the prophet Jeremiah (Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel) was a contemporary of Heraclitus, as were Lao Tse, Zoroaster, and the Buddha. all of them participated in bringing about what's been called a Great Leap of Being, of which we need another.

lately i’ve been reading Heraclitus through Richard Geldard. to my joy, what the back cover of his book (Remembering Heraclitus) promised turned out to be true; through Geldard, i have advanced my appreciation and understanding of Heraclitus as “one of the principle sources of Western mystical thinking.”

here are some of Heraclitus’ fragments:

3. Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.

13. To God all things are beautiful, good, and just, but human beings have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.

15. Nature prefers to hide.

16. They do not apprehend how being in conflict it [the Logos] still agrees with itself; there is an opposing coherence, as in the tensions of the bow and the lyre.

39. You would not find out the limits of the soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a Logos does it have.

53. I searched my nature.

And a thought from Geldard, inspired by his study of Heraclitus: Consciousness is not a part of us (generated, for example, by the brain); we are part of consciousness (the Greater Consciousness, the Logos). Just as any given radio can transform the flux and flow of all-pervasive electromagnetic waves into something locally coherent (a particular song, at a particular volume, in whatever room the radio resides), our central nervous systems are that which transforms Consciousness into little-c consciousness, our consciousness – a local coherence, or resolution, of peculiar being.