Plotinus (204–270)

the soul is a meteor / a blossom of light / burned by harsh skies. so influential it is the skeleton key to Christian thought and Renaissance Painting, a primary text alike the Timaeus, the Vedas, the Nikayas (which all happen to rhyme), and an indispensable guide to the mystic on how to become One with the Void. scaling up the Ennead of Parmenides 8 1 affirmative/negative to eventually reach the Top, an ineffable meta-principle. the circle of emanation and return is the ultimate story of the stuttering of the One, recoils of shots in the War in Heaven that sparked between the logos and the void that took place before the Fiat Lux, the war was not fought with missiles and spears but axioms of being, propositions and proofs in the vacuum. and God won through reflexion: in the Nothing only the tautology of identity is self-supporting. the One is the ultimate meta-tautology, Atum masturbating ouroborically, a self-study in henosis. the main concepts are the arborescent hierarchy of the One-Being-Intellect triad. this fractalizes and is responsible for spirit's descent into matter which one must eventually escape by tracing back up the emanationist ladder one has tragically fell down from. oneness is goodness because individuation commits an object to being an intelligible unity. there can be no distinction between inside and outside within the One, being and center as a dimensionless point, God's being is his centrality and yet also this flickering as its own emanationist contraction and expansion in all its quasi-gnostic contours with theses like the badness of Nature but doesn't quite reach finality. finality as gnosis cannot be voiced or even thematized, yet even a deeper truth is the apophatic non-conceptualization of a negative/unknowable God is yet another capture mechanism, the inclusion of its own negation within the meta-logic in the Game with Being as an internal production of the One, that black hole brain structure you see from time to time: the Demiurge is a donut. the annular repetition of the torus coinciding and retroactively refuting yet clarifying Campbell's monomyth: the Hero's Journey is really an immanentized Spirit's journey. somewhere Plotinus says that the Odyssey is the eternal story of the Journey of the Spirit. spirit always has a story to tell precisely because it's there to tell it, because its being and its telling are one and the same. the One's overflow is the jouissance that fissions into Two. there is no room for a positive Evil in Plotinus only privations just as the monists before him, the Nous for him is Good. the Gnostic co-opts it as the origin of Evil, determination: the Demiurge. the je ne sais quoi, things best left unsaid, the black square as an art piece, or better, a black Sphere. man as a creator is himself co-operating in demiurgy, his art and ornament distractions or reminders to re-member your true Self, like how re-membering the limbs of Osiris is akin to restructuring the estranged Self. Plotinus thought the world-soul was something like a star that radiates Light (internality) everywhere and "adheres" only in that substance given to adhere to it and this mutual relation between ground and issue became the principle of non-contradiction. the One neither is one, nor is. the hierarchy of Spirit is the only hierarchy climbed by its recognition: it is hierarchy as such, of which all others participate in only formally. the chain of being as it should be. symbols speak in rhizomatic bursts of signification. there will come a time you'll read in color. the One overflows because it overflows, yet this statement seems more like an evasion than anything else and perhaps even neoplatonism is yet another root in this meta-intellectual fingertrap of the Demiurge, which is the God creating this material world easily demonized to a being of affect, terror, sense and horror. one question resounds and echoes after all the mysticalization: why did the One plunge himself into nescience?

he who is self-luminous is his own shadow… (more)

My primary interest in reading the Enneads was finding the foundation for neo-platonic theurgy, therefore a practical interest in post—Plotinian thought in ceremonial Theion Ergon seduced me to read the foundational philosophy. For how, after all should I understand a system without grasping its roots? Although the system stemming from the Chaldean Oracles is somewhat different from neo-platonic philosophy, it has its motherly embrace there. Here, in the Enneads there is a major-work of a religion (religere - to delimit, after Macrobius) that has simple tenets at its structural approach and an in-depth elucidation for many cases that may trouble the neoplatonic follower. The hypothesis are well-weighted and they are balanced in a clear way, attempting to arrive at faith by reason, not by blind faith. There is not one area of life that may not be read through the lenses of the Enneads, yet the system remains open and compatible with scientific undertakings. Farah Godredj enumerated “three hermeneutic moments” when encountering literature: “Understanding, representation and relational relevance”, in relation to Plotinus, the first is understanding or incorporation that is existential hermeneutics, internalizing the text, giving it a broad setting in the topos, the second is attempting not to “totalitarize” the text keeping relativity in mind, and a multi-faceted approach to the narrative, the last one in short is an approach in building a philosophical ontology of the whole metaphysics, a certain angle of reading. I may add my own: “Explicit act”, that is practiced aretology, practicing beauty and awe, practicing the deification - which is the golden way to theurgy. Exchanging perspective, I put full thrust into the belief-mechanisms of the text and without stripping if of deep metaphysics I fully arrived at understanding a separate, whole, and intricate system of self-referential open ground for interpreting the Divine into it, often-wise I engage the text that produced interesting comparative grounds with my discoveries in theurgy, astrology, other religious systems, sometimes I ignored the more technical parts of it (I read them, but they didn’t appeal to me). Now, I haven’t fully grasped it with a major masterly mind that could recite the dynamics of the system in a flash, that requires years of practice and studies, and I never will, as I would have to be Plotinus and move “with his mind”, but by conversing with his mind via the text I may fully agree that the theology and interpretation that he created via clustered “generalizations” into the particular is beautiful, “arete-ical”, and provides ground for training beautiful men and women, in the ensouled, teological (goal oriented) manner. What gives good fruit in effects is a worthy enterprise.
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Neoplatonism is credited with having its roots in the mystic philosopher Plotinus. He felt that throughout his life, he had repeatedly attained unity with the Supreme Principle, also known as the One. According to his idea, the Intellect, the Soul, and mankind were all manifestations of the One, as were all other material creatures and things. In his worldview, people should strive to achieve union (or reunion) with the One in order to escape the limitations of material reality. Plotinus was a well-known instructor who delivered lectures on this philosophy. One of his pupils, Porphyry of Tyre, eventually organized these lectures into six books with nine chapters each, which he termed Enneads. This book contains a selection from those lectures.

Plotinus’s interpretation of Platonic philosophy centers on his conception of the One, the creator-being. The One is that which makes all things possible; thus he claimed that the One is the penultimate element. It is made up of everything else, yet it remains in the purest form. Plotinus calls this state “the light before the light.” As this purest form, it cannot be described or discussed; living beings can only hope to realize that even with a sense of perfection in meditation, they must be aware that there is a greater perfection that exists.

The One is known only by what it is not; it is not comprehensible, but it is the source of both the intelligence and the soul. These three entities form a trinity that is hierarchical and to a great extent ineffable. The intelligence remind one of the forms of Plato's thought. In addition to clear connections to Platonic philosophy there are resonances with both the thought of Aristotle and the writings of Paul in the New Testament of the Christian Bible.

Plotinus' thought is paradoxical, yet through contemplation it appears to form a natural hierarchical structure that leads from the sentient world to the ultimate source of everything.… (more)