2 Metaphysics and The Secret Mysteries: Mathematical Universe

Part 2: The Mathematical Universe Written and Narrated by Darryl Thomas Around the middle of the 6th century BCE, there arose an Orphic reformer from the Greek Island of Samos. He allegedly spent over 20 years in Egypt, Babylon and even India, perfecting his mystical knowledge. Pythagoras was considered an expert on soul's experience in the afterlife, and he held that the soul consisted of a unified, rational, immortal substance that was repeatedly incarnated into bodies. Pythagoras agreed with the Orphics that the soul was preexistent, but he said that the soul fell from the stars to the Earth into a body. He taught that humans could reach divinity if only they perfected and purified themselves by avoiding bodily passions, for the passions led to incarnations of lower life-forms, or worse, descending to Tartarus, the underworld where iniquitous souls suffered punishment. The Pythagoreans practiced rituals, asceticism, self-discipline, vegetarianism and believed that mediation on numbers would raise one's consciousness to divine realms. It was Pythagoras who invented the word, Cosmos; the rational, ordered universe. For Pythagoras, science and religion held little distinction. Plato also borrowed from Pythagoras that the universe was mathematical in nature While the Pythagoreans were concerned with the ethical issues about human behavior, the cult of Orpheus focused on the purification of the soul. Both cults were obsessed with getting the immortal soul to ascend back to ...