Plato further implies that justice concerns the discernment and assessment of truth by each of two parties: one who attempts to satisfy the purpose and the intended beneficiary who assesses the success of the attempt. One of his illustrative examples is the approach to truth by mutual co-operation between a flute-maker who translates his idea of a flute into a material instrument and a flute-player who assesses the quality of an actual instrument in use. This is to say that a kind of duality is essential in coming to a fair judgment of relative truth. As Socrates puts it, "The one knows and therefore speaks with authority about the goodness and badness of flutes, while the other, confiding in him, will do what he is told by him". It also suggests that subjective assessment is required in cases where objective measurement is either impracticable or insufficient, and implies that perfect or absolute truth may be unattainable.
Is this not the fundamental idea underlying the free market?
I cannot refrain from reflecting that these words of Socrates succinctly summarise the status of the dishonest trader and the corrupt professional politician in a democracy.
We must accept that we cannot hope to fully comprehend the ultimate Source of "life, the Universe, and everything" from objective evidence alone. We should also bear in mind that men and women down the ages have testified that when we turn our attention inwards, contemplate our own psychological make-up, and pay close attention to the thoughts that arise in the passive detachment of meditation, we may be granted subjective glimpses of universal truth that will enable us to discern a meaningful purpose in our personal lives.
This disunity is emphasised by Ouspensky.
"The law would say that to be patient under suffering is best, and that we should not give way to impatience because there is no knowing whether such things are good or evil and nothing is gained by impatience; no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the way of that which at the moment is most required.
"Few persons ever reflect, as I should imagine, that from the evil of other men, something of evil is communicated to themselves. And so the feeling of sorrow, which has gathered strength at the sight of the misfortunes of others, is with difficulty repressed in our own.
"There are jests which you would be ashamed to make yourself, and yet on the comic stage, or indeed in private, when you hear them, you are greatly amused by them, and are not at all disgusted at their unseemliness.
"And the same may be said of lust and anger and all the other affections: of desire, and pain, and pleasure, which are held to be inseparable from every action."
Compare what Ouspensky says on the same subject.
Is it not the case that appeal to the emotions is the main stock in trade of most artistic expressions, whether on stage or screen or radio, whether from pulpits or the soap-boxes of rabble-rousers?
Hence we should endeavour to conduct ourselves as far as possible on the advice of Socrates and "remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse, whether in epic or lyric verse, to replace law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have ever been deemed best, then pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State."
Please consider at this point whether the State in which you reside is governed by appeal to pleasure, by the infliction of pain, by reason, or by a mixture of all three. To what extent do you agree with Socrates when he says: "...great is the issue at stake, greater than appears, whether a man is to be good or bad. And what will anyone be profited if under the influence of honour or money or power — aye, or under the excitement of poetry — he neglect justice and virtue?"
We should note also, however, that Socrates does not dismiss the arts out of hand. He says, "we shall surely be the gainers if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight".
The more materialistic followers of Darwin, arguing backwards from the observed facts of apparently intelligent development in living creatures, seek a starting point in matter itself, and they lay great emphasis on the "selfish gene" as the engine of reproduction of the distinctive properties of living species — even although the level of intelligence possessed by a gene must, like the gene itself, be vanishingly small. We note also that even they do not claim to find any tendency among material elements to transform themselves into new "species".
Going still futher back in search of the origin of matter itself, extreme materialists can find nothing more satisfying than a "Big Bang" without providing any idea as to who or what might have invented, contructed, and exploded the original cosmic bomb. Granted that human intelligence must have originated somehow, application of that same intelligence can hardly rest content with a bang which seems more like a desperate whimper.
Elena Soldatkina, a contributor to the Ardue Mailing List, provides a helpful example of external influence. One day, she was intrigued by the sight of an obviously driverless petrol-driven toy car performing complicated manoeuvres in a school playground at the behest of a boy who was controlling it "remotely" by means of a radio transmitter. She noted that the "intelligence" operating the toy was governed by the external intelligence of the boy. She made a further leap in consciousness by reflecting that the "intelligence" operating the boy himself was subordinate to a still higher "Intelligence" transmitted by some means of which he was almost certainly not consciously aware.
We are so dependent on our physical senses that we tend to overlook the importance of the invisible and intangible processes which are so important in Nature. Yet no one in his or her "senses" will deny the reality of the intangible and invisible process by which water from salty seas and poisonous pools is purified and re-distributed as raindrops, snowflakes, or hailstones — a process which we can picture only in imagination.
This is the interior mental process to which Thomas Troward refers as involution. See, for example, The Great Affirmative and Man's Place in the Creative Order.
Quoting from the latter: "According to all teaching, then, both ancient and modern, all life and energy have their source in a Primary Life and Energy, of which we can only say that IT IS. We cannot conceive of any time when it was not — for, if there was a time when no such Primary Energising Life existed, what was there to energise it? So we are landed in a reductio ad absurdum [an absurd conclusion — Ed.] which leaves no alternative but to predicate the Eternal Existence of an All-Originating Living Spirit."
The concrete and calculable is never the whole truth. Origination in mind is like a seed. A healthy idea, like a healthy seed, released into the Cosmic "mind" and set free from individual limitations may, if it chances to fall in congenial "soil", undergo a miraculous transformation and manifest as a material form. Should the "Living Spirit" depart from such a form, it "dies" and begins to disintegrate.
We should bear this in mind as we go on to consider what Socrates has to say about the soul.
Another analogy may help here. Every reader of these Web pages is familiar with that marvellous invention, the computer. The computer itself is merely a complex material machine. What enables it to work as it does is an invisible, intangible, "operating system" which may be common to innumerable individual computers. Might we not say that the operating system is "the soul" of the computer which exists independently of the machine and "lives on" long after the machine breaks down or wears out?
Might we not go further and suggest that what is referred to as "artificial intelligence" is merely an imitatation of the natural intelligence which exists throughout the Universe and which, through the intermediate agency of human intelligence, makes it possible to devise increasingly powerful "imitation intelligence" in the form of ever-more-refined computer "software"? With respect to the materialistic advocates of artificial intelligence, we might once again echo Socrates: "Have they come across imitators and been deceived by them?"
If we can now make the imaginative mental effort to recognise that spacetime is the "All-Originating Living Spirit" of which Troward speaks, we shall ascend to a higher plane of consciousness and greatly increase our potential for better understanding of the mysteries in Nature.
On getting out of bed yesterday morning, I happened to look out of the window and saw a cat pawing the ground containing some of my wife's treasured crocus bulbs. As I concentrated my gaze on the cat, the cat became aware of my gaze, was clearly discomfited, desisted, and ran away. What form of communication took place between me and the cat?
Fundamentalist adherents to the materialistic faith scoff at phenomena they do not understand and they would consign all mystics to a lunatic asylum. People of higher consciousness cannot force people of lower consciousness, no matter how "clever" or "educated" they may be, to accept as facts phenomena for which they have no theoretical explanation. This makes it all the more important for those of us who can open our minds for reception of a wider spectrum of "influences" to make ourselves more proficient in the arts of communication through sustained efforts at practical application. Then we may, like Einstein, construct a body of theory that can stand up to examination by sceptics.
Both the Masonic and the "Hermetic System" lectures offered in The Ardue University constitute carefully constructed courses designed to help us in our task of personal evolution. Together with the other material published on the Ardue site, they constitute an attempt to bring thought-provoking ideas to the notice of individuals whose minds may be open to the possibility of self-development and who desire to test the validity of these ideas in their own lives.
Our computers tend to be adapted for particular uses by the incorporation of specialised software which may, like an operating system, be carried forward and refined as it goes from one mechanical realisation to another. We might say that each individual combination of machine and software constitutes an "imitation personality".
The key unifying concept in these pages is acceptance of the truth of the assertion that there is only One Soul in the Universe and the consequent deduction that the soul is immortal. Each and every living body is a toolkit for the worldly expression of an unseparated segment of the One Soul. Our task as human beings is to apply our bodily experience to the further refinement of our soul personality so as to express as faithfully as possible whatever we are inspired to express by the influences we recognise as originating from the Absolute Source. In this respect, each of us is like a spiritual "software developer". Lest we deceive ourselves, our first priority must be to develop our consciousness to the highest and widest extent possible within whatever limitations we may have been born with, whether genetically inherited from our parents or carried forward from previous soul personalities [See Categories of Man — Ed.], so that our development may accord as closely as possible with the requirements of the Absolute Cosmic Soul.
This task requires us to be open to the subtle influences transmitted through our psychological as well as our intellectual faculties, and to learn how to interpret their messages correctly. As Socrates points out, this task can occupy us for many lifetimes, but we are also at liberty to neglect it completely if we so choose.
Please test the following suggestions for yourself:
Ideas such as these are not easily grasped by people who have been reared and educated in a culture which recognises nothing beyond the material, and so they are unlikely to be taken up by more than a small minority of the human population of Earth.
A humorous story from Scotland may be appropriate here. An elderly Scotsman died, and the local Presbyterian minister called at the house to comfort the bereaved. His opening words to the grieving widow were, "Ah well, so John has gone to join the great majority". The widow replied: "Oh no, minister! He wasn't as bad as that!"
Now that we have arrived at the grand concept of an All-Originating Living Spirit that sustains the Universe and animates all living species within it, we must revise our deeply imbedded ideas about our individual separateness and try to realise that death need not be the absolute end of the individual entity but only its separation from an outworn bodily toolkit. Hence we would be wise to follow the example of Socrates himself as recounted in the Phaedo and, if we have conscientiously tried to make ourselves better people, we may confidently go forward to meet death optimistically as to a further living adventure in which we may continue our self-evolution in new circumstances.
We should in this be encouraged by some more words of Socrates himself: "Look at things as they really are, and you will see that the clever unjust are in the case of runners who run well from the starting-place but not back again from the goal. They go off at a great pace, but in the end only look foolish, slinking away with their ears draggling on their shoulders, and without a crown, whereas the true runner reaches the finish and receives the prize and is crowned. This last is the way with the just. He endures to the end of every action and occasion of his entire life; he has a good report and carries off the prize which men have to bestow."
Recalling Darwin's theory of "natural selection", we remember that unsuccesful species are weeded out by death — as, indeed, are commercially unsuccessful software packages. Could the same fate await spiritually unsuccessful soul personalities?
On the other hand, if you have succeeded in improving your mortal soul personality, you may have fitted yourself for higher things and have some choice over your next incarnation:
"Mortal soul personalities, behold a new cycle of life and mortality. Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose your genius; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser — God is justified.
"Even for the last comer, if he chooses wisely and will live diligently, there is appointed a happy and not undesirable existence. Let not him who chooses first be careless, and let not the last despair".