Return to the One (13 page)

Since spirit is a one-many, unlimited multiplicity enfolded within simple unity, Plotinus implies that we can know it in two ways: as one, or many. It seems to come down to a matter of emptiness. So long as we remain filled with our illusory ego-selves, absorbed in what we mistakenly consider ourselves to be, spirit can only “write its laws” in us on whatever blank pages of
psyche
exist. In this way we become more spiritual, but not spirit itself.

But if a person’s soul is, as it were, a blank slate then spirit fills him completely. Spirit is present immediately and intuitively. He becomes aware that spirit is the substance of his life, just as spirit is the substance of the universe. Instead of knowing the laws of the cosmos, he comes to know the lawgiver.

Above Is Astonishment

W
HAT A WONDER
! What a surprise!

What we think is most real, this physical world, actually possesses precious little substance. We’ve got things completely backward. So it isn’t surprising that when reality is realized as it is, not as how it is believed to be, there is going to be some wide-eyed astonishment, and not a little hilarity.

What a relief! What a joke!

What we are so terribly, horribly, sincerely concerned about isn’t worth a single tear. “Oh my difficult life. Oh the wretched state of the world. Oh the sad suffering so many have to endure.” For Plotinus, both delight and despair flow from ignorance of spiritual truth. Underneath the ugly thin crust of ephemeral matter flows a never-ending clear stream of being, real life. We smile and sob at shadows dancing on the cave wall, while the sun shines brightly just beyond our awareness.

What joy to have a vision of boundless life without any material covering.

For here below most of our attention is directed to lifeless things, and when it is directed to living beings what is lifeless in them stands in the way, and the life within them is mixed. But there all are living beings, living as wholes and pure.
[VI-6-18]

Earthly life, for Plotinus, is akin to a masquerade where the guests dress and act in a fashion that limits their natural beauty and wisdom, sort of an Ugly Idiot’s Ball. In the dressing room of materiality, crude coverings—a physical body and brain—are placed over the soul’s naked glory and intelligence. If we could see what lies beneath the costume each of us has put on, we would realize that inert coverings come and go while the living substance of soul and spirit abides unchanged.

But what does this vision consist of? Take away what is lifeless (matter) and what would remain to make us “laugh at the lower nature for its pretension to substantiality” ? [VI-6-18] Could Plotinus be speaking of pure thought here? If so, what substance is there to thinking?

There are no easy answers to these questions. Plotinus’s experience is his own. If we want to know what he has realized we must realize it for ourselves. Still, Plotinus is quite explicit about what spiritual reality is like. There in the spiritual world, as here on earth, one sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches. Forms impress themselves upon matter both here and there: divided forms upon lifeless material matter here, unified forms upon living spiritual matter there.

And if form comes to matter, the composite being will be a body; so that there will be body in the intelligible world too.
[II-4-2]

So what is perceived in the spiritual realms is not ethereal thoughts, but substantial things. Our physical sense organs mirror the soul’s immaterial organs of perception. What is sensed here is mirror images of what is sensed there. The spiritual world, though, is the original, and this physical universe is the copy. Thus it isn’t surprising that the
Enneads
describe earthly sights as akin to an out-of-focus snapshot of Niagara Falls: somewhat like the real thing, but without the original’s clarity, depth, or grandeur.

How, then, is there a power of sense-perception in the better soul? It would be a power of perceiving the sense-objects there, and would correspond to the sense-objects there.
[VI-7-6]

It is fair to say, then, that what surrounds us at this very moment is indeed heaven on earth. The reason we don’t presently feel embraced by divinity is that much necessarily gets lost in the translation from the immaterial realm of spirit to the physical world of matter. Missing in the earthly copy is the unity that seamlessly connects all spiritual beings and forms, and the undiluted creative power of spirit.

Most of us have the feeling that life truly would be wonderful if we just could get rid of all those nasty “buts.” “Our garden is really doing well this year
but
we’ve been having a problem with moles.” “Johnny is getting good grades
but
his teacher says that he needs to develop better social skills.” “I like my new job
but
it takes me twice as long to get to work as before.” And so on, and so on.

The spiritual world, we’re told, basically is this world without the buts. It is all the good stuff without any of the bad, a fine place to return to and enjoy on our way back home to the One.

And nothing there wears out or wearies…. Life holds no weariness for anyone when it is pure: and how should that which leads the best life grow weary?
[V-8-4]

Many people believe that spirituality and sensuality are contraries. You must choose one or the other; you can’t have both. Desires aroused by the senses, they say glue us to materiality. Our eyes attach us to beautiful sights, our ears to sweet sounds, our mouth to pleasant tastes, our nostrils to fragrant smells, our skin to enjoyable touches. Knowing only bodily delights, not surprisingly our souls are reluctant to let loose of certain physical pleasure for the promise of spiritual bliss.

Plotinus, in large part, agrees with this way of thinking. But as we have noted before, his stern admonition, “Leave this world behind,” must be coupled with his equally adamant assurance, “And gain a better one.” Plotinus’s form of asceticism is more akin to a sensual savings plan: we spend less on material sensation now, so we will have more spiritual sensation later.

There
[in the spiritual world]
, all things are filled, and, as it were, boiling over with life. It is as though they flowed like a stream, from one source—not from one breath or warmth. Rather, it is as though there were one quality, containing within itself and preserving all the other qualities: that of sweetness along with fragrance; the quality of wine along with the powers of every juice, with visions of colors, and with all that is known by the sense of touch. Let there also be all that the ear can hear; each melody and every rhythm.
[VI-7-12]
¹

Amazingly, Plotinus tells us, all of this incomparable life and beauty is within each one of us. No, the truth is even grander than that: it
is
us, part and parcel of every person’s essential being. Here we touch upon a great mystery, not just of classic Greek philosophy, but of the human condition throughout the ages. How is it possible that we feel pleasure and pain, or anything at all for that matter? Why does a beautiful person or thing produce feelings of beauty in us, and an ugly thing feelings of ugliness?

The answer, says Plotinus, is that whatever forms exist in the world out there—beautiful or ugly, loving or hateful, bright or dark, colorful or bland, light or heavy—also exist in the world in here, innermost consciousness. So if we are astonished by Plotinus’s descriptions of the marvels in the spiritual realm, we will be flabbergasted when we discover that all of this is not only for us to behold, but to become.

If one were to compare [the world of Forms] to a living, variegated sphere, or to something made up only of faces, shining with living faces … then one would see it, but as it were from the outside, as one being sees another; in fact, however, one must oneself become Spirit, and oneself become vision.
[VI-7-15]
²

Still, the spiritual traveler must not remain content with even the most intimate vision of higher truth and the beauties beyond. Above every form of creation is the creator; transcending every object of beauty is the source of beauty; on the further edge of all that exists is existence itself. Plotinus urges us to keep treading the spiritual path until there is no more path to be tread and we reach the One, where all traveling and all questioning come to an end.

But we must not remain always in that manifold beauty but go on still darting upwards, leaving even this behind, not out of this sky here below, but out of that, in our wondering about who generated it and how.
[VI-7-16]

All Is Alive

M
ANY PEOPLE
would consider this bold statement “all is alive” implausible. Admittedly, it sounds suspiciously animistic. Are we to believe along with the primitives that earth, water, and sky are as alive as plants and animals? That a boulder somehow shares kinship with a baby, as do a lake and a lizard, a star and a sunflower? Isn’t there an unbridgeable difference between animate and inanimate objects that is real and enduring?

Before rejecting Plotinus’s perspective as a relic of ancient mythology, let’s consider some modern science. No one knows for sure how life appeared on earth. Some scientists believe that life arrived here from space, perhaps in the form of a tiny spore carried by an asteroid. But this begs the question of how that extra-terrestrial life started.

Whether life sprang up on earth or was brought here from beyond, science sees no need for a miraculous explanation of life’s beginnings. Neither does Plotinus. Biologists have no problem believing that matter somehow became complex enough to develop the qualities associated with life, such as being highly organized, carbon-based, adaptive, capable of reproduction, and chemically different from the environment.

So if living things are merely a special sort of matter and matter/energy is everywhere in the universe, why is it so strange to hold that life is omnipresent, yet not always recognized?

The First Nature is present to all things. Present? But how? Like one single Life which is within all things. In a living being, Life does not penetrate as far as a certain point and then stop, as if it could not spread to the entire being; rather, it is present in every part of it.

…
If you can grasp the inexhaustible infinity of Life—its tireless, unwearied, unfailing nature, as if boiling over with life—it will do you no good to fix your gaze on one spot, or concentrate your attention on any given object: you will not find it there. Rather, the exact opposite would happen to you.
[VI-5-12]
¹

For Plotinus life in the cosmos is much like life in our own bodies. If I try to pinpoint the location of the life that resides within me, I will fail. Life obviously isn’t present in some parts of my body and mind while absent from other parts. Life is experienced as a whole. I can’t focus on a particular aspect of me and say, “Ah,
here
is my life.” Indeed, the more I try to analyze and dissect myself the more I distance myself from the wholeness that is my self

Still, while there is no spot in my body where life is not, life manifests in various ways. For example, my toenails and brain are both alive but the life of my innermost consciousness certainly is quite different from the life on the end of my big toe.

It’s a humbling thought, but our normal human experience may be as conscious of the larger life that surrounds us as is my big toe. Plotinus teaches that the cosmos is a single living entity, yet awareness of its unified aliveness is greater in the spiritual domains apart from matter. Here on earth, beauty seems to be impressed upon us from the outside. There, beauty is part and parcel of every being, as is life, love, wisdom, and every other spiritual form.

[Beauty] shines brightly upon all things, and fills whomever arrives there, so that they too become beautiful. Likewise, people often climb to lofty places, where the earth is colored golden-brown, and are filled with that color, and made similar to that upon which they are walking In that other world, however, the color which blooms on the surface is beauty itself or rather, each thing is color and beauty, right from its very depths.
[V-8-10]
²

The realm of spirit is the first life and the best life, where One becomes many, yet all are intimately connected.

Indeed, each has everything within it, and again sees all things in any other, so that all things are everywhere, everything is everything, each individual is all things, and the splendor is without end.
[V-8-4]
³

Pierre Hadot says, “In this universe of pure Forms, where each Form is nothing other than itself, there is complete interpenetra-tion.”
⁴
So there is no hint in the
Enneads
that life takes on any sort of personality or personhood in the domain of spirit. Spirit certainly is conscious. It is the intelligence behind all other intelligences. Yet it is too unified, too whole, for the individuality normally associated with a living being. We could say that the One is beyond life and that spirit is undivided life.

The realm of soul, which follows spirit in Plotinus’s metaphysical cosmology, is where life begins to differentiate. Yet the Soul of the All still is far beyond everyday comprehension. Wondrously, the entire universe and much that lies beyond is none other than the “body” of a soul, which is similar in kind to the personal human soul but possesses tremendously greater power and wisdom.

First of all we must posit that this All is a “single living being which encompasses all the living beings that are within it”; it has one soul which extends to all its parts.
[IV-4-32]

Thus all that we call inanimate—earthly matter, as well as other planets, stars, galaxies, and intergalactic space—actually is the unimaginably vast body of the Soul of the All. As such, all is alive, just as our own bodies are enlivened by our personal souls.

Each of us governs, albeit with considerable difficulty, a body (“Stop gaining weight!” I tell my subject, but he generally fails to obey me). With infinitely greater ease, the Soul of the All guides the affairs of its body, which includes the entire physical universe. Not from without (as a doctor diagnoses and treats people), says Plotinus, but from within.

But the administration of the universe is much simpler, in that all things with which it deals are included as parts of a single living being
[IV-4-11]

We have such difficulty coming to grips with the central mysteries of life—How did it begin? What are its boundaries? Does it ever end?—because life isn’t something that can be grasped. To grasp an object one needs to be separate from it. If life isn’t just part of creation, but the whole of creation, then these mysteries are ungraspable. They can be understood, perhaps, by becoming the whole, but not otherwise. The pursuit of highest truth necessarily leads beyond the confines of material science. Shimon Malin, a physicist, says:

The scientific claim that so-called inanimate entities are really lifeless is a statement about the scientific method and not about the entities. In reality there is nothing in the current scientific knowledge that disproves the proposition that putatively inanimate entities are alive.

This proposition can only be verified or disproved through experiences and modes of knowledge that lie outside of the methodology of present-day science…. If the universe is indeed alive, or “ensouled” as the ancient Greeks put it, this aliveness will not show up in a scientific context.
⁵

The search goes on for extraterrestrial life. Scientists listen for faint signals from distant star systems and probe rocks from Mars for microscopic signs that humans are not alone. Yet the
Enneads
imply that we are unable to recognize life beyond our present ken not because it is too distant or too small, but because it is too close and too large. Everything that we can sense and all that is insensible is alive, teaches Plotinus. Life is everywhere we look, but we are looking for it in the wrong fashion.

This one universe is all bound together in shared experience and is like one living creature, and that which is far is really near.
[IV-4-32]

Everything in the universe is connected to everything else. No part stands alone. Whatever we do or think affects other parts of the whole, because the drops of our souls are immersed in the living ocean of the Soul of the All. J.M. Rist says, “The whole cosmos must be regarded as a living being with a body and soul. There is therefore a kind of nervous system, as we might put it, between the different parts.”
⁶

If too much alcohol passes through my stomach, it will damage my liver; if I’m deathly afraid, my whole body trembles; an infection in my finger summons white blood cells from distant limbs; an intention of my will causes my arms and legs to be put in motion. I readily accept that my body and mind form a single living being, causes here leading to effects there. And if I come to believe that the cosmos is similarly constituted then I will realize that whatever I do, this necessarily will affect other parts of the living All.

One principle must make the universe a single complex living creature, one from all; and just as in individual organisms each member undertakes its own particular task, so the members of the All, each individual one of them, have their individual work to do.
[II-3-7]

If one wants a powerful philosophical rationale for environmental-ism, here it is. Preserving the earth and all upon it is nothing other than keeping the larger body of the All, within which we live out our smaller bodily lives, in good health. Thus when we despoil the oceans, we despoil ourselves. When we poison the earth, we poison ourselves. When we pollute the air, we pollute ourselves. Some of the connections between humans and the environment are obvious and some are subtle but all are inescapable, the order of nature.

Here it is appropriate to point out that while diet is never explicitly mentioned in the
Enneads,
Porphyry tells us that Plotinus didn’t approve of eating animal flesh. How could he? Plotinus’s life was devoted to experiencing the reality of limitless love, not the illusion of restricted self-aggrandizement.

This All is visibly not only one living creature, but many; so that in so far as it is one, each individual part is preserved by the whole, but in so far as it is many, when the many encounter each other they often injure each other because they are different.
[IV-4-32]

The ecological sciences teach that the continued existence of every species and each individual within a species is dependent on many other life forms. Thus in one sense it is natural to kill and eat other living beings since life necessarily feeds on life. Yet Plotinus draws our attention to the unnaturalness of injuring others simply because they are different from us. This behavior is fitting for an irrational animal but out of sync for humans aspiring to spiritual wisdom.

Plotinus refused to countenance the oft-heard rationale for meat-eating: “Animals are not like us.” He considered this to be a shoddy bit of philosophizing. If humans are entitled to pursue happiness, one of the inalienable rights enshrined in the United States Declaration of Independence, then why should other living things be denied their own right to seek well-being, insofar as it is possible? Humans differ from animals in what we are capable of doing and experiencing, but all life is able to do and experience something. So one should be cautious about denying the good life to any form of life.

Why will it not seem absurd of him to deny that other living things live well just because he does not think them important? … If pleasure is the end and the good life is determined by pleasure, it is absurd of anyone to deny the good life to other living things.
[I-4-1]