Let us pursue another issue raised by the above sutra: the Buddha talks of the body "activated by thoughts that come and go": this is a shorthand reference to the Buddhist attitude to thought, that it is in itself the great obstacle. (In Zen this doctrine becomes 'no-mind'.) Granted that we should not make this a simplistic either/or issue regarding meditation and cogitation, let us return to the Phaedo to a passage where the same issue is at stake:

'Don't you think that the person who is likely to succeed in the attempt most perfectly is the one who approaches each object, as far as possible, with the unaided intellect, without taking account of any sense of sight in his thinking, or dragging in any other sense into his reckoning the man who pursues the truth by applying his pure and unadulterated thought to the pure and unadulterated object, cutting himself off as much as possible from his eyes and ears and virtually all the rest of his body as an impediment which by its presence prevents the soul from attaining the truth and clear thinking? Is not this the person, Simmias, who will reach the goal of reality, if anybody can?' [47]

We have in this passage 'intellect', 'thinking', 'reckoning', 'pure and unadulterated thought' and finally 'clear thinking'. Socrates is reiterating the need to cut oneself of from the senses (one of the Buddhist metaphors for this makes the comparison with a turtle withdrawing its limbs), but can we really make a case for meditation ('no mind') here against a form of cogitation? In particular as he now talks of 'each object' as if we were now to investigate the truth about a range of objects (or perhaps propositions) rather than attaining to the (single) Truth? This passage probably epitomises our difficulties with Socrates, from the perspective of mysticism. However, two things should be born in mind. Firstly the translation of the ancient Greek words may not be accurate in this context, and of course there is the possibility of transcription errors over the two and a half thousand years since Plato wrote his dialogues. Secondly, if we are to withdraw from the senses and the body, what kind of 'objects' can we encounter? The trite answer to this of course is Plato's famous 'forms'; however, we cannot necessarily understand the forms to be in the plural, despite the use of the plural noun. There are sufficient passages in Plato to suggest that they can be subsumed into a single form, that of the 'good', but this becomes nothing more than a vague philosophical ultimate.

If one attempts an explanation independent of the 'forms', then various, similarly unsatisfactory, possibilities arise. If one withdraws from the conventional five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch then one is left with thoughts and feelings. The Buddha proposed that 'mind' was in fact a sixth sense with thoughts (he was not clear about feelings) as the objects appropriate to it like sights were to the sense of sight. (I have long suggested that the 'heart' be the seventh sense with feelings as the objects appropriate to it, but I have found no support in the literature for this position.) For the Buddha it was clear that withdrawal from the senses meant also withdrawal from thought, and that meditation, if it had an object at all, was on emptiness. If Socrates means us to withdraw only from the five senses, then clearly one could find a myriad of objects for his recollection: the contents of his thoughts. But, and this is the crux: all thoughts derive originally from the senses. Surely he cannot dismiss the senses on the one hand, and yet invite us to cogitate ad nauseam on our memories, derived from those very senses?

Socrates continues from the previous extract by returning to the singular: "So long as we keep to the body and our soul is contaminated with this imperfection, there is no chance of our ever attaining satisfactorily to our object, which we assert to be Truth." Whether the capitalisation of truth is a vagary of the translation I don't know, but Plato scholars do point out that Plato is rather vague on all these technical terms. It may well be, therefore, that the rather crucial difference (to us) between the singular and plural may not be resolved, and that we shall have to rely on the cumulative weight of evidence to answer our main question. Socrates, in the immediately subsequent passage, also confides the following: "It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead, and not in our lifetime." This is reminiscent of the Manichean and Gnostic tradition, also known as radical dualism, where all matter is regarded as corrupt, and liberation can only take place on death (of the body). The Buddhists on the other hand regard liberation as possible while in the body, though there is the sense of a more final liberation at death.

Much of the rest of the Phaedo is spent on discussion about reincarnation and immortality, but before dealing with this I would like to quote a passage that helps complete our profile of a jnani.

'Well, surely we can see now that the soul works in just the opposite way. It directs all the elements of which it is said to consist, opposing them in almost everything all through life, and exercising every form of control; sometimes by severe and unpleasant methods like those of physical training and medicine, and sometimes by milder ones; sometimes scolding, sometimes encouraging; and conversing with the desires and passions and fears as though it were quite separate and distinct from them.' [48]

This is a reminder that the development of the will is important in jnani.

Let us look now at how reincarnation is dealt with in the Phaedo. In itself, a belief in reincarnation itself is little indication as to mysticism: millions if not billions of people in the Orient formally ascribe to religious systems predicated on reincarnation, and with which they probably have little or no engagement. Many occultists in the West also hold beliefs in reincarnation, and in some instances (as with occult 'scientists' Rudolf Steiner and Papus) it is central to their teachings. It is commonly held that Pythagoras also believed in reincarnation. I would suggest, however, that reincarnation is only of significance to the mystic if (a) they personally recall previous incarnations, and (b) this has an impact on their orientation to the eternal within them. The sutra from the Dhammapada above gives a clear indication that for the Buddha both these aspects are true: he remembers former lives, and as a result has come to know the 'house-builder' (the causes of incarnation). Let us look at a passages in the Phaedo regarding reincarnation:

Because every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies. The result of agreeing with the body and finding pleasure in the same things is, I imagine, that it cannot help becoming like it in character and training, so that it can never get clean away to the unseen world, but is always saturated with the body when it sets out [i.e. at death], and so soon falls back again into another body, where it takes root and grows. Consequently it is excluded from all fellowship with the pure and uniform and divine. [49]

Taken with the many other references to reincarnation in Plato, we learn of a conventional idea (in comparison with the Buddhist and Hindu systems at least) of reincarnation: the soul departs from the body at death and 'takes root and grows' in another body soon after, if 'contaminated' by the rivets of pleasures or pains. Do we have here the 'house-builder' of the Buddha? In all likelihood yes, because the Buddha's account stresses desire and the 'karma' engendered by it as the causes of incarnation. In fact the Socratic/Platonic view of reincarnation that we gather from the dialogues differs only in these respects from the Oriental view: (a) there is no developed concept of 'karma', though it is present in a nascent form; (b) reincarnation is seen as a 'fall', which is not the same as the Hindu concept of ages (where we have degenerated from a golden age to the present Kali Yuga). In the Timaeus the soul is created in a kind of mixing-bowl and placed on a star; the first incarnation (as a man, not a woman as that would be a form of punishment) tests the soul, and if found wanting it degenerates in sequence to woman, higher animal, and lower animal. [50] This account is not to be taken too seriously I think, as it is part of a longer and speculative cosmogeny (though it is similar to that in the Gnostic tradition). The idea of incarnation as a progressive fall is found in a slightly different form in Rudolf Steiner: he even speaks of the melancholy of Adam and the progressive materialisation of the spirit.

What evidence however does the treatment of reincarnation in the Platonic dialogues give us for the status of Socrates as mystic? Only this, I would suggest: that it was part of what gave Socrates his equanimity and dignity in the face of death. We have no direct evidence however that his relation to reincarnation fulfilled the conditions above, that he remembered past lives and from the memories (as opposed to the theory) came to his position regarding death and incarnation. In fact the remaining discussion in the Phaedo is concerned with how one reaches the higher knowledge by a form of recollection, and, it is logically a recollection of knowledge gained while disincarnate and hence does not require a continuous cycle of rebirths. Socrates says: "The theory that our soul exists even before it enters the body surely stands or falls with the soul's possession of the ultimate standard of reality; a view which I have, to the best of my belief, fully and rightly accepted." [51] Socrates is insistent in many of the dialogues that this kind of knowledge (unlike that of the craftsmen or artisans) is a recollection, but (I would argue) this cannot be from a previous embodiment because of the infinite regress that this implies. Hence reincarnation per se is not vital to his teachings.

The Phaedo finishes with perhaps the most moving of all scenes from Plato: an account of Socrates' last moments. Crito asks how they shall bury him.

He [Socrates] laughed gently as he spoke, and turning to us went on: 'I can't persuade Crito that I am this Socrates here who is talking to you now and marshalling all the arguments; he thinks that I am the one whom he will see presently lying dead; and he asks how he is to bury me! [52]

Socrates is reminding us of one of the profoundest messages of the mystics: one is not one's body. Yes, the physical body is about to die; as a composite thing (to use a terminology that Socrates introduces earlier in the Phaedo) it must disintegrate at some point, but the part of Socrates that is not composite (his soul) cannot disintegrate nor die. The calmness, even joyfulness of Socrates' acceptance of the hemlock, and his general demeanour, bring even the remaining brave souls to tears the jailer, finding Socrates to be 'the noblest and gentlest and bravest of all the men that have ever come here,' and Phaedo and Appolodorus. Socrates chides them that he had sent the women away to avoid exactly this, takes the hemlock, and dies.

2.2.4. The Phaedrus, and the Symposium

If the Phaedo gives us a base from which to draw a recognisable portrait of a jnani mystic, then the Phaedrus and the Symposium add the love-element that must lurk close to the surface (as discussed above). Quite early in the Phaedrus we have a confirmation that for Socrates his mysticism is an inquiry:

Now I have no time for such work, and the reason is, my friend, that I've not yet succeeded in obeying the Delphic injunction to 'know myself,' and it seems to me absurd to consider problems about other [mythical] beings while I am still in ignorance about my own nature. So I let these things alone and acquiesce in the popular attitude towards them; as I've already said I make myself rather than them the object of my investigations, and I try to discover whether I am a more complicated and puffed-up sort of animal than Typho [father of the winds] or whether I am a gentler and simpler creature, endowed by heaven with a nature altogether less typhonic. [53]

This passage is preceded by a discussion of legend, and it is this 'work' that Socrates has no time for. At the start of the Euthyphro we have a similar admission by Socrates that he is not that interested in stories about civil war amongst the gods and other myths and legends; he ponders on it:

Do you thing that is the reason why I am being called to trial, Euthyphro, because when I hear anyone telling stories like these about the gods I somehow find it difficult to accept them? [54]

The Phaedrus complicates our sketch of the jnani because it suggests that Socrates is in favour of a kind of divine possession or madness, not just as a basis for the arts, but for love. In the opening section Socrates tells Phaedrus that the wooded river-bank outside the city that they have chosen for their conversation seems full of spirits, "so do not be surprised if, as my speech goes on, the nymphs take possession of me." [55] The speeches that follow are about love, and in so far as they are about the love between two human beings they are not relevant to our inquiry. However, in the later discussion on possession and madness Socrates hints that he is interested in its broader effects:

If it were true without qualification that madness is an evil, that would be all very well, but in fact madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings. Take the prophetess at Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona, for example, and consider all the benefits which individuals and states in Greece have received from them when they were in a state of frenzy, though their usefulness in their sober senses amounts to little or nothing. [56]

(Note that a modern equivalent is the trance state in which the radio prophet Edgar Cacey gave his 'readings'; he only learned about what he had said afterwards through tape-recordings. [57] ) Socrates also says that "this type of madness is the greatest benefit that heaven can confer on us." [58] Socrates then goes on to show that the soul is uncreated and immortal, and then makes a long detour with metaphors of charioteer and horses, and the wings of the soul. Reincarnation (i.e. being incarnated again) is the losing of the 'wings of the soul' through ignorance, but "These souls, if they choose the life of the philosopher three times successively, regain their wings in the third period of a thousand years, and in the three-thousandth year win their release." [59] This contradicts the passage in the Phaedo quoted earlier that indicates reincarnation takes place 'soon'. This issue is not important however: across the world's literature on reincarnation the time intervals posited between incarnations varies tremendously. Socrates elaborates on the relationship between the 'wings' and a fourth type of madness:

This then is the fourth type of madness, which befalls when a man, reminded by the sight of beauty on earth of the true beauty, grows his wings and endeavours to fly upward, but in vain, exposing himself to the reproach of insanity because like a bird he fixes his gaze on the heights to the neglect of things below; and the conclusion to which our whole discourse points is that in itself and in its origin this is the best of all forms of divine possession, both for the subject himself and for his associate, and it is when he is touched with this madness that the man whose love is aroused by beauty in others is called a lover. [60]

This passage is useful for pointing up the confusion of interpretation that is possible: is Socrates talking about a divine love that reaches to the Union of the bhakti mystics, or is he talking about a homosexual or homoerotic love between 'subject and associate'? Either way it is in the context of two men, and we have on the one hand a master-disciple spiritual relationship and on the other an older-younger homosexual one. In the more normal context of philosophy it is usually assumed in the West that the relationship was a homosexual one (though possibly not consummated) between an older man teaching philosophy or wisdom to a younger one. In the context of mysticism we have parallels with at least three other cases where the same question has been asked but the evidence is strongly in favour of the master-disciple relationship: between Rumi and Shamsi Tabriz, between Ramakrishna and his disciples, and between Whitman and his male companions (e.g. Peter Doyle). In Iran today it is a common belief that Tabriz was Rumi's homosexual lover; a recent volume has been entirely devoted to Ramakrishna's possible homosexuality with his disciples [61] , and Whitman's alleged homosexuality is a key biographical question for all Whitman scholars. We live in a culture where it is assumed that male signs of affection (Socrates fondled Phaedo's curls for example, regretting that they would be shorn after his execution as a sign of mourning [62]) indicate homosexuality, and that to sleep with another man is proof. But we will see that Alcibiades slept with Socrates as if with a 'father or older brother', and we know that Whitman slept with the naturalist John Burroughs, 'by no stretch of imagination his sexual lover.' [63] This topic is worthy I think of a whole investigation, but for now let us just note that modern interpretations of behaviour may lead to the wrong conclusions in this area.

Where is Socrates leading us with his possession, madness and beauty in the Phaedrus? A form of madness befalls a man who sees beauty; this leads to his 'wings'; the following passage then sums up Socrates' views:

It is impossible for a soul that has never seen the truth to enter into our human shape; it takes a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the multiplicity of sense-impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason. Such a process is simply the recollection of the things which our soul once perceived when it took its journey with a god, looking down from above on the things to which we now ascribe reality and gazing upwards towards what is truly real. That is why it is right that the soul of the philosopher alone should regain its wings; for it is always dwelling in memory as best it may upon those things which a god owes his divinity to dwelling upon. It is only by the right use of such aids to recollection, which form a continual initiation into the perfect mystic vision that a man can become perfect in the true sense of the word. Because he stands apart from the common objects of human ambition and applies himself to the divine, he is reproached by most men for being out of his wits; they do not realize that he is in fact possessed by a god. [64]

It may be a coincidence that the translator has used the word 'mystic' in this passage, but it stands anyhow alongside any classical mystical text. The introduction into our picture of Socrates of the phenomenon of possession is of interest.

Let us turn now to the Symposium (symposium means a 'drinking-together', or drinks party). It is interesting because it reinforces some of the love-aspects of Socrates' possible mysticism, and also because it starts with Socrates getting lost on his way to the party. He is in one of his 'fits of abstraction' (discussed earlier), and this event is reinforced by Alcibiades' later description of a full day's such abstraction, so remarkable as to cause some Ionians to take their bedding out to observe him in the cool of the evening. [65] The bulk of the Symposium is taken up with speeches on the subject of love, again to be seen in the context of either a homosexual love, or that between master and disciple. Unusually, for Socrates, he calls on the authority of another in his own speech on love; this other is the priestess Diotima. Her most important statement in the context of mysticism is that love is "the desire for the perpetual possession of the good." [66] The homosexual interpretation would be one of continuously possessing (in the carnal sense) young men, while the mystical interpretation would be to arrive at the eternal within one. Perhaps the most useful testimony for us in the Symposium is that of Alcibiades. He is a young and handsome man who is later to become a ruthless tyrant, and is often cited as a evidence against Socrates in his trial; there are several mentions in the Platonic Dialogues of Socrates 'chasing after him'. Alcibiades own (rueful) evidence suggests the opposite: that he sought Socrates' physical love, and received only a lecture in philosophy: "I swear by all the gods in heaven that for anything that had happened between us when I got up after sleeping with Socrates, I might have been sleeping with my father or elder brother. ... On the one hand I realized that I had been slighted, but on the other I felt a reverence for Socrates' character, his self-control and courage; I had met a man whose like for wisdom and fortitude I could never have expected to encounter." [67] Alcibiades tells us also: "Whenever I listen to him my heart beats faster than if I were in a religious frenzy, and tears run down my face, and I observe that numbers of other people have the same experience." [68] Socrates has a shaming effect on him:

He is the only person in whose presence I experienced a sensation of which I might be thought incapable, a sensation of shame; he, and he alone, positively makes me ashamed of myself. ... The Socrates whom you see has a tendency to fall in love with good-looking young men, and is always in their society and in an ecstasy about them. ... , but once you see beneath the surface you will discover a degree of self-control of which you can hardly form a notion, gentlemen. Believe me, it makes no difference to him whether a person is good-looking he despises good looks to an almost inconceivable extent nor whether he is rich nor whether he possesses any of the other advantages that rank high in popular esteem; to him all these things are worthless, and we ourselves of no account, be sure of that. He spends his whole life pretending and playing with people, and I doubt whether anyone has ever seen the treasures which are revealed when he grows serious and exposes what he keeps inside. However, I once saw them, and found them so divine and precious and beautiful and marvellous that, to put the matter briefly, I had no choice but to do whatever Socrates bade me. [69]

Jacob Needleman comments in connection with this passage that "the impact of Socrates is to produce upon man a specific sort of suffering that involves seeing oneself against a very high criterion of what man should be" [70] . Needleman is influenced in this comment by the teachings of G.I.Gurdjieff, who often said that the purpose of a Master was to induce this specific form of suffering in the disciple (he referred to the process of creating it as 'friction'). The following passage reinforces this impression of Socrates as spiritual Master (Alcibiades is speaking again):

But our friend here is so extraordinary, both in his person and in his conversation, that you will never be able to find anyone remotely resembling him either in antiquity of in the present generation, unless you go beyond humanity altogether, and have recourse to the images of Silenus and satyr which I am using myself in this speech. ... Anyone who sets out to listen to Socrates talking will probably find his conversation utterly ridiculous at first, it is clothed in such curious words and phrases, the hide, so to speak of a hectoring satyr. He will talk of pack-asses and blacksmiths, cobblers and tanners, and appear to express the same ideas in the same language over and over again, so that any inexperienced or foolish person is bound to laugh at his way of speaking. But if a man penetrates within and sees the content of Socrates' talk exposed, he will find that there is nothing but sound sense inside, and that this talk is almost the talk of a god, and enshrines countless representations of ideal excellence, and is of the widest possible application; in fact that it extends over all the subjects with which a man who means to turn out a gentleman needs to concern himself. [71]

Alcibiades concludes his speech with another useful clue to Socrates' behaviour, and the wider problems of homosexual implication discussed earlier: "I may add that I am not the only sufferer in this way; Charmides the son of Glaucon and Euthydemus the son of Diocles and many others have had the same treatment; he has pretended to be in love with them, when in fact he is himself the beloved rather than the lover." [72] He himself is the beloved an indication that Socrates as spiritual Master is loved, though as a device he pretends the opposite (not that the Master's love is not genuine, but it is not of the familiar sort). Bucke's criteria of attractiveness seems met in this description of Socrates.

2.2.5. The Evidence so Far

With the general evidence earlier presented, and the detailed evidence from the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium, I believe we have a plausible case that the Socrates presented by Plato was a mystic, of the jnani type, engaged with the via negativa (though not by any means in an extreme way) and generally non-theistic. The love-aspects are there in just the proportion one might expect in a jnani: absence of these indications would actually weaken the case for Socrates as a mystic. Furthermore, Socrates appears as a Master devoted to teaching his disciples, who loved him.

If we step back from this thesis for a moment, we can consider other possibilities. What of the possibility that it was Plato himself that was the mystic, and that the image of Socrates we have so far discovered was entirely his invention, plastered over the bare historic facts of an Athenian trouble-maker sentenced to death? Or that both were equally mystics? We need to look further into the Platonic canon to answer these questions.

References for Part 4

[47] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 110
[48] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 151
[49] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 136
[50] Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Trans.: Desmon Lee, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 58
[51] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954, p. 148
[52] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 179
[53] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 25
[54] Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, Trans.: Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954, p. 25
[55] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 38
[56] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 46
[57] Stearn, J. Edgar Cayce - The Sleeping Prophet, Bantam Books, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland, 1989
[58] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 48
[59] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 54
[60] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 56
[61] Kripal, Jeffery, J., Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, University of Chicago Press, 1995
[62] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 143
[63] Callow, Philip, Walt Whitman, From Noon to Starry Night, London: Allison and Busby, 1992, p. 257
[64] Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 55
[65] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 108
[66] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 86
[67] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 103
[68] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 101
[69] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 102
[70] Needleman, Jacob, The Heart of Philosophy, London, Melbourne and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 35
[71] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 110
[72] Plato, The Symposium, Trans.: Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951, p. 111

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