Seeds
For some reason hidden in your justified enthusiasm of wanting to help lift humanity out of Plato’s cave, you cannot seem to recognize (as I have suggested elsewhere) that your theology forms the basis of one of the most exclusive religions I have ever heard of.
What is wrong with that? According to Buddhism, how many become a Buddha? Don’t the vast majority continue on the wheel of Samsara and reincarnate in forms rarely with the evolutionary potential of a human being? Such exclusivity may not be PC but what if it is true. Does it really matter if the secularists who worship the Great Beast object?
“The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.” ~ Meister Eckhart
Man is dual natured. If the God seed is within us and is destroyed by our outer shell through lack of nourishment, why does it seem so odd?
Please explain what you mean by “duality” in the context of your statement above. How are humans living in “duality”?
Every created act or action is a union of three forces of various but complimentary qualities: Yang (active) Yin (passive) and Qi (reconciling yin and yang. The hidden third is what allows enables life on earth. A person may will one thing, experience resistance and nothing is created. Normally this reconciling force manifests on the same level as yin and yang producing ever changing unities. Organic life continues the process of existence in this way. Qi reconciles extremes from a higher conscious level of quality which is what enables the experience of intuition. Without the awareness of the presence and potential for Qi, we live in duality only aware of the interplay between yes and no, or the male female principles.
In which case, the only thing you seem to be offering is some kind of symbolic “logo” for your metaphysics – a metaphysics that is filled to the brim with criticisms of cave consciousness, but empty of any tangible means of escaping the cave.
Diagnosing a problem isn’t a criticism. If the human condition has made it so that we live in imagination attached to shadows on the wall and completely oblivious to objective human meaning and purpose and the potential for human “being,” isn’t it worth the effort? Transcending the cave influence is called consciously awakening. If it were impossible than it would be cruel to bring it up. But the reality is that awakening is possible but not wanted. Imagination is too attractive. The first step consists of impartial efforts to “know thyself” or having the experience of ourselves. But how many even know what it means and that it is entirely different from introspection. Efforts to “Know Thyself” consist of having the conscious experience of oneself without judgment. Who wants that? Our dominant ego prefers to “Imagine Oneself.” How is the God seed supposed to grow if imagination denies the help of grace? A green plant cannot survive without sunlight so how can the God seed be expected to grow without the energy from the light of grace? When Jesus said “Let the dead bury their dead,” he was referring to the spiritually dead burying the physically dead.
You need to provide some substantive and well fleshed-out answers to Arising_uk’s query of what needs to be taught to the children in order to set them on your extremely “narrow path” to becoming cosmic man.
A human being and in this case a student consists of a lower animal part which normally lives our lives and a higher part with the potential to open to conscious awareness. For the healthy development of the lower parts, the human organism needs what Plato called a healthy “Metaxy” This provides our normal physical needs as well as the quality of ideas which awaken the intellect, and the quality of art which awakens us to emotional quality and the experience of wonder. Finally, a healthy body allows us to put the results of a healthy metaxy into practice
SOCRATES: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher; for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. (Plato, Theaetetus 155c-d, tr. Jowett; "wonder" in Aristotle.)
But in which sense of the word 'wonder'? What is 'philosophic wondering'?
According to Plato, perplexity is the origin of philosophy; G.E. Moore agreed, as did Wittgenstein, but perhaps not Immanuel Kant ("Two things fill us with awe: the starry sky above and the moral law within"). In Plato's Apology the oracle of Apollo at Delphi gives Socrates special reason to wonder in philosophy.
A human being is analogous to a green plant. Its roots are fed by a healthy soil and its leaves are fed by sunlight. Man’s roots are nourished by a healthy socicty aware of its source and our higher parts are fed by grace if we allow it to enter.
The purpose of a human education would be to provide a healthy metaxy inspiring the human attraction to wholeness and teaching conscious attention as a means for opening to grace. In this way reason would become an expression of the balanced relationship between inductive and deductive logic. A teacher capable of leading this quality of education would be capable of what Plato describes.
There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject [of a certain teaching]. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.” Plato, Seventh Letter
None of this is possible anymore in secular schools. Dominant blind emotional denial prevents it. That is why I am in favor of private schools founded on sound knowledge of human “being” and how to allow the outer man not only serve society but care for the seed of the soul.