Reality - what a concept! Living in a world of forms and ideas, I thought "reality" was just kind of a parallel universe, with other forms and ideas. I was wrong. According to both demonic and human authors, reality consists of... how to formulate this... of shadows of ideas. Imperfect incarnations of perfect ideas. Take, for example, a sphere. Down here, a sphere consists of all points within a certain distance from a given point. Up there, in reality, it's some "material" object having more or less the form of a sphere.
One of their philosophers explained the difference between our world of forms and their world of objects with an analogy - it's more made for people living in reality but you might get it anyway. People trapped in reality are like prisoners in a cave, watching shadows of ideal entities on a wall. They take the shadows for existing, they call it reality, but in fact they are less real than the ideas (or "forms") casting the shadows, which they can't perceive directly.
Living in reality must be a strange and perturbing experience. You only see shadows, mock-ups, which they call "objects". You can't even be sure that those "objects" exist. Down here, a sphere exists, without any doubt, just as a poem exists, or a number, or a shape, or a formula, or a melody. Up there, it's not sure what exists and what doesn't. This is because thows who live in reality can't perceive objects immediately, they use "senses" to perceive them, and the senses can be wrong. They are doomed to live in eternal doubt.
Well, I think this doubt gives us tempters a double advantage when trying to influence a human: First we can make a human doubt of the existence of pretty much anything that exists, and secondly we can try to convince him of the existence of something that doesn't exist. Can be kinda fun, when you think about it. Can't wait getting up ther eto try it out...
No comments:
Post a Comment