The Logos

The Logos is eternal
but men have not heard it
or men have heard it and not understood.

Through the Logos all things are understood, yet men do not understand as you shall see when you put acts and words to the test I am going to propose:

One must talk about everything according to its nature, how it comes to be and how it grows.
Men have talked about the world without paying attention to the world or to their own minds,
as if they were asleep or absent-minded.

-Heraclitus

Heraclitus is making the point, while describing the utterly profound Logos itself, that men, confined to limited perception and therefore to regressive cycles of thought, do not actually see the “nature of things,” but rather only the content of their own limited minds.  Therefore, when we talk from that limited domain of knowledge (the mind), we talk like a person asleep and vainly dreaming of things which do not actually exist.  The Logos is what delivers one from that vicious cycle. 

In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates is quoted as commenting on the tendency of men to attempt to reason out the fundamental causes behind nature:  “To trouble one’s brain in this way is to play the fool. Do these investigator’s feel their knowledge of things human so complete that they betake themselves to such lofty speculations?  Do they arrogate that they are playing their proper parts [by] rising above the basic issues of being human to speculate on the concerns of God?  Amazing they see not how far beyond mortality lives the source of nature’s law.  Even those who pride themselves most on their discussions of these points differ from each other, as do madmen.”

Here, too, a Master is pointing out not that the individual ought somehow be barred from speculating on the causes behind phenomena for moral reasons, or out of some narrow holier-than-thou attitude, he is pointing out the profound truth that one is incapable of understanding the incredibly deep reality underlying nature without first understanding the incredibly deep truth underlying one’s own being.  “Know thyself” was more than a nice idea.  Socrates put this forth as the absolute first principle of all worthwhile philosophy, and indeed, all worthy living.  It’s through knowing one’s self that one can start to see what is behind the veil and “show” of nature (assuming one even cares at that point to find out — because having achieved self realization, it may be rather trite to inquire into the mechanics of creation when you have begun to knock on the door of the Creator Itself!)

So, when Heraclitus observes that men have “not heard it,” or “hearing it have not understood,” he again is talking about the individual soul and awareness, and scoffing at the efforts of men to understand with limited awareness and thought the vastly awesome principles underlying nature.  “Through the Logos, all things are understood.”  And Socrates said, “All learning is simply remembrance.”  In other words, through one’s awareness, one gains the Logos and hence all understanding.  “The Kingdom of God is within.”