The Warrior :
Time Lords of Gallifrey,
Daleks of Skaro,
I serve notice on you all.
Too long I have stayed my hand.
No More.
"I was reading about Socrates today, and I was reading about Socrates’ trial.
He was tried by the Athenians for failing to worship the correct Gods, and [ like Ozzy Osbourne ] for corrupting The Youth of Athens by teaching them stuff and asking them questions -
Which is a great way to corrupt people.
So he knew The Trial was coming, and Athens wasn’t a very big place.
It only had about 25,000 people.
Everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew who the powerful guys were.
Everybody, including Socrates, knew that the trial was a warning to get out of town.
‘We’re going to put you on trial in six months,
and the potential penalty is death.
Got that?’
So Socrates had a chat with his compatriots.
They were contemplating Fair means and Foul to set up a defense for him, or to leave, so that he could not be Tried and put to death.
He decided that he wasn’t going to do that.
He also decided that he wasn’t going to even think about his defense.
He said why, and this is quite an interesting thing.
He told one of his friends that he had this voice in his head
—a daemon, a spirit, or something like that—
that he always listened to, and that it was one of the reasons that he was different from other people.
He always listened to this thing.
It didn’t tell him what to do, but it told him what not to do.
It always told him what not to do.
And if it told him not to do something, then he didn’t do it.
If he was speaking and the little voice came up and said, ‘no,’
then he shut up and tried to say something else.
He was very emphatic about this.
He said that, when he tried to plan to evade the trial
—or even to mount his own defense—
the voice came up and said,
‘No, don’t bother with it.’
He thought,
‘What the hell do you mean by that?
There’s a trial coming, and I’m going to be put to death.’
Well, he eventually concluded that he was an old guy.
He was in his 70s, perhaps, and the next 10 years weren’t going to be that great for him.
Maybe The Gods were giving him a chance to bow out, to put his affairs in order, to say goodbye to everyone, to avoid that last descent into catastrophe, which might have been particularly painful for a philosopher, and to walk off the world on his own terms.
Something like that.
The point I’m making with that is that Socrates attended to this internal voice, that at least told him
what not to do,
and then
he didn’t do it.
Of course, Socrates was a very remarkable man, and we still hear about him today.
We know that he existed, and all of those things.
Back to the Walking with God idea.
You create a Judge at the same time as you elevate your aim.
The new ideal
—which is an ideal you, even if it’s just an ideal position that you might occupy, even if it’s still conceptualized in that concrete way—
becomes a judge, because it’s above you. You’re terrified of it, maybe.
That’s why you might be afraid when you go start a new job, right?
This thing is above you, and you’re terrified of it, and it judges you.
That’s useful because The Judge that you’re creating by formulating the ideal tells you what’s useless about yourself,
and then you can dispense with it.
You want to keep doing that, and then every time you make a Judge that’s more elevated, then
There’s more useless you that has to be dispensed with.
And then, if you create an Ultimate Judge, which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done, say, with
The Figure of Christ
—because if Christ is nothing else, he is at least the archetypal Perfect Man, and therefore The Judge—
You have a Judge that says,
‘Get rid of everything about yourself that isn’t perfect.’
Of course, that’s also what God tells Abraham.
He says to Be Perfect—
to pick an ideal that’s high enough.
You can do this.
The thing that’s interesting about this, I think, is that you can do it more or less on your own terms.
You have to have some collaboration from other people, but you don’t have to pick an external idea.
You can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of idea for you: you can say,
‘Ok, well, if things could be set up for me the way I need them to be, and if I could be who I needed to be, what would that look like?’
You can figure that out for yourself, and then, instantly, you have a Judge.
I also think that’s part of the reason that people don’t do it.
Why don’t people look up and move ahead?
The Answer is, well, you start formulating an ideal, and you formulate a Judge.
It’s pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal.
That’s what happens to Cain versus Abel, for example.
Then it’s really easy to destroy the ideal instead of trying to pursue it, because then you get rid of The Judge.
But it’s way better to lower the damn Judge if it’s too much.
If your current ambition is crushing you, then maybe you’re playing the tyrant to yourself, and you should tap down the conditions—
Not get rid of them, by any stretch of imagination, but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp.
You don’t have to leap from point one to point 50 in one leap, right?
You can do it incrementally.
I really like this idea.
I think it’s a profound idea—
That the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also a phoenix-like process.
You’re shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you’re valuing.
And then I would say, the idea, here, is that as you do that, you shape yourself evermore precisely into something that can withstand the Tragedy of Life,
and that can act as a beacon to The World.
That’s the right way of thinking about it—maybe first to your friends, and then to your family.
It’s a hell of a fine ambition, and there’s no reason that it can’t happen.
Every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis, and people that you admire, right?
You could think of all those people that you admire as partial incarnations of the archetypal messiah.
That’s Exactly Right.
The more that manifests itself in any given person, then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations.
We don’t know the limit to that, but people can be unbelievably good for things.
It’s really something to behold.
So that’s what God tells Abraham. "
The Warrior :
Time Lords of Gallifrey,
Daleks of Skaro,
I serve notice on you all.
Too long I have stayed my hand. No more.
Today you leave me no choice.
Today, this war will end.
No More. No More.
Perfect-10 :
What we do today is not out of fear or hatred.
It is done because there is no other way.
The Chin:
And it is done in the name of the many live we are failing to save.
(He looks at Clara, who shakes her head.)
The Chin :
What? What is it? What?
Clara Oswald,
"I'm His Carer." - Cares About All Those Things He is Unable to Fully and Completely Care About, in Order to Be a Doctor :
Nothing.
The Chin:
No, it's something. Tell me.
Clara Oswald,
"I'm His Carer." - Cares About All Those Things He is Unable to Fully and Completely Care About, in Order to Be a Doctor :
You told me you wiped out your own people.
I just — I never pictured you doing it, that's all.
