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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: be an idea?
From that, again, there is no escape.
Then, said Parmenides, if you say that everything else participates in the
ideas, must you not say either that everything is made up of thoughts, and
that all things think; or that they are thoughts but have no thought?
The latter view, Parmenides, is no more rational than the previous one. In
my opinion, the ideas are, as it were, patterns fixed in nature, and other
things are like them, and resemblances of them--what is meant by the
participation of other things in the ideas, is really assimilation to them.
But if, said he, the individual is like the idea, must not the idea also be
like the individual, in so far as the individual is a resemblance of the
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