Logos & Dharma - Platonic Buddhism
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– Neoplatonism and theurgy – Dzogchen and the View of spontaneous presence – Zen Koans and Platonic dialectics – Theurgy, non-dual Tantra, and mysticism – Ancient languages, sacred texts, and poetic meditations – Dialogues, essays, rants and chants
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پستهای کانال
This is an open response to Imperium Press critique of Socratic and Platonic teachings, presented in their article "Was Plato Really Gay?"
The author argues that Socrates was justly condemned as "impious," the ancient Greek equivalent of atheism, and that Platonism diverges from what constitutes “authentic Greek paganism.”
Despite the essay's ludicrous title, it deserves to be taken seriously. Philosophy can indeed be hollowed out into a substitute for religion, and certain Platonic circles, by reducing Platonism to abstract metaphysics, do exactly that.
Nonetheless, the critique rests on a historical misapprehension of both the trial of Socrates and the historical conditions surrounding it, and in multiple places caricatures the immense vastness of the Platonic tradition.
A pagan revivalism built from a deliberately narrowed corpus, purged of everything that doesn't fit a puritanical standard of purity, is not a return to ancestral vitality; it is a smaller and more brittle thing than the traditions it claims to restore. The readiness of Platonism and the Greco-Roman mystery cults to draw on Chaldaean, Orphic, Pythagorean, Persian, and Egyptian material alike suggests the ancestral mind was far less concerned with such purity than its modern defenders are on its behalf.
So the question I want this reply ultimately to leave standing is not whether Socrates and Plato can pass some test of pagan validity. It is whether what remains, once every wider current of the totality of European heritage, has been pruned away in the name of purity, still carries enough life to answer the civilizational decay and collective nihilism of the postmodern West, or whether it has, in the act of purifying itself, cut away the very roots it needed to grow.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-214288855
| 2 |  As our minds wander into the bardos (passages of conscious experience) of appearances within our embodied-ego world-creating interface, it is easy to lose ourselves in these wanderings and mistake what appears in the mind for "objective truth, “an objective universe,” or “a self.”
In such instances, periods, and even whole lifetimes for some, time seems an eternally recurring loop, comprised largely of suffering and an ocean of tears. There is, of course, no objective time "out there." Our own fixated minds *are* the recurring loops — the miraculous power of innate awareness contracting itself as delusion.
It is a great blessing to carry "mementos" in our travels within and as time: a form of practice to remind us, or rather to help us recollect amid fragmented perception, that we are the creators of these loops, and prior to time, unbounded and whole.
That practice can take as many shapes and flavors as there are sentient beings: a prayer, a mantra, a simple phrase of recollection, a breathing technique, a visual, a bodily gesture, the opening of the gaze, and so on.
The form of the means is of secondary importance. What matters is that through this means, through this point of reference of practice, we return to open clarity. This is true sanity: the flash of awareness that turns its light upon itself, the "aha" we feel when we remember something completely self-evident.
These "aha" moments of existential remembrance are breaths of pure freedom. They open a space in which what would otherwise appear as cyclical, inevitable fate can be changed.
We are the loop, and we are the beginning and the end of the loop. Yet we are not and never were the loop.
Let us heed, then, the old Orphic commandment which is likewise taught in the ancient Nordic myths: avoid the river of Lethe, and drink instead from the wellspring of Memory.
The Mind is the Buddha. The Buddha is the Mind. Behold how I conceal and reveal Myself as the miraculous power of innate Awareness. | 138 |
| 3 | Dzogchen, Christianity, and the non-dual Circle of Orthodoxy and Heresy.
Undoubtedly, one must become a heretic even to entertain the comparison I am proposing in this article. This is why the essay opens by denouncing naive forms of perennialism in which “all doctrines point toward the same truth.”
The word doctrine traces to the Greek verb dokeō, meaning to think, to hold as opinion, or to seem. This is the root of doxa (opinion) and dogma (that which seems true, hence a fixed tenet). A doctrine, therefore, is how reality appears, and in some cases a choice of how an apprehender wishes for reality to appear, to a given mind or tradition, a rendering of the "terrain of the Real" rather than the terrain itself.
In other words, doctrines are maps of meaning and world-creation for the human mind. A map may represent the "real place" accurately, or it may misrepresent it entirely. As such, not all doctrines carry equal value, nor do they necessarily point to the same location. Some, in time, require revision, as new information arrives from direct exploration of the "real place" itself.
This is where my proposal begins. To explore the "real place" directly is, in my view, equivalent to the direct perception of non-dual, pure, empty, and total consciousness, or simply put, consciousness as such.
The essay compares the phenomenology of liberation and awakening consciousness across Dzogchen and the Nicene Creed, not their doctrinal or ontological claims. A consciousness-based phenomenological comparison between Buddhism, non-dual traditions generally, and Christianity might update their doctrinal maps, drawing new information from the direct crossings made by each tradition's explorers.
Yet, in the case of this comparison, it is the hyper-religious, hyper-doctrinal view of the Great Perfection that can encompass the Christian view as such and not the other way around.
One of my aims as a philosopher is to be so radical a heretic that the circle closes, until heresy becomes indistinguishable from super-orthodoxy. Jesus himself was an ultimate heretic, yet he declared with sovereign authority: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."
Siddharta Gautama too was branded by many as belonging to the same company of radical heretics, yet he reassured them that he did not invent a teaching from his individual fantasy, but stumbled upon a great discovery already waiting for him to arrive since beginningless times. As it is written by the Nagara Sutta (SN 12:65), the Buddha taught:
“It’s just as if a man, traveling along a wilderness track, were to see an ancient path, an ancient road, traveled by people of former times. He would follow it. Following it, he would see an ancient city, an ancient capital inhabited by people of former times, complete with parks, groves, & ponds, walled, delightful. He would go to address the king or the king’s minister, saying, ‘Sire, you should know that while traveling along a wilderness track I saw an ancient path… I followed it… I saw an ancient city, an ancient capital… complete with parks, groves, & ponds, walled, delightful. Sire, rebuild that city!’
Yes, Buddha, we shall build that wondrous City anew.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194062534 | 287 |
| 4 |  A Platonic-Buddhist Epode on Behalf of the Soul of Europe and the World
Strophe
O Dharmakāya, unborn Peace,
Amitābha, whose rays increase,
Thou Vindonnus, Apollo wise,
Who dwells beyond all birth and blights.
O Source of Suns, pure Nous and Fire,
From Whom all forms and dreams respire, Thy pulse is Time, Thy breath the stars,
Thy wisdom weaves the world’s avatars.
Thou Art the Root no root contains,
The Law that thunders through the planes.
In Thee the Aeons rise and sleep,
And Gods their solemn presence keep.
All things arise and pass and turn,
Yet in the Source forever yearn.
Through One, as One, in One they shine,
In Earth and Wind, in Water and Fire.
Antistrophe
O Sambhogakāya, Voice of Bliss,
Avalokita's sacred kiss,
O Donar, thunder-lord of rain,
Whose mighty strikes release our pain.
Lokéśvara of gentle gaze,
Whose presence breaks samsāric maze,
And Tara, Dolma crowned with stars,
Who breaks the fetters of our scars.
Thy triple dance, thy solar vow,
Is written on the ether now.
From Union’s Womb thy forms expand,
As stars pour forth from spirit’s hand.
With hearts aligned to Rigpa’s aim
We name the Light beyond all name.
From True Light shines the Truth-born Ray, The Bodhi-path, the boundless Way.
Doxologikon
O Radiance born of Radiance pure,
O Light through Light that shall endure,
Glory to the Power whose mighty gleam Outshines the suns of every realm.
Praise to the Depth that depth denies,
The Formless Form that fills the skies,
The One whose Mind is void and whole,
The Axis Mundi of the Soul.
Through Thee, as Thee, the All returns,
The wheel dissolves, the wisdom burns.
Each breath, each earth, each star, each tree In awe, they cry: “No Self but Thee.”
Epode-Chorus
O Trinity of Light, give ear,
From Europe’s heart, attend our fear.
Behold our wound, our bloodied cry,
And dream with us beneath the sky.
Feel now our heart of crimson grief,
The soul’s eclipse, the spirit’s brief.
Yet in our blood, thy spark remains,
Blood of the Spirit—ancient veins.
O cast with us the rites of wrath
Tantric and pure, of our soul’s path.
Through iron hymn and lightning breath, Europa rises, scorning death.
Through One, through Love, o Hope divine, Renew the Earth with sacred Sign.
Let Soul and Cosmos co-respire,
Europa crowned in sapphire fire!
Let silence sublime now the watcher crown, Where self is released and form self-liberates. Behold the Sphere no eye can see, the unborn Ground of liberty—A. | 351 |
| 5 |  On the Tension of the Soul and Anatta Between Platonism and Buddhism
The soul in Platonism is a mediating power, not a "puppeteer" substance-entity. It exists relatively, as the emanative unity—at once indivisible and divisible—of Nous and the One within Time.
In union with the "One"—a deictic term for Hellenic philosophy to point to the "Not Two", the Non-Dual— the soul's self-identity is transcended.
Master Proclus, following the hierophant Iamblichus, describes this median mode of existence by attributing to the soul opposing terms held simultaneously, terms characteristic of the intelligible and sense-perceptible realities that form the upper and lower limits of the soul's existence as a mean between them.
The soul is thus indivisible and divisible, eternal and temporal, immortal and mortal, ungenerated (agennētos) and generated (genētos). This simultaneous inherence of contradictory attributes earns soul its designation as a "middle" being, an intermediary dynamic power—simultaneously changeable and unchangeable—between incorporeal intelligible realities and sense-perceptible things.
As such, Platonic emantive soul-doctrines stands in no absolute conflict with the emanative Trikāya of Mahāyāna Buddhism and its descriptions on how individuality appears in the temporal realm. Platonism emphasizes ontology; Buddhism emphasizes the phenomenology of mind. The difference generates a productive comparative tension, one I find genuinely exciting.
The Platonic doctrines of the soul are incompatible chiefly with Madhyamaka Emptiness-Only (Prāsaṅgika) and other anti-metaphysical Buddhist schools, where dependent origination is radicalized into ontological incoherence and reductionist metaphysical nihilism is reified as dogma.
Nonetheless, the Prāsaṅgika approach, in turn, is incompatible with multiple other Buddhist schools as well, including but not limited to the "Buddha-Nature/Tathagathagarbha" sutric litertature, the Other-Emptiness Madyamikas, Yogachara, and Dzogchen, the crown pinnacle of Tibetan Buddhism.
Most essentially, I argue, that the metaphysical nihilist branches of Buddhism sit uneasily with pre-Abhidharmic Pāli Buddhism—the canon closest in time, and therefore the most accurate source available to us, of Śākyamuni Buddha's actual teachings.
Regardless whether one understands selfhood in terms of soul or in purely reductionist terms,
The essential to our immediate felt experience is this: egohood is a living power—a creative, free, relational, conscious force mediating between the unmanifest and the manifest. | 442 |
| 6 | I had the pleasure of a two-hour discussion yesterday with a fellow Platonist and community-builder, Eric Claussen, founder of the Platonic Path.
We covered a range of topics relevant to Platonic, Buddhist, and Tantric practitioners navigating spiritual self-realization through an age steeped in uncertainty and dissolution, yet pregnant with unprecedented potential for creative reimagining of ourselves and our civilizational paradigm.
Among the many topics discussed, I presented briefly the common operative principles of theurgy and tantra, and the opportunity for theurgic practitioners to connect with living lineages of tantric praxis. This opens a path for an authentic revival—rather than a reconstruction—of the ancient Mystery and theurgic lineages of Hellenic and Western origin.
We also stressed the importance of forming hubs of spiritual communal life, and I mentioned Politeia Mandala, the emergent community in Greece I founded, built on Platonic and Eastern non-dual philosophical and contemplative principles.
Such hubs will serve as vital nodes for the world to come, once the already-rotten foundation of the nihilistic, hylic worldview governing both the secular and religious mind of the modern age finally gives way.
In that unraveling of modernity's dead forms, the cutting-edge scientific study of consciousness will play a vital role, particularly where non-dual consciousness is understood as primary to spacetime. Scientist-practitioners, following the example of the Platonic and Far Eastern spiritual masters of old, are ideal to facilitate this shift.
To cross the turbulent waves of the sea of Becoming and reach undiscovered shores of Blessedness requires nothing less than a lucid and grounded innate sense of destiny, and a reconnection with the Primordial Religion of the Heart.
https://youtu.be/Ce7SEoKYz4k?is=ugxy8rrQzDtlNPKL | 385 |
| 7 | If your beliefs point toward the Good, the Just, and the True, why be ashamed, or afraid, to share them in public onymity?
If you aspire to bring about a beneficial change in an age steeped in Darkness, what good does it do to remain within an anti-social echo-chamber?
If you follow a life of virtue and sanctity, guided by principles of timeless wisdom, why not present yourself as a real persona, instead of standing behind an online mask, so that others may draw inspiration from it?
The following essay raises these questions, which have arisen in me more than once in the past. Although issues of online security and avoiding the “evil eye” of the regime’s Political Correctness remain unresolved, the author provides a mirror to all of us who claim to want to build a better future for our communities.
The author speaks mainly to the Pagan community, yet I believe it holds equally for the rest of the counter-culture spiritual movements of our time.
https://open.substack.com/pub/platonicpath/p/which-way-pagan-anon?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1rg85c | 363 |
| 8 | The constructed layers of self, whether physical or abstract, gross or subtle, are not intrinsic to nondual awareness. In this sense, Rigpa has no self. In a second, related sense, it also has no self because it does not conceptually reify itself: it is not some transcended concept or compounded entity left standing once the others fall away.
That the mundane self, our ego and sense of personality, is constructed doesn't mean it fails to exist absolutely in a nihilistic sense. It simply isn't the fixed, unchanging entity we habitually assume it to be, nor is it the fundamental dimension of our existence. A related error holds that this constructed self must be eradicated to reach nondual awareness. This error rests on a misunderstanding, and it quietly reinstates the very duality it claims to dissolve, one in which ego-related content is barred from consciousness altogether.
It also misses something deeper: the wholeness of experience, paradoxically, holds both nondual and dual experiencing at once. The One, when manifested, is Many.
And yet, once this is made explicit, primordial Awareness is the most essential and the only true Self there is. It is who or what is conscious of consciousness, what is aware of awareness itself, non-representationally and unmediated, in any felt experience whatsoever.
Prior to any becoming in the world, it is already There. And although the recognition and non-recognition of Rigpa carry distinct epistemic qualities for a subject, how things are perceived and known for him, ontologically there is no distinction whatsoever between Primordial and Total Consciousness and the ephemeral content of its unborn spaciousness.
The apprehension in perception of the self-manifest, self-realized Rigpa is what allows us as individuals to be liberated from the delusion of misrecognizing our hypercosmic true essence, instead of misidentifying it as the transient, fictional world and the mundane identities of cyclical suffering, chained between the endless extremes of existence and non-existence within time. | 373 |
| 9 |  Recognizing the Primordial Dimensions of our Original Face
In my experience, practitioners of contemplative-insight traditions not infrequently hold only a vague, obscure understanding of what their practice is meant to reconnect them to. Whether they conceptualize that "something" they wish to realize as Dharmakaya, the Self, the Unconditioned, Union, or by some other name, they often lack the clarity to discern the phenomenological qualities meant to be apprehended as participatory knowledge of their own cognition.
The following list of qualitative categories, then, may serve as a useful cognitive map through the felt experience of liberation. Though that experience is unbounded by such conceptualizations, these mental mappings can still help us avoid losing our way in our mind's labyrinth.
The unchanging dimensions of Primordial, Pure, and Total Consciousness - rigpa - already completely luminous in the immediacy of the present moment,
can be laid out as follows:
Being: the obvious, self-evident, and self-manifest fact of awareness being present, or phenomenally existing.
Emptiness: an absence of conceptually assigned identity, free of the conceptualizations about itself or the world that reify awareness as subject and phenomena as objects.
Spaciousness: the sphere of nondual awareness that encompasses and pervades everything within one's perceptual bubble, internal and external alike, without conceptually constructed boundaries. It is phenomenally infinite, since no edge can be detected in it, no point at which it ceases.
Non-dual reflexivity and luminosity: rigpa inherently knows itself to be aware, without relying on mediation by mental representations or by any other person, entity, or factor external to it. This luminosity is not perceptual content that rigpa comes to know; it is what awareness itself is.
Atemporality: rigpa is without past or future as ordinarily experienced. Nondual awareness holds no beliefs about the past and makes no predictions about the future; it abides always in the Now. Yet this nowness is not a present moment sandwiched between a past and a future. That way of experiencing time presupposes a subject observing a succession of moments, and no such subject is present in nondual awareness.
Bliss: the silent, equanimous contentment of being entirely complete in itself, with no sense of lack or need for anything outside itself, without intention, and thus beyond desire.
Singularity or unity: nondual awareness is singular and homogeneous, a unity of all its dimensions rather than something compounded or constructed from them, or from anything else. It is, for this reason, beyond co-dependent origination and conditionality. | 278 |
| 10 |  Logos is the Sword. Dharma is the Essence. | 287 |
| 11 | “But if “you will seek nothing any more,” however will this happen to you? Now it is because you approached the All and did not remain in a part of it, and you did not even say of yourself “I am just so much,” but by rejecting the “so much” you have become all—yet even before this you were all; but because something else came to you after the “all” you became less by the addition: for the addition did not come from being—you will add nothing to that—but from non-being. And when someone has come to be also from non-being, he is not all except when he rejects the non-being.”
-Plotinus, Enneads, VI.5 | 297 |
| 12 |  "There is, monks, an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated. If there were not that unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, there would not be the case that emancipation from the born — become — made — fabricated would be discerned. But precisely because there is an unborn — unbecome — unmade — unfabricated, emancipation from the born — become — made — fabricated is discerned."
-Siddhartha Gautama, Udāna 8.3, the Tatiyanibbānasutta "The Third Discourse about Nibbāna".
"Freed from the classification of form, Vaccha, the Tathagata is deep, boundless, hard to fathom, like the ocean."
-Siddhartha Gautama, Majjhima Nikāya 72, Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta.
if we ever see in ourselves a nature of this kind which has nothing of the other things which are attached to us by which we have to experience whatever happens by chance … when we ascend to this and become this alone and let the rest go, what can we say of it except that we are more than free and more than independent?
-Plotinus, Plot. 6.8.15.15-17 and 21-24.
“The Self exists. There is no other. Spontaneous perfection exists, as the
Great Self. Because it is one with the state of Samantabhadra (Primordial Buddhahood), there is no other. In [the misunderstanding of the notion of] no-self, one falls into the error of nihilism.”
-The Universal Inclusiveness [of Perfection] - Spyi bcings, Early Dzogchen text. | 322 |
| 13 | I had a podcast conversation with a fellow farer of the innermost reaches of the Hidden and the Manifest—the substack content-creator @seeingthroughtheworld.
We discussed Neoplatonic theurgy and tantra in relation to the perennial structure of awakening consciousness; the narrow line separating deep non-dual immersion (samadhi states) from psychotic breakdown; the importance of connection to a living lineage; the ideal of the Overman as the eternal process of forging new and vital modes of being-in-the-world; the transformative power of the vibration of ineffable names; and more.
May it be of benefit.
https://youtu.be/AX02MXRD4fI?is=ZUZPZ5fkErcYroJg | 1 988 |
| 14 |  We live inside a dream. But where is the Dreamer?
When the curtain of death falls, the theater empties.
We look backstage and the borrowed masks fade away.
At this moment how immaculate it will be to recognize our true face.
We live inside a dream. But who is the Dreamer?
Through the darkness of the future past,
the magician longs to see —
one chance for a sudden flash,
between life and death—
the light asking the dark an unspoken question,
it already answered, long after future,
long before past.
There is no dream yet there is a Dreamer beyond our dreams. Light of memory shine upon us. | 415 |
| 15 |  The Overman is not an ideal man with fixed characteristics, but a process that instantiates a new mode of recollecting being. From a Platonist perspective, one could say the Overman is what reveals or embodies a Henad—perfect and complete in its self-ownership and relational Unity.
The Overman perpetuates the procession of the One in the grand epic of sentient life in the beginningless vastness of the Cosmos.
_________
Much appreciation to the author of the channel https://t.me/SunTastinGood for the articulation of this logos. | 422 |
| 16 | My Vajra Consort and I have just published the first video in our Logos and Dharma project.
This video introduces the central concerns of our work and spiritual praxis: rekindling genuine initiation and cultivating a culture of awakening in the West.
We believe this is possible through a clear and lucid understanding of the perennial phenomenology of awakening, forged by studying, practicing, and synthesizing the teachings of Platonic, Tantric, and other Non-Dual contemplative schools of gnosis and liberation — re-seen and authentically embodied through contemporary scientific lenses and lived ways of life.
Such a rekindling could awaken a new renaissance in the West, which, like the rest of the modern world, has long languished under a crisis of meaning--"the Death of God".
From this renaissance, new philosophies, religions, and scientific fields may emerge. In time, new sociopolitical possibilities may open beyond the fixed ideological categories and modes of being that have constrained contemporary human life.
History offers us real precedents for this task. The European peoples have, on several occasions, reinvented themselves by reinterpreting Hellenic philosophy and sacred symbolism.
And there was once a moment, in Hellenistic times, when the Hellenic and Western spirit synthesized harmoniously with the Dharma: the Greco-Buddhism of Gandhara, the Indo-Greek Kingdom, and the Kushan Empire. What was possible then is possible again.
Our work centers on what is called the "West" because this is our immediate heritage and social surroundings, but it is ultimately ecumenical in scope, embracing the interconnected ecological, inter-cultural, and sentient life on this small planet, our shared home in the vastness of the cosmos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo_BCH5etbc | 3 509 |
| 17 | This passage from my article series "At the Threshold of Ultimacy" may be helpful to further clarify this topic:
"Many Western readers, shaped by a philosophical inheritance that privileges ontology as the primary foundation of the intelligibility of reality, therefore misread Buddhist soteriological doctrines and phenomenological examination of the workings of the mind as metaphysical assertions about what is. This conflation obscures a decisive cultural and methodological difference in Western and Buddhist schools of thought. In classical Buddhist contexts, questions concerning Being as such are neither foundational nor neutral; they are frequently bracketed and, at times, deliberately avoided precisely because they are perceived as inviting an endless proliferation of conceptual grasping that reifies experience and obstructs liberation. The concern is not that such questions are illegitimate in principle, but that they are pragmatically maladaptive within a path oriented toward release from conceptual appropriation.
Buddhist methodology operates tactically in the sphere of the subjective mind rather than ontologically in the domain of objective reasoning: it interrogates experience insofar as doing so loosens conceptual fixation, dissolves psychological clinging, and clarifies the conditions of suffering and freedom of subjective consciousness. When Western interpreters transpose these soteriological strategies into an ontological register, they inadvertently invert their function, mistaking therapeutic negations of neurotic patterns of human behavior—such as the doctrine of non-self—for metaphysical denials, and conflating practical descriptions of existential fulfillment with claims about ultimate reality. What is lost in this translation is the disciplined refusal to absolutize any speculative theory, a refusal that safeguards non-conceptual liberation by preventing insight in the nature of the mind from hardening into yet another mental object of attachment.” | 396 |
| 18 |  Lost in Translation: Why Western and Buddhist Philosophy Rarely Understand Each Other
Buddhism deals primarily with the phenomenology and psychology of liberation.
"Ultimate Truth" within this context refers to the "ultimacy of felt experience," not to metaphysical ultimate truth.
The reason for this is that metaphysical speculation is seen within Buddhism (broadly speaking) as an obscuration on the path of awakening.
This Buddhist attitude goes all the way back to the teachings of Buddha Shakyamuni as depicted in the Pali canon. In the Culamalunkya Sutta (MN 63), the monk Māluṅkyaputta threatens to leave the Sangha unless the Buddha answers a series of metaphysical questions. The Buddha responds with the famous poison-arrow simile: a man struck by a poisoned arrow (the Samsaric condition of perpetual suffering) does not refuse treatment until he knows the archer's caste, name, height, skin color, and hometown. The arrow must be removed now.
This foundational approach to soteriology can be discerned in all Buddhist lineages.
As such, Buddhist traditions—depending on schools and lineage— are either non-metaphysical or even anti-metaphysical, with certain more niche forms of Buddhism being quasi-ontological. | 346 |
| 19 | A selection of Heraclitus quotes (Fragments):
“The aeion is child moving pieces in a game. Sovereignty belongs to the child.”
“Man does not step into the same river twice”
“War is both father and king of all, some he has shown forth as gods and others men, some he has made slaves and others free”
“It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife”
“Homer was wrong in saying ‘Would that strife perish from amongst gods and men’ For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist”
“There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of wares for gold and gold for ware”
“This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures”
“The thunderbolt pilots all things through all things”
“The sun is not only new each day, but forever continually new.”
“Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow”
“A man’s character is his daimon”
“Greater dooms win greater destinies”
“Fire in its progress will catch all things by surprise and judge them”
“One man is worth ten thousand if he is best”
“The best of men choose one thing in preference to all else, immortal glory in preference to mortal good, whereas the masses simply glut themselves like cattle”
“To extinguish hubris is more needed than to extinguish a fire”
“Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony”
“To God all things are beautiful, good, and right. Men, on the other hand, deem some things right and others wrong”
“The way up and the way down are one and the same”
“Into the same rivers we step and do not step. We exist and we do not exist”
“The hidden harmony is better than the obvious”
“Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one” | 308 |
| 20 |  Theurgy is not mundane Magic
Although ancient terminology of esoteric practices is fluid, master Iamblichus draws a sharp distinction between Theurgy and —Magic (Goeteia)—practices of coercion, dealings and manipulations related with occult entities for the sake of wordly acquisition.
Though their operative principles may share common ground, their effects diverge entirely, owing to the inner constitution of those who conduct the rite.
The goetes grasps at a fabricated and enlarged selfhood. He believes himself to command metaphysical forces whereas in reality, he becomes a puppet of his passions, and frequently, of occult entities that is beyond his comprehension. The very incantations through which he seeks mastery over his reality tighten the bonds of his captivity.
The theurgist, by contrast, undertakes a purificatory work of self-emptying (Oudenia)— stripping away the illusory imprints accumulated through countless cycles of Generation, until the soul becomes a transparent vehicle—not an ego-maniac "commander"—for supra-human, sacred agency.
In the silence that abides within primordial Oneness, the Power and the Beauty of the One is recognized as the soul's own most authentic will: what master Proclus calls *to hen en hēmin* — "the one in us."
Yet the line dividing Theurgy from Goeteia is a thin one for the practitioner who lacks discrimination. As such, it is not unsual for one to slip between both without knowing it. | 388 |
