Plato said your soul comes from a star, and returns to it when you die. 🌟
This idea runs through almost 2,000 years of philosophy, and it keeps coming back to the same shape: the sphere.
Before Plato, Parmenides described ultimate reality as a perfect sphere, balanced equally from the center in every direction. Empedocles believed that when the universe is fully united by Love, it becomes one single sphere. He called it the Sphairos.
Then came Plato. In the Timaeus, the creator makes the universe a sphere, the most perfect of all shapes. It has no eyes, no ears, no hands, because nothing exists outside it to see or touch. It is a living being, complete in itself.
The stars are made mostly of fire, round like the universe itself. Plato calls them visible gods. And here's the part almost nobody talks about: the creator assigns every soul to its own star. Live well, and after death your soul returns home to it. ✨
Even your head, Plato says, is round because it copies the shape of the cosmos. The part of you that holds the divine is shaped like an orb.
In the Symposium, he tells another story. The first humans were round, with four arms, four legs and two faces. Why round? Because they came from the sun, the earth and the moon. Zeus split them in two, and we've been searching for our other half ever since.
Cicero picked up the thread. In the Dream of Scipio, human souls come from the eternal fires we call stars, which are round, spherical and animated by divine minds. The virtuous, he wrote, return to the Milky Way.
The later Platonists went even further. They taught that the soul travels inside a luminous vehicle, the augoeides, meaning "radiant" or "star-like." Iamblichus said this vehicle is spherical. Proclus said the soul descends in a perfectly spherical body of light, picking up layers of the four elements on its way down.
Your physical body is just a coat worn over an orb of light.
Over the centuries, this body of light picked up other names: the body of glory, the celestial body. If you read my last post about the glorified body, that should sound familiar. 👀
The idea never died. Around 1320, Dante writes the Paradiso. In the heaven of Saturn, he sees "a hundred little spheres." They were souls. 🌕
In 553 AD, the Church officially condemned a teaching: that after the resurrection, our bodies would become spheres. 🤯
Paul wrote about "celestial bodies" and compared the resurrected body to the glory of the sun, moon and stars. Daniel said the wise will shine like the stars forever. Jesus said the righteous will shine like the sun.
Some early Christians took this literally. The glorified body isn't flesh. It's light. A radiant orb, like the stars themselves.
The idea was banned in 543. Then banned again in 553.
Fast forward 1,500 years. The Pentagon's UAP office reveals the most commonly reported shape among unidentified phenomena is... a sphere. White, silver, translucent orbs, seen all over the world.
In my opinion, the monks who were silenced weren't describing a heresy. They were describing what we become.
What are the orbs 👇