Zhongyongdaoist

With all due respect Taoist Texts, and believe me, in your areas of expertise I have a lot of respect for you, except for the Stoics, Greek Philosophy gave a lot of impetus to esoteric arts of all kinds, especially Platonism and Aristotelianism, though as I think about it, the Stoics were responsible for a lot of development in Astrology, the Philosopher-magician was alive and well. The case of Epicureans is more complex, I cannot speculate about them, but the influence of Plato and Aristotle and their followers an Western esoteric practices lasts from the Hellenistic period through the late Nineteenth Century. I have posted a great deal on the roots of the Occult Philosophy of the Renaissance Platonist and Magician Cornelius Agrippa in Agrippa subsection of the Esoteric section of TDB. An excellent post, it gets right to the core of the matter. Oh, but getting to that core . . . aye, there's the rub.

Inspiration and expiration come from the Latin spiritus, breath, with meanings similar to qi. It is the root of the English "spirit" and its association with whirls may have originated from the idea that such spiral manifestations of air as "dust devils", were in point of fact manifestations of spirits.

To make some sense of the OP: Wikipedia has a good introduction which cannot be reached by any direct link because of limitations TDB's software, but a search entering the string "Gödel's Ontological Proof on Wikipedia" will get you there indirectly. On ontological style of "proof" in general see: Ontological Arguments on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Which can be reached directly.

To save you some time: The Van Allen Radiation Belts These consists of charged particles, electrons, called Beta Radiation and Hydroden Nuclei, called alpha radiation they are of more danger to electrical equipment than people, there are no gamma rays in these belts because Gamma Rays are electromagnetic and electrically neutral, they cannot be held in fields like charged particles can. Gamma rays are the most dangerous to people, but the amount in space is not significant, except in certain stellar environtments only found far away from here. When I was a boy I saw this movie: Voyage to the bottom of the Sea about the Van Allen Belts catching fire, caused by a meteor shower of all things, which being a junior science nerd, I new was utter nonsense, but is was a fun movie nonetheless. The Van Allen Belts catching fire is about as likely as really dangerous showers of rocks on the moon every 48 hours. They used to print maps of the world complete with largely imaginary sea monsters, and the Van Allen belts in this case are the equivalent of the imaginary sea monsters, as opposed real ones, like big whales and apparently giant squid. Science has a great deal of data that has been rigorously tested and confirmed over the past few centuries, this is what discovered the Van Allen Belts and put men on the Moon. Oddly enough what it doesn't have is data that supports the dogmatic materialism that pervades the modern "educated" world. This is a left over from the revival of Epicureanism in the Seventeenth Century, it was given momentum by an accidental confluence with Newtonianism and given a special status in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, but when the mathematics and experimental procedures were well developed enough to examine these concepts, their fundamental defects were revealed. This is what is really important to concentrate on, not whether the earth is round or not. I don't have time to say anything more about this and won't make any either.

Being very familiar with the literature, this is strictly speaking, not true. Here are two Elizabethan examples of generalized uses of necromancy from Reginald Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft where necromancie is used as a general term for "black magic" from Joseph Peterson's Twilight Grotto: While your etymology is correct, usage seldom follows such niceties and there was also a tendency to conflate "nigromancy" meaning black magic with "necromancy" for magic using the dead. Here necromancie is contrasted to theurgie: Before Dr. Johnson set us all straight, there was no standard spelling or usage and chaos raigned (a common spelling of reigned in Elizabethan times) in the field of word usage and spelling. As for such practices, they are more common than one might think, especially in parts of the world where access to the dead is not as restricted as it is in Western countries. Jerry Alan Johnson's books on Daoist sorcery have some things in them that that definitely border on this and you can find details online like here: Maoshan ghost magic and yes, it is a serious site. As for how any of this relates to Max Christensen, I don't know. I have my own misgivings about Kunlun, but this story does seem more than a little odd and a lot of trouble to go to for things more easily accomplished.

It goes here: El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California, USA. For Rock Solid storage, more permanent than a cloud.

I know you read it, I'm just giving you a hard time, as the saying goes. The terminology and the thought behind them takes a little getting used too, but once one does they are extremely powerful and useful.

In Religious Daoism Xuanwu, the Emperor of the North is one of the most important deities. Mount Wudang is sacred to him and his was the Patron God of the Ming Dynsasty. He serves both the function of Daoist "Dharma" protector among other things he is very important in Daoist Thunder Magic, and also the Cosmological function of the God of Water, the North and the Kidneys. That's just the quick, short story. No time for more now.

But not before Maxwell's developed his theory of "electro-magnetic waves" and found their "speed", which was later identified as the speed of light. Once light had a constant speed, special relativity emerges as a deduction from electromagnetic theory. So Tesla could have developed an understanding of something like "Relativity", but if "Relativity" is mentioned by name, specifically, then it is just one more piece of evidence of the "fakeness", which I suspected from the first paragraph and knew for a fact from the use of the late Twentieth Century term "futurists" by the so-called journalist. I didn't read more. Still, Tesla was a remarkable man.

Why, I thought everyone knew it was Aristotle's Unmoved Mover: About which I wrote here: Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" and Wuwei You did read that, didn't you Trinley? But in order to find which of the Pre-Socratic Greeks is most relevant you need to look for Anaxagoras: I guess I was wrong, it looks like everybody didn't know that. In any case Plato is between the two of them, and probably means something like these things. Beginning with the Middle Platonists Aristotle's Nous, or "unmoved mover" was more or less successfully assimilated to Plato, with the most profound version being Plotinus' version which inaugurated Late Platonism, otherwise known as Neo-Platonism. Oh, Philo of Alexandria, AKA, Philo Judeaus, among the Middle Platonists, created a very influential version, which was important to Christian Platonism.

For some time I have been asking myself how best I can further the topic of the study of Agrippa, and the conclusion that I came to was to clarify the relationship between Agrippa's Occult Philosophy and the Philosophy of Aristotle. It is simply not possible to get a good understanding of Agrippa without an appreciation of Aristotle, in particular his doctrine of the “Four Causes”. Other aspects of Aristotelian thinking are important also, but it starts with these “Four Causes”. In the modern world the basic tendency is a viewpoint created in the Seventeenth Century in which the basic categories are mind and matter and objective and subjective. If you watch the discussions here on the Tao Bums and elsewhere you will see these terms bandied about with little attempt to understand them, but with a great deal argued from them. I will deal with them and their effects on the Modern Mentality in a series on Agrippa and the Scientific Revolution, but for now the most important thing is to understand what those Revolutionaries found so revolting about the worldview Circa 1500 and what about it may have been worth preserving or reviving as part of our understanding of Traditional Magic and its application to modern magic. This is the beginning of the Wikipedia article on the Four Causes: The further discussion in the article is also worthwhile. This is a fair first step, but in order to understand its application to Agrippa and to other aspects of the Occult Philosophy of his age we will have to dig deeper. That is the intent of this thread and I will examine all of these in more detail and their relationship to other aspects of Aristotle's thinking and then their applicablity to understanding how and why Agrippa thought magic and by extension alchemy and other “esoteric” arts should be practiced. As I develop this thread I will expand on the above, examine them for their applicability to understanding Agrippa, how to understand modern magic in these terms, why they are relevant to an understanding of modern science and how they can reconcile science and magic, and extend magical theory and practice. Questions and comments are welcome and I will answer them according to relevance and as time permits, in some cases putting an answer off until more groundwork has been laid, even to the extent of answering it in another thread, such as the one I am thinking about the Scientific Revolution.

Thank you both for your interest and Michael Sternbach for seconding them, but when I say I am busy, as I have in "Plato and Platonism 101", I am busy. I really hadn't intended to leave poor Trinley's post unanswered for so long, especially since he seems to be having way too much fun here, but like I said . . . So, when I have time to return seriously to these posts, I will do so.

30 Rockefeller Plaza is one of the masterpieces of American Art Deco Architecture and hardly their "new" headquarters. The art over the door seems to be inspired by a William Blake work, "The Ancient of Days": Which is in turn above a Bible verse, Isaiah 33:6 Yes, its all very bold, that was a principle feature of Art Deco.

I intend this thread to be kind of an introduction to Plato and his influence. I have chosen the following links as a starting point. The author of these posts, John Uebersax, is a Christian Platonist and so I do not agree with everything he says, but roughly 95%+ of what he says in these links, I could have written myself and in point of fact over the past thirty years have written things like this, but they are not in a form easily transferred to the internet. So with this in mind I recommend these links to Uebersax's writings as a good introduction to real Platonism: Question: I have heard that Platonism ought to be approached as a ‘therapy of the soul’, or literally as psychotherapy? Can you explain this? The Republic you never heard about in College Some suggestions for a psychological/allegorical correspondence of key terms of Plato's Republic can be found here What, Plato an Anarchist!? To get some insight into Platonic "Intellectualism" and to distinguish it from modern "intellectualism" you need to read this: Plato's divided line from the Republic And Download this: Higher and lower Reason With this introduction in mind, then more of Uebersax's work may be found here: http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/ I have not read all of them and I may not agree with things that he says in all of his posts, how much I might disagree I cannot say now. That said I will post more references to his site in subsequent posts. It seems to me that generally his site can be studied with considerable benefit to ones understanding of Plato in his religious, mystical and psychological interpretation. I will also post links to and from other sites and insofar as time allows, and frankly that may be limited, answer questions related to these posts. I will also probably link to or copy posts that I have made elsewhere on the Dao Bums here. I will also post about books and authors who are most useful for a positive interpretation of Plato.

The idea of catharsis introduced in my previous post is why I posted this: We all 'ate' a lot of words growing up and a lot of them are there in our hearts and our bellies and the they determine who we think we are and how we act. Maybe we should get to know what they are. and similar sentiments elsewhere on the Dao Bums. Following up on this in posts to come I will go back to what I have posted on congruence previously in this thread: I think that Plato's description is also an example of this state of congruence, of internal consistency and cooperation between the various selves, as the most desirable state of consciousness for a person, that of complete internal agreement. and examine the relationship between neurosis and enlightenment as brought up in this thread: I have always thought “illumination” and its cognate, "elightenment", to be, and yes a pun of sorts is intended, "opaque metaphors", poorly defined, except in terms of the psychology that Agrippa uses and to which I referred to earlier in this thread here: in which “light” is clearly identified as an “image” or “representation” of divine “understanding”, thus anchoring the metaphor, but also putting it in the more profound, and yes Platonic, concept of a "representation". I have for a long time preferred the metaphor of "awakening", as representing a shift in consciousness, but as also involving Wisdom, which I considered could be more easily defined, which is why as I go along I will comment on this thread: What is this "wisdom" that they love? Which has generated more smoke then fire from opinions about "wisdom" and the applicability of Hebrew and Greek terms to it. I hope to shed a little "light" on the matter. In the process I can start to examine the differences between noesis and dianoia and how dianoia can help us sort out opinions, helping us to differentiate "good" opinion from "bad"opinion and help to bring out the real issues at the base of "differences of opinion", and also to achieve a better state of internal congruence. I also will examine the reductionism/romanticism cultural divide that is the one of the big problems of modern Western Society and by its influence the world and part of the background dynamic from things like the conflicts between the science and humanities departments in Schools to the relationship of Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy in “Star Trek”. This thread will remain locked for little while longer.

This post has been a little difficult to write, which is why the delay, but it deals with a very important and much misunderstood aspect of Plato's writings and his writing style. I have decided to break it up into sections to keep each one simple, but they are important and bring to a point much of what I have written so far. Back in the early 1980s I was reading Plato in a public place and a guy came up to me and said that he had started reading Plato himself a while back and said “You know, I think I know less now then I did before”. To which my reply was, “Good, you're making real progress” and then I explained to him what I am about to explain here. Socrates "Ritual" is that of the lesser or prefatory mysteries and these are rituals of purification or "catharsis" as the Greeks would call have called it, from which which get the medical term “cathartic” and derived meanings, such as a “cathartic experience”, in which clears out a lot of junk and resolves issues. Socrates “cathartic” ritual is designed to clear the mind of false and conflicting opinions, and that is why I categorize some of the dialogues as “cathartic”. What I call the “cathartic” dialogues are those which are usually referred to as the “Socratic” ones, supposedly Plato's devoted portrait of his master doing what Socrates did best, which was ask niggling questions, and yes it is certainly that, but there is also a real purpose to it and that is made clear in the following quote from the Sophist: As I said in my old "Intelligble Order of the Dialogues", the Protreptic dialogues attracted the students, but: This is how I described the dialogues usually considered early and “Socratic” in my classification of the dialogues: You see those "niggling" questions have a point, the point being catharsis, a clearing out of the mind and a purging of the "conceit of knowing", which will allow real study to begin. Aside from simply being very busy, another delay has been deciding exactly what to do about Innersound and his posts, I think I have more or less decided, but for now I am locking this thread. I will continue with my exposition as time allows.

As a start this is probably the best modern translation/commentary on "The Great Learning" and "The Doctrine of the mean" Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung: (The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean) For a modern person these two are the best to start with because they are short and their style is more approachable than either the Analects or the Mencius. The Chung Yung (Zhongyong) in particular is very profound and Tu Weiming's Centrality and Commonality Is an excellent study of it. All of Tu Weiming's books are excellent, it was his: Humanity and Self-Cultivaton That transformed my understanding and opened the path of Confucian Dao for me. I'll post more as I have time.

I would come as a surprise to more than "some", but they would simply write it off as proof positive of how nutty these later religious-alchemical taoists were. My original post was part of my discussion here: Ren is conformism Part of that discussion quotes Zhuangzi to Confucius detriment, to which I took great exception. The original post should be read as a witness deposition for that discussion and this thread should be read in the context of that discussion. In Confucianism Ren, 仁, is an extremely powerful and profound concept and as far as I am concerned if all Confucius did was put the problem of what Ren is at the center of Chinese culture, his importance would be undeniable, if he actually had a conception of it such as arises in Mencius and the Zhongyong, then he was a Sage indeed. As an example I have pointed out elsewhere: in which the '...circle which Confucius called virtuous perfection (jen)', jen is Cantonese for the Pinyin, rén (仁), the fundamental concept of the Confucian Dao. I don't have time to develop the above more, but a strong case can be made that the reference to "jen" in Taoist Yoga is more than a respectful bow to "Three Teachings" syncretism. My posts in: Confucian Qi gong Are useful for understanding Ren in its Confucian sense. Edit: Corrected some problems with font size.

Warning: The following post is in dubious taste and may not be suitable for all Dao Bums, reader discretion is advised. So . . . Robert Anton Wilson had his daughter's head frozen. All of sudden this fabulous piece of satire makes much more sense to me: The Head Museum Matt Groening is such a bad boy, ya just gotta love him. (Sorry about the horrible English there, but sometimes, ya just gotta use it.) Of course it could just be a coincidence, and not a deeply revelatory synchronicity. Note to self: File under Pseudo-Scientific Madness.

Thank you for the generosity of your detailed response. I was pressed for time yesterday and don't have much to spare today. In my previous post: I cited Shingon as a ready example of an earlier pre-Tibetan form of "Esoteric Buddhism" that while it originated in India it traveled through China, was well established in Japan by the time Buddhism was being introduced into Tibet. Ancient religious uses of sex are well known: Sacred Sex and Temple Prostitution Why call them Tantra? Tantra was originally a term which meant a category of scripture with a wide subject matter, but was misused by Nineteenth Century Western Scholars as a term for a certain type of teaching and practice, those which were explicitly sexual, whether symbolically or actually, in nature. To call ancient religious sexuality "tantric" simply projects this mistake into the past. You could call them proto-tantric if you want, as something that contributes the ultimate synthesis, and its mistaken interpretation by Western Scholars, but they need to be studied and understood on their own terms, and then they can be studied as to how they were assimilated into Hindu and Buddhist "Tantra". Returning to Shingon: This is all very nice, but it is also Nyingma-centric and all sects portray themselves as the highest and best. I have seen this attitude too many times to take any one of them seriously. How do you suppose Shingon masters categorize all these later scriptures? How do you analyze and compare the claims of different religions and sects within them? This is a question about which I started thinking in my teens, a long time ago. As I said this is an issue far too complex for development here and I don't want to put much more time into it here or now.

If you mean of alchemy then you want: The Alchemy Web Site There are of course a large number of other sites dealing with different aspects of the Western Tradition, I don't know most of them because I because I learned all of what they continuously rehash decades ago. To get a clearer idea of what Regardie and others regard as Kabbalah, or Qabala or however you want to spell it, this is considered the "classic": The Mystical Qabalah by Dion Fortune I was very influenced by Gestalt Psychology as a teenager in the late sixties, but ended out preferring Transactional Analysis because of its clear goal orientation. Its modern a adaptations in Neuro-Linguistic Programing (NLP) with its idea of Congruence is probably the best modern version. I had worked out similar ideas in the Eighties and when I met some NLP practitioners in 1990 they were surprised by my own work. Yes, the Western concept of Tantra is very limited and most Westerners would be surprised to learn that the earlier pre-Tibetan forms of "Tantra", such as represented by Shingon, have nothing to do with sex at all, but all of that is a complex subject, too complex to get into here. Finally, because of your apparent interest in art, that I start off my own teaching of "magic" by teaching people to draw using using Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the neurology is a little outdated, but it is very effective both for gaining skill in visualization and for accessing a state of consciousness that is the essence of magic. Welcome to the Dao Bums.

wants you to be playing the violin rather than talking about or around it: And so does Plato. That is why I quoted this sometime back: I talked about the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion here: Modern academic philosophers collect and compare "maps to Larisa", they discuss them and write about them and argue about them, but never set out on the journey. Plato wrote to inspire people to make the journey and outlined it as best he could. To continue your own analogy, if he did the equivalent of writing odes about the beauty of the violin, it was to inspire people to practice on it harder.

Return Bridge to My Previous Post Since Bodhichitta introduced Thomas Taylor: and Innersound has been busy Googling Neo-Platonism to spam on these topics, which is why I put in another "Bridge over Garbled Waters". Also included are these, which are an interesting if unanticipated development: and Good suggestion ... I dropped out of the Plato and Platonism 101 class a while back because this other professor came into the hall and the two of them started arguing. It must have been in the air because early last week I had a long PM chat with someone who suggested pretty much the same thing. First to clarify the situation. This is an "owners permissions" part of the board, all I have to do is request them, I mentioned this earlier: I have misgivings about the "owners permission" system, which I discussed in the PMs that I mentioned. Though I have given some thought to them because of the PMs. Now I have open requests to use them and that fact must certainly be weighed in the balance. If we count this earlier post of Seth Ananda: As implicitly making a similar request, and the PM, that would be four requests to trim out Innersound's spam posts. If there are more such public requests, it may tip the scales and I will go ahead and request "owner permissions" and trim out the junk, however I will not count PMs directly, only public requests, so if you want to see a change, post that wish publicly. Aside from being busy this last week, I have also been thinking of several different subjects for my next post. I have decided that it is probably time to address the question of Socrates and those niggling questions and what they have to do with "the Lesser Mysteries". Edit: I had to edit the link for the "Return Bridge"

All of the above sounds very grand, but since Innersound has not read Plato he has missed this: In other words the whole account is nothing but "a likely" story! What I found interesting about this when I read it was it contemporaneous quality, I was reminded of Thomas Kuhn's concept of "paradigm". Had I not read this and thought about it I would have been much less impressed by Plato as a thinker, but viewing the discussion in the Timaeus and much else in Plato as "a likely story" given the state of mathematics and cosmology at the the time and not some grand revelation of esoteric truth to be taken as a dogma and used as a means of saying what Plato did and did not think, makes all of the models of Plato that have been built on it and other aspects of his dialogues a lot less convincing, especially when taken with his other statements of his where he distances himself from everything that he as written, and which I have quoted in my posts. All of this academic speculation, whether laudatory or a condemnation of Plato, is just that, academic speculation. Some of it is more thoughtful and interesting than others, but all of them are just models of who Plato was and what Plato may have thought. I found Plato an interesting and much misunderstood thinker. I found that the philosophy that descends from him had much to recommend it as a "working model" of reality. I think other people might find him interesting also, if they give him a chance. What I wish to bring out can only come from a patient examination of Plato's work and I will continue to do so. I will not enter into any detailed responses with Innersound because of his apparent inability to not distort his sources, here is a great example, which has recurred in the above post: This "quote" is made up of four sections separated by ellipsis, these excerpts occur in the paper as follows: Starts as end of the last paragraph on p. 13 In fact, it could be argued that there are no discrete numbers at all, just magnitudes related by numerical ratios. This will prove significant.... Continues from the middle of p. 14: On this point, it is worth recalling that Aristotle (at De anima 407a) had criticized Plato for presenting the soul as a spatial magnitude.... Continues on p. 14 at a reasonable distance: a debate that likely sprung from the Timaeus about whether or not the soul, the world soul in particular, is a ‘geometrical magnitude.’... And then jumps over 20 pages to conclude on p.35: Nevertheless, geometry does have an explicitly foundational role: and Calcidius begins by highlighting the word portio, his translation for moira: Plato, he writes, ‘does not say that he has taken a part of the simple and incorporeal soul-stuff, but rather a portion, that is to say, a kind of likeness of a part, which is similar to the geometrical point.’ From there he proceeds to build the first Adrastan lambda diagram, on whose left and right there flow from the apex of this geometrical point the first even and odd linear, planar, and cubic numbers: 2 4 8 and 3 9 27. I had to perform a search within the document in order to find this conclusion, after I gave up looking for a continuation in even a reasonable number of pages. As far as I am concerned an ellipsis should not cover twenty pages without an explicit note and a good reason. I should not have to do this type of homework and I think that the person who thanked Innersound for this quote owes me a thanks for doing homework that they should have done before saying thanks. But this type of work that I have had to do every time I have looked at Innersound's "quotes" and his use of sources. The text itself is an analysis of medieval musical theory I found it quite interesting, but Innersond has not demonstrated its relevance. This is what I pointed out at the beginning, Innersound has no intent for a real discussion, he is blatantly hostile to Plato for reasons of his own conspiracy theories which he started concocting in early to mid adolescence. This series is addressed to people who are open minded, I will not waste my time with fanatics, but I will point out their abuse of sources, when and where I chose, as I already have elsewhere, but I don't have more time for this now. Innersound has been spamming again thus another: Bridge over Garbled Waters Edit: Added "Bridge over Garbled Waters"

I have decided to add a new feature to this series, drum roll please: What Innersound does not want you to know: the conspiracy theorist's conspiracy revealed! Over the time I have been looking at Innersound's use of sources, one thing has constantly been in my mind, aside from the fact that the quotes are often taken out of context, the sources often have ideas and opinions that directly contradict most of what Innersound is saying. Here is an example from the first source cited above: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=11&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CFAQFjAKahUKEwjPgsKy2pXIAhUQM4gKHZ9ZApc&url=https://journals.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/StudiaAntiqua/article/viewFile/11647/11649&usg=AFQjCNG57zISG0GpEXmBRlVKmGqSgrMy4g&sig2=YK_jm0vRXQ4nJnj0gVdK4g&bvm=bv.103388427,d.dmo pdf link. Too bad Plato misunderstood Pythagoras - specifically the origin of knowledge as Emptiness aka formless awareness. Aside from the embarrassing fact that in the quote the author says: Indicating that he could not possibly be cited to support the idea that Plato did not understand Pythagoras, as Innersound asserts "Too bad Plato misunderstood Pythagoras . . .", there is this equally embarrassing beginning to the essay: What, Nietzsche wrong about Plato? But wasn't Heidegger influenced by Nietzsche, and Derrida by the combination of Heidegger and Nietzsche? What if the all wise Peter Kingsley was influenced by such academic misconceptions as these when he examined Plato? I have complained, but never been specific about misconceptions related to Plato before, but I have not cited anything because I did not want to go dig it up from sources I read decades ago, but really, to have source such a trusty and reliable source as this one, so reliable that Innersound himself would quote it, handed to me on a platter, well, I just couldn't let it go by without expressing my gratitude to Innersound by using it. Of course the problem is that Innersound himself, ignores things like this, they aren't what he is looking for and he certainly doesn't want anyone to read them, so he tells you what he thinks you should know and uses these sources to look like his own opinions have more scholarly backing than they do. There are also some interesting points in this essay that I could use to begin some of my discussions, in particular the "rite of Elenchus" mentioned and what Socrates was really up to asking all those annoying questions, and what is has to do with the Greater and Lesser Mysteries as I mentioned in one of my previous posts. So everyone download the essay Innersound cites: Plato in Context: The Republic and Allegory, by Joseph Spencer, Studia Antiqua, Vol 4 No 1, Winter 2005 You'll find the section he cites on page 26 and after having read all of the things that Innersound does not want you to know be even more dismayed by his quoting it and maybe a bit upset about how much he is trying to hide from you. Oh, and as a passing note, I have already posted here and elsewhere on the Dao Bums quotes that would indicate to all but the most hidebound fundamentalist that Plato is quite aware of knowledge originating in "formless awareness".