Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
Speaker 2: What's going to happen?
Speaker 3: What I do.
Speaker 4: Help welcome back to the occult rejects. Today is going
Speaker 4: to be a special one. We're stepping into one of
Speaker 4: the deepest wells in Western thought, the world of Plato.
Speaker 4: And I don't mean the silly putty, and not just
Speaker 4: Plato the philosopher. You hear about it in school, but
Speaker 4: we hear about Plato the myth maker, the architect of metaphysics,
Speaker 4: the man who's writing shape everything from Christianity to mysticism,
Speaker 4: esoteric philosophy, and the occult tradition that came much much later.
Speaker 4: To help them, help us unpack a little bit here.
Speaker 4: We've got two great, amazing and brilliant guests with us today, P. D.
Speaker 4: Newman and the Ike Baker. And this time it's going
Speaker 4: to be heavy. We're talking about Plato's writings, the hidden
Speaker 4: layers inside of them, the big ideas like the forms
Speaker 4: the soul of the nature of reality, and why texts
Speaker 4: like The Republic and the Tamaea still matter today as
Speaker 4: we're trying to understand the spiritual and the symbolic foundations
Speaker 4: of Western world as we know it. Plato isn't just
Speaker 4: ancient history. He's still in the room with us today.
Speaker 4: His fingerprints are all over everything religion, philosophy, initiation systems,
Speaker 4: and the way people think about truth itself. So today
Speaker 4: we're going back into the cave and hopefully coming back
Speaker 4: out with a little more light. Pd Ike, welcome back
Speaker 4: to the old cult rejects, and I myself do not
Speaker 4: forget am Brandon Lee of Megas in the media. After this,
Speaker 4: head over sbscribe like and share the same thing you
Speaker 4: do with everybody else on this panel. We're going deep
Speaker 4: and I'm sending it over to the head cardinal himself,
Speaker 4: the nick the occult reject himself. Head it over.
Speaker 2: What is funny? I love it?
Speaker 5: Thanks Jules, Yo, that was a bang banger of an intro.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much Brad that I really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: I appreciate I coming here. I appreciate p D. Newman
Speaker 5: coming on. Ike, I really appreciate you even setting this up.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is amazing for me, So.
Speaker 2: Thank you all.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can check out the Ocult Rejects Bitch You
Speaker 5: Rumble YouTube, all major podcasts if you feel inclined to
Speaker 5: send money. We do sell t shirts too for twenty
Speaker 5: five dollars a piece. You will get it delivered to
Speaker 5: your house. So if you're interested, hit me up on
Speaker 5: social media and yeah.
Speaker 2: That is all. Uh, let me introduce Judith. What is
Speaker 2: going on? How are you hi?
Speaker 1: This is the Loon.
Speaker 6: You can catch me on YouTube on as the Loon
Speaker 6: and on and I just do some self care and
Speaker 6: some internal discussions.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me, no.
Speaker 5: Of course, thank you for joining always appreciate it. And
Speaker 5: my man Jewels just saw you a few hours ago.
Speaker 2: What is going on? Brother? Thank you for joining us again?
Speaker 2: What's up? Man?
Speaker 6: Thank you for having me, guys Jewels, host of the
Speaker 6: Great Pill Podcast, Handsome Higher Front Mississippi Mystic.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, glad to be here.
Speaker 6: It's been a while since I've been on in a
Speaker 6: Cult Rejects episode, so I'll probably keep my mouth shut
Speaker 6: for most of this one. I don't know much about Plato,
Speaker 6: but I am willing to learn, so Ike and PD,
Speaker 6: it's it's good to meet you, guys.
Speaker 2: PD.
Speaker 6: I heard me and you have something common, you know,
Speaker 6: being from the same area. Maybe, so that's pretty cool,
Speaker 6: I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Mississippi, yeah man, yeah, yeah, yeah, Mississippi Mystic. You know
Speaker 6: it's a web parton that I've coined. But yeah, up
Speaker 6: in North Mississippi, well central to north little north of Jackson,
Speaker 6: So okay, yeah man, but yeah no, Nick, thanks for
Speaker 6: having me and uh, yeah, guys follow me on x
Speaker 6: at grypul pod and go over to Patreon check us
Speaker 6: out over there. We do Gods of the Morning. Would
Speaker 6: every Saturday morning, Nick and Headless usually join us, and uh,
Speaker 6: this morning we covered the Naghamadi text. We covered, uh, the.
Speaker 7: The sanctum I really want to say sanctum rectum of
Speaker 7: the terror, but uh, sanctum sanctum something I don't know,
Speaker 7: and then uh, the Delphic maxims.
Speaker 6: It was a banger and it will be going private
Speaker 6: in a few hours, so go check it out after this.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Jules, I appreciate you.
Speaker 6: You could be here to see all my fellow rejects.
Speaker 5: Hell yeah, brother, it's good to have you on. And
Speaker 5: mister Robbie Marks the storyteller himself, what is going on.
Speaker 8: Sir, Yeah, thanks for having me on. This is gonna
Speaker 8: be a fun one. I am our Marx artist illustrator
Speaker 8: and do a variety of research in the various subject matters.
Speaker 8: I have the metamind Cast, which is my podcast various
Speaker 8: interviews like this and stuff that I esoteric subjects that
Speaker 8: I cover. But if you want to check out all
Speaker 8: my Miss laney SLINKs, you can go to my link
Speaker 8: tree which is link tree r M A r X.
Speaker 8: And I will say that over the last couple of years,
Speaker 8: I've pretty extensively been really digging into play though, and
Speaker 8: I'm just completing laws right now, and so it's, uh,
Speaker 8: it's been quite the journey going through all this information
Speaker 8: and I'm really interested to see kind of you know,
Speaker 8: where this whole conversation goes on, just platonic, you know, philosophy,
Speaker 8: the governmental processes, the various gods and goddesses and temples
Speaker 8: and it's just uh yeah, some really uh stuff that
Speaker 8: I really enjoy and I appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 2: Nick.
Speaker 5: Of course, Robbie was a pleasure I have on the show,
Speaker 5: and we got Arrows and what is up?
Speaker 2: Arrows.
Speaker 9: Good to have you back, Yeah, thank you, and thanks
Speaker 9: for having me on. I'm so excited for this one today.
Speaker 9: You know, Plato was the first to create this unified
Speaker 9: ethical cosmology, and he coined the term demn urge and
Speaker 9: the ideal forms and was the first to talk about Atlantis.
Speaker 9: There's just so much that could be said about Plato.
Speaker 9: It's like, how we're not going to be able to
Speaker 9: cover much. I'm sure, but yeah, very excited. You can
Speaker 9: find me on x at Arrows to Ethos and you
Speaker 9: can find me on YouTube at Arrows Up.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much for coming on Arrows and Ethan Indigo,
Speaker 5: what is going on through well?
Speaker 10: Thank you so much everyone for being aeric Brandon Dope
Speaker 10: introduction pd Ike. I'm really excited to speak with you guys.
Speaker 10: And like many of the things that I look into,
Speaker 10: Plato makes me feel more ignorant the more I study
Speaker 10: and learn of him. Right, it's just so such a
Speaker 10: deep stream of information. So Ethan Indigo Smith, I'm easy
Speaker 10: to find on all the social media and I always
Speaker 10: appreciate people reaching out and communicating and once you're writing
Speaker 10: out there and articles and books and again, appreciate.
Speaker 2: Everybody, appreciate you making it, Ethan.
Speaker 5: And finally to the guests, Ike, please, sir, people don't
Speaker 5: know who you are already, Let's remind them where can
Speaker 5: they find all your amazing work.
Speaker 3: I will be moonlighting at Chuck e Cheese for the
Speaker 3: next month and a half. If you guys want to
Speaker 3: come down, it's over here, just outside of Charlotte. They're
Speaker 3: gonna get They told me that I can't bring a
Speaker 3: full sized guitar. I have to bring a ukulele. So
Speaker 3: my name's like Baker. I it's a pleasure to be
Speaker 3: here amongst such excellent company. I host the Arcane podcast
Speaker 3: and YouTube channel ar C A n VM, and I
Speaker 3: wrote a bunch of books and I primarily I guess
Speaker 3: most people will know me as Golden Down magician. That's
Speaker 3: kind of my background.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I was on this channel with Fredi RC just a
Speaker 3: little while ago talking about the Golden Down. It was
Speaker 3: a great conversation. But Platonism is something that's very, very
Speaker 3: near and dear to me. I got my first four
Speaker 3: Platonic dialogues. My dad bought it for me and he
Speaker 3: gifted it to me when I was about eleven years old,
Speaker 3: and it was it's called four Great Dialogues. I think
Speaker 3: it was the Feto, the Apology, the Creto, and I'm
Speaker 3: forgetting the fourth one. But so it started really early
Speaker 3: for me, and I didn't have any kind of academic
Speaker 3: filter that was that was trying to you know, fit
Speaker 3: me into this little nice, uh you know, rationally square
Speaker 3: box that uh that academia was trying to filter our
Speaker 3: perception of of the Platonic dialogues through for a really
Speaker 3: long time. So these always came across as mystical texts
Speaker 3: to me and I actually bonded for the first time.
Speaker 3: I had PD on my podcast to cut a number
Speaker 3: of years ago, and just and I think we might
Speaker 3: have used exactly these words in the podcast. What he
Speaker 3: was putting down I was picking up because this, immediately
Speaker 3: to me was a kindred spirit. PD is one of
Speaker 3: the finest, finest Platonists I've ever met my entire life.
Speaker 3: And uh, he's an incredible author and his book Theogy
Speaker 3: Theory in practice, it just blew the doors off. And
Speaker 3: you know what it's saying something when you get an
Speaker 3: author who writes relatively short treatise, if you've seen literature
Speaker 3: on Platonism and theory, she's like, you know, and but
Speaker 3: more information, more valuable information, and more heart in that
Speaker 3: in that thin volume than than arguably probably the last
Speaker 3: forty books I read on Platonism. So of course I
Speaker 3: jumped at the opportunity to uh to bring them on
Speaker 3: this show today, and so thanks for being here man.
Speaker 1: And thank you, and you are far too generous. But
Speaker 1: that book, that that book came about in a very
Speaker 1: very strange way. I told you a little bit about it,
Speaker 1: you know, for those of you who aren't familiar with
Speaker 1: my research and how it started. I mainly focus on
Speaker 1: psychedelics and the use of psychedelics within ritual contexts, indigenous settings,
Speaker 1: and especially religious youth is in ancient religions. But in
Speaker 1: my teens I got really involved in ceremonial magic, and
Speaker 1: just like I, you know, the first kind of the
Speaker 1: most visible system was the golden dullstem. I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in the Golden Dull system, got into
Speaker 1: too Crowley for a little while, especially because of his
Speaker 1: validation of the use of enthegens within a magical context,
Speaker 1: which was the first validation I had seen of what
Speaker 1: I was experiencing in my own path. But what got
Speaker 1: me into Platonism and what led to the writing of theogy,
Speaker 1: Believe it or not, I read this book by Augus
Speaker 1: uzda Venis. He passed away in twenty ten, probably probably
Speaker 1: the most brilliant author I've ever read, next to somebody
Speaker 1: like Peter Kingsley, and that book absolutely set me on fire.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know that Algus had passed away. I
Speaker 1: didn't know who this man was, and and I had
Speaker 1: no intentions of writing a book on theorgy. But one
Speaker 1: night I'm dead asleep, and I have an encounter with
Speaker 1: what I can only call Ustavinni's ghost comes to me
Speaker 1: in my sleep and gives me this book fully formed, uh,
Speaker 1: the entire organization of it, the the structure of it,
Speaker 1: each chapter, the themes. And I woke up two three
Speaker 1: in the morning with this fully formed book in my head,
Speaker 1: and and I thought, how the fuck does that happen?
Speaker 1: Where does you know? Where did that come from? But
Speaker 1: I didn't do anything about it. And successively, for roughly
Speaker 1: ninety days, he would startle me awake about the same time,
Speaker 1: two or three in the morning and make me write.
Speaker 1: And every book I wrote before that book, you know,
Speaker 1: you can probably confirm this. It takes about a year,
Speaker 1: you know, to research and write a book. This book
Speaker 1: happened in ninety days. I wrote it in an absolute
Speaker 1: fever and a half trance state in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night, being prodded by this ornery Lithuanian fucking ghost.
Speaker 1: So I say that because I don't take full credit
Speaker 1: for that book. I also, I am not trying to
Speaker 1: say it's a channeled work, but it came about in
Speaker 1: a very strange way and was by far the oddest
Speaker 1: night the days of my entire career as a writer.
Speaker 1: So strange stuff the muse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh, and just so selfless plug and people want
Speaker 5: to hear more about his book on Theorgy and Ike
Speaker 5: Baker's Etheric Magic, and can go check out the Occult Rejects.
Speaker 2: We have episodes. Yes, So I don't know. Uh, I
Speaker 2: don't know who wants to start it off first with Plato?
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 5: I was thinking about asking people if you if you
Speaker 5: if you don't mind, I guess like where, I don't
Speaker 5: even know what ite Uh, I guess when it comes
Speaker 5: to Plato in in In.
Speaker 2: I guess a cult or esoteric system. Where do you see?
Speaker 2: I guess like the most blatant. I guess, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: borrowing from his ideas, his influence.
Speaker 1: Who we asking?
Speaker 2: I guess really, I'll ask you first if you don't mind.
Speaker 1: Okay, everywhere, if it's a Western system of attainment, Plato
Speaker 1: is in the background somewhere, even if the author of
Speaker 1: that system isn't aware of the fact. So many tropes
Speaker 1: that we take for granted in Western mystery traditions western
Speaker 1: mysticism have their origin in either Plato or in what
Speaker 1: Plato was reading. And that's especially true if someone like Parmenides, Pythagoras,
Speaker 1: and Pedocles, Heraclitis, you know, all of these early pre
Speaker 1: Socratic voices, he addresses them and their ideas, even if
Speaker 1: he's not clear about it, even if he's not saying,
Speaker 1: you know, we're commenting on or building on what came
Speaker 1: in the past. In a big way, he gives his
Speaker 1: reader the benefit of the doubt that they already know
Speaker 1: this stuff. And at the time they probably did, you know,
Speaker 1: within the academy, they certainly would have been familiar with
Speaker 1: those those texts. But yeah, everything and and it's especially
Speaker 1: true of early Christianity, of Orthodox Christianity, and it's true
Speaker 1: of heterodox Christianity a gnosticism. But when you see the
Speaker 1: emergence of Christianity proper in the Orthodox Church and figures
Speaker 1: like Saint Dionysius, the Areopagite Gregory of Nissa, Saint Anthonasius.
Speaker 1: It's a Maximus the Confessor. Especially, it's impossible two make
Speaker 1: sense of what they're saying without recourse to Plato. Like
Speaker 1: IX said, without that, without a filter in there that
Speaker 1: you're you can say, oh, you know this, this is
Speaker 1: Plato just recast for for a different type of audience.
Speaker 1: And what's really different about that audience and Platonism the
Speaker 1: one the monad is transcendent a lot like the Father
Speaker 1: in Christianity right, and in Judaism, the fathers is separate
Speaker 1: from his creation. Christianity drawing from not necessarily Plato, but
Speaker 1: certainly the Neoplatonists realized the gap that creates because there
Speaker 1: is a philosophical need to maintain God's eminence within the creation.
Speaker 1: And the Neoplatonists solve this problem by what they call suntha, Mata,
Speaker 1: and sumbola, which are tokens and symbols, but tokens are
Speaker 1: so you can think about them similar to how the
Speaker 1: Golden Dawn has correspondences. When you look at the Tree
Speaker 1: of life, each sephera, each netteva, they each have a
Speaker 1: string of correspondences, but and a lot of approaches to that.
Speaker 1: It becomes a psychological mnemonic where you'll see practitioners saying
Speaker 1: things like, well, if I surround myself with things that
Speaker 1: are red, you know, and increments of five and iron,
Speaker 1: that I'm propelling my consciousness into Gibera, because all of
Speaker 1: these are psychological mnemonics that entrance me to think about Mars,
Speaker 1: to think about Gibura. But what's different about the way
Speaker 1: the Neoplatonists think about these tokens are that they don't
Speaker 1: represent the gods. They are the gods and fractal microcosmic form.
Speaker 1: So when you interact with with iron, you are interacting
Speaker 1: with Mars only simply the way Mars manifests on this plane.
Speaker 1: So Christianity takes this and transfers all of that into
Speaker 1: the figure of Christ. Christ becomes the imminence of God
Speaker 1: within this creation. But that couldn't have happened without Plato.
Speaker 1: I like to say that Christ was born and crucified
Speaker 1: in a Platonic cosmos, in particularly a Hellenistic cosmos. Then
Speaker 1: the best example of that is in the Creed, where
Speaker 1: it says that Christ descends to Hades right to release
Speaker 1: the saints. Well, that means he descended to a Greek
Speaker 1: underworld right. So in the same motion, it confirms the
Speaker 1: Greek cosmo conception, but it also overturns it in that
Speaker 1: for the first time people can get out of Hades
Speaker 1: and into Heaven, which for them would have been Mount Olympus,
Speaker 1: where men don't go men are allowed there. But Christ
Speaker 1: confirms it and overturns it. So no Plato, no.
Speaker 3: Christ, You're here. Yeah, absolutely, you know, like people will,
Speaker 3: people will get confused when I tell them that I'm
Speaker 3: a Christian. I was like, wait, hold on, you're a
Speaker 3: magician too, you claim to do the Golden dawns. Like,
Speaker 3: first of all, you know, there's definitely some sort of
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily the person's fault per se, but you know,
Speaker 3: exoteric discussions about religion always devolve upon the same issues,
Speaker 3: which is a definition of terms. People will use terms
Speaker 3: generically according to their own sort of you know, referencing
Speaker 3: themselves and what they know. That's kind of like if
Speaker 3: you say, hey, can you get me a band aid
Speaker 3: out of the cabinet. What you're talking about is a bandage.
Speaker 3: Band aid is a brand, but you're using that term
Speaker 3: generically without even thinking about it, And people do that
Speaker 3: with Christianity. I am in terms of my faith, my
Speaker 3: outlook on the world. I would say that I'm someone
Speaker 3: a little bit more pre Nicene, uh contemplative Christian. Also,
Speaker 3: you know, I practice the and and administer the seven Sacraments.
Speaker 3: I'm even though I'm not Orthodox, technically, I'm Orthoprats. So
Speaker 3: I'll practice those rituals according to the Roman writer the
Speaker 3: Coptic right. And then I'll say, look, but my my
Speaker 3: metaphysic hell, even my theology is Platonic. You know, the
Speaker 3: early Church. I mean you look a look at the reading,
Speaker 3: any reading. Augustine's the obvious one. But if you look
Speaker 3: at even like the Desert Fathers, they're using and it's
Speaker 3: this is true of the Hermetica as well. We like
Speaker 3: to for for what I believe is like reasons of
Speaker 3: political correctness in the modern day. We like to attribute
Speaker 3: the Hermetic texts specifically to the Egyptians. But in reality,
Speaker 3: there's there's no Hermetic text that predates the Platonic Dialogues.
Speaker 3: And not only it's written in Greek and Coptic. Coptic
Speaker 3: is mostly Greek in terms of the alphabet, and they're
Speaker 3: using discrete Platonic terms in context, words like c he right, soul, nous, higher,
Speaker 3: consciousness logos, these kinds of thing using those those platonic
Speaker 3: terms in us in that specific platonic context. It's the
Speaker 3: same thing in the writings of the Desert Fathers when
Speaker 3: they talk about I mean Evagius of Pontus, who is
Speaker 3: the great you know, taxonomist of of of of early
Speaker 3: Christian demonology. He talks about the soul having three parts. Okay,
Speaker 3: that comes we first see that in the Fato. The
Speaker 3: platonic dialog is the tripartite nature of the soul, and
Speaker 3: he's talking about how he came out here in the
Speaker 3: desert so he could he could raise his consciousness up
Speaker 3: out of the appetitive, which is the lowest part, and
Speaker 3: into the rational, the logisticon.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 3: So there, as as PD rightly points out, I mean,
Speaker 3: it is so diffuse. We're on like truly the modern commentators,
Speaker 3: specifically through esotericism and what I would say adjacent to academia.
Speaker 3: This is the first time I'm seeing in a very
Speaker 3: long time commentators that are looking at this stuff and
Speaker 3: realizing just how significant it is. And we're beginning to
Speaker 3: ice ICEE a movement now in the modern day of
Speaker 3: people starting to interpret this stuff not in this very sterile.
Speaker 3: You know, let's put this thing in a glass case
Speaker 3: and put a little light on it, like but but
Speaker 3: interpreting it from almost almost from a position within the tradition,
Speaker 3: you know. So so so it's almost like we have
Speaker 3: a new Neoplatonism here. That's that's working, and that's what
Speaker 3: the old commentators were doing, you know. And and somebody
Speaker 3: mentioned that they felt ignorant by reading Plato, and I
Speaker 3: mean even the early neoplatonists talk about that, you know,
Speaker 3: they you know, so it's it's it's quite interesting. But
Speaker 3: I would say that, uh to to sort of piggyback
Speaker 3: on what PD said about Parmenides and Heraclitis. There was
Speaker 3: so so pre Socratic philosophy in the main, in the main, right,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna break with with this generalization to show you
Speaker 3: the exceptions, but in the main was not really that
Speaker 3: interested in uh A sophisticated theology. They were very very
Speaker 3: they were they were they were early early sort of protophysicists,
Speaker 3: natural philosophers, and that would have been what was going
Speaker 3: on in the Egyptian temple complexes, right, because the gods
Speaker 3: were forces of nature, and each particularly particular you know,
Speaker 3: hieratic station or cultists, was dedicated not only to working
Speaker 3: with the God but understanding its functions in nature. Okay,
Speaker 3: so then this this stuff gets taught to the Greeks.
Speaker 3: We know that we don't have to go over that
Speaker 3: is well established that they went there to learn this shit,
Speaker 3: and they came back wizards. But a lot of guys
Speaker 3: were more interested in ethics, more interested in you know,
Speaker 3: are things relative and the heraclitis and things like this.
Speaker 3: Not parmenit. He's protagorists, things like that, and Plato addresses
Speaker 3: these in turn. Throughout his dialogues. He's constantly trying to
Speaker 3: or what I think, he's orienting those old, those pre
Speaker 3: Socratic philosophies in the light of the Socratic movement, which
Speaker 3: is but he's to PD's point, he's not being so
Speaker 3: heavy handed about it, right, because at the end of
Speaker 3: most of the Platonic dialogues, we're like, okay, we just
Speaker 3: spent forty five pages, and we're really we don't know
Speaker 3: where we are anymore, you know's there's not like they don't.
Speaker 3: He never wraps a bow on it. He's the eternal cliffhanger.
Speaker 3: But there is an exception. There's an exception, and those
Speaker 3: exceptions that the way that I see them through my
Speaker 3: research is Pherisides, the ancient orphic mythographer who was, according
Speaker 3: to Diogenes Laertius, was the teacher of Pythagoras, we all know,
Speaker 3: the great metaphysician and number mystic, and then Parmenides. And
Speaker 3: Parmenides I believe it is said that at one point
Speaker 3: he was a Pythagorean, and he left that cult specifically
Speaker 3: for a new teacher who taught him the art of
Speaker 3: silence and and uh and PD talks some about that
Speaker 3: in his in his book. So what you get in
Speaker 3: Plato really is a focus on metaphysic uh, an ethical
Speaker 3: imperative two to using the mind to reach metaphysical heights uh,
Speaker 3: not necessarily just epistemological, but to get above that discursive weather,
Speaker 3: the way a plane has to get above the clouds
Speaker 3: in a storm. So to me, Plato is a continuation
Speaker 3: of those ancient pre Socratic metaphysicians, right. And you see
Speaker 3: that in in something like the curriculum curriculum of your Iamblicus.
Speaker 3: The twelve Platonic dialogues that that were you know, in
Speaker 3: the the the late academy. They were requisite before practicing theogy.
Speaker 3: There are two dialogues, and I believe that they're termed
Speaker 3: this according to either Olympiadorus of the of Alexandria or
Speaker 3: the anonymous Prologomna. And Denny could probably tell me which
Speaker 3: one is which.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 3: But but the time Aus and the Parmenides, which are
Speaker 3: very very very cosmological, metaphysical, uh, very abstract, they're they're
Speaker 3: considered right, they're the final two. They're they're eleven and
Speaker 3: twelve out of twelve. You reach those last before you
Speaker 3: become a theorist. But these are referred to as the
Speaker 3: dialogues beyond philosophy, Okay, And it's very very important, right
Speaker 3: you have Parmenides right there. Not only that, but if
Speaker 3: if you go debt back to the epistemological test trad
Speaker 3: of the cradlest the Theotitis, the sofas and the statesman,
Speaker 3: Socrates says, Parmenides taught me the dialectic when I was
Speaker 3: a kid. And then in the Parmenides that final you know,
Speaker 3: series finale of the ambliking curriculum. It's it's the retelling
Speaker 3: of the story between Parmenides, his student Zeno, and the
Speaker 3: young Socrates. As a matter of fact, in the epistemological
Speaker 3: tetrad Socrates hands the mic over to somebody who we
Speaker 3: call the Eleatic stranger Sinon, the the Eleatic foreigner, who
Speaker 3: then asks questions of a younger person named Socrates who's
Speaker 3: not Socrates. So there's a lot of this coding and
Speaker 3: a lot of this layering in there to point who
Speaker 3: he who the the forebears of this tradition really are.
Speaker 3: And then of course the Timeus. You know, whether you
Speaker 3: believe it's misattributed to Timeus of low career or not,
Speaker 3: it's an anakronick sort of attribution, whether you believe in
Speaker 3: the historicity or not, it is so clearly Pythagorean. So
Speaker 3: at least you know as far as what we know
Speaker 3: about about the cult. So yeah, all of that stuff
Speaker 3: ends up becoming one way or the other, particularly And
Speaker 3: this is the point I tried to make, and I'll
Speaker 3: end here. The point I tried to make in writing
Speaker 3: my first book, A Formless Fire, was to show the
Speaker 3: trajectory of how we got how we it is we
Speaker 3: come to custodianship of these capital m mysteries, and it
Speaker 3: is through the initiatory societies that took place, you know,
Speaker 3: obviously in the in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries,
Speaker 3: they were going based off of they were not necessarily
Speaker 3: just doing money, magic and go at a conjuration. They
Speaker 3: were interested in theorgy. The Golden Dawn specifically states in
Speaker 3: in in a series of documents called the Flying Roles,
Speaker 3: which are foundational to the Inner Order. You've come here
Speaker 3: to do theorgy. Whether you realize they or not, theorgy
Speaker 3: is is the purpose of this. And then sprinkled throughout
Speaker 3: their rituals, which you really gotta you really got to
Speaker 3: listen to understand her two things, the Christian New Testament
Speaker 3: really the Gospels and Neoplatonic literature. There are sayings from
Speaker 3: Proclus and the Neophyight ritual. So it's it's very very uh,
Speaker 3: it's that is to me, that is the real tradition.
Speaker 2: For me.
Speaker 3: And you get things like the Grimoire tradition outside of
Speaker 3: you know, academia or clerical custodianship and given to us
Speaker 3: sort of egalitarian through people like Mathers and Crowley, who
Speaker 3: came right out of yeah, you know, and put these
Speaker 3: things in our hands, came right out of the society,
Speaker 3: these initiatory societies. So with that, I'm going to shut
Speaker 3: up and hand it back to to PD and uh
Speaker 3: and refill my coffee. I'll be back in two seconds.
Speaker 1: No, he's absolutely right. So I agree with everything that
Speaker 1: that he said.
Speaker 9: I'll ask a question, if you don't mind. I've this
Speaker 9: is sort of for Ike, but maybe for pe Ye.
Speaker 9: Would you also say that you're Christian?
Speaker 1: PD, that's an interesting question.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: So I was baptized into the Orthodox Church and I
Speaker 1: am absolutely smitten with the Divine Liturgy as probably the
Speaker 1: most well preserved the urgic ritual available through the practice
Speaker 1: of theophagy of God eating. It spells out in symbolic
Speaker 1: form exactly how these these tokens work and how engaging
Speaker 1: with them in a proper context has the ability to
Speaker 1: awaken their corresponding logo within the soul. And I think
Speaker 1: the Divine Liturgy is it really is something special. That
Speaker 1: being said, there are so many heretical bones in my
Speaker 1: body that I mean, I can't just say I'm an
Speaker 1: Orthodox Christian because so much of the lens through which
Speaker 1: I view the ongoings of the liturgical cycle is colored
Speaker 1: by people like Origin and Clement of Alexandria, and while
Speaker 1: they are incredibly important figures, the Church is kind of
Speaker 1: whitewash them. Let's get them out of here. They're not saints,
Speaker 1: we don't recognize them. And I had there was this
Speaker 1: I forget his name. He's a theologian Orthodox theologian, but
Speaker 1: he was describing the role that Origin played in the
Speaker 1: early Church, and he basically said, he says that, you know,
Speaker 1: we've got the Church fathers and they're playing soccer, and
Speaker 1: they're enjoying playing soccer, and Origin enters the picture, runs
Speaker 1: on the field, he says, I'm going to play, but
Speaker 1: he picks up the ball and runs off with it
Speaker 1: and in the process creates football instead of soccer. And
Speaker 1: so the church fathers get pissed and kick him off
Speaker 1: the team. Then once he's out of the picture, they
Speaker 1: all continue playing football.
Speaker 11: And that's so.
Speaker 1: Real to the program and what kind of an influence
Speaker 1: those two figures had. But at the same time, if
Speaker 1: you say that out loud within a proper Orthodox setting,
Speaker 1: you're going to get labeled heterodox and probably probably be
Speaker 1: requested to take some counseling.
Speaker 9: I guess the reason that I ask because you both
Speaker 9: mentioned Christianity and Jesus, And to me, a big difference
Speaker 9: between Platonism and Christianity or the Abrahamic religion kind of
Speaker 9: pre Neoplatonism is like, you know, it was sacrificial. It's
Speaker 9: a very sacrificial religion, which neo Platonism and Platonism doesn't
Speaker 9: really encourage or incorporate at all. And so to me,
Speaker 9: it's like, is Jesus a way of incorporating morality and
Speaker 9: ethics into the Bible and also synthesizing it with that
Speaker 9: tradition that is more sacrificial. I guess I wonder what
Speaker 9: you guys would think about that.
Speaker 1: I get a short answer, and then I want to
Speaker 1: hear what I has to say about that. I would
Speaker 1: wholly disagree about Neoplatonism not being sacrificial. We see that
Speaker 1: in someone like Porphyry, who is against the sacrificing of
Speaker 1: animals and has adopted this very early Christian idea that
Speaker 1: what's being sacri to our demons, and in Platonism, demons
Speaker 1: do not exist. It's not a dualistic cosmos. There is
Speaker 1: the good and everything stems from the good. There is
Speaker 1: no evil. There is privation of the good. But what
Speaker 1: privation of the good is a tendency to act in
Speaker 1: a way as though non being were real. But as
Speaker 1: Parmenides tells us, non being by definition cannot be. So
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a tendency to act in a way
Speaker 1: that is self defeating because it's impossible. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a physical lie. Right, demons are demonized damons,
Speaker 1: and that's it's important to keep in mind. And when
Speaker 1: we get to someone like Iamblicus, he's very clear about
Speaker 1: the necessity of sacrifice. He's Syrian and fully immersed in
Speaker 1: the Syrian religious tradition. He he espouses the traditional Hellenistic
Speaker 1: picture where everyone sacrifices at the temple, and it's through
Speaker 1: this act of sacrifice because these animals are tokens of
Speaker 1: the gods. And just like Ike said, they get this
Speaker 1: from the Egyptians. They Le's goes to Egypt. You know,
Speaker 1: Plato goes to Egypt, but th Agris goes to Egypt.
Speaker 1: When an Egyptian looked out on the Nile and saw
Speaker 1: an ibis, they didn't think, oh, that bird is sacred
Speaker 1: to thought or to Uti. They said, there's to Huti.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a very different worldview and it demands
Speaker 1: a lot of us because all of the sudden, right,
Speaker 1: everything we do is sacred. The secular does not exist. Right,
Speaker 1: So when they take an animal, they're taking the God
Speaker 1: and sacrificing it. And within the Greek tradition, the sacrifice
Speaker 1: is not complete until you partake of it. So unlike
Speaker 1: with the Jewish tradition where they would burn the entire
Speaker 1: animal and leave it on the altar to legitimize the
Speaker 1: sacrifice and Hellenistic tradition, you have to partake of it.
Speaker 1: And that's the origin of this theophagi of consuming the
Speaker 1: god to become the god. Once you consume it, you're
Speaker 1: possessed by it. And you know, ever since William Bladdie
Speaker 1: wrote The psyop that is the Exorcist, we've got this
Speaker 1: bad idea in America of possession. That possession is bad,
Speaker 1: but possession in the Greek tradition, especially in Neoplatonism, that's
Speaker 1: the highest grace we can be of it. You know,
Speaker 1: it demands that we completely reorientate our view of this.
Speaker 1: And what was the second thing you said? After sacrifice Jesus.
Speaker 8: More into the Israelite I would say that.
Speaker 1: I would say Jesus completely disrupts the Torah, disrupts Mosaic law,
Speaker 1: you know, because he says he and the Apostolic Creed.
Speaker 1: For instance, when they're talking about allowing Gentiles to be Christians,
Speaker 1: the big question is, well, do they have to cut
Speaker 1: off their foreskin? If they're going to be Christians, shouldn't
Speaker 1: they be circumcised and there and the answer is no,
Speaker 1: because Christianity is not bound by the Abrahamic Covenant. Gentiles
Speaker 1: do not have to be circumcised to be Christians. That
Speaker 1: in itself completely disrupts any continuity between Judaism and Christianity,
Speaker 1: so much so that, you know, so of someone like Valentinis,
Speaker 1: I think it is perfectly his his his desire to
Speaker 1: remove the Old Testament altogether is warranted because that's not
Speaker 1: what they're practicing anymore. That's all I got.
Speaker 4: Circumcision is also a sy op. So there's that going on.
Speaker 3: That's that I think that's beautifully put. What what I
Speaker 3: would what I would add, I would just reinforce that
Speaker 3: point of you look at it this way. Right in
Speaker 3: the Old Kingdom of Egypt, when we begin to start
Speaker 3: seeing the pyramid texts, Okay, where do we get these?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: That's this where we get the stuff like the Book
Speaker 3: of the Dead and the Book of the Gates and
Speaker 3: all this stuff. These are from from the funerary carvings,
Speaker 3: the hieroglyphics inside the tombs, and the the the the
Speaker 3: mortuary complexes of the pharaoh. Okay, it was believed that
Speaker 3: the pharaoh was the only one who got to meet
Speaker 3: and identify with Osiris bring light to the underworld like
Speaker 3: raw and push back apep the serpent of oblivion, like Set.
Speaker 3: Set is the one use Set is the one who
Speaker 3: does that in the underworld. Believe it or not. They
Speaker 3: got to they got, of course, they have to incorporate
Speaker 3: they got of violence to push back in the annihilation.
Speaker 3: Then later in the second intermediate period, you start seeing
Speaker 3: the coffin text still a little bit more democratic about it,
Speaker 3: and say, okay, well, you know, if you guys can
Speaker 3: pay us, then you'll have souls too, and you can
Speaker 3: afford for us to carve this ship on the inside
Speaker 3: of your tomb. Now, then you get the Hebrew Covenant,
Speaker 3: which you know obviously says over and it's itself admittedly
Speaker 3: refers to a chosen people, a chosen people. You get
Speaker 3: the New Testament. Somebody who comes out of this chosen
Speaker 3: people and says, immortality is for fucking everyone everyone, right, okay,
Speaker 3: you must but this is what it is. That's how
Speaker 3: you become god. It's the reason for theophagia. In my opinion,
Speaker 3: what he does is what what Jesus does at the
Speaker 3: Last Supper is a baptism of the old gods. He
Speaker 3: takes them down from a place right the only sys
Speaker 3: It's very difficult to understand. Why is it difficult to understand?
Speaker 3: He's very similar to Christ, similar similar, you know, theophagic
Speaker 3: sort of thing with the wine and things like this.
Speaker 3: He's difficult. It's because that's a difficult thing for us
Speaker 3: to understand about ourselves. How is it that one one
Speaker 3: with with with one glass or two glasses, I can
Speaker 3: be sitting there and me and PD can be you know,
Speaker 3: just having this incredible time full of joy and a brilliance.
Speaker 3: And then and then on another night, I can have
Speaker 3: the same amount of alcohol and uh, you know, be
Speaker 3: be vomiting or throwing falling down the stairs. Yeah, becoming
Speaker 3: the main ad versus the uh, the the the exalted,
Speaker 3: you know, god of wine. It is a very difficult
Speaker 3: thing there in the ancient world where they were still
Speaker 3: really really wrestling by the strict bonds of their mortality.
Speaker 3: So when Christ comes he addresses this stuff. He talks
Speaker 3: about the Mosaic Law, and you'll find in the Gospels
Speaker 3: he says, he'll make a pronouncement to his to his disciples.
Speaker 3: So say, you have heard it said A B and C,
Speaker 3: and A B and C is some variant of the
Speaker 3: Mosaic law. And then he'll go on to say, but verily, truly,
Speaker 3: I say unto you x y and Z, and x
Speaker 3: y and Z will directly contradict A, B and C.
Speaker 3: And so there's this defense in orthodox Christianity to say, well, yeah,
Speaker 3: but he says, I didn't come to break the law. Yes,
Speaker 3: that's right. He says I came not to break but
Speaker 3: and the typical translation is to fulfill the law. Now
Speaker 3: what does that do?
Speaker 11: Right?
Speaker 3: In this archaic English, it's very very like that. It's
Speaker 3: that band aid thing that we're talking about again. People
Speaker 3: are defining it on their own terms. What the Greek
Speaker 3: word is there is plerosai, and it's related to the
Speaker 3: word pleroma fullness. He says, I came not to not
Speaker 3: to destroy, but to complete the law, to make it whole.
Speaker 3: Immortality is for everyone. Now, there's some stuff where he
Speaker 3: talks about if you choose the path of separateness, if
Speaker 3: you choose that, then you will go to a place
Speaker 3: where there is much pain in the gnashing of teeth,
Speaker 3: but is insane. He says, you're gonna go somewhere, You're
Speaker 3: you're not gonna die and be in the ground, and
Speaker 3: it's over. Immortality is for every soul. It's just where
Speaker 3: how do you want to spend it? Based on what
Speaker 3: you do here? And that is extremely platonic. That's all.
Speaker 3: You get that all the way in the Fato, the
Speaker 3: afterlife myth in the Fader, you get in the myth
Speaker 3: of er fuck you if you go to the Osiria
Speaker 3: and an abidhost right now and you go through the
Speaker 3: procession way. I was there in October and I took pictures.
Speaker 3: On the right hand side is the Duot. Okay, this
Speaker 3: is written like four thousand years ago on that wall. Okay.
Speaker 3: On the left side are the Book of Gates in
Speaker 3: the Amduat. The book m Duad means what is in
Speaker 3: the duot? What is in the afterlife? Okay? At the
Speaker 3: highest it's it's kind of like this this vertical triptych.
Speaker 3: At the highest point near the ceiling, they're the blessed dead,
Speaker 3: and there they get to participate with with Raw and
Speaker 3: his solar bark, and they pull him very gratefully through
Speaker 3: the through the the night of the underworld. They get
Speaker 3: to participate in that. In the middle are people who
Speaker 3: live decent lives, and they go to the kind of
Speaker 3: like the field of reeds and they live what life
Speaker 3: was like here kind of uh. And then on the
Speaker 3: bottom of the wall, bottom of the wall, near the floor,
Speaker 3: there are people who are hung upside down with their
Speaker 3: arms tied behind their back, and they are the only
Speaker 3: figures on either wall that are completely painted red for
Speaker 3: burning for pain. For So, this idea that Hell is Christian,
Speaker 3: or specifically judo Christian is bullshit, very convenient bullshit. But
Speaker 3: this stuff is way, way, way, way, way predates that stuff.
Speaker 3: So there's he's coming to talk about. Here's the way out.
Speaker 3: Here is the way. I'm gonna leave it on this.
Speaker 3: If anybody wants to understand a little bit more of
Speaker 3: this through maybe like a Christian cabalistic lens Renaissance cabalism.
Speaker 3: Look at the work of Johannis Ruyklin, particularly de Verbo
Speaker 3: Mirifico the Wonder Working Word. He shows how the old
Speaker 3: dispensation was the tetragrammaton, the four lettered name of God,
Speaker 3: and how the new dispensation is the pentagrammaton with the
Speaker 3: insertion of the shin of spirit in the middle of
Speaker 3: that old name Yahweh becoming Aeshue. It's a little anachronistic
Speaker 3: because we don't have Jesus's name written anywhere in Hebrew.
Speaker 3: It's in Greek and it's Jezus. But I think that
Speaker 3: the idea is really relevant and very important, and I
Speaker 3: don't think any of this. Whether whether you believe it
Speaker 3: happened or not, it doesn't matter to me. The true
Speaker 3: truth is what matters to me, not the not the
Speaker 3: historical truth, but the capital T truth underlying that thing
Speaker 3: is what's important to me. And I think whether you
Speaker 3: believe Christ existed or now are symbolic, you could not
Speaker 3: have Christianity. Those ideas come to the to the fullest
Speaker 3: without Platonism. It all starts with Plato. You know, at
Speaker 3: least in the historical record, there may very well may
Speaker 3: have been people before him. We don't know about them,
Speaker 3: and they didn't they didn't leave anything.
Speaker 4: So I h I want to I want to make
Speaker 4: a little I want to take us back like three
Speaker 4: hundred years from Christ back to Plato and then even
Speaker 4: before then, because I think it's really important for the
Speaker 4: audience who don't know much about Plato, for us to
Speaker 4: break down why the immortality of the soul is so
Speaker 4: important in Plato and where that even comes from, when
Speaker 4: we hit before Pythagoras and into more of the orphic
Speaker 4: mysteries and how important it was, and that from Orphism
Speaker 4: to Pythagorianism to the you know, Socrates and his dialectic
Speaker 4: in getting it into the Platonic dialogues and Plato himself,
Speaker 4: because Plato talks about what metempsychosis is and the trends
Speaker 4: migration of the soul and how important that is too.
Speaker 4: Understanding what even immortality is and why the Platonic forms
Speaker 4: are so important in Plato's dialogues to begin with, because
Speaker 4: when we're understanding that the orphic mysteries are a mythic
Speaker 4: mystery of you know, Orpheus trying to bring his love
Speaker 4: Aridise up from the cave, up from Hades, up from
Speaker 4: the underworld, and he doesn't have enough faith to not
Speaker 4: look back as she disappears, and then he pines on
Speaker 4: into existence of his arrows forever. And then from there
Speaker 4: we move forth to Pythagoreanism, where we get the ideas
Speaker 4: of the mathematic and the harmony of the spheres, and
Speaker 4: so we're taking it from the mythic into the more
Speaker 4: pre scientific understanding of how to build up a mystery
Speaker 4: school and how to bring people in too, understanding that
Speaker 4: divine spheres and the geometries, which then Plato, which in
Speaker 4: your classes you brief very well described, has taken Pythagorea
Speaker 4: in his understanding of the harmony of the spheres and
Speaker 4: put it into his very work in a very uh
Speaker 4: in a very coded way. And from there we understand
Speaker 4: that Socrates is trying to now retrain the mind from
Speaker 4: the mythic into the dialectic and teach people how to philosophize,
Speaker 4: which is why we don't ever get anything wrapped up
Speaker 4: into a tight bow. And then through there we can
Speaker 4: understand what is the transmigration of the soul, what does
Speaker 4: it mean to be immortal, and how do we take
Speaker 4: what we're trying to then talk about with the crustos,
Speaker 4: with our golden dawn with our magical practices, and what
Speaker 4: field gea is, what is the divine working of trying
Speaker 4: to have that anagogic experience of bringing ourselves up into
Speaker 4: the heavens or the forms or into the divine or
Speaker 4: as Amblicus want us to do, is bring the vine
Speaker 4: down into this world so we can have an embodied experience,
Speaker 4: because I think that's what Socrates is truly trying to
Speaker 4: talk about in Plato's Plato's works, especially the Republic, especially
Speaker 4: the Phadrus, where he is actually Socrates's god is Apollo,
Speaker 4: and if we want to map that to the Tree
Speaker 4: of Life, we can map Apollo to Tipereth, which then
Speaker 4: is bringing us back to Christ where from Cather down
Speaker 4: you get Socrates speaking from his Apollonian way of trying
Speaker 4: to truly break things down in that well organized, symphonic
Speaker 4: style of style of speech. And then that reincarnation that
Speaker 4: we're talking about with the metim psychosis and the transmigration
Speaker 4: of the soul, is that ascent into the forms, and
Speaker 4: that forms is every time we die and are reborn,
Speaker 4: that metim psychosis, that cyclical nature of the soul trying
Speaker 4: to reach its highest state of the philosopher King. You know,
Speaker 4: I think that's really telling of what is our path
Speaker 4: as magicians and what are we truly trying to do here,
Speaker 4: which is trying to reach that divine state and reach
Speaker 4: that spark that's within us and get rid of that
Speaker 4: leaden soul, that alchemizing of our soul. And what he's
Speaker 4: doing every time, especially in the Republic, every person he
Speaker 4: talks to, you know, Plato's brothers, you know, which is
Speaker 4: Glaucon and Thetitis or whoever the guy with the teen
Speaker 4: name and everybody else is taking a certain position as
Speaker 4: Socrates is like, No, this is how we're going to
Speaker 4: start philosophizing here, and we're going to start laying out
Speaker 4: the direct understanding of what is justice and how do
Speaker 4: we live a just life? And to live that just
Speaker 4: life is trying to understand how to transcend our current
Speaker 4: state is which is what I believe PD and Ike
Speaker 4: is talking about here, is how do we live that
Speaker 4: path of the Cristos or the Apollonian or how do
Speaker 4: we truly understand how to philosophize, how do we live
Speaker 4: the magical life, which is that are unifying ourselves with
Speaker 4: the forms or you know, walking out of the cave.
Speaker 4: And so that's kind of like I want to take
Speaker 4: us back into Plato itself, because I think that's really
Speaker 4: important to lay the foundations of what is the Western
Speaker 4: esoteric tradition. It is nothing without Plato, and Christianity is
Speaker 4: nothing without Plato, because Christianity is laying itself the foundation
Speaker 4: of Aristotelianism and what Thomas Aquinas did. So without Plato,
Speaker 4: you don't have Aristotle, you don't have the mind. You know,
Speaker 4: Aristotle was known as the mind of the academy, and
Speaker 4: so you get the mind and the light, right, the
Speaker 4: mind being Aristotle and the light being Plato, and you
Speaker 4: put that together, and Christianity would be nothing. And what
Speaker 4: exists today without the very foundation in the bedrock of
Speaker 4: the Western philosophical tradition.
Speaker 3: Well, and I don't I don't look at it too
Speaker 3: strictly historical in terms of the way you might look
Speaker 3: at an organism evolving biologically, so much as I look
Speaker 3: at the tilos, and I look at it more less
Speaker 3: like evolution and more like like growing growing up from
Speaker 3: a child into into mature. That's how I see the history.
Speaker 3: And I see a telos a teleology behind it, meaning
Speaker 3: a metaphysical purpose, a purpose purpose behind it. So so
Speaker 3: I think that really Platonism, it was, was an early
Speaker 3: early form of Christianity attempting to be like what, I'll
Speaker 3: put it this way, forget, forget the label what Christianity
Speaker 3: actually was when it was first happening. Okay, that's that's
Speaker 3: it in the world, the christ event. Let's just call
Speaker 3: it that. Platonism was for me, that trying to be
Speaker 3: born into the world. And what do you have. You
Speaker 3: see a guy named Socrates who's running around telling everybody,
Speaker 3: uh to walk away from the wisdom of the world,
Speaker 3: walk away from worldly wisdom. What happened? They killed him
Speaker 3: for it? Well, actually they gave him a choice, same
Speaker 3: way christ had kind of had a choice. They said,
Speaker 3: you can either leave, you can be exiled, or you
Speaker 3: you you die, And he said, you know, fuck, you
Speaker 3: kill me. And it's that willing that willingness to go
Speaker 3: to his to his death for the right reasons is
Speaker 3: ultimately where we are all headed, if we are if
Speaker 3: we are doing theogic initiatory magic. I want to hear
Speaker 3: from from PD though, what do you think.
Speaker 1: Well, my first thought is in regard to what you said,
Speaker 1: Brandon taking it back and and what that immediately made
Speaker 1: me think of, what was the organic, gradual development of
Speaker 1: this idea of a soul and eventual movement into metam psychosis,
Speaker 1: and how even that model became kind of allegorized once
Speaker 1: we get into the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. But the
Speaker 1: picture of the soul in the earliest literature, in Homer,
Speaker 1: you know, the soul is like an echo, like a
Speaker 1: dim shade, a reflection of what we are a a
Speaker 1: living being.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 1: But somehow, somewhere, probably from the north, you know, Dodds
Speaker 1: proposes it could be the Scythians or the Thracians, which
Speaker 1: constitutes that Hyperborea, that north beyond the North. Kingsley gets
Speaker 1: into Mongolians, Tibetans, Siberian Shamans. But somehow this idea of
Speaker 1: the soul not as a shade of the self, but
Speaker 1: as the very locust of one's emotional and intellectual life
Speaker 1: enters the picture, and seemingly out of nowhere we get
Speaker 1: figures like Hermontomous Epiminites, Aristaeus, these figures that long before
Speaker 1: somebody like Robert Monroe comes along and talks about out
Speaker 1: of body experiences, we've got these these three poet philosophers,
Speaker 1: leaving their body, lying as though dead, much like we
Speaker 1: see with Parmenides and how his teacher taught him, like
Speaker 1: Ike said, stillness heskia, which is actually where we get
Speaker 1: the term for hesi chasm and orthodoxy, their ritual practice
Speaker 1: of monks not laid persons, but lying is though dead,
Speaker 1: and their souls leaving their body. But they're traveling horizontally
Speaker 1: at this point. They're traveling around the place where they
Speaker 1: already live, so they're going to other cities and reporting
Speaker 1: what they see back. It isn't until we get to
Speaker 1: someone like Parmenides where all of the sudden we get
Speaker 1: vertical soul travel, where he's going down into the underworld,
Speaker 1: meeting with the goddess there and acquiring laws. But it's
Speaker 1: a very gradual transition of this idea of soul movement,
Speaker 1: you know. But by the time Plato enters the picture.
Speaker 1: This is one reason I think in the Parmenides why
Speaker 1: he says, you know, if we're going to do this,
Speaker 1: we have to kill father Parmenides. And what does he
Speaker 1: mean by that, Well, his program is essentially reorientating soul
Speaker 1: flight and saying just like Christ did when he overturned
Speaker 1: the Greek cosmo conception. He's saying, Hades is right here,
Speaker 1: We're in it. He allegorizes the underworld and says, we
Speaker 1: are at the bottom of the chain of being. There's
Speaker 1: no further down you can go, which means soul flight reorientates,
Speaker 1: and now we go up, we ascend and we get
Speaker 1: to unite with the gods, you know, And all of
Speaker 1: this is what this gradual development of what the soul
Speaker 1: is looks like and does feeds into Christianity and changes it.
Speaker 1: And when Christ says, like at the Last Supper, like
Speaker 1: Ike was talking about a moment ago, when he says this, dude,
Speaker 1: in remembrance of me, the word he uses for remembrance
Speaker 1: is a conjugation of an amnesis. And any educated spectator
Speaker 1: that would have heard him say that would have immediately thought, oh,
Speaker 1: he's talking about Plato. He's saying that what we're about
Speaker 1: to do is going to make us remember the divine origins,
Speaker 1: the divine nature of our soul. He's talking about our soul,
Speaker 1: you know. So that's what first came to my mind.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's great. I think that's great. I find it
Speaker 4: interesting how this conversation is so quickly moved to Christianity,
Speaker 4: especially for and I get why it did, and I'm
Speaker 4: totally like Il that I blame he too, thank you pd.
Speaker 9: BO.
Speaker 4: Why I say that is because the Neil Playtonists were
Speaker 4: being killed off at droves by Christians in that timeframe.
Speaker 4: So it's really fascinating how then the exoteric to the
Speaker 4: esoteric is such economized, and how we can how it
Speaker 4: can be so mistrewed the allegory of a cave itself.
Speaker 4: It seems like the exoteric Christians never made it out
Speaker 4: of the cave and the esotera Christians, which I have
Speaker 4: considered myself at times, and I guess I don't know
Speaker 4: if I would anymore. But it's such a fascinating conversation,
Speaker 4: this level of remembrance because Christianity itself, I do think,
Speaker 4: And I can actually blame my schooling for this, because
Speaker 4: I studied Platonism and I have a degree in philosophy,
Speaker 4: and so I'm more my brain structures it slightly different
Speaker 4: than maybe yourself, I like, because of you were raised differently.
Speaker 4: But it's such a fascinating conversation how it moves itself forward,
Speaker 4: and so what do you think about that?
Speaker 9: And why?
Speaker 3: Here's the thing, man, I mean, you read the Republic
Speaker 3: and it starts off basically, but you know, Glovcon and
Speaker 3: at Alia, they're they're asking Socrates, they're pushing him a
Speaker 3: little bit, right, it's a normal conversation, like a typical thing,
Speaker 3: but they're pushing him to say, like, Okay, let's talk
Speaker 3: about the philosopher king. Let's talk about the best possible civilization,
Speaker 3: the best possible but they state of the best governance
Speaker 3: of the police. Really, it's a it's it's not just
Speaker 3: talking about the external police, it's talking about the internal police. Yeah,
Speaker 3: of course that's a huge part of it. But what
Speaker 3: he basically says, you know, if you listen to it,
Speaker 3: if you read it, he basically he kind of basically
Speaker 3: puts it in a way where it's like, look, the best,
Speaker 3: the best of all possible situations is an agrarian sort
Speaker 3: of small thing, tribal thing almost, And then they kind
Speaker 3: of push him for like, okay, well what about about war,
Speaker 3: And it's like, okay, if you want to go that route, well,
Speaker 3: now here's this kind of like eugenics hellscape that he
Speaker 3: just lays out. It's like there is no there is
Speaker 3: anything that human beings do. Anything that we're going to
Speaker 3: do will inevitably or really indelibly be imprinted with our
Speaker 3: highest potentials and also our lows. And I think one
Speaker 3: of the things that you find a lot in Platonism
Speaker 3: in particular was a railing against worldly institutions.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Plato talks about it in his Seventh Letter, which is
Speaker 3: one of the coolest, one of the coolest pieces of Platonism,
Speaker 3: And it's the one that I think, and Daniel tell
Speaker 3: me if I'm wrong, that most scholars agree out of
Speaker 3: all the letters, is most likely authentic. So Plato's talking
Speaker 3: about how he he goes. He basically gives us right
Speaker 3: there the scheme of like why he's always talking about
Speaker 3: politics and putting in an ethical imperative on being wise, right,
Speaker 3: because he basically says, if you are not wise and
Speaker 3: you're in charge of governing people, you do a lot
Speaker 3: of harm. Okay, So there's an ethical imperative tied to philosophy.
Speaker 3: And he talks about how he don't forget he lived
Speaker 3: this was a golden age, agreed, but he lived during
Speaker 3: the time of the forty tyrants. Okay, that was like
Speaker 3: Gestapo shit, they're pulling people out of their house at
Speaker 3: night and they're disappearing. And meantime, some of those people
Speaker 3: were his relatives. So he says in his second letter,
Speaker 3: he's like, or a Seventh Letter, I was poised for
Speaker 3: a life in politics, and I walked away. I said,
Speaker 3: I'm going into philosophy. And then, you know, for anybody
Speaker 3: that's interested in really getting getting inside his his history,
Speaker 3: I would recommend reading the Seventh Letter as well. But
Speaker 3: I think that's that's really what we're talking about here.
Speaker 3: When you look at like any organization is capable of atrocities,
Speaker 3: but it's usually the smaller and at the beginning period
Speaker 3: it's very very I would say that's when it's probably
Speaker 3: most pure. But at the end of the day, like
Speaker 3: nothing's really ever at its beginning period, we're all evolving
Speaker 3: out of something else. And I think I could go
Speaker 3: on about the neoplatonic stuff, but I feel like I'm
Speaker 3: beating a dead horse. So maybe maybe I hear from PD.
Speaker 1: Well, you mentioned the Seventh Letter, and it's legitimacy and
Speaker 1: beyond the testimonials, it's really the best source for uh
Speaker 1: clear evidence of what the Tubingen School calls the unwritten doctrines.
Speaker 1: You know that that there is this is esoteric, as
Speaker 1: Plato's dialogues are, there is an esoteric component that was
Speaker 1: taught only within the academy. And we really get the
Speaker 1: best picture of that from the seventh the seventh Letter,
Speaker 1: and it lines up a lot with the Parmenides, because
Speaker 1: you know Plato, there's so much emphasis placed on the forms,
Speaker 1: but even in the Parmenides he allows himself to doubt
Speaker 1: the existence of the forms. But what comes in place
Speaker 1: of that isn't really spelled out until the seventh Letter,
Speaker 1: and it's what is referred to as the principles, and
Speaker 1: that it's a lot like with Empedocles. Empedocles has his
Speaker 1: four roots, which are the source of our elements in
Speaker 1: the West. Now, in modern magical traditions, it's often juxtaposed
Speaker 1: against the planets. The planets are up there, the elements
Speaker 1: are down here. For Empedocles, that wasn't the case. His
Speaker 1: roots are are very similar to Plato's forms. He identifies
Speaker 1: them with gods. Fire is Zeus, and water is Persephone,
Speaker 1: Hera is air. So they're not the elements as the
Speaker 1: building blocks of the world in kind of the way
Speaker 1: the atomists might have thought about it, even though they
Speaker 1: weren't thinking in terms of elements. But in addition to
Speaker 1: these four ruling roots, you have two factors, love and strife,
Speaker 1: that are constantly pushing and pulling the world apart. When
Speaker 1: love rules, everything comes together and we what we get
Speaker 1: is something like the Parmiti parmid Parmenidean one. Right, there's
Speaker 1: no there's no space. With these everything is is one changes.
Speaker 1: But when strife rules, we enter a picture more akin
Speaker 1: too Heraclitis's cosmos, where everything is changed, everything is kind
Speaker 1: of being pushed apart and expelling each other. Well, with
Speaker 1: the seventh letter we get the first peak at these
Speaker 1: unwritten doctrines, which are essentially Pythagorean his his Paris and
Speaker 1: a perion, which is is limit and limitlessness, limit being
Speaker 1: kin to the mona, the one, the Parmenidean idea, and
Speaker 1: then limitlessness being what has been called the indefinite diad.
Speaker 1: I think is what Aristotle calls it and his testimonial
Speaker 1: the the indefinite diad, which is the source of all multiplicity.
Speaker 1: And so what we're really looking at is similar to
Speaker 1: to Olympiodorus's reading of the story of of segraeis of
Speaker 1: Dionysius when he's he's ripped apart by the Titans. Zegraeis
Speaker 1: reperence paros limit, He's one, the one, you know, but
Speaker 1: the Titans, who Olympiodorus says, because of the t and
Speaker 1: Titan the t i, which which means in Greek something specific,
Speaker 1: something separate. So so separateness rips the one apart and
Speaker 1: dismembers the one. And now we get the the indefinite
Speaker 1: diad that creates complete multiplicity in the world. And I
Speaker 1: don't want to go far off into that because it's
Speaker 1: it's a deep, deep weight. But but to Ike's point, yes,
Speaker 1: that that alone is enough to make the seventh letter
Speaker 1: more valid than the rest of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's if you look at the Pythagorean upsilon, right,
Speaker 3: which would look like our why our letter? Why this
Speaker 3: is this this sort of triform a crossroads is this
Speaker 3: was a pedagogical sort of device, a symbolic kind of
Speaker 3: device for teaching the right or the left path, okay,
Speaker 3: particularly in in in Pythagoreanism. And we can liken these
Speaker 3: two like the path of return in the path of separateness,
Speaker 3: which have to do On the one hand, the path
Speaker 3: of separateness is selfishness, right, because we're conly identifying with
Speaker 3: self rather than all the the and the one, right.
Speaker 3: And then another one is sacrifice, which which we're constantly
Speaker 3: working for the one, and so we're we're I don't
Speaker 3: know how like technical I should get, but this idea
Speaker 3: that Proclus talks about, this reversion of of of all
Speaker 3: cycles revert upon themselves, and that's what the Pythagorean question
Speaker 3: is kind of trying to answer, is like, in this reversion,
Speaker 3: you know, do we do we stop and revert towards
Speaker 3: the one or do we see it because we all
Speaker 3: see it and then keep going the direction we were
Speaker 3: going in further further out until we're eventually pulled down
Speaker 3: to the furthest nature and then has to come back up.
Speaker 3: And what's really interesting, and I'll end on this is
Speaker 3: I guess this is like cool trivia, but you know,
Speaker 3: I'm in good company here. I like etymology. You have
Speaker 3: monas or or write the monad or end the one.
Speaker 3: They're different, but really monas in this in this case
Speaker 3: is uh the one, the monad the whole unity and
Speaker 3: the second thing, Yeah, you get the das or dad diad,
Speaker 3: which is separateness and an eternal tension or not eternal
Speaker 3: but unresolved tension, right, the indefinite tension. The root of
Speaker 3: that word dia is the root of the Latin word
Speaker 3: diavolos for devil.
Speaker 4: Nice nice. And I also want to bring it back
Speaker 4: to even Nick's very first question is like, how do
Speaker 4: how do we see this coming up in our magical
Speaker 4: traditions for today and everything like that. And I think
Speaker 4: it's really important to know that Plato and all these
Speaker 4: characters that we're talking about war initiates of the illusion
Speaker 4: mystery schools as well as other mystery schools of that time,
Speaker 4: right Plato is you know, Pythagorean at that same time
Speaker 4: as well, And these mystery schools are bringing upon the
Speaker 4: allegories and myths of right Persephone going into again what
Speaker 4: the underworld as we keep hitting on and being stuck
Speaker 4: there because she ate of the pomegranate fruit, and then
Speaker 4: you know, we're trying to express and understand these lesser
Speaker 4: and greater mysteries of how the cyclical nature, the cyclical
Speaker 4: cycles of nature are moving just like this. It's that
Speaker 4: internal understanding of the allegory of the tripartite soul, and
Speaker 4: how these cyclical natures of our own soul are you know,
Speaker 4: you know, transmigrating from one time to the next, and
Speaker 4: then they move on through the mystery schools of the ages,
Speaker 4: that golden thread that spreads itself to the many myriads
Speaker 4: of individuals, even on this panel, as we practice our
Speaker 4: own magical traditions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I've heard, I've heard pd you you've referred
Speaker 3: to this particular brain right, because here's the thing. You
Speaker 3: can you can generically refer to magic as as initiation,
Speaker 3: but I don't think that's accurate. I think magic, you know,
Speaker 3: theorgy is specifically the application of the techniques and technologogies
Speaker 3: of magic to the end of the the purification, elevation
Speaker 3: and illumination of the soul. Okay, whereas like not everybody
Speaker 3: uses is it for that? But but the originy is
Speaker 3: particularly working in that dimension, which gives us the initiatory
Speaker 3: schools like the Golden Dawn orm Soul is all claiming
Speaker 3: to do that. So I think it's important, it's interesting
Speaker 3: to talk about. But I think PDA has a very
Speaker 3: unique perspective, specifically because of his work with the you
Speaker 3: just work with so many different sort of I guess
Speaker 3: what we could call them, like shamanic cultures where there's
Speaker 3: a descent and an ascent, or you've said to me
Speaker 3: before in private conversation, the descent is the ascent. But
Speaker 3: I've heard you also talk about what it is that
Speaker 3: you're interested in as models of ascent. So maybe you
Speaker 3: could talk a little bit about that in terms of
Speaker 3: Platonism or how would you how would you define models
Speaker 3: of ascent?
Speaker 1: Really, I think what makes a model a system real
Speaker 1: is the suspension of non belief and the application of
Speaker 1: belief to it. If we look at, for instance, the
Speaker 1: picture of the subtle body in Taoism, there are multiple, right,
Speaker 1: because there are multiple systems of that. You know this
Speaker 1: from your work with Chinese medicine. Yeah, there are multiple
Speaker 1: subtle bodies, whether we're talking about martial arts, acupuncture. But
Speaker 1: if we compare that subtle body to the multiple subtle
Speaker 1: bodies in Hinduism and yoga. We're so familiar with the
Speaker 1: septinary chakra system, but there are so many chakra systems
Speaker 1: depending on who you're learning from there. Some have ten,
Speaker 1: some have eight, some have three, you know, and so
Speaker 1: when we compare these pictures of the soul and the
Speaker 1: cosmos in which these traditions tell us these souls exist.
Speaker 1: Who's right?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Do we take the lowest common denominator and say this
Speaker 1: is right? Or do accept the fact that the soul
Speaker 1: is so mercurial that it takes on whatever we believe
Speaker 1: to be true.
Speaker 11: Right?
Speaker 1: And I don't want to get into the territory of
Speaker 1: chaos magic. You know, I respect people who practice chaos magic,
Speaker 1: but that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying we
Speaker 1: can take anything and make it a divine practice. There's
Speaker 1: something special in that, and saying that there is a
Speaker 1: sanctity in that, but that's not to be clear, That's
Speaker 1: not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is with each
Speaker 1: of these traditions, we we we meet them on their
Speaker 1: own terms, and this is this is what this is
Speaker 1: how phenomenology works, how we move between emic and etic
Speaker 1: perspectives of a thing. We have to take it at
Speaker 1: its own word and say, okay, uh, let's let's fly
Speaker 1: this plane right now and see where you can get.
Speaker 1: So when I'm when I say i'm I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: models of assent, what I'm I'm really saying is not
Speaker 1: how are they similar, but how are they different? And
Speaker 1: why is it that they all work? Once we suspend
Speaker 1: disbelief and apply magical fuel of of belief to the practice,
Speaker 1: then all of the sudden again the soul becomes the
Speaker 1: mercurial thing Young said it was. It can it can
Speaker 1: be anything, and it's really our imagination. And I don't
Speaker 1: mean like Fantasia, and I mean I mean the ochema,
Speaker 1: the soul vehicle, which is in Neoplatonism, the seat of
Speaker 1: our imagination. When when when you look at somebody like
Speaker 1: Young or Henry Corbon and they're talking about active imagination,
Speaker 1: they're getting that term from the neoplatonists because there's a
Speaker 1: passive imagination, which is the daydreaming faculty. But then there's
Speaker 1: an active imagination which comes about through purification of the soul.
Speaker 1: And this speaks to what I was say in a
Speaker 1: moment ago about about how we define things. When we
Speaker 1: see the word initiation in a text that's been translated
Speaker 1: from the Greek, what they're usually translating is teleta telotate
Speaker 1: does initiation means the beginning of a thing? Telltate is
Speaker 1: its telos, the completion, the perfection of it, so that
Speaker 1: what we're really talking about initiation is more akin to Catharsis,
Speaker 1: to the initial purification of the soul that's necessary for
Speaker 1: it to you know, to borrow from a Buddhist term,
Speaker 1: to become that clean mirror of the dharma that will
Speaker 1: literally reflect whatever world we can conceive, because at the
Speaker 1: in the final analysis, we're not creatures like we think
Speaker 1: we are. You know, when when we say when we
Speaker 1: say we we can unite with a God, we're not
Speaker 1: saying we can hug them. We're saying that we can
Speaker 1: remember that we are them choosing to participate in this
Speaker 1: kind of an experience and for whatever reason we can
Speaker 1: s I think it probably has a lot to do
Speaker 1: with the existential boredom that arises from being the one thing.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't know who or what we are
Speaker 1: until someone shows us to ourselves. So imagine being the
Speaker 1: one there's no no environment, you're not in a room,
Speaker 1: there's not a second, and you could say, well, God's
Speaker 1: all knowing, it says in the Bible He's omniscient. But
Speaker 1: this great theologian Orthodox elogian, John Scotus or Eugena, he says,
Speaker 1: what the fuck are you talking about God doesn't know anything.
Speaker 1: Knowledge implies duality. There has to be a knower, a known,
Speaker 1: and the knowledge between them. He's like, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: God's stupid, but whatever knowledge is, it's the province of man.
Speaker 1: So how do you, as the one, acquire self knowledge
Speaker 1: except to sacrifice yourself, dismember yourself.
Speaker 12: And and you show me I I can get a
Speaker 12: degree of self knowledge through interacting with each of you,
Speaker 12: because each of you are the one.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not this this uh. I think that's
Speaker 1: what I Amblicus is really getting at that. And Shawl
Speaker 1: really spells that in his book on Hellenistic Tantra where
Speaker 1: he compares it to aban Avagupta's tantras, that this is it.
Speaker 1: And so when Ike says, you know that the the
Speaker 1: ascent is the decent, the ascent is the descent. We're
Speaker 1: not ascending or descending. These are these are geocentric pictures
Speaker 1: of how the world works. Like Sunra says, when you
Speaker 1: get out in space, there's no up or down. You've
Speaker 1: got to be on a planet to have an up
Speaker 1: or down. You know, it's it's useful while we're here
Speaker 1: doing this thing. We're doing but the ascent is the
Speaker 1: the acent is the decent when when when we go up,
Speaker 1: it's really because the gods come down, but no motion
Speaker 1: has taken place. It's this right here is the this
Speaker 1: holy meeting ground between one thing, not two things. If
Speaker 1: that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, beautifully put, beautifully put, I would I would say,
Speaker 3: maybe we could, Like my my thoughts are, where do
Speaker 3: you see traces of this? Like that's what I want
Speaker 3: to know. Where do you see traces of this kind
Speaker 3: of stuff in Plato? Because we're you know, we're familiar
Speaker 3: with the neoplatonic elaboration of this stuff. They sort of,
Speaker 3: you know, if Plato gave us a house, they turned
Speaker 3: it into a mansion by adding rooms and kitchens and
Speaker 3: things like this. So one thing that I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 3: I'm always interested in in understanding is you know Proclus
Speaker 3: calls I think it's his commentary on Euclid, I think,
Speaker 3: but I'm pretty sure he calls Plato a mysticgog, very
Speaker 3: different than of philosophy. He calls him a mysticgog like
Speaker 3: a hiero fat somebody who reveals the mysteries. Do you
Speaker 3: think it was just this.
Speaker 9: Kind of.
Speaker 3: You know, feedback looped evolution in some way of Plato?
Speaker 3: Do you or do you think they were do you
Speaker 3: think that they were putting things in there that were,
Speaker 3: you know, stretched a little way, a little ways away
Speaker 3: from what we see when we look at the Platonic dialogues,
Speaker 3: you know, because basically what I'm trying to ask is,
Speaker 3: do you see evidence for the neoplatonic worldviews of somebody
Speaker 3: like Iamlichus Proclus Platinus in the actual Platonic dialogues or
Speaker 3: did they just kind of do you think that they
Speaker 3: just put bells and whistles on a Christmas tree, you know,
Speaker 3: so to speak, to put adorning it with these things
Speaker 3: that weren't necessarily organically there. I'm just curious because I've
Speaker 3: never we've never talked about that.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a good question, a valid question. I
Speaker 1: think what we're seeing with with the neo Platonic readings
Speaker 1: of Plato and their commentaries is a group of very
Speaker 1: profound thinkers pushing a text to its limits. I don't
Speaker 1: think they're inserting that aren't there. I think they're they're
Speaker 1: finding readings that we can't confirm or dispute because it's
Speaker 1: valid right there there reading is valid whether it's there
Speaker 1: or not. Uh, we can't say, and I'll tell you why,
Speaker 1: because we don't know what Plato thought. Plato. Plato put
Speaker 1: all all of these different perspectives in the mouths of
Speaker 1: other people, you know. And that's the beauty of the
Speaker 1: dialogue is that it allows dialectic to emerge through the
Speaker 1: interaction of these oppositional perspectives. But as far as what
Speaker 1: Plato himself thought, we don't have a fucking clue what
Speaker 1: Plato thought, you know. All we can do is read
Speaker 1: the dialogues. And that's why I say it's not up
Speaker 1: to us to determine whether the Neoplatonists readings are valid,
Speaker 1: because we're doing the same thing. We're walking away with
Speaker 1: our best perception of what they're saying, and we ourselves
Speaker 1: push these texts to their limit, even if we try
Speaker 1: to limit them and say that stuff's not in there,
Speaker 1: because we can't know that. We can't know what Plato's
Speaker 1: saying himself.
Speaker 8: And to your point, you consistently see over and over
Speaker 8: Plato saying He's like, well, I don't know anything. I'm
Speaker 8: just asking.
Speaker 11: Questions, you know, in.
Speaker 8: True Socratic method, and he's breaking things down to the
Speaker 8: essence of what the forms are, to the point that
Speaker 8: a lot of times when they get done with the conversation,
Speaker 8: the person will be like, well, I don't know what
Speaker 8: I believe anymore or what I thought I.
Speaker 6: Believe and did not know that like the.
Speaker 8: But that is that is the logical you know, as
Speaker 8: far as the logical structure of logic, rhetoric and fallacy
Speaker 8: that I think kind of comes forth into again the
Speaker 8: Christ phenomena calling himself the truth in the way and
Speaker 8: the light, you know, so he is he is you know,
Speaker 8: uh in a synchron that in a synchronistic matter, kind
Speaker 8: of bringing this this idea of truth into the modern death.
Speaker 8: And and he's claiming lineage from before the time of
Speaker 8: the Temple priest back to Maki's deck in order to
Speaker 8: you know, avert and go back to the original forms
Speaker 8: of ascended you know, thinking, I don't know.
Speaker 1: If you're familiar with the work of Gomerkin, he recently
Speaker 1: passed away, fairly recently, I mean, I think it's been
Speaker 1: a year or two years year, I think, But he
Speaker 1: was involved in this this Copenhagen conference with a number
Speaker 1: of other presenters that really pissed a lot of people off,
Speaker 1: especially Orthodox Jews, because they're using textual evidence to try
Speaker 1: and determine whether or not the Jewish writings have been antedated,
Speaker 1: and if they have, what's their actual date. And if
Speaker 1: we can determine their actual date, does that tell us
Speaker 1: anything about where some of these ideas.
Speaker 8: And that's yeah, when you get into the early as
Speaker 8: far as the first five books of the Torah in
Speaker 8: the church coming out and saying these are the books
Speaker 8: of Moses, you know Voltaire, he argues and shows all
Speaker 8: and he says, you know, they're not brought up in
Speaker 8: the Psalms, they're not brought up in any of the
Speaker 8: past you know, texts, and so they just kind of
Speaker 8: it's like, yeah, as far as the dating of these things,
Speaker 8: and when these things came and there's.
Speaker 1: A new Manius, he makes this statement, he says, what
Speaker 1: is what is Plato? But Moses speaking Attic Greek, right,
Speaker 1: and he's he's Numinius is subtle, like he's making a
Speaker 1: point there and what and and that point speaks to
Speaker 1: what Gamerican conclusions are that that rabbis in exile encountered
Speaker 1: the writings of Plato, probably at the Library of Alexandria,
Speaker 1: and those writings, particularly were the Timaeus and the Laws,
Speaker 1: and whether or not the Torah existed in some form
Speaker 1: prior to that. He demonstrates it argues very very well
Speaker 1: that if it did exist, it was rewritten after the
Speaker 1: encounter with Plato. Plato's work after their encounter with Hellenism,
Speaker 1: which explains why we get something like a mercaba. You know,
Speaker 1: a soul, the sole chariot that has no precedent other
Speaker 1: than the okeema, which means chariot. And it's this sole vehicle, right,
Speaker 1: so lots of problems there, if you know.
Speaker 2: What I mean yours.
Speaker 11: Look into the darkness, find the blazing star. Focus on
Speaker 11: it would be called the eclipse. Don't feel that you should?
Speaker 1: We do?
Speaker 11: Oh?
Speaker 9: Isn't beat to turn?
Speaker 1: All?
Speaker 3: Every game?
Speaker 1: I never have him