Later I became interested in mysticism and spirituality by examining what went on in my own mind and also noting some of the more weird implications of quantum mechanics.

Moreover, I had studied the biochemistry of the brain thinking that this was the high frontier of science. However, whether we looked at the brain (neurochemistry, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology) or the mind (psychology, cognitive sciences, computer science as in artificial intelligence, neural nets, philology, epistemology, mathematics as in Godel, Turing, Cantor etc) one thing was missing and that was consciousness.

Theoretically in time we could explain all behavior (maybe) but we had no clue about the existence of consciousness as a subjective experience. Also, consciousness seemed to be central to many readings of that height of science: quantum mechanics. I developed a materialistic absolute monism where consciousness was a basic property of matter.

Later when I was a software engineer I heard about a wonderful organization in Los Felitse, near the Los Angeles zoo, called the philosophical research society. . So given my interest in mysticism and spirituality, i went to many lectures and seminars by world class leaders of consciousness studies such as Raymond Moody (the father of near death experience research), Geoffrey Mishlove (the quantum mechanics physicist), Stephan Hoeller Jungian psychologist, Gnostic Bishop and my Tarot teacher and many more.

In the meanwhile I found a teacher of Persian mystical poetry. He had an extremely authoritarian view of philosophy especially Plato. Hid version of Plato was in retrospect a way of justifying his own prejudices. Thus he claimed that Plato had proved the immortality of the soul as if that is logically possible. I kind of felt that this teacher’s reading of Persian mysticism was basically neo-Platonic. So next time the PRS had a series of lectures on Plato I decided to go. The lecturer was Dr. Pierre Grimes who looked at Plato as a total mystic. Although coincidentally he was very much into Socratic dialogue as a methodology.

My attitude toward Plato was that there was a lot of things he wrote about which made no sense given the discoveries of modern psychology, cognitive science and physics. For example there is no evidence that all learning is relearning as Plato claimed in (OK I cannot remember when it exactly but I believe it was Meno) and the idea of ideas as presented by Plato in his theory of forms has absolutely no justification from either the cognitive sciences or physics.

I did love the myth of the cave as a metaphor for plenty of different things and use it in different seminars I give. Also the myth of Ur or whatever it is in book ten of Republic is an interesting start about reincarnation but the Indians were way ahead of the Greeks and anyway we don’t know where the Pythagorean were (my guess is that Plato got a lot of his ideas about death, reincarnation and the soul from them).

I did think the overwhelming insistence of Plato on the superiority of logic and rationality to emotions and feelings was just wrong headed and stupid. After all if you want total logic have a stupid computer and you see where mere logic gets you. I have seen very intelligent people acting extremely rational and totally dumbly.

I’ll write more about most of these issues later. I want to end this post on a recent audio book I listened to by Simon Blackburn on Plato’s Republic which among other things posited the question: Was Plato a proto-faschist?

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