I look at Agora’s “Topics” section – it has so many beautiful philosophical texts from 2500 years of Western philosophy. I go through the monthly pages, month by month, and I see texts by famous philosophers and forgotten philosophers, poetic philosophers and logical ones, ancient thinkers and modern and those in between, spiritual thinkers and materialist thinkers, abstract theoreticians and intuitive ones, mainstream and revolutionaries. Each text is a precious diamond, shining with new surprising insights.

It took us a lot of work to prepare those texts. Why spend so much time on this project, week after week, month after month? Because deep philosophical texts are precious to me. They touch me, they awaken profound ideas within me, they inspire me to think in new ways and see new things.

I sit quietly and listen to their voice – I don’t argue against them, I don’t try to analyze them too much, I don’t try to form an opinion. I listen to the sentences as if listening to music, to the way they formulate their ideas, to the conceptual connections they create, to the way they flow in the world of ideas. And often, after a while, they touch me and inspire me, giving me new insights and opening for me new horizons of understanding.

This week I chose to reflect on Agora’s “Inner Truth” page (Topics, January 2017). For several days I focused on Gabriel Marcel’s text, and I reflected quietly on it. One sentence in particular attracted my attention: “Our experience of depth is connected to the feeling that a promise is being made, but that we can grasp only a glimpse of the fulfillment of that promise.” I listened to it speak, and it gave me a beautiful symphony insights. Interestingly, the photo under the text also helped me in this reflection.