Teaching-1

As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is nonsense—although there is something in Plato’s Meno and Phaedrus that makes us want to believe that we are the person we identify with, having passed through the river Lethe to come back to life.