I am now on X.

https://twitter.com/gnothisauton

"'Live with the gods.' The man who lives with the gods is the one whose soul is constantly on display to them as content with its lot and obedient to the will of the guardian spirit, the fragment of himself that Zeus has granted every person to act as his custodian and command center. And in each of us this is mind and reason."

Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.27

"For love of bustle is not industry, – it is only the restlessness of a hunted mind."

Seneca, Letters 3

"Dithyrambs are hymns composed to Dionysus, not the son of Kore but the one [born] from Semele and from the thigh of Zeus. This latter is the god responsible for rebirth, who some say is called Dithyrambus because he was born a second time, first from Semele, then from the thigh of Zeus; and what is more to the point is the one who creates the enmattered forms for a second time and prepares all generation to go forth. (‘For a second time’ [actually means] many times, or times without number.) "

Hermias, On Plato's Phaedrus 1.52

"Concerning unseen things, [which] concern divine things, clarity is what the gods have, whereas for men there is inference, albeit of one thing after another."

Alcmaeon, fragment D-K 24 A1

Contemplation is a vital part of mysticism. Without it, you will sink. The problem is--in a world where we are so disconnected from our own minds, learning to contemplate, and contemplate properly, is a challenge. But, one that we must endure to be happy.

There can be a terminological confusion here when talking about contemplation. Traditionally, in the West, "meditation" meant something like "deep thinking," whereas "contemplation" had a sense more akin to what we now mean by meditation.

Meditation, or dialectic, leads us to contemplation. See my post on Platonism as meditation & contemplation for more.

- CWT Admin

"But the universe must be truly perfect since it embraces everything and nothing exists that is not in it. How therefore can it fail to possess that which is best? Nothing is better than intelligence and reason, so the universe cannot lack these things."

Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.38

"This whole cosmos, in fact, would be dissolved, if one were to entrust it to the binding power of matter, granting it the rank of soul so far as noscripts are concerned, that is to say, to air and breath, things supremely liable to dispersion and having their principle of unity not from within themselves. For how, when all bodies are subject to fragmentation, in attributing this universe to any one of them, will one not render it non-intelligible and random in its motions? For what order could there be in a breath which itself requires ordering from soul? What reason, or what intellect? Rather, if soul exists, all these things will be subject to it for the establishment of the cosmos and of each living being, with various powers from various bodies contributing to the whole, whereas if this is not present in the cosmos, these things will not even exist, never mind not being in an ordered system."

Plotinus, Enneads 4.7.3.25-35

But he who neither perceives by himself nor takes in a lesson from another, he on the other hand is a worthless man.

Hesiod, Works and Days

"Apollo is the god who directs the harmony, and makes all things move together, whether for gods or human beings."

Plato, Cratylus 405d

"There are many kinds of gods, of whom one part is intelligible, the other sensible. ... The heads of all classes are gods, after whom come gods who have a head-of-essence; these are the sensible gods, true to both their origins, who produce everything throughout sensible nature, one thing through another, each god illuminating his own work."

Asclepius 19

"...[The] Plato of our classrooms would scarcely have been recognizable to the Platonists of antiquity, because the Plato we have inherited is an invention of our own habits of thought, and the dualism we attribute to him reflects our own existential estrangement from the divinity of the world. In contrast to our inherited caricature, the Platonists of late antiquity believed that Plato was 'divine and Apollonian.' For them, 'philosophy was conceived as a sacred rite' and Plato was a hierophant who revealed the world as theophany. Before Christian dualism blinded us to that world, and before materialist science erased it altogether, the supernatural was not elsewhere but here, in the natural world. The gods were everywhere: in plants, in rocks, in animals, in temples, and in us. And it was precisely the aim of the later Platonists to ensure that this integration of the supernatural and the natural, of the divine and the human, remains alive."

Gregory Shaw, Hellenic Tantra p. 22

"We said that sight tries at last to look at the animals themselves, the stars themselves, and in the end, at the sun itself. In the same way, whenever someone tries through argument and apart from all sense perceptions to find the being itself of each thing and doesn't give up until he grasps the good itself with understanding itself, he reaches the end of the intelligible, just as the other reached the end of the visible. ... Don't you call [this] dialectic? ... And when the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around."

Plato, Republic 532a - 534b

"Athena is the intelligence of Zeus, being the same thing as his providence [pronoia], which is why temples are founded to ‘Athena Pronoia.’ She is said to have been born from the head of Zeus perhaps because the ancients got the idea that the ruling part of our souls is there—as others after them have thought—but perhaps because the head is the highest part of the human body, as the aether, which is its ruling part and the substance of its wisdom, is the highest part of the cosmos. ... Her virginity is a symbol of her being pure and unstained: that is what virtue is like. Athena is depicted armed, and the story is that she was born like that, which points out that wisdom is sufficiently well equipped for the greatest and most difficult deeds—for martial [deeds] strike us as the greatest."

Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, Greek Theology 20

"Hence the world is the statue of the intelligible Gods ... But it is a statue in motion, and full of life, and deity; fashioned from all things within itself; preserving all things, and filled with an at-once-collected abundance of all good from the father."

Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus of Plato 239B

"Hail unto you, O Lord Jupiter, you blessed one, happy and serene, Lord of Law, Justice, Fairness and Conscientiousness, you who are wise in religion, ascetic [sic], mighty, high-minded, bringer of good fortune, noble, elevated, powerful, subjugator, granting honour, you who keep treaties, who are upright in love and of noble nature! We ask you, O father, by your noble, beautiful attributes and your precious deeds, grant us wealth and prosperity, and a portion of that which one desires in this world, O source of good deeds, fulfiller of wishes. Hail unto you, you exalted magnificent great star, good-natured, you who take care of the concerns of the wise and who prepare a way for the spirits of the pure and who help those drowning in the depths of the sea and calling for help! From your light, from your spirit, from your pneuma, overflow on us, that thereby our concern may be furthered, that the completion of our affairs be good and the impurity of our nature washed from us. O Rufija'il, you angel who are set over Jupiter, Lord of the Sixth Sphere, joyful and serene, complete, consummate, pious, lord of beautiful garb, of dignity and of insight, far from all that is filthy, far from vulgar speech! We invoke you by all your names: in Arabic O MUSTARI, in Persian O BIRGIS, in Iranian O HURMUZ, in Greek O ZEUS, in Hindi O WIHASFATI! By the Lord of the Highest Edifice, of good deeds and mercy, let flow upon us and our children and those who belong to us your peace and the light of your noble pneuma, which is bound to higher powers, that thereby you may watch over our affairs, increase our goods and take away from us all care for our earthly sustenance, that our life be blessed, comfortable, pleasant, and overflow with fullness. Come, grant us a sign of thy presence!"

This very Indo-European prayer is actually preserved in a medieval Arabic book of astrology called Picatrix but which evidently preserved ancient European traditions.

"[Dialectic] is actually the capacity to say what each thing is, and in what way it differs from other things, and what it has in common with them, and in what and where each of these is, and if it is what it is, and how many Beings there are and, again, how many non-Beings there are, different from Beings. ... Then, it remains still, in stillness to the extent that it is in the intelligible world, no longer busying itself with many things, but having become one [with its objects], it just looks."

Plotinus, Enneads 1.3.4

I'm begging you to stop proclaiming your strong opinions about ancient philosophical traditions if you have not made a serious, good faith effort to learn about them on their own terms. You are being irresponsible.

- CWT Admin

"The reason it is hard to fight against passion is that it buys what it wants at the expense of the soul."

Heraclitus, fragment KRS 240