τά δέ πάντα οίακίξει κεραυνός.

 All entities are guided by lightning

 — Heraclitus  

  

Today we are going to look as deeply as possible into a ‘fragment’ of Heraclitus.  Early in the book, Heraclitus Seminar, Martin Heidegger, Eugene Fink and others discuss this ‘fragment’ of Heraclitus.  They beat around the bush, trotting out their knowledge of Classical Greek, but Heraclitus-the-Obscure becomes even more obscure in the peasoup of their discussion.

 

In Ancient Greece, the destinies of men are ruled by the Gods.  When Zeus strikes with His thunderbolt, everything is made to move in a direction that will fulfill or frustrate the desire or ambition of a human being on the Earth.  The thunderbolt is the “Decree of Heaven”.  However, lightning also illuminates the landscape so that a human being traveling in darkness can get his or her bearings.  The light of a torch does not brighten the extended terrain.  So, Zeus, the Ruler-of-Destiny, takes some things out of our hands but yet bestows a Gift-of-Light to illuminate our journey.  If our inner eye is open as a valid intuition, we can receive guidance from beyond our anxious or clever brain function.

 

Heraclitus is confirming that the human rational, calculating or pragmatic faculty is not always able to get the job done.  He is also pointing out that the very choices and directions taken in life by human beings are all too often puppet-like as conditioned automatons being driven by hidden forces or impulses from beyond their consciousness or their ‘explanations’ of why they did this or that.  The ‘fragment’ is therefore itself a philosophical lightning strike on our assumptions about our cognitive abilities and our free will to fulfill our desires and ambitions.  He also asserts metaphysical principles and powers beyond the rational materialism of Scientism.

 

Where do you get your habits, desires, revulsions, hopes, fears, ambitions or evasions?  Did you consciously design your volition or decision system?  Is it only by your own anxieties and calculations that you go forward in life and get the results you suffer or enjoy?  Are you truly ‘conscious’ and able to exercise a genuinely free or non-habitual ‘Will’ of your own?  Is any habit-compulsion ‘free will’?  Are you able and willing to question your usual assumptions about all this?  Is this not what Heraclitus had in mind for all alert and intelligent people who might look into his sayings?

 

Most people since ancient times who look into the ‘fragments’ of Heraclitus do not want to open themselves to the issues he points out, so they have called him ‘obscure’ in ancient times, whereas in our contemporary era, only a few university students have heard the name, Heraclitus, and only a very tiny percentage of those students have bothered to look into the Pre-Socratic Greek Philosophers to see what was going on there that might give us something valuable from our own Western Tradition before it was destroyed by the stupid Christians during the Dark Ages, the Kali Yug of the Hindus, when the masses lost what little intellect they had possessed in ancient lands and times.

 

One good way to get inside the teachings of Heraclitus and bring them to life for oneself, is to read the provocative book, The Hidden Harmony, by Bhagawan Shree Rajneesh!  He goes very fully into some selected ‘fragments’ from a spiritual perspective rather than an academic scholarship or analytic nit-picking approach.  Whatever your societal conditioned judgment of Rajneesh may be, set it aside and read him on Heraclitus.  It may open your eyes in more ways than one.  You do want a living philosophical journey and not a dead one, do you not?  You know, it is quite possible that Rajneesh was himself incarnate as Heraclitus in Ancient Greece, which would explain why he felt a deep need to comment on Heraclitus.  Of course, dead Scientism disparages these kinds of metaphysical assertions and intuitions.  So, fuck-em!  Let’s go ahead and understand both Heraclitus and Rajneesh.  You-the-reader here may of course need some lightning bolt or “impulse from beyond” to want to help bring Ancient Greek Philosophical Inquiry back to life!  Do you really decide what is ‘interesting’ or worth ‘study-in-depth’?  In a life driven by all sorts of inner pressures and caught-up in all sorts of outer difficulties and distractions, how can one find quality time for some ‘fragments’ of Heraclitus?  Heraclitus himself understood your intellectual and spiritual predicament way back then, which is why he said:

 

“All entities are guided by lightning.”

 

What really caused you to read this article?  Do you truly, consciously know your own Volition and Direction in all this?  What actually guides you?  Do you want to find out?  Have you read the teachings of Gurdjieff from P.D. Ouspensky’s, In Search of the Miraculous?  The idea there is that if we have just a little real ‘Consciousness’ and real ‘Will’, we can get more, but nothing much can happen for our Self-realization if we stupidly assume that we already have ‘Clear Consciousness’, ‘Free Will’ or that we can ‘Do’ things.

 

To look deeply into this fragment of Heraclitus means you must look deeply into yourself, your actual states and conditions, and what drives you.  You must take to heart another Heraclitus fragment that reads, “I searched myself.”  We cannot take you (or anyone else) deeper than you (or they) want to go.  But, again, the very initiative or aspiration to ‘search the self’ may not be in your hands.  Hence, some Higher Power (Zeus?) may decide whether or not to strike up a full-blown inquiry and spiritual quest in yourself.  Like the Highlander in the film of that name, you may need ‘The Quickening’ of being struck by lightning to activate your potential Immortality.  Those who are not “struck from beyond”, as it were, may be doomed to remain boring, flat and undeveloped people without Authentic Selfhood of Being-here (Dasein) or Resoluteness, Intent or Free Will.

 

A true Philosopher, ancient or modern, is more than intellectually awake and original, but not less.  Without a spiritual awakening (Atma-Bodha as Shankaracharya puts it), there can be neither real intellectual development on the causal plane nor divine development on the supracausal plane.