We sit in a circle and contemplate in togetherness, a page from Plato in our hands. We read each paragraph slowly and attentively, several times again and again, and through our special contemplative exercises we savor gently the words as they float in our minds.We push out our opinions, our judgement, even our thoughts, so they don’t interfere. Let Plato’s words do the thinking inside us – they don’t need our help to speak. Let the sentences resonate deep inside and among us. Our silent listening invites the words to open up, and it reassures them that they are free to move within us and to whisper their secret meanings.
After a while, a greater presence appears in the room, vast and immense, silent yet emanating hidden meanings. It comes with words from elsewhere, it materializes within us, it opens hidden depths. I am now a little wave in the great ocean. There is nothing to say or explain – waves do not speak about the ocean, only from it.
The words in the room are no longer human words – they belong to greater horizons. And the text is no longer Plato’s, even though his fingers wrote it on paper many centuries ago. The real author is the voices of human reality which once spoke in his mind. He was, after all, a philosopher – a seeker of fundamental ideas, and he had the greatness of mind to hear those fundamental voices, to be inspired, and to translate them into human words.
And we too, in our twenty-first century contemplation, listen through his human words to the original voices that spoke those basic meanings, and are still speaking them now. That’s why we are all flooded by a sense of preciousness, of realness, of inspiration. That’s how we quench our yearning to connect to the depth of reality.