In case you wondered …

… Why Socrates believed that sexual desire is the first step towards enlightenment - Philosophy and Life.

The higher mysteries require another step-change. The difficulty with that was identified by Ficino, the Renaissance philosopher who brought Plato back into the west. The lower mysteries, of children and parents and city and land, are powerfully fecund because they are attached to "propagating one's own perfection," he noted - the best thing in us. There's nothing wrong with that. But the philosopher who wants to continue on love's path must now be prepared to loosen those ties. It's a shift of perceptive from the human to include the divine, not to leave this world behind, but rather to become a lover of the transcendent that rests in it, Blake's "heaven in a wild flower" and "eternity in an hour".