'A Sound Like Many Thunders'

Revelation 14:2

And then a sound like great waves rolling and the voice as of the sound thunder, and then I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.

Okay.

'Red Pill/Blue Pill.' An important totem
of modern popular culture. I think
they took the idea from an old Disney
movie called 'Babes in Toyland' but
I know people will argue with me.
...Who haven't even seen that movie.

Well, we've already had the 'silence in heaven for about one half of an hour,' so okay, we're back to noise again then...

LOL

Still, let's have another look at this: 'the voice of harpers harping...' Well what does that mean?

Means the general music, singing and playing - and then it goes on 'as it were a new song, that no one except so-and-so many were able to learn.'

Toni-Ville Henrik Virtanen, the Finnish expert EDM producer and DJ says at the end of his show to the audience: 'Given what is going on currently in the rest of the world, and in Europe particularly, I can't believe that what I am seeing is such a demonstration of people being united: you guys are the very definition of unity, of being unified.'

Well okay, part of that is true enough, the rest of it is he has been into the audience proper, chatting to the people, playing around at the front edge of the stage proper where the mostly all pretty hot women aged from 18 to anything, up the front pushing forward, were.

And then, let's not forget that the sound system is utterly extraordinary and bones and tissue and blood are 'at one' with the very physical vibrations going through the air.

A couple of years earlier, I had watched as the current state Premier of Western Australia turned up at a suburban food hall and sat with the people who were just there in their normal daily lives, and he left his 'security team' well behind as he chatted with people generally without any kind of arrogant manner or standoffish-nish at all. After a while it was clear he would be protected most of all, by the ordinary people, if anything

One side of the vast complex at Hillarys Boat Harbor
where Finnish music producer 'Darude,' performed.
Pic doesn't give an accurate impression
of the size of the place; it's pretty huge - many
floors. Very upscale inside.

Later that year, he won the election by the greatest margin ever in the history of all Australian elections, leaving just one 'opposition' member on the other side in Parliament, but another one eventually joining that side through a contested result and I think, someone just plain feeling sorry for them on 'the other side.' 

The human race is just such a 'game in development.' I've said this a number of times, but it's worth re-stating:

I totally accept the sincerity of people of the past who 'went out in the earnest search for God.' But then when they come back, you can certainly say to them -  you went out looking for God but you came back with an idea. And then you turned around and told everyone else that you had found God whereas in fact you found an idea. And you are pressing onto people an idea, as if it were the God, but in fact never showing the God.

God is not an idea. The word for God yes, that is an idea of something. But it is not God.

The so-called Tetragrammaton, as much as Jews want you to believe they 'have hold' of the name of God, and that this is 'special' and sacred, and also powerful (of course powerful, naturally, it has to be powerful) - is nothing more than an idea.

You see, there is not one single actual hard text in existence, dating from anywhere near the supposed time of the supposed 'Moses,' with the 'Yodh' - that letter 'floating in the air' at the beginning of 'JVHV' - in that supposed name.'

There is every excuse of course - 'goat ate my Quran' (lol, sorry, just had to), goatskin faded and then decayed into dust... ...and then Wikipedia too for example, goes to great lengths to blur the matter by showing this 'letter' as it would have been written in ancient Phoenician, and 'Paleo-Hebrew' as if somehow, this means that it ever had have been, written.

Darude.
Famous for a track called 'Sandstorm.'
Has many many others though.

So but is God then, actually an idea - such that yes you can 'viscerally experience' God, but as a full comprehension of the powerful idea?

No. Well, It is that, resonance from supremely powerful ideas...

But, like the sound of many thunders - because it is itself in part an idea like thunder - and then, just like the thunder -, the sound of it presages lighting, storm, and rain.

God is not just an idea, however good that idea may be.

Here is how you may touch God personally, and have the god touch you:

Inside of you is a space, in which you have entertained every idea... You have let in there, the words of your University professors, your media speakers, your politicians, your culture, what passes for your society.

The only things that should be allowed into that space, are the highest, most illuminated dynamic living beings - and the ideas are what you have with your material brain about them.

Put yourself there...
Except wear earplugs, okay?
And then, listen to the music below.

Five seconds after I teach you what 'word' really is that thing they are describing as the Tetragrammaton, every single thing you imbue with it, becomes alive, becomes endowed with a dynamic living force, and 'happens.' Which is the reason why they say not to use the name of God in vain.

You don't need me to teach you that word. Not right now.

For now just look forward, and imagine yourself, in a relatively not too large EDM space, like a nightclub, with incredibly powerful speakers arranged properly everywhere. ...And lots of beaming lights flitting through the air. And realize the visceral feeling of being caught in the sound waves. I had ear-plugs, myself. I don't know how anyone doesn't. The sound from the speakers is so powerful but also precise, so that when the percussive 'rim shots' strike they literally feel like they are cutting into your body, and the futuristic 'twitch twitch' sounds of the phaser sound effects, synced to the beam lighting literally feels like you are being zapped by a sci-fi space gun. The bass is the whole swelling visceral force of some kind of 'sound sea':

'Follow The White Rabbit'

It's probably not a great idea to advertise where you are going to be in three hours.

So, I won't.

Suffice to say that if I even survive the night and live to tell the tale, well maybe we'll be in a condition to tell it by tomorrow... ...sometime.

LOL

Apparently, the code is 'follow the White Rabbit.'

So that's what I'll do. And see what happens. That's a good idea, isn't it?

I couldn't make the Church Nightclub last week in Denver for Haliene's Aliens but, um, we'll be doing the * - or wherever the White Rabbit goes this evening instead.

Gotta go. Almost late already.

Getting Out Of Myths

Plato himself writes that too many of the myth-makers were continually fabricating stories in order to connect this or that happening with some new part of the whole 'mythos' they specialized in virtually as a professional activity.

I mean, people write stuff down, sure, but how does anyone know what happened between this 'god' and the other one, unless they were literally there as a witness, or had at least been given the account by, um, let's say, the god themselves. And then, today, we would be stuck with the small matter of 'pics or it didn't happen!' LOL

Ah Calvin, you are tricking us, that's not the
'water-to-wine' thing.
Calvin: 'Well, they wouldn't know that back then,
now would they??'

Saint Paul, of the much much later Christian Scriptures-Writing Era, is totally guilty of this kind of thing - and just like the people who look at ancient Greek mythology, the later Christians never pick apart what is really being said and the logic of what is being said...

'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?' Says Jesus to Paul in a vision, and Paul is convinced that the vision is legit and is really a direct message from the god - and then he writes about it, and then also writes down (some) other things he is subsequently told in more visions, and then writes a lot of things he himself has decided to be true from his own thoughts and knowledge of the Jewish religion. He has also a very fine knowledge of the Roman laws and Roman politics and so on so no one much challenges anything he says because, well, they just never have inside of the Christian church at least.

But why are we not given the other side of the coin, in terms of his first vision? Why do we not get told of the vision in which Paul is told:

'Paul, everything you have said and written down is just great. And true. I, Jesus, endorse it.'

You don't get to see that in any scripture because it never happened.

What you actually get is this thing from Jesus: 'And people in later times follow the traditions of men in place of the laws of God.'

Plato criticizes some of the myth writers quite harshly, but in other instances, he simply makes the point that there is 'some disagreement' or 'variations' (in accounts).

He particularly makes one reference to the very founding of Athens after the Flood, and says that the narratives are wrong in some of the names they give - and he gives an alternate view that it was not 'Ericthonius' who founded Athens, but that some people whose only recollection of their first culture and previously high civilization of Atlantis, was their remembrance of their names or family names; and he designates 'Erusicthiones' as one such person or group of people and that in any case, here it wasn't even their actual family name but rather the pre-Greek language description for 'men who rose with their skins red from the mud after the Great Flood.'

Something for the girls...
Can't find the nice rosey-colored ones
that I really like. But these'll do!

Standard Greek myth is that a half-serpent being, Cecrops, was the first king of Athens - and that he was a son of Poseidon and he had a son called Ericthonius, and then that son had a son called 'Erusichthiones.'

But one of the problems with the Greek's own mythology is that they themselves (as Plato also noted) were a bit shaky about the whole thing because they also claimed at the same time (as other accounts that he was a son of Poseidon) that Cecrops was 'autochthon' - someone who was 'born from the earth itself' and had no father. Now this may have meant they were the indigenous peoples ('Aboriginals') but then at the same time they also had the very clear myth story of actual civilized people surviving from out of the muddy ground which was left over after the Great Flood of Atlantis.

So it looks like the Greeks cannot make up their minds as to whether they are the descendants of Poseidon, or, that they are 'autocthon.'

The answer is that they are both - and, plus, there is this other group as well that 'came down at Mount Evuron' and built a memorial pile of stones there which reflected an incident concerning one of the gods animating some stones, bringing these to life as 'humans.'

Here is the thing though - Homer says quite clearly, that 'never had a Goddess shown so much favor to a human,' and it was suggestive of some kind of relationship beyond even 'mere favor;' and he really implies something so close as to be a kind of bigamous thing too, since Odysseus had a human wife - Penelope. Funny too, because for various suspect reasons, 'the gods' one way or the other delay Odysseus's return to his human wife for some huge amount of years, during which time he is, in all practicality, if not exactly 'cavorting' with Athena, then he is 'having this strange peculiar close relationship' though, with her, as well as with other demi-goddesses.

'Jukes No's.'
Make all kinds of different 'wines.'

And then added to this, 'Peitho' is the city standard-bearer of Athens (Jesus mentions this word, and everyone thinks He is just using some Greek descriptive word but no, in fact He actually makes it clear this 'word' has Divine Power! ...It's actually someone's name, and not just a 'word.' The meaning part, the 'word' comes about because of the identity of the person with that name). But Peitho is Hermes' daughter from Aphrodite... And the 'Peitho' goes along with the Palladium - 'upon the safe-keeping of which the safety of the city was thought to depend.'

The 'Palladium' is the wooden statue of Athena, part of which came down from the sky. And the statue of Athena, is housed in a temple called the 'Erectheion...' Literally after this 'Ericthonius,' or as Plato would have it 'Erusichthiones.'

And the human person Odysseus...

...is a the great grandson of Hermes.

You see, this is all very complicated yes I know, but, actually you should try to think of things this way: the Greeks had the exact same three-way split of who all these 'gods and goddesses' actually were as the Norse had.

The Norse say - 'Jotuns,' and 'Vanir' and 'Aesir.' All of those can go to Asgard.

And the Greeks say - 'Titans,' and 'Proto-Titans' who were also the allies of Zeus in the Titanomachy, and then the Ouranoids (sons and loyal grandsons of Ouranos). All of those can go to Olympus.

Peitho at the Erechtheion - 
which is also called 'the Parthenon'
of Athena.

This 'Hephaestos' was from a Titan mother Hera, and he was also born by parthenogenesis. He tried to force Zeus into handing over his daughter. Is this really going to happen, is Athena really going to accept a rather rough Titan? Unlikely.

Whereas Hermes is an actual Olympian, albeit a very young one so hardly an 'Ouranoid' as such, but definitely no Titan in any way at all. Now whereas the Greeks are being explicit about Hephaestus and Athena, they are downright scandalous about what Hermes made for Athena... Which is namely the smooth wooden 'device.' 

Hermes is the fastest thinking, and the most accurate communicator, and the craftiest of the male gods, and thus he is or should be the natural consort of Athena. But it's actually 'worse' than that though, because while Athena has outright rejected the Titan-generated 'Hephaestus' and that becomes an 'incident,' she keeps something secret about her relationship with Hermes.

The clarification of what is opaque here, is not readily accepted by too many people, but it is this:

In fact Athena is 'conforming' actual humanity over millennia, to a literal relationship with her. And I mean 'relationship' in that way. The ending of Homer in the Iliad is very much like the implication to the words of Jesus about David - namely, that he lives.

Athena has made an 'Eternal Covenant' with seemingly, an apparent mortal - but then how could that be? This is not like any Abrahamic thing about 'and your children and the future of their offspring shall be like...' Oh no, this says expressly 'and the two made between each other an eternal covenant that she shall for him do... such-and-such, for all time to come.'

The Greek Mount Evuron story is the same story as the Jews' one about Mount Hermon, and the 'angels coming down and cohabiting with mortal women and having children with them.'

Opera mezzo again, Garanca.

The mounds of stones signifying the creation of 'Athens' from out of animated stones, is a parallel construction myth referring to the people who survived the Flood of Atlantis and were living in muddy red conditions for a long time, and who thus appeared like 'dried red mud,' alongside the incident on Mount Evuron to do with Hermes. And the matter about the so-called 'sacred' phallus of Hermes, well I don't want to go into it but it is a bit of a cheeky jibe (at best, and pretty rude at worst) at the 'maiden' or the 'virgin' goddess. I don't know how they think they could get away with it...!

But you have to remember, there are several 'secret' rites known to the ancient 'mystery cult' religious Greeks - and one of them is to do with Peitho and her sisters and some snakes in some stone jars and so on. And that one is generally claimed to depict the actual 'Eleusinian Mysteries' that for the most part, only young aristocratic women can partake in.

But the other, and related one, is to do with the Hermes matter, and it might be, although I cannot confirm this openly in public here, that it is sanctioned by the Goddess herself albeit only because of what is disclosed within the secret rites themselves and for very good reasons. So that doesn't give people the right to make rude jokes, especially not if they don't actually know what is in those rites.

Now, look, the only people who would really know these things for certain, would in any case be those who had actually undergone those sacred mysteries.

It is said, that Plato had.

Cannot see the Kingdom of God, all right!
Unless you have the eyes to see.

So I am just distilling stuff from his writings. I am not disclosing anything from 'secret rites and rituals.'

But in truth - Hermes delivers messages from Olympus to men, and men (meaning Mankind so that means 'and women') become animated with the Divine Message or 'gift' or whatever you want to say; that is, they are given real Divine life by the Gods, except this is a process, in which Wisdom is both the midwife and then some kind of actual consort in the end.

'Except that a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.'

I really don't know how willing the Jews are going to be giving up that this is really any kind of a Jewish story at all, but instead an Egyptian one, and a Greek, most ancient one, dating from the time as far back as before the Great Flood of Atlantis itself.

The High Classics

So... ...the Ancient Greeks had this coin, see - the tetradrachma. Very high value denomination -, actually, I think it was the highest value of all the silver coins, representing pretty much a week's salary for a hoplite soldier.

On the coin were some letters: 'AOE.' ...Is actually 'Alpha,' Theta,' 'Epsilon;' and that is an abbreviation - according to modern academics - for 'Of the Athenians.'

Now, 'Of the Athenians' is the word in Greek, or at least, supposedly, the word 'Athenaion.'

Whereas really, it means 'the children of Athena.'

We're getting to the 'High Classics' now.
What does that mean...?

Ostensibly, this is impossible, since she is said to be a 'virgin' Goddess and doesn't have any actual 'engendered' children. Yet here we are, having the Athenian people themselves, literally claiming that they are the children of Athena. Look there are so many word puns going here in the original Greek, that it is pointless me going through them all because half of them would only be seen by actual ethnic Greeks themselves, and whereas 'academics' and 'scholars' continuously insist on affecting dubiousness over these punning claims. Waste of time enumerating them all. Like our friend who ran to Wiki to check 'Alcibiades' and instantly came up with the rude stuff, having totally abstained, himself, from just plain reading the actual source text and seeing about that last section in there... ...like that kind of thing, stating the puns here would have people rushing straightaway to 'check' on Wikipedia and gainsay anything that was just said.

Waste... of... time.

So okay but put my 'attitude' aside for one minute, and let's go to this matter of 'why somewhat slanderous?'

Hey hey hey. But now look here!

We have had over two thousand years of people talking about this, no one has ever told you what I am about to...

Remember, we have to entertain
the 'short-cut haired' girls, now, right...

; )

And believe me, beforehand posting this I had to do a little, well, not so much 'proseuchomai' at the Temenos - in fact in this case I dared not even to 'pour out a libation' (and you will shortly see why; casting something onto the ground!), and I prefer the Latin word 'precaria' because -, Jesus! 

This thing is precarious. You can't mess with these for real gods. They can take exception.

I don't wish to be seen in even the slightest way, to be promoting any kind of slander, but nor telling false stories either just to extricate something, some 'delicate matter.'

Some delicate matter...

Underscoring therefore, that I am simply for the purpose of explaining properly, recounting the (false) myth about it first: Hermes formed a strong desire for Athena, and as he pursued her, he 'spilled his seed onto the ground.' The slanderers don't even say that - they say he ejaculated, either deliberately onto her lap, or she pushed him away and at the precise moment... ...on her lap whereupon she slung it off onto the ground. 

...From which these 'pebbles' came alive; aka the Athenian indigenous people, albeit prior to when the place was even actually called 'Athens.'

For reasons which go well beyond the most obvious one, this 'wooden phallus' then, was symbolic of the event.

And the pebble 'Herms' symbolized the people who 'sprang from the stony ground,' but then also, their official Divine claim to the land where they were 'born.'

The 'High Classics' are what is in
some of the Classics, that is really,
stupendously involved.

But there is a kind of a problem with this. And it is this - the Athenians, by adopting these symbols, literally are confronting Athena openly to her face, that she didn't bear them as her actual bodily children (even though, sure, Hermes was forcing himself on her), and they are reminding her of this by calling themselves 'of Athena.' I mean, ostensibly, they are clearly 'of Hermes and the ground' and not 'of Athena' at all.

Some ignorant but well-meaning people think still now, or 'thought' back then, that they, the Athenians, as ordinary humans, sided with her against the bad actions of Hermes, and so that is how come they call themselves after her even though she didn't bear them. Or, that additionally to that first reason, the 'Athenians' were attracted to her and not to their real father Hermes... Theoretically then, in this perspective, she has no actual 'physical' part of them at all though. And the children of Hermes are openly, again, just as Hermes had, declaring their attraction to her. 

But now we arrive at the next most obvious problem with that - she NEVER not even for one single second, repudiates them in anyway, always siding with them, and aiding them at every turn, even doing so sometimes surreptitiously behind the backs of all the other gods.

The slander comes in from this fact:

It is not possible for a god to do wrong. 

So, we cannot and we must not, say that Hermes was setting about to, or was in the interdicted act of, raping the Goddess.

This is what happened - nay, is happening: 

'Octavian' pretending to be a 'silver rose knight,'
presents the marriage sign to the Princess,
on behalf of some lecherous Prince,
but the Princess falls in love
with Octavian on the spot instead -,
who is played always by a female.

Hermes found himself attracted to the Goddess of Wisdom, and, he moved on her all right, and she did not repel him (don't strike me blind, You-Know-Who!), instead she set out her terms to him.

Thus, the pebble people are not completed people; they are 'embryonic.'

And, fulfilling her terms - following the edicts of Wisdom, as Solomon says, and David actually did - leads a human of a certain kind, to the Olympian Family. And what does that mean - it means you become one of the Olympian tribe, an immortal.

And what did Jesus say?

He said this: 'You know not David. David is not dead for God is not God of the Dead but of the Living,' and in this He explicitly said that David was alive, when all 'knew' that David had been dead for a thousand years.

Strauss's 'Der Rosenkavalier:' (Elina Garanca as Octavian).

Out In The Alleyway

Now here, some of you will start to perform miraculous things. Literally you will attain special powers. Oh you think not?

So sooner or later I guess we had to get here though.

The good question was posed in some recent pages - 'what is this, about Love being the child of Poverty?'

This whole idea underpins everything that is Christianity at its core. There is literally no such thing as 'Christianity' without this entire concept, intact, straight from the actual core meaning of the affair.

Cristina Soto's just-posted, photograph
of the many layers of blue.

The Symposium is far and away the most complex, the most austerely advanced, and the least understood of all of the works of Plato, whether they be the known authentic works, or any whose authorship is contested among scholars.

Even more complex than any of the texts that deal with maths and geometry, is the Symposium.

Because, the structure is one of many dimensions.

The play, virtually, is designed around a sophisticated dinner, attended only by the highest class, most educated, and esteemed of people including a leading Athenian doctor and the historical Athenian general Alcibiades.

The discussion is deemed so important by these leading figures, that they instruct the host to 'send the dancing girls away' for the rest of the evening.

And this mind you, is still a wine drinking party. And in fact this aspect becomes a crucial 'literary device' (let's just leave it at that for the moment) towards the end.

Here begins this whole matter of 'different dimensions;' for on the one hand, the girls are going to distract, but somehow, we are meant to accept that the wine will not affect the procuring of the truth - which is what they were all going after here.

The Christian 'New Testament' leaps ahead over the subject of well, but really, why?

And also, how did it all begin, and not with the Garden of Eden story, but hey, where did all these 'God' things, come from at all? I mean why not, we just have nothing and then 'Big Bang' then soup and then lightning and then amoeba and then slugs and then lizards and then monkeys and then giraffes and finally, Neanderthals, from where we have only gone backwards ever since.

Plaster model and art by Ben Kommets
and 'Lucky-LBT.'
The Praiseworthy One, Socrates.
Or is that a genie?

LOL

But everything in the Symposium is happening on multiple levels all at once...

So, as people with the modern Western Mind, we must see the Goddess 'Ate' (Destruction/Havoc) now, not with our crass and simple-minded, childish 'modern' Western vision, but in a different way.

Ate is Destruction yes, but then she is the daughter of a Goddess (Eris) by parthenogenesis, of Nyx, with whom Zeus then co-operates, to plant her (Eris) deep into the Earth and so that she (Eris, who is 'Envy') would be here to interact with Mankind in a certain way.

Ate has a daughter, who is 'Poverty.' So right away we must 'see' that Envy causes Strife, which causes Destruction which ends up in Poverty.

But this is not the whole of the matter - 'Envy' is an extremely powerful animating daimones, which causes Men even lazy ones, to work to attain something they desire to have; and only after that, is it sometimes (albeit mostly it is) the case that war and strife ensue when the desires are not achieved.

So we have this great big profile story here going on, this systematic chain of connected psychological events.

And so that is how come we have Poverty coming into the scene now; and that is how we must view her - as a crucial element within a whole profile of connected things.

Moving into another 'dimension' then, Poverty is a God: she is a Spirit, meaning not some kind of wisp of fog in a graveyard, but a super powerful Divine thing. Which means - she cannot die, she cannot be overcome by mortal things, and she has Divine Power, that is to say, Divine means to get whatever she wants.

The wine, the food...
...and our own Poverty.

She goes to a feast of wining and dining other Gods, and she well knows her own suffering and lack, and seeing that the God 'Plenty,' or Abundance, or Resource is completely drunk and fallen over asleep at that moment in the back yard, she purposes to lie with him and conceive a child who will then inherit of his father, some wealth, and therewith resolve her own lack; in a way.

So this then, is the God 'Love.'

From His mother He has literally nothing, but He also inherits from her great contrivance, literally the Divine Skill to make something from out of nothing - since, because she herself is a God, she can do anything, but the way she does it, is from without any advantages at all.

And from His father, He literally gets everything.

And then, in the Symposium, we learn something on another level again, namely that some genealogists of the Gods, regard 'Love' as the youngest of the Gods, and then yet, others of them regard Him as literally the Oldest, through some strange and mysterious means.

And they say that prior to His birth, it was the very reason of His not being there beforehand, that the Gods warred and did violence and many horrible things happened, and that after His advent, He subdued all of them permanently, so that none of them who did not bow to Him were permitted to remain in Olympus ever more. And that only those 'among whom there was ever Love only, and no enmity at all' were allowed to remain in the Heaven of the Gods.

But then, without anyone telling us, we must see that He is in fact a direct descendant of Nyx, of whom even Zeus the Leader and Father of Gods and Men was solely afraid and respected completely. And because Nyx is His (Zeus's) own daughter's (Wisdom)'s aunt or grandmother, He also has a somewhat similar relationship to her too (the Goddess 'Wisdom') although she behaves to him as a daughter and is also respectful anyway.

And if He, Love, is a descendant of Nyx, then by the organized structure of Divinity, He is of the oldest strands of the Divine Vine, as it were.

The Genie is out of the bottle!

We are mortals. In the sense of what is truly speaking Eternal, we have nothing, and we die, to be no more, whether personally, or in any other way as a given certainty.

In the Symposium, suddenly at the end, Plato interposes a new device. He brings in the drunken general Alcibiades, dressed like Dionysus, the God of Wine, and just like Dionysus is often to be found, having come back from a street party, where he has been cavorting with lovers.

Now Alcibiades is a completely historical figure, of whom we know a very great deal.

He was the last 'famous' (there may be others, descendants down to this very day, but none are famous) of the Aristocratic family the Alcmaeonidae, among whose ancestors was the old soldier Nestor, who possessed a large drinking vessel, so huge and heavy that none but he was able to lift it and drink it. And Nestor, was a human descendant of Poseidon's affair with a princess of Thessaly, which makes Alcibiades already regarded 'officially' as semi-divine himself. 

Plato is implicating the ancestral Nestorian Drinking Vessel echo (which Greeks would know about, but is not explicit in the text) in Alcibiades' very presence there at all, and his comportment (his attire and his state of drunkeness), with Divinity and specifically with the God Dionysus. He is making Alcibiades into a real life, earthly, physical material presence or 'hint,' of the actual spirit of Dionysus.

And that simply underscores the point that Plato is making, namely, that here in this part of the 'dialogue,' we are to understand that this is now taking things right down to earth, as in, this is now a real-life thing going on for us to see through the story, but, that it implicates the matter of the 'demi-god' nature of certain people and certain things.

Alcibiades is a literary device, that we are to take as representing the God Dionysus Himself.

And then, 'things get messy' you see, because naturally, Alcibiades is quite drunk. By 'messy' we can also say 'they get real.'

So let us also now 'get real.'

We are humans. We live, we come from nothing and Hawking's Big Bang, and we die. And that's it. Back to the nothing that we are.

Hawking has nothing for us. He is nothing himself right now. A few words on some pages, some digital space in some computer chips, some DNA samples stored in labs in Imperial College London.

Now by the way, so as not to be unfair on 'sci-entists' (those creatures who actually know exactly nothing, in fact), in another plane of dimension in the dialogue, we have heard from the Athenian doctor, Eryximachus, on the physician's perspective of 'Love.' And right convincing it is too.

Alcibiades' 'Naval Marque...'

Meanwhile, Alcibiades is telling us now, things about 'the tire rubber hitting the road,' as it were.

Just a little beforehand, Socrates' old nurse maid, Diotima from Mantinea, had been setting forth how it is that a human mortal person, can become immortal...

A mortal, realistically, in the sense of anything really enduring by way of personal consciousness, literally has nothing and cannot be immortal.

And to a certainty, Steven Hawking is fully dead and completely gone. Maybe he reincarnates, but possibly not, and in all events, even if he did -, not so that his ego and his mind, his actual consciousness, knows anything about it. Yet the whole world is fooled by him when he has the stage, given to him by others, whose motives you cannot see.

Say to the carpet: 'Rise!' And it will not. This is reality.

Whereas Diotima, the 'woman who honors,' or who is honored by Deos (it can mean both things), is credited by Socrates in the Symposium, as inspiring the theory, that God is able to raise dead things or inanimate things, or make mortal things eternal beings. And then she goes ahead and says what 'God' actually is. But it is all wrapped up in the ultra-dimensionality of the Symposium, as a structured Platonic 'dialogue.' And Alcibiades disrupts everything at the end.

Capture though, even just the one time, and even but only dimly too, the 'ultra' meaning of the words that are in there, and the carpet rises but only for the person who has grasped the core.