Get rid of Plato - and the four corners of the world

Dear Parviz

This is precisely what I have always sad too.
Which also means that Truth was not invented or revealed in and through modernity but rather that Truth as the guiding principleof existence is a 3,700-year-old Central Asian concept in the sense that "nothing is new under the sun". Even our "holy book" is subordinated to the truth requirement.
What the early Zoroastrians understood - and nobidy else seem to have understood - is that collective wisdom is always superior to individual wisdom. And how do you reach collective wisdom if not by protecting plurality and diversity as guiding principles as if your life depended on it?
That is Mazdayasna for you. The four conerns of the world indeed.

Ushta
Alexander

2009/8/18 Parviz Varjavand



Friends,

It is amazing that sometimes in history, the dots do get connected and truth does come out. I and anybody I call my friends like to be about connecting those dots rather than making coffee shop cute conversations about Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is the only pro civilization and pro clear thinking religion you have on the planet. While the Assyrians and the Babylonians ruled by building fortifications and ruling by terror, when Cyrus the Persian conquerors their empire, he establishes the code of human rights, he builds roads, banking and postal service trace their roots to the Persians. All this, I think because the Mazdayasa or Philosophia mind set of the Persians was pro-civilization and decent relationship of the good people of the four corners of the earth.

Still in our sedre-pooshi or initiation ceremony, we do not say that we join a selected fold by becoming Zoroastrians. We say (Boy and Girl, mind you!), "May we be united with the good men and women of the four corners of the earth". By the way, this idea that the earth has four corners is the origin of the sign of cross being sacred. The Mithraists took it to Europe and the Christians stole it. The equal distanced cross of the Mithraists means that may the blessings of this act or this ritual be spread to the four corners of the earth. The Christian cross is an instrument of torture and a very appropriate one too for their way of thinking. Pass it on ;-)

Mehr Afzoon,
Parviz Varjavand

--- On Tue, 8/18/09, Alexander Bard wrote:


From: Alexander Bard
Subject: [Ushta] Getting rid of Plato (to think like Zarathushtra)
To: Ushta@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009, 12:46 AM



Correct!
"Ethics" is a heavy book but Parviz will be able to handle it. It's an amazing challange.
Parviz is absolutely correct:; It was Gilles Deleuze who pointed out that Spinoza and Nietzsche are brethren (even though Nietzsche who lived in the 19th century also said so about Spinoza who lived in the 17th century) and the most important anti-Platonists. Nietzsche also knew they were both making philosophy in relation to Zarathushtra and Zarathustra's questions (The Gathas arrived in Germany in the 1860s and Nietzsche was a professor of PHILOLOGY originally and not philosophy, so he was a language expert and knew the Avesta well!).
We have just tied this thread together, the Mazdayasna history starts with Zarathushtra and his contemporaries in Central Asia and its "modern western equivalent" takes shape in philosophers such as Spinoza and Nietzsche and their 20th century megaphones Deleuze and Richard Rorty. And we still have "Platonists" with their dualist idea that the ideal world is superior to the physically existing world to fight against. That is what Mazdayasna is all about.
Ushta
Alexander