Let’s Give Credit to Whom Credit is Due

Honoring ancient Greek philosophers and those who write about them for their contributions to modernity

Medium’s algorithm had locked this story by Tiffany about heaven and hell in my feed for days. I follow Tiffany because she describes herself as “a girl with an old soul and a lot to share,” and my soul experiencing this17,043rd life, this time cycling in the body of a white, male, Gen-Xer who just missed being a Boomer, is drawn to such chicks. I’ve also had a thing for girls with names like Tiffany. Plus in all seriousness and not with my tongue in her cheek, she writes about topics that interest me. As I said to a friend today:

she writes for a lot of different spiritual pubs and seems to have a theory on everything. She states certain concepts with too much listicality for my taste, like the nonsense about 12 universal laws that I think she posted in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself (which is my spiritual homegroup, and whose owner 𝘋𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘢 𝘊. is a spellbinding spiritual-healing-though-chakra-clearing-sorceress), as they all are restatements of various forms of the other “laws” and I know I responded with my 2 cents on many of them, but some of her pieces provide the opportunity for food for thought.

Indeed, the story I read this morning provided much food for thought and prompted me to both meaningfully engage within the piece on the topic of the interplay between free will and fate:

In my view, and as it has been explained to me by my Lord Rama and my Spirit Guides, the only hard-external boundary in everyone’s life cycle contract (I just coined that — it makes more sense to me than the term soul contract), is date of death (date, not how). People’s contracts have varying other hard facts predetermined, by our souls’ choosing with our gods’ signoff, designed to see how we exercise our free will to navigate the obstacle course and learn life lessons;

and write a story responding thereto, I am Told “Heaven” Has Levels, Including purgatory in the basement — some have to go all the way back down to Earth to find the hellish penance they deserve

Sidebar: I’ve read that the CFFDAlgo, fka curation-bot-from-hell, eschews “on-story links” as too self-promoting. This is my workaround now and it sometimes doubles as my feature image in a short form and displays quite nicely in the app compared to an imageless short form.

Back to my lead-up to the feature story: George Blue Kelly, who I thank for clearly drilling down into my back-linked stories on what my aforementioned Lord Rama and my traveling band of merry-mirth-missionaries, aka, Sgt. Gregorius’ Lonley Spirit-Guide Band have had to say on the subjects of souls and why we reincarnate again and again ad infinitum, meaningfully engaged with me thusly:

I think at the end of the road, the road where men seek knowledge, at the height of enlightenment, is this, as the words of Socrates revamped,

the only thing we seek knowledge for, is to finally understand that we know nothing.

To which I replied:

I wish those that have credited Tolstoy for this would correct their excellent and meaningful stories to credit Socrates. The Maverick Files’ story 5 Quotes By Leo Tolstoy to Hep Lead a More Content Life and Living Outside of All the Boxes by Katrina Bos are two stories in which I have recently noted this attribution and commented therein that Socrates is the first human recorded to have imparted this wisdom.

Giving Tolstoy benefit of the doubt that he did not read Plato and intentionally plagiarize Socrates (in Socrates’ time I understand that knowledge was transmitted orally and that we know of Socrates’ wisdom from Plato’s writings) and mistook his archetypal knowledge (see Rebecca Romanelli’s masterpiece on the topic) for his own original thought.

George thanked me, and while I didn’t think I deserved a compliment for simply giving credit where credit is due, I have learned from masters like my former psychologist and now trusted friend, Dr. Harris Stratyner, and my dear friend, Unicorn and sparring partner in the realms of ILLUMINATION’s editors’ Slack-channel, Holly Kellums, to accept compliments.

Thus, this feature story was born, as all I did was say what I have learned here on Medium, from reading great pieces like Jack Road’s story In With the Old: Timeless Quotes from Ancient Greece, which I had the synchronous pleasure of editing. Jack was a dream to work with — he gladly and with the humility of one who writes well yet yearns to be his best, went through several rounds of edits with me, because as good as the piece got, there was more that could make it better. Jack’s piece discusses, with in-depth analysis and application to today’s world, 3 Socrates quotes, 2 of Plato’s, 3 from Aristotle, and 1 from Plutarch. This 6-minute-story deserved many, many, many more than 15 views, ten 30-second reads, and one fan.

At least that one fan and only person to meaningfully engage with the story was The Great Greek Goddess of Poetry and Ancient Wisdom, Anthi Psomiadou, who said of Jack’s piece:

Philosophy has a practical usage and encloses many solutions/answers to/about every-day-life matters, though most of the people think it’s just some theoretical talking.

This piece was very moving to me, not only because you’re referring to my ancestors, but also because I see many of these things giving me practical solutions every day.

Please read Jack’s story and thus give him the credit due him for the hard work he put into it.

In Rama I create,

Marcus

While searching back through Illuminations logs to find Jack’s story, I came upon these other good reads: