Yoga, Plato, and The Mysteries: Freedom and Liberation of the Seer

The goal of all spiritual paths is freedom or liberation, the freedom from suffering, the liberation from the “mad masters”, as Plato mentions in his first book of the Republic. Freedom is something that the ancient Athenian culture deeply prized and yet lost. Freedom is something Americans prize and have already lost. Many speak about liberation and freedom, just as many speak about love and money. Few seem to be able to hold any of it, and those that do, become corrupted by it through abuse, greed, and all the other seven deadly sins.

Consider the following passage from the Yoga Sutras. It is something to refer back to when consider the Phaedo. Do not try to “get it”. It is reflecting the light of the deep mysteries of wisdom. It does not dwell in the world of goals, advice, philosophical grandstanding, or philosophy. It’s worse become and take on form, as you lose your own form in them. They only reveal what you are able to see, at any given point in time, and they will continue to reveal more as you see it. Note that the purusha is like the pure soul, and the prakriti is like pragmatic matter.

The Seer is nothing but the power of seeing which, although pure, appears to see through the mind.
The seen exists only for the sake of the seer.
Although destroyed for him who has attained liberation, it (the seen) still exists for others, being
common to them.
The union of Owner (Purusha) and owned (Prakriti) causes the recognition of the nature and powers of
them both.
The cause of this union is ignorance.
Without this ignorance, no such union occurs. This is the independence of the Seer.
Uninterrupted discriminative discernment is the method for its removal.
One’s wisdom in the final stage is sevenfold. One experiences the end of:
Desire to know anything more.
Desire to stay away from any thing.
Desire to gain anything new.
Desire to do anything.
Sorrow.
Fear.
Delusion.
By the practice of the limbs of Yoga, the impurities dwindle away and there dawns the light of wisdom,
leading to discriminative discernment.

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book 2, translation by Swami Satchidananda

The passage above reflects the intention of all Plato’s great works, but they are given in a form that is quite different, and unique to Plato’s style and circumstance. I don’t intend to spend any time discussing the differences here, because the Sutras are very cryptic, deceptive in their simplicity of expression, and demand deep study of the original Sanskrit, something that most people don’t have easy access to. However, I assure you, that you don’t need Sanskrit in order to study the Sutras. I’ll leave it at that.

True freedom, or eleutheria, is never something a government can give you, or anyone else for that matter. Freedom is a gift of the divine, and it is only granted to those who can experience and express it. With freedom, comes autonomy and creativity, not co-dependency and an allegiance to others. Freedom is to be unbound by the travails of this world. Freedom is a state of joy that transcends all circumstances. It is not bought by money. It is not bought by power. The state of governments is a symptom of our personal disconnection with our own freedom and is not imposed upon us from those governments. Any Christian who gives such power to governments, has no faith in the power of God at all. There lies their contradiction, as so many who claim to be religious, who spend much of their time complaining about their governments, as if their freedom belonged to such lowly masters.

This is why the Great Mysteries of Eleusis were established, in order to cultivate and harvest freedom, to keep humanity in connection and communion with the divine, and not with tyrannical governments, in order to create civilizations, relationships, and partnerships that align with the natural creation as evolved through divine guidance. That the root of Eleusis and the word freedom is the same (-eleu-), is no accident. The entire religious/spiritual experience was to assist in the revelation of freedom, freedom from the sufferings of a mortal world, freedom from fear, freedom from death. Through the experiences of the mysteries, participants or teleutoi were to experience a deep and powerful connection with the divine. The establishment of these mysteries was not created in order to affect some spiritual experience on the weekend. The ancients saw that this divine connection was the foundation of civilization, the source of abundance, and wisdom on this earth plane. To them, the original founders, the establishment of the mysteries and their rites, no matter what level attained for initiation, was a matter of survival, not entertainment and not egoic absorption into spiritual lifestyles. The alternative to them was slavery to some empire. The ancient wisdom of Greece had an intention to create a civilization much like civilizations in the past, before Atlantis fell. Plato speaks about this Atlantis in his Timaeus.

Sufferings, which are an experience of a lack of freedom, can only be released when the god realizes that he is not the body in which he inhabits, and that he is in fact immortal in his true form. Once that is known, once you know that it is only an illusion, a game, or however you wish to call it, your suffering will come to an end. Once that is realized, the true journey of expansion and wonder arrive, as you are now in the experience of the divine revelation, not as some external experience or force, but through the creative Self, the one that designed the perceivable world-as-perceived in the first place and has chosen to live the life that it is living and has lived and will live. That is the true original essence of the Mysteries of Eleusis, the mysteries that could not be spoken of and were forbidden to be spoken of.

The word for god in Greek is theos. The root –the– refers to that which is visualized. Our word theatre comes from this, as it is a spectacle before which audiences experience the lives of the fictional others. Incidentally, the root –the– also refers to that which is placed or set down, such as a law or an edit. What we see materializes because it is we who set it down. To see is to create. To be a god is to be able to manifest through vision (sight) alone. That is the true nature of our ability to see and is the core reason why Aristotle began his Metaphysics with the following: Man desires, above all things, to see (to know). Seeing is knowing and knowing is visualizing the circumstances and essence of identity. When the “I” or ego perceives the world, it imagines you as the subject of that world, as relating to the world. It merges seer into seen.

The goal of every Platonic dialogue is for you to realize your god-essence, the one who sees and can materialize life, experience, and civilization. The ultimate goal, however, is to achieve this with consciousness, like being fully conscious in a dream. The god, when asleep, is of course a dangerous animal. He acts out as if in a dream, thinking he knows what is happening, but is completely detached from reality. The realization that we are not awake and have not been awake is called awakening. This means – and this is very important – that you are the only one who has the keys to unbind yourself from your own prison, your limitations, and your sufferings. No one can teach you this wisdom. The only thing that others can provide is a light to shine into the dark places that you have forgotten about yourself and who you are and what you have created to get you to this point in your life. These lights, these memories will show up in your life, like breadcrumbs, in hopes that you find your way back to what has been forgotten, which is the Truth of who you are.

Modern life is composed of layers upon layers of distractions, that are composed of mirrors and rooms of mirrors. So many are hopelessly lost in this very challenging mental labyrinth. Some find little rooms and stay there in the comfort of others and do this for a lifetime. They do not know they are in a labyrinth at all. They think the room is the world and is reality. Others find some progress and proceed to the next layer of this labyrinth and become a little more facile in moving around and experiencing it as a whole. They start to see that their room isn’t the only one, and they imagine there are as many rooms as there are eyes. At some point, there will be a realization that not only are their many rooms, but there is one room that contains all these rooms. At that point the consciousness begins to comprehend the holistic relationship connecting all rooms together. At some point however, the consciousness, even while the body may still be grounded in a single room (since that is the only option for a body), will free itself from the labyrinth altogether, enough so that he or she might provide assistance towards improving the quality of life of the labyrinth and the education for those awakening and ascending from within it.

I just used a metaphor to describe the nature of ascension and how it relates to our perception of life and ourselves in it. Spiritual growth cannot be separated from who you are: how you spend your time, your conversations, your friends, and the music and art you pay attention to, the politics and the distractions designed to keep you trapped in rooms and multiple rooms.

There are of course guides who show themselves in different ways, depending on your path. Plato is one of those guides, a master if you will. He understood the intention of the mysteries and their function in the education of humanity. However, he also saw that political and lower interests had corrupted the teachings into a yearly orgy festival of drugs and decadence. This state of things peaked in the Roman age, and still continues in the activities of the entertainment and global elite lifestyles, hidden from public view, although adequately portrayed in Stanley Kubrick’s film, Eyes Wide Shut.

The Platonic tradition has preserved the true teachings of the mysteries as the illumination of the light, and the revelation and rebirth (awakening) of the god and goddess energies in union, whether through a single soul, or through two souls such as twin flames or even soul mates. This is in deep contrast to the dark magic as practiced through the deranged mysteries of the hidden orders of demonic bloodlines, the ones that rule this matrix. It is very difficult for the modern mind to read any of these classic mystery texts. The first obvious reason is the language. Modern English is a matrix tongue. Most people do not feel the roots of it, because it has been severed from those roots. It truly has become a noxious brew of symbols and sounds, similar to a pile of dismembered limbs from sources unknown and beings that have been forgotten. In addition, the teaching of ancient languages has become nearly extinct and even where they are taught, they are mostly taught in terms of translation, that is to say, in English. Students are not trained to understand the deep meaning of the Theos (God) and usually just seem to imagine what they have been taught in Sunday school. it is a very strange situation, as the mental fragmentation of our education has created a jigsaw puzzle out of perception, and even when all the pieces fit together, it still doesn’t make sense as a whole organism. In other words, integrity is lost. And when integrity is lost, freedom is lost in that puzzle or game or labyrinth that was once of our own making, but is now the world in which most human beings wander and cower in fear.

If you are reading this, and it is igniting a light somewhere inside of you, it is not due to these words at all, but by the spirit and light in which they are written and to which your heart can connect. That spirit and light is a function of Source and your connection to your highest self. The arrangement of these words and letters, their meanderings speak only around that light, like water is around the light of the sun as it projects all the colors of the rocks and the fish back into our eyes. And we marvel that we are even here as the witness and the watcher, as an observer of the very wonder of Sight and Awareness itself.