It is common to treat our self-consciousness as being synonymous with the soul-mind itself.
We know our bodies to be our own, but we do not have knowledge of our bodies in a way that differs from the way we know the bodies of other people. In both cases, our body and the bodies of others are known through ideas constituted of images derived from our experience of sense.
Generally, we feel our ego encapsulates the totality of who and what we are. The idea that we might extend beyond it feels unnatural to us because we define the ego by ‘that which is experiencing’, thus precluding identity with anything we do not have conscious experience of.
However, concerning the above graphic, the reality which escapes our casual, intuitive grasp is that the ego-consciousness we name and treat as “me” is only a part of our soul, that the “me” we live exists solely for the facilitation of our reversion back to our cause.
To reify this into an intuition, consider the biological life of your body. Within your body is a vast and unbelievably complex inner network of cells that, taken all together, operate rhythmically towards the health of the body.
Daily we take the sum of these activities for granted. Not once do we dedicate our consciousness towards monitoring the billions of activities our bodies are engaged in on a constant basis. Our complex management of this fractal biological machine is simply totally absent to us.
Why are we so oblivious and unconscious to our own body’s operations? Why are the only times we actually consciously engage in its management when the body seems to “communicate” to us its needs? It too uses our brain for its own activities, yet somehow we are ignorant to it?
Discordance between the conscious life and the bodily life isn’t due to a distinction in essence, but due to a distinction in activity. Participating of soul’s essential-act is a triad: each tripart performs a peculiar act, and by their union the soul’s own activity is complete.
Each tripart within the triad derives as its primary activity an equal portion from the soul’s unified essential-activity. As each tripart taken as particulars are of the same ontological level, differentiation mutually precludes them from participation in each other’s acts.
Consequently, why our consciousness is deprived from knowing the body’s activities is due to differentiation. Were we ignorant to their union in soul and knew only of body and consciousness, we’d find them incompatible. And so we see this recur in history with Mind-Body dualism.
But we know of their union, so Platonism has told us. Yet to truly know their union requires more than semantical knowledge of the soul. The reversive tripart which gives rise to our conscious life must itself discover it is not the total of soul, but a participant of its union.
Knowing that the reversive ego-generative experience is not synonymous with the true self is critical: this is the seminal “Know Thyself”, the proper commencement of identity’s overcoming difference and the beginning of the assimilatory ascent to apotheosis.
Irrespective to the breadth or depth of your own knowledge regarding Platonic philosophy, its spiritual value is greatly nulled if in the whole of your life in receipt of its wisdom you would fall short of your own self-knowing. Without it, you are bound to ignorance.
Apotheism 