Socrates And The Creative Thinking | Eckhart Tolle

There was a man that many of you have heard of. Some of you read some of the teachings. Socrates, he lived 2,000, roughly 2005, 2,400 years ago in Greece. He never wrote anything. His disciples later wrote down what they remembered, and his main disciple was Plato. And Plato then wrote the Socratic dialogues. We don't know, of course, whether what Plato wrote was exactly what Socrates taught. In a way, what Plato wrote. In Plato's writing, Socrates is a literary character. So the characteristic of Platonic dialogues is that Socrates asks questions. His people who come to him for teaching, he doesn't seem to immediately have the answer. He asks questions and then the person answers, and he gradually leads the person to the answer. Now, in the dialogues, which some of you may have read, some of them not, perhaps many people these days read Plato. In the dialogues, the impression is given that Socrates kind of manipulates a little bit the people who come to him. Then the impression is given that he already knows the answer. He just pretends not to know the answer. That's what comes across in the dialogues. And I think that is the character that Plato created. But I believe, and I have evidence for this belief that that's not actually what happened. I believe, and I'll tell you in a minute why, that Plato actually started every teaching session from a place of not knowing the answer. And so unlike the impression we get, if you read, if you read the Platonic dialogues, he already knows. He's just pretending not to know. No, how do I know this? Plato said, sorry. Socrates said, they call me the wisest of all men. And the reason why they call me the wisest of all men is that I'm the only one who knows that he knows, knows nothing. And again, when we read it retrospectively after having read the Platonic dialogues, we think, oh, he's just, again, some kind of affectation. He's saying, I know nothing. No, I believe that his genuine starting point was the ability to go into that state of not knowing, rather than coming from already having accumulated knowledge just waiting to come out of his head. And this is why he was able to think creatively. He actually taught, one could say almost he taught humanity how to think for the first time, to think rationally. But his thinking is creative. It's fresh and new. And it was a process between him and the people who came to him. There was an energy field that arose, and out of this energy field the answers came. Sometimes they came through him, sometimes they came through the people who came to him. Another interesting thing, he said, that's not reported in Plato, but written by another disciple of his called Xenophon. And he said that Socrates frequently pointed out that he received counsel from a divine voice. And again, that's something that the Western rationalists try to ignore. They, to them, Plato is the absolutely clear, rational, analytical, conceptual thinker. And they don't see, because they don't know that dimension within themselves. They don't see the depth out of which his thinking actually came. So he said frequently, as reported by Xenophon, that he received guidance from a divine voice. Socrates not in the sense one doesn't get, the sense that some entity spoke through him, but obviously he was referring to inspiration from a dimension within him that was beyond thinking, beyond conceptualization, beyond the rational thought. So what we, the impression we get of Socrates is really we see half the story. We see only the upper half of the iceberg. Well, the iceberg actually you see far less than half of it. You, you see only a tiny fraction of it. And that was when these things are taught at universities and so on. The more important dimension is actually completely missed. They only look at the upper. What's he saying? But where did all that come from? What was the state of consciousness out of which such a creative teaching, such creative thinking could arise? And so it is that most these dimensions, the dimension of conceptualization, of thinking is in everyone, but the dimension of non conceptual intelligence is also in everyone. This mind made sense of self is also much more focused on the negative than the positive. To be free, you awaken to who you are beyond your history and your life situation. Sa.