"It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the 'truth' and 'original form' of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres."
- Ananda Coomaraswamy

"When has religion ever been one? It has always been two or three, and war has always been raged among coreligionists. How are you going to unify religion? On the Day of Resurrection it will be unified, but here in this world that is impossible because everybody has a different desire and want. Unification is not possible here. At the Resurrection, however, when all will be united, everyone will look to one thing, everyone will hear and speak one thing."

- Jalalludin Rumi, Signs of the Unseen

When Iamblichus taught at the Neoplatonic Academy, he gave his students a reading list of Platonic dialogues that constituted an initiation into philosophy. There are two “cycles” in this curriculum. The first cycle is comprised of ten dialogues and the second cycle has two dialogues, making twelve dialogues altogether. For my own study, I am inserting The Discourses and Enchiridion of Epictetus as a primer.

The Iamblichean Platonic Dialogue reading list is as follows:
First Cycle (10):
⁃ Alcibiades
⁃ Gorgias
⁃ Phaedo
⁃ Cratylus
⁃ Theaetetus
⁃ Sophist
⁃ Politicus
⁃ Phaedrus
⁃ Symposium
⁃ Philebus
Second Cycle (2):
⁃ Timaeus
⁃ Parmenides

"Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore, they who have the Tao do not like to employ them.

The superior man ordinarily considers the left hand the most honorable place, but in time of war the right hand. Those sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, and not the instruments of the superior man—he uses them only on the compulsion of necessity. Calm and repose are what he prizes; victory by force of arms is to him undesirable. To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom.

On occasions of festivity, to be on the left hand is the prized position; on occasions of mourning, the right hand. The second in command of the army has his place on the left; the general commanding in chief has his on the right; his place, that is, is assigned to him as in the rites of mourning. He who has killed multitudes of men should weep for them with the bitterest grief; and the victor in battle has his place rightly according to those rites."

- Lao Tzŭ, The Tao Te Ching

This profoundly connects military leadership and rites of mourning, but also leadership in general with a willingness to use peaceful means. The man who is responsible for many lives must be cautious to protect them from danger, or, as it is said, he will not rule over them for long. When the time comes, the man who is responsible for taking lives must mourn their loss, or he himself will not live long.

The tragedy of the great man then, to extrapolate this proposition, is that his continued greatness depends upon states of anxiety or concern and grief. This would certainly seem a miserable and tragic condition, but clearly the great man, the man of the Tao, is not such at all. What causes man to worry on behalf of others? What causes man to grieve at the loss of life?

Love—of others, of one's self, of Life, of God. The great leader's concern is not crippling anxiety if he walks lightly with love for the lives he rules over, as a father is not burdened by his children but uplifted by them. The great warrior's grief is not a terrible despair if he loves life as the pious man does, who knows that fate always comes for us all, yet also that death is not the end for the soul.

Guénon quotes in the text "Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power" the medieval parable of the blind man and the paralytic: in it the blind man has the paralytic on his shoulders. in fact, the blind man is guided by a paralytic who, resting on his shoulders, directs his action. 

What does this story want to teach us? The blind man is the temporal power, the political action, while the paralytic is the spiritual authority, the contemplation. One cannot exist without the other. 

Contemplation without action, spirituality without politics is impotence, while politics without spirituality is mere brute force. These examples, although referring to the relationship between spiritual Authority and temporal power, a task, a work that is not only mere culture, or mere study, and which is not only mere politics or mere militancy.

~ Paolo Rada

"Philosophy, then, with all its blessed advantages to man, flourished long ages ago among the barbarians, diffusing its light among the gentiles, and eventually penetrated into Greece. Its hierophants were the prophets among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Sramanas of the Bactrians, and the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi among the Persians who announced beforehand the birth of the Saviour, being led by a star till they arrived in the land of Judaea, and among the Indians the Gymnosophists, and other philosophers of barbarous nations."

- 𝑺𝒕. 𝑪𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝑨𝒍𝒆𝒙𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒓𝒊𝒂, 𝑺𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒂 𝒊.𝒙𝒗.𝒍𝒙𝒙𝒊

"God is God."
~ Meister Eckhart

Hello this is Ex Non Grata speaking to you from Wald's channel.

I am here to promote my latest video.

This third and final installment of the Immortalized Art Trilogy explains why it is not merely the greatness of the artist himself that makes a painting or sculpture stand tall - it is just as much on the people to have a sense of appreciation for art in the first place.

Why?

Art cannot stand the test of time if it cannot first stand atop the consciousness of the people.

For just as a tree that falls without being heard can be argued as having never fallen, when we as a people begin to fail to revere our highest instincts expressed through art, the argument will go that it was never painted in the first place.

And because of this what is needed is the bridge within us that is able to allow our spirits to cross into the world of ideals. High above the landscape of modernity, there lies in the heavens above us our highest aspirations.

And it is art that shall take us there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrMSvtV0CYk

One day, the Earth will burn as the Sun burns in the sky, and on that day the Golden King will return.

"Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings . . . the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with it the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art . . . So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense . . . madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human."
~ Socrates

The anti-socratics think this is the man responsible for rationalism.

"A democracy is a state in which the poor, gaining the upper hand, kill some and banish others, and then divide the offices among the remaining citizens equally, usually by lot."
~ Socrates

And liberalism.

https://news.1rj.ru/str/nixjeelvy/2983

Socrates is right of course—madness can be a divine blessing. Nietzsche blames this man over all others for being the origin of rationalism, meanwhile, Socrates was known to have fought valiantly yet to have spoken always as a common man, always seeking the truth but never stopping to write it down, and in all his mad wisdom most famously said he knew nothing at all. He was not the man responsible for the dry, stiff 'Apollonian' order overtaking Nietzsche's wild and free Dionysian element, which culminated in this era of rationalism.

The damning of Socrates is not a conclusion of Nietzsche's own famous madness—indeed it begins in the first pages of his earliest, soberest work; it is the conclusion of the overactive rational sense of a mere man. What Socrates did not affirm life? The one who risked his life on the battlefield despite having his wife and sons at home? The one who praised wine and arts, who composed poetry in the final moments of his life? The man who taught so selflessly he gave his own life rather than betray a single principle he believed in? I can think of few men who have courageously affirmed Life so much and lived so well their entire lives, as Socrates!

'The same dream came to me ... always saying the same or nearly the same words: Make and cultivate music, said the dream. And ... in obedience to the dream, composed a few verses before I departed [the festival]. And first I made a hymn in honor of the god of the festival, and then ... I took some fables of Aesop, which I had ready at hand and knew, and turned them into verse.'
- Socrates before his death in Phaedo

'"Well, gentlemen," said he, "so far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth have my 'moisten the soul' and lull our griefs to sleep just as the mandragora does with men, at the same time awakening kindly feelings as oil quickens a flame."'
- Socrates in Xenophon's Banquet

'...take Socrates and observe that he had a wife and children, but he did not consider them as his own; that he had a country, so long as it was fit to have one, and in such a manner as was fit; friends and kinsmen also, but he held all in subjection to law and to the obedience due to it. For this reason he was the first to go out as a soldier, when it was necessary, and in war he exposed himself to danger most unsparingly.'
- Epictetus in Discourses

'And in combat, if you want to hear about it – for it is just to credit him with this once when there was a battle for which the generals gave me the prize of excellence, no other human being saved me but he; for he was not willing to leave me wounded, but saved both myself and my weapons. And even then, Socrates, asked the generals to offer me the prize of excellence. And in this too you will not blame me and say that I lie; but as a matter of fact, when the generals looked to my rank and wanted to offer me the prize of excellence, you [Socrates] proved more eager than the generals that I take it rather than yourself.'
- Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium

"How pleasantly accessible did Greek mythology become, as, over time, even in the hymns themselves, it threw off the fetters of mere epithet and instead recited fables of the gods, as in the Homeric songs. In the cosmogonies, too, with the passage of time, the ancient, hard primeval fables were constricted, and human heroes and tribal patriarchs were celebrated, closely tied to the ancient fables and to the figures of the gods. Fortunately, the ancient narrators of the theogonies had brought such fitting and beautiful allegories into the genealogies of the gods and heroes, often by merely injecting one word of their sublime language, that a new and beautiful cloth emerged when later philosophers merely endeavored to spin out their meaning and to link their own finer ideas to them. Thus, in time, even the epic bards laid aside their often-repeated fables of the creation of the gods, the storming of the heavens, the deeds of Hercules, and the like, and sang more human themes for the use of humankind."
~ Johann Gottfried Herder

Whatever you think of Socrates, don't make the mistake of thinking that The Republic is a model for an ideal state. Doing so puts you in the ranks of a Karl Popper.
The Republic acts much like Socrates' most famous saying, "All I know is that I know nothing." It is constructed naively, as a continuous question without a definitive answer. The questions always return to nothing, or to myth. Ironically, this compels all of the participants, readers included, to become invested in the question of justice, to build an idea of it themselves. There is an architecture of ideas behind it all, but this is closer to a rough sketch than a blueprint.
As form, the city unfolds as a dramatic scene, an act of justice: unexpected, and forcing difficult decisions that may cause uprisings or injustices. Without this vital aspect it would not remain the most powerful work of philosophy for over two-thousand years.

Of course, there is a practical side too. And who can say that artists make great works when freed of the martial threat over their heads?

https://news.1rj.ru/str/goldenageman/186

- Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits

"For these reasons, Plato affirmed the existence of ideas, avoiding the opinion of the Epicureans, who asserted that everything happens by chance, and that of Empedocles and others who asserted that everything happens because of a natural necessity. This reason for affirming ideas, namely, on account of the previous planning of the works that are to be done, is suggested by Dionysius, who says: “We say that exemplars in God are the intelligible characters of things that come to be, the individually pre-existing causes of subsistent beings. These, theology calls ‘predefinitions.’ They predetermine and cause godly and good inclinations in creatures. It is according to these that the super-substance predefines and produces all things. However, because an exemplary form or idea has, in some sense, the nature of an end, and because an artist receives the form by which he acts—if it is outside of him—we cannot say that the divine ideas are outside of God. They can be only within the divine mind, for it is unreasonable to say that God acts on account of an end other than Himself or that He receives that which enables Him to act from a source other than Himself."

- 𝑺𝒕. 𝑻𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒔 𝑨𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒔, 𝑸𝒖𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑻𝒉𝒓𝒆𝒆: 𝑰𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒔, 𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝑰

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.b90bb6e5fa821f6c6288f8b83294b107?rik=m1PAe7vhVgh7Bg&riu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.swiss-artists.com%2Fprints%2Fportraits%2FThomasAquinas.jpg&ehk=Iymq6T%2BYKLJqzqq8XnGZD4Totvd50XMgbviDyo7M%2B58%3D&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0

"Such then, I [Socrates] said, are our principles of theology—some tales are to be told, and others are not to be told to our disciples from their youth upwards, if we mean them to honour the gods and their parents, and to value friendship with one another.

Yes; and I [Adeimantus] think that our principles are right, he said.
But if they are to be courageous, must they not learn other lessons besides these, and lessons of such a kind as will take away the fear of death? Can any man be courageous who has the fear of death in him?

Certainly not, he said.
And can he be fearless of death, or will he choose death in battle rather than defeat and slavery, who believes the world below to be real and terrible?

Impossible.
Then we must assume a control over the narrators of this class of tales as well as over the others, and beg them not simply to revile but rather to commend the world below, intimating to them that their denoscriptions are untrue, and will do harm to our future warriors.

That will be our duty, he said.
Then, I said, we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses:
I would rather he a serf on the land of a poor and portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to nought.¹

We must also expunge the verse, which tells us how Pluto feared:
Lest the mansions grim and squalid which the gods abhor should he seen both of mortals and immortals.²

And again:
O heavens! verily in the house of Hades there is soul and ghostly form but no mind at all!³

Again of Tiresias:
[To him even after death did Persephone grant mind,] that he alone should be wise; but the other souls are flitting shades.⁴

Again:
The soul flying from the limbs had gone to Hades, lamentng her fate, leaving manhood and youth.⁵

Again:
And the soul, with shrilling cry, passed like smoke beneath the earth.⁶

And:
As bats in hollow of mystic cavern, whenever any of the has dropped out of the string and falls from the rock, fly shrilling and cling to one another, so did they with shrilling cry hold together as they moved.⁷

And we must beg Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we strike out these and similar passages, not because they are unpoetical, or unattractive to the popular ear, but because the greater the poetical charm of them, the less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free, and who should fear slavery more than death.

Undoubtedly.
Also we shall have to reject all the terrible and appalling names describe the world below—Cocytus and Styx, ghosts under the earth, and sapless shades, and any similar words of which the very mention causes a shudder to pass through the inmost soul of him who hears them. I do not say that these horrible stories may not have a use of some kind; but there is a danger that the nerves of our guardians may be rendered too excitable and effeminate by them.

There is a real danger, he said.
Then we must have no more of them.
True.
Another and a nobler strain must be composed and sung by us.
Clearly.
And shall we proceed to get rid of the weepings and wailings of famous men?
They will go with the rest."

- Republic Book III

¹ Odyssey 11.489-491, Achilles in the underworld
² Iliad 20.64-65
³ Iliad 23.103-104
⁴ Odyssey 11.493-495
⁵ Iliad 16.856-857
⁶ Iliad 23.100
⁷ Odyssey 246-249