Buddha

The image that stays with me at the end of Karen Armstrong's Buddha is Ananda's tears. Ananda was Siddhatta Gotama's cousin and one of his earliest followers, accompanying Gotama through his long career. But Ananda did not reach enlightenment during the Buddha's life, and he openly wept when he realized that his friend Gotama had finally laid down to die. "When the Buddha heard about Ananda's tears, he sent for him. 'That is enough, Ananda,' he said. 'Don't be sorrowful; don't grieve.' Had he not explained, over and over again, that nothing was permanent but that separation was the law of life? 'And Ananda,' the Buddha concluded, 'for years you have waited on me with constant love and kindness. You have taken care of my physical needs, and have supported me in all your words and thought. You have done all this to help me, joyfully and with your whole heart. You have earned merit, Ananda. Keep trying, and soon you will be enlightened, too.'" So why, in a book about the Buddha, is it Ananda that I most admire? Why does he feel more fully human?

This is my third time through Buddha, and even though it is a slender book trying to capture the life of Siddhattha Gotama, it spoke more to me now than through my first two readings. Of course, trying to judge the accuracy of the book when Gotama's life is shrouded in even more legend and mystery than most biblical characters is virtually impossible. The first written accounts come at least 400 years after he died, and estimates for the dates of his life range from as early as about 570 to as late as 400 BCE. A number of historians question whether he even existed. From what little I know, however, Armstrong's take on his life seems a good place to start.

I especially appreciate her characterization of the social and intellectual milieu of the “Gangetic plains” around the time of Gotama's life. Developing iron age technologies allowed for the cultivation of more land and the production of surplus grains, stimulating trade and an increase in wealth. New social conditions called for increasing specialization, a growing merchant class, and a much more mobile society. These conditions set in motion a growing dissatisfaction with the established Vedic tradition that emphasized social caste, animal sacrifice and Brahmanic domination of ritual. "Since [the] new men fit less and less easily into the caste system, many of them felt that they had been pushed into a spiritual vacuum."

Two main trends began to fill the void. Along the western areas of the Ganges, thinkers reinterpreted the Vedic texts and ideas as emphasizing individual spiritual realization. These ideas eventually coalesced into the Upanishads, giving rise to Vedanta and other schools of Hindu thought. In the forests to the east of the Ganges, more emphasis was put on spiritual liberation through renunciation of the householder's life, living in small communities (sanghas) of beggar monks, and engaging in extreme ascetic or yogic practices.

The spiritual anomie caused by disillusionment with traditional answers reflected a much broader spiritual crisis and awakening during the first century B.C.E. that Armstrong, following Karl Jaspers, calls the Axial Age. Traditional ritualistic religions gradually yielded to ideas of individual responsibility, guilt and salvation in different areas of the world from about 700 to 200 BCE, giving rise to Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, the Hebrew prophets and the Ionian enlightenment. "The Axial Age marks the beginning of humanity as we know it. During this period, men and women became conscious of their own existence, their own nature and their limitations in an unprecedented way. Their experience of utter impotence in a cruel world impelled them to seek the highest goals and absolute reality in the depths of their being.” This concept of the Axial Age has been roundly criticized by a number of historians as overlooking too many differences between the different traditions and encompassing too broad a span of time to be meaningful, but a number of other scholars, notably Robert Bellah and Jurgen Habermas, have found the idea to be useful in exploring the nature and evolution of religious practices.

The Buddha's message, then, begins with the "inescapable reality of pain"--dukkha. It is the first of the Four Noble Truths--"suffering...informs the whole of human life." The cause of our suffering comes from desire, which "makes us grab or cling to things that can never give lasting satisfaction." These were common assumptions among the forest monks, but Gotama said that the way out--Nirvana--was not through the extreme ascetic or yogic practices which he had tried and eventually abandoned but through a "middle way"--the eightfold path--that emphasized morality, meditation, and wisdom. Gotama taught techniques of mindfulness and awareness that stressed intense examination of thoughts, emotions and actions, leading to realization of the truths of anicca (impermanence), anatta (non-self)--the ego and the self had no reality but were just streams of sensations and thoughts held together out of fear. Contrary to other schools of thought, Gotama did not posit an eternal Self or soul or any other kind of metaphysical entity. (One recent commentator stated, "The Buddha was an atheist. There's no getting around it.") Nor did he insist on the infallibility of any of his teachings. His Dhamma (instructions or methods) were to be judged only by their consequences--how well they worked. But he felt that the monks who followed his path would find that "by meditation, concentration, mindfulness and a disciplined detachment from the world...it was possible to live in this world of pain, at peace, in control and in harmony with oneself and the rest of creation."

Which brings me back to Ananda’s tears. Since all living beings suffer, Gotama extended his compassion to the four corners of the universe, but it was a “wholly disinterested benevolence, “an attitude of total equanimity,” which “demanded that he abandon all personal preference.” Here was the one man, Ananda, who had accompanied Gotama on his journeys for over 40 years, shedding tears for the loss of his beloved companion and teacher, and the Buddha chided Ananda for his grief, in essence saying to him, you still don’t get it, do you. Gotama could not deal with his best friend’s sorrow (well, ok, he did not allow himself to have a bff), and that’s where Mr. Gotama and I begin to part company.

I have been a fellow traveller with Buddhism for, what, close to 45 years now. I have had a great affinity for the ideas of Buddhism, especially the radical agnosticism that seems to underlie much of Buddhist thought. Anatta and anicca seem to be truths that fit comfortably with the findings of science and can even accommodate the weirdness of quantum mechanics. As I keep track of the current debates over personal responsibility with the current findings of neuroscience, Buddhism made the same points about 2500 years ago. Gotama could have agreed with Michael Gazzaniga's "left brained interpreter that is coming up with the theory, the narrative and the self image, taking the information from various inputs, from the neuronal workspace, and from the knowledge structures, and gluing it together, thus creating the self, the autobiography, out of the chaos of input." And, certainly, as I grow older, the concept of dukkha fits with the decay and the suffering of old age.

But I never took my Buddhism to the next level, to that of practice, and as Armstrong really makes clear to me this time, it don't mean jack shit until then. Ideas don't mean nothing in the Buddhist scheme of things until they have been thoroughly and totally assimilated through the full acceptance and practice of the Eightfold path and the incorporation of samadhi, jhana, and praja--meditation, concentration, and wisdom. Only those people who have taken the vows to triple refuge--to the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha--can hope to get there. "The full Dhamma was possible only for monks---the Noble Truths were not for laymen; they had to be "realized" and this direct knowledge could not be realized without yoga, which was essential to the full Buddhist regimen....the laity were never able to graduate to serious yoga." The "full Buddhist regimen," then, eventually means "going forth" (taking the vows) and renunciation of the self--a renunciation of who I am and what I have stood for. And that ain't going to happen.

I guess when it comes down to it, my Buddhism has been more about self actualization rather than self renunciation. It's been more related to sports psychology or the path of achievement than to the eightfold path, more about trying to remove limitations, doubts, negativity than about acknowledging suffering and seeking release. I wanted more tools in my mental arsenal to help me deal with my own problems. I don’t want to give up my best friends, my goals, my values, my personality

Perhaps it’s my inability to accept the centrality of suffering as the main fact of life. Armstrong begins her narrative of Gotama's life with the premise that, "the spiritual life cannot begin until people allow themselves to be invaded by the reality of suffering, realizing how fully it permeates our whole experience, and feel the pain of all other beings." Or as paraphrased by Diarmaid McCulloch in his review of The Great Transformation, "Life is a bastard, and then you die."

Well, frankly, I've spent the better part of my life trying to hide that little nastiness from myself. You would have thought that wallowing around in my own shallow mediocrity would have driven that point home by now, but somehow I've managed to keep hold of the hope that life is good, still trying to escape the limitations that time, place, age, and circumstance have laid on me, trying to be better than I am even though the energy and the physical presence have inevitably started draining away. It's kind of like what Waldo (Mr. Emerson) said as he came towards the end of his life, "One of these days, before I die, I still believe I shall do better." Probably it's all delusion. Or as my man Michael (Mr. Montaigne) might have said, I'm really pretty fucking lucky to have gotten this far, I guess, without undue suffering and hardship. It doesn't feel very noble or heroic, but well, it’s all I’ve got. "I grow old...I grow old..."

So, I guess I'll continue to be a fellow traveler, and maybe even spend more time on my zafu, waiting for my meditation app to tell me that I've done enough for the day. But I have no hopes about reaching any kind of enlightenment, and a whole lot of doubts about how desirable it even is. I'll just kind of muddle along and grow older and suffer--and then die, as confused about it as ever. So be it.

Self Reliance

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. loc: 7416

Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; loc: 7417

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. loc: 7421

is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; loc: 7426

nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. loc: 7449

But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. loc: 7453

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. loc: 7459

would be a man must be a nonconformist. loc: 7463

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. loc: 7464

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. loc: 7468

truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. loc: 7475

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim loc: 7477

Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. loc: 7494

I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. loc: 7496

you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. loc: 7498

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. loc: 7498

objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. loc: 7501

But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. loc: 7504

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. loc: 7509

There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. loc: 7513

nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. loc: 7517

the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. loc: 7520

other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. loc: 7526

Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? loc: 7529

foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? loc: 7534

will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, loc: 7547

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. loc: 7550

Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. loc: 7551

Be it how it will, do right now. loc: 7552

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you, and all men, and all events. loc: 7562

Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much, that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. loc: 7566

magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? loc: 7592

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. loc: 7595

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. loc: 7599

We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. loc: 7601

Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. loc: 7613

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. loc: 7618

is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. loc: 7621

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time. loc: 7625

If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. loc: 7633

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. loc: 7638

The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. loc: 7642

only avails, not the having lived. loc: 7646

This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. loc: 7647

is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. loc: 7655

Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. loc: 7659

we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. loc: 7676

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. loc: 7682

But so you may give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. loc: 7688

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. loc: 7705

We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. loc: 7709

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. loc: 7731

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. loc: 7739

Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. loc: 7741

men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. loc: 7747

The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology, as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind. loc: 7754

But in all unbalanced minds, the classification is idolized, passes for the end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. loc: 7756

In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still, loc: 7764

He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, loc: 7770

At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. loc: 7773

The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. loc: 7778

on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; loc: 7786

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. loc: 7791

never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. loc: 7798

civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. loc: 7805

The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; loc: 7808

No greater men are now than ever were. loc: 7813

is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them. loc: 7826

so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. loc: 7828

a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, loc: 7831

Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. loc: 7836

It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. loc: 7840

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. loc: 7849

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S AXIAL AGE: ORIGINS AND ETHICS

• The Heythrop Journal
  
  
  
  • Monotheism emerged among the Jews, the philosophical foundations of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism were laid down in northern India; Confucianism and Daoism appeared in China, while the Western intellectual tradition began in Greece

  
  
  • her feeling that the world religions hit upon something profound and true in their inception – in the Axial Age – but have since ossified in unfortunate ways. That something is ethics, no less – and not much more. This, in turn, can be condensed as the Golden Rule:

  
  
  • all the Axial teachers insisted that kindness should not be guided by kinship or kingship; everyone now belonged to the great tribe of the suffering

  
  
  • most other scholars have located it in something called the ‘transcendentalist breakthrough’

  
  
  • Eisenstadt has defined the transcendentalist breakthrough as the erection of two sharply distinguished orders of reality and modes of behaviour. This is indeed a powerful way of lending coherence to the apparently disparate ancient philosophies.

  
  
  • Once could condense her story thus: the religious vision of the early civilizations was on the whole quite benign – before climate change, increasing competition for land and the arrival of charioteer nomads brought cataclysm. A dark age followed and the religious imagination darkened too. Warrior gods come to the fore, myths revealed the power of chaos to tear apart human society or were structured by agonistic struggle

  
  
  • traditional means of ameliorating and explaining suffering through ritual and myth must also come to seem inadequate.

  
  
  • pain appears to be equated with an anxiety about impermanence

  
  
  • urbanization, growing trade, introduction of new metals, formation of state power

  
  
  • reality was now outstripping the old rites and old stories simply too quickly.

  
  
  • An answer could be found in a vision of the transcendent, which floats free and serene above ‘reality’ by virtue of its ineffability

  
  
  • Change was not only witnessed in people's lifetimes, it was also being tracked over generations thanks to the new technologies of memorization: literacy or exacting methods of oral repetition.

  
  
  • The relativizing powers of historical consciousness were unleashed.

  
  
  • Thus the Axial Age: the pursuit of meaning not the practice of ritual – because just doing the rituals doesn't work any more; inwardness not exteriority – because we have mastery over our minds but little else; challenge not status quo – because the status quo is obviously deficient; ethics not law – because the law is the creature of power. These indicate a loss of faith in man's ability to better himself through mundane activity. This is also a loss of faith in politics.

  
  
  • As Karl Jaspers recognized, all occur in ‘an interregnum between two great ages of empire, a pause for liberty, a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness’– between the collapse of the Zhou dynasty and the unification of the warring states under the Qin in China, between Harappan civilization and the Mauryan empire in India, between Mycenae and Alexander in Greece.

  
  
  • Breakthroughs have therefore tended to emerge from the ruins of dead empires – or on the margins of ones that are very much alive.

  
  
  • demand for moral self-scrutiny

  
  
  • The warrior god was no longer merely fighting on behalf of his people but challenging them to fight their own evil within.

  
  
  • origins in collective rather than personal suffering, in the need to make sense of political disaster.

  
  
  • The Axial Age vision is the achievement of a new breed of peripatetic intellectual, who roamed this fragmented political landscape offering their minds for hire.

  
  
  • Already living outside the normal flow of life and its round of assumption and convenience, they then drew a breach across reality entire

  
  
  • the Greeks cannot seem to get beyond the First Noble Truth, determinedly staring into the abyss without straining to look up into the immensity above

  
  
  • Debate having become a spectator sport and a means to celebrity, any proposition inherited or invented now became subject to scrutiny, and the chains of reason abstract, dense and open-ended. The difference is that in India this dialogic exuberance was yoked to techniques of sustained introspection and altered consciousness: meditation and yoga. These brought not only cognitive illumination but a more wholesale transformation of being, a lightening of one's mortal load. This is why India's philosophical sea-change was poured into the vessel of religion. If here too reason brushed aside traditional habits of thought, it was to clear the ground for a fully-realized and intimately-explored vision of the transcendent.

  
  
  • the most analytically useful formulation of that breakthrough (as the conception of two sharply distinguished orders of reality and modes of behaviour) may not serve to define all the traditions. We have noted that this seems to be an awkward image to apply to Chinese philosophy, and some scholars of the Theravada would even object to the characterization of early Buddhism as a transcendentalist system, given its rejection of any form of absolutism. Moreover, the concept seems ultimately marginal to the Greek breakthrough.

  
  
  • her text does disclose a more profound connection between ethics and transcendence: it arises from what happens to the self. This is most clearly seen in the Indian tradition, a great deal of the logical energy of which was directed towards trying to grapple with the nature of consciousness – this thing at once ungraspable yet unavoidably fundamental,

  
  
  • all the Axial movements evince a sense that as soon as the self has been identified it has become something to worry about

  
  
  • One might say, that just as the self was discovered so too was mankind, which makes its first appearance here as an undifferentiated moral community.

  
  
  • all transcendentalisms have to destroy our normal understanding of life in order to imagine its continuation

  
  
  • But the logic is clear: one asserts that divine forms do exist and can be known, that our shadowy cave can be left behind for the light of the sun, but that since these things are entirely hidden from everyday life then apprehending them is not exactly like falling off a log. That task will fall to the moral and intellectual virtuosi, who will return to the cave with a unique authority: their account of reality is unimpeachable, and their desire to re-order it in accordance with their vision the most important message in the world.