[Socrates'] knowing how to live in the face of his ignorance is what the examined life is all about.
— Fooloso4
:fire: — 180 Proof

:fire: :fire: :fire:

Unfortunately, in many cases (though by no means all), it becomes a pseudo-spirituality (or ersatz religion) that is just a form of materialism by another name. — Apollodorus

And these people make more money in leading one retreat than you do in a year. Or ten years.
Not negligible.

Your opinions are not supported by the texts. You will never find Socrates boasting of anything. — Wayfarer

Meh. Those folks mastered the art of humility.
It is the mark of a plebeian mind to take things literally, to take them as if they were said straightforwardly, and not, perhaps, diplomatically.

George Lucas set the precedent.

“Fear is the path to the dark side … fear leads to anger … anger leads to hate … hate leads to suffering.”

And suffering is the prerequisite for nibbana! For nobody gets to nibbana unless they've suffered first.

From the egological point of view, the idea of a 'superior being' is always interpreted as a claim, and a threat, or as a power-structure. No doubt religious institutions have exploited this dynamic, as do political organisations and leaders.

Not just interpreted, but this is how the "spiritually advanced" so often behave.
There's a reason why that meme of Trump's head being photoshopped onto the body of a Theravada monk took hold.

But it ought not to be forgottten that in the Christian faith, the higher being manifested as a lowly indigent, in the person of Jesus, subject to all manner of insults and punishment by death.

God can incarnate in all kinds of forms. The incarnation that Christians prefer is just one of many.

You mean what if these forms of personal conviction really are higher knowledge of reality? My question is how that could ever be demonstrated or known to be true. How could you ever demonstrate that you know that to be true as opposed to believing it to be true? — Janus

Why would you need to demonstrate it?

If one had truly come to a spiritual attaiment, that would be the one knowledge, the one attainment that one would not feel the need to demonstrate to others.

but merely that they should be honest to both themselves and others and admit that it is a question of faith not knowledge (in the sense of being 'knowledge that' or propositional knowledge at least).

So what are you? The arbiter of other people's reality?

I think discipleship is for those who don't have the capacity/(ies) to inquire and think for themselves and practice in their own way (s); it's valid enough for them, but won't suit a freethinker. — Janus

Yet freethinking won't necessarily stop you from falling into an abyss, or save you from it.
Freethinking is no guarantee for success, in any field of endeavor.

evertheless if you practice it - and really Zen meditation is neither easy nor entertaining and very easy NOT to do - then those insights can become integrated into your outlook. Through that you can begin to understand the meaning of those teachings in a kind of embodied way. — Wayfarer

But what is the use of "understanding the meaning of those teachings in a kind of embodied way"?

You said elsewhere you have attained a "greater degree of equanimity, and a loosening of self-centredness" through your practice. I don't doubt that. But what is the use of those attainments?

None whatever, but thanks for asking.

People have always directly or indirectly managed their emotions through music (and this is its adaptive utility). And via managing their emotions, their worldview. — baker

Yes. I would have thought human emotional connection to sound and beat helped to build our original impulses. Not hard to see how sounds of nature, bird song and animal calls (representations of threats and pleasures) would have led to music which allowed us to intensify our sense of the numinous, hence chants, sacred song and hymns. And Mahler.

Then you're doing it wrong. There should be some use to them.

Yes. I would have thought human emotional connection to sound and beat helped to build our original impulses. Not hard to see how sounds of nature, bird song and animal calls (representations of threats and pleasures) would have led to music which allowed us to intensify our sense of the numinous, hence chants, sacred song and hymns. — Tom Storm

These things are culturally specific, though.
For example, we can't relate to Indian or Japanese music the way the natives do, the way they intend it.

And Mahler.

As interpreted by which conductor?

It's only for the select few. So you have nothing to fear

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it ... For many are called, but few are chosen ... (Matt 7:14; 22:14) — Apollodorus

This, however, points at the inherent unfairness of the situation.

So God created mostly scrap?? In his infinite goodness and wisdom, he chose that most of his creation should go to waste??

These things are culturally specific, though. — baker

Of course. Like so many things.

As interpreted by which conductor? — baker

Depends on the recording - I'm not a connoisseur.

A joke explained is a joke lost.

Sorry - stupid thing to say. What I mean to say is that the benefits of meditation don't have any utility beyond themselves. If you are practicing for some advantage or utilitarian reason, then 'you are doing it wrong'.

And these people make more money in leading one retreat than you do in a year. Or ten years.
Not negligible. — baker

Some of them, yes.

So God created mostly scrap?? In his infinite goodness and wisdom, he chose that most of his creation should go to waste?? — baker

1. God can do as he pleases.

2. Even scrap may serve a good purpose.

3. There is always the possibility of reincarnation.

I think a lot of philosophy of mind has been influenced by that - talk of ‘consciousness’ always seems to me to carry an echo of the Sanskrit ‘citta’. Also enactivism and the ‘embodied cognition’ movement has some Eastern influences. All part of life’s rich tapestry. — Wayfarer

Some influence is entirely conceivable. But I think it is in order to bear in mind a couple of things.

Business in India used to be done by the commercial class or caste (though even sannyasi orders were known to be engaged in commercial activities). But now everyone is into it and even yoga isn’t what it used to be. It has become a multi-billion dollar business even in India.

The other thing is that a lot of “yoga” is just a Western fantasy. The Indians will know exactly what kind of “customer” you are and will sell you anything you want. If they don’t have it, they will find, make or invent it for you on the spot.

In a way, it may be said that whilst India has “spiritualized” the West, the West has modernized, westernized, commercialized, and "despiritualized" India.

The scholars of modern yoga Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg comment that the globalisation of yoga has radically changed the nature and role of the guru. The medieval relationship between guru and shishya was one-to-one, well-understood in traditional Hindu society, based on trust developed over many years of instruction. The modern situation may bring the celebrity yoga teacher into close contact with strangers, anywhere in the world, in "milieus where the religious affiliations, function, status, and role of the guru may not be well understood" …

OK - I should have said ‘non-dualism’, not ‘yoga’. Yoga is middle class folks in expensive tracksuits doing Downward facing Dog. I had in mind more the influence of The Vedanta Society, D T Suzuki, and other famous popularisers of Eastern philosophy as a cultural movement. I myself was influenced, for better or for worse, by The Beatles encounter with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and what came after it. What I and many others found, was an immediacy, an emphasis on ‘spiritual experience’, and a sense of discovery of something real which you could encounter yourself. It seemed worlds away from what I had been taught as ‘religion’ - so much so that at the time, I didn’t even recognise it as that.

Sure, a lot of it turned out to be bullshit - I never did the Transcendental Meditation training, although I was taught a similar technique elsewhere - but I was embarrassed by the ‘yogic flying’ fiasco that came out of their so-called 'University'. The first Ashram I spent time at was later exposed as one of the worst instances of child abuse in the Australian Royal Commission into that sorry history. So I’m very well aware of the scams, the failures, the fake gurus. But nevertheless, I learned something through that encounter which I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

For a great and insightful essay into that, see Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960’s, Camille Paglia - it’s a great read and by no means gilds the lily.

Writing in 2003, the conclusion says:

The present cultural landscape is bleak: mainline religions torn between their liberal and conservative wings; a snobbishly secular intelligentsia; an alternately cynical or naively credulous media; and a mass of neo-pagan cults and superstitions seething beneath the surface.

If anything, that's only gotten worse. ('Snobbishly secular' sure rings a bell around here, don't it?)

Her recommendation:

The religious impulse of the sixties must be rescued from he wreckage and redeemed. The exposure to Hinduism and Buddhism that my generation* had to get haphazardly from contemporary literature and music should be formalized and standardized for basic education. What students need to negotiate their way through the New Age fog is scholarly knowledge of ancient and medieval history, from early pagan nature cults through the embattled consolidation of Christian theology. Teaching religion as culture rather than as morality also gives students the intellectual freedom to find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion.

*Paglia is five years older than me

Which more or less exactly describes the curriculum I've followed since about the late 1970's. Still at it.

We are children of the State to whom we owe obedience. Or the State beats it into us. — baker

There are laws we have to obey or face the consequences, of course. But the state doesn penetrate into every corner of our lives; at least not where I live anyway. experience.

"But it turns out you only have to hop a few feet, to one side, and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all". Lew Welch.

Rumor has it that an enlightened person could, in fact, step in front of a semi-trailer, but the semi-trailer's engine would fail or its brakes malfunction and block just in time for the semi-trailer to stop before it would hit the enlightened person. — baker

Yeah, rumour....or fairy tales for children...

Why would you need to demonstrate it?

If one had truly come to a spiritual attaiment, that would be the one knowledge, the one attainment that one would not feel the need to demonstrate to others. — baker

Right, and that's exactly all I've been saying; that such knowledge is not demonstrable, even to oneself.. no matter how sublimely confident and perfectly convinced one might be that one possess such knowledge.

It might turn out, at death, that one was correct, if consciousness survives death, but no one could know it in advance, and you could never know it was anything more than a lucky intuition in any case. At least if you turned out to be wrong you'd never know, could never be proven to be wrong. I have no argument with anyone who feels so convinced they know something as to not entertain even the shadow of a doubt, provide they don't seek to impose their beliefs on others, or expect others to be convinced by their personal conviction and profession of certainty.

Yet freethinking won't necessarily stop you from falling into an abyss, or save you from it.
Freethinking is no guarantee for success, in any field of endeavor. — baker

If you don't want to think freely, but would rather have other's impose their thoughts on you then you are at least free to do that. It's up to you. At least be honest and admit to yourself at least if not to others, that there is no possibility of absolute rational certainly, or certainty of any truth, even if certainty of personal conviction is possible

Sure, a lot of it turned out to be bullshit - I never did the Transcendental Meditation training, although I was taught a similar technique elsewhere - but I was embarrassed by the ‘yogic flying’ fiasco that came out of their so-called 'University'. The first Ashram I spent time at was later exposed as one of the worst instances of child abuse in the Australian Royal Commission into that sorry history. So I’m very well aware of the scams, the failures, the fake gurus. But nevertheless, I learned something through that encounter which I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. — Wayfarer

When I first went to India to look into all those claims of special knowledge (not very long ago actually) the first thing I instinctively noticed was how good Indians were at reading Westerners' every single thought and feeling, by watching their body language, facial expression, the way they dressed, moved, talked, everything. So I decided to turn it around and watch them instead. It didn't take me long to discover that almost without exception they were very clever actors who knew how to put on a show and how to answer (or not) questions in a way that suggested "superior" or "hidden" knowledge, fully aware that this was what Westerners expected.

To my surprise, even supposedly seasoned foreigners like Australians and Israelis got easily taken for a ride .... :smile:

But I agree that genuine spiritual teachers, though few and far between, do exist. And I continue to hold traditional texts like Shankaracharya's Brahmasutra Bhashya and the Bhagavad Gita in high regard. They are in no way inferior to Plato or Plotinus.

living an examined life — Shawn

Or maybe 'examination' of life is really just a hidden attempt to control it to alleviate your irrational doubts towards it.

Or maybe 'examination' of life is really just a hidden attempt to control it to alleviate your irrational doubts towards it. — hope

It may well be that in certain cases.

However, true examination is not motivated by "irrational doubts" but by the rational desire to live in harmony with a higher reality and to be your true self.

desire to live in harmony with a higher reality and to be your true self. — Apollodorus

You don't need 'examination' for that. Only surrender.

You don't need 'examination' for that. Only surrender. — hope

Different souls or minds exist on different levels of awareness, experience, and being.

Some can surrender to a higher reality and always be and act in unity with it.

Others need to practice self-examination in order to ascertain whether and to what extent they have surrendered, until they have overcome all doubt and uncertainty.

And others practice 'self-examination' as a form of neurosis or obsessive compulsion and surrender to that instead.

By “Bhagavad Gita” I really meant Abhinavagupta’s Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (Gitartha Samgraha) in the Advaita tradition.

Abhinavagupta's Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (Gitartha Samgraha)

In terms of yogic practices (concentration, meditation, contemplation, etc.) my favorite is the Vijnanabhairava Tantra.

Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra – Wikipedia

Thanks! My own field of study was first comparative religion, then Buddhist Studies. But the point I started out trying to make was the emphasis on 'spiritual practice' or sadhana, in those Eastern disciplines. It is always tied to that, as distinct from abstract reasoning about purported entities.

It doesn't boil down to Ethics. The general gist of the Socratic dialogues is that philosophers should evince a humility of thought. His whole ish is that the truly wise recognize what they do not know, which is just about everything. It's effectively a form of skepticism, but, as Plato is our source for Socrates, it's difficult to say as to what he actually thought.

For me, though I am loathe to cite this philosopher, it's all about authenticity. People should just cultivate veritable ways of life. The "examined life", then, is what you create in order to do so. It necessitates coming into a relationship with one's experience of the world that is genuine.

There's a certain degree of pretense to Sartre's notion of false consciousness, though. No person who waits tables wants to be doing so. The purpose of the act is to cope with having to settle for a life that you believe to be beneath thy star. Cultivating such acts becomes pathology in its own right to a certain extent, but his assumption that most people, i.e. those who don't have the privilege of writing philosophical texts, live inauthentic lives is only indicative of a certain prejudice on his part. The Parisian cafes probably had a better social ecology than the bars in the city that I live in, but there are still existent arbitrary social orders that arise within any given cultural climate.

By the same token, however, he's spot on. Within the service industry, there's an archaic wisdom that, if you are asked to stay until seven-thirty after being scheduled from noon to four, you should clock out at 7:55 P.M. on the dot, quite deliberately. That only makes sense to do the first time you do it. Otherwise, you're just setting yourself up to never get out of having to wait tables for the rest of your life.

But the point I started out trying to make was the emphasis on 'spiritual practice' or sadhana, in those Eastern disciplines. It is always tied to that, as distinct from abstract reasoning about purported entities. — Wayfarer

Of course. Aside from parallels in theory, what Greek and Indian traditions have in common is that they are practice oriented.

And distinguishing true teachings from false, or what is true from what is untrue, is central to the practice of both. Hence the stress on diakrisis in the Greek world and on viveka in next-door India.

Personally, I started reading Plato in my early teens (which I believe is the best age to do it) and I always remembered Plato’s warning about false teachers such as the Sophists.

Interestingly, whilst flicking through the Indian shastras and agamas I found similar caveats including detailed descriptions of what constitutes a true teacher. Of course, if one applied the prescribed criteria to modern “gurus”, nearly 100% of them would fail to pass the test!

Returning to the OP topic, I think Plato’s equation of true philosophy to unwavering adherence to righteousness (dikaiosyne) and wisdom (phronesis) is a good definition:

we shall believe that the soul is immortal and capable of enduring all extremes of good and evil, and so we shall hold ever to the upward way and pursue righteousness with wisdom always and ever, that we may be dear to ourselves and to the gods both during our sojourn here and when we receive our reward, as the victors in the games go about to gather in theirs. And thus both here and in that journey of a thousand years, whereof I have told you, we shall fare well (Rep. 621c-d).

Being and acting in unity with one’s own higher self and with the higher reality of which the soul is a part, is the very essence of Platonic thought and practice.

As is evident from the text, the Platonic Way or “Upward Way” is “the Way of Righteousness and Wisdom”.

By definition, "way" is something one walks on, not merely thinks about. "Upward" similarly suggests direction and therefore movement.

And Greek odos “way or method followed” is the equivalent of Sanskrit sadhana, “method of (spiritual) practice”.

His words were a defence of freedom of speech and thought. The quote was a reason he gave for refusing to hold his tongue. By censoring yourself you are unable to discourse about virtue and approach the greatest good of man.

Which is all the more reason to suspect that he did not arrive at his certainty about those religious ideas by those same rational arguments with which he's trying to persuade thinking people.
— baker

Are you practicing your Buddhist sophistry, sorry, debating, skills on us? — Apollodorus

Eh?

Logic was just emerging and every system of rational thought is based on the elements available in the current culture of the time. Plato simply made use of what he had at his disposal. What would you have liked him to do, invent everything from scratch?

I'm saying that it is not at all likely that he arrived at his certainty about those religious ideas by those same rational arguments with which he's trying to persuade thinking people.

Instead, he was more like religious people usually are: born and raised into a religion, and then only later on developing justifications for their religious choice and knowledge.

The Forms are a type of universals. First, in Greek religion, the Gods were personifications of natural phenomena, states of mind, human occupations, moral values, etc., that served as a form of universals that enabled Greeks to organize and make sense of the world they lived in.

Second, the Greek word for Form, eidos, means “form”, “kind”, “species”. So, it makes sense to speak of a particular x as being a form or kind of a universal X.

Third, Plato follows the reductivist tendency already found in Greek philosophy, and in natural science in general, that sought to reduce the number of fundamental principles of explanation to the absolute minimum, hence the “first principle” or arche of the earliest Greek philosophers.

So, the Forms are consistent with Plato’s explanatory framework which is hierarchical.

Fourth, it is an undeniable fact that all experience, for example, visual perception, can be reduced to fundamental elements such as number, size, shape, color, distance, etc. that constitute a form of natural universals.

Fifth, it is a common feature of the Greek language as spoken at Plato’s time to form abstract nouns by adding the definite article to the neuter adjective. Thus the adjective “good”, agathos, which is agathon in the neuter, becomes the abstract noun “the good”, to agathon. This enables the Greek philosopher to speak of “the Good”, “the Beautiful”, or “the True”. Plato was making philosophy and logic for Greeks, not for non-Greek speaking people.

Sixth, eidos comes from the verb eido, “I see” and literally means “the seen”, “that which is seen”. This reflects the fact that for Greeks in general and for Plato in particular, to know was to see, thus knowledge or wisdom being a form of mental looking or seeing. Which is why in Plato, invisible realities are seen with the “eye of the soul”.

So, when Socrates talks to Meno or Simmias about Forms, it makes perfect sense to them.

Thank you for the summary! However,

No one says that we should. But if we are trying to reconstruct what Socrates meant by examined life, etc., we need to look into known states of consciousness that are in agreement with Socrates' statements in the Phaedo and elsewhere.

It seems unquestionable that certain concentration and meditation techniques lead to an experience of peace and calm followed by joy, clarity, and what has been described as something akin to “love”, as well as experiences of "light."

But just like ordinary religious people nowadays, Plato et al. didn't arrive at their certainties by doing concentration and meditation techniques, did they?

I find it more likely that they were born and raised into their religion, and then later on propped it up with fancy explanations and justifications. As is common for religious people.

Socrates relates that he had dreams in which he was ordered to write poems to his master Apollo (Phaedo 60d-e). People have precognitive dreams. How does science explain this?

And Beethoven said God inspired his music. I wouldn't make too much of such declarations; I see them primarily as culturally specific way of professing humility, gratitude, justification for making art.

What I mean to say is that the benefits of meditation don't have any utility beyond themselves. If you are practicing for some advantage or utilitarian reason, then 'you are doing it wrong'. — Wayfarer

One should meditate etc. for the purpose of the complete cessation of suffering. Granted, it is said that up until the point of stream entry, one cannot be certain whether one is on the right path or not. Still, even prior to that, one's practice should bear some results by which to judge whether one is heading in the right direction or not.

Sappadasa.

So God created mostly scrap?? In his infinite goodness and wisdom, he chose that most of his creation should go to waste??
— baker

1. God can do as he pleases. — Apollodorus

Then we shall pay him back in his own coin.

the West has modernized, westernized, commercialized, and "despiritualized" India. — Apollodorus

Well then India wasn't all that spiritual to begin with, eh.