Reincarnation

These are evil souls. They are compelled to wander around such places in payment of the penalty of their former evil way of life.

They have a persistent craving for the corporeal. They continue to wander until their craving imprisons them finally in another body.

They find their prisons in the same natures which they have had in their former lives.

Men who have followed after gluttony, and wantonness, and drunkenness would pass into asses and animals of that sort.

Those who have chosen injustice, tyranny, and violence, will pass into wolves or hawks and kites.

Some are happier than others.

The happiest both in themselves and in their reincarnation are those who have practised the civil and social virtues called temperance and justice. These are acquired by habit and attention without philosophy and mind.

They are the happiest because they will reincarnate into some gentle and social kind which is like their own. This is just as bees, wasps, or ants reincarnate as men or men as bees, wasps, or ants.

A person who has not studied philosophy and who is not entirely pure at the time of his death is not allowed to enter the company of the Gods.

This is why, Simmias and Cebes, the true devotees of philosophy:

• abstain from all fleshly lusts
• hold out against them and refuse to give themselves up to them

The lovers of money and the world fear poverty or the ruin of their families. The lovers of power and honour dread the dishonour or disgrace of evil deeds.

But those who care about their own souls do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body. They say farewell to all this.

They will not walk in the ways of the blind. When philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they should not resist her influence. They will turn and follow her.

The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body.

Until philosophy received the soul, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and through herself.

The soul was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance. Lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity.

This was her original state.

The lovers of knowledge know how terrible the confinement of philosophy was. This confinement she herself caused.

They gently comforted her and sought to release her. They pointed out that the senses are full of deception.

They persuade her:

• to retire from them and abstain from all but the necessary use of them
• to be gathered up and collected into herself
• to trust in herself and her own pure apprehension of pure existence
• to mistrust whatever comes to her through other channels and is subject to variation

The true philosopher’s soul thinks that the soul should not resist this deliverance.

The soul should abstain from pleasures, desires, pains and fears, as far as she can.

She should reflect that when a man has great joys or sorrows or fears or desires, he suffers from them, not merely the sort of evil which might be anticipated—as for example, the loss of his health or property which he has sacrificed to his lusts—but an evil greater far, which is the greatest and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks.

The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense, every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then plainest and truest= but this is not so, they are really the things of sight.

This is the state in which the soul is most enthralled by the body.

Each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul to the body, until the soul becomes like the body, and believes that the true is that which the body affirms to be true.

From agreeing with the body and having the same delights, the soul is obliged to have the same habits and haunts. The soul is not likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below.

The soul is always infected by the body. And so she sinks into another body and there germinates and grows. The soul gets no part in the communion of the divine and pure and simple.

This, Cebes, is why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave.

The soul of a philosopher will reason in quite another way.

The philosopher will not ask philosophy to release the soul in order to reincarnate. This is because it would do a work only to be undone again, weaving instead of unweaving her Penelope’s web.

The philosopher’s soul will calm passion, follow reason, and dwell in the contemplation of the soul. It will behold the true and divine and thence derive nourishment.

Thus the soul seeks to live while it lives.

After death, it hopes to:

• go to its own kindred and to that which is like it
• be freed from human ills

Simmias and Cebes, never fear that a soul which thus has been nurtured will be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing at the time of death.