Diotema From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Diotima of Mantinea
(Greek: ???????) is a female seer who plays an important role in Plato’s Symposium. Her ideas are the origin of the concept of Platonic love. Since the only source concerning her is Plato, it is uncertain whether she was a real historical personage or merely a fictional creation. However, nearly all of the characters named in Plato’s dialogues have been found to correspond to real people living in ancient Athens.[1]
In Plato’s Symposium the members of a party discuss the meaning of love. Socratessays that in his youth he was taught “the philosophy of love” by Diotima, who was a seer or priestess. Socrates also claims that Diotima successfully postponed the plague of Athens.
In a dialogue that Socrates recounts at the symposium, Diotima gives Socrates a genealogy of Love (Eros), stating that he is the son of “resource and need.” In her view, love is a means of ascent to contemplation of the Divine. For Diotima, and for Plato generally, the most correct use of love of other human beings is to direct one’s mind to love of Divinity.[citation needed] In short, with genuine Platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one’s attention to spiritual things. One proceeds from recognition of another’s beauty, to appreciation of Beauty as it exists apart from any individual, to consideration of Divinity, the source of Beauty, to love of Divinity.
In reply to yesterday’s brain transplant post, this from Todd German of Key West:
Hey Sloan,
Here is a link to Scientific American article.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain
Hi, Todd. I rather imagine all of a human brain is in use in a mechanical or chemical sense. That’s not what Antonio, or I, addressed. We addressed the general massive reliance on and deification of the intellect, which comes out of a small part (don’t ask me which part, I don’t know) of the left side of the brain, and the general massive unreliance on the rest of the “thinking” process.
You and I have have two mutual Key West friends, who have spent a great deal of energy trying to engage me in/convert me over to their version of rational discussion. One insists on Socratic debate to the exclusion of all other discourse on an issue. The other has, a few times, accused me of being incapable of rational discussion. Then, that one, using a front to avoid saying it was his view, said a prominent Keys psychologist said I present classical symptoms of schizophrenia. That one was trained by Jesuits. Then, he decided he wanted nothing to do with the church and went to the East to find his spirituality. He memorized the Buddhist scriptures the way he had memorized the Bible. The other is a reborn or otherwise hard-core Christian. Neither man, as far as I have been able to determine, ever had one experience with anything beyond the secular. Both men, as far as I have been able to determine, are completely trapped in their intellects, the 5 percent part of their brains.
As we discussed on the phone when you called to say you had sent The Scientific American article, there actually are three human brains: the one in the skull, the one in the heart, and the one in the solar plexus region. This is ancient knowledge some esoteric sects today still know and have methods of developing and putting into practice. For those sects, this is every bit as much a science as anything ever written in The Scientific American, which I don’t imagine ever wrote about anything that would defy the 5 percent brain god. This was the struggle that faced the Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung. After being drenched in dreams and other non-5 percent brain god experiences, Jung realized he had discovered a science, which he hoped to persuade the European medical community to adopt with him as its head professor. In competition was Sigmund Freud. The European medical community opted for Freud’s approach, to the great distress of humanity, as Freud had a much smaller grip on the elephant than Jung had. Jung was having direct experiences with the Numinous, and there was no way the European medical community could, or would, fit that into their 5 percent brain god theology.
The Scientific American article looks to me like 5 percent brain thinking and writing. The pity. Also a pity, our friend who went to India, the Buddhist, did not have happen to him there what happens to many Americans and Europeans and other people who go there and meet up with a spirit-accelerated yogi. All of a sudden such people are having experiences the 5 percent brain god cannot fathom or control. All of a sudden such people are headed down a path they will not be able to reverse without a great deal of effort, such as can be accomplished by massive drug use, by massive reborn Christian-ing, or by suicide. The downside of such a psychic opening in people who are spirit-ignited by spirit-advanced yogis is they end up being possessed by those yogis, which is sort of like being possessed by demonic spirits. I have had considerable dealings in the past with such people, trying to help them be rid of what they brought back from India. Our friend who went to India actually picked something like that up unawares while he was over there, as did his buddy, who went over their and became a Sikh, and later became a Buddhist. This is why I tell people not to go to India to seek spiritual acceleration unless they go there fully protected by powerful spirit allies, which looks to me is what happened for Antonio T. de Nicholas when he went to India for an extended period of time.
Somehow, I can’t imagine seeing anything about any of that in The Scientific American, even though it is pure science, what I have just explained to you. Nor can I imagine Albert Einstein getting on too well with much of it, either.
India came to me and I received it because it was meant for me to receive it and I was protected by angels who had set it up. It was part of my training and preparation for the work I would do. And, it was part of my soul’s further expansion. But it came about so very differently than what happens to people who just go over there unaware of what lurks beyond the 5 percent brain god’s vision. I could say much the same about people who to elsewhere to get spirit acceleration, say with a Buddhist rinpoche (very high Tibetan lama), or a Sufi master, or whatever. I have had extensive dealings with Americans and Europeans and other people who did that, too. They all contracted something that it looked to me they should have left alone. I see the same thing happening in the New Age, with its brand of gurus and their disciples. It’s a form of brainwashing not unlike that practiced by the Christian sects and other religions, Islam comes to mind, Judaism also. It’s all designed to control the pilgrim in the name of liberation. It’s all designed to keep the pilgrim from having direct experience with the Numinous devoid of a human intermediary. Jesus was about having direct experience with the Numinous, but the church that spawned from his life does all it can to replace the Numinous with itself and/or the Bible, and those who have direct experience with the Numinous are heretics, or crazy, or possessed by demons.
Somehow I can’t see anything about that in The Scientific American, although it is all science.
I wrote some about St. John of the Cross recently. He was seriously persecuted by his own Carmelite brethren, who viewed him as a heretic because his spiritual path by-passed all reliance on the Catholic church and its practices and authority. Juan went one-on-one with the Numinous. He was incarcerated. Then, he escaped. Then toward the end, he was incarcerated again and fed a starvation diet. As his time neared, as he lay on his death bed, he exclaimed, it is reported, “Oh what beautiful daisies!” Then, he died and the air around him was filled with the wonderful scent of flowers according to reports handed down from people who were with him in that moment. In that day, it was the practice to remove the digits of loved ones, and perhaps, not sure about this, the ears and nose, and distribute them as keepsakes to the deceased’s close relations. (Antonio T. di Nicholas wrote of this in St. John of the Cross: Alchemist of the Soul.) Juan’s removed body parts did not rot. They were preserved by some force the 5 percent mind god could not fathom. Generations later, the Rome church concluded the Carmelites had murdered a saint, and Juan was canonized. Even the Rome church recognized miracles and that some people could go straight to God.
Somehow, I can’t imagine The Scientific American dealing with San Jaun de la Cruz very well.
Here is what I wrote to Antonio today about Francis of Assisi, re this part of today’s post about Antonio:
There was this one time when the Pope (a friend) called him: “He asked me, ‘Antonio, what can we do to Christianize Europe?’ and I said, ‘You’re asking me? You talk to Him.’”
Hi, Antonio:
What the Pope asked of you, and your perfect reply, sort of reminds me of something from Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
Francis, not yet of Assisi in the saint sense, after emerging from a very rough dark night, or perhaps before, was asked by the Lord in a vision to help Him rebuild His church. After finding he no longer fit into his father’s merchant paradigm, Francis stripped himself naked in the town center and walked out of Assisi. Clad in what would become Franciscan garb, he went to an old crumbling country church no longer in use and started rebuilding it stone by stone. By and by, Francis started attracting followers from Assisi in that endeavor, including the love of his life, Claire, whom he had known since childhood. By and by, Francis was attracting a lot of followers and the big church in Assisi was pretty well empty. By and by, soldiers showed up at Francis’ church and burned it and killed the man looking out for it while Francis and the others were off doing something else for a while. On returning to see that, Francis was so distressed that he decided to go to Rome to ask the Pope what he had done wrong that God would allow such a thing to happen? Two of Francis’ male disciples, also childhood friends, followed him, all three in rags, barefoot and dirty. As it would be, Francis and his ragtags gained an audience with the Pope surrounded by his finely-dressed entourage, much to their consternation. Instead of asking the Pope what he had done wrong, Francis started reciting Jesus about how well the birds of the air were clothed and so forth and so on, which created far more serious consternation even as the Pope came down off his seat and walked to Francis and was seized and knelt and kissed Francis’ feet and ordained him and, well, what I’m getting around to is, Francis had totally misunderstood what the Lord had meant by asking him to help Him rebuild His Church.
Were I the Pope, Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Stigmata would be required viewing for all Roman Catholics. Nikos Kazantzakis did a nice job on Francis in his novel St. Francis.
Sloan
I brought the movie, Stigmata, into the mix, Todd, because Francis was the first person in history, according to the Rome church, to experience manifestation on his body of some of the same wounds Jesus received to his body during the crucifixion. Open bleeding wounds that do not heal. Francis did not live long after he experienced the Stigmata. The movie is about a young woman living in New York city, a non-believer, who spontaneously experienced onset of the Stigmata and was moving toward experiencing all of the wounds of the crucified Jesus, all of which turned a Jesuit priest scientist upside down and inside out and caused tremendous difficulty inside the Vatican Jesuits as well. More important, the real message in Stigmata is God’s Church is not made of bricks and mortar but is all around us and inside of us.
Somehow I can’t imagine The Scientific American and the 5 percent brain god dealing with Francis of Assisi and the Stigmata very well. Nor can I imagine Albert Einstein getting on too well with much of it either.
How are you dealing, Todd, with what I just told you about John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi? Those two men were so far beyond the 5 percent brain god that they were like God compared to the 5 percent brain god. The 5 percent brain god would not have been able to admit those two men had their experiences. Today, the 5 percent god would put Juan and Francis under the care of psychiatry. Or, if they were in a church setting exorcisms would be attempted. How do you exorcise God? Right, not possible. But there is no possible way to get the 5 percent brain god to accept any of that, or anything I write of God and angels and my experiences with same. Only having the direct experience can shake the 5 percent brain god up and knock him off his very tiny self-imagined throne.
This is the kind of discussion I can have with Antonio because we both are one-on-one with the Numinous in ways you, Todd, our two mutual Key West friends, and nobody else I currently have any dealings with can remotely fathom. You really should stop proselytizing the 5 percent brain god, Todd. You really should stop doing that. It’s unbecoming, and it’s demonic.
This is all science, Todd. This is what I was trained to do. Politics was a last-minute add on after a lot of things didn’t work out as had been hoped. A few people need to hold onto the flame for all of humanity, lest it go out altogether. This is well known in certain circles, while the masses live as if there is no flame at all.
Right, I had dreams in my morning siesta that were about this discussion with you, but I didn’t know that from the dreams. I just knew I was going into something heavy and rough that had to do with Antonio’s and my conversations and outlook. The dots back to the dreams started connecting as I began writing this repsonse.
Sloan
Post-Script: Accompanying this discourse is intense internal load in the form of feeling poisoned and jammed in my intestines, all of which will work its way out of me sooner or later, as I do what is given to me to do concerning this work assignment. In my spirit program, it seems the work assignments are endless, there are no vacations in the sense that is understood by humans. At least not in this life. There are respites, reposes, recharging moments, but the work is relentless.
It has been said that Jesus took on the sins of the world. I don’t see it that way, perhaps he took on the sins of the world in which he operated. But assume he did take on the sins of humanity, did he take on the sins of humanity to come? I seriously doubt it. Jesus opened a very large spirit door through which others could follow behind and not have to grope blindly because they had at least a general roadmap to follow, which Jesus had left with his disciples. Had he not left them, he would have been hindered from moving into his next experience and they would have been hindered into moving into his likeness, for they would have continued to rely on him, instead of on what he had been relying on, which he called the Holy Ghost.
Somewhere in the Gospels, Jesus told his disciples they could blaspheme him and they would be forgiven, but if they blasphemed the Holy Ghost they would not be forgiven. Jesus knew, even if they did not, that the Holy Ghost was feminine. He knew because he was Jewish and learned in that faith in which the Spirit of God was named Shekinah, female gender. The disciples needed to grow up into Her to become like but not greater than Jesus, as he had told them they could do. This was the guru (spiritual teacher) method of that age, and of ages before and since. Except in Jesus’ case, he only assumed guru duties for a little over three years, according to the Gospels. Then he turned his students over to the Holy Ghost. Such is not usually the case with gurus, whose students cling to them until they die and even afterward, not unlike Christians did with Paul and even with Jesus after he was gone. The transition into the Divine Feminine is absolutely necessary to continue the journey into God, regardless of what you or anyone else thinks.
What Antonio and I both have experienced is the by-pass of the human guru. We have been dealt with and taught directly by the Numinous, which is possible because our feminine aspects are functioning well enough for that to happen. Sure, we encountered plenty of people on this world who were arranged to instruct us, but that was arranged by the real instructors. Eventually, we moved beyond the temporary human teachers and were taught directly by the Numinous. This approach is available to any person, although some people certainly are more open/ready for it than others. At the very least, a person has to be ready to depart from the herd, be viewed as an aberration, strange, odd, crazy, demonically posessed. More strenuous, a person has to be ready to be bossed around and corrected day and night unceasing. Although it is not required, it is quite helpful to the person to be so totally desperate that no other way of continuing to live on this world seems to be an option. Seeing no other options seriously inhibits any attempt to escape, for no possible escape is seen.
This was Jesus’ path, and some of his disciples experienced it as well. St. Francis experienced it. John of the Cross experienced it. Anthony of the Desert experienced it. Mother Teresa experienced it, to name others in Christendom who exeperienced it. This path, of course, is not limited to Christendom. It is open to anyone regardless of religious origin or lack thereof. The Vatican is no more the seat of Christ on this world than is the Dalai Lama. Christ is the seat of Christ. Jesus said something very interesting somewhere in the Gospels. He told his disciples that he had flocks about which they knew not. I never heard that passage mentioned in any church in Christendom. I have discussed that passage with devout Christians and they had no answer for it other than they were convinced only Christians went to heaven after they left this world. I rather imagine they are going to be quite surprised after they pass over to see what is really up. The way to be saved by Jesus is to live as he lived and taught others to live.
I told Antonio when we spoke the one time so far on the phone, the sum of Jesus was, is, “Not my but God’s will be done.” Antonio agreed. The catch is, what is God’s will? The 5 percent god brain is not nearly smart enough to figure that out. I’m not even convinced the whole brain is smart enough to figure that out. I’m not convinced even the wisest and most developed souls in human bodies are not led and instructed and corrected. I bet the ranch Jesus was led and instructed and corrected. If he was, who could dare say they don’t need the same?
The soul is so much bigger than the brain that, well, maybe that’s too big of a subject even to try to address in words, although something keeps pushing me to continue to give it the old college try. I was taught how to teach other people to be one-on-one with the Numinous, and guess what I learned from the people who were ready and went for it? I learned they liked walking and talking with God a hell of a lot more than they like God talking to them. Pretty darn funny, huh?
No, then how about this? Starting just before dawn yesterday and still running strong, I received a heap of messages in dreams and out of the blue serendipitous waking experiences from the Keys and Birmingham that the new lady dolphin brain I just received to replace the old worn out lady dolphin brain I had to have replaced is about me running for the School Board next year in my voting district, which is District 2. Well, I have a blue-plated conventional education. And I am a published author and poet. And I am a career educator who leans toward the
Dead Poet’s Society approach to teaching children. And I am a lawyer who, thanks to the angels, is pretty darn good at sniffing out what is what and who is doing what ought not to be done and blowing the whistle real loud. And I do not believe God should be expelled from schools any more than I believe God should be expelled from government. Note I said God, I am all in favor of expelling religion from schools and government, which is how I read the First Amendment, which also is how the people who wrote and passed it felt. They did not want to see repeated in America what had happened in England and Europe where various aberrations from Jesus had gained control of entire national governments and made everyone else’s lives miserable.
Ciao
My thoughts on the Key West city elections yesterday are, the defeat of incumbent Ty Symroski for the Utility Board was astounding in a city that makes so much commotion about protecting the environment and going green. Ty has been the only elected official in the Keys known to me who seems truly committed to protecting the environment and going green. During my interview last night on KONK Radio in Key West after the returns came in, I said that and that there are a lot of hypocrites in Key West, for if all the people who claim to want to save the environment and go green had voted for Ty, he would have won going away. I saw Mayor Craig Cates last night and congratulated him for getting 70 percent of the votes in a 3-candidate race. I was glad Charlie Bradford was reelected to the Utility Board. I had no dog in the District 4 City Commission race. I remain glad I did not run this year and that it is them who have to deal as city officials with all of the issues facing Key West and the Utility Board, and not me.