Return to the One (12 page)

Multiplicity and unity are not at war with each other. How could they be? Both are emanations from the One, branches from the same tree, waves from the same ocean.

All the tension, pain, suffering, and anxiety we feel comes from us, not the cosmos. There always is complete harmony in the whole of the universe, for it is unity. Any grating sense of wrongness we may have (“This shouldn’t be happening”) is, we can be sure, the result of an excessive partness that has set itself at odds with the greater order.

I love the image Plotinus gives us in the following quotation. Who hasn’t felt trampled by life? Maybe, he suggests, we need to learn how to dance along with the rest of the universe.

As if when a great company of dancers was moving in order a tortoise was caught in the middle of its advance and trampled because it was not able to get out of the way of the ordered movement of the dancers: yet if it had ranged itself with that movement, even it would have taken no harm from them.
[I I-
9
-7]

Whether man or woman, almost every person feels, consciously or unconsciously, that he or she should be the one doing the leading in the dance of life. We all expect that the people and things that surround us, the whole of which Plotinus speaks, will adjust to our needs, desires, and actions. The problem of course is that nearly everyone else feels the same way. And any couple that has taken dancing lessons knows what happens when both parties try to do the leading: chaos. Yet here we are with billions of human souls attempting the same impossible task.

When all are one, in truth there are no leaders and no followers. When we consciously live as parts of the whole we dance through life happily and gracefully, not caring who seems to be doing the leading and who the following at any particular moment. The universe is a unity. With the dawning of spiritual wisdom we realize that all are dancing to the same tune.

Section II

The One

A
ND
M
ANY
—

Soul’s Descent,

And Return

Spirit Is Substance

T
HE CORNERSTONE
of Plotinus’s spiritual philosophy is, not surprisingly, spirit. This makes complete sense. How can we aspire to spirituality, much less lay claim to actually being spiritual, if we don’t understand the nature of spirit? A prospective mountain climber should at least be able to recognize a mountain, even if he doesn’t yet know how to scale one.

Strangely, though, one rarely comes across explicit descriptions of spirit in religious literature or philosophical writings. We hear much talk of being filled with spirit or embraced by spirit but little mention of what this mysterious entity we are to be filled with or embraced by actually
is.
Plotinus, thankfully, gives us as good an understanding as will be found anywhere in Western mystic philosophy.

The One, we are told, is beyond being, beyond form, beyond knowledge, beyond time, beyond space, beyond everything we can possibly conceive. So we would not be far off the mark to call the One ineffable existence, the mystery of all mysteries. The first emanation of the One, spirit (intellect) is all being within existence. Spirit is the actual creator of the cosmos. The One creates the creator and endows its offspring with its own power.

For Intellect also has of itself a kind of intimate perception of its power, that it has power to produce substantial reality…. And because its substance is a kind of single part of what belongs to the One and comes from the One, it is strengthened by the One and made perfect in substantial existence by and from it.
[V-l-7]

According to Plotinus, there is little difference between the One and spirit, other than the fact that spirit is a one-many, containing the entire reality of the cosmos within itself. Spirit may be thought of as all-pervading intelligent energy with unlimited creative power.

Here again, as so often in the
Enneads,
we need to reverse our usual way of thinking. Most people consider spirit to be some sort of wispy, ethereal divinity that episodically makes its presence subtly known on this earthly plane. This is the sense in which spirits, angelic or otherwise, are viewed: occasional visitors from a higher dimension. Similarly, most religions hold that a small number (maybe only one) of humans have been privileged to be embraced by spirit.

Here too, spirit seems highly selective, warmly greeting a few and roundly ignoring everyone else.

By contrast, Plotinus teaches that other than the One, spirit is the most substantial of all substances, the most real of all realities, the most intelligent of all intelligences, the most lovable of all loves. What is wispy and ethereal is this world not the domain of spirit. Matter is a bit of fluff barely worth our consideration.

The true substance has stripped off these things
[matter and sense-perception]
and is a power standing on itself, no feeble shadowy thing but the most living and intelligent of all, than which nothing is livelier or more intelligent or more substantial.
[VI-6-8]

Spirit is so wonderful for a simple reason: in truth, there is nothing else in creation. All that is, is spirit. There is nothing material that is not also spiritual. So we need have no fear we will be leaving behind anything important as we return to the One. At first it may seem more is being lost than gained. Plotinus tells us to shun our senses, silence our emotions, and shut down our thinking. “What’s going to be left of me?” Well, what’s going to be left is reality minus materiality, creation without a covering.

Intellect and being are one and the same thing…. The knowledge of things without matter is its objects.
[V-4-2]

Spirit, as will be discussed more fully later, is true intelligence. Spirit, or intellect, possesses knowledge of all things because it is all things in much the same sense that I know what I am experiencing because my experience is me. The difference between us, of course, is that the content of my experience is personal and subjective, while the content of spirit’s experience is universal and objective.

The ancient Greeks asked the same question that modern scientists struggle to answer: Where does everything in the universe come from? I’m not speaking here of basic matter or energy, which can be thought of as the raw material of physical existence. This too is a mystery, since no one presently can say what energy is, just what it does. The greatest wonder, though, is that the universe began as a formless blob of energy (in the big bang, so physicists tell us) and has ended up so amazingly well-structured.

Galaxies, stars, planets, plants, animals, people—everything is put together so well. DNA, atoms, elements, electricity, gravity, language, music, culture—all that surrounds us and is us and has been created by us is so nicely formed. Not that all this is pleasant, wise, or beautiful. The value placed on creation is a different matter. The mystery I’m pointing toward is twofold: that anything exists at all, and, now existing, that it isn’t just a whirlpool of primal chaos.

Plotinus has an answer.

So Intellect, by giving something of itself to matter, made all things in unperturbed quietness; this something of itself is the rational formative principle flowing from Intellect.
[III-2-2]

It is this rational formative principle, or
logos,
that accounts for the structure of both the physical universe and the lower reaches of the spiritual universe, the domain of the Soul of the All.
Logos
is the source of all laws of nature, which generally can be framed in rational mathematical terms. But Plotinus warns against confusing the intelligence that flows from spirit with the limited human intellect. The rationality of
logos
and the Soul of the All isn’t thinking as we know it but an intuitive knowledge which translates directly into action.

Being and Intellect are therefore one nature…. And the thoughts of this kind are the form and shape of being and its active actuality. But they are thought of by us as one before the other because they are divided by our thinking.
[V-9-8]

Intelligence tends to be associated with complex activity, the dividing intellect Plotinus speaks of. If a movie wants to show an advanced scientist at work, it often depicts him or her filling a blackboard with row after row of indecipherable mathematical equations. Then, with a flourish, this scientist scribbles out the solution and proclaims something like, “So, the comet will hit earth in fifty-six days!”

Yet wouldn’t an undivided intellect be even more impressive? The scientist is asked the same difficult question and without any hesitation he or she responds: “fifty-six days.” Why do we consider that an answer arrived at with difficulty reflects greater intelligence than one produced with ease?

Nature, which has no apparent brain, clearly is much smarter than all the high-IQ scientists who are trying to figure out her mysteries.

Mathematician John Casti notes how the proteins that make up every living organism fold up into specific three-dimensional structures that determine their function in the organism. It takes merely a second or two for a protein with several thousand amino acids to fold into its final configuration.

Yet Casti says, “When we try to simulate this folding process on a computer, it has been estimated that it would take 10
¹²⁷
years
of supercomputer time to find the final folded form for even a very short protein consisting of just 100 amino acids.”
¹
He asks, “How does nature do it?” Plotinus’s answer likely would be: “Through the intuitive intelligence of spirit, which encompasses all knowledge of everything in creation.”

In spirit this knowledge isn’t divided, as scientific understanding is, into (1) a thing, and (2) what is known about that thing. Recall the earlier mention of the lively debate between Porphyry and Amelius over the question of whether the forms existed outside of spirit, or
nous.
Porphyry at first believed they did, which meant that spirit would create from a sort of blueprint separate from itself.

But this way of thinking leads to an infinite regress. Where does that blueprint or collection of forms come from? From another blueprint? The cosmos then becomes, in effect, an endless series of plans with no architect in sight. Porphyry became convinced of the wisdom of Plotinus’s teaching: that intellect possesses the forms much as we possess our knowledge of ourselves—intimately, immediately, intuitively.

Let it be granted then, that Intellect is the real beings, possessing them all not as if [they were in it] as in a place, but as possessing itself and being one with them.
[V-9-6]

Spirit, then, faces no obstacles as it creates the cosmos. For what is created is nothing other than itself. Even though our thoughts seem to be separate from ourselves (each of us says, “I think such-and-such”), we have no difficulty thinking those thoughts. The universe is spirit’s thought, brought into being with vastly more ease, just as fire naturally forms heat and a mirror naturally reflects light. What is below comes from above, flowing ceaselessly and effortlessly from the infinitely productive power of the One, or Good.

The life of Intellect, then, is all power, and the seeing which came from the Good is the power to become all things, and the Intellect which came to be is manifest as the very totality of things…. It is, then, thought; that is, all movement filling all substance.
[VI-7-17, VI-7-13]

Since we are part of the substance of the universe, spirit is active within us as well. All is ensouled, animate and inanimate alike, but Plotinus teaches that living beings have a special connection with spirit that non-living objects lack. Entities with individual souls such as plants, animals, and humans are directly linked to spirit in the same fashion as a ray of light is linked to the sun.

The souls are like rays, so that it
[spirit]
is set firm in itself but the soul-rays sent out come now to one living thing and now to another.
[VI-4-3]

The One produces spirit and spirit produces soul. This means that it is possible to return to spirit, and thence to the One, by retracing the path we took on our earthly descent. The soul turns away from material preoccupations and says, “Whatever I once was I will be again: pure spirit.” This, in fact, is the only way to truly be spiritual, or to know spirit. For spirit does not divide itself into parts; it is realized as a unity or not at all. We can possess half a loaf of bread or one-fourth of a gallon of milk but spirit always comes in whole portions.

Intellectual knowledge necessarily is fragmented. Little by little, bit by bit, fact by fact, reason attempts to fit together an understanding of reality. This is a noble but undeniably quixotic undertaking. For no matter how much is learned about the pieces that appear to comprise the totality of the cosmos, a primal enigma remains: Why does all this exist? The unfathomable mystery lying at the heart of a hundred billion galaxies is the same unfathomable mystery lying at the heart of a single atom: existence, plain and simple.

If we ever are to know the deepest mysteries of creation, it will not be by studying what has been created. Instead, Plotinus teaches, we should seek to know the creator, spirit, which as a one-many contains all the myriad forms of creation. Miraculously, when purified, our own souls are identical with the substance of the cosmos.

But how are we related to the Intellect? … We have it either as common to all or particular to ourselves, or both common and particular; common because it is without parts and one and everywhere the same, particular to ourselves because each has the whole of it in the primary part of his soul…. It is probable, then, that he who intends to know what Intellect really is must know soul, and the most divine part of soul
[I-1-8, V-3-9]

Here Plotinus indicates the central difference between spirit and soul. Spirit is not particularized. It is “without parts and one and everywhere the same.” In the
Enneads
there is no individuality associated with spirit, as there is with the Soul of the All, even though both are universal. Yet somehow it is possible for a particular soul to possess the whole of spirit in its primary part. This, then, is how it is possible to know spirit: through “the most divine part of soul.”

The grand Plotinian quest is to explore reality from the inside out, as it were. The mystic philosopher finds immense, world-shattering truth in a most unexpected place—the intimate confines of his or her innermost consciousness.

As strange as this may seem, it is no stranger than a central tenet of modern science: that billions upon billions of galaxies were once contained in an infinitesimal bit of seed-energy smaller than a subatomic particle. If physics tells us that a universe can exist in a grain of sand, with lots of room to spare, why should not the seemingly limited consciousness of an individual soul be similarly capable of possessing unlimited truth?

As for soul, the part of it directed to Intellect is, so to speak, within, and the part outside Intellect directed to the outside…. But we too are kings, when we are in accord with it; we can be in accord with it in two ways, either by having something like its writing written in us like laws, or by being as if filled with it and able to see it and be aware of it as present.
[V-3-7, V-3-4]