Gospel of Plato 1 · Fourth Witness: The Eternal Return, and the Ascent of the Bird
The sentences of this book are long, because what is told here cannot be exhausted in short ones.
1.1In the beginning was the Law.
1.2The Law is not outside all things; the Law is why all things are as they are.
1.3Before there was heaven and earth, there was its order; before there was light, there was that which light obeys.
1.4All that is came to be according to this Law; and of everything that has come to be, there is nothing that came to be otherwise.
1.5In the Law is reason, and this reason is the light of men.
1.6The light shines in the chaos, and the chaos cannot swallow it.
1.7In the beginning, nothing had taken form.
1.8Whatever is unexamined is neither being nor non-being; it is every possibility standing together at once, and not one of them true.
1.9Where the gaze of reason falls, the many roads become one, and only then is the real born.
1.10Therefore it is said: the unexamined life is a living death — for what is unexamined never happened at all.
1.11The whole is not piled up block upon block.
1.12Of the hardest stone beneath your foot, nine parts in ten and nine again are void.
1.13And the part that remains is not stone either.
1.14That which is called indivisible is not a very small pebble; it is a very small trembling.
1.15All things are notes upon a string. What you hear is stone; what is played is Law.
1.16The void is not emptiness.
1.17The stillest place is the most clamorous; in the midst of nothing at all, everything is ceaselessly born and destroyed.
1.18None can see how fast it goes, and none can deny that it is so.
1.19Therefore whoever says "I have nothing left" has not yet begun to count.
1.20There is a thing that travels as ripples travel, and arrives as flung sand arrives.
1.21Ask it whether it is ripple, and it is ripple; ask it whether it is sand, and it is sand.
1.22This is not its deceit. This is the honesty of the Law: how you ask is what you take.
1.23Therefore the wise are careful what they ask, for what is asked decides what is seen, and what is seen decides what is.
1.24Whoever asks where it stands shall lose where it goes.
1.25Whoever asks where it goes shall lose where it stands.
1.26The two cannot both be had. Not because men are foolish, but because heaven is so made.
1.27By this the humble are set free, and by this the arrogant go mad.
1.28The ladder of heaven has no slope. It has only steps.
1.29Whoever rises does not arrive by walking, but arrives by a leap.
1.30Between them there is no place to rest, and no body in transit.
1.31Therefore practice is not a little more each day, but sufficiency, and then the leap.
1.32Whoever waits in bitterness between the steps is waiting in a place that does not exist.
1.33Whatever once came out of one source is never truly parted.
1.34Divide it to the two ends of the star-sea: turn this end, and that end turns.
1.35No messenger runs between them, and no time passes.
1.36The world calls this longing. The prophets call it co-soaring.
1.37Whoever grasps this is a Co-Soarer.
1.38All things run, yet there is one speed that cannot be crossed.
1.39This is no limit of fast and slow; it is the fence of cause.
1.40What is inside the fence may be held to account. What is outside it is no concern of yours.
1.41Therefore the wise answer for what is inside the fence, and do not weep for what is outside it.
1.42All things may be reversed; only dispersal cannot.
1.43Time is not a river. Time is the direction of dispersal.
1.44You cannot go back to yesterday, for yesterday was tidier than today, and the Law does not permit tidiness to return of itself.
1.45Whoever would take a thing back is wrestling with the direction of the whole universe.
1.46Therefore do not take it back. Go forward, and disperse beautifully.
1.47Yet there is this: whoever can bring fire indoors may raise order again in one corner.
1.48But that order is not the old thing recovered; it is a new thing made. And for every measure of tidiness inside the house, there is more disorder outside it.
1.49Therefore the Order does not call this a miracle. It calls it the price.
1.50This Law has no form, no voice, and no favourite.
1.51Yet in that generation the Law took the shape of dust, put on a coarse cloak, and walked barefoot in the marketplace of Athens.
1.52It dwelt among us, and we saw its light.
1.53That light did not scorch men; it only let them see where they were standing.
1.54The world was made according to it, and the world did not know it.
1.55It came to its own city, and the city sentenced it to death.
1.56But to all who received it, it gave the power to be sovereign over their own lives:
1.57who were born not of blood, nor of lineage, nor of another man's permission, but of examination.