The Emerald Tablet & Pythagorean Duality
October 2008.
In
this article I explain the Emerald tablet, making clear as I do so the links
between the tablet concepts and the works of Plato & Jung etc.
The Emerald Tablet is said to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus, "Hermes the Thrice-Great", a legendary Egyptian sage or God. Modern historians have, however, proved that the Hermitic texts were in fact written by a collection of unknown 200AD+ writers who mixed ideas from Platonism, Stoicism, Judaism, Christianity, Persia, Egypt etc. The myth of antiquity, which persisted up until the 20th Century, gave the writings enormous, yet completely unwarranted, credibility. Why? Because inside them are metaphysical theories which Plato and others appeared to have independently rediscovered at a much later date. The writings also 'predict' the rise of Christianity despite supposedly predating it by thousands of years. This had a disastrous impact on Western metaphysics, because many seekers of truth consequently became fixated on these contradictory and cryptic texts which they considered to be the unadulterated ancient source of all wisdom. The important Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, was horrified by the blasphemies, and declared the work demonically inspired - satanic occultism instead of divine wisdom. One marvels at how easily the world was once taken in!
The Emerald Tablet is probably the most famous Hermitic Text. It supposedly contains the secrets of enlightenment, what Alchemists called the "Philosophers Stone", the method of turning of Lead, Man, Mortal into Gold, God, Immortal. Isaac Newton famously wrote a translation. Of course, Newton was not trying to turn lead into gold physically, in those days it was fashionable to be cryptic, which hardly helped the knowledge escape. Why? Because had Newton admitted that he was studying God rather than "alchemy" the Christian authorities might have persecuted him.
The Emerald tablet is essentially a Neo-Platonist work. What's is it value? There is nothing here that Plato didn't talk about, but the occult presentation is helpful because Plato is so subtle that the world completely misunderstands him. Look at the introduction to Plato's Complete Works (published by Hacket): John Copper says "The dialogues are not always read in the way I have suggested, not all scholars share my sceptical approach. Some try to identify positions and arguments, they make the Aristotlilian mistake of trying to extract an underlying schema." Protagoras would be thrilled by modern academics! I think, therefore, that occultism is a good stepping stone which opens the reader to Plato's bigger picture, treat this article as a crib sheet to take your understanding of Plato to the next level.
Remember the Symposium, the words of Socrates are like hallow statues that you have to look behind. It's all about idioms and allegory and multi levels, it's a spiritual journey, it's like the Confucian eight legged essay, it's extremely demanding. So in this short article I will try and do what mystics in the past never did, I will try to present the basics of philosophy in a way understandable even to average readers, I will even give one of Socrates' simple proofs of God. Perhaps this article will plant the seeds of philosophy in a few readers, but even if it simply rekindles the dying embers of faith in a few religious people, it will be enough for me. When I was young I used to enjoy tearing apart the naive faith of religious people, but now that I am old, I known that it is better to love muddy water than not to love at all.
1) This is true and remote from all cover of falsehood.
What follows is the complete truth. A seminal statement. Have you ever heard a mystic tell you that what he going to tell you is absolutely true? Socrates would never claim he could perfectly know let alone express truth. Anyone who opens with a statement like this is telling you something. For more than a thousand years people turned the Hermetic texts into the mystical equivalent of the bible. Mystics who tell you that what follows is totally true are testing you, do you get the joke or will you be the fool who takes it seriously? Plato uses a similar the line in the Timaeus just before the story of Atlantis, Greek philosophy is full of humour.
2) Whatever is below is similar to that which is above. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected.
This is the most famous Emerald Tablet line, and without doubt the most important principle in mysticism, the starting point of wisdom.
Carl Jung's famous paper "Synchronicity" contains a chapter called "Forerunners of the Theory of Synchronicity" which talks about Taoist Duality, Plato's Forms, and Hermetic above/below also macrocosm/microcosm. In order to grasp this metaphysical principle lets focus on Plato's Theory of Forms first. Although Plato's theory is ultra-famous, it is poorly understood (eg debate about why no Form for dirt). The problem is that people loose sight of the big picture, you need to understand Plato's overall view of the universe (eg Phaedo) to grasp his idea of Form. Therefore I will begin with Plato's cosmology, then present the Theory of Forms, then present Jung's Synchronicity, then show how it is not just reflected in events, also physical form.
Plato was a student of Socrates, and his Phaedo is a dialogue in which Socrates does most of the talking, so in the description that follows I will describe the model as recounted by Socrates. Platonic philosophy is Socratic philosophy, I just point this out because sometimes it confuses unfamiliar readers to hear the two names being used essentially interchangeably.
Socrates begins by describing the archetypal model of reincarnation, Chinese mystics never articulated it quite as well as the Greeks. The physical world, or mortal world, is a sort of school or prison into which we are born, and to which we return after death. At death we leave the body and go up above the earth, and can look down on the beautiful spherical ball of three colours (Pythogras figured out the the world is round). We meet our guide, who is a spirit who has been assigned to look after us. He takes us to be judged, then we spend time in the heavenly worlds, before eventually returning to earth.
Socrates said we can escape this reincarnation cycle by developing a very high degree of wisdom in the study of philosophy. Such a wise person has achieved all that human life has to offer, stops reincarnating, and goes to a better place. Socrates went happily to his death because he thought he had learned all he could, indeed he was so wise he expected to escape the reincarnation cycle. The Phaedo is actually set in the last minutes of his life, and the sense of simultaneous excitement for heaven and peaceful contented detachment from earthly life is extraordinarily spiritual. Religious people who lead exceptionally pious earthly lives are also rewarded by never having to return to earth, instead their self perfecting reincarnation cycle continues on a less punishing level of the heavenly wheel.
So philosophy is a technique for cultivating and practicing wisdom. Wisdom is enlightenment, wisdom allows one to see the truth hidden behind the smoke of the mortal world, wisdom strips away the chains of attachment which keep soul trapped in mortal prison, wisdom strips away the selfish individualism of the human ego making utopia possible. The intelligence inside the individual is buried under layers of human personality, we become great by burning away the human personality, or rising above the human personality.
One of the ways Socrates teaches his acolytes wisdom is by exposing the absurdity of their personal beliefs in intellectual debate. For example, he might ask a person what he thinks courage is, and then through a series of question-answers he demonstrates how the person's concept of courage breaks down. So he sharpens up a person's fuzzy belief system, then tears it to shreds. Socrates is anti-traditionalist, anti-faith, anti-dogma, anti-morality, anti-indulgence.
However, Socrates is not always destructive. He also teaches a new way of thinking about the world, and this system of thought has turned him into a superman, a Philosopher King, unrivalled in Athens for wisdom, courage, selflessness and lack of human weaknesses. Socrates is uninterested in money or conventional pleasures, he spends his entire life blissfully happy either thinking about philosophy or talking about philosophy.
Socrates said that when he was a young man in search of wisdom, he began by studying natural philosophy, by which he means biology, physics etc. However, he found it a hopeless path to truth. Instead of learning anything interesting he just got caught up in never ending layers of complexity, and felt all the time he was moving away from the 'why' to the 'how'. For example, ask a physicist and a psychologist why a person is sitting in chair. The physicist will start with muscles and mechanics and go on forever without actually telling you anything. The psychologist will give a much more useful answer, eg the man is tired. In the same way Socrates believed in looking past the detail and grasping the big picture. He does not deny a mechanical world, but he claims the mechanics are effect not cause.
We can understand this viewpoint by imagining the idea that life is a play. The stage is the mortal world of mechanics, but the driving force is what the actors and the director think. The actors have mechanical bodies, but these bodies are just puppets controlled by the mind. The director controls the set and the coincidences which interact with the actors, so we can also think of 'fate' as a puppet controlled by the director. All the interesting stuff is in the minds of the of the actors and director, the action on stage reflects that, but it does not reflect it perfectly.
A wise person is one who understands the ideas behind the action, what is in the heads of the actors and director, he can tell you why this and that happened, and can even figure out what is probably going to happen in the future. A stupid person hasn't got a clue why things are arranged the way they are, or what will happen next. Perhaps he thinks it is all random, or he gets completely the wrong idea. Engineering skills don't help, you need wisdom not mechanics to figure it out.
So imagine an adult and a child watching a play or film and we have a pretty good model of wisdom. The most obvious point is that for a child most of what is going on goes right over their head. They miss the dirty jokes, they miss the psychodrama, the touching moments. They have no idea where the film is headed, or what things are taking place, so simple are their though process that they live absolutely in the present moment with no sense of the future. They love garish colours and loud noises and fast action, or they love ultra slushy scenes in which all the animals cry and a motherly voice says how sad. Their experience of the film is extremely simple. The wise person has a vastly richer experience, he feels and knows things the child cannot imagine. How do children spot an adult? He likes different things, he talks about a lot of funny ideas, he is the 'prophet' who can explain what is going to happen in the next scene.
Now Socrates said the idea of life as a play is to be taken seriously, it is not a joke. Even if you are the stubborn type who denies the gods, you will find there is no other truth in the world but to think along these lines as much as you can. In that case you can call this idea Reflection vs Form. But if you want to be a philosopher take this model ultra seriously. In that case call this model the mortal vs immortal world, which is what new age types today like to call the physical and spiritual world.
So from a pure engineering viewpoint Socrates believes that between the "mortal world" and "immortal world" there is some kind of interface, but if scientists try to follow the mechanics they will go on forever and ever looking for this interface, for the puppet strings. Note that these strings are buried not just in the brain, but in all sorts of other places as well. For example, if we followed the motion of the planets back far enough, through all the laws of physics and the state of the universe, we would find the motion came out of the immortal world too.
Orthodox scientists today are just beginning to think about this possibility. Roger Penrose says we are stumbling on some kind of holistic mind-body-universe model in quantum mechanics, and Stephen Hawkins consequently calls Penrose a Platonist. Penrose and Hawkins are the two leading lights, and judging by the moneys throwing nuts Penrose is beginning to pull head, and books about God and Quantum physics are getting bigger and bigger news. In the early 20th Century the mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce, a fan of Ancient Greek philosophy, and in my opinion the only really worthy Western philosopher since Plato, actually predicted quantum mechanics based on the existence of this mortal-immortal interface. In other words he predicted Heisenberg's uncertainty principle several years before Heisenberg, but based on big picture philosophical thinking about the world rather than measurements. Working out scientific theories philosophically was what the Ancient Greeks were famous for- they figured out a theory of evolution based on survival of the fittest, they realised matter is composed of tiny atoms with have large spaces between them like stars in the sky, they postulated a finite speed of light etc.
Remember that modern Western Philosophy begun when "Cartesians" such as Descartes and Hobbes rejected this mortal-immortal puppet string duality, they claimed the world is mechanical and explicable. Now the statistical uncertainties of quantum mechanics have ripped away all that scientific certainly, so the immortal-mortal puppet strings are possible again. Remember Einstein said the existence of God is obvious, but he resisted quantum mechanics because he he didn't like the idea of God playing dice, he said quantum physics was blasphemous. Furthermore Einstein said he belied in Spinoza's God, one that does not interfere with the fate of humanity. So you see, Einstein got it completely backwards in both cases, quantum mechanics is the proof of God (or Mind-Body-Universe), and the route by which it interferes! Einstein made the age old mistake of having faith in his preconceptions about the moral nature of God rather than letting go of dogma.
Now your average physics professor say all this is nonsense and he faithfully denies an immortal layer with puppet strings running down to the mortal layer. However, no scientist can argue his case, he just assumes it because he has been brought up that way. Why is it impossible to be a dogmatic skeptic? Because we are light years away from penetrating the mysteries of nature, so we can not discount the presence of puppet strings. Primitive man had no explanation of how the stars move at all, now our engineers have gravity, but the distance between out current position and the deepest mystery is still an infinity away. So the belief in a 100% mechanical world is just an assumption with no supporting evidence at all. As Charles Sanders Peirce pointed out, if you look at the non-homogeneity of the world it is also instantly obvious that it is an absolutely absurd assumption. One day the 21st Century is going to have it's own Copernican revolution and there is going to be a lot of egg on a lot of faces!
Even without all the science, Socrates says the existence of a two layer immortal-mortal world is intuitively obvious, but you often meet the sort of person who refuses to believe it, people can convince themselves of the most absurd things in things in the world if they have no skill in philosophy and an axe to grind. He says this type of person should either take the advice of his betters, or assume the model for the purposes of argument, and then see where reason takes him. Like a jigsaw, the pieces come together. For people like myself, who have been studying philosophy for a few years, the existence of God is blindingly obvious, and one can argue it numerous different ways. This article gives just one route.
So Socrates says that anyone who is not thinking of the world within the two layer framework is not actually doing philosophy at all. Any thinking outside this framework is mundane, is natural science; or, if it tries to answer the sort of things that philosophers answer, it is mumbo jumbo. For example, everything about politics comes down to deep question in human nature which can only be answered using philosophy. Anyone not using philosophy is working with unjustified emotive assumptions. So modern academics have no wisdom at all, they are like witch doctors who bury unjustified assumption in footnotes and verbal diarrhoea. If you dig down into their work all you will find is a lot of moral intuitions, all of which by dint of the paradoxical nature of true philosophy are actually wrong. Modern thinking is a house of cards built on a bed of sand. This is the great irony of the modern academic, he is what he accuses everyone else of, a complete muddle head. He thinks he has escaped religion, but in reality he is no better than the medieval ideologies of the Christian Church, indeed his lack of spiritual discipline makes him far worse.
So the big question is: How can we practice philosophical thinking as opposed to mechanical thinking? Socrates explains that philosophical thinking comes out of our intellectual process, especially thinking about how we think. Its about generalization and categorization of generalizations into opposites according to a rigorous framework- so look for the opposites behind the infinity of examples. Getting good at philosophy means getting familiar with the way to divide principles into dualities, trinities etc. Lets give a quick example here. Look at socialism and capitalism. The average person gets lost in the distinction, he tries to measure it, to give examples. But the philosopher zooms out and sees that socialism is individual contentment, and capitalism individual freedom. He sees that the relation between these two political system is a reflection of the female / male duality. He generalizes, he pulls out the objective substance behind the smoke. He looks behind the empirical fact and statistics, and grasps the fundamental essence of the relationship. One reason the world has gone so badly off-track is they didn't realise that what Socrates calls "philosophy" is closer to "psychology" than "science". Virtue is a psychological issue, so all the subdivisions of virtue, and everything else interesting in this life, but not really the "dirt" that is making my mouse stick. The closest we get to Plato today is psychology, especially Jung's archetypes.
This is the poorly understood "Pythagorean duality", mostly lost to the intellectual world since Plato, and completely discarded by philosophers since Descartes. We have been talking about physics, but lets get more philosophical. What physical evidence would support this duality? If you were living in a play instead of a random world how would you know? I give this question to a lot of people, if they struggle I start giving them hints, remember than film the matrix?
In a play the action on stage is not purely random, the director uses the twists and turns of fate to challenge and reflect his psychological ideas, in a play we get meaningful coincidences. Is this true of the world we live in? Perhaps my writing is too quick, think about it - meaningful coincidences are proof of a mind body universe connection! Keeping this idea in mind, I will now introduce the theory of synchronicity.
Explaining synchronicity Carl Jung tells the story: "A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since."
Was this coincidence? Jung thought not (anyway, this was only one of many examples).
Was this an example of conventional telepathy, clairvoyance or psychokinesis? Jung though not, although he said it could be the principle from which these phenomena derive.
What was it then? Jung said the best way to describe it is as an example of a simultaneous occurrence that is meaningfully related in a psychological sense but has no causal relationship in nature. Hence, Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Of course Socrates would call it the puppet string process running between the mortal-immortal world.
Here are some examples: (1) A film director emphasises the coming assassination of the King by having his palace catch fire the night before. According to the principle this type of 'meaningful coincidence' happens in real life as well as films. (2) A young man dreams and prays for something to happen which subsequently does. As within so without: if something is imagined with enough force it crystallises in the physical. Here we have the power of prayer. There is said to be a link between the spiritual development of the individual and the speed with which his inner manifests on the outer physical. The more spiritually developed an individual the more synchronistic events occur around him. (3) A young man is vain and arrogant as a result of his inherited wealth. His higher unconscious mind is in opposition to his egotistical flaws and manifests his financial ruin in order that he may develop. Karma is the drawing toward an individual those external circumstances most appropriate to his self development. As we evolve spiritually our Karma works out that much more quickly. (The use of the individual's higher unconscious in this explanation of Karma does not exclude other possible mechanisms).
Although in the past this principle was universally accepted, eg Shakespeare's plays are full of it, today our scientists reject it as mumbo jumbo and our politicians reject it as immoral. In fact there is limited circumstantial scientific evidence for some sort micro-synchronistic process coming from results in quantum mechanics. It is possible, and has been demonstrated in laboratory tests, to split particles in two, send the halves in opposite directions, and then measure one of them for spin. The instant it is measured, and the spin determined, the other particle adopts the opposite spin. The time interval is zero, the event takes place instantaneously, even though the particles are separated, and theoretically would still do so even if they were separated by a distance measured in light years. This "EPR Paradox" mystifies physicists and is an apparent example of micro-synchronicity. Another possible example is the wave-particle like nature of electromagnetic energy. The photon particle is detected at random but in accordance with the wave distribution, thus we have probability crystallising into events.
Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung were friends who collaborated on the theory on synchronicity. Pauli was a brilliant Nobel Prize winning scientist at the forefront of quantum mechanics who developed spin theory. Pauli thought synchronicity is a fundamental principle which needs to be properly integrated into Physics at the mechanical level, whereas Jung was interested in the psychological and spiritual ramifications. Jung considered Pauli a highly evolved individual whose dreams contained vast quantities of deep archetypal material. The Pauli effect was named after his bizarre ability to break experimental equipment simply by being in the vicinity. Pauli himself was aware of his reputation, he believed this poltergeist like activity was the synchronistic effect of inner conflict. In 1958 he was admitted to hospital with cancer. When his assistant visited him Pauli asked “Did you see the room number?” It was number 137. Throughout his life, Pauli had been preoccupied with the question of why the fine structure constant, a dimensionless fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137. Pauli later died in that room.
Once one really understands the connection principle the veil is lifted and one begins to live in another world.
Notice that we are showing how the physical world is effect not cause, synchronicity is the puppet strings. Jung didn't understand the depth of it, synchronicity is not a phenomena, it is the very foundation stone of life.
Some more complex examples: (a) A woman is tense and fussy and has difficulty behaving in a loving way - her top lip is thin - 'Face Reading' is an example of synchronicity. Angelina Jolie's large lips are popular because they reflect a desirable psychological trait in a mate. Although the conscious mind of the average person cannot see a link, deep down feelings are generated. (b) What is beauty? The striking reflection of a harmonious state of consciousness. Of course, it is easier to create striking reflections of disharmonious states, a trick employed by many Modern Artists. Beauty defined at last and so simply- I hope you are impressed! Yet there is another problem - what of raw nature? Not the one, the many. Dorris Day vs Japanese Calligraphy.
Now we have gone infinitely further than Jung- we now realize that not only events reflect psychological puppet strings, even physical shape reflects Form, the world is cast from psychological energy. Of course it had to be that way, and it is institutively the most obvious thing in the world. We understand why Pythagoras called all the world numbers, we understand why he obsessed over the pyramid, circle, oblong etc- because these numbers/shapes reflect Form too! If we are smart, we can map out all the world religions first into two, then four, then adding the three levels of becoming to give twelve, giving each one its number, its shape, its sound, its example in history. We can see the will of God and human evolution reflected in physical events, we can predict the future. So an Enlightened individual is one who can discern the plot and untangle the connections by reading the Form substance in the immortal world which underlies both the events and shape of the world!
Let's practice: take face reading - how can one become conscious of the inner outer associations, the remarkable play underlying life? By reason and feeling, by sight and sound. For example, place your finger above your top lip and consider the "psychological mood" associated with this posture. It's pensive of course, everyone can feel that. Now place your finger on your chin below your bottom lip and feel the mood. Feel how it changes. It's still pensive right, but now the energy flow is incoming. In one case we are inhibiting the outward flow of energy, we are contemplating what to do. In the other case we are inhibiting the inward flow of sensory data, in order to concentrate and process the data already received, we are contemplating what it means. Try this for real - I can teach almost everyone to feel as much as this! It's easy! If you can't feel a thing ask you kids to try! Just this little example helps open the mind to the psychological essence running through life. So we can see why a long pointed beard hanging from the chin is associated with wisdom, whilst moustaches are associated with discipline. Some homework: What do large ear lobes mean? You need detachment and inner calm to release yourself from your ego and feel these subtle energies. To reason you need detachment again and concentration to follow the abstract arguments so remote from ordinary thinking.
How is Plato's Forms and the Neo Platonic "As Above, So Below" different? Well Plato deliberately setup a very black and white mortal and immortal world model. We will see later in this essay the brilliance of that observation. Yet the energy reflects throughout nature. So we can talk about a fluid sea of Form, a three dimensional not a back and white formulation. Imagine the physical body of a living cat as a reflection of the cat's state of consciousness, and this individual state of consciousness is in turn a reflection of the archetypical cat consciousness. If we were to change the cat's consciousness, its physical form and fate would tend to readjust synchronistically. So now you know why the lips of old women loose their fullness, unlike the dermatologist who can only tell you how. How strong is this process? Let's not get carried away, you car radiator does not boil over every time you are angry, and your hair does not instantly fall out when you get a shock. The superstitious believe that if you alter the cat's physical form it would alter the cat's consciousness, that synchronicity works in reverse as well - this is of course the idea of the voodoo doll. A Tarot card reader knows that the images reflect states of consciousness, he relies on synchronicity to arrange these powerful energy patters correctly when shuffles the cards randomly.
For the unenlightened the world is in chaos. The miraculous order is what makes the perfecting process possible because the lessons and manifestations are appropriate not random.
The "As Above, So Below" concept is the most important principle in mysticism.
3) Also, as all things are made from one, by the consideration of one, so all things were made from this one, by conjunction.
The One is really a Neo-Platonist idea. Plato does not describe the nature of God, although Aristotle did call God the prime mover etc. The Neo-Platonist did not understand that the One and the Many in Plato's Parmenides described ways of thinking, their background made them obsessed with the nature of God.
This line is famous for the paradox that: God is in all things, but God is not in all things. That which is manifested is no longer God, it is the daughter of God, sometimes very good, sometimes very evil. Was Einstein evil because he invented the technology used to create nuclear weapons? Of course not but that doesn't let God off the hook say some because he invented the politicians! But God is the totality and capable of all things, manifestations (things below) are limited reflections. All manifestation is 'evil' in a sense. Thus we have the positive Immortal world and the negative physical world of limited reflection and illusion.
4) The father of it is the sun, the mother the moon.
The sun is the symbol of the immortal world, the moon the mortal world. Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, the mortal world reflects the Forms of the immortal world. More precisely: the sun radiates light which is separated and reflected in a multitude of colours and shades below.
Duality: Why father and mother? The biggest mistake modern philosophers make is not making the link between Plato's duality and the yin/yang. See, for example, Plato's Sophist the cut of productive expertise into two - divine and human. Plato's constant division are not random, they reflect the divine and human duality, which is the and yang/yin duality. Even the Forms themselves are divided between God and the Gods, wisdom is an immortal concept, whereas the Gods have active/passive faces.
As above so below- the male/female is not simply limited to human nature, it reflects the very structure of heaven and earth!
Male attributes include: detachment, intelligence, theory, power, competitive, active, positive. Female attributes include: materialism, emotion, practicality, love, nurturing, passive, negative. Now we understand why women are multitasking and man are single minded. We can see why the Christians call God "The Father" and why Paul said "wives [must] to submit to their husbands as to the Lord". Some homework: Why does the woman suffer from hysteria and the man from lack of purpose? I read a beautiful metaphor describing the male female relationship in a book called "On the Breath of the Gods" by Ariel Tomioka, she described a butterfly (male) landing on a flower (female).
So the moral code of rationalist philosophers depends on their perspective. The Mortal Moral Perspective is the nurturing love of the mother. Justice is equality, utopia, cohesive. We have today's popular Christian morality. The Immortal Moral Perspective is the competitive father who forces his children to take risks. Divisive and painful evolution is no longer immoral, instead stasis is the primary evil. Recall the genetic breeding viewpoint expressed in the Republic which is so offensive to modern Christian morality. For modern humanists (who have abandoned religion because God appears inconsistent with their passive feminine Christian morality) Plato & Nietzsche are evil or 'emotionally damaged'. But the passive viewpoint does not withstand reason. Does God care when humans die in a Tsunami any more than we humans care when we stand on a Cockroach?
In the 1970s it became fashionable to believe that men and women are the same and separated only by their upbringing (the nature vs nurture argument). Although clearly utter nonsense the theory was popular with the so called great minds of western science until the discovery of the psychological impact of testosterone in the 1980s forced them to change their minds. This remarkable example shows how utterly stupid humanity is - another example is of course the theory of Evolution. The world is full of robots who believe in nonsense and can not reprogram themselves.
Trinity: In Plato's Symposium Socrates asks Diotima above love: "What then is Love?" I asked; "Is he mortal?" "No." "What then?" "As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two."... "He is a great spirit and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal... Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love...."
This is famous Immortal-Mortal-Love Trinity. Love, which mediates between the Immortal and Mortal, is an intermediate by which the Mortal and the Immortal communicate, or do business. In Christianity "Divine Love" is given a prominent place and normally associated with the "Holy Spirit" which intermediates between the Mortal and Immortal. So when a man fills himself with love he can communicate with truth, and act in truthful ways.
Nevertheless "Now these spirits or intermediate powers are many and diverse, and one of them is Love...." Two things come to mind: First, God is not love, love is the intermediate. Second: Love is not the only definition of the holy spirit, man also beholds truth by 'reason', wisdom is selfless resourcefulness, a sort of mix of love and reason if you like. Yet wisdom or intellect is not enough, as Plato's Timaeus explains, necessity and wisdom are two key intermediates between the mortal and immortal.
There are other sorts of trinity, for example water, earth, fire for a trinity. I am not going to write about this stuff in this article.
Quaternary: The immortal-mortal duality subdivides to give the four elements Water, Earth, Fire, Air. What are the two subdivisions: It's the mortal / immortal at both the vertical and horizontal level. It's just too complicated to try and explain here, unravelling the meaning of the Quaternary takes a huge amount of work. In Plato, the four opening arguments in the Symposium reflect the four mindsets, Aritophanes has the hiccups because the reversal in the ordering of the fire-air compared to water-earth is confusing. People normally start out thinking about the quaternary as emotional vs intellectual at one level, and passive vs active at another. From there the journey unfolds over a lot of reading and thinking.
An example: Jung speaks of the male anima, which is the feminine inner personality present in the unconscious of the male, and the female animus, which is the masculine in the female. The anima is emotional-passive water, and the animus is rational-active fire. Men can have an uncomfortable shock realising how down to earth women are, and women a shock realising what detached airy intellectuals men are. Why are masculine women stubborn? Their active principle lacks detachment. Why are feminine men moody? Their passive principle lacks practicality. The gap between the male vision of the female, and the real earthy female creates the unbalanced and increasingly perverted personality of the homosexual.
5) The wind bore it in the womb. Its nurse is the earth, the mother of all perfection.
We have this idea of the imperfect mortal world which is the living expression of the immortal world of truth. We have also talked about intermediates such as love and reason which run between these two worlds. This brings us to idea of evolving perfection key to this line of the text. By the intermediate the mortal world evolves toward the immortal world. Man, for example, becomes Enlightened, becomes divine. In this idea we have the key teological positivism of the Platonic Model of God.
Some mechanisms which lift the human upwards from mortal illusion to immortal truth include love, reason, causality and synchronicity. So the Neo-Platonists rejected the ever materialistic nature of mortal man implicit in Christianity, and see in him a divine potential (not just a channel for divine power). The passive 'divine redemption' concept of Christanity, eg saviour from our sins at death, is replaced with the active concept of 'self redemption', personal spiritual evolution to perfection over lifetimes on earth. Heaven is replaced by Reincarnation. The passive oneness with God sought by prayer and meditation is rejected in favour of the razor sharp wisdom of contemplation.
The manifest mortal world (world of attachment, materialism and pain) is a mechanism of this evolutionary perfecting process. This Darwinian "Dog Eat Dog" World is the "School of Hard Knocks" with the motto "No Pain, No Gain". The blood stained earth is the mother of all perfection. More on this: Solving The Problem Of Evil. One day man will walk the earth as a god, brilliant, loving, all powerful. Technology was the missing key which limited the explanations of the ancients. Perhaps one day man will shed his physical body and take on a new engineered form, perhaps one day he will loose interest in physical existence and merge his essence into the collective, star trek style. The "Forbidden Planet" was wrong - interface without instrumentation is not the final step! The final step is omniscience and omnipotence, mastery of our world, becoming God.
Reflect carefully on this vital Un-Christian thought: We are born the worm, and by experience and reincarnation, evolve into the eagle, capable of feeding on worms. Inequality is a characteristic of this alternative Platonic vision of cosmology. Also, God is not the nurturing shepherd of Christianity, rather an infinitely detached principle concerned only with evolution. Christians philosophers are careful to point out that the concept of divine love is not the same as emotional love, but the truth is far more radical, it's the wisdom of the Philosopher King. Jung described primitive man as a prisoner of the collective unconscious who is now developing freedom. Nietzsche shocked us with his provocative descriptions of the herd and the Übermensch. Ah how exciting that powerful story of the Superman, how could any man believe that cringing nonsense about a heavenly utopia? Only a woman could believe that happy story of an infinitely caring saviour, which brings tears to the eyes of sheep, and naïvely rejects the heartless truth of the Superman and the infinite detachment of God!
Although the process which turns the worm into the eagle is evolutionary, Darwin's theory of Evolution is non-divine, its relevance to mortal->immortal progression is only an appealing allegory. In fact Darwin's Theory of Evolution fails anyway, the entire theory is nothing more than allegory.
6) Its power is perfected, (7a) If it is turned into earth
The mind must manifest to perfect its power.
7b) Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle and thin from the crude and coarse, prudently, with modesty and wisdom.
This line is referring to how the mind works, but it's a huge topic and these words are not going to help much! Earth thinking is inspired single pointed religious thinking, fire thinking is cutting up analytical thinking. Wisdom requires both, that's why Socrates and Diotima do philosophy together. She gives birth and he checks the baby for defects by dissecting it!
8) This ascends from the earth into the sky and again descends from the sky to the earth, and receives the power and efficacy of things above and of things below.
The two way flow of force between the physical and mind layer.
9) By this means you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and so you will drive away all shadows and blindness.
Shadows: wrong understanding (illusion). Blindness: no understanding.
10) For this by its fortitude snatches the palm from all other fortitude and power. For it is able to penetrate and subdue everything subtle and everything crude and hard.
Wisdom is the ultimate goal and brings the ultimate fulfilment. As you understand more and more the circumstances of your life arrange to bring you toward the glory of the whole world. This snatches the palm from all other fortitude and power.
Perhaps also it is worth mentioning that one can consciously use the connection principle by speaking or creating symbols which evoke thoughts which in turn manifest.
11) By this means the world was founded
12) And hence the marvellous conjunctions of it and admirable effects, since this is the way by which these marvels may be brought about.
13) And because of this they have called me Hermes Tristmegistus since I have the three parts of the wisdom and Philosophy of the whole universe.
The three parts wisdom & conjunctions refers to the "trinity" concept described earlier (in 4).
14) My speech is finished which I have spoken concerning the solar work.
Update: Further reading in philosophy for those ready to abandon everything they know
Now get back to Plato. Dedicate yourself it to. Spend months on each dialogue, spend years reading him, pulling out the paradoxes, understanding how every argument is constructed. Forget everything else, all modern philosophy is worthless. How do you know when you have it? First it transforms your life, then it takes over every fibre of your mind, then the scale of it and danger of it shocks you so profoundly that you think about deleting everything you ever wrote, and you know that philosophy can never be taught to the world at large.
So what should you really do, my friend? Forget Plato, perhaps the best book I can recommend is "Journey of Souls" by Dr Michael Newton. Don't both with his later works, just read that one book very slowly and meaningfully and think about it, then try to make your life more divine. Too many religious books can give both readers and authors indigestion, better to read the biographies of heroes. The secret of life for the non-philosopher is very simple: Faith in God, and love of different personality types. What killed the Christians? They got dogmatic, they didn't look for new inspiration as circumstances changed. As long as you fill your heart with love and turn away from your self, you will be able to identify new visions of goodness as circumstances change. Once upon a time John Wayne was the vision Americans needed, today it's more like Fredrick The Great. As long as religion is never tied down it need not fail mankind. Ancient Greek philosophers and Chinese Sages are in another league, but you don't need to play in the premier league to be a good person. Just keep your heart open, be pious, and look for guidance. Where must you be strong? Fight against people who would try to hypnotise you for their own ends, journalists, politicians etc. Never believe a person who is not always trying to push you higher, anyone who lavishes praise on you is satanic. Every true leader is a critic of the deepest you, never never a panderer. "Let he who is of pure of heart throw the first stone", Jesus said to the mob, not because throwing stones is always the wrong thing to do, but because his words cut like a shard of glass every person in that mob, those words made it clear that none were without sin, they made everyone in that crowd blush with shame. Yes prostitutes can be better people that princesses, it all depends on how much love is pouring out of them compared to how much indulgence in self is turned inside. Forgetting the sinfulness of oneself and arrogantly becoming dogmatic is the road to failure and then faithlessness, because it closes the heart to innovation in inspiration. Back in some countries in WW2 even the best of women had to prostitute themselves and kill their unwanted babies, but some did it for God and others for themselves. Now I am rambling so much I am going round in circles, but good luck my friends and thanks for reading my work. It takes a long time to write, if I made a difference it wasn't all in vain.