Return to the One (30 page)

Forgetting Is Favorable

I
MAGINE
opening your eyes one morning, and not being able to remember anything that had happened before waking up. You know where you are but not where you’ve been. You know what you’re thinking but not what you’ve thought. You know what you’re feeling but not what you’ve felt.

Most people would consider this a scary proposition since the security that comes from having a stable sense of self is closely tied to our memories. Remembering that yesterday I was the same person I am today it seems reasonable to anticipate that tomorrow I still will be me. If my personality had no past, it is difficult to imagine how I could confidently look forward to the future.

On the other hand, the idea of starting fresh has a considerable appeal. It’s natural to look back upon the course of my life and wonder wistfully, “If only I had it to do over again.” But I can’t.

For we are forced into the future by the pressure of the past. Rather than freely choosing the direction we wish to go right now, we find ourselves traveling down habitual avenues of thinking and behaving, driven by a state of consciousness that adores ruts and the motto, “What has been, will be.”

Plotinus points us toward another way of being where the wispy chimera of
has been
and
will be
fades away, gloriously supplanted by the solid reality of
is.
This is the life of soul in the spiritual realm, where there is nothing to recall and nothing to anticipate because everything exists all together as a whole.

And what will the soul remember when it has come to be in the intelligible world, and with that higher reality? … It is impossible that there should be a memory there, not only of the things here below, but of anything at all. But each and every thing is present there; so there is no discursive thought or transition from one to the other.
[IV-4-1]

Almost everyone has heard the adage, “Be here now,” even if few of us are able to practice this wise advice. While physically here (where else could we be?) our minds frequently are far away in some other time or space. Ignoring the immediate presence of the present, we either replay past events that have come and gone or fast forward to an imaginary future. So being fully in touch with even this lower reality entails attending to what is, not what was or may be.

Still, it is understandable that past, present, and future freely intermingle in our earthly consciousness, since we live in a world of time. Time can’t be ignored, for it is an undeniable aspect of our current reality. But if we want to experience a higher reality that is beyond time, then memories must be discarded.

Here, time creates divisions of past, present, and future while space divides one material form from another. Since this physical universe is so split up, memories and imagination help to connect one moment with the next and one thing with another. But the spiritual realm is a whole, a one-many of true being outside of time and becoming. In the soul’s contemplation of the unchanging World of Forms, where each is in the all and the all is in each, there is no place for memory or thought.

If memory is something acquired, either learnt or experienced, then memory will not be present in those realities which are unaffected by experience or those which are in the timeless.
[IV-3-25]

Memories are traces of experiences that no longer exist for us. An experience becomes a memory when something changes. No change, no memory. Consider: throughout your life you have been conscious. Because you’ve been conscious of lots of different things, you have lots of different memories. But you have no memory of consciousness itself since it has always been with you. Similarly, you have no memory of being without a body because you’ve always possessed a physical form.

This helps us understand why Plotinus says that the realized soul doesn’t remember or think about the One. How could it? That blessed soul essentially has become the One. You don’t remember or think about what you are now, a human consciousness in a human body. Rather, you experience this state of being. In like fashion, when a soul returns to spirit and the One it will experience higher states of being, not remember or think about them.

Certainly the prospect of knowing God sounds wonderful. Yet if God is one, how would it be possible to truly know him except by merging with him? This is the genuine meaning of divine love. It isn’t a relationship between a lover and a beloved, since this requires two entities. Instead, divine love is a union that is so intimate and natural it isn’t even noticed or known. For as long as there is someone around who says, “I know God,” the knowing is more accurately called a forgetting

When a person really is immersed in something—a book, a thought, an activity, an emotion—there isn’t enough of him left outside of that experience to know he is immersed in it. Only later does he recollect the experience from the outside, so to speak. Similarly, only when someone leaves God’s presence does he or she say, “I was with him.”

Well, then, will they not remember that they saw God? They always see him; and while they see him it is surely not possible to say that they have seen him: this would be something which would happen to those who have ceased to see.
[IV-
4
-7]

Of course, most of us would be exceedingly happy to have even a single memory of God. Our problem isn’t that we now only remember the One but that we have never known him. So the dilemma faced by a spiritual seeker is how to forget the world without ever having had a remembrance of the divine. I can relax and go to sleep because I’ve woken up again so many times. But if I didn’t know whether the oblivion of dreamless sleep was to last for only a short time or for eternity, it would be much more difficult to leave behind my present waking state.

Only the bold soul is able to traverse the most difficult part of the path that leads to the One: the journey from physical reality to the lower reaches of the spiritual world. As has already been noted, the inner emptiness within my consciousness marks the opening that leads out of the cave of illusion. Yet it isn’t easy to turn away from the seeming solidity of all the physical shadows to which I have become accustomed, even if I am intellectually convinced that it is impossible to embrace spirit while clinging to matter.

Thus, if someone were to say that the good soul is forgetful, in this sense he would be right: the soul flees from multiplicity, and gathers the many together into one, and abandons the infinite. Thus she is not encumbered by multiplicity, but she is light and by herself. In this world, too, whenever she wishes, even while still in this one, to be in the other world, she abandons everything alien to her.
[IV3-32]
¹

Memories, thoughts, and sensations of multiplicity obviously won’t bring the soul closer to the unity of the One. This is why the wise soul would rather be alone by itself than in the company of all this world has to offer. When the mind is empty of matter, it begins to be filled with the Good, even though spirit and the One may not yet be revealed in their fullness.

To rise up, the soul must become light. Material memories, says Plotinus, are like an anvil attached to the leg of those trying to swim in the spiritual, or intelligible, ocean. They drag us down to the bottom and we once again end up stuck in the muck of matter.

But if it
[the soul]
comes out of the intelligible world, and cannot endure unity, but embraces its own individuality and wants to be different and so to speak puts its head outside, it thereupon acquires memory. Its memory of what is in the intelligible world still holds it back from falling, but its memory of the things here below carries it down here.
[IV-4-3]

Now it must be admitted that this passage seems to contradict Plotinus’s assertion that there is no memory in the spiritual world. But here he seems to be speaking of an in-between state where a soul that has risen to higher realms is no longer fully immersed in spirit, while it hasn’t yet sunk all the way back to materiality. Balanced in this precarious condition the soul tilts in the direction of its memories and these are closely linked to its desires.

In an ideal situation, philosophy (the love of wisdom) should be a full-time way of life, not episodic intellectual speculation. Our consciousnesses have to be turned around from their present fascination with material objects and sensual pleasures in order to return to the One. This isn’t just a matter of directing attention to the spirit within rather than the matter without. That is necessary, but not sufficient, to break the bonds that keep us earthbound.

As important, if not more so, is what Plotinus calls our general “disposition.” This, we might say, is the net effect of all that the soul has experienced in countless incarnations. It’s something we don’t even know we have since it is so intimately entwined with our present sense of self. Though difficult to define, this global disposition toward heaven or earth is what makes the soul rise or fall.

But one must understand memory not only in the sense of a kind of perception that one is remembering, but as existing when the soul is disposed according to what it has previously experienced or contemplated…. And this is certainly the experience which makes the soul sink lower.
[IV-4-4]

The anonymous medieval author of
The Cloud of Unknowing
speaks in a similar fashion of what he calls a “filthy and nauseating lump—you do not particularize—between you and God.” And what is this horrible barrier that separates us from divinity? The author says, “That lump is yourself. For you are to think of it as being identified with yourself: inseparable from you.”
²

To return to the One a spiritual seeker must first forget the world. Then he must forget his own self, or at least his illusory shadow self. For what presently seems so transparently obvious, that each of us is an ego-encapsulated entity distinct from everyone and everything else, is the densest illusion that must be cast off. What I currently take for granted, the inherent assumption that earthly existence is real as is the “I” experiencing it, must be exhumed from my unconscious and laid on the philosophical examining table for inspection.

Only then will I be able to divide the true me from the false me. As the saying goes, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If I cease being aware of worldly sensations and memories and stop paying attention to my own body and personality, what remains? Reality.

Plotinus advises us to use the time-honored mystic approach of the
via negativa,
the negative way, to become aware of what we have forgotten: the unity of the One. By negating a negation, illusory material multiplicity, we arrive at the greatest positive Good. So the soul that longs to return home is happy to forget both the manyness without and the manyness within.

The more she hastens towards the upper regions, the greater is her forgetfulness, unless by chance her whole terrestrial life has been such that her memories are only of greater things. Indeed, even in this world, it is good “to be a stranger to human concerns”; necessarily, then, we must also avoid remembrances.
[IV-3-32]
³

This world appears solid and real but actually the eternal forms merely play upon the surface of ever-changing matter, failing to produce anything more than a semblance of true being. All this manyness confounds and depresses the soul, a stranger in a strange land.

So with great joy she turns her attention away from shadows and seeks to embrace her only true love, God. In this world, someone who has been long-separated from a beloved and catches sight of him or her across a crowded room will rush forward, eyes oblivious to everyone but the object of desire. In like fashion, the soul blessed with spiritual passion wants to forget everything but the One so there is no barrier to their divine union.

Purification Is Presence

W
ITH SO MUCH TALK
in the past few chapters of detaching, divesting, emptying, and forgetting, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of all this purification is presence. Since the One is overall, there is nowhere it is not. But as creation emanates from the One, ultimate reality is masked by increasingly complex spiritual and material forms. Thus Plotinus teaches that God is present when consciousness is purified of everything that is not-God. Returning to the One above means separating from the many below.

But the purification of the part subject to affections
[of this world]
is the waking up from inappropriate images and not seeing them, and its separation is effected by not inclining much downwards and not having a mental picture of the things below.
[III-6-5]

The soul’s separation and purification happen simultaneously, just as the removal of a dark cover from a light and the consequent illumination are inextricably linked. Because the cosmos is a continuous emanation from the One with no gaps or firm divisions, every movement away from matter is a corresponding step toward spirit. This “turning,” of course, doesn’t involve any sort of physical motion.

Rather it is the inner attention that must be turned around. There is no problem with perceiving the physical world with our eyes, ears, and other sense organs. That merely involves matter affecting matter—photons, for example, stimulating light-sensitive ocular cells. What pollutes the purity of the soul is a different sort of affection—the mental images and memories that remain in consciousness when the physical sensations they represent are long gone.

It is impossible to contemplate spirit and the One if our attention is directed downward toward the people, objects, and activities of this world. Thus virtue is both the prerequisite and the result of spiritual realization. Pierre Hadot says, “Plotinian virtue is born of contemplation, and brings us back to contemplation.”
¹
As we read earlier:

When one falls from contemplation, he must reawaken the virtue within him.
[VI-9-11]
²

Since the greatest virtue is to turn away from the illusory shadow-shapes of this world and gaze upon immaterial divine light, it follows that Plotinus is much less concerned with what we do here on Earth than with how it is possible to reach heaven. J.M. Rist says, “Plotinus is not particularly concerned to tell us directly what we ought to do…. As in Plato, so in Plotinus we are not told what is morally good and what we therefore must (or ought to) choose.”
³

But Rist adds, “Of course, it does not follow that he is unconcerned with what ought to be done or thinks it of little importance…. For Plotinus, as for Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, the good life is a life of virtue and virtue is a state of the soul. Without such a virtuous condition all hope of progress towards God is vain.”
⁴
This is because Plotinian virtue is a simultaneous movement toward holy spirit and away from profane matter. If our consciousnesses are filled to the brim with worldly passions and perceptions, we shouldn’t expect that there will be any room for God’s presence.

For it does no good to say, “Look towards God,” unless we are taught how to look towards him…. What is there to stop us, someone might say, from looking towards God without abstaining from any pleasure, and without suppressing our anger? What is to stop us, let us say, from keeping the name “God” in mind, and yet being kept ensnared by every passion, and not trying to eliminate any of them?

What shows God to us is virtue, as it comes to be in the soul, accompanied by wisdom. Without this genuine virtue, God is only a word.
[II-9-15]
⁵

However, it is important to distinguish between the process of scrubbing the soul, which necessarily begins in our present bodily condition, and what remains when the scrubbing is done.

But being completely purified is a stripping of everything alien, and the good is different from that…. The good will be what is left after purification, not the purification itself.
[I-2-4]

As we’ve already learned, a quintessential Plotinian image is that of a statue encrusted with filth being cleansed until its original gilded beauty shines forth. Gold is different from both filth and cleansing, just as God is different from matter and purification. The One gleams in every particle of creation including every person’s soul but is hidden under various material and mental coverings. Hence purification is a “stripping of everything alien,” for the Good is what remains when lesser goods have been discarded.

We’re reminded here to keep our attention focused on the goal, not the means. Purification, or virtue, is the means by which the soul realizes the One. Just as a destination isn’t the same as the path that leads to it, pursuing virtue isn’t the same as having attained to God. The soul’s cup is cleansed only to be filled.

Our concern, though, is not to be out of sin, but to be god.
[I-2-6]

At the end of the road there is no more road. Similarly, virtue is a quality of this lower world, not that higher world. Without virtue we will never be able to rise up spiritually, but when we leave materiality, virtue is left behind as well.

So, then, if we participate in order and arrangement and harmony which come from There, and these constitute virtue here, and if the principles There have no need of harmony or order or arrangement, they will have no need of virtue either, and we shall all the same be made like them by the presence of virtue.
[I-2-1]

Plotinus says that virtue does not exist in the spiritual world. How could it? Virtue is the means by which the soul becomes akin to spirit and the One. Since spirit and the One are, obviously, already themselves they have no need of virtue. However, we do, because we are not yet who we truly are, pure soul. Hence it is necessary to put bounds on our otherwise limitless worldly desires. Limitless, because the fulfillment we seek cannot be found in a realm that possesses so little being and thus so little well-being.

But in the spiritual world it is just the opposite. There, what is boundless is the fulfillment of desire, for the World of Forms contains all that does exist, has existed, or could ever possibly exist. The purified soul is able to contemplate these forms so completely as to virtually become them, thereby achieving the wonderfully satisfying confluence of attainment and desire.

What is virtue for the soul? It is what she obtains as a result of her conversion. And what is this? Contemplation…. Wisdom and prudence consist in the contemplation of that which exists within the Intellect…. The best kind of justice for the soul is when her activity is directed entirely towards the Intellect, while temperance is turning inwards towards the Intellect. Bravery is impassability, in imitation of that which the soul looks at: the Intellect, which is impassible by nature.
[I-2-4, I-2-6]
⁶

So we see that Plotinian virtue is much more of a quiet turning within than an active doing without. The goal isn’t to perform good deeds and stop there but to become the Good. While it certainly is better to act rightly than wrongly Plotinus espouses a withdrawal from worldly concerns in which even the best external action is still “vulgar” in comparison to the sage’s internal union with spirit.

John Dillon puts it nicely: “He [Plotinus] would, of course, observe the vulgar decencies; it is just that they would be subsumed into something higher. One feels of Plotinus that he would have gladly helped an old lady across the road—but he might very well fail to notice her at all. And if she were squashed by a passing wagon, he would remain quite unmoved.”
⁷
While this may sound heartless, to Plotinus such a Stoic attitude actually is divine, for it reflects the impassible nature of spirit and the Soul of the All, which similarly remain unaffected by all the goings-on of the physical universe.

Whether a person lives a good life or a bad life, it is still a bodily life. Thus true virtue entails breaking every sort of attachment to matter and cleaving solely to spirit through inward contemplation.

It could perhaps be said that, in and of itself, life within the body is an evil, but that, thanks to virtue, the soul can come to be within the Good, not by living the life of the composite [of soul and body], but by separating herself from it already in this life.
[I-7-3]
⁸

It is fine to live with a body but not for a body. The mystic philosopher’s life isn’t centered around bodily needs and desires. Rather, he or she recognizes that the body with which an incarnated soul presently is involved should be the servant of the soul, not the master. After all, who is better able to decide what is right and good: unintelligent matter or intelligent soul?

Since the soul is evil when it is thoroughly mixed with the body and shares its experiences and has all the same opinions, it will be good and possess virtue when it no longer has the same opinions but acts alone.
[I-2-3]

Still, all this talk of controlling the body and not sharing in its experiences shouldn’t leave us with the impression that Plotinian virtue involves any sort of forceful repression of our natural appetites. Sensual passions and the cruder sort of human desires simply fade away as the sage’s attention becomes more firmly rooted in the bliss of a higher consciousness. Hence, virtue isn’t something distinct from a person’s innermost being, a flimsy façade he presents to the outside world that masks his genuine inclinations.

In short, the soul herself will be pure from all these things, and will wish to make her irrational part pure from them as well. In this way she will not be disturbed, or if at all, then not intensely; but the disturbances will be few and easily dissolved by the proximity [of the Spirit].
[I-2-5]
⁹

Best of all is for the soul to not have any physical desires at all, but to provide for the body almost as a matter of duty. We should eat and drink and have sex to live, not live to eat and drink and have sex.

If we are still attracted to sensual pleasures, they should be simple pleasures. Spending a quiet evening drinking wine with friends is preferable to reveling drunkenly at a Bacchanalian orgy. Unnatural desires that go far beyond fulfilling the body’s physical needs and wants are to remain a fantasy, not reality, and should enter a person’s imagination only when reason is temporarily helpless.

Bodily needs and sensual desires are part of our physical nature that we share with other animals. Yet the true natural condition of the soul is either not to be tied to a material body, or, if already incarnated, to be as detached as possible from the crude flesh, blood, and bone with which it is temporarily partnered.

The true person is something different, pure from contact with the animal part of our nature.
[I-1-10]
¹⁰

If our bodies could make us truly happy, not just for a moment but permanently, then this would be unarguable evidence that alcohol, drugs, sex, food, beauty, fame, and money have been given to us for our guilt-free enjoyment. But experience demonstrates that this isn’t the case. Every body eventually withers and dies along with the hopes for happiness placed in it. And even while we remain in materiality, the soul remains hungry after every meal of physical sensation, no matter what is served.

Only when the soul is able to enjoy the light of spirit in the World of Forms will it finally begin to enjoy true bliss. The sage no longer seeks solace through outer activities and external sensations because a much greater source of satisfaction has been found within.

The illumination which comes from the Intellect gives the soul a clearer, brighter life, but a life which is not generative. On the contrary, it turns the soul back upon herself and does not allow her to become dispersed, but rather makes her satisfied with the splendor within her.
[V-3-8]
¹¹

Since people have an outer life and an inner life, there are two different kinds of virtue. The lower civic virtue is a foundation for the higher purificatory virtue. Basically civic or social virtue encompasses the qualities and behaviors we normally associate with a good person: prudence, justice, civility, generosity, honesty, kindness, courage, temperance, and so on.

The civic virtues … do genuinely set us in order and make us better by giving limit and measure to our desires, and putting measure into all our experience.
[I-2-2]

The civic virtues aid in turning our attention away from physical concerns and pleasures, and toward spirit and the One. We might think of them as giving us some wriggle room, loosening the ties that bind us to materiality enough to allow us to turn toward the purificatory virtues that lead fully to spiritual freedom. For Plotinus says that a good man who possesses the lower virtues is not necessarily godly, while a godly man who has the higher virtues will necessarily be good. Thus the lesser comes along with the greater but by itself the lesser does not lead to the greater.