Daring to Listen to Your Inner Guidance
Socrates
from a garden in Komeriz, Czech Republic
When I was in college, I took three semesters of courses about Plato and his guru, Socrates. It didn’t matter if we were reading Plato in Greek or English, I couldn’t get into it.
I tried hard to care about philosophical dialogue, about the importance of Socrates, about ancient Athenian political life, and most importantly, about Greek grammar, but it never seemed to stick.
After analyzing one of Socrates’ dialogues, I would end up like his interlocutors, having reasoned my way into a confused, dead end for the sake of pleasing my professors and proving that I was “wise” (sophos, in Greek).
Reading Socrates in Greek made me conscious of the confusion in my own mind. A confusion caused by the ideas I had inherited from my culture, my judgments about the world, and how I wanted to appear to be an intellectually brilliant 20-year-old, but in truth knew I wasn’t yet “wise.”
I never understood fully the importance of Socrates until I read The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours by Gregory Nagy. In the last 2 parts of this monumental book about Greek literature, Socrates is presented under the rubric of the idealized ancient hero.
In the ancient Greek worldview, the hero is a man (yes, only a man) whose life is guided and designed by his connection to the Gods. This connection gives him everlasting glory (kleos, in Greek) and also assures that the Gods have everlasting glory as well as influence in the life of men.
Nagy compares Socrates to ancient Greek heroes such as Odysseus and Achilles, demonstrating that Socrates fits the pattern of a hero whose purpose is to provide everlasting glory to the Gods through the stories of his life and the power of his words.
The Daimonion Semeion: The Superhuman Signal, or Divine Sign
In Nagy’s translation, Socrates calls his inner connection to the Divine Source both a voice (phone) and a superhuman signal (daimonion semeion). (Most other scholars would translate daimonion semeion as the “divine sign.”)
In Plato’s Apology— a recounting of Socrates’ speech before the citizens of Athens who are deciding whether to carry out a death sentence against him— Socrates reasons that he is ready to accept a death sentence because his inner voice does not oppose the idea of his death. Therefore, he knows that it is just, or the right thing to do, to die at the hands of his fellow citizens.
It has taken me many years to reconcile my academic experiences reading Socrates’ dialogues in the works of Plato with Nagy’s argument that Socrates represents a divine hero like Hercules or Achilles.
In my experience, Socrates is the culture hero for academic philosophy in the Twentieth Century, a discipline that questions everything, especially the existence of God. It is, by nature, separate from God, because in practice, academic philosophy posits that God as a reality can be known through theoretical speculation rather than direct experience.
Most scholars agree that the Apology demonstrates that Socrates was truly motivated by an inner experience of truth, mediated by a divine voice. But there is some disagreement about whether Socrates’ “superhuman signal” contravenes his trademark rationalism, or is outside of rational thought. (For a summary of scholarship on this issue, see this book review.)
What Nagy shows is that Socrates’ reasoning and rationale for his life is consistent with the raison d’etre of the ancient Greek hero, to be immortalized in sacred language.
Listening to the Inner Voice
In our Western culture, we idealize Socrates as the ultimate hero of speaking truth to power, freedom, and wisdom and certainly the text of Plato’s Apology is an inspiring treatise.
But what if a friend of yours was facing a death sentence and told you that he was going to argue before the court that death was nothing to fear, that his jurors could and should sentence him to death, and that he was confident in his inner wisdom because of a superhuman voice that has guided him his whole life?
You might call that person crazy and probably try to talk him out of doing what his inner voice said.
I have returned to Nagy’s argument about Socrates often because I have been trying to solve my own confusion about the inner voice that has guided me my whole life.
I too, have my own daimonion semeion, which can appear as a voice, a physical sensation, or knowledge.
There are years when it has been quite loud and years when I have ignored it as much as possible. It is easiest to hear and to interact with in meditation or when I am quiet and mindful of my thoughts.
I do not remember a time when my consciousness was exclusively “mine.”
In Stan Grof’s “cartography of the psyche,” our psyche contains multiple levels of experience: the biological, biographical, and the transpersonal. Grof’s definition of the transpersonal realm of our psyche is that it contains “non-ordinary states of consciousness.”
I seem to have a facility for activating the transpersonal area of my psyche quite easily, without the aid of psychedelics, fasting, or intensive practice of mystical spiritual techniques (though I do self-identify as a yogi and mystic).
This ability wasn’t ever explained to me, made safe, or normalized by my parents or the culture I was raised in.
I am quite lucky that my defense mechanisms— to be quiet, hyper-rational, and hyper-functional— kept me from being labeled with a diagnosis of mental illness or prescribed anti-psychotic drugs.
It is only after many years of psychotherapy, physical healing, and participation in a number of spiritual groups that I have been able to acknowledge my inner divine voice. And truly, only after doing my own work using the Compassionate Inquiry approach can I be somewhat open about my inner experience of guidance and truth.
Allowing the Inner Voice to Speak
If our culture doesn’t understand or create space for an inner dialogue and our connection to something greater than ourselves, how can we learn to do this?
In my previous blog post, I wrote about becoming your own spiritual authority and the centaur asteroid Pholus.
Becoming your own spiritual authority is a process— one that involves many years of inward-directed listening to the subtle ways your self reacts to stimuli from the outside world.
It is a process of discernment in body, mind, heart, and spirit.
What I mean by becoming your own spiritual authority is returning a sense of awareness and agency to your authentic self. As you reveal who your authentic self is and what she feels, you may also discover your own daimonion semeion.
We need external structures such as relationships with others, jobs, and spiritual practices (whether you call that a religion or a set of rituals or a set of precepts and beliefs) to be in dialogue with in order to develop both our public and private selves.
But, too often, we give up all authority to those outside of us to determine what is happening inside of us.
I now understand that Socrates is a model, not of skeptical individualism, but of allowing and trusting the inner voice to be the ultimate spiritual authority over our lives.
This is very important to me not just for the health of my psyche, but so that I can trust myself to support my clients in developing their own authentic selves and agency.
In upcoming blog posts, I’ll write more about the subject of thoughts and the Divine, as well as continuing to discern where your own thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are coming from.
Meanwhile, this blog post discusses what our intuition actually is and how to balance reason and feeling.
And I have two guided meditations on this subject: nurture your body and awaken your intuition.
How are you nurturing your own inner dialogue?
What does your inner voice tell you, whether you feel that you have your own “superhuman signal” or not?
What do you need to do now to trust yourself to be the authority over your own life and your connection to the Divine?
References
Grof, Stan. A Brief History of Transpersonal Psychology.
Nagy, Gregory. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. 2013.
Partridge, John. Review of Socrates’ Divine Sign: Religion, Practice, and Value in Socratic Philosophy. in BMCR 2006.7.57.
Note: Gregory Nagy was an external examiner of my dissertation and my supervisor for a decade when I worked at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies. To say that I am influenced by his scholarship and life’s work is an understatement. The world of Classical scholarship contains many differing viewpoints on the matters of Socrates, his works, and his tenets; here I present only one viewpoint that has been thought-provoking for me in light of my personal experiences.
