11 December 2018
Earlier this morning you had what you call a 'flash-vision' while near sleeping. You pulled the iBook up and commenced with notes though you felt something of the event had already been lost. - Amorella
0920 - [raw notes] vision - souls combine to keep a unity of earth for heartsanminds - live in the own time and own cultures that continue to progress within the earth setting - slowly progress in all the past and an ability to move forward and backward through the meeting of souls - home base though is where you were, where you lived and how you lived originally through your own life and the lives of your friends who may include family. a kind of realistic heaven on earth enforced by the betterment progress of human nature and culture through the ages without overt politics and religions - an alternate reality not a virtual reality - the reality of the great dream of what humanity means and can be -- this serves the Beyond to live without having lived biologically -- through heartansoulanminds. - 0929
1057 hours. As the above are raw notes, below is the revision:
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Souls combine to keep a unity of earth for like heartsanminds so they may live in the own since of time and place. These souls containing heartsanminds continue to assure a self-educational progress for the individual as well as the group within the Earth settings (combined by friendship of individual and groups of heartsanminds to progress, that is to better learn who one is as and individual and within the ever-growing groups of the shared earth setting. Slowly from an outsider's sense of time the individuals and/or small groups of friends will be able (through other souls' heartsanminds) obtain the conscious ability of the human spirit(s) to move through all the conscious human past and to move forward (from their physical deaths) move forward since their time on Earth to learn from others as well as observe a change in their own perspectives through the meeting of souls containing heartsanminds of others of the species. - rho
Home base though is where you were, where you lived and how you lived originally through your own life and the lives of your friends who may include family in a kind of realistic though alternative heavenly-like existence on a transcendental Earth enforced by the betterment progress of human nature and culture without the usual overt politics and religious rhetoric. A great dream of heartsanminds that serves to unite a timeless humanity that has once lived. - Amorella
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You are near the south Macy's entrance at Polaris Fashion Place facing northwest. Carol is shopping. This is after a shared afternoon McD large diet Coke and two kids' cups of Graeters. - Amorella
1433 hours. I am curious about the classification of Earthly Heaven -- in here do we describe it as an alternative Afterlife or a transcendental Afterlife?
Less confusion with a Transcendental Afterlife; here is why in context with this blog. Back in the 1980's when Dr. Payne showed you how to put yourself into a self-hypnotic trance I eventually sprang from that experimental work. As you first and always have associated me, the Amorella, with a spiritual existence, be it your own or G-D's thus clarity demands the spiritual Afterlife within to be transcendental in nature. This is also fitting because you see yourself as a transcendental realist in context with the progress of this blog. - Amorella
1445 hours. Normally, I would see myself as a transcendental existentialist. However, oddly enough, transcendental realist is the projection I see with this Afterlife in that it appears to me to be extraordinarily reasonable in its greater Nature. And, in added thought, this blog is a 'projection' similar to that within Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Though I consider myself forever a student in this world of the living not a philosopher.
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Allegory of the Cave
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality.
Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners.
The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind. Like the fire that cast light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever bound to the impressions that are received through the senses.
Even if these interpretations (or, in Kantian terminology, intuitions) are an absurd misrepresentation of reality, we cannot somehow break free from the bonds of our human condition—we cannot free ourselves from phenomenal state just as the prisoners could not free themselves from their chains. If, however, we were to miraculously escape our bondage, we would find a world that we could not understand—the sun is incomprehensible for someone who has never seen it. In other words, we would encounter another "realm", a place incomprehensible because, theoretically, it is the source of a higher reality than the one we have always known; it is the realm of pure Form, pure fact.[1]
Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line
Terminology
The allegory of the cave is also called the analogy of the cave, myth of the cave, metaphor of the cave, parable of the cave, and Plato's Cave.[2]
Summary
Imprisonment in the cave
Plato begins by having Socrates ask Glaucon to imagine a cave where people have been imprisoned from birth. These prisoners are chained so that their legs and necks are fixed, forcing them to gaze at the wall in front of them and not look around at the cave, each other, or themselves (514a–b).[3] Behind the prisoners is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway with a low wall, behind which people walk carrying objects or puppets "of men and other living things" (514b).[3] The people walk behind the wall so their bodies do not cast shadows for the prisoners to see, but the objects they carry do ("just as puppet showmen have screens in front of them at which they work their puppets" (514a)[3]). The prisoners cannot see any of what is happening behind them, they are only able to see the shadows cast upon the cave wall in front of them. The sounds of the people talking echo off the walls, and the prisoners believe these sounds come from the shadows (514c).[3]
Socrates suggests that the shadows are reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire, much less that these objects are inspired by real things outside the cave which they do not see (514b-515a).[3]
Departure from the cave
Plato then supposes that one prisoner is freed. This prisoner would look around and see the fire. The light would hurt his eyes and make it difficult for him to see the objects casting the shadows. If he were told that what he is seeing is real instead of the other version of reality he sees on the wall, he would not believe it. In his pain, Plato continues, the freed prisoner would turn away and run back to what he is accustomed to (that is, the shadows of the carried objects). He writes "... it would hurt his eyes, and he would escape by turning away to the things which he was able to look at, and these he would believe to be clearer than what was being shown to him."[3]
Plato continues: "Suppose... that someone should drag him... by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun."[3] The prisoner would be angry and in pain, and this would only worsen when the radiant light of the sun overwhelms his eyes and blinds him.[3]
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can only see shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself (516a)."[3] Only after he can look straight at the sun "is he able to reason about it" and what it is (516b).[3] (See also Plato's Analogy of the Sun, which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI.[4])
Return to the cave
Plato continues, saying that the freed prisoner would think that the world outside the cave was superior to the world he experienced in the cave; "he would bless himself for the change, and pity [the other prisoners]" and would want to bring his fellow cave dwellers out of the cave and into the sunlight (516c).[3]
The returning prisoner, whose eyes have become accustomed to the sunlight, would be blind when he re-enters the cave, just as he was when he was first exposed to the sun (516e).[3] The prisoners, according to Plato, would infer from the returning man's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Plato concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave (517a).[3]
Symbolism
"Plato's Cave Allegory" by Markus Maurer
The allegory contains many forms of symbolism used to describe the illusions of the world. The cave represents the superficial world for the prisoners. The chains that prevent the prisoners from leaving the cave represent ignorance, meaning the chains are stopping them from learning the truth. The shadows that cast on the walls of the cave represent the superficial truth, which is an illusion that the prisoners see in the cave. The freed prisoner represents those in society who see the physical world for the illusion that it is. The sun that is glaring the eyes of the prisoners represents the real truth of the actual world.[3]
Themes in the allegory appearing elsewhere in Plato's work
The allegory is probably related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. Only knowledge of the Forms constitutes real knowledge or what Socrates considers "the good".[5]
Socrates informs Glaucon that the most excellent people must follow the highest of all studies, which is to behold the Good. Those who have ascended to this highest level, however, must not remain there but must return to the cave and dwell with the prisoners, sharing in their labors and honors.
Plato's Phaedo contains similar imagery to that of the allegory of the Cave; a philosopher recognizes that before philosophy, his soul was "a veritable prisoner fast bound within his body... and that instead of investigating reality of itself and in itself is compelled to peer through the bars of a prison."[6]
Scholarly discussion
Scholars debate the possible interpretations of the allegory of the Cave, either looking at it from an epistemological standpoint – one based on the study of how Plato believes we come to know things – or through a political (Politeia) lens.[6]
Much of the scholarship on the allegory falls between these two perspectives, with some completely independent of either.
The epistemological view and the political view, fathered by Richard Lewis Nettleship and A.S. Ferguson respectively, tend to be discussed most frequently.[6]
Nettleship interprets the allegory of the cave as representative of our innate intellectual incapacity, in order to contrast our lesser understanding with that of the philosopher, as well as an allegory about people who are unable or unwilling to seek truth and wisdom.[7]
Ferguson, on the other hand, bases his interpretation of the allegory on the claim that the cave is an allegory of human nature and that it symbolizes the opposition between the philosopher and the corruption of the prevailing political condition.[7][8]
Cleavages have emerged within these respective camps of thought, however. Much of the modern scholarly debate surrounding the allegory has emerged from Martin Heidegger's exploration of the allegory, and philosophy as a whole, through the lens of human freedom in his book The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy and The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus.[8]
In response, Hannah Arendt, an advocate of the political interpretation of the allegory, suggests that through the allegory, Plato "wanted to apply his own theory of ideas to politics".[9] Conversely, Heidegger argues that the essence of truth is a way of being and not an object.[10]
Arendt criticised Heidegger's interpretation of the allegory, writing that "Heidegger…is off base in using the cave simile to interpret and 'criticize' Plato's theory of ideas".[9]
Selected and edited from - Wikipedia
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1614 hours. I am beginning to fall in love with this topic. This is on esoteric material I have been interested in since before high school. Below is another background Wikipedia article -- first read about it studying Emerson my junior year of high school. Fritz M. and I were both interested at that time. We were definitely romantics, no question about it. I just received a letter from him today showing that he has updated our wills once again. He was best man at our wedding and I was in his. We have pretty much had an ongoing friendship since junior high days. Below is pretty much reinforcing background from my perspective. Good stuff.
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The Over-Soul
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Over-Soul" is an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, first published in 1841. With the human soul as its overriding subject, several general themes are treated: (1) the existence and nature of the human soul; (2) the relationship between the soul and the personal ego; (3) the relationship of one human soul to another; and (4) the relationship of the human soul to God. Influence of Eastern religions, including Vedantism, is plainly evident, but the essay also develops ideas long present in the Western tradition, e.g., in the works of Plato, Plutarch, and Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus – all of whose writings Emerson read extensively throughout his career[1][2] – and Emanuel Swedenborg.
The essay attempts no systematic doctrine, but rather serves as a work of art, something like poetry. Its virtue is in personal insights of the author and the lofty manner of their presentation. Emerson wishes to exhort and direct the reader to an awakening of similar thoughts or sentiments.
With respect to the four themes listed above, the essay presents the following views:
(1) the human soul is immortal, and immensely vast and beautiful;
(2) our conscious ego is slight and limited in comparison to the soul, despite the fact that we habitually mistake our ego for our true self;
(3) at some level, the souls of all people are connected, though the precise manner and degree of this connection is not spelled out; and
(4) the essay does not seem to explicitly contradict the traditional Western idea that the soul is created by and has an existence that is similar to God, or rather God exists within us.
The Over-Soul is now considered one of Emerson's greatest writings.
History
The essay includes the following passage:
The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.[3]
For Emerson the term denotes a supreme underlying unity which transcends duality or plurality, much in keeping with the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.
This non-Abrahamic interpretation of Emerson's use of the term is further supported by the fact that Emerson's Journal records in 1845 suggest that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's essays on the Vedas.[4] Emerson goes on in the same essay to further articulate his view of this dichotomy between phenomenal plurality and transcendental unity:
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE.
And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.
We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.[3]
"Over-soul" has more recently come to be used by Eastern philosophers such as Meher Baba and others as the closest English language equivalent of the Vedic concept of Paramatman.[5]
(In Sanskrit the word param means "supreme" and atman means "soul"; thus Paramatman literally means "Supreme-Soul".[6])
The term is used frequently in discussion of Eastern metaphysics and has also entered western vernacular. In this context, the term "Over-soul" is understood as the collective indivisible Soul, of which all individual souls or identities are included.
The experience of this underlying reality of the indivisible "I am" state of the Over-soul is said to be veiled from the human mind by sanskaras, or impressions, acquired over the course of evolution and reincarnation. Such past impressions form a kind of sheath between the Over-soul and its true identity, as they give rise to the tendency of identification with the gross differentiated body.
Thus the world, as apperceived through the impressions of the past appears plural, while reality experienced in the present, unencumbered by past impressions (the unconditioned or liberated mind), perceives itself as the One indivisible totality, i.e. the Over-soul.
[apperceive. transitive verb. To perceive (something) while being conscious of perceiving. To perceive (something) in terms of past experience.- from your dictionary dot com]
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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Enough for today, boy. Post. - Amorella
2224 hours. How would this Afterlife concept set out in my morning flash-vision work?
Work for what, boy? This is not a build an afterlife set blog. - Amorella
2228 hours. Okay, I should have called it a day.
We are working on a spiritual project together; otherwise there is no reason for me to be here, is there? - Amorella
2231 hours. I cannot do whatever this is without you. I do not have the intellect, skills or imagination.
You have the heartansoulanmind, otherwise I would not be here in the first place. Go to bed, orndorff. - Amorella
