Should you hear someone declaim that ‘The Ancient Greeks believed … ‘ or any similar thing about some Western people, I ask you to immediately realize that this is not so.

In terms of the Ancient Greeks, ‘belief’ was a broad and varied continuum, just as it is with us. There were secular persons, mystics, superficial persons, and a broad range of different ‘beliefs’. But there was also, something that has little or nothing to do with ‘beliefs’. There was direct, experiential participation. Although there are exceptions, few of us have this. Some, yes, but mostly, what we moderns have, is conceptual representations of ideas. This is not even belief, and it has nothing to do with participation.

Some few of the Ancient Greeks were aware of something that we would find extremely unlike our common perspectives and concerns. They were aware that we have life and death largely backwards… that our spirit or soul ( not necessarily a singular entity ) was »trapped in our living body, in the way a corpse is trapped in a grave. These specific Ancients did not merely ‘believe’ this, they had direct experience of the primordial nature of birth, life and death. They knew, like other ancient cultures ( those from India in particular ), that life was, most often, a kind of trap for the soul. A result, in a sense, of having done harm, or squandering the opportunities of human existence and participation in »the Chorus. The ‘body of all beings’.

This is, in part, I suspect, why Socrates did not think death to be a punishment, or even a loss. He knew that there was not precisely ‘an afterlife’, but rather, a plenum that was outside of time, and that his descent into a body would be reversed, eventually, resulting in a kind of liberation. He also had some trust in the virtue of his mind and life, and that, having acted, at least in later life, in such a way as to preserve and enact the virtues… there would not merely be nothing lost in death, there would be a kind of cascade of restorations.

These words I speak here are simply words, but some of the ancients had »methods, by which they could explore, learn, remember, and come to direct awareness of the nature of existence, the world, mind, life, and death. Many of these methods involved a mode of dreaming that was nonordinary. A mode that was visionary and anamnoetic.

But when you hear ‘The Ancient Greeks believed…’ you can be certain this is not so. Nor is it so for the Modern Americans… or any other broad category of humans. Those who had wisdom were few and rare, and those who had direct experience of the Mysteries, often strove diligently to ensure that their participation in Cere-monies… was not converted into words or records, because then, it would be dead inside. Much like our modern culture most often is.