energy, souls, plato and mayble the closest thing to a theistic post....
on REM Zoe Lara (in India) (India), 07/Apr/2009 23:45, 34 days ago
Around about the time before finals-panic set in, just before I would head off to Barcelona with Fab for the sort of sudden sea-and-wind that would throw sand into myHandbook of International Relations, I started reading Plato. There's an awful lot of funny things in his most famous text,Republic- sending off children to be reared so that they don't know who their parents are, grouping people according to the sort of metal in their heart, keeping "wives in common" and regulating sex, all to foster unity among citizens(!). But there are some beautiful moments of insight scattered through the book. It's all the more magical now because it's insight from a time gone by: a world of knights and and sheer gladiator-courage, valiant servants and wise men, the deep magic of mathematics and astrology and sexual indulgence and misogyny as well. But the human experience sings out and we can touch Plato's mind and musings because we're people too.There's a lovely bit in there that really struck me the second time, about energy. You'll have to bear with me for a moment. Plato says that our souls are made up of different parts and that the only happy soul is a harmonious one, where the hungry appetitive parts (eat, sleep, rest, have sex), the courageous willfull part and the thinking-knowledgeable part are satisfied all at once. Developing one to the exclusion of the others makes us hedonists or warriors or philosophers, but always unhealthy souls, divorced from another part of ourselves. The only solution is to develop the different parts in harmony, so that they work with one another, not fighting a sort of internal civil war with one another (the kind that happens when your heart tells you to kiss someone or blurt something out and your head tells your heart to behave). According to Plato, a soul with the right measure of thirst and spirit and wisdom is a healthy one; a soul with a disproportionate amount of any one suffers vice, a sort of weakness or disease. Harmony is the only true path to satisfying our nature.It's this thing about the nature of being human that is so fascinating, and why I've only just started surrendering to this idea of trying to live a harmonious life. It never really hit me before how seemingly strange and unfair it is that unlike goldfish swimming round a bowl, we can't keep doing the same thing repeatedly and stay happy. You love the feeling you have after exercise; you know that it's fleeting because sooner or later it will fade and you'll have to exercise again. You love sleeping; you sleep and sleep until suddenly your head is sore and you realise that you have to get up. You love to swing on the swings; you swing and you swing until you feel nauseated or else hungry, and you must jump off. You love chocolate; you eat and eat and must come to realise after enough bites it stops being the chocolate you loved and begins to taste sweet and sickly, and your stomach is hurting and you have to move on. Laughter doesn't last for the same reasons of the stomach, and things that are funny are only fleetingly so: they become corny, or old. If I made a list of all my favourite things - things that the idea of doing forever seems wonderfully hedonistic - I know that I could never have them forever. (Love is a possible exception, but that's a whole other train of midnight thoughts).So we as people bow to the pattern of rising and falling and moving and changing, just like energy. Science says that energy is always changing hands, always moving in and out from something to something else; always the same thing but never inside the same thing for long. We mimicenergyas we live, always restless, even when resting: because while we are still living, sleep has to end somewhere. And all living things are just the same; just as unable to keep tugging at the same pleasure without it eventually losing its lustre. Even the sea, part-alive, can't stand still: it tumbles and tosses with the pull of the moon.Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe it's energy - this constant, universal, eternal - that tugs us and plays with us and makes joys and sadnesses as fleeting as they are. We can only respond to its slippiness by jolting our lives into harmony - some rest, some sleep, some fits of movement, of work, of emotion, just as Plato says. Whatever made this eternal energy is awesome. Maybe they were trying to teach us about harmony, or maybe they were just having a play. Whichever it is, we're its servant. Energy made us and sustains us and lives through us and after us. Wow.