) Buddhism is not a faith, it is closer to a philosophy (which it isn't either.) Don't "try" to practice it as a faith. The works of Alan Watts are a good ladder to get to where you want to go but if you forget to throw away the ladder once you get there, well, you might as well go back to being a fundamentalist Christian because the result will be better. I'm not looking for any correspondence from you, I'm just perpetrating a random act of kindness. You sound like a dedicated man of integrity and courage. We need people like you and I want to encourage you and push you along your path. Every one of the authors I recommended has a humorous and ironic side (except possibly
things, even in the darkest times. It might be the most important
advice of all.
Yours with feet firmly planted in nothingness,
J.
This 'random act of kindness' inspired me to collect as many of these works, and others of import, as I could find in e-text and put them together into a single Library.For a package of must read literature, 'Philosophers' is a collection of works from such great philosophers as Aristotle, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Sun Tzu, and others packed in an application that allows you to add works to, rearrange, delete, or customize in any way you see fit. And the app also allows you to organize any other information and ideas in a hierarchical, tree-like structure. 'Philosophers' is a .gde file packed especially for use with 'The Guide'.'The Guide' is an application that allows you create documents ("guides") which inherently have a tree (which you can modify as you please) and text associated with each node of the tree. The text itself is of the rich-text variety, and the editor allows you to modify the style and formatting of the text (fonts, bold, italics etc). The Guide is available as an installable package for Microsoft Windows 2000 and upwards (XP, 2003, Vista). It should work (although not tested) on the 64-bit versions also. The binaries are also available as a zip file that requires no installation. The Guide is a 32-bit native C++ Win32 application (that uses MFC).You may get 'Philosophers' and 'The Guide' packed together by clicking here .
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