Return to the One (33 page)

But the attainment
[of the Good]
is confirmed when a thing becomes better and has no regrets, and fulfillment comes to it and it remains with the Good and does not seek something else.
[VI-7-26]

We enjoy a good meal but the goodness doesn’t stay with us very long. Hunger returns in a few hours. The same is true of every other sort of physical, mental, or emotional pleasure. Here today, gone tomorrow, or even sooner.

By contrast, what the mystic philosopher seeks is something that satisfies so fully there is no more seeking. Hard to conceive of, but wonderful to envision. Jean Stafford said that “Happy people don’t have to have fun.”
⁴
Neither does the sage attuned to spirit and the One.

This is why the First has no pleasure, not only because it is simple but because it is the acquisition of something needed which is pleasant.
[VI-7-29]

Just as the richest person is someone who has no desire for material wealth, the happiest person has little desire for sensual pleasure. He or she already enjoys the unchanging presence of the Good. A candle does not add to the noonday brilliance of the sun, nor does bodily sensation affect the radiant happiness of the purified soul.

But when he
[the sage]
is experiencing pleasures, health, and lack of pain, he will not consider them an addition to his happiness, nor, when he is in the opposite condition, will he consider them a negation or diminution of it. If one condition does not add anything to a subject, how could the opposite condition take anything away from it?
[I-4-14]
⁵

Fear Is a Fiction

F
EAR AR ISES
when a person feels that his or her well-being is threatened. A hazy future threat may create only a mild sense of concern. A clear and present danger can produce a heart-pounding, adrenaline-pumping, chills-up-the-spine paroxysm of terror. In between these extremes lie the myriad anxieties, frettings, worries, gripes, irritations, and resentments that so frequently course through consciousness.

Like a bird who wants to peacefully enjoy juicy worms on the lawn but is forced to stay on a nervous lookout for cats hidden in the bushes, we rarely are able to relax our vigilance against the threats to happiness that seem to be all around us, and also within us.

Even if we’re happy for the moment, a fear lurks not far beneath the surface of our contentment: “Will this moment last?” For anything that comes, can go. So a happiness dependent on external circumstances spawns a fear that what is currently propping up our well-being will eventually let us down. This is a justified fear, for nothing physical is permanent.

The sage, however, carries his own source of happiness around with him, for it
is
him, his purified soul. Knowing the soul to be immortal, an indestructible drop of the divine ocean that is the One, he smiles at the illusory fears that make other people frown. Fear for him is a fiction.

But we bring our own weakness into it when we are considering whether a man is well off, and regard things as frightening and terrible which the man in a state of well-being would not so regard.
[I-4-15]

Plotinus says we project our own weaknesses onto the world, assuming those defects to be immutable truths. Since
we
don’t feel happy if we’re in great physical distress or in danger of losing our lives, pain and death are considered to be evils, threats to well-being that have to be guarded against.

Much anxious effort on both an individual and societal level is devoted to protecting the fragile crop of happiness each of us is trying to grow in our consciousnesses. It’s taken for granted that illness, poverty, crime, discrimination, lack of education, and the like are locusts able to strip our well-being bare, leaving us bereft of the good life.

And the activities which are undertaken to avoid suffering have fear as their origin.
[IV-4-44]

Fear is so much a part of most people’s lives, as well as the lives of nations, that it is difficult to envision existing without worry. This is, Plotinus teaches, because we can’t envision existing without our bodies. When our physical being is considered the end-all of existence, it isn’t surprising that the prospect of losing some bodily pleasure, or worse, the body itself, fills us with dread.

So too, it will be the body that desires—for it is the body which is going to enjoy the objects of desire—and is afraid for itself—for it is going to miss its pleasures and be destroyed.
[I-1-4]

Fear, then, is as real as the physical form that is afraid of losing some particular bodily sensation while alive, or all sensation after death. More precisely, it is our
psyche’s
identification with a body that makes us afraid, since the unconscious matter that comprises our physical forms obviously can’t be conscious of anything, including fear.

What happens is that one’s wise reason and even wiser spiritual intelligence become overwhelmed by the throng of pseudo-selves inhabiting one’s consciousness. Though ultimately illusory and fabricated by the single self that is the soul, these fragmented pieces of our personality—whom we might personify as Lust, Anger, Greed, and the other familiar vices—are like boorish party-crashers. Open the door of your consciousness to them and they burst right in, wrecking the pleasant conviviality of the higher self and spirit.

When a person feels overwhelmed by fear, passion, depression, sadness or any other human frailty, it’s important to remember that the “I” who is aware of that sensation is separate from the feeling itself. A child runs up to her father or mother and cries, with tears in her eyes, “A monster is under my bed and wants to
eat
me!” The parent hears the fear but doesn’t share it. He or she tells the child that monsters aren’t real, then looks under the bed with her. “See, you were just imagining things.”

In this fashion, the child begins to absorb the adult’s wisdom and way of looking at the world. Children gradually learn that many fears of things unseen are unjustified and that it is the role of reason to distinguish between reality and imagination. Similarly Plotinus urges us to take firm hold of the frightened aspects of our self and tell them, “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t bother me any more with your silly woes and worries.”

If sometimes when he is concerned with other things an involuntary fear comes upon him before he has time to reflect, the wise man [in him] will come and drive it away and quiet the child in him which is stirred to a sort of distress, by threatening or reasoning; the threatening will be unemotional, as if the child was shocked into quietness just by a severe look.
[I-4-15]

Again we come back to the power of presence. As a child can be brought under control by just a stern glance from an authority figure and as a speeding driver slows down at the mere sight of a police car, so is it possible for us to eliminate irrational fears by simply being present to our wiser, higher self. If this doesn’t work, then reasoning with our foolish lower self may be necessary. Whatever means are used, the goal of the mystic philosopher is to stop being afraid of fantasies.

One must not behave like someone untrained, but stand up to the blows of fortune like a great trained fighter, and know that, though some natures may not like them, one’s own can bear them, not as terrors but as children’s bogeys.
[I-4-8]

Cowards never will be able to return to the One because the journey back to God means passing through the gates of death, a fearful prospect to most people. Indeed, Plotinus’s spiritual practice is directed toward the end of separating soul from body. Inevitably this happens at the moment of physical death, but the sage strives to die before his or her death.

In Plato’s
Phaedo,
Socrates speaks with Simmias about this subject.

And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body…. And this separation and release of the soul from the body is termed death? … And the true philosophers, and they only, are ever seeking to release the soul. Is not the separation and release of the soul from the body their especial study?

… And the true philosophers, Simmias, are always occupied in the practice of dying, wherefore also to them least of all men is death terrible…. And is not courage, Simmias, a quality which is specially characteristic of the philosopher?
¹

Plotinus echoes these sentiments.

Courage, too, is not being afraid of death. And death is the separation of body and soul; and a man does not fear this if he welcomes the prospect of being alone.
[I-6-6]

The mystic philosopher attempts to die a living death through spiritual contemplation. Leaving behind physical sensation and mental cognition, becoming again what he or she once was, pure consciousness, the sage dies to illusion so as to be reborn in truth. This is a happy death, free of fear, a choice to live by the higher principle of spirit rather than the lower principle of the senses.

Most people are afraid of death because it is a leap into the unknown. Even though we may have beliefs about what will happen after our last breath, these are unproven hypotheses rather than experientially verified facts. Actually, says Plotinus, what we are before death is what we will be after death. So we need fear the prospect of dying only if we are afraid to examine the reality of our living.

That is, if a person can honestly say, “I have lived a good life,” then it is virtually certain that he or she will enjoy a good death. But if there are things that he or she has done, or is still doing, that are painful to scrutinize, this pain will not lessen after death. So it makes sense to fear death if we haven’t preserved the purity of soul that makes for an enjoyable afterlife. Yet, Plotinus points out, in that case it isn’t death that we should be worried about, but the lives we’ll have to live after dying.

If life and the soul exist after death, then death is a good, all the more so in that the soul is better able to carry out her proper activities without the body. If she becomes a part of the universal Soul, what kind of evil could affect her there?

In general … there is no evil for the soul who has maintained her purity; and if she has not maintained it, then it is not death that is an evil for her, but rather life.
[I-7-3]
²

If our consciousness doesn’t continue to exist after death, then we have nothing to fear, for we will be nothing. But if the soul is immortal and indestructible—and the
Enneads,
as do countless other spiritual writings, tell us that it is—then what should concern us isn’t death but the living that awaits us after dying. Human life is precious not because it is so rare or brief. Rather, its value lies in the opportunity offered to us to become more than human, to learn to live now the true life of soul unfettered by body.

If the mystic philosopher fears anything, it is not making the best use of his or her time in this physical world. There is a reason each of us is here, and it isn’t to make money, have children, get an education, create art, enjoy nature, serve humanity, or any other of the myriad worldly activities that usually consume the bulk of our attention.

Most souls remain caught in an endless cycle of incarnations because their earthly doing prepares them for nothing else than more earthly doing, just as the endpoint of a plant grown to maturity is to bear seeds that make more plants. To Plotinus this is fruitless since what we harvest from the physical branches of the tree of life lacks genuine taste and permanence.

But this world can be a staging ground for leaving it and such is its greatest value. The more spiritual progress someone makes before death, the more elevated will be his or her spiritual position after death. Hence, suicide is not a wise choice since it cuts short the opportunity to further purify the soul. In addition, it is unseemly to be dissatisfied with the course of life that providence has laid out.

And after all, taking drugs to give the soul a way out is not likely to be good for the soul. And if each man has a destined time allotted to him, it is not a good thing to go out before it, unless, as we maintain, it is necessary.
[I-9-1]

Fear of misfortune, including a painful or ignominious death, is only for those who have failed to realize that the Good is always present. The sage knows that what he truly is, soul, never can be taken away from him. So it doesn’t matter what happens to his body, for even the most extreme sort of physical suffering or bodily degradation is a petty frivolity to anyone who knows that matter is a mirage.

There are thousands of things which, if they do not turn out according to his mind, disturb in no way the final good which he has attained.
[I-4-7]

Fear springs from a single presumption: “I can lose something important” (pleasure, wealth, health, life, love, and so on). Plotinus challenges this belief, which is why, for him, fear involves a fiction. A loss is a change but what really exists, true being, is permanent.

So if something presently possessed can be lost it isn’t real and isn’t worth wanting in the first place. It’s a learning experience for a person to feel disillusioned when he doesn’t get something he desired or loses something he had. This is the purpose of life: to separate fact from fiction, reality from illusion. In the end, death will be the greatest disillusion because the soul will separate permanently from the body that presently seems such a prized possession.

If, then, death is a changing of body, like changing of clothes on the stage, or, for some of us, a putting off of body, like in the theatre the final exit, in that peformance, of an actor who will on a later occasion come in again to play, what would there be that is terrible in a change of this kind, of living beings into each other?
[III-2-15]

Always, to die is to live. Those still bound to the wheel of reincarnation will revolve into life in another body. Those freed of the ties that bind them to physical existence will live without body. They will make a “final exit” at death, leaving the stage of materiality to return to the company of spirit and the One.

In either case, as Plotinus says, there is nothing terrible in the transformation of life into life. It is all good, wonderfully free of any reason to fear.