From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 02:55:19 GMT
Howdy MOQers. I plan to do something with these quotes tomorrow, but it
might be fun if somebody else connected them in their own way. Or maybe
someone would just like some thoughts to chew. In any case, feel free....
"This duality of form and substance and the scientific method of arriving at
facts about substances were central to Aristotle's philosophy. Thus the
dethronement dialectic from what Socrates and Plato held it to be..." (ZAMM
P330)
"Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each
generation, moving onward and upward toward the 'one'." (ZAMM P331)
"What Phaedrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have
described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no
contradiction." (ZAMM P349)
"As is well known, during the century or more before Plato's time there was
an extremely close link between Pythagoreanism and the production of Orphic
literature; it was plainly an established tradition for early Pythagoreans
to attribute to Orpheus poems they wrote on gods and the cosmos, salvation
and the soul. ... What is more, Orphic literary production exhibited a
marked tendency to gravitate towards the mysteries of Demeter and
Persephone, and assume the role in relation to them of sacred narrative
tests - as clearly emerges in the case of the Elusinian mysteries. And here
we come back to the Phaedo myth..." APMM 115
"Plato himself, as we have seen, knew and used a body of Orphic lierature
which already in his days was considered ancient; and earlier in the Phaedo
he alludes to this literature in a way which prepare us for the fact that he
will be using Orphic sources in the cultimating myth. The Derveni papyrus is
vivd proof... " APMM 122
"In highly vivid and critical terms the author of the papyrus (the Derveni
papyrus re-discovered in 1962)attacks wandering Orphic priests - the details
of the description show that these priests are indistinguishable from the
ones mocked at by Plato in the REPUBLIC - for going about their business and
earning money performng their ritual without being able to explain either to
themselves, or to anyone else, what they are really doing." ANCIENT
PHILOSOPHY, MYSTERY AND MAGIC Page 164-5
"The name Orpheus itself belongs to the oldest level of Greek names; those
ending in -eus. Such are pre-Homeric. Early representations show him
singing, drawing animals to him by the power of his song; also as a fesitval
singer whose listeners - significantly - are men. The basic idea is of an
initiator whose power transforms even the wildest creatures, animals and men
who live the wilderness. Such a figure would have been associated with the
initiation of young men - in the wilds of nature, excluding women. There
something significant was disclosed to them in music and song that delivered
them from their blood-spilling savagery and gave a deep sense to the
ceremonies of transition from immaturity to adulthood. And the announcer of
this mystery played the lyre but was not a mere singer." MOG 184-5
"Later on, in the period of Greek urban life, detached from the earlier
ground of the tribal-bound secret men's rites, the so-called 'initiating
priests of Orpheus' revised their spiritual arts to the new spiritual needs.
And their modes of presentation now were divinded into a lower, largely
ritualistic category, and a higher, purely spiritual, philosophical one,
where the initiators were, indeed, philsophers; first the Pythagoreans, but
then others also; Empedocles and onward to our dear and well-known Platonic
Banqueteers." MOG P185
"In the teaching of Pythagoras the philosophic quest for the first cause and
principle of all things was carried to a consideration of the problem of the
magic of the Orphic lyre itself, by which the hearts of men are quelled,
purified, and restored to their part in God. His conclusion was that the
first principle is number, which is audible in music, and by a principle of
resonance touches - and thereby adjusts - the tuning of the soul. This idea
is fundamental to the arts of both India and the Far East and may go back to
the age of the Pyramids. However, as far as we know, it was Pythagoras who
first rendered it systematically as a princilpe by which art, psychology,
philosophy, ritual, mathematics and even athletics were to recognized as
aspects of a single science of harmony." MOG 185
jiniki = "one's own strenth" Stoicism and Zen are examples
tariki = "outside strength" Amida Buddhism and the Western Orthodoxies
"...the numerous mystery cults flourished with increasing influence until,
in the late Roman period, first Mithraism, then Christianity, gained
imperial support and, thereby, the field.
For not all of us are philosophers. Many require an atmosphere of incense,
music, vestments and procession, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries, to
be carried beyond themselves. And for such the various styles of religion
exist - where, for the most part, however, truth is so enveloped in symbol
as to be imperceptible to anyone who is not already a philsopher. Degrees of
initation have been developed, through which the mind is meant to be carried
beyond the fields of the symbols to increasingly exalted realizations -
passsing, as it were, through veil beyond veil. But the ultimate
realizations differ, according, on one hand, to those cults in which
divinity is seen as at once immanent and transcendent, and on the other to
the orthodoz Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan liturgies, where
the ontological distinction is retained between God and Man, Creator and
Creature.
In cults of the former type the two strengths, "outside" and "within" are
finally to be recognized as identical. The saviour worshipped as without,
though indeed without, is at the same time one's self. 'All things are
Buddha things'. Whereas in the great Near Eastern orthodoxies no such
identity can be imagined or even credited as conceivable. The aim is not to
come to a realization of one's self, here and now, as of one mystery with
the Being of beings, but to know, love, and serve in this world a God who is
apart (mythic dissociation) though close at hand (omnipresent), and to be
happy with him when time shall have ceased and eternity been attained. The
referent (the 'God') of cults of the first type is never a personage
somewhere else, to be known, loved, served, and someday beheld (which, in
fact, is the notion to be dispelled), but a state of realization to be
attained by way of the initiatory, knowledge-releasing imagery of the 'God',
as through a sign. The function of such signs is to effect a psychological
change of immediate value in itself, while that of the orthodox mythology is
to fix the mind and will upon a state of soul to come." MOG P254-5
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