Get Email Updates • Email this Topic • Print this Page
OK then it is true. Plato and Socrates both are profoundly 'mystical' but it is a word I am very careful about using. In many circles it is a derogatory term, something you take refuge in when you can't think straight.
I have actually become a very convinced, albeit not very well-educated, Platonist, in the last decade or so. I am convinced that the idea of forms, and the realm of ideas, has a basis in reality, but it is on another plane of reality. Nobody nowadays in respectable circles has any time for such notions. They don't make sense, and indeed it is true, they don't. From where we sit, deeply ensconsed in our notion of normality and our confidence of who we think we are, there is absolutely no way to intuit the forms or to penetrate the realm of which Plato spoke. it takes a deep askesis, metanoia, and many other spooky Greek technical terms I don't even know about. One thing is for sure, you will never see them through the Hubble. A saying I have coined about it is that the forms don't exist. They don't have to exist - THINGS do the hard work of existing. All anything can do is reach towards or try and express its ideal form. This reaching is called entelechy, which is the principle by which anything knows which whole it is part of, and the form it should take.
Anyway, I am sure it is all true. Sometime back in late medieval times, maybe in the battle between realism (proponents of universals) and nominalists (deniers of same), the whole idea of the laws of form and the ideals was abandoned. Had I but world enough, and time, I would go back and find out the details.
I realised long since that whatever one sees there - and you really do see it - you have to develop a praxis and a way of relating to it in real life.
But you have to get out of your normal space. Ex-stasis. Outside normality. Even if you don't stay there, and you can't, there is something you see from there, that you have to see. (And it is hazardous to do so, there is a risk.)
But you have to get out of your normal space. Ex-stasis. Outside normality. Even if you don't stay there, and you can't, there is something you see from there, that you have to see. (And it is hazardous to do so, there is a risk.)
Leary might well have dressed in priestly robes, but he was a trickster and first rate bullshit artist, nothing would surprise me.
I wrote a song called For Sophia, after my first meditation retreat, long time ago. It is here.
Leary was a trickster and had no lasting value. But he seemed amazing at the time.
Didn't Thoreau compare Socrates and Jesus? I see the resemblances, but in my 'spiritual anthropology', Jesus is the Perfectly Realised Being, and Socrates a Very Wise Man. Jesus was on a completely different plane.