Herakleitos

Herakleitos lived circa 545BC to 485BC - exactly at the time Greek civilisation began to rise towards its Golden Age. But Herakleitos was not a great statesman or soldier or sculptor; he looked at the world without wanting to change it or bring it under his control or make beautiful stone images of it. He simply wanted to understand it. So he thought about it: how things come to be and how things pass away...and he saw that nothing is really separate at all - all matter, everywhere, simply changes form, in an endless cycle of transformation. What we experience as individual forms are but fleeting interlocking brush strokes in a picture too big for our normal human vision to grasp. Herakleitos, though, did grasp this mystic vision of unity. And he intuitively understood that every brush stroke in the picture can only occur if there is an underlying unseen pattern. This pattern he called the Logos. Observing that human problems and failures are caused by living separately, and thus out of harmony with Logos to the attention of all. The methods he chose were the methods anyone might resort to when describing something previously unknown: similes, riddles, metaphors, aphorisms, allegories and...when those failed, browbeating and exasperated criticism! This book tried again. Herakleitos' own words are the starting place as the reader is taken on a voyage of discovery through philosophy and physics, through time and space, through human behaviour and consciousness - to arrive at a new vision of the nature of reality.