“- as any philosophically educated Greek of the time knew, "Logos" doesn't just mean "word" in a literal or even in a lively metaphorical sense. It's more along the lines of "the rational principle of the universe." It's the underlying pattern of the cosmic fabric, the warp and weft by which all things hang together. It's why things make sense--the reason cause follows effect--the law of non-contradiction -- the creative mind that accounts for why there is something rather than nothing. Because the Logos is, everything else is too. Above change, beyond time, outside of space: prepositions break down in the face of the Logos. It's the first and final cause of the whole created world.”
The 6th-century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus was the first to use the term Logos in a metaphysical sense. He asserted that the world is governed by a fire-like Logos, a divine force that produces the order and pattern discernible in the flux of nature.
Lao Tzu and those who followed him understood this as well but referred to this “cosmic fabric, the warp and weft by which all things hang together”, and this, “divine force that produces the order and pattern discernible in the flux of nature”, as the Tao. Others use the word ”God” to describe this never ending, ubiquitous, all-permeating power, energy, or whatever you wish to call it, as the source of all existence, the creator, the father or the mother if you prefer. Conversely, it becomes fairly easy when considering God, the Tao, the life-giving force, the vastness and mystery of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things to consider the soul immortal, especially when you consider that no thing actually dies or disappears, they only take on new forms; are dispersed and absorbed into one another.
Because of our mind and its processing of sensory information provided by our only sensing apparatus (the five physical senses) we are locked into this sphere of a limited conceptual thought allowing that once a living thing enters the stage of what we refer to as death, the loss of spirit and the decay of physical properties, life ends. But all evidence is to the contrary.
While we accept that life begins from the interaction of living microscopic cells, we have difficulty accepting that in death it reverts back to living microscopic cells. When the form of a rock, tree, animal or any “living” form “dies”, the molecules that make up that form do not die or disappear, they just disassemble and move on to interact with and become reassembled as a part of a new form or substance. The body, the plant, the organic cellular structure, breaks down into miniscule parts that are still alive but no longer a part of the larger organism. They enter the earth the air, the water and are picked up and reassembled as part of many other living organisms. They become metabolic energy and are gathered up and incorporated into new life – they continue to live. So it’s a given that the physical elements that make up our bodies do not die.
So, what about the other part of life forms, the one that seems to live in us as the observer, the spiritual being that occupies this life form we call a body? It’s easy to conceive that whatever constitutes “the soul” of all living organisms is part of the “Tao”, or “God”, etc. and that this “soul” or the “spirit”, just like the physical components, does not die and moves on to inhabit and become the living expression of another life form.
In the Phaedo, Socrates’ great discourse on the immortality of the soul, Socrates asserts (while slowly dying of poison), "I cannot imagine anything more self-evident than the fact that absolute beauty and goodness and all the rest ... exist in the fullest possible sense." In the same dialogue, Socrates wonders, "Is there any certainty in human sight and hearing, or is it true, as the poets are always dinning into our ears, that we neither hear nor see anything accurately?" Philosophers have argued ever since whether sensory input aids or arrests the quest for knowledge.Socrates has no doubts about what puts the distance between him and the pure knowledge of pure being for which he longs. It's his body. His soul is always being led astray in its search for truth, because his body attracts distractions. Socrates lists them: "diseases which attack and hinder us in our quest for reality.... The body fills us with loves and desires and tears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense.... Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires."
Socrates fully believed in an afterlife of the spirit and like Jesus and so many other great spiritual masters he authored no written work and lived a life of simplicity. He held “- that to need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach divinity.”
At the root of the charges that led to his death sentence was the fact that Socrates was corrupting the youth but the truth was he publicly criticized many of those in power showing their judgments and decisions to be flawed, lacking intelligence and good reason. Regarding the issue Socrates suggested that he had made many abiding enemies by personally approaching people who had reputations for wisdom only to reveal through questionings that their wisdom was specious. Others had been alienated by young persons who had witnessed Socrates' methods of questioning similarly revealing yet other people's pretensions to wisdom to be baseless. Socrates made the case that his questions had tended to vindicate the utterance of the Oracle at Delphi that “no one was wiser than Socrates” by showing that he, Socrates, did indeed have a particular claim to wisdom in that he at least fully recognized his own ignorance.
Socrates was also accused of being an atheist and neglecting the Gods. Those charges and the death sentence that was delivered underscores that right-wing religious fundamentalists have always had a penchant for violence and murder.
Perhaps as a mockery, the last words Socrates spoke were to remind his friend Crito they owed a chicken sacrifice to Aesculapius the Greek God of Medicine for the Hemlock he had drank to end his life. “Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don't let it pass.”
Gary
