Hal Manogue's Page

It is wonderful to move
To a new place every day.
It is wonderful to flow
Without ice and mud
Everything my friends,
Is gone with yesterday.
All the words are gone.
Now is the time to say something new.

Rumi’s words from Divan-I Kebir translated by Dr. Nevit O. Ergin, capture 21st century thought with 13th century words. It’s wonderful to move in the now. It’s wonderful to flow in this moment of linear time where my spirit meets my flesh. It’s where yesterday and tomorrow i… Continue

The hour is striking so close above me,
So clear and sharp,
That all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: There’s a power in me
To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
Without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
And they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish
And paint in gold, as if it were an icon
That could bless us,
Though I’ll not know who else among us
Will feel this blessi… Continue

The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I’m doing now. I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future… Continue

But the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent the awareness of reality. . .
Every society, by it own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the form of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially conditioned filter; experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. . . I am aware of all my feelings and thoughts whi… Continue

We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergences later in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting, as it were, in our modes of thinking, a… Continue