Heraclitus

[Horatius Piscinus]

Salvete

A short time ago I purchased a copy of ?The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus? and have begun to include passages from him in my daily meditations. One particular saying by Heraclitus has struck me, since it fits so easily in my own beliefs and yet adds a greater dimension. ?Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work, and helps make something of the world.?

Valete optime

[Gnaeus Dionysius Draco]

Salve Piscine,

Someone once said that quoting Heraclitus is never wrong because there are so many ways to interpret his words. I agree that this quote is a particulary memorable one. On of my Heraclitan favourites is usually translated as "The way up and the way down are the same way."

Vale!
Draco

[Anonymous]

Salve Piscine, Draco et omnes!

"Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep."



Of course the sound of one hand clapping is........


Valete!


Caius Brutus

[Primus Aurelius Timavus]

"...makes something of the world" could be taken as "interprets the world". This is close to modern research that suggests that dreaming is a process by which the mind makes sense of what it has experienced during the day (by making connections, perceiving patterns, etc).

[Horatius Piscinus]

Salve Prime Tergeste

Interesting point. The Roman terminology for taking the auspices says that one "preserves the heavens." It is said with this same idea of "making sense" of the signs seen in the heavens, which to accept as auspices and which not, at the same time with an idea of "preserving" the natural order of things, since omens were thought to have been placed in Nature along with the Gods at the creation, rather than as messages directly sent from the Gods. But I think that Heraclites had in mind that we are most connected to the Gods in sleep, our minds freed of the weight of the body at those times are better able to ascend to the Gods. There is even some sense that our minds are godlike, derived from the Gods, and that at death when we return to our devine abode as Lares, it is the mind rather than the body or soul that makes this journey. It is in sleep that we therefore have intercourse with the Gods and may influence Them, and thus the Universe as well. Heraclitus though seems to take that a step further.

Vale optime

[Anonymous]

Salve Piscine et Omnes!

First of all thank you for posting this topic, Piscine. By inclination I think I'm more of a Roman than a Greek when it comes to philosophy but it has been very interesting looking into Heraclitus' ideas. He seems to me to have been more of a mystic than a philosopher in the modern sense. Indeed there seems to be an almost Zen-like quality about him and an idea that beneath/within/between reality there is a deeper Something/Nothing that can be experienced intuitively but cannot really be described verbally. I was reminded me of the opening of the Tao Te Ching:-

"The Way that can be travelled is not the Eternal Way, the Name that can be named is not the Eternal Name..."


I wonder whether Heraclitus' paradoxical statements were perhaps meant to serve the same purpose as the Koans of Zen masters, to force the individual to see through the limitations of words and thoughts to something beyond. The behaviour of his follower Cratylus who, according to Plato (who seems not to have approved of him) eventually found there was no point in saying anything and ended up just waggling his finger every now and then, is quite reminiscent of accounts I have read of Zen and even Sufi masters.

I have a friend who is much consumed by Buddhism and the "Four Noble Truths" of that religion at the present time. And while I cannot claim to be an expert there does at first sight appear to be a strong correspondence between Buddha's teaching on the everchanging nature of reality and those of Heraclitus'.

Finally, and rather obscurely, I was reminded strongly of a scene in the old film 'Black Narcissus' where a Christian Nun comes across a Hindu Swami who has been sitting on the same rock for as long as anyone can remember. While on the face of it he is doing nothing useful at all one is left feeling that, somehow, you have missed a crucial something together with the whole point.

Satori in Ephesus, eh?

Vale!

Brutus

[Gnaeus Dionysius Draco]

Salvete!

Heraclitus (or Herakleitos, as I prefer to call him) has been linked to Eastern philosophy. There are a few number of amazing correspondences. Although I'm not buying it, Atticus argumented that there may have been contacts of thought between East and West around that time. Buddha and Herakleitos were contemporaries, by the way. Still, I'm unconvinced of such contacts. It may well have been that their thoughts were similar but evolved uninfluenced.

In any case, Herakleitos is one of the timeless philosophers who is never outdated and always thought-provoking. Definitely belongs to the three greatest philosophers of the world in my book (and that means a lot ).

Valete!
Draco

[Horatius Piscinus]

Salvete

I am not sure Heraclitus would agree in a distinction between physics and metaphysics. He would probably say something on how they were one, two sides of the same coin, and if you'd agree, he'd say "Arguing the same we disagree; singing together we compete."

Heraclitus said, "The river where you set your foot just now is gone - those waters giving way to this, now this." Ovid echoed Heraclitus by saying that, "Life is like a river, our time flies and is always made anew," and Ovid also said that, "Our bodies are always changing, this that we once were, or else what we are now, tomorrow we will not be." It is easy to see how the metaphor of a river can be taken to mean our life, or time in general. "Behold: the baby born under a new moon, under the old moon holds her grandchild in her arms.? But Heraclitus held that all in the universe we live is constantly in a state of transformation into something else. "What was cold soon warms, and warmth soon cools. So moisture dries, and dry things drown." While this is all perhaps more easily seen with our corporeal existence, I think Heraclitus would apply it to the mind as well. The flow of the river of consciousness has the mind constantly moving its attention between sense perception of physical stimuli to the sympathetic and asympathetic nervous systems, greeting these with conscious thoughts and subconscious memory, unconscious thought and even entering at times into the collective unconscious, where beyond lies universal consciousness. The four levels of the mind was explored more in Indian philosophy than has been in the West. They assign these four levels to waking consciousness, dream state, the state of dreamless sleep, and the other is known simply as ?the fourth.? To some extent Greek philosophers, and more so Indian, have associated these levels of consciousness to the four levels of the metaphysical Universe. The state of dreamless sleep is reported to be one of bliss, while ?the fourth? lies beyond bliss, where the atman, or the foundation of the self, unites in Brahman.

The way that I reconcile these views is to recall a near death experience I had long ago. It was the classic example, brought on by the loss of a tremendous amount of blood, I found myself aware of floating over a hospital bed, looking down on my body as a doctor and nurses frantically tried to bring me back. Looking up then, there was a light above me, and a presence that advised me to return, and suddenly I was once again aware of being in my body and looking up into the faces of the doctor and nurses. To that I can add my mother?s experiences as she lay dying, especially her vision of deceased family members advising her to join with them. In my own way of thinking, the bliss experienced during the state of dreamless sleep, the entry into the collective consciousness, is a transfer of the self aware mind to the Blessed Isles where live our Lares who walk among the Gods. And beyond then would be the realm of the Gods, attainable by only a unique few who can achieve a state of universal conscious through an ex stasis. In our conscious state of mind we are constantly transferring between conscious thought and unconscious memory as part of our thought processes, at times interrupted with those daydreams that take our attention elsewhere. So we are normally aware of moving from the physical world into the lower levels of the metaphysical. And if you are open to it, higher levels of the metaphysical realms can even enter into your conscious awareness, allowing you to speak with and see visions of the Lares and Gods.

Now Heraclitus may see things a little differently, and would certainly explain it in a different manner. Agreeing, we will disagree. But I think he would see that in the flow of our being we constantly move between the physical and the metaphysical. And since this rather limited, three dimensional physical world is contained in the greater ?physical? world, as modern physicists struggle to understand the multi dimensional structure of the universe, we can accept, if not understand those string theories, that the physical universe is part of and supported by the greater metaphysical Universe. The physical and metaphysical are one. Even our empirical minded scientists have today begun to discuss the physical universe within a metaphysical existence, speculating on what lies beyond the border of the physical universe, into which it expands and from which it contracts, the flow of our reality passing out of black holes and in from white holes, and what may exist beyond time, before the existence of time in our small universe came to be. As the Greek philosophers argued, the universe moves, and therefore it must move in some other that lies beyond the universe. Our modern understanding of the universe may have expanded since Heraclitus? day, but human existence remains the same, and Heraclitus would acknowledge that our authentic existence lies within more than is empirically perceived.

Valete optime