Return to the One (29 page)

Lloyd Gerson likens the difference between everyday human emotionality and the sage’s disengagement from worldly concerns to the difference “between someone who thinks that he is affected directly by an attack on a voodoo doll made in his image and someone who knows that he is not.”
⁸
If we really believe that a stick is a snake, it won’t help to mouth the words, “That is not a snake.” But when we know without a doubt that it is a stick, a crowd of people could yell “Snake!” and we wouldn’t be scared in the slightest.

To Plotinus, everything associated with the body is stickish, not snakeish, even death. So if we’re able to maintain a calm composure in the face of what distresses ordinary people, this is an encouraging sign as regards our spiritual intelligence quotient.

Even if the death of friends and relations causes grief it does not grieve him but only that in him which has no intelligence, and he will not allow the distresses of this to move him.
[I-4-4]

It’s important that we come to understand the difference between necessities and goods. If we believe that out there in the world is where we’ll find the good life, then we will be disturbed when someone or something we’re attached to is taken away from us or a material desire isn’t fulfilled. But Plotinus teaches that this is an unrealistic attitude. The source of well-being is within, not without.

Divesting Is Divine

T
ODAY
, as I begin writing this chapter, the U.S. stock market experienced its greatest point decline ever. At the moment, many investments are looking a lot more like divestments, so it’s an appropriate time to be pondering the message “divesting is divine.”

Of course, Plotinus doesn’t mean that we become more spiritual by losing money. If that were the case, many people would have turned into saints during the United States’ Great Depression. Few mystics teach that financial poverty is associated with godliness even though, throughout the ages, spiritual seekers have been attracted to cloisters, monasteries, deserts, caves, and forests in a hope that forsaking material comforts would lead them closer to divinity.

According to the
Enneads,
they are on the right track. But it isn’t our outward connection with material goods that is the problem; it is our inward preoccupation with things made of matter.

If a person gave away all that he had except a coarse cloak and a begging bowl yet worried incessantly about whether his cloak would be stolen or his bowl left unfilled, these two items would be more detrimental to his spiritual progress than would the vast holdings of a king whose serene contemplation of the divine was undisturbed by thoughts of either gain or loss.

No particular physical barrier prevents us from returning to God, for the One is not reached by journeying through time and space. Rather, it is the attention given to anything made of matter that keeps us bound to the cave wall of the material universe, forced to stare at shadows instead of the bright light of reality. A flea is strong enough to hold us here on Earth if we are unable to detach our minds from flea-thoughts and flea-desires.

It
[the All]
will not appear to you as long as you are in the midst of other things. It is not the case that it came, in order to be present; rather, if it is not present, it is you who have absented yourself. If you are absent, it is not that you have absented yourself from the All—it continues to be present—but rather that, while still continuing to be present, you have turned towards other things.
[VI-5-12]
¹

The One is present in every particle of creation even though the source remains separate and distinct from what has been created.

Thus Plotinus says that the One, or God, never comes and goes, making an appearance here and disappearing there. So if we aren’t aware of God’s presence, it isn’t the divine that has distanced itself It is we who have chosen to pay attention to the creation instead of the source.

Whoever has seen knows what I am saying: when the soul approaches him
[God]
, reaches him, and participates in him, she acquires another life, and when she is in this state, she realizes that the one she is with is the bestower of true life, and that she has no need of anything else; on the contrary, she knows she must reject everything else and rest in him alone.

She must become him alone, cutting loose everything else we wear around ourselves. Therefore we hurry to escape from here; we are irritated at the bonds which tie us to other things, so that we may embrace him with the whole of ourselves, and have no part of us which is not in contact with God.
[VI-9-9]
²

The core of Plotinus’s mystical philosophy is wondrously simple. God is one, the creation is many. Material multiplicity emanates from spiritual unity. To return to God, we must reverse this creative process. From many we must become one. What has been added on to the soul—matter, and mind mesmerized by matter—must be cast off. We don’t need to be filled with spirit, for we already are. To realize this, all a spiritual seeker needs to do is empty his or her consciousness of material images and thoughts and be aware of what is left.

To return to the One, the soul must travel through domains of consciousness that are objectively real. This is the difference between armchair spiritual traveling and actual mystical transport into higher spheres of the cosmos. I can try to conjure up a mental picture of Paris from books and photographs, or memory if I’ve ever visited the city, but this isn’t the same as actually being there. Plotinus’s mystic philosophy is aimed at helping us understand what it takes to be in the presence of the One: to truly be with God, not merely with our ideas of God.

Our questioning, “What is God like?” is natural. But does it make sense to believe that we are even capable of asking the right questions about ultimate reality? Plotinus teaches that the framing of a question puts bounds around the answer. Since the One is infinite, omnipresent, and without any divisions, it is meaningless to ask what separate qualities God has. At the moment the question arises, so does the answer. Wrong.

And to inquire into what kind of thing it
[the One]
is, is to enquire what attributes it has, which has no attributes. And the question “what is it?” rather makes clear that we must make no enquiry about it, grasping it, if possible, in our minds by learning that it is not right to add anything to it.
[VI-8-11]

Now it might seem that Plotinus contradicts his own message by having written tens of thousands of words in the
Enneads
inquiring into the nature of the One. However, what he points to in this passage is how the soul returns to the One, not how we prepare for the journey. This is akin to the distinction between reading travel brochures and getting on a plane.

A person can think all he or she likes about God before setting forth on the spiritual journey. But during his or her inward contemplation of spirit and the One, the means by which the soul travels homeward, all suppositions about the nature of divinity must be suspended. Otherwise we will find ourselves journeying through an exceedingly confined and almost entirely personal space: imagination. This is where we spend most of our supposedly spiritual time now, but it isn’t where we want to be.

Plotinus explains that we generally think about God in a curious fashion. While paying lip service to a belief in a transcendent being who exists in a realm beyond normal mental cognition and sensory perception, we conjure up thoughts and images that are firmly rooted in everyday experiences. Even though we might call these conceptions “divine,” actually they are merely material images thinly disguised by a covering of theological abstraction.

We first assume a space and place, a kind of vast emptiness, and then, when the space is already there, we bring this nature
[of God]
into the place which has come to be or is in our imagination.
[VI-8-11]

In other words, we first assume that God is an entity like everything else with which we’re familiar. Since things and people always occupy a place in space, so must God. This is our first faulty assumption. Building on this shaky foundation, we then go about asking how this divine being got into the place we just imagined for it.

However, it is better to be honest and say “I don’t know what the One is like” than to fill our heads with guesses about God. An empty mind can be filled with truth; a mind clogged with false notions cannot.

As long as we’re wholly immersed in the creation, how is it possible for us to believe that we can understand anything about the source of all this? Plotinus reminds us that the One existed by itself prior to the emanation of the spiritual and material realms. Can we conceive of anything beyond time and space? No, for our conceptions are products of time and space. These mental abstractions can accurately reflect physical reality (the goal of science) because they are founded on knowledge gained through our physical senses.

Physical reality, physical sensation. Nice match.

Spiritual reality, spiritual sensation. Also a nice match. But where are the spiritual senses that allow us to perceive spiritual realities? They are not part of the body, says Plotinus, because the body is physical. So we have to ignore what the external senses tell us in order to become attuned to the soul’s internal senses.

If there is to be perception of these great faculties within the soul, we must direct the faculty of sensation inwards, and make it concentrate its attention there.

It is as if someone were waiting to hear a long-desired voice; he turns away from all other sounds, and awakens his ear to the best of all audible things, lest it should happen by.

It is the same for us in this world: we must leave behind all sensible hearing, unless it is unavoidable, and keep the soul’s power of perception pure and ready to hear the voices from on high.
[V-l-12]
³

Between crude earthly existence and the ineffable One lie the grand realms of immaterial soul and spirit. Here there is matter, along with sights, sounds, and other sensations, but all is spiritual, not physical. The bodily senses must be put to sleep in order to awaken what Plotinus calls the soul’s great faculties. This is the goal of the mystic philosopher’s contemplation: to shift his or her attention from the shadows of Earth to the light of heaven, from the clanging clamor of outward sounds to the melodious music of spirit within.

When we sequester our senses and stop the movements of our minds, Plotinus assures us that we will be filled with the presence of the One since there is nowhere it is not. If we can divest ourselves of all else, God will remain.

If you have come to be within the All, then you will no longer search for anything. Otherwise you will give up, be diverted to something else, and fall; although it was right there, you will not have seen it, because you were looking elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you “no longer search for anything,” how will you sense its presence?
[VI-5-12]
⁴

Good question. Usually we conceive of spirituality as seeking for what we lack, the presence of God. If we don’t search for God, or the One, then won’t we remain in our current discontented condition? Yes, this is true. But Plotinus wants us to engage in a special sort of searching that is unlike any other kind of quest.

If I’ve lost an object in a dark room, my first thought is to turn on a light. Then I can locate what I’m looking for. This makes sense when my goal is to find something outside of myself. But when the object I’ve misplaced is my own true self, soul, then a radically different approach is called for.

Consciousness is the light of the soul. Attention is the means by which that light is focused. Plotinus teaches that soul illumines matter, spirit illumines soul, and the One illumines spirit. So what I seek is the source of the very light that is doing the seeking, my consciousness. In a beautiful passage, Plotinus explains that spiritual contemplation aims at uniting the soul’s attention so intimately with the light of the One that nothing else is attended to.

We must believe that we have seen him when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him…. Similarly, the soul when she is unilluminated is godless and bereft of him; once she has been illuminated, however, she has what she was looking for.

This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see. What she must behold is precisely that by which she was illuminated.

…
How, then, could this come about? Eliminate everything [that is not light]!
[V-3-17]
⁵

As long as there is light, what is lit, and sight, we have three entities, not one. Light and sight, God’s universal consciousness and the soul’s personal consciousness, must enter into a union. This is accomplished by eliminating the unwanted third party, what is lit, whether this is a material or spiritual entity. If we continue to be conscious of the physical world, we will be aware of physical objects. And even if we come to be conscious of the spiritual world, we still will be aware of spiritual objects.

Thus everything must be left behind if the light of consciousness itself, the One, is to be known in its fullness. The more we let go of, the more we possess, until we have the All.