Return to the One (25 page)

Myself Is Multiple

T
HE EASIEST THING
to know seemingly would be myself.

In the outside world, there always is some gulf between me and what I want to know. My senses tell me only about my immediate surroundings and even this understanding is imperfect. I can’t smell as keenly as a dog or see as clearly as a hawk. Over the horizon are lands mostly unknown to me, on a planet circling a sun that is only one of billions of stars existing in billions of galaxies.

Books, magazines, television, and other media allow me to know about things I haven’t personally experienced. But my mind doesn’t retain everything that I’ve learned and my understanding of the facts that remain is equally limited.

So if I want to know something completely, it makes sense to turn within, to my self. What barrier could there be between me and me? Obeying the Delphic injunction, “Know yourself,” should be as simple as existing. I am what I am. What more is there to this business of self-knowledge?

Unfortunately, a lot, according to Plotinus. Echoing modern understanding of the human unconscious, he says that most people have no idea of who they really are. It’s fallacious that I’m a single entity just because I go by one name. What I need to do is become aware of all the different aspects of myself. Then I’ll be on the way to sorting out which of those parts is the permanent me and which are temporary add-ons.

Since also “Know yourself” is said to those who, because of their selves multiplicity have the business of counting themselves up and learning that they do not know all of the number and kind of things they are, or do not know any one of them, not what their ruling principle is or by what they are themselves.
[VI-7-41]

It is indeed a strange business, this counting up of our selves. On the face of it, how could there be anybody but me sitting here typing these words? Count off, all you Brians. “One.” That’s me speaking. Hearing no other voices, that would be my final answer if Plotinus didn’t lead me to dig deeper into the nature of myself. Most obviously, the soul has taken on the company of a body. The body of the Soul of the All is the physical universe; my soul’s body is what I see when I look in a mirror.

So this introduces an evident duality in my consciousness. For example, I can be happily writing away and my stomach will say “Stop. Go get some food.” Or my bladder will exclaim, “Let’s go to the bathroom.” Now, the mental Brian who is doing the writing wants to keep on with what he’s doing while the bodily Brian has another agenda. This implies that I must be at least two: immaterial soul, and my present compound condition, a soul enmeshed with a body.

For every man is double, one of him is the sort of compound being and one of him is himself.
[II-3-9]

We’ve learned that the Soul of the All effortlessly manages in a detached manner the affairs of its body, the universe. It isn’t driven by bodily needs like we are but remains separate from materiality. We individual souls, on the other hand, have become so attached to our bodies (which nevertheless leave us at the end of every incarnation) that we consider the self and the body to be virtually identical. It behooves us to remember that in the spiritual world we existed without bodies, as we will again when we return to the One.

That world has souls without bodies, but this world has the souls which have come to be in bodies and are divided by bodies.
[IV-2]

When Plotinus says that the soul is divided by bodies he doesn’t mean that the soul is made up of parts, like the body is. A person can have a tooth extracted, a toe amputated, or an appendix removed, because bodies are composed of many parts, not all of which are needed to stay alive. The pure soul, however, is an undivided whole. It is nothing but consciousness, or spirit. So when Plotinus speaks of the parts of the soul, he is referring to the various powers of our present state of consciousness.

And then the soul is many, even the soul which is one, even if it is not composed from parts; for there are very many powers in it, reasoning, desiring, apprehending, which are held together by the one as by a bond.
[VI-9-1]

When the soul enters the physical universe, the realm of many, it becomes similarly divided. Otherwise, the soul couldn’t function in this alien environment. To experience materiality a separate body is needed. To live as a separate body a sense of individuality or ego is needed. To be an individual, memories, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and desires are required. These become a personality, the little bit of the cosmos that has become particularized into you or me.

All that gets added on to the soul—body, ego, personality—eventually becomes so familiar that we can’t remember or even imagine being anything else. Yet there was a time when we were not conscious of being many in matter, but single in spirit (intellect).

Intellect, then, is always inseparable and indivisible, but soul is inseparable and indivisible There, but it is in its nature to be divided. For its division is departing from Intellect and coming to be in a body.
[IV-2]

So long as my attention is directed to the things of this world, which includes my own body, I will consider myself to be a unique individual who is composed of all the polarized parts that I call

“me”: my likes and dislikes, my strengths and weaknesses, my loves and hates, my luminous longings and dark desires.

Currently my consciousness is composite, marked by a fragmented sense of self that has been cobbled together from the myriad experiences of countless incarnations since my descent from the spiritual world. Most of us cling to our uniqueness with all our might because it seems to be the life preserver that keeps us from sinking into the oblivion of the Other, the harsh external world which threatens to obliterate our being.

We’re sadly mistaken, says Plotinus. What we truly are is something universal, not personal. Wrongly believing in the shadowy insubstantiality of a separate personality, we’re prevented from experiencing the solid reality of a spiritual consciousness that is one with all that exists.

It’s as if the body and ego are fences that keep us confined within a field of illusion. Because everyone else around us is grazing in the same field, we assume that the barriers that divide us from the larger cosmos, the “All,” are impassable. Mystics such as Plotinus come to tell us that we need to expand the boundary of what we consider possible. For, in truth, our souls already enjoy the limitless.

As Pierre Hadot says, “We are always in God…. Our ‘self extends from God to matter, since we are up above at the same time as we are down here on earth.”
¹

Our head strikes the heavens.
[IV-3-12]
²

This is a wonderfully encouraging message: nothing needs to be done to become spiritual. A vast spiritual treasure of well-being lies within us, but, ignorant of this, we’re still grubbing about for a few coins of happiness out there in the sensible world. Our preoccupation with matter keeps us unaware of what the higher power of our souls continually contemplate.

It seems that human consciousness is akin to a television set that can receive several stations, each of which is broadcasting continuously, twenty-four hours a day. We can tune in to the Spiritual World or the Physical World. Only one station can appear on the screen of consciousness, so we have a choice as to which to watch. A.H. Armstrong says, “On this direction of attention our whole way of living depends: and it is the function of philosophy to turn us and direct us rightly, upwards.”
³

It is the middle part of
psyche,
then, that mostly concerns us. The higher part is eternally in the spiritual world. The lower part is temporarily involved in caring for the body and sensing the physical world. The middle or rational part is where the balance of power, we might say, resides. If our thoughts and desires are primarily directed downward, to sense pleasures and such, then that is where our conscious attention will be taken. Alternatively, if a person’s attention is turned toward spirit, his or her lower part will be drawn upward.

One part of the soul is always directed to the intelligible realities, one to the things of this world, and one is in the middle between these; for since the soul is one nature in many powers, sometimes the whole of it is carried along with the best of itself and of real being, sometimes the worse part is dragged down and drags the middle with it; for it is not lawful for it to drag down the whole.

…
Is this lower part, then, always in body? No; if we turn, this, too, turns with us to the upper world.
[II-9-2, III-4-4]

All of us know what it is like to be obsessed with some passion for the physical: sex, drugs, alcohol, money, sports, gambling, travel, shopping. It’s impossible to make this list exhaustive, because virtually everything people do is connected somehow with the bodily side of their compound beings. The higher soul gets short shrift. Even a love of physical nature or a desire to know its secrets (the goal of science) reflects a passion for what is material, not spiritual.

Plotinus asks: What if it was possible to discard our present personalities and passionate dispositions? What would be left of us?

What’s left is what we truly are, we to whom Nature has granted dominion even over our passions…. This is why we must “flee from here,” “separate” ourselves from those things that have been added on to us, and no longer be that composite, ensouled body in which the nature of the body is predominant…. But it is to the other soul, which is not within the body, that belongs the drive towards the upper regions.
[II-3-9]
⁴

To return to the One, we have to become one ourselves. Since the soul, a drop of the ocean of universal consciousness, has no parts, it goes where the primary focus of its attention carries it. If three climbers are roped together, they all will fall if one loses his grip, and the others are unable to arrest his descent. This is similar to our earthly condition, since one aspect of us is characterized by the power of rationality, another aspect by sense-perception, and a final aspect by vegetative concerns such as staying alive, growing, and reproducing.

In an ideal situation, says Lloyd Gerson, “The ‘whole self is one with a unity of purpose. It is a life that really makes sense because it has ordered the disjointed desires of the endowed [bodily] self.”
⁵
But most people are pulled in all kinds of different directions by a mixture of spiritual yearnings and physical passions. This results in our living less the life of intelligent souls, and more the life of irrational animals, or even insentient plants.

In man, however, the inferior parts are not dominant but they are also present…. Therefore we also live like beings characterized by sense-perception, for we, too have sense-organs; and in many ways we live like plants, for we have a body which grows and produces.
[III-4-2]

It turns out, then, that what people think they mostly are, body, actually is what they least are. For body is the separable aspect of the composite self. To Plotinus, the bundle of blood and bones to which each of us gives so much care and attention is nothing more than a tool being temporarily used by the soul. A carpenter wielding a saw doesn’t consider the saw to be part of himself. If it gets rusty or dull he fixes it. If it breaks he gets a new one. At the end of the day, the saw is left behind in the toolbox. This is the attitude the mystic philosopher takes toward his or her body: use it; don’t let it use you.

Body-consciousness is an awareness of what we are not. If we try to know ourselves by turning to our physical frames, this would be like the carpenter pursuing self-awareness by contemplating his saw.

Body-consciousness introduces a confusing duality into a person’s sense of self. It’s what leads people to say such things as “I hate the way I look,” and “I wish I could stop smoking.” It’s a sign that something is amiss whenever we use two “I’s” in the same sentence. There should be just one of us using the body and thinking thoughts. Who am I talking to inside my head? To whom am I complaining when I berate myself? Who am I trying to impress when I praise myself?

Really, it must be admitted that our situation is more than a little crazy. On face value, we’re each one person, but we have some company inside consciousness. Who is this other person? Most importantly, how do I know which is the real “me” ?

Who are “we”? … As pure souls, we were Spirit…. We were a part of the spiritual world, neither circumscribed nor cut off from it. Even now, we are still not cut off from it. Now, however, another person, who wanted to exist and who has found us … has added himself on to the original person…. Then we became both: now we are no longer only the one we were, and at times, when the spiritual person is idle and in a certain sense stops being present, we are only the person we have added on to ourselves.
[VI-4-14]
⁶

This is a beautiful quotation. Psychologically perceptive, mystically profound, it cuts to the quick of the human condition. Whenever a person feels split, torn, divided, or pulled in opposite directions, the cause is this division in his consciousness between the pure soul he truly is and the doppelganger, the bodily form that has been added on to him.