Poem: Thinking About Thinking

Thinking About Thinking

by Paul Margulies

For everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking - and with good will every normal human being has this ability - this observation is the most important one he or she could possibly make.... Thinking all too readily leaves us cold in recollection; it is as if the life of the soul had dried out. Yet this is really nothing but the strongly marked shadow of its real nature - warm, luminous, and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world. This penetration is brought about by a power flowing through the activity of thinking itself - the power of love in its spiritual form.

- Rudolf Steiner, 'The Philosophy of Freedom'

You say Confucius is confusing

You refuse to start with Sartre

And you just can’t understand Kant.

Mr. Spinoza really throws ya

Schopenhauer is quite sour

These philosophers rave and rant.

Your brain can’t find the room

For Bishop Berkeley, David Hume

And well may you lament,

That though Plato may be great

Oh, God! It’s difficult to state

Precisely what the hell he meant.

You may think a puff of pot’ll

Help you more than Aristotle,

Heraclitus is quite dense.

Or you substitute for thinking

Just a touch of social drinking

But still you feel quite tense.

If you think that thoughts will bore you

Someone else will have them for you

And that’s the catch, my friend.

Because from thinking you can’t hide

Or someone else will be your guide

From the beginning to the end.

Through thinking, Beauty, Truth, and Good

Can be rightly understood

As light shimm’ring from above.

And when our thinking becomes seeing

We experience pure being

And our thinking turns to love.

Paul Margulies was a famous talent in the advertising world as well as a devoted anthroposophist.