"I suppose you're right," Socrates said. "Of course I'm right," the priestess Diotima said. (Symp. 206e)

The beginning of recorded history is roughly the beginning of the present Kali Yuga, and it has been downhill ever since then. What gods roamed the earth before our declension into historical man, the old poets give a faint remembrance of.

RT @N20drawing: 変化について。. #イラスト

When someone asserts that mind is reducible or epiphenomenal to the body, don't argue with them. They are simply telling you that they are a bug-man automaton, and you should rather pity than confute them.

Daily reminder to always be kind to animals.

'I myself reared, at Carthage, a tame partridge which flew to me, and as time went on and habit made it very tame, I observed it not only making up to me and being attentive and playing, but even speaking in response to my speech and. replying' (Porphyry, De abst. III.4.7)

'human marriage is regarded as an initiation of the cosmic hierogamy. "I am Heaven," the husband proclaims in the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad (VI, 4, 20), "thou art Earth!"' . Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane p. 146.

The only unique thing now is that the samsaric flow of phenomena is much more potent and much more onrushing, which even more so saps the mind of all vigour and closes the path to self-knowledge.

The mind has a native and boundless energy, if only it returns to itself and away from the dispersal and division about the sensible. Modern lethargy is a critically acute example of a broader phenomenon, of the mind's confused descent into materiality.

The complaints about fatigue and cognitive issues are so ubiquitous that I sympathise with those seeking a medical solution: take creatine, get a blood test, etc. But in almost all cases the causes are spiritual, and the solution is spiritual.

No, you don't have 'sleep apnea' or 'thyroid issues' or too many 'seed oils'— you are fatigued and mentally clouded because you are in a tech environment that is waging relentless war on your attention, and you are losing this battle of attrition. προσέχειν σεαυτῷ.

The Laws is a masterpiece and I will not stand for its denigration.

Plato's Early, Middle, and Late periods.

18th(?) century Tibetan text, Bya chos (The Buddha’s Law Among the Birds), trans. Conze.

Still the best book on Macrobius

. involving a dissolution of all former values. A church or society. that does not provide a way of escape from its own regimen, and will not let its people go, is defeating its own ultimate purpose.'.

'. As it was by the knowledge of good and evil that man fell from his first high estate, so it must be from the knowledge of good and evil. that he must be delivered at last. However far one may have gone, there remains a last step to be taken. .

'There always remains a last step, in which the ritual is abandoned and the relative truths of theology denied. ' . (1/3). (Ananda Coomaraswamy, "Hinduism" pp. 28-9)

Detail from "Alexander Visits the Sage Plato in his Mountain Cave", Folio from a Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi (1597–98)

'Unless you consider that your body is joined to you as the outer covering to the child in the womb and the stalk to the sprouting corn, you cannot know yourself' (Porphyry, Ep. ad Marc. 23)