Silly Moderns Claiming to be ‘Non-dualists’
by Eric S. Fallick
Q. I wonder if you would be willing to deal with those who take an immanentist perspective, such as western non-dualists. They would argue that ascesis is a kind of attachment and not necessary. I believe this denies causation as well as the nature of the One, but I would be interested in your thoughts about this.
A. The modern alleged 'non-dualists' you ask about are not actually 'non-dualists' at all, but rather the most extreme dualists and actually pluralists. 'Non-duality' means that there are not two (or more) things, that there is only One. In the One as such, there is only the One, nothing else at all. As I have written about elsewhere, all the appearance of multiplicity is the darkening and lessening of the One. The silly people you refer to denying world-denying-ness and claiming that the most extreme world of multiplicity is the Absolute as it is are completely denying true Oneness and taking duality/multiplicity as the real and the ultimate, and are thus the real dualists or pluralists. The ascetic and renunciant is the real 'non-dualist' since he turns from the sense-world of multiplicity and focuses as much as possible on the One. Even in terms of the second hypostasis, Nous, these people are among the many mentioned in, for example, the Politea who can see many beautiful, etc. things, but can't see or understand or believe in a single beauty, etc.-in-itself even if someone points it out to them and pass their lives as if dreaming rather than awake. The same applies to modern alleged 'immanentism'. For the One to be immanent in the many means that the many are really the One mistakenly perceived to be many due to delusion and darkness, and that one must awaken through contemplative asceticism to see only the One and no longer see multiplicity at all, which, of course, means that asceticism and renunciation that involves decreasing experience of the many as real, desirable, etc. is the only real spiritual practice. The alleged spiritual practice of the silly moderns amounts to no more than grooviness in everyday life, being just an ordinary deluded sensually indulgent desiring worldling but thinking one is cooler than others who don't exalt and rationalize their desires and attachments.
You are quite right that these so-called modern 'non-dualists' and 'immanentists' (really just pluralistic realists and positivists, and not restricted to the West) deny causation and the nature of the One, of Reality, and they are the most deluded and foolish of deluded fools. They are so ridiculous and silly that they wouldn't even be worth a thought except that they are now in this modern world so ubiquitous and numerous, like demons, plague vectors, or a cancer. In Christianity, they hide under the cover of 'creation spirituality' and post-Vatican II and modernism; in Hinduism and Buddhism, they go under 'tantra' (a perversion to begin with, as you have noted); in Buddhism, they also hide under 'emptiness', 'compassion and bodhicitta', misuse of Chan/Zen rhetoric, confusion about Hua-yen teachings, etc., and in Hinduism, also under 'advaita' and sometimes 'bhakti'; the few who now claim to be what they think are Platonists, use 'theurgy' and the perversions and nonsense of Iamblichus, etc.; and etc. and etc. They are all just really simply rationalizing their worldly desires and attachments that they don't want to give up and twisting alleged spirituality and spiritual teachings to allow them to do so, and to fit in with their modern this-worldly prejudices. Their karma is simply very heavy and their minds and souls most clouded and deluded so that they can't see even the most obvious, simple, and basic of spiritual principles. Most of them probably will be lucky if they even manage to get reborn as human beings again! Yet, they are so prevalent now (there have always been some, but not so many and so much the norm) that I tend to think that they and their nonsensical ideas are another symptom of the modern world and its inability to comprehend transcendence, renunciation, and genuine spiritual practice. (I have been waging this fight against this kind of nonsense for 40 years since my days at the so-called 'Zen Community of New York' as a young man. (As is, or should be, well-known, Japanese so-called Zen and Buddhism largely went down the tubes this way long ago.) And I still encounter it all the time.) As you know, no real spiritual teaching or teacher has ever gone their way in the history of mankind. It just doesn't make any sense at all and is self-contradictory--if what they say is correct and just everything as it is the Absolute and the ascesis is not necessary and is just an attachment, then, logically, their own teaching and such little practice as they themselves do is also not necessary and just an attachment! If they are correct, then everything is already OK as it is just like ordinary worldlings who don't believe in anything spiritual say--they should just look around them and see if this world is really so wonderful! If enlightenment and spirituality is such a simple and easy and effortless thing as they say, then all the sages of all the systems of the past who renounced and exerted tremendous efforts in the ascesis were the stupidest people in the world, and they are the first who have ever really understood how things are on a large scale! Is such worth even entertaining? Even the slightest actual understanding of how Reality, karma, the spiritual Path, causation, etc.--even ordinary life (it is like someone saying that one can become a concert pianist without practicing because music is already present in the world!)!--works indicates the absolute necessity of the ascesis and the absurdity of their ideas. Their ideas simply destroy all spirituality and philosophy and practice of any kind. It is hard for me to understand how they can think the way they do when it is so obviously silly and erroneous--I guess it must be their heavy karma and delusion just like ordinary worldling secular materialists who deny spirituality and transcendence and from whom they are hardly much removed.
It seems that it should be obvious that one's experience is what one is and if one is involved in worldly pursuits and desires and sensual pleasures and involvements, etc., etc., then one is ipso facto experiencing and in samsara with all its misery and if one is not doing and pursuing and involved in any of these things but is involved with the sense world as little as possible and directed to contemplation and noetic things, then one is, to that extent at least, less experiencing and more out of samsara and its misery! In Plotinian terms, the soul is contemplation, as everything is contemplation, and worldling life is per se a dim, dark, obscure, false contemplation, but contemplative ascetic life is per se a brighter, clearer, truer contemplation, and, hence, a truer and happier state of existence. Truly, worldlings actually exist and are less than true renunciants and contemplative ascetics; their state of being is less real! Such has seemed obvious to me for a very long time, but no one understands.
It is intrinsically impossible for someone with a significant and stable degree of realization or experience of the One/Good not to be an ascetic and renunciant and not to lead an ascetic life. One who has fully realized re-union with the One is, of course, not even here or experiencing this world or individuated sensate existence in space-time at all, so any phenomenal questions are no longer relevant, but one who has gone significantly along the Way but is still in becoming no longer can even perceive or experience or experience as really real the sense world enough to pursue worldly and sensual desires. To pursue worldly and sensual desires, pursuits, and life is inherently to turn the soul towards darkness, non-being, and non-knowing and darken and dim and lessen the soul's own light and being and knowing. When the light of the Good/One has illuminated sufficiently and stably enough the soul, it can no longer darken itself enough to experience the pursuit of worldly things beyond survival and of worldly and sensual desires and pleasures--it is simply no longer possible to be in that state of non-being--and thus such a one perforce is an ascetic and renunciant.
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Sunday, September 9, 2018
A Couple of Q. and A.'s About Beginning Renunciation
Q. I am a 18-year-old (nearly 19) soon-to-be renunciant and ascetic,
hopefully, as it cannot be ignored that you cannot have the world
and the great rewards of salvation and freedom. I found your blog in
my investigation of Platonism, as it is a pure system where the
majority of (if not all of it completely!) it's teachings are true. Of
course, as I am new to studying it, I have to keep researching, and
read all of Plato. Your blog has been extremely helpful in this
effort, and the starting point of renunciation for any genuine
spiritual practice is self-evidently true. How doing this reflects God
("the One" or "the Absolute" as you call Him) is amazing. Though, to
begin, although some things can be renounced immediately with ease
("don't read fiction books, apply yourself to spiritual text" and
"don't lust after sweets, and don't eat meats", etc), I had a few
questions about the whole process, and your experience with it.
The first is about how to begin the initial efforts and survive the
fatigue when the excitement of a new, more proper, life begins. I
expect there to be failings and relapses (though it should be avoided
at all cost). I see one method to possibly use is continued meditation
on why you began this, escape from the world, and how perfect God is.
How did you overcome this period? How would you recommend someone who
has lived a very sedentary, and "pleasurable" life to do this? After a
while, does it just become more natural? If so, how long is this?
The second is about the temptation to return to the world and it's
ways if it arises. What methods do you have for overcoming this? Or is
it that after a while, and true cognitive change has happened,
temptation doesn't really happen (or is very weak)?
I hope that you can answer these, and again I thank you for your blog
and your efforts to spread this information.
A. Thank you very much for reading and appreciating my writings. Of course, I greatly encourage and exhort you to retain your new-found understanding of the necessity of renunciation and asceticism and to practice this for the remainder of this birth and, indeed, for all future births until you attain liberation. Please stick to it no matter how difficult it may be in this present world where there is so little, to say the least, appreciation, respect and support for renunciation and true spiritual practice. I hope, as you kindly say, my writings may be of modest help in this regard.
I began, or renewed, my spiritual practice in earnest in this birth when I was just your age forty years ago. Not encountering any renunciants or real spiritual practitioners, not even the degree of guidance or encouragement that my writings might provide, I had to learn on my own by 'the school of hard knocks' and gradually come to understand the necessity of renunciation and move in that direction despite all the silly people around me discouraging it. It was by reading the records of the ancients, the primary source texts of, at that time, Buddhism, that I understood that the moderns are for the birds and that it was clearly necessary to follow the real Path of the ancients and of all ascetic practitioners of all time, regardless of whether anyone else was or not. Thus, for example, it wasn't until four years later at the age of 22, while I was living at a so-called Zen Community in NY (which I long since repudiate as being completely fraudulent, corrupt and silly), that I took my vow of celibacy on my own (though I had never actually not been celibate and was still virginal anyway). I had already gradually become a most committed and ardent vegetarian by the time I turned 20. I had never been a drinker or party person and had always been of sort of naturally monastic and solitary temperament. I was, however, in my youth and when I was your age, what you have described in your email as 'one who has lived a very sedentary and "pleasurable" life'. I was, and have always been, not very tough physically and have always had much anxiety and was quite a 'wimp' as it were. I just kept gradually working and gently pushing myself and becoming more and more dedicated and ascetic and devoted as my understanding and devotion increased--though, as I say, in various respects other than physical and emotional toughness, I was already naturally of monastic, ascetic, renunciant temperament. The most important thing is to have great sincerity and devotion and dedication and determination to attain release and be devoted to true spiritual practice and renunciation no matter what, and then just gradually and steadily work towards renouncing more and emulating the ideal. Be patient and steady and don't be dismayed by any lapses of the sort that you refer to that may occur. If you fall down, always just pick yourself right up and keep on going. You seem to show remarkable insight into how things could work, recognizing that after the initial excitement fades the spiritual path is really a lot of hard continuous work. The kind of meditation that you suggest is a good way to keep yourself going on the right track and also to overcome any temptation to return to the world as you ask about in your second question.
In regard to both your questions, yes, it does get easier and more natural as you go on, and you backslide, even in thought, less. The more disciplined you are the easier and more natural discipline becomes. Once the cognitive shift has really been made and the aspiration for the Way has really been awakened in the soul, there is less and less serious temptation to return to the world--in fact, the thought of doing so is horrifying and revolting. How long this will take in a particular individual case such as your own, I can't say. Everyone is different and has their own individual karma to deal with. But I can say that it will definitely become easier and more natural and inevitable over time, the more diligent and devoted you are within your capacities (though again go gradually without overreaching yourself too much if it becomes discouraging). Also, some things are more difficult than others. For example, sexual desire is one of the very most difficult things to eradicate and deal with and you can expect to struggle with it and have it around for very many years to come. Of course, we don't act on it at all and don't really dream of doing so, even when thoughts and fantasies run off at length in that direction, but we still have to deal with it and be very careful about it. Perhaps, more renunciants, especially now, have fallen because of women than anything else. Other things, though, also can be hard to leave--even such as if you are still living at home and your family has a television and you get drawn into watching it!
A couple of concrete suggestions: It is very important, however much long struggle it may take, to establish a regular routine of going to bed early and getting up very early before dawn to spend time in meditation/contemplation practice. Being disciplined in different areas reinforce each other and make it all easier. A regular daily meditation/contemplation practice is essential to, is the essence of, the Path and of great assistance in developing renunciation and asceticism, indeed, is part and parcel with it. Read regularly and widely in the records and writings of the authentic great ascetics and renunciants of the past of the various systems (much is available in English). This will be of great help and importance in gaining understanding, getting encouragement, and sticking to your devotion. I'm afraid that, except perhaps for myself, you are not very likely in this present age of darkness and this modern brave new techno-world to encounter any living examples to help you and provide support, so you need to take the renunciants of the past (and future and present, though just not visible) as your support, 'the communion of saints' as the Catholics say. Vegetarianism, or, ideally, veganism, is of the greatest and most essential importance and not really very difficult at all and can be implemented rapidly and will be of great help in supporting all your other efforts. Similarly, it should go without saying that any alcohol or intoxicants or illicit drugs (not to say that I think you are doing any of that anyway) are to be immediately and permanently stopped. Even decent ordinary worldlings don't drink and spiritual practice can't even be begun without teetotaling, and, besides, you are legally underage for that anyway. If you can keep 'the big three'--celibacy, vegetarianism, and teetotalling--and keep a regular schedule of meditation/contemplation practice and be devoted to meditation/contemplation practice and spiritual and ascetic reading and study to the best of your ability, the rest will gradually fall into place.
I hope this answers your inquiries somewhat. Again, be patient and diligent and work steadily, gradually, and devotedly, and keep clearly in mind that there is no question that renunciation and asceticism and devotion to contemplative practice is the only way to go and any alternative can't even be entertained.
hopefully, as it cannot be ignored that you cannot have the world
and the great rewards of salvation and freedom. I found your blog in
my investigation of Platonism, as it is a pure system where the
majority of (if not all of it completely!) it's teachings are true. Of
course, as I am new to studying it, I have to keep researching, and
read all of Plato. Your blog has been extremely helpful in this
effort, and the starting point of renunciation for any genuine
spiritual practice is self-evidently true. How doing this reflects God
("the One" or "the Absolute" as you call Him) is amazing. Though, to
begin, although some things can be renounced immediately with ease
("don't read fiction books, apply yourself to spiritual text" and
"don't lust after sweets, and don't eat meats", etc), I had a few
questions about the whole process, and your experience with it.
The first is about how to begin the initial efforts and survive the
fatigue when the excitement of a new, more proper, life begins. I
expect there to be failings and relapses (though it should be avoided
at all cost). I see one method to possibly use is continued meditation
on why you began this, escape from the world, and how perfect God is.
How did you overcome this period? How would you recommend someone who
has lived a very sedentary, and "pleasurable" life to do this? After a
while, does it just become more natural? If so, how long is this?
The second is about the temptation to return to the world and it's
ways if it arises. What methods do you have for overcoming this? Or is
it that after a while, and true cognitive change has happened,
temptation doesn't really happen (or is very weak)?
I hope that you can answer these, and again I thank you for your blog
and your efforts to spread this information.
A. Thank you very much for reading and appreciating my writings. Of course, I greatly encourage and exhort you to retain your new-found understanding of the necessity of renunciation and asceticism and to practice this for the remainder of this birth and, indeed, for all future births until you attain liberation. Please stick to it no matter how difficult it may be in this present world where there is so little, to say the least, appreciation, respect and support for renunciation and true spiritual practice. I hope, as you kindly say, my writings may be of modest help in this regard.
I began, or renewed, my spiritual practice in earnest in this birth when I was just your age forty years ago. Not encountering any renunciants or real spiritual practitioners, not even the degree of guidance or encouragement that my writings might provide, I had to learn on my own by 'the school of hard knocks' and gradually come to understand the necessity of renunciation and move in that direction despite all the silly people around me discouraging it. It was by reading the records of the ancients, the primary source texts of, at that time, Buddhism, that I understood that the moderns are for the birds and that it was clearly necessary to follow the real Path of the ancients and of all ascetic practitioners of all time, regardless of whether anyone else was or not. Thus, for example, it wasn't until four years later at the age of 22, while I was living at a so-called Zen Community in NY (which I long since repudiate as being completely fraudulent, corrupt and silly), that I took my vow of celibacy on my own (though I had never actually not been celibate and was still virginal anyway). I had already gradually become a most committed and ardent vegetarian by the time I turned 20. I had never been a drinker or party person and had always been of sort of naturally monastic and solitary temperament. I was, however, in my youth and when I was your age, what you have described in your email as 'one who has lived a very sedentary and "pleasurable" life'. I was, and have always been, not very tough physically and have always had much anxiety and was quite a 'wimp' as it were. I just kept gradually working and gently pushing myself and becoming more and more dedicated and ascetic and devoted as my understanding and devotion increased--though, as I say, in various respects other than physical and emotional toughness, I was already naturally of monastic, ascetic, renunciant temperament. The most important thing is to have great sincerity and devotion and dedication and determination to attain release and be devoted to true spiritual practice and renunciation no matter what, and then just gradually and steadily work towards renouncing more and emulating the ideal. Be patient and steady and don't be dismayed by any lapses of the sort that you refer to that may occur. If you fall down, always just pick yourself right up and keep on going. You seem to show remarkable insight into how things could work, recognizing that after the initial excitement fades the spiritual path is really a lot of hard continuous work. The kind of meditation that you suggest is a good way to keep yourself going on the right track and also to overcome any temptation to return to the world as you ask about in your second question.
In regard to both your questions, yes, it does get easier and more natural as you go on, and you backslide, even in thought, less. The more disciplined you are the easier and more natural discipline becomes. Once the cognitive shift has really been made and the aspiration for the Way has really been awakened in the soul, there is less and less serious temptation to return to the world--in fact, the thought of doing so is horrifying and revolting. How long this will take in a particular individual case such as your own, I can't say. Everyone is different and has their own individual karma to deal with. But I can say that it will definitely become easier and more natural and inevitable over time, the more diligent and devoted you are within your capacities (though again go gradually without overreaching yourself too much if it becomes discouraging). Also, some things are more difficult than others. For example, sexual desire is one of the very most difficult things to eradicate and deal with and you can expect to struggle with it and have it around for very many years to come. Of course, we don't act on it at all and don't really dream of doing so, even when thoughts and fantasies run off at length in that direction, but we still have to deal with it and be very careful about it. Perhaps, more renunciants, especially now, have fallen because of women than anything else. Other things, though, also can be hard to leave--even such as if you are still living at home and your family has a television and you get drawn into watching it!
A couple of concrete suggestions: It is very important, however much long struggle it may take, to establish a regular routine of going to bed early and getting up very early before dawn to spend time in meditation/contemplation practice. Being disciplined in different areas reinforce each other and make it all easier. A regular daily meditation/contemplation practice is essential to, is the essence of, the Path and of great assistance in developing renunciation and asceticism, indeed, is part and parcel with it. Read regularly and widely in the records and writings of the authentic great ascetics and renunciants of the past of the various systems (much is available in English). This will be of great help and importance in gaining understanding, getting encouragement, and sticking to your devotion. I'm afraid that, except perhaps for myself, you are not very likely in this present age of darkness and this modern brave new techno-world to encounter any living examples to help you and provide support, so you need to take the renunciants of the past (and future and present, though just not visible) as your support, 'the communion of saints' as the Catholics say. Vegetarianism, or, ideally, veganism, is of the greatest and most essential importance and not really very difficult at all and can be implemented rapidly and will be of great help in supporting all your other efforts. Similarly, it should go without saying that any alcohol or intoxicants or illicit drugs (not to say that I think you are doing any of that anyway) are to be immediately and permanently stopped. Even decent ordinary worldlings don't drink and spiritual practice can't even be begun without teetotaling, and, besides, you are legally underage for that anyway. If you can keep 'the big three'--celibacy, vegetarianism, and teetotalling--and keep a regular schedule of meditation/contemplation practice and be devoted to meditation/contemplation practice and spiritual and ascetic reading and study to the best of your ability, the rest will gradually fall into place.
I hope this answers your inquiries somewhat. Again, be patient and diligent and work steadily, gradually, and devotedly, and keep clearly in mind that there is no question that renunciation and asceticism and devotion to contemplative practice is the only way to go and any alternative can't even be entertained.
Sunday, September 2, 2018
Flesh-eating as the Fall of the Soul in Plato's 'Republic'
Flesh-eating as the Fall of the Soul in Plato’s ‘Republic’
by Eric S. Fallick
The Politea or ‘Republic’ of Plato is an allegorical, symbolic manual and description of individual contemplative ascetic spiritual practice. As the text itself repeatedly states and makes clear, the ‘city’ is just an analogy, a blown-up symbolic picture, for the individual soul. It has nothing at all to do with politics, political ‘philosophy’, or governance of states. ‘Socrates’ represents nous, intellect, and the higher, divine part of the soul and its divine understanding. Nous descends from the noetic realm to this lower realm of the senses and lower soul, ‘goes down (from the town) to the Piraeus’, and in doing so becomes associated with a lower soul and faculties, ‘with Glaucon (son) of Ariston’. Nous initially descends only so far as to participate in divine spiritual activities and contemplation in the lower realm of soul, ‘will be offering prayers to the goddess and wanting at the same time to view the festival’. It then is immediately returning to the noetic realm, but is restrained by more lower souls and faculties, ‘Polemarchus’ and the others, and compelled to remain for a time and instruct them in righteousness and divine matters.
Book 1 then proceeds to establish the correct divine understanding based on the noetic realm and the Forms of righteousness and holiness and their necessity and superiority for living a well-off life against the naturalistic, materialist (in both senses of the word!), physicalist, immoral, worldly understanding, ‘Thrasymachus’. Books 2 through the first part of Book 5 then, using the analogy and symbolism of the ‘city’, though constantly reminding that it is only just that and showing how it is a projection for understanding the individual soul, and the ‘guardians’, the thoughts, understandings, and discursive reasoning and cognitive state of the soul, describes the cognitive and emotional condition and training and disposition and ordering of the soul in this world as a whole with both its true higher part and the lower soul and faculties endemic to being at the lowest level that is the sense world of the beginning and, for a long time, conditioned ascetic practitioner. That is, initially and for long time on the Path, the contemplative ascetic practitioner has proper orientation, thoughts, and ordering of soul only as a conditioned state attained through practice without actual direct realization and understanding and ordering directly from the higher hypostases and spiritual realities. This is a necessary preliminary and stage of the practice, and, indeed, one at which the practitioner will likely remain for many births as he progresses, but is still a conditioned relative state, one of right opinion rather than true knowledge, and, as such, is unstable and has the possibility of being disrupted or lost until it is made into true knowledge and permanence through direct experience of the higher hypostases. The latter part of Book 5 through Book 7 then describe the further practice of actual direct contemplative experience of the higher hypostases, the attaining of actual true knowledge of the way things are and correct renunciant, ascetic practice, the mode of practice with this knowledge and experience, and the transformation of the conditioned contemplative ascetic practitioner liable to the possibility of falling from his conditioned state of practice, however wonderful it is, into a truly divine renunciant with actual stable knowledge and a permanent understanding and ordering of the soul that is not liable to regress until the final end is attained. Book 8 and the first part of Book 9 then describe how the conditioned practicing soul might fall and the various types of lower souls in this world down to the very worst. The rest of Book 9 and Book 10 show the superiority of righteousness and contemplative asceticism over the worldly way and cover various important topics of spiritual practice and metaphysics and transmigration.
In Book 2, ‘Socrates’ initially proposes and begins to develop the model of the ‘city’ as a blown-up analogy for understanding righteousness in the individual soul. The ‘city’, the complex soul in individuated sensate existence in space-time with higher and lower souls and faculties together in relation to each other, develops upon the initial fall of the true soul into the lower realm of soul and body and the senses from the noetic realm due to the need for now dealing with the senses, maintaining the psychophysical organism and body, and dealing with individual apparent objects appearing one after another in space-time. At this point, at its initial minimal descent, the soul and its thoughts and faculties naturally live a simple, reclusive, contemplative ascetic life with only the minimum lower faculties and minimum possessions and involvements in worldly affairs to maintain bodily existence. It, or now the person, just has enough clothing, shoes, and shelter for protection from the elements as necessary according to the season. He reclines on the ground on simple mats and eats from simple utensils made from leaves, etc. He, most significantly for this discussion, eats a simple grain based vegetarian diet with the addition of some modest vegetarian ‘relishes’ for complete nutrition. Note that when the text refers to the modest and moderate drinking of ‘wine’ that ‘wine’ is a symbol for the senses, which are intoxicants to the soul. So the text is saying that the contemplative ascetic recluse living in peace makes use of the senses only to a moderate degree as necessary to the minimum extent possible. A contemplative ascetic and philosophos, of course, never drinks even a drop of wine in the literal sense or any sort of alcohol, and the divine Plato never would suggest that he may. (Incidentally, this symbolism of ‘wine’ as representing the senses and sense experience occurs elsewhere in the dialogs, most notably, of course, in the Symposium.) He passes his leisure in divine contemplation, ‘hymning the gods’, and content in himself with the higher and lower faculties in order, ‘pleasantly being together with each other’. He produces no thoughts of wanting any more, ‘not making children beyond the (present) substance, taking care to avoid want or war’. He passes his life in peace and health maturing these renunciant and contented thoughts and mental states and continuing such as further circumstances continue or develop, ‘reaching old age and handing down another life of such a sort to the offspring’. This, the text makes clear, is the true, healthy, and proper way of life, the minimum declension of the fallen soul if it has to be here in this realm, the reclusive contemplative ascetic renunciant life.
How, then, does this true ascetic pure life degenerate into the mess of ordinary human life and the world as we see it and the people around us, this mess having been such since time immemorial? How does the soul after its initial fall then fall even deeper into becoming, samsara, genesis, the cycle of birth and death? The lowest faculty of the soul embedded in the body, ‘Glaucon’, seeing the bad way of sensual pleasures and desires lived by most all in samsara, is not satisfied with the simple ascetic life and wants all the sensual pleasures and sense experiences and desires that it sees around it. It turns and corrupts the whole person and soul to consider these necessary and desirable and to pursue them and dive headlong into the karmic mess of samsara and create the kind of lives we see around us. Not only does it now require comfortable furnishings and utensils to use while indulging its now excessive and luxurious desire for food and feasting, but, most crucially, now wants, and even thinks it necessary, to eat meat, to eat animal flesh and to kill for this purpose, as it sees those doing around it. This creates the inflamed, unhealthy, licentious ‘city’/soul. In true Orphic fashion, flesh-eating and killing is shown to be a critical turning point in the fall of the soul, leading to the wandering as an alien in the cycle of repeated birth and death. (And, of course, reversing this and becoming vegetarian again is a crucial and essential step in escaping from becoming and returning to the soul’s pristine state.) Once the soul has imbibed the greed for flesh and meat and has abandoned the true ascetic life that no longer suffices for it and has come to require its life of continual killing and production of meat for its consumption, this leads in snowball fashion to desires for all manners of luxuries, possessions, entertainments, etc., as listed in the text, and even for sex, ‘female companions’ and ‘the things concerning feminine adornment’. Following from the perverse desire for flesh-eating, the soul and its thoughts are darkened, and it becomes firmly ensconced in pursuing the desires of this world and ever binding itself to and suffering on the wheel of birth and death (a true Orphic as well a Platonic image).
The explication of the complete meaning of the Politea would be a great task. Perhaps, this short essay has given a tiny pointer in that direction. At any rate, the Politea reminds us that flesh-eating is a great crime and primal transgression, and that vegetarianism is an indispensable prerequisite of genuine spiritual life and practice.
Ⓒ 2018 Eric S. Fallick
by Eric S. Fallick
The Politea or ‘Republic’ of Plato is an allegorical, symbolic manual and description of individual contemplative ascetic spiritual practice. As the text itself repeatedly states and makes clear, the ‘city’ is just an analogy, a blown-up symbolic picture, for the individual soul. It has nothing at all to do with politics, political ‘philosophy’, or governance of states. ‘Socrates’ represents nous, intellect, and the higher, divine part of the soul and its divine understanding. Nous descends from the noetic realm to this lower realm of the senses and lower soul, ‘goes down (from the town) to the Piraeus’, and in doing so becomes associated with a lower soul and faculties, ‘with Glaucon (son) of Ariston’. Nous initially descends only so far as to participate in divine spiritual activities and contemplation in the lower realm of soul, ‘will be offering prayers to the goddess and wanting at the same time to view the festival’. It then is immediately returning to the noetic realm, but is restrained by more lower souls and faculties, ‘Polemarchus’ and the others, and compelled to remain for a time and instruct them in righteousness and divine matters.
Book 1 then proceeds to establish the correct divine understanding based on the noetic realm and the Forms of righteousness and holiness and their necessity and superiority for living a well-off life against the naturalistic, materialist (in both senses of the word!), physicalist, immoral, worldly understanding, ‘Thrasymachus’. Books 2 through the first part of Book 5 then, using the analogy and symbolism of the ‘city’, though constantly reminding that it is only just that and showing how it is a projection for understanding the individual soul, and the ‘guardians’, the thoughts, understandings, and discursive reasoning and cognitive state of the soul, describes the cognitive and emotional condition and training and disposition and ordering of the soul in this world as a whole with both its true higher part and the lower soul and faculties endemic to being at the lowest level that is the sense world of the beginning and, for a long time, conditioned ascetic practitioner. That is, initially and for long time on the Path, the contemplative ascetic practitioner has proper orientation, thoughts, and ordering of soul only as a conditioned state attained through practice without actual direct realization and understanding and ordering directly from the higher hypostases and spiritual realities. This is a necessary preliminary and stage of the practice, and, indeed, one at which the practitioner will likely remain for many births as he progresses, but is still a conditioned relative state, one of right opinion rather than true knowledge, and, as such, is unstable and has the possibility of being disrupted or lost until it is made into true knowledge and permanence through direct experience of the higher hypostases. The latter part of Book 5 through Book 7 then describe the further practice of actual direct contemplative experience of the higher hypostases, the attaining of actual true knowledge of the way things are and correct renunciant, ascetic practice, the mode of practice with this knowledge and experience, and the transformation of the conditioned contemplative ascetic practitioner liable to the possibility of falling from his conditioned state of practice, however wonderful it is, into a truly divine renunciant with actual stable knowledge and a permanent understanding and ordering of the soul that is not liable to regress until the final end is attained. Book 8 and the first part of Book 9 then describe how the conditioned practicing soul might fall and the various types of lower souls in this world down to the very worst. The rest of Book 9 and Book 10 show the superiority of righteousness and contemplative asceticism over the worldly way and cover various important topics of spiritual practice and metaphysics and transmigration.
In Book 2, ‘Socrates’ initially proposes and begins to develop the model of the ‘city’ as a blown-up analogy for understanding righteousness in the individual soul. The ‘city’, the complex soul in individuated sensate existence in space-time with higher and lower souls and faculties together in relation to each other, develops upon the initial fall of the true soul into the lower realm of soul and body and the senses from the noetic realm due to the need for now dealing with the senses, maintaining the psychophysical organism and body, and dealing with individual apparent objects appearing one after another in space-time. At this point, at its initial minimal descent, the soul and its thoughts and faculties naturally live a simple, reclusive, contemplative ascetic life with only the minimum lower faculties and minimum possessions and involvements in worldly affairs to maintain bodily existence. It, or now the person, just has enough clothing, shoes, and shelter for protection from the elements as necessary according to the season. He reclines on the ground on simple mats and eats from simple utensils made from leaves, etc. He, most significantly for this discussion, eats a simple grain based vegetarian diet with the addition of some modest vegetarian ‘relishes’ for complete nutrition. Note that when the text refers to the modest and moderate drinking of ‘wine’ that ‘wine’ is a symbol for the senses, which are intoxicants to the soul. So the text is saying that the contemplative ascetic recluse living in peace makes use of the senses only to a moderate degree as necessary to the minimum extent possible. A contemplative ascetic and philosophos, of course, never drinks even a drop of wine in the literal sense or any sort of alcohol, and the divine Plato never would suggest that he may. (Incidentally, this symbolism of ‘wine’ as representing the senses and sense experience occurs elsewhere in the dialogs, most notably, of course, in the Symposium.) He passes his leisure in divine contemplation, ‘hymning the gods’, and content in himself with the higher and lower faculties in order, ‘pleasantly being together with each other’. He produces no thoughts of wanting any more, ‘not making children beyond the (present) substance, taking care to avoid want or war’. He passes his life in peace and health maturing these renunciant and contented thoughts and mental states and continuing such as further circumstances continue or develop, ‘reaching old age and handing down another life of such a sort to the offspring’. This, the text makes clear, is the true, healthy, and proper way of life, the minimum declension of the fallen soul if it has to be here in this realm, the reclusive contemplative ascetic renunciant life.
How, then, does this true ascetic pure life degenerate into the mess of ordinary human life and the world as we see it and the people around us, this mess having been such since time immemorial? How does the soul after its initial fall then fall even deeper into becoming, samsara, genesis, the cycle of birth and death? The lowest faculty of the soul embedded in the body, ‘Glaucon’, seeing the bad way of sensual pleasures and desires lived by most all in samsara, is not satisfied with the simple ascetic life and wants all the sensual pleasures and sense experiences and desires that it sees around it. It turns and corrupts the whole person and soul to consider these necessary and desirable and to pursue them and dive headlong into the karmic mess of samsara and create the kind of lives we see around us. Not only does it now require comfortable furnishings and utensils to use while indulging its now excessive and luxurious desire for food and feasting, but, most crucially, now wants, and even thinks it necessary, to eat meat, to eat animal flesh and to kill for this purpose, as it sees those doing around it. This creates the inflamed, unhealthy, licentious ‘city’/soul. In true Orphic fashion, flesh-eating and killing is shown to be a critical turning point in the fall of the soul, leading to the wandering as an alien in the cycle of repeated birth and death. (And, of course, reversing this and becoming vegetarian again is a crucial and essential step in escaping from becoming and returning to the soul’s pristine state.) Once the soul has imbibed the greed for flesh and meat and has abandoned the true ascetic life that no longer suffices for it and has come to require its life of continual killing and production of meat for its consumption, this leads in snowball fashion to desires for all manners of luxuries, possessions, entertainments, etc., as listed in the text, and even for sex, ‘female companions’ and ‘the things concerning feminine adornment’. Following from the perverse desire for flesh-eating, the soul and its thoughts are darkened, and it becomes firmly ensconced in pursuing the desires of this world and ever binding itself to and suffering on the wheel of birth and death (a true Orphic as well a Platonic image).
The explication of the complete meaning of the Politea would be a great task. Perhaps, this short essay has given a tiny pointer in that direction. At any rate, the Politea reminds us that flesh-eating is a great crime and primal transgression, and that vegetarianism is an indispensable prerequisite of genuine spiritual life and practice.
Ⓒ 2018 Eric S. Fallick
Sunday, July 1, 2018
A Note on the Crito
I had only read the Crito once long ago and had, except for one particular passage, not paid much further attention to it since I couldn't understand what relation it had to spiritual practice and metaphysics, am not interested in social/political/societal concerns and can't believe that the divine Plato really was also, have no interest in a 'historical' Socrates disqualified as being of interest as being a grhastha and etc. However, I was encouraged to put it in the queue for reading in Greek. I finished reading it in Greek and now have a whole different take on it. Suffering as I do from hypertrophy of the allegorical faculty and seeing everything in terms of contemplative asceticism and renunciation, I now see it as having a clear renunciant undermeaning and not being actually at all about the literal surface meaning and actually being a very good ascetic text.
Very briefly, Socrates, as usual, represents the higher divine part of the soul in touch with the higher hypostases. Crito represents the lower deluded soul or self enmeshed in the body and the sense world and attentive to the opinions and inclinations and desires of the world, the many and society. The prison, as usual, is the prison of the body and life in this world. The polis/city is this All, this world, the lowest level of existence comprehended by the World Soul, and its Laws are the law of karma and necessity and justice. Deluded souls and the many and the world (Crito) want to evade the law of karma and extend existence in this world and gain worldly benefit by acting unrighteously and against the law of karma and in a worldly unascetic unspiritual way (to try to escape from Athens by illegal means), and think that this is to their benefit, and try to persuade the soul as a whole, even the soul properly governed by the higher true part of the soul (Socrates), to do so. The true higher soul (Socrates) responds at length, using also a personification of the laws of karma (the Laws of the polis), that it is not and never is proper and to the true benefit of the soul to pursue worldly gain or what the world considers gain or desirable by going against the law of karma and righteousness and that such never works. Thus, it is not a political, but actually a very ascetic text clearly indicating the necessity of following the Way and being in accord with the Law of Karma and necessity and righteousness regardless or in spite of apparent short term worldly gain and the ways and desires of the world.
One can see countless examples of this in the world around us and how the many behave all the time. Over the years, I have often had worldlings try to tell me that I should act contrary to spiritual and ascetic principles and righteousness for some immediate short term worldly gain and have had to respond either to them or at least internally think of responding as 'Socrates', the higher soul with true considerations, does to 'Crito', the views of the many and the lower samsaric self. No doubt any other renunciants left in this world have also often been in this position. It is nice to have further the ascetic text of the Crito behind us also.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Relative Realities, Spiritual Systems, Genuine Spiritual Practice and Renunciation
Relative Realities, Spiritual Systems, Genuine Spiritual Practice and Renunciation
by Eric S. Fallick
Platonism is very subtle because it requires transcending the sense-realm, and, finally, only Platonism is of ultimate soteriological value among the different systems. All the other systems, especially those involved with institutionalized religions for the many, really take place just within particular relative phenomenal realities, even when they think they are going beyond them, and are very much wrapped up and involved with particular relative consensus realities and confound actual spiritual contemplative ascetic practice aimed at the transcendent and phenomenal sensory experiences and occurrences. (That is not to say that they aren't of value to particular souls at a particular stage of their practice in a given birth, nor that we can't learn from them, but ultimately to get free one has to access the higher hypostases through Platonic contemplative asceticism.) Plotinus has expressed this well at the beginning of Ennead V.9. Renunciation and asceticism is an absolutely necessary corollary of this understanding. A somewhat hokey analogy is that when we look at a website all that is really being sent is the HTML code that the browser converts into the web page we see. All the different systems are really just moving within their given webpages, even when they think they are getting out of it, and so are concerned with the details and things going on within their webpage. Platonists, however, are concerned with how webpages in general are generated and how to get out of webpages of any sort altogether! (For example, the Mahayana/Bodhisattva ideal is all dependent on and wrapped up in a particular version of relative reality that is no more than just another phenomenal sensory experience set that is no more valid than any. Tibetan Buddhism is especially egregious in this regard. Similarly, and even more so, especially given their notion, of the essence of their systems, of a single linear geocentric historical progression, the Abrahamic systems are totally caught up in and involved with and dependent on one particular phenomenal sensory relative reality as being of spiritual significance. Such observations could me multiplied practically indefinitely. As just one of countless examples, some Catholics go on pilgrimage to pray at the relics of saints--just running around all the time chasing after phenomena instead of pursuing noumena through contemplative ascetic practice, which would be real actual spiritual practice! If one tries to explain a little that such phenomenal 'miraculous' experiences occur in all different religious traditions and have no bearing whatsoever on the metaphysical validity of their theological and soteriological systems and are just more phenomenal sensory karmic experiences--things to be ignored and transcended in pursuing the Absolute to really get free--of course, they don’t understand at all what one is talking about. The same quite and altogether applies to Iamblichus and Proclus and other post-Iamblichus so-called ‘Platonists’ or ‘Neoplatonists’ with their theurgy and etc. Most sadly, they have simply jettisoned the true transcendent Platonism of Plato and Plotinus and replaced it with what is really just another worldly, phenomenal, particular relative reality dependent ‘religious’ system.)
All sensory or 'physical' worlds are just shadow relative realities according to the karma of souls, of which there can be very many--the present world of modernity and science and scientism and naturalism, especially, just being one of many possibilities and not one of particular validity, except that it believes itself to be so--actually, it is one of the worst and least valid of many possibilities since it is most unconducive to and makes most inaccessible true spiritual knowledge and practice and renunciation and thus makes most remote the possibility of making progress towards getting out of relative realities and their misery altogether. The true underlying realities are transcendent and spiritual and suprasensory and are the objects of real knowledge--sensory knowledge being relatively unreal and unimportant and variable.
The real unchanging actual Realities are the higher Realities or hypostases of the One or the Good and then of Nous or the Divine Mind-Thought--the realm of the Divine Mind and the Platonic Forms. From the Divine Mind-Thought then further emanates or devolves or darkens the last and lowest and least real level or hypostasis of Soul and the "world" or "worlds" that Soul perceives and creates through projecting the Forms and Itself in the realm of individuated changing sensate existence in space-time. This includes both the Soul of the All or "World Soul" and all the individual souls, such as ourselves. There is only experience. There are no other separately existing objects or worlds or things apart from the experience of Soul or souls. This level of experience where there are different souls and their variety of experiences that change and present the image of worlds and changing worlds is, again, the lowest and least real level and the only one in which there is change and the possibility of a variety of different experiences and, therefore, "worlds". There are as many different sets of experiences or possibilities of experiences or "worlds" as the possible combinations of projection of souls and their projection of combinations of projections from/of the Forms as are possible--effectively, an infinite variety. All these are determined by what we call 'karma'--which is the experience of the individual souls and the World Soul modifying each other's experiential fields through their volitional workings. The relative realities are just all the different sets of experiences and experiential fields determined by karma of the different souls and the World Soul. These are all that there is at the level of soul--there is no other sort of objective world out there. These sets of experiences and experiential fields can take all sorts of forms according to karma. The underlying Reality is only the higher hypostases and the unchanging Law or Way in which these are projected down into the level of Soul. Thus, all phenomenal things, all the things in the supposed phenomenal sense world--so-called physical laws, gods or no gods, miracles or no miracles, etc., etc.--are just parts of different experience sets according to the karma of different souls as mediated through the World Soul. This is what is meant by relative realities and such applications of the idea as that some souls may experience or have experienced a relative world, for example, where 'miraculous' or 'supernatural' things are more likely to occur, but we don't, or we experience at the moment a world where things appear to operate according to the so-called laws of modern science, but others didn't, and etc., etc. These hypostases and these workings are all that there is. One shouldn’t be mislead by all the foolish people and society around one into thinking that there is some sort of objective material world out there and that its workings are real and that different appearances within it, including those that seem to violate its usual workings, are of significance or spiritual importance. One must just strive to transcend all these relative realities and worlds and existence as an individual soul to return to Nous and the One and to create karma only tending to aid in this direction.
It can readily be seen that this nature of Reality means that actual transcendent-oriented contemplative asceticism and renunciation is the very essence of, is, in fact, identical with, genuine spiritual practice of actual ultimate soteric value. The actual ultimately valid spiritual teaching is this of the higher realities and the generation and ultimately minimally valid nature of the many lower relative realities and possible worlds and experiences and how to understand this and to escape from and transcend the cycle of rebirth in these lower relative shadow realities that are miserable as a result of their minimal degree of being and to return to the real higher realities that are freedom as a result of their really being or being beyond being. To do this one must truly renounce all the relative lower realities and life in them and all that is entailed or contained in them and focus, as much as possible, solely on contemplation of the higher hypostases. One must shift one’s entire being from the lower relative realities of individuated sensate existence in space-time and repeated rebirth to the unchanging higher hypostases of Nous and the One. This means having as little to do with the sense world of the lower relative realities as possible while one is still in them (though, alas, maintaining the psycho-physical organism until one is free from it will constantly do more than plenty of pulling one’s attention back to the sense realm!). This, of course, means as much renunciation of the world and all worldly pursuits, desires, activities and possessions as possible and single-minded devotion to ascetic contemplation (and ancillary study, etc.). The very turning of the soul from the shadow worlds of relative realities and relative non-being back to the higher hypostases of true being and beyond being appears in these very shadow worlds of relative realities as the very fact of true transcendent-oriented otherworldly world-denying renunciation and ascetic contemplation.
Ⓒ 2018 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (dot) com
by Eric S. Fallick
Platonism is very subtle because it requires transcending the sense-realm, and, finally, only Platonism is of ultimate soteriological value among the different systems. All the other systems, especially those involved with institutionalized religions for the many, really take place just within particular relative phenomenal realities, even when they think they are going beyond them, and are very much wrapped up and involved with particular relative consensus realities and confound actual spiritual contemplative ascetic practice aimed at the transcendent and phenomenal sensory experiences and occurrences. (That is not to say that they aren't of value to particular souls at a particular stage of their practice in a given birth, nor that we can't learn from them, but ultimately to get free one has to access the higher hypostases through Platonic contemplative asceticism.) Plotinus has expressed this well at the beginning of Ennead V.9. Renunciation and asceticism is an absolutely necessary corollary of this understanding. A somewhat hokey analogy is that when we look at a website all that is really being sent is the HTML code that the browser converts into the web page we see. All the different systems are really just moving within their given webpages, even when they think they are getting out of it, and so are concerned with the details and things going on within their webpage. Platonists, however, are concerned with how webpages in general are generated and how to get out of webpages of any sort altogether! (For example, the Mahayana/Bodhisattva ideal is all dependent on and wrapped up in a particular version of relative reality that is no more than just another phenomenal sensory experience set that is no more valid than any. Tibetan Buddhism is especially egregious in this regard. Similarly, and even more so, especially given their notion, of the essence of their systems, of a single linear geocentric historical progression, the Abrahamic systems are totally caught up in and involved with and dependent on one particular phenomenal sensory relative reality as being of spiritual significance. Such observations could me multiplied practically indefinitely. As just one of countless examples, some Catholics go on pilgrimage to pray at the relics of saints--just running around all the time chasing after phenomena instead of pursuing noumena through contemplative ascetic practice, which would be real actual spiritual practice! If one tries to explain a little that such phenomenal 'miraculous' experiences occur in all different religious traditions and have no bearing whatsoever on the metaphysical validity of their theological and soteriological systems and are just more phenomenal sensory karmic experiences--things to be ignored and transcended in pursuing the Absolute to really get free--of course, they don’t understand at all what one is talking about. The same quite and altogether applies to Iamblichus and Proclus and other post-Iamblichus so-called ‘Platonists’ or ‘Neoplatonists’ with their theurgy and etc. Most sadly, they have simply jettisoned the true transcendent Platonism of Plato and Plotinus and replaced it with what is really just another worldly, phenomenal, particular relative reality dependent ‘religious’ system.)
All sensory or 'physical' worlds are just shadow relative realities according to the karma of souls, of which there can be very many--the present world of modernity and science and scientism and naturalism, especially, just being one of many possibilities and not one of particular validity, except that it believes itself to be so--actually, it is one of the worst and least valid of many possibilities since it is most unconducive to and makes most inaccessible true spiritual knowledge and practice and renunciation and thus makes most remote the possibility of making progress towards getting out of relative realities and their misery altogether. The true underlying realities are transcendent and spiritual and suprasensory and are the objects of real knowledge--sensory knowledge being relatively unreal and unimportant and variable.
The real unchanging actual Realities are the higher Realities or hypostases of the One or the Good and then of Nous or the Divine Mind-Thought--the realm of the Divine Mind and the Platonic Forms. From the Divine Mind-Thought then further emanates or devolves or darkens the last and lowest and least real level or hypostasis of Soul and the "world" or "worlds" that Soul perceives and creates through projecting the Forms and Itself in the realm of individuated changing sensate existence in space-time. This includes both the Soul of the All or "World Soul" and all the individual souls, such as ourselves. There is only experience. There are no other separately existing objects or worlds or things apart from the experience of Soul or souls. This level of experience where there are different souls and their variety of experiences that change and present the image of worlds and changing worlds is, again, the lowest and least real level and the only one in which there is change and the possibility of a variety of different experiences and, therefore, "worlds". There are as many different sets of experiences or possibilities of experiences or "worlds" as the possible combinations of projection of souls and their projection of combinations of projections from/of the Forms as are possible--effectively, an infinite variety. All these are determined by what we call 'karma'--which is the experience of the individual souls and the World Soul modifying each other's experiential fields through their volitional workings. The relative realities are just all the different sets of experiences and experiential fields determined by karma of the different souls and the World Soul. These are all that there is at the level of soul--there is no other sort of objective world out there. These sets of experiences and experiential fields can take all sorts of forms according to karma. The underlying Reality is only the higher hypostases and the unchanging Law or Way in which these are projected down into the level of Soul. Thus, all phenomenal things, all the things in the supposed phenomenal sense world--so-called physical laws, gods or no gods, miracles or no miracles, etc., etc.--are just parts of different experience sets according to the karma of different souls as mediated through the World Soul. This is what is meant by relative realities and such applications of the idea as that some souls may experience or have experienced a relative world, for example, where 'miraculous' or 'supernatural' things are more likely to occur, but we don't, or we experience at the moment a world where things appear to operate according to the so-called laws of modern science, but others didn't, and etc., etc. These hypostases and these workings are all that there is. One shouldn’t be mislead by all the foolish people and society around one into thinking that there is some sort of objective material world out there and that its workings are real and that different appearances within it, including those that seem to violate its usual workings, are of significance or spiritual importance. One must just strive to transcend all these relative realities and worlds and existence as an individual soul to return to Nous and the One and to create karma only tending to aid in this direction.
It can readily be seen that this nature of Reality means that actual transcendent-oriented contemplative asceticism and renunciation is the very essence of, is, in fact, identical with, genuine spiritual practice of actual ultimate soteric value. The actual ultimately valid spiritual teaching is this of the higher realities and the generation and ultimately minimally valid nature of the many lower relative realities and possible worlds and experiences and how to understand this and to escape from and transcend the cycle of rebirth in these lower relative shadow realities that are miserable as a result of their minimal degree of being and to return to the real higher realities that are freedom as a result of their really being or being beyond being. To do this one must truly renounce all the relative lower realities and life in them and all that is entailed or contained in them and focus, as much as possible, solely on contemplation of the higher hypostases. One must shift one’s entire being from the lower relative realities of individuated sensate existence in space-time and repeated rebirth to the unchanging higher hypostases of Nous and the One. This means having as little to do with the sense world of the lower relative realities as possible while one is still in them (though, alas, maintaining the psycho-physical organism until one is free from it will constantly do more than plenty of pulling one’s attention back to the sense realm!). This, of course, means as much renunciation of the world and all worldly pursuits, desires, activities and possessions as possible and single-minded devotion to ascetic contemplation (and ancillary study, etc.). The very turning of the soul from the shadow worlds of relative realities and relative non-being back to the higher hypostases of true being and beyond being appears in these very shadow worlds of relative realities as the very fact of true transcendent-oriented otherworldly world-denying renunciation and ascetic contemplation.
Ⓒ 2018 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (dot) com
Saturday, June 16, 2018
Purification of the Unalterable Soul from "Matter"
The Platonic/Plotinian teaching is pure idealism, even if it is expressed in a vocabulary and language that we may not immediately understand as such. (Incidentally, 'matter' is a very misleading translation for the Greek hule in Plotinus. In Plotinus, it carries none of the connotations of 'matter' in the modern physical sense, but is rather the extremity or principle, so to speak, of non-being, of darkness, of nescience. I have toyed with the idea of using 'anti-stuff' as a translation for hule.) There is only knowing, experience, 'mind', 'consciousness' or, as Plotinus puts it, contemplation. All is, as Plotinus says (Ennead 3.8), contemplation. The One is complete pure knowing or contemplation beyond knowing/contemplation. Nous is already lesser, incomplete, impure, adulterated to some extent but still unified knowing/contemplation having already been mixed, so to speak, to a certain extent with nescience/darkness/non-being, which Plotinus sometimes refers to as noetic hule/'matter'. Soul is knowing/contemplation mixed to the greatest extent with nescience/darkness/non-being to the point that it appears as individuated as our souls and in space-time and sense-perception, etc. It is still, though, the same knowing/contemplation, in its reality unchanged and unalterable and indestructible, as knowing/contemplation is still only in itself purely knowing/contemplation as such and can't be anything else, but is now turned or looking in the direction of the extremity of nescience/darkness/non-being and thus no longer knows itself or complete pure knowing/contemplation. The soul, thus, needs to turn around back to, to redirect back its attention to, to regain the complete pure knowing/contemplation of and that is the One, to re-become that complete pure knowing/contemplation without any admixture of nescience/darkness/non-being. Thus, renunciation and asceticism is of the very essence of the purification process, and also is not just of instrumental value but remains of the very essence of the fuller knowing/contemplation state(s), since involvement in and pursuit of the world of diversified individuated sense data in space-time more than is absolutely necessary, which is what worldly life is, is the very fact of looking in the direction of darkness, of only knowing/contemplating in a very darkened, impure, incomplete, ignorant way--being in worldly life is by definition knowing/contemplating/seeing the darkness and non-being of sense perception. The practice of purification, on the other hand, is more and more only seeing/knowing/contemplating the Forms and Nous and then the One/Good, and thus being in the very state of Nous and eventually the One Themselves, and thus obviously involves knowing/contemplating/seeing worldly life and its things of the senses less and less. The One is, of course, always there and unchanged, but we don't know it without turning away from the sense world, which is really non-being, in both life and mind, and turning the imperishable knowing of the soul back to the One.
Friday, May 4, 2018
Maximus of Tyre on the World as but a Game for Children
But by this, someone would say, the righteous man is abused and falsely accused and prosecuted, and his possessions and money are taken away and he is thrown into prison, and he is banished and dishonored and dies. What then, if also children establishing laws for each other, establishing a law court of themselves, would bring a man for judgment according to their laws, and then, if he appeared to do wrong, would vote him to be dishonored in the community of children, and would confiscate his child's possessions, his knucklebones and and toys? What is the man likely to do with regard to a court of such a sort {but laugh at them with their} votes themselves and adverse judgments themselves? And thus also Socrates was laughing at the Athenians, as at little children, voting and ordering a mortal man to die. And any other good and righteous man will laugh unmixed laughter, seeing the unrighteous rushing zealously upon him, thinking to do something, but doing nothing. But also when they are dishonoring him, he will cry the cry of Achilles, ‘but I understand myself to have been honored by the dispensation of Zeus’. And when they are taking away his money and possessions, he will let them go as toys and knucklebones being taken away, and he will die as by fever and stone, not at all being vexed towards those killing him.
(Maximus of Tyre, Dissertation 12, translated from Ancient Greek by ESF)
Translator's Note: To a true contemplative ascetic or Platonist or renunciant/philosopher (in the original, ancient sense of the word) all the business and affairs of the world appear as at best a children's game, and the principle advanced in the above is of more general applicability. For example, those who spend much time reading the newspaper and the like, may consider that it is just as if a bunch of children got together and decided, with crayons and construction paper, to report daily what happened in their playing--who played what games and won or lost and got upset or gloated, who fell and skinned their knee and cried and how it happened and could it have been prevented, who lost their toys, who got new toys and which ones, what new toys and cartoons will soon be available, and etc. Would any adult with pressing adult business spend more time concerned with such things than is absolutely necessary? The only pressing affair and concern of an adult soul is striving to get free from the cycle of birth and death, from repeated individuated existence in space-time with its concomitant suffering, and attain re-union with the Good or the One. Most regrettably, especially in this complex modern techno-world, the renunciant is in the meanwhile still entwined with and dependent on the world and the childish souls in it for his psycho-physical survival, but will try as best as possible not to get caught up in it and not to share the attitudes and concerns and thought patterns of the child souls in it while doing what is necessary to get by in it.
Ⓒ 2014 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (period) com
Maximus of Tyre on Homer and Plato
But those ancient things, in which the song of Homer has still been being powerful, have educated and brought up noble and true and genuine nurslings of philosophy. A nursling of that song was Plato: for even if he would forswear a teacher, I see the tokens and I perceive the seeds:
Of him indeed were feet of such a sort and hands of such a sort,
and glances of the eyes and head and loose flowing hair above
so that I myself would dare stand firm to say that Plato is more similar to Homer rather than to Socrates, even if he should flee Homer and pursue Socrates. ...
(Maximus of Tyre, Dissertation 26, draft translation from Ancient Greek by ESF)
Note: The divine Plato does not actually forswear or flee Homer, or chase Socrates. He just protects the proper interpretation or undermeaning of Homer from profanation (though desecration of Homer's sacred text is almost all that is done now by professor-types who claim to study and teach it!), and uses the literary symbol of Socrates as nous or the divine part of the soul or self to indicate the self-contained-ness and independence of the true contemplative ascetic and renunciant from human concerns and socially constructed reality.
Of him indeed were feet of such a sort and hands of such a sort,
and glances of the eyes and head and loose flowing hair above
so that I myself would dare stand firm to say that Plato is more similar to Homer rather than to Socrates, even if he should flee Homer and pursue Socrates. ...
(Maximus of Tyre, Dissertation 26, draft translation from Ancient Greek by ESF)
Note: The divine Plato does not actually forswear or flee Homer, or chase Socrates. He just protects the proper interpretation or undermeaning of Homer from profanation (though desecration of Homer's sacred text is almost all that is done now by professor-types who claim to study and teach it!), and uses the literary symbol of Socrates as nous or the divine part of the soul or self to indicate the self-contained-ness and independence of the true contemplative ascetic and renunciant from human concerns and socially constructed reality.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Plotinus Ennead I.3: On Dialectic
Plotinus' Ennead I.3: On Dialectic
translated from Ancient Greek by Eric S. Fallick
What skill or method or practice brings us back to where it is necessary to journey? Where it is necessary to go, that it is to the Good and the First Principle, let it be assumed as having been granted and having been shown through many things—and indeed even through which things that is shown there was a certain bringing up. But who is it necessary for the one being brought back up to be? Is it not then the one, he says, having seen all or most things who in the first birth takes birth as a man who will be a philosopher or some musician or lover? Truly, the philosopher (ascends) by nature—the musician and the lover have to be brought up. What, then, is the way? Is it one and the same for all these, or is there a certain one for each one? The journey, then, is twofold for all—either going up or having come to be above. For the first is from the things below, but the second indeed is for those who are already in the noetic realm and, so to speak, have put their foot in there, for whom there is the necessity to travel until they would come to the furthest point of the place, which then is actually the end of the journey, when someone would be at the noetical topmost endpoint. But let the second wait—before that it is necessary to try to talk about the bringing up.
First, then, it is necessary for us to distinguish those men beginning from the musician, saying who he is by nature. It is necessary then to reckon him as easily moved and being excited towards beauty, but not very able to be moved by beauty-in-itself, but ready to be moved by its chance reflections, as it were. As the timid are towards noises, thus also that one is towards sounds and ready for the beauty in them, but always fleeing the out of tune and the not one in songs and harmonies and pursuing the rhythmical and graceful. So after those sense-perceptible sounds and harmonies and figures, he needs to be thus brought to separate the material stuff from that from which come the proportions and formulas and needs to be brought to the beauty in those and taught that those were concerning which he had been excited, the noetical harmony and the beauty in that and universal beauty, not any certain beauty only, and the understandings of philosophy need to be put into him, from which he needs to be brought to confidence in what things he doesn't know he has. But what understandings these are will be dealt with later.
But the lover, into whom the musician may also be transformed and being transformed either remain or go beyond, has a good memory somehow of beauty—but he is unable to get knowledge of it being separate, but being struck by the beauties in the sense of sight has been excited about these. He needs to be taught not to have been excited having fallen down around one body, but needs to be brought to all bodies showing by the understanding the beauty that is the same in all of them and that is other than the bodies and that needs to be said to be from elsewhere and that it is more in other things, showing, for instance, beautiful practices and beautiful customs—for this is already becoming accustomed to the lovely in things without body—and that beauty is also in arts and in knowledges and in virtues. Then, next, these need to be made into one and he needs to be taught how they come to be. But from the virtues already one can go up to Nous, the Divine mind-thought, to Being—and from there one needs to traverse the journey above.
The philosopher, however, is this one who is ready by nature and winged, so to speak, and not in need of separation, as are those others, having been moved to the above, but being at a loss is only in need of being shown. He needs to be shown, therefore, and released, himself wanting to be by nature and long since having been released. He needs to be given mathematical-type lessons for habituation in apprehension of and confidence in the bodiless—for he will accept this easily being a lover of learning—and, being virtuous by nature, he needs to be brought to the completion of virtues and, after the mathematical-type lessons, given understandings of dialectic and made wholly a dialectical one.
But what is the dialectic, which it is necessary to give over to the previous ones also? It is the practiced condition being able to say with understanding about each thing what each thing is and why it is different from other things and what is common with the things in which it is and where each of these is and if it is what it is and how many real beings there are and, on the other hand, the not really beings, different from the real beings. It also reckons about good and about not good and how many things are under the category of the good and how many things are under the opposite and what is the eternal, clearly, and the not of such a sort—by knowledge about all things, not by opinion. Stopping the soul from wandering around the sense-perceptible, it settles it in the noetical realm and there has its business getting rid of the false and nourishing the soul in what is called the plain of truth, using the dividing of Plato for distinguishing the Forms and also for knowing what is, using it for the primary genera, and noetically plaiting the things coming from these, until it would go through all the noetical, and back again unloosing them—it would come to which point it has covered the principle—but then it rests, as as far as certainly the soul being There in quiet no longer busying itself about anything looks, becoming gathered into one. It gives the so-called logical business about premises and syllogisms, as it would the knowing how to write, to another skill—some things of which it thinks are necessary before the actual art, but judging these things as also all others and considering some things useful and others superfluous and of the method that wants them.
But from where does this knowledge have its principles? In fact, the Divine Mind-Thought gives clear principles, if a given soul is able to receive them. Then, next, it puts together the things in order and twines together and takes apart, until it has come to complete intelligence, nous. For this, he says, is the purest part of intelligence and wisdom. It is a necessity, therefore, that being the most valued practiced state of those in us, it is about Real Being and the most valued thing—wisdom being about Real Being and intelligence, nous, about that beyond Being. What then, isn't philosophy the most valued thing? Or, are philosophy and dialectic the same thing? In fact, it is the valued part of philosophy. For it is, then, necessary not to think this to be an instrument of the philosopher. For it is not bare theories and rules, but it is about actual things and has the Real Beings as its material, as it were—it comes to them by a journey, however, having actual things with its theorems. But the false and the sophistical it knows as something it happens to have come across as being made by another, as alien, judging the false by the truths in itself, knowing, whenever someone brings it forth, whatever is contrary to the measuring rod of the True. About propositions, therefore, it does not know—for these are (just) letters—but knowing the True, it knows what they call propositions, and it universally knows the movements of the soul, what it posits and what it denies, and if it denies what it posits or something else, and if things are different or the same. Apprehending by intuition whatever is presented, as also sense-perception does, it gives concern for exactness of language to another skill that is fond of that.
That then is the valued part—for philosophy also has other things—for it also observes about nature receiving help from dialectic, as also the other arts use arithmetic besides, though this receives more closely from the dialectic. It also looks concerning moral customs from There in the same way, but adding the practiced states and the practices, from which the practiced conditions come forth. The rational practiced states even already have the things from There as their own—for this is the case even though they are mostly with material stuff—and the other virtues have rationality in their own experiences and actions, but lower wisdom is a certain higher reflection and more to do with the universal and if things are reciprocally implied and if it is necessary to follow or not a certain course now or later or if another is wholly better. But the dialectic and the higher wisdom still more universally and immaterially bring forward all things for use by the lower wisdom. But are the lower virtues and wisdom below able to be without dialectic and higher wisdom? In fact, imperfectly and incompletely. But is it possible to be a wise and dialectical man without those lower virtues and wisdom? In fact, it could not be at all, but they would either be present before or increase together at the same time. And perhaps someone might have natural virtues from which the complete ones come as wisdom comes to be. Wisdom, therefore, comes after natural virtues—then next it would complete the moral characteristics. The natural virtues being in existence both they and wisdom already increase together and are completed—the one going before has completed the other. For altogether the natural virtue has an incomplete eye and moral character, and the principles from which we have them are the greatest thing for both.
Translation © 2016 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (with) (Gee) mail (period) com
translated from Ancient Greek by Eric S. Fallick
What skill or method or practice brings us back to where it is necessary to journey? Where it is necessary to go, that it is to the Good and the First Principle, let it be assumed as having been granted and having been shown through many things—and indeed even through which things that is shown there was a certain bringing up. But who is it necessary for the one being brought back up to be? Is it not then the one, he says, having seen all or most things who in the first birth takes birth as a man who will be a philosopher or some musician or lover? Truly, the philosopher (ascends) by nature—the musician and the lover have to be brought up. What, then, is the way? Is it one and the same for all these, or is there a certain one for each one? The journey, then, is twofold for all—either going up or having come to be above. For the first is from the things below, but the second indeed is for those who are already in the noetic realm and, so to speak, have put their foot in there, for whom there is the necessity to travel until they would come to the furthest point of the place, which then is actually the end of the journey, when someone would be at the noetical topmost endpoint. But let the second wait—before that it is necessary to try to talk about the bringing up.
First, then, it is necessary for us to distinguish those men beginning from the musician, saying who he is by nature. It is necessary then to reckon him as easily moved and being excited towards beauty, but not very able to be moved by beauty-in-itself, but ready to be moved by its chance reflections, as it were. As the timid are towards noises, thus also that one is towards sounds and ready for the beauty in them, but always fleeing the out of tune and the not one in songs and harmonies and pursuing the rhythmical and graceful. So after those sense-perceptible sounds and harmonies and figures, he needs to be thus brought to separate the material stuff from that from which come the proportions and formulas and needs to be brought to the beauty in those and taught that those were concerning which he had been excited, the noetical harmony and the beauty in that and universal beauty, not any certain beauty only, and the understandings of philosophy need to be put into him, from which he needs to be brought to confidence in what things he doesn't know he has. But what understandings these are will be dealt with later.
But the lover, into whom the musician may also be transformed and being transformed either remain or go beyond, has a good memory somehow of beauty—but he is unable to get knowledge of it being separate, but being struck by the beauties in the sense of sight has been excited about these. He needs to be taught not to have been excited having fallen down around one body, but needs to be brought to all bodies showing by the understanding the beauty that is the same in all of them and that is other than the bodies and that needs to be said to be from elsewhere and that it is more in other things, showing, for instance, beautiful practices and beautiful customs—for this is already becoming accustomed to the lovely in things without body—and that beauty is also in arts and in knowledges and in virtues. Then, next, these need to be made into one and he needs to be taught how they come to be. But from the virtues already one can go up to Nous, the Divine mind-thought, to Being—and from there one needs to traverse the journey above.
The philosopher, however, is this one who is ready by nature and winged, so to speak, and not in need of separation, as are those others, having been moved to the above, but being at a loss is only in need of being shown. He needs to be shown, therefore, and released, himself wanting to be by nature and long since having been released. He needs to be given mathematical-type lessons for habituation in apprehension of and confidence in the bodiless—for he will accept this easily being a lover of learning—and, being virtuous by nature, he needs to be brought to the completion of virtues and, after the mathematical-type lessons, given understandings of dialectic and made wholly a dialectical one.
But what is the dialectic, which it is necessary to give over to the previous ones also? It is the practiced condition being able to say with understanding about each thing what each thing is and why it is different from other things and what is common with the things in which it is and where each of these is and if it is what it is and how many real beings there are and, on the other hand, the not really beings, different from the real beings. It also reckons about good and about not good and how many things are under the category of the good and how many things are under the opposite and what is the eternal, clearly, and the not of such a sort—by knowledge about all things, not by opinion. Stopping the soul from wandering around the sense-perceptible, it settles it in the noetical realm and there has its business getting rid of the false and nourishing the soul in what is called the plain of truth, using the dividing of Plato for distinguishing the Forms and also for knowing what is, using it for the primary genera, and noetically plaiting the things coming from these, until it would go through all the noetical, and back again unloosing them—it would come to which point it has covered the principle—but then it rests, as as far as certainly the soul being There in quiet no longer busying itself about anything looks, becoming gathered into one. It gives the so-called logical business about premises and syllogisms, as it would the knowing how to write, to another skill—some things of which it thinks are necessary before the actual art, but judging these things as also all others and considering some things useful and others superfluous and of the method that wants them.
But from where does this knowledge have its principles? In fact, the Divine Mind-Thought gives clear principles, if a given soul is able to receive them. Then, next, it puts together the things in order and twines together and takes apart, until it has come to complete intelligence, nous. For this, he says, is the purest part of intelligence and wisdom. It is a necessity, therefore, that being the most valued practiced state of those in us, it is about Real Being and the most valued thing—wisdom being about Real Being and intelligence, nous, about that beyond Being. What then, isn't philosophy the most valued thing? Or, are philosophy and dialectic the same thing? In fact, it is the valued part of philosophy. For it is, then, necessary not to think this to be an instrument of the philosopher. For it is not bare theories and rules, but it is about actual things and has the Real Beings as its material, as it were—it comes to them by a journey, however, having actual things with its theorems. But the false and the sophistical it knows as something it happens to have come across as being made by another, as alien, judging the false by the truths in itself, knowing, whenever someone brings it forth, whatever is contrary to the measuring rod of the True. About propositions, therefore, it does not know—for these are (just) letters—but knowing the True, it knows what they call propositions, and it universally knows the movements of the soul, what it posits and what it denies, and if it denies what it posits or something else, and if things are different or the same. Apprehending by intuition whatever is presented, as also sense-perception does, it gives concern for exactness of language to another skill that is fond of that.
That then is the valued part—for philosophy also has other things—for it also observes about nature receiving help from dialectic, as also the other arts use arithmetic besides, though this receives more closely from the dialectic. It also looks concerning moral customs from There in the same way, but adding the practiced states and the practices, from which the practiced conditions come forth. The rational practiced states even already have the things from There as their own—for this is the case even though they are mostly with material stuff—and the other virtues have rationality in their own experiences and actions, but lower wisdom is a certain higher reflection and more to do with the universal and if things are reciprocally implied and if it is necessary to follow or not a certain course now or later or if another is wholly better. But the dialectic and the higher wisdom still more universally and immaterially bring forward all things for use by the lower wisdom. But are the lower virtues and wisdom below able to be without dialectic and higher wisdom? In fact, imperfectly and incompletely. But is it possible to be a wise and dialectical man without those lower virtues and wisdom? In fact, it could not be at all, but they would either be present before or increase together at the same time. And perhaps someone might have natural virtues from which the complete ones come as wisdom comes to be. Wisdom, therefore, comes after natural virtues—then next it would complete the moral characteristics. The natural virtues being in existence both they and wisdom already increase together and are completed—the one going before has completed the other. For altogether the natural virtue has an incomplete eye and moral character, and the principles from which we have them are the greatest thing for both.
Translation © 2016 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (with) (Gee) mail (period) com
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
Plotinus Ennead I.7: On the First Good and the Other Goods
Plotinus' Ennead I.7: On the First Good and the Other Goods
translated from ancient Greek by Eric S. Fallick
1. Could anyone say there is another good to each thing than the activity according to nature of its life, and if something would be made of many things, good to this is the proper, cognate activity, according to nature, never falling short with respect to anything, of the better part of it? The activity of the soul, then, is the good for it according to nature. But if also it would be active towards the best thing being itself best, this would not only be the good with respect to it, but also absolutely a good. If then something would not be active towards another thing, being the best of the beings and beyond the beings, but the other things would be active towards it, it is clear that this would be the Good, through which it comes to be also for the other things to participate in good. But the other things would have good in two ways, as many as thus do have good, both by becoming like the Good and by being active towards it. If then aiming at and activity towards the best is good, it is necessary that the Good, neither looking towards another thing nor aiming at another thing, being in quiet a fount and origin of activities according to nature, and making the other things in the form of good not by activity towards them, for they are active towards it, be the Good not by activity or thought, but by itself alone being the Good. For because it is beyond being, it is both beyond activity and beyond thinking mind and thought. For again it is necessary for the Good to be considered that on which all things depend, but which itself depends on nothing: for thus also the thing is true that it is that which all things aim at. It is necessary then for it to abide, but all things to turn around towards it, as a circle towards a center from which come all the radii. The sun is also a paradigm, as being a center with respect to the light that comes from it and depends on it: everywhere indeed then the light is with it and has not been cut off—and even if you would want to cut it off on one side, the light is with respect to the sun.
2. But how do all the other things exist towards it? Well, soulless things exist for soul, whereas soul exists towards the Good through the Divine Mind-Thought. But everything has something of it by its being one somehow and by its being somehow. And also all things participate in form: therefore, as they participate in these things—oneness, being, and form—so also do they participate in the Good. An image or phantom of the Good, that is—for the things they participate in are images, phantoms of being and of one, and in the same way with regard to form. But life in soul, in the first soul after the Divine Mind-Thought, is nearer to truth, and through the Divine Mind-Thought is a thing in the form of good. It would have the Good if it would look to it, but the Divine Mind-Thought is after the Good. So then, life, to what lives, is the good, and Divine Mind-Thought is the good to what participates in the Divine Mind-Thought; thus, for that for which there is life with Divine Mind-Thought, there is also a twofold direction to the Good.
3. But if life is a good, does this good belong to every living thing? In fact, not: for life is lame in the base, like an eye in one not seeing purely, for it does not do its own work. If then life with us, which life has been mixed with evil, is a good, how is death not an evil? Well, evil for whom? For it is necessary for evil to happen to someone. But for something that no longer exists, or, if it exists, has been deprived of life, there is nothing evil, as there is nothing evil for a stone. But if there is life and soul after death, this already would be a good by how much more the soul is active with respect to its own things without a body. But if it becomes of the Whole, what would be an evil to it being there? And wholly, as there is good with the gods, but no evil, so neither is there evil to the soul preserving its purity; but if it would not preserve its purity, it is not death that would be an evil to it, but life. And also if there would be punishments in Hades, again there also life would be an evil to it, because it is not life alone. But if life is a conjunction of soul and body, and death is a separation of these, the soul will be capable of both. But if life is good, how is death not an evil? In fact, life is good for those to whom it is good, not as a good in so far as it is a conjunction, but because by virtue it wards off evil; but death is more a good. In fact, it needs to be said that life in a body is itself an evil in itself, but by virtue the soul comes to be in a good, not living as the complex of soul and body, but now already separating itself.
translation © 2010 by Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (period) com
Sunday, April 22, 2018
Homer on the Platonic Tripartite Soul
Homer on the Platonic Tripartite Soul:
The Adultery of Aphrodite and Ares in the Odyssey
Eric S. Fallick
The Odyssey is a symbolic, allegorical, anagogical description of contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual practice through successive reincarnations in the soul’s journey back to its origin from its fallen state. All systems or descriptions of spiritual practice presuppose and assume (whether they are conscious of it or not and have understood it or not) a metaphysics or description of the nature of Reality. In the case of the Odyssey, the assumed and understood metaphysics and nature of Reality is the same as that expounded by Plato and Plotinus. Most of the Odyssey is detailing practice, stages on the Path and experiences that have to be undergone and things that have to be done by the contemplative ascetic practitioner, with the metaphysics and spiritual Reality involved already understood and presupposed without the need for specific exposition per se. There are, however, some places where a digression is made for explicit exposition of certain metaphysical topics and facets of spiritual Reality. In an earlier essay, I attempted to explain one such passage covering the three Platonic hypostases. Another expository passage, this time presenting the understanding of the Platonic tripartite soul, is found in the colorful and much discussed song of Demodocus relating the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite at Book 8, lines 266 to 366. Let me attempt to explain the undermeaning of this famously controversial story, which will turn out to be not at all so scandalous as has sometimes been supposed by those not penetrating beneath the surface level of the text.
In the Republic (and the Phaedrus myth), the soul in its fallen embodied condition imprisoned in individuated sensate existence in space-time is described, for functional purposes, as having three parts. The first and most important part, which is the true and separable soul, belonging both to this world, in a sense, and the higher noetic world, is the rational and divine part of the soul, nous, logos or ‘intellect’ or understanding. The other two parts are only attached to this true and higher soul when it is embodied and fallen and stuck here in individuated sensate existence in space-time and are produced from the soul’s mixture with ‘matter’, material and bodily existence and darkness. These are the spirited or passionate or energetic part of the soul and the desiring and sensual part of the soul. These last two form the animal soul, so to speak, in opposition to the divine soul. These can’t be completely eliminated as long as the soul remains in embodied sensate existence, until it has attained release and liberation from rebirth and re-union with the One, but in the contemplative ascetic and more accomplished practitioner they are controlled by and strictly subordinate to the divine rational soul, to one degree or another as best as possible (part of the Path is the constant struggle to control these and subject them to the divine soul), and used only as needed to maintain the psycho-physical organism until it can be transcended. In ordinary worldlings, the animal soul is most powerful and exerts control and is only moderated to some degree by the divine soul and often only to the degree necessary to keep it from self-destructing the whole organism and keep it, and particularly the desiring part, being satisfied and able to attain its desires to some degree. In the more accomplished practitioner, the spirited passionate part is subject to the divine part and used to control the desiring part and protect the divine part from outside hindrances; in mundane people, it is in the service of the desiring part and its own passions, and fights for them against the divine rational part.
In the symbolic description in the story of the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares in the Odyssey, Hephaestus represents the divine, rational part of the soul, Ares represents the spirited, passionate part, and Aphrodite represents the desiring, sensual part of the soul. Hephaestus, representing intelligence and the divine soul, is ‘famed for art’ and ‘of great good sense’. He is also ‘lame’ and ‘not firm on the feet’ representing the non-involvement of the rational soul in the material world and its being separable and really separate therefrom, and is ‘slow’ since intellect isn’t caught up in impulse and immediate passion. Ares, on the other hand, representing the spirited, passionate and angry part of the soul, is ‘destructive’ and ‘hateful’, is ‘handsome’ because this part appeals to worldly desires, is the ‘fastest’ of the gods on account of its mercurial nature, and is ‘sound and swift of foot’ since it is part of this world and functions only within it. Aphrodite, the desiring and sensual part of the soul, is ‘golden’ and ‘fair-crowned’ and ‘smile-loving’ representing the apparent but illusory pleasures of the senses, like a honey coated razor blade.
Aphrodite is lawfully married to Hephaestus. In the good soul, the desiring part is subject to the rational part and not supported or encouraged by the spirited part. However, as the story begins, while Hephaestus is absent, while the rational part is occupied with its own proper activity of noetic contemplation apart from the sense world, Ares enters Hephaestus’ house and wooing Aphrodite with gifts commits adultery with her in secret, the spirited part usurps the rational part’s position in the soul while the latter is unaware and presenting the lures of helping the unintelligent desiring part to fulfil its desire for sensual pleasures joins with the desiring part and makes it autonomous rather than subject to the rational part as is proper. Hephaestus is, however, immediately informed by Helios, the sun, of the goings on. The divine part of the soul in contemplation is informed by the light of the Absolute, the Source of all knowledge, and realizes that the lower parts of the soul are still acting on and out of delusion and immersion in the material world. Hephaestus goes to his smithy and fashions fine bonds that are invisible to others and spreads them around his bed. The rational part of the soul consults its intellectual resources and spiritual understanding and develops the means to reveal and immobilize the lower parts of the soul in their unskilful functioning and deploys them throughout the soul as a whole. Hephaestus then pretends to go off to Lemnos, ‘the well-built city’ that is ‘much dearest to him of all lands’, but really turns back when Helios, who has kept watch, tells him that Ares, who was keeping watch, has seen him leaving and taken Aphrodite to bed. The rational part turns to contemplation of the well-ordered noetic realm that it prefers to this world, but is now aware that it has to keep an eye on the lower parts, and, when in the seeming absence of rational control the spirited part again tries to join with the willing desiring part, he knows it through the light of the Absolute and the knowing it provides. This time, however, the rational soul has prepared things and the misalignment and malfunctioning of the animal soul is revealed and the lower two parts are immobilized in their misconduct through the understanding of the divine soul that they can’t perceive; the invisible bonds made by Hephaestus fall on Ares and Aphrodite and they are caught and bound and are unable to move.
Hephaestus now reappears at his house, the rational soul now makes its presence obviously known again throughout the whole soul, and calls all the other gods to witness, the lower parts of the soul are revealed for what they are and have done in the light of the divine Ideas and the noetic order. Hephaestus demands the return of his bridal gifts and the assembled gods (the goddesses stay back out of modesty, the animal soul is still required to function to a certain limited extent in maintaining the psycho-physical organism prior to liberation) exclaim that justice always prevails and that Ares owes the penalty for adultery, the divine order requires that the parts of the soul be properly aligned and stay in their proper roles, otherwise negative karma is created that must be worked out as regulated by providence. The gods laugh at the scene and joke with each other, the divine order rejoices at the rational soul’s retaking control and the soul’s being recalibrated back to its proper order. Poseidon, however, does not laugh and keeps entreating Hephaestus to release Ares and eventually promises that either Ares or himself will pay the debt for adultery. Poseidon represents ‘matter’, non-being and darkness. He is the ‘earth-holder’ and ‘earth-shaker’ since he governs much of the material world and is the lord of the ocean of material existence and birth and death. He is thus on the side of Ares, material darkness and bondage desires and requires the malfunctioning of the animal soul, and thus assures that karmic retribution will continue since the divine order of things keeps compensating for the mess-up of ‘matter’ and non-being by bringing things back into order through the working out of the karma taken on by souls mixed up with the material sense world. Hephaestus finally agrees and releases the bonds and Ares and Aphrodite at once spring up and depart for their respective separate preferred locations. The rational soul, as long as it is still stuck in embodied existence, has to concede some continued limited functioning to the animal soul, but this now, through the intervention of understanding illuminated from the Good, is more in accord with the workings of the divine order and karma and the two lower parts of the soul are now separated from their illicit collusion and are assigned to their separate proper places.
Thus, Homer and his divine Muse have expounded and detailed by means of the undermeaning of a myth the same tripartite nature of the embodied, bound mortal soul and its proper and necessary alignment and functioning as has the divine Plato in the Politea in a more immediately explicit and accessible fashion.
© 2018 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (gee)mail (dot) com
The Adultery of Aphrodite and Ares in the Odyssey
Eric S. Fallick
The Odyssey is a symbolic, allegorical, anagogical description of contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual practice through successive reincarnations in the soul’s journey back to its origin from its fallen state. All systems or descriptions of spiritual practice presuppose and assume (whether they are conscious of it or not and have understood it or not) a metaphysics or description of the nature of Reality. In the case of the Odyssey, the assumed and understood metaphysics and nature of Reality is the same as that expounded by Plato and Plotinus. Most of the Odyssey is detailing practice, stages on the Path and experiences that have to be undergone and things that have to be done by the contemplative ascetic practitioner, with the metaphysics and spiritual Reality involved already understood and presupposed without the need for specific exposition per se. There are, however, some places where a digression is made for explicit exposition of certain metaphysical topics and facets of spiritual Reality. In an earlier essay, I attempted to explain one such passage covering the three Platonic hypostases. Another expository passage, this time presenting the understanding of the Platonic tripartite soul, is found in the colorful and much discussed song of Demodocus relating the adultery of Ares and Aphrodite at Book 8, lines 266 to 366. Let me attempt to explain the undermeaning of this famously controversial story, which will turn out to be not at all so scandalous as has sometimes been supposed by those not penetrating beneath the surface level of the text.
In the Republic (and the Phaedrus myth), the soul in its fallen embodied condition imprisoned in individuated sensate existence in space-time is described, for functional purposes, as having three parts. The first and most important part, which is the true and separable soul, belonging both to this world, in a sense, and the higher noetic world, is the rational and divine part of the soul, nous, logos or ‘intellect’ or understanding. The other two parts are only attached to this true and higher soul when it is embodied and fallen and stuck here in individuated sensate existence in space-time and are produced from the soul’s mixture with ‘matter’, material and bodily existence and darkness. These are the spirited or passionate or energetic part of the soul and the desiring and sensual part of the soul. These last two form the animal soul, so to speak, in opposition to the divine soul. These can’t be completely eliminated as long as the soul remains in embodied sensate existence, until it has attained release and liberation from rebirth and re-union with the One, but in the contemplative ascetic and more accomplished practitioner they are controlled by and strictly subordinate to the divine rational soul, to one degree or another as best as possible (part of the Path is the constant struggle to control these and subject them to the divine soul), and used only as needed to maintain the psycho-physical organism until it can be transcended. In ordinary worldlings, the animal soul is most powerful and exerts control and is only moderated to some degree by the divine soul and often only to the degree necessary to keep it from self-destructing the whole organism and keep it, and particularly the desiring part, being satisfied and able to attain its desires to some degree. In the more accomplished practitioner, the spirited passionate part is subject to the divine part and used to control the desiring part and protect the divine part from outside hindrances; in mundane people, it is in the service of the desiring part and its own passions, and fights for them against the divine rational part.
In the symbolic description in the story of the adultery of Aphrodite and Ares in the Odyssey, Hephaestus represents the divine, rational part of the soul, Ares represents the spirited, passionate part, and Aphrodite represents the desiring, sensual part of the soul. Hephaestus, representing intelligence and the divine soul, is ‘famed for art’ and ‘of great good sense’. He is also ‘lame’ and ‘not firm on the feet’ representing the non-involvement of the rational soul in the material world and its being separable and really separate therefrom, and is ‘slow’ since intellect isn’t caught up in impulse and immediate passion. Ares, on the other hand, representing the spirited, passionate and angry part of the soul, is ‘destructive’ and ‘hateful’, is ‘handsome’ because this part appeals to worldly desires, is the ‘fastest’ of the gods on account of its mercurial nature, and is ‘sound and swift of foot’ since it is part of this world and functions only within it. Aphrodite, the desiring and sensual part of the soul, is ‘golden’ and ‘fair-crowned’ and ‘smile-loving’ representing the apparent but illusory pleasures of the senses, like a honey coated razor blade.
Aphrodite is lawfully married to Hephaestus. In the good soul, the desiring part is subject to the rational part and not supported or encouraged by the spirited part. However, as the story begins, while Hephaestus is absent, while the rational part is occupied with its own proper activity of noetic contemplation apart from the sense world, Ares enters Hephaestus’ house and wooing Aphrodite with gifts commits adultery with her in secret, the spirited part usurps the rational part’s position in the soul while the latter is unaware and presenting the lures of helping the unintelligent desiring part to fulfil its desire for sensual pleasures joins with the desiring part and makes it autonomous rather than subject to the rational part as is proper. Hephaestus is, however, immediately informed by Helios, the sun, of the goings on. The divine part of the soul in contemplation is informed by the light of the Absolute, the Source of all knowledge, and realizes that the lower parts of the soul are still acting on and out of delusion and immersion in the material world. Hephaestus goes to his smithy and fashions fine bonds that are invisible to others and spreads them around his bed. The rational part of the soul consults its intellectual resources and spiritual understanding and develops the means to reveal and immobilize the lower parts of the soul in their unskilful functioning and deploys them throughout the soul as a whole. Hephaestus then pretends to go off to Lemnos, ‘the well-built city’ that is ‘much dearest to him of all lands’, but really turns back when Helios, who has kept watch, tells him that Ares, who was keeping watch, has seen him leaving and taken Aphrodite to bed. The rational part turns to contemplation of the well-ordered noetic realm that it prefers to this world, but is now aware that it has to keep an eye on the lower parts, and, when in the seeming absence of rational control the spirited part again tries to join with the willing desiring part, he knows it through the light of the Absolute and the knowing it provides. This time, however, the rational soul has prepared things and the misalignment and malfunctioning of the animal soul is revealed and the lower two parts are immobilized in their misconduct through the understanding of the divine soul that they can’t perceive; the invisible bonds made by Hephaestus fall on Ares and Aphrodite and they are caught and bound and are unable to move.
Hephaestus now reappears at his house, the rational soul now makes its presence obviously known again throughout the whole soul, and calls all the other gods to witness, the lower parts of the soul are revealed for what they are and have done in the light of the divine Ideas and the noetic order. Hephaestus demands the return of his bridal gifts and the assembled gods (the goddesses stay back out of modesty, the animal soul is still required to function to a certain limited extent in maintaining the psycho-physical organism prior to liberation) exclaim that justice always prevails and that Ares owes the penalty for adultery, the divine order requires that the parts of the soul be properly aligned and stay in their proper roles, otherwise negative karma is created that must be worked out as regulated by providence. The gods laugh at the scene and joke with each other, the divine order rejoices at the rational soul’s retaking control and the soul’s being recalibrated back to its proper order. Poseidon, however, does not laugh and keeps entreating Hephaestus to release Ares and eventually promises that either Ares or himself will pay the debt for adultery. Poseidon represents ‘matter’, non-being and darkness. He is the ‘earth-holder’ and ‘earth-shaker’ since he governs much of the material world and is the lord of the ocean of material existence and birth and death. He is thus on the side of Ares, material darkness and bondage desires and requires the malfunctioning of the animal soul, and thus assures that karmic retribution will continue since the divine order of things keeps compensating for the mess-up of ‘matter’ and non-being by bringing things back into order through the working out of the karma taken on by souls mixed up with the material sense world. Hephaestus finally agrees and releases the bonds and Ares and Aphrodite at once spring up and depart for their respective separate preferred locations. The rational soul, as long as it is still stuck in embodied existence, has to concede some continued limited functioning to the animal soul, but this now, through the intervention of understanding illuminated from the Good, is more in accord with the workings of the divine order and karma and the two lower parts of the soul are now separated from their illicit collusion and are assigned to their separate proper places.
Thus, Homer and his divine Muse have expounded and detailed by means of the undermeaning of a myth the same tripartite nature of the embodied, bound mortal soul and its proper and necessary alignment and functioning as has the divine Plato in the Politea in a more immediately explicit and accessible fashion.
© 2018 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (gee)mail (dot) com
Friday, April 20, 2018
Homer on the Three Platonic Hypostases
Homer on the Three Platonic Hypostases:
The Proteus episode of the Odyssey
by Eric S. Fallick
The Odyssey of Homer is a most marvelous transhistorical transmigratory allegorical guidebook to contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual practice detailing the soul's journey in successive rebirths to return to its true home in the noetic realm and the Absolute. All spiritual and religious systems and systems of practice take as their basis and presuppose a metaphysics or ontological (and axiological) understanding of the nature of reality, whether they explicitly recognize it or not. The metaphysics underlying the Odyssey is exactly the same as that presented by Plato and Plotinus—the system of the three Platonic hypostases. (Plato and Plotinus both teach precisely the same metaphysical, spiritual and soteriological system, even though many spiritually imperceptive modern scholars here in the dark ages are unable or unwilling to see this. In the much more illumined pre-modern world, this was more obvious to many.) The three hypostases or levels of existence or reality are the One or the Good, the Absolute, the Source and Ground of everything, from which everything comes and to which everything returns and which encompasses everything; Nous or the Divine Mind-thought, the noetic realm of the Ideas or Forms, eternal and unchanging; and the level of Soul, of space and time and individuation. Only the One or the Good is wholly real and perfect and knowing. The other two hypostases or levels are descending levels of increased darkness and unreality and nescience within, so to speak, the One. The level of soul includes various aspects such as the nature and faculties and function of both our souls and the World Soul, the production of space and time, the workings of Dike (justice) or Adastreia (necessity) or karma or providence, the struggles of the soul on the Path, and so forth. The Odyssey is particularly concerned, by its nature, with detailing the processes of this level, although the higher realities are always, of course, presumed in the background. It is not, therefore, especially concerned with giving systematic metaphysical expositions. The most explicit and systematic exposition of the three Platonic hypostases, combined, of course, with instructions for the Path, occurs in the Proteus episode related by Menelaus to Telemachus in Book 4. In this essay I will attempt to briefly explicate the undermeaning of this part of the text.
Telemachus represents the conceptual or discriminating understanding and discernment of the practitioner's soul. This understanding is born of the combination of the true, higher soul, Odysseus, and the lower, embodied soul, Penelope. Penelope, the lower soul, dwells in Odysseus' house, the body, the embodied state of individuated sensate existence in space-time, harassed by and barely fending off the evil suitors, the passions and defilements and worldly emotions and desires, who unlawfully and against her will and that of Telemachus, the understanding, occupy the domain/house of the lower soul. They unlawfully consume their livelihood, that is, they use up the lower soul's physical, emotional and mental energies to feed themselves instead of conserving and allowing these energies to be used, having been turned by the higher soul, to proper divine and holy and ascetic purposes of contemplation and striving towards liberation from becoming, genesis. Throughout the Odyssey, the disturbing image of the sacrificing and eating of animals (the faculties and energies of the lower, animal soul) and the libation and drinking of wine (the unavoidable pleasant or painful experiences of the senses) represent the maintenance and use of the physical and emotional and lower mental faculties of the soul and the senses that unfortunately have to be constantly attended to as long as we are still in becoming, in embodied sensate existence, but should be always only used as necessary for and totally dedicated to divine ascetic contemplative purposes, sacrificed to the gods before being consumed, and are by divine and holy higher souls committed to the Path, but are misused by the defilements and worldly deluded souls only for worldly purposes and pleasures, sacrificed to the gods in name only in the misguided attempt to obtain worldly advantages. The reason for the choice of the grotesque and horrific symbols and images of killing and eating of animals and consuming of alcohol, so revolting to the true contemplative ascetic and renunciant, is to serve as a continual reminder of how gross and painful and horrible and contemptible and miserable and burdensome and dark sensate existence and continued rebirth and physical and embodied life really is compared to the inconceivable bliss and brightness and knowing of the Absolute and re-union with and re-absorption therein, and to constantly inspire the renunciant with revulsion from this world and life and with desire for liberation and the Good and impel him to constantly strive for release and re-union, for the Absolute only. Penelope, the lower soul, and Telemachus, the conceptual understanding, long for the return of Odysseus, the true higher divine soul and the true contemplative ascetic practitioner, who, fully purified and developed and divininized by his long trials and adventures, will destroy the defilements, etc., the suitors, and be reunited with the lower embodied existence and take proper care of it and eventually get rid of it by drawing it up fully into the higher levels. (Of course, they can never actually be separate during the course of the Path, and Odysseus, the higher soul and contemplative ascetic, is always really present there, but for much of the Path the two seem to be separate in that the constant need to maintain the psycho-physical organism and deal with its attendant passions, etc. seems to be separate from and always cause problems for and drag one away from contemplation and holy practice. Note that in the Odyssey the trials of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus are all actually going on at the same time.)
At the beginning of the Odyssey, as the conditions are becoming ripe for Odysseus' return, Telemachus, the cognitive understanding, has now developed to the point that it understands more what is actually going on and that the suitors, the defilements, have to be ejected and destroyed, the world needs to be renounced, the higher soul needs to return, and liberation only needs to be striven for. Athena, divine wisdom, in the guise of Mentes and Mentor (both meaning “Reminder”) sends the understanding, Telemachus, on a journey of learning. First, he learns piety and asceticism, but without philosophia, from Nestor. Then he travels to see Menelaus. Here he sees noetical beauty, Helen, and, eventually, in response to his inquiring about Odysseus, Menelaus relates the Proteus episode that forms the main subject of this essay and provides a more structured exposition of the three hypostases. Even if I won't be able to explicate the undermeaning of every detail, the main features are clear.
Menelaus represents a soul that has made quite significant progress on the Path, but is still far from the end and will be detained for a while. He has firmly regained the vision of intelligible beauty, he has regained Helen, and has had a glimpse, however brief, of the One, he has had an encounter with Proteus, “the First”, and has learned a great deal from these and his practice so far. He has, however, not gone through all the necessary trials and practice for ultimately attaining the telos and destroying the defilements that Odysseus has. He still has many of his ships and his men, which, unlike Odysseus, he brought back with him, the various aspects and views and burdens of the lower self that need to be destroyed, however painfully, on the Path. He has not learned all the things that Odysseus has learned in the various episodes that occur later in the Odyssey. He has, however, progressed and learned enough and has a good enough lower self, also represented by Helen, that he was not destroyed by a bad lower self and the defilements and passions and wrong views upon prematurely returning like Agamemnon, he has avoided 'the fate of Agamemnon', referred to repeatedly in the text and related by Proteus, as mentioned below. At the end of their discussion, Proteus assures him, he knows from his vision of the Absolute, that he won't fall totally back into genesis, becoming, won't die and meet his fate in horse-grazing Argos, but will go to the Elysian plane of unchanging, pleasant and easy life and weather, will remain in contact with the noetical realm, the second hypostasis, since he has the vision of noetical beauty, Helen, daughter of the divine order of things, Zeus. He is, therefore, still around in the sensate lower level of soul and individuated phenomena in space-time to be able to give instruction to the understanding, Telemachus (sort of like the writers of essays?), unlike the fully completed soul that has fully attained the telos and no longer perceives this world at all but has become only the Absolute. Thus, in Menelaus and his situation, details, activities, etc. we have expounded, illustrated and disclosed the third hypostasis, the level of soul, both ours and the World Soul.
Menelaus' relation of the Proteus episode begins with him and his ships and men stuck on a desert island not too long after beginning his journey from the lower this-world of Egypt to his return to Lacedaemon, stuck at a single and difficult and unpleasant place in his practice, because he did not offer sufficient complete hecatombs, sacrifices, to the gods before departing, he did not sufficiently practice asceticism, piety, holiness and total devotion to the divine, he did not adequately dedicate all his physical, emotional, and mental existence, all the powers and faculties of the lower animal soul to the Divine and the attaining thereof. Thus, his lower faculties are perishing and are hungry, having been deprived of their true use and good. At this point, though, he is able to enter into contemplation of and contact with in contemplation of the Divine Mind-Thought, the noetic realm, the second hypostasis, which is expounded and represented here by the goddess Eidothea, “Contemplation of Form” and the seals and their counting. (So two of the three hypostases have been accounted for.) He meets Eidothea, significantly while wandering alone, in contemplation without the burden of his lower self, his men and ships, and enters into interaction with her, with the noetic realm, the Divine Mind-Thought. From this he learns that to find out what is going on, why he is stuck in his practice, he will have to at least briefly ascend to the One in contemplation and that the Divine Mind-Thought itself will facilitate this.
Proteus, “the First”, represents the One, the Absolute, Itself, the first Platonic hypostasis (so we now have all three hypostases revealed and presented in orderly fashion). Proteus, the One, is here presented in reverse fashion to emphasize His being the underlying source and ground of all phenomena, even the lowest. Thus, he is described, backwards, as of and under Egypt, the sea and Poseidon, all of which represent hyle, the body and bodily and sensate existence. Eidothea's instructions on how to 'catch' her Father Proteus, the approach to the Good revealed through contact with the Divine Mind-Thought, and the events as they actually unfold largely coincide and so will be explicated together without distinction here.
Proteus emerges from the sea at high noon. The One is seen during and as and is the greatest illumination. Along with Him emerge and He is seen among, at the head of and beyond the Ideas or Forms, the seals. He counts the seals by fives showing the rational order of the Ideas and the beginning approach to the noetic through number and mathematics (shades of the Politea!). Menelaus and his few compatriots (this practicing soul is not yet to the point where he can enter this contemplation without any of the faculties of the lower soul remaining with him) are disguised by the Divine Mind-Thought as seals, as Ideas; that is, it is through entrance into and identification with the noetic realm, Nous, that the ascent can be made to seeing the Good. For this soul as yet still burdened from behind, the entrance into and abiding in Nous would be more than he could bear, the smell of the seals would be terrible, were it not for the pleasure of the noetic beauty, the ambrosia that Eidothea places under their noses (compare Phaedo 109 e6 where the nature must be sufficient to bear the contemplating). When they grab Proteus, when they make the approach to the One, He turns into all manner of forms of animals and plants and physical elements, but they have to hang on and not let go until He returns to His actual form. The Absolute has to be discerned and kept in sight as beyond and throughout the experience of all the diversified phenomena (compare Politea 534 b8-d1 where the one who knows the Idea of the Good has to be able to abstract It from all things as in battle and know it truly in reality, not just in opinion).
The first thing, and that for which this has all been undertaken, that Menelaus learns from Proteus is that he is stuck on the island because he did not perform satisfactory sacrificial offerings to Zeus and the gods before leaving Egypt and that he has to return to Egypt and do it before the gods will allow him to proceed safely and successfully on his way. This is highly significant. The first thing that the practitioner, that the soul, learns in having a true vision or contemplation of the Absolute, however brief, is the absolute necessity of full-blown, pure renunciation and asceticism and piety and holiness and total, single-minded devotion to the Divine in order to proceed truly and successfully on the Path of contemplation and return home. Returning to the bodily, sensate realm, he must uncompromisingly sacrifice and dedicate all the powers, maintenance and faculties of the lower self, of the animal soul, of bodily life to the single divine and holy purpose of attaining re-union with the Absolute, of attaining liberation. The stream of all his energies must be wholly and holy-ly directed to the Divine without any diversion into the channels of worldly desires and the pursuit of sensual pleasures and the things of this world. His maintenance of the psycho-physical organism, however greatly this occupies so much of our time and energy and attention in this world, must be solely for the purpose of, be dedicated to, the Divine Path and aspiration. This, as discussed above, is the undermeaning of the symbol of offering satisfactory hectacombs, sacrifices or offerings. This is most important to understand, especially now in these dark times in the modern secular world where there are many who claim to have known the Absolute, God, Enlightenment, etc. and to teach others to attain this in 'meditation' but display understanding, teaching and behavior that indicate that they couldn't possibly have true accomplishment. Anyone who has truly had even a little contact with the One in contemplation and in reality knows the absolute necessity of renunciation, purity, holiness and asceticism for and as the Path. Contemplative asceticism is the very manifestation and reflection of the Absolute, of God, etc. in this world. Anyone who claims to have contemplative attainment, to have attained Union, Realization, Enlightenment, etc. and is not a pure contemplative ascetic, is not celibate, vegetarian, teetotaling, poor, abstaining from sensual and social pleasures, etc., and does not understand or teach this, or teaches people that they can attain this without being renunciants and without giving up this world can, ipso facto, be dismissed as a fraud. Again, Homer, along with Plato and Plotinus, continually teaches true contemplative asceticism of the purest and most abstract and austere sort as the only and only possible Path to liberation and realization of the Absolute, as integral with and the flip side, as it were, in this world of the Absolute Divine Reality Itself. To become God, the soul must become godlike.
This theme is further reinforced by the remaining subsidiary part of Proteus' revelation in which He relates the fate or status of three of the chiefs of the Achaeans who made it out of Troy. Aias perished in the sea of hyle, of bodily sensate existence, on the Path home, because he departed from and closed himself to divine wisdom, he was hated by Athena, and because he fell from holiness and a proper supernatural understanding of the Path and into a naturalist, humanist understanding of reality and the Path arrogating to himself the ability to accomplish a telos without the Divine, he boasted, in his blindness, that he had been saved from the sea against the will of rather than because of the gods. Thus, he was re-engulfed by hyle and material bodily existence, believing this and purely human action to be real, and fell back into the ocean of birth and death, falling completely from the Path (at least for the time being). Next, He relates the 'fate of Agamemnon', the destruction or loss or falling from the Path (for the time being, at least) of the soul that returns home, that attempts to ascend to the higher hypostases and thinks that it has, without at all adequate preparation, understanding, practice or condition. He returns with all his ships and men, without at all having freed himself from the burden of the lower soul by going through the painful trials, purifications and learnings of Odysseus, and with a bad lower self overcome by the passions and delusions and defilements, his wife overcome and surrendered to Aegisthus, not at all practicing holiness, morality, humility, asceticism and renunciation, that puts an end to the higher soul's attempts at liberation and plunges it back into the lower areas of rebirth. (One need only look around, both in the past and especially in the present, to see examples of these two lamentable fates.) Finally, He relates that Odysseus, the true ascetic practitioner and higher soul, is still alive, is still on the Path, has lost all his ships and men, has been purified of the burden of the lower soul and the things of this world, as is necessary, but is temporarily stuck on the island of and is detained by Calypso, “the Concealer”, sensate life and sensory existence, but is longing and ready to return, the telos is getting nearer, though there is still a long way to go. (The Path, viewed from the temporal side of things, is a very long, difficult and tricky journey—very few are they who make it all the way through to the end and liberation.)
Thus, it is clear that the Odyssey clearly and explicitly presents and presupposes the Platonic metaphysics of the three hypostases and their concomitant contemplative ascetic, renunciant practice, the exposition being interleaved with instructions on the Path. Homer (or, rather, the Muse) and Plato and Plotinus all teach the same Platonic Idealist metaphysic or structure and understanding of the nature of Reality and teach it as inseparable from the contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual Path and soteriology of re-union with the One or the Good and liberation thereby from the cycle of repeated birth and death or becoming of genesis. This is a most important lesson to learn. Idealist metaphysics and ontology of the Absolute and the lower manifestations contained in It and the contemplative ascetic and mystic spiritual practice and Path intrinsically go together and are inseparable. They are two sides of the same coin, the reflections of each other in the nontemporal, transcendent and temporal, immanent spheres. We may be grateful for the manifestation of the Absolute in our present experiential fields as the Homeric Muse for teaching us this.
© 2015 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (period) com
The Proteus episode of the Odyssey
by Eric S. Fallick
The Odyssey of Homer is a most marvelous transhistorical transmigratory allegorical guidebook to contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual practice detailing the soul's journey in successive rebirths to return to its true home in the noetic realm and the Absolute. All spiritual and religious systems and systems of practice take as their basis and presuppose a metaphysics or ontological (and axiological) understanding of the nature of reality, whether they explicitly recognize it or not. The metaphysics underlying the Odyssey is exactly the same as that presented by Plato and Plotinus—the system of the three Platonic hypostases. (Plato and Plotinus both teach precisely the same metaphysical, spiritual and soteriological system, even though many spiritually imperceptive modern scholars here in the dark ages are unable or unwilling to see this. In the much more illumined pre-modern world, this was more obvious to many.) The three hypostases or levels of existence or reality are the One or the Good, the Absolute, the Source and Ground of everything, from which everything comes and to which everything returns and which encompasses everything; Nous or the Divine Mind-thought, the noetic realm of the Ideas or Forms, eternal and unchanging; and the level of Soul, of space and time and individuation. Only the One or the Good is wholly real and perfect and knowing. The other two hypostases or levels are descending levels of increased darkness and unreality and nescience within, so to speak, the One. The level of soul includes various aspects such as the nature and faculties and function of both our souls and the World Soul, the production of space and time, the workings of Dike (justice) or Adastreia (necessity) or karma or providence, the struggles of the soul on the Path, and so forth. The Odyssey is particularly concerned, by its nature, with detailing the processes of this level, although the higher realities are always, of course, presumed in the background. It is not, therefore, especially concerned with giving systematic metaphysical expositions. The most explicit and systematic exposition of the three Platonic hypostases, combined, of course, with instructions for the Path, occurs in the Proteus episode related by Menelaus to Telemachus in Book 4. In this essay I will attempt to briefly explicate the undermeaning of this part of the text.
Telemachus represents the conceptual or discriminating understanding and discernment of the practitioner's soul. This understanding is born of the combination of the true, higher soul, Odysseus, and the lower, embodied soul, Penelope. Penelope, the lower soul, dwells in Odysseus' house, the body, the embodied state of individuated sensate existence in space-time, harassed by and barely fending off the evil suitors, the passions and defilements and worldly emotions and desires, who unlawfully and against her will and that of Telemachus, the understanding, occupy the domain/house of the lower soul. They unlawfully consume their livelihood, that is, they use up the lower soul's physical, emotional and mental energies to feed themselves instead of conserving and allowing these energies to be used, having been turned by the higher soul, to proper divine and holy and ascetic purposes of contemplation and striving towards liberation from becoming, genesis. Throughout the Odyssey, the disturbing image of the sacrificing and eating of animals (the faculties and energies of the lower, animal soul) and the libation and drinking of wine (the unavoidable pleasant or painful experiences of the senses) represent the maintenance and use of the physical and emotional and lower mental faculties of the soul and the senses that unfortunately have to be constantly attended to as long as we are still in becoming, in embodied sensate existence, but should be always only used as necessary for and totally dedicated to divine ascetic contemplative purposes, sacrificed to the gods before being consumed, and are by divine and holy higher souls committed to the Path, but are misused by the defilements and worldly deluded souls only for worldly purposes and pleasures, sacrificed to the gods in name only in the misguided attempt to obtain worldly advantages. The reason for the choice of the grotesque and horrific symbols and images of killing and eating of animals and consuming of alcohol, so revolting to the true contemplative ascetic and renunciant, is to serve as a continual reminder of how gross and painful and horrible and contemptible and miserable and burdensome and dark sensate existence and continued rebirth and physical and embodied life really is compared to the inconceivable bliss and brightness and knowing of the Absolute and re-union with and re-absorption therein, and to constantly inspire the renunciant with revulsion from this world and life and with desire for liberation and the Good and impel him to constantly strive for release and re-union, for the Absolute only. Penelope, the lower soul, and Telemachus, the conceptual understanding, long for the return of Odysseus, the true higher divine soul and the true contemplative ascetic practitioner, who, fully purified and developed and divininized by his long trials and adventures, will destroy the defilements, etc., the suitors, and be reunited with the lower embodied existence and take proper care of it and eventually get rid of it by drawing it up fully into the higher levels. (Of course, they can never actually be separate during the course of the Path, and Odysseus, the higher soul and contemplative ascetic, is always really present there, but for much of the Path the two seem to be separate in that the constant need to maintain the psycho-physical organism and deal with its attendant passions, etc. seems to be separate from and always cause problems for and drag one away from contemplation and holy practice. Note that in the Odyssey the trials of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus are all actually going on at the same time.)
At the beginning of the Odyssey, as the conditions are becoming ripe for Odysseus' return, Telemachus, the cognitive understanding, has now developed to the point that it understands more what is actually going on and that the suitors, the defilements, have to be ejected and destroyed, the world needs to be renounced, the higher soul needs to return, and liberation only needs to be striven for. Athena, divine wisdom, in the guise of Mentes and Mentor (both meaning “Reminder”) sends the understanding, Telemachus, on a journey of learning. First, he learns piety and asceticism, but without philosophia, from Nestor. Then he travels to see Menelaus. Here he sees noetical beauty, Helen, and, eventually, in response to his inquiring about Odysseus, Menelaus relates the Proteus episode that forms the main subject of this essay and provides a more structured exposition of the three hypostases. Even if I won't be able to explicate the undermeaning of every detail, the main features are clear.
Menelaus represents a soul that has made quite significant progress on the Path, but is still far from the end and will be detained for a while. He has firmly regained the vision of intelligible beauty, he has regained Helen, and has had a glimpse, however brief, of the One, he has had an encounter with Proteus, “the First”, and has learned a great deal from these and his practice so far. He has, however, not gone through all the necessary trials and practice for ultimately attaining the telos and destroying the defilements that Odysseus has. He still has many of his ships and his men, which, unlike Odysseus, he brought back with him, the various aspects and views and burdens of the lower self that need to be destroyed, however painfully, on the Path. He has not learned all the things that Odysseus has learned in the various episodes that occur later in the Odyssey. He has, however, progressed and learned enough and has a good enough lower self, also represented by Helen, that he was not destroyed by a bad lower self and the defilements and passions and wrong views upon prematurely returning like Agamemnon, he has avoided 'the fate of Agamemnon', referred to repeatedly in the text and related by Proteus, as mentioned below. At the end of their discussion, Proteus assures him, he knows from his vision of the Absolute, that he won't fall totally back into genesis, becoming, won't die and meet his fate in horse-grazing Argos, but will go to the Elysian plane of unchanging, pleasant and easy life and weather, will remain in contact with the noetical realm, the second hypostasis, since he has the vision of noetical beauty, Helen, daughter of the divine order of things, Zeus. He is, therefore, still around in the sensate lower level of soul and individuated phenomena in space-time to be able to give instruction to the understanding, Telemachus (sort of like the writers of essays?), unlike the fully completed soul that has fully attained the telos and no longer perceives this world at all but has become only the Absolute. Thus, in Menelaus and his situation, details, activities, etc. we have expounded, illustrated and disclosed the third hypostasis, the level of soul, both ours and the World Soul.
Menelaus' relation of the Proteus episode begins with him and his ships and men stuck on a desert island not too long after beginning his journey from the lower this-world of Egypt to his return to Lacedaemon, stuck at a single and difficult and unpleasant place in his practice, because he did not offer sufficient complete hecatombs, sacrifices, to the gods before departing, he did not sufficiently practice asceticism, piety, holiness and total devotion to the divine, he did not adequately dedicate all his physical, emotional, and mental existence, all the powers and faculties of the lower animal soul to the Divine and the attaining thereof. Thus, his lower faculties are perishing and are hungry, having been deprived of their true use and good. At this point, though, he is able to enter into contemplation of and contact with in contemplation of the Divine Mind-Thought, the noetic realm, the second hypostasis, which is expounded and represented here by the goddess Eidothea, “Contemplation of Form” and the seals and their counting. (So two of the three hypostases have been accounted for.) He meets Eidothea, significantly while wandering alone, in contemplation without the burden of his lower self, his men and ships, and enters into interaction with her, with the noetic realm, the Divine Mind-Thought. From this he learns that to find out what is going on, why he is stuck in his practice, he will have to at least briefly ascend to the One in contemplation and that the Divine Mind-Thought itself will facilitate this.
Proteus, “the First”, represents the One, the Absolute, Itself, the first Platonic hypostasis (so we now have all three hypostases revealed and presented in orderly fashion). Proteus, the One, is here presented in reverse fashion to emphasize His being the underlying source and ground of all phenomena, even the lowest. Thus, he is described, backwards, as of and under Egypt, the sea and Poseidon, all of which represent hyle, the body and bodily and sensate existence. Eidothea's instructions on how to 'catch' her Father Proteus, the approach to the Good revealed through contact with the Divine Mind-Thought, and the events as they actually unfold largely coincide and so will be explicated together without distinction here.
Proteus emerges from the sea at high noon. The One is seen during and as and is the greatest illumination. Along with Him emerge and He is seen among, at the head of and beyond the Ideas or Forms, the seals. He counts the seals by fives showing the rational order of the Ideas and the beginning approach to the noetic through number and mathematics (shades of the Politea!). Menelaus and his few compatriots (this practicing soul is not yet to the point where he can enter this contemplation without any of the faculties of the lower soul remaining with him) are disguised by the Divine Mind-Thought as seals, as Ideas; that is, it is through entrance into and identification with the noetic realm, Nous, that the ascent can be made to seeing the Good. For this soul as yet still burdened from behind, the entrance into and abiding in Nous would be more than he could bear, the smell of the seals would be terrible, were it not for the pleasure of the noetic beauty, the ambrosia that Eidothea places under their noses (compare Phaedo 109 e6 where the nature must be sufficient to bear the contemplating). When they grab Proteus, when they make the approach to the One, He turns into all manner of forms of animals and plants and physical elements, but they have to hang on and not let go until He returns to His actual form. The Absolute has to be discerned and kept in sight as beyond and throughout the experience of all the diversified phenomena (compare Politea 534 b8-d1 where the one who knows the Idea of the Good has to be able to abstract It from all things as in battle and know it truly in reality, not just in opinion).
The first thing, and that for which this has all been undertaken, that Menelaus learns from Proteus is that he is stuck on the island because he did not perform satisfactory sacrificial offerings to Zeus and the gods before leaving Egypt and that he has to return to Egypt and do it before the gods will allow him to proceed safely and successfully on his way. This is highly significant. The first thing that the practitioner, that the soul, learns in having a true vision or contemplation of the Absolute, however brief, is the absolute necessity of full-blown, pure renunciation and asceticism and piety and holiness and total, single-minded devotion to the Divine in order to proceed truly and successfully on the Path of contemplation and return home. Returning to the bodily, sensate realm, he must uncompromisingly sacrifice and dedicate all the powers, maintenance and faculties of the lower self, of the animal soul, of bodily life to the single divine and holy purpose of attaining re-union with the Absolute, of attaining liberation. The stream of all his energies must be wholly and holy-ly directed to the Divine without any diversion into the channels of worldly desires and the pursuit of sensual pleasures and the things of this world. His maintenance of the psycho-physical organism, however greatly this occupies so much of our time and energy and attention in this world, must be solely for the purpose of, be dedicated to, the Divine Path and aspiration. This, as discussed above, is the undermeaning of the symbol of offering satisfactory hectacombs, sacrifices or offerings. This is most important to understand, especially now in these dark times in the modern secular world where there are many who claim to have known the Absolute, God, Enlightenment, etc. and to teach others to attain this in 'meditation' but display understanding, teaching and behavior that indicate that they couldn't possibly have true accomplishment. Anyone who has truly had even a little contact with the One in contemplation and in reality knows the absolute necessity of renunciation, purity, holiness and asceticism for and as the Path. Contemplative asceticism is the very manifestation and reflection of the Absolute, of God, etc. in this world. Anyone who claims to have contemplative attainment, to have attained Union, Realization, Enlightenment, etc. and is not a pure contemplative ascetic, is not celibate, vegetarian, teetotaling, poor, abstaining from sensual and social pleasures, etc., and does not understand or teach this, or teaches people that they can attain this without being renunciants and without giving up this world can, ipso facto, be dismissed as a fraud. Again, Homer, along with Plato and Plotinus, continually teaches true contemplative asceticism of the purest and most abstract and austere sort as the only and only possible Path to liberation and realization of the Absolute, as integral with and the flip side, as it were, in this world of the Absolute Divine Reality Itself. To become God, the soul must become godlike.
This theme is further reinforced by the remaining subsidiary part of Proteus' revelation in which He relates the fate or status of three of the chiefs of the Achaeans who made it out of Troy. Aias perished in the sea of hyle, of bodily sensate existence, on the Path home, because he departed from and closed himself to divine wisdom, he was hated by Athena, and because he fell from holiness and a proper supernatural understanding of the Path and into a naturalist, humanist understanding of reality and the Path arrogating to himself the ability to accomplish a telos without the Divine, he boasted, in his blindness, that he had been saved from the sea against the will of rather than because of the gods. Thus, he was re-engulfed by hyle and material bodily existence, believing this and purely human action to be real, and fell back into the ocean of birth and death, falling completely from the Path (at least for the time being). Next, He relates the 'fate of Agamemnon', the destruction or loss or falling from the Path (for the time being, at least) of the soul that returns home, that attempts to ascend to the higher hypostases and thinks that it has, without at all adequate preparation, understanding, practice or condition. He returns with all his ships and men, without at all having freed himself from the burden of the lower soul by going through the painful trials, purifications and learnings of Odysseus, and with a bad lower self overcome by the passions and delusions and defilements, his wife overcome and surrendered to Aegisthus, not at all practicing holiness, morality, humility, asceticism and renunciation, that puts an end to the higher soul's attempts at liberation and plunges it back into the lower areas of rebirth. (One need only look around, both in the past and especially in the present, to see examples of these two lamentable fates.) Finally, He relates that Odysseus, the true ascetic practitioner and higher soul, is still alive, is still on the Path, has lost all his ships and men, has been purified of the burden of the lower soul and the things of this world, as is necessary, but is temporarily stuck on the island of and is detained by Calypso, “the Concealer”, sensate life and sensory existence, but is longing and ready to return, the telos is getting nearer, though there is still a long way to go. (The Path, viewed from the temporal side of things, is a very long, difficult and tricky journey—very few are they who make it all the way through to the end and liberation.)
Thus, it is clear that the Odyssey clearly and explicitly presents and presupposes the Platonic metaphysics of the three hypostases and their concomitant contemplative ascetic, renunciant practice, the exposition being interleaved with instructions on the Path. Homer (or, rather, the Muse) and Plato and Plotinus all teach the same Platonic Idealist metaphysic or structure and understanding of the nature of Reality and teach it as inseparable from the contemplative ascetic, renunciant spiritual Path and soteriology of re-union with the One or the Good and liberation thereby from the cycle of repeated birth and death or becoming of genesis. This is a most important lesson to learn. Idealist metaphysics and ontology of the Absolute and the lower manifestations contained in It and the contemplative ascetic and mystic spiritual practice and Path intrinsically go together and are inseparable. They are two sides of the same coin, the reflections of each other in the nontemporal, transcendent and temporal, immanent spheres. We may be grateful for the manifestation of the Absolute in our present experiential fields as the Homeric Muse for teaching us this.
© 2015 Eric S. Fallick platonicascetic (at) (Gee) mail (period) com
Monday, April 16, 2018
Q. and A. on Karma
Q. and A. on Karma
Greetings Eric. In past emails we touched upon the subject of karma several times. For instance, why we view phenomena the way we do, while others do not. I want to clear any erroneous notions I might have, regarding how karma works within the Platonic system. I once heard the late Advaita Vedanta teacher Ramesh Balsekar say, "there is no individual doer of any deed, everything is just a happening. The Will of God or Cosmic law." You also know, the Jains and Buddhist understand karma completely different from him, and each other. Is everything predetermined by karma? What is the difference between fate and karma? Is the human will completely in bondage to karma? I do not wish to sound Augustinian, I just desire clarity. What is the proper hierarchy between intellect and will? Which Ennead and Platonic dialogue should I read, which would point to the correct understanding, concerning freedom of the will or the lack thereof? Thank you in advance for your reply
These are questions of great importance and involved and hard to cover extensively in an email reply, but I will try to do so briefly. Ennead VI.8 is "On Free Will and the Will of the One" and deals with this. You might also want to read the beginning of Ennead V.1. It would take a very long time for me to go through all the Enneads and try to cite all the passages and parts related to this. There isn't a specific Platonic dialogue I can refer you to for this. In passing, let me mention that modern so-called Advaitins are generally most all actually full-blown theists of almost an Abrahamic type and I wouldn't necessarily go by what they say as actually representing the actual earlier Advaita school. Karma is not determinism, fate or pre-destination and we are not Augustinians or Calvinists. The human will is not completely in bondage to karma or else liberation would not be possible. Everything is determined by karma but not pre-determined. At every moment, we have the free will to move either towards liberation and re-union with the One or further into multiplicity and greater bondage. Some of the confusion may be due to a realist (in the modern, not the opposite medieval, sense) and physicalist/materialist perspective on things that conceives of objects and events existing apart from perceiving subjects, where in reality there is just experience and Mind as a unitary whole. Karma is only relevant at this lowest level of Soul and individuated sensate existence in space-time that is a weak projection or faint reflection or darkening of the higher hypostases of Nous and the Good. At this level, subject and object have apparently broken up, but still cannot exist apart from each other, by definition. The Soul of the All experiences this All as a whole and all time and space, which are only created by soul, simultaneously and all our individual souls are within its experiential field. Our individual experiential fields include all our individual relative worlds and experiences that we experience appearing as a temporal and spatial series of past, present and future and translation in space and all our sense-perceptions of objects and events and other souls, etc. At each moment, we experience given things and happenings as our experiential field and we act volitionally on this basis. Our volitional actions and choices and thoughts modify our experiential field and sometimes that of others we are interacting with. All the modifications of our experiential field and those of all other souls modify the experiential field of the Soul of the All. These modifications of the experiential field of the All in turn then modify our experiential field and those of all other souls. The Soul of the All experiences all this in a single moment of time, as it were, and a single place, as it were, but we experience all these modifications of our experiential fields as a temporal series.
Thus, all the modifications that we have done by volitional thought and action in what we perceive as the past modify, through the Soul of the All and its experience of both our modified experiential fields and those of all other souls, what we perceive and experience as our present and future experiential fields. This is what we call karma. There is no such thing as fate in the sense of experiences that don't occur as a result of our volitional choices, but there is providence in that all this works in accordance with righteousness and necessity and is a reflection or unfolding in space-time of the eternal relations of Nous. At each moment, we have the choice of our will being that of the higher soul--of that in contact with Nous and the Good and, ultimately, really of Nous and the Good themselves--which moves us in the direction of divinity and liberation or our will being that of the lower or animal soul bound in with the body and sense-perception and this world, which moves us further into bondage and sense-experience. Even though the conditions, circumstances, perceptions, desires, passions, emotions, defilements, involuntarily arising thoughts, etc., etc. that we experience and that constitute our experiential field at a given time are determined by karma, we always have the ability to whatever extent to then react to them or act and think, even if only a little bit, based on the higher soul and higher hypostases rather than the lower and thus create positive karma and, more specifically, karma leading to release. As I have indicated before, this striving for liberation and renunciation and acting according to the true higher self is really the One acting through us and working to re-realize and re-unify Itself through us, though It has actually never become de-unified and all this is actually only happening or apparently happening at our level which is less real and only a subtraction and darkening that doesn't affect the Light at the level of the Good, which is completely unchanged. Words and purely discursive understanding maybe begin to fail at this point in my explanation. When this happens, when one is truly renouncing and correctly striving for release, the modification of the experiential field of the Soul of the All includes that the Light is starting to reappear in and through a particular soul and its experiential field is being thus modified, and so that soul's experiential field keeps being modified in a way to allow it to keep going to liberation, but also brings forth the deluded modifications that it previously effected and have to be used up, but now in a manner that, while perhaps difficult and not pleasant, doesn't permanently or really hinder its continued progress towards the telos. Ordinary deluded worldlings, on the other hand, just experience modifications to their experiential field based on previous deluded volitions based on the lower self and just react to them again on the basis of the lower self and just then create more such modifications and just keep going in an endless cycle of shifting low level experiential fields of rebirth as humans and non-humans until and if somehow they begin to see through it and begin to act from the higher soul and the Absolute begins to remanifest through them. Why this movement towards release has started in a few souls but not in most at any given point, I don't know. As I have said, this is all kind of involved and not necessarily easily graspable at soul-level. The most important thing is to renounce the world and strive wholeheartedly for re-union with the Good, the source of all knowing and knowledge, at which point this won't be a problem.
I hope this explanation is at least somewhat intelligible and helps to answer your questions and give you greater clarity, at least to a reasonable degree. Perhaps, I should also mention that my answers are, frankly, based on my own contemplative experience and understanding, and I can't necessarily cite written authorities for my way of putting things.
Greetings Eric. In past emails we touched upon the subject of karma several times. For instance, why we view phenomena the way we do, while others do not. I want to clear any erroneous notions I might have, regarding how karma works within the Platonic system. I once heard the late Advaita Vedanta teacher Ramesh Balsekar say, "there is no individual doer of any deed, everything is just a happening. The Will of God or Cosmic law." You also know, the Jains and Buddhist understand karma completely different from him, and each other. Is everything predetermined by karma? What is the difference between fate and karma? Is the human will completely in bondage to karma? I do not wish to sound Augustinian, I just desire clarity. What is the proper hierarchy between intellect and will? Which Ennead and Platonic dialogue should I read, which would point to the correct understanding, concerning freedom of the will or the lack thereof? Thank you in advance for your reply
These are questions of great importance and involved and hard to cover extensively in an email reply, but I will try to do so briefly. Ennead VI.8 is "On Free Will and the Will of the One" and deals with this. You might also want to read the beginning of Ennead V.1. It would take a very long time for me to go through all the Enneads and try to cite all the passages and parts related to this. There isn't a specific Platonic dialogue I can refer you to for this. In passing, let me mention that modern so-called Advaitins are generally most all actually full-blown theists of almost an Abrahamic type and I wouldn't necessarily go by what they say as actually representing the actual earlier Advaita school. Karma is not determinism, fate or pre-destination and we are not Augustinians or Calvinists. The human will is not completely in bondage to karma or else liberation would not be possible. Everything is determined by karma but not pre-determined. At every moment, we have the free will to move either towards liberation and re-union with the One or further into multiplicity and greater bondage. Some of the confusion may be due to a realist (in the modern, not the opposite medieval, sense) and physicalist/materialist perspective on things that conceives of objects and events existing apart from perceiving subjects, where in reality there is just experience and Mind as a unitary whole. Karma is only relevant at this lowest level of Soul and individuated sensate existence in space-time that is a weak projection or faint reflection or darkening of the higher hypostases of Nous and the Good. At this level, subject and object have apparently broken up, but still cannot exist apart from each other, by definition. The Soul of the All experiences this All as a whole and all time and space, which are only created by soul, simultaneously and all our individual souls are within its experiential field. Our individual experiential fields include all our individual relative worlds and experiences that we experience appearing as a temporal and spatial series of past, present and future and translation in space and all our sense-perceptions of objects and events and other souls, etc. At each moment, we experience given things and happenings as our experiential field and we act volitionally on this basis. Our volitional actions and choices and thoughts modify our experiential field and sometimes that of others we are interacting with. All the modifications of our experiential field and those of all other souls modify the experiential field of the Soul of the All. These modifications of the experiential field of the All in turn then modify our experiential field and those of all other souls. The Soul of the All experiences all this in a single moment of time, as it were, and a single place, as it were, but we experience all these modifications of our experiential fields as a temporal series.
Thus, all the modifications that we have done by volitional thought and action in what we perceive as the past modify, through the Soul of the All and its experience of both our modified experiential fields and those of all other souls, what we perceive and experience as our present and future experiential fields. This is what we call karma. There is no such thing as fate in the sense of experiences that don't occur as a result of our volitional choices, but there is providence in that all this works in accordance with righteousness and necessity and is a reflection or unfolding in space-time of the eternal relations of Nous. At each moment, we have the choice of our will being that of the higher soul--of that in contact with Nous and the Good and, ultimately, really of Nous and the Good themselves--which moves us in the direction of divinity and liberation or our will being that of the lower or animal soul bound in with the body and sense-perception and this world, which moves us further into bondage and sense-experience. Even though the conditions, circumstances, perceptions, desires, passions, emotions, defilements, involuntarily arising thoughts, etc., etc. that we experience and that constitute our experiential field at a given time are determined by karma, we always have the ability to whatever extent to then react to them or act and think, even if only a little bit, based on the higher soul and higher hypostases rather than the lower and thus create positive karma and, more specifically, karma leading to release. As I have indicated before, this striving for liberation and renunciation and acting according to the true higher self is really the One acting through us and working to re-realize and re-unify Itself through us, though It has actually never become de-unified and all this is actually only happening or apparently happening at our level which is less real and only a subtraction and darkening that doesn't affect the Light at the level of the Good, which is completely unchanged. Words and purely discursive understanding maybe begin to fail at this point in my explanation. When this happens, when one is truly renouncing and correctly striving for release, the modification of the experiential field of the Soul of the All includes that the Light is starting to reappear in and through a particular soul and its experiential field is being thus modified, and so that soul's experiential field keeps being modified in a way to allow it to keep going to liberation, but also brings forth the deluded modifications that it previously effected and have to be used up, but now in a manner that, while perhaps difficult and not pleasant, doesn't permanently or really hinder its continued progress towards the telos. Ordinary deluded worldlings, on the other hand, just experience modifications to their experiential field based on previous deluded volitions based on the lower self and just react to them again on the basis of the lower self and just then create more such modifications and just keep going in an endless cycle of shifting low level experiential fields of rebirth as humans and non-humans until and if somehow they begin to see through it and begin to act from the higher soul and the Absolute begins to remanifest through them. Why this movement towards release has started in a few souls but not in most at any given point, I don't know. As I have said, this is all kind of involved and not necessarily easily graspable at soul-level. The most important thing is to renounce the world and strive wholeheartedly for re-union with the Good, the source of all knowing and knowledge, at which point this won't be a problem.
I hope this explanation is at least somewhat intelligible and helps to answer your questions and give you greater clarity, at least to a reasonable degree. Perhaps, I should also mention that my answers are, frankly, based on my own contemplative experience and understanding, and I can't necessarily cite written authorities for my way of putting things.
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