Philosophy of being - Non-Philosophy of The One

Philosophers, we should note at the beginning, are of two kinds: there are those speculative
philosophers who are given to the study and consideration of various theories of cosmology,
ontology, epistemology,
etc.; and who are commonly to be found among the academic professors, theoreticians,
and historians of philosophy.
At a more advanced level, (I would not employ the standard of being more advanced, but of
different types of philosophical interests as far as subject-matter, methodology, attitudes and
other aspects of personality-type go. I would describe this second type as original- and
creative-thinking individuals, eg Plato, Kant, Spinoza, et al) philosophy becomes a thing not
so much taught, as lived, and leads to the direct realization of the nature of reality. (I agree
with some sort of distinction between at least two types of philosophers. Or rather, a
continuum with two opposite poles the one is the professional, living off philosophy,
publishing a lot on the current fashionable ideas, but with few original ideas of her own, more
derivative ideas obtained from other thinkers. The opposite pole will have the very creative-
and original thinking individual, who lives for philosophy. I will not distinguish between the
two opposite poles on the ground of the one being more mystical, but on the basis of
creative-and original thinking. For example where would one place Wittgenstein if one were
to consider only his earlier work, or Broad. Who became increasingly interested in the
supernatural, although he was a scientist and mathematician?)
Those who have attained such a direct realization are (non)philosophers of the second variety,
and are commonly known as mystics. (it is much more complex than this simplistic
distinction by means of mysticism.)
Those who have reached this ultimate level of philosophy have sought and realized within
themselves, (I agree with this fact that some individuals reach this type of self-realization)
through contemplative prayer or meditation, (I am not convinced that these are the only
methods and the nature of these methods need to be described in much greater detail, and
perhaps being investigated to identify how they function and how they bring such changes or
so-called self-realization about) the union of the individual mind with the universal Mind, or
as we may say, the individual soul with the universal Soul. (What are the standards to asses
that this occurred, especially as there are so many fake-gurus and enlightened teachers who
have severe moral and other types of malfunctions or caused scandals. Do the entire or
whole of the person become transformed into god-like unity or perhaps only certain aspects
of her?) This mystical experience is referred to variously as the mystic marriage, the
vision of God, or simply enlightenment. And those who have reached that interior
experiential knowledge do so, not by learning, reason or speculation (alone), but by a divine
(meaning of divine in this context?) inspiration called grace (meaning? And illustrate how
it functions), that draws the soul as if by a magnet toward the interior revelation of its Divine
Source.
(I would suggest that there are many more than the two positions of philosophy as suggested
by the Swami. And, that each position could function or exhibit many different levels and
multiple dimensions. Depending on the particular dimension, the specific level and the
context one deals with, ones style of expression and description will probably vary a great
deal. Certain contexts might require reasoned arguments, coherence of ones descriptions, etc,
while others might allow and enable greater poetic freedom, more visual images and other
types of illustrations in an attempt to identify, express and communicate what one wishes to
convey in an original and creative manner.)

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http://www.themysticsvision.com/uploads/1/3/9/2/13928072/plotinus_the_origin_of_western
_mysticism-rev._2012.pdf THE ORIGIN OF WESTERN MYSTICISM Selected Writings of
Plotinus
Copyright 2000, 2007, 2012 by Swami Abhayananda
Swami Abhayananda Preface, page 8. (My additions inside brackets)

I wish to say something about what precedes consciousness or awareness. For example as is
mentioned in the Swamis book on page 28. We may think of it although, as has often
been stated, It is beyond conceptionas a pure Consciousness But before I can say anything
about this notion, and the many assumptions underlying it and the way in which this word is
used here, I first need to return to the Preface of the Swamis book as there we can begin to
identify a few of the many assumptions that underlie the ways in which the notion pure
Consciousness is used here on page 28. My reason for this critical treatment and questioning
of his use of this notion , and trying to identify his assumptions and make them explicit, is not
because I reject this notion of his use of it, the manner in which he allows it to function, but
because I find some meaning in the notion of pure Consciousness and I wish to say a
number of things about it myself. A number of things that will serve as an introduction to
what I wish to try and attempt to express in words.
The Swami continues , prior to Thought, which, since (I question this which, since..
assumption) It is the primal Source of all that is (I question this statement, it might well be
meaningful and even true, but no argument is made for accepting it) manifested by Thought,
is by extension, the Self of all, (several un-argued for assumptions are made here) our own
eternal Identity. (Look at this jump to our own eternal Identity.)
It may be termed "pure Consciousness," but even this is inaccurate as It is Consciousness
prior to the act of being conscious of anything. (I find this statement of great value the
notion of pure consciousness or I would prefer to refer to it as pre-conceptual consciousness
of awareness.*) Even to say, "It is," is
misleading, since It is beyond Being; (I am in absolute agreement with this existence or
Being, to b, should not automatically be ascribed to or projected on it, or on whatever one is
aware of during pre-conceptual consciousness) even the word, "prior," connotes causal or
temporal sequence, (I am in complete agreement with this acute perception do not
automatically ascribe temporality to it, without arguing for it, if that is what one wishes to
do). It is beyond both Time and Causation. (I agree, until and if one wishes to argue for its
time and causation.) Nothing can be rightly said of It, but we must settle upon a name in
order to speak of It, and so we may choose "Consciousness," "the Self," "The One," The
First," or "The Good," despite their
inadequacy. (I am in absolute agreement about both points a) nothing can be said about it,
pre-conceptual consciousness, and my reason for this is: until one has argued for whatever
predicates or characteristics one wishes to ascribe to it and b) let us call it something,
anything, so as to be able to refer to it, or allow it to function in our descriptions and ideas,
for example X, the one Real Self, Sophos, Consciousness, The One, etc).
The One, we must remember, is not something standing behind the manifold, as a separate
thing, but is the One by which, in which, and from which all that is manifest exists. (I cannot
agree or disagree with this as too many assumptions are made and I would have to identify

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and make them explicit.)The manifest universe comes forth from the Divine Mind which is
the active, creative Power of The One. (Again, too many assumptions.)
Now having made the above remarks concerning this paragraph I can return to the Preface of
the book and deal with a number of statements made there.
I agree with the existence of pre-conceptual consciousness. One merely needs to concentrate
on one sense, for example touch and the experience, feeling or qualia concerning it prior
to thinking about it, to even thinking it in words, concepts, colours, tastes, etc. I have
experimented with this with different senses and from personal experience, for what it is
worth, I can state that pre-conceptual, or pure consciousness or awareness is possible, without
employing concepts, or applying concepts to what one feels, or experiences.
For much more on this and detailed analysis of the nature of this see for example
https://sites.google.com/site/philosophyphilosophizing/monism/moller-de-la-rouviere-
spirituality-without-god-s

http://www.spiritualhumanism.co.za/
By the author - The first edition of my book: Spirituality Without God has now completely
sold out. May I take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to those who have
purchased this book and to the great many readers who have given me such overwhelmingly
positive and insightful feedback. Many of your constructive suggestions have been
incorporated into the material shared in the new book to make it a truly accessible instrument
for spiritual unfolding.

My new book: THE ONLY AWAKENING addresses many of the issues described in the
original work, but attempts to present these in an even more lucid way. THE ONLY
AWAKENING also contains illuminating new articles, replies to questions from interested
readers of Spirituality Without God and offers new insights into the immediate availability of
awakened living.
http://nonduality.com/hl2947.htm
https://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Without-God-Moller-Rouviere/dp/1595261419
Guidelines to spiritual enlightenment, sustainable emotional equanimity, and fulfillment of
their own human potential, with a radical departure from traditional religious and spiritual
conventions. Mller's unique concept of Spiritual Humanism brings the spiritual quest back
into the human realm.
Spirituality Without God Paperback March 15, 2005
by Moller de la Rouviere (Author) These reviews sum up why I include this book. No talk of
gods, the divine etc and the author expresses at least as much about self-realization, The
One, unity with the one, the Real Self, etc as Plotinus and those mentioned by the Swami.
Top Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars...clearly points to what needs to be done.
By Heather L. on August 3, 2007
In "Spirituality Without God", Moller de la Rouviere has provided, at long last, a clear path,
starting from the separate self, right through to total self-transcendence.
De la Rouviere presents the ancient teachings of non-dualism in a most human and
understandable way. The book, although very readable, is both challenging and original.
However, the real challenge begins when you finish reading it and start the actual work of
enquiring into your true nature. It will become quite evident, in your own experience, that
anything you could "seek" for is (literally) right in front of your nose. Everything you need

3
along the path is inherent in your own humanity. De la Rouviere sensitively anticipates the
struggles we are all bound to run into during this process of self-enquiry and self-
transcendence. He gently takes the reader through these difficulties and explains how to work
with inner disabilities in a creative and freeing manner.
He is the first writer that I know of to completely integrate human psychology with
contemplation, self-transcendence and the notion of non-duality. Nothing is ignored and he
encourages the enquirer to face both themselves, and how they look at the world, head-on.
This book is not one of the latest stream of God and religion bashers (Hitchens, Dawkins etc)
but rather a celebration of truly "Human" spirituality. "God" in this book becomes something
like a big bag of gold in a rowboat full of people. In another time and context the gold might
have been useful but in this context, it's simply too much weight and will inevitably have to
be thrown overboard, leaving those on board to discover for themselves how to find their true
spiritual nature.
This is where 'Spirituality Without God" comes into its own. It clearly points toward what
needs to be done.Read more
Comment 6 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
5.0 out of 5 starsAt last, a breath of fresh air regarding spirituality!
By R. Michael K. Adamson on August 11, 2005
Don't let the title of this book throw you! It is not "blasphemous" at all. In fact, it's just the
opposite!

In his most refreshing book - refreshing because it is completely free of all jargon and
theories - Mller de la Rouvire offers a common sense, step-by-step, logical, and self-
verifiable approach for directly experiencing the non-dual state that gobs of mystics, saints,
sages, pundits, yogis, and theorists have talked about and argued over for centuries.

If you're looking for a genuine way to dissolve your sense of being separate from "that which
is", a way that won't get you addicted to following a pet theory or becoming a slave to a
"guru" of any kind, this is the book to read! It's an exceptionally clear and effective guide, but
simply reading the book is not enough! You have to do the necessary rigorous self-inquiry
and investigation yourself! Believe me, it'll be worth it! I recommend "Spirituality Without
God" wholeheartedly and unreservedly.

Michael Adamson, Ph.D./abd

San Diego, CA
(...)
Comment 12 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
5.0 out of 5 starsClarity at last....
By Espen on October 5, 2005
I have read and been inspired by some of the recognized heavyweights of spiritual teachings
such as Adi Da, Krishnamurti, Osho, Wilber and many others which are all great all working
on the principle of pointing in the direction of liberation, while undermining your tightly-held
beliefs about the way you perceive the world and yourself in it.

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Where they all fail to be clear however, Moeller succeeds! Immediately when I read the first
pages, I knew he is onto something....it hit me right in my gut. Moeller in principle does not
point in the direction of anything - unlike the others - because once you do....you start
conceptualizing and fantasizing about a spiritual reality better than your current life situation,
much like when you dream about a new car to make your life better, which makes it into a
spiritual conquest rather than an unfolding or unblocking to live your full potential. Moeller
simply lays out clearly what clouds a clear and unobstructed reality. He prevents you from
daydreaming about this, and ties you down to the simple problems of unconscious addiction
to thought, the impossibility of wholeness under the reign of the unconscious workings of
attention, and laying a solid framework where transformation actually can take place.

Now let it be clear you cannot read your way to enlightenment, but you can lay a solid
foundation and a working plan to get you going and this is where most writers on the topic
fail, but where Moeller's success is evident and manifested on every single page of the book.
Comment 14 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
5.0 out of 5 starsInner emotional and psychological work
By Vicente C. Sabda on August 25, 2005
For years I've been puzzled why those who advocate practical work on self promote a God-
centered path. Spirituality Without God, for those who have actually worked on self, is a no-
brainer,...there can be no authentic spirituality through belief in a God. This is a new genre of
discourse that focuses on self-reliance and Spiritual Humanism, thus belief, dogma and faith
are not needed.

I got through the first chapters of Spirituality Without God with the interest of an orienteer
beginning an awaited quest, but by the middle, in the words of the American TV commercial,
was wondering 'where's the beef'. The table setting, subordinate meal and garnishings, like
passive awareness, looked great, but where was the main course, Like a cordial guest, I
stayed at the table, munching on the finger food, when at the end, in the last two chapters,
Moller delivered on much of what was promised.

Mller de la Rouvire's insights into what he calls the inner emotional and psychological
reactivities which fragment and distort our lives brings a fresh perspective of the self-inquiry
work necessary for us, as he says, to begin participating willingly and joyfully in the natural
and effortless demise of our deeply-held misconceptions about life.

I disagree on a few premises, like the popular notion of the Copenhagen Interpretation that
"everything is because we are,...without us, there is nothing." In my view, there is no need of
a human involvement for the universe to be. Overall however, the book is very worth the read
by those interesting in liberating themselves from core beliefs that keep us bound to a false
reality. Until we understand the false in us, transformation is futile.

Farewell God,...Welcome to the Birthing of Human Beingness.

5
VISIT THE SPIRITUAL HUMANISM FOUNDATION HOMEPAGE FOR
ARTICLES, SAMPLE CHAPTER AND OTHER INFORMATION.

Awaken to the Power of Being

Going beyond words, images, beliefs and conventional spiritual dogma, Mller de la
Rouvire describes in engaging, lucid detail a radical and original way to sustainable inner
awakening. His humanistic, practical and iconoclastic approach explains in simple, direct
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insightful, yet practical way, the reader is taken on a unique journey of self-discovery to the
heart of their own spiritual reality. The book not only challenges existing traditional
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Discover the living truth of your own spiritual being.

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Be who and what you are, prior to confusion, disempowerment and life-negative
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A LIVING GUIDE FOR SPIRITUAL SEEKERS, FREE THINKERS, CONTEMPLATIVES,

HUMANISTS, SPIRITUAL TEACHERS AND ALL OTHER STUDENTS OF LIFE

http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/teachers/enlightenment_moller.htm
In response to Andrew Cohens widely read, and generally excellent, magazine: WHAT IS
ENLIGHTENMENT?, I felt that perhaps this question could be meaningfully approached
from the perspective of SPIRITUAL HUMANISM.

For those who are not acquainted with my work in this regard, may I just briefly mention
some of the core principles of SPIRITUAL HUMANISM relevant to the discussion of What
is Enlightenment?.

SPIRITUAL HUMANISM is an approach to integral, holistic living founded entirely upon

the circumstance of human life and nothing else. SPIRITUAL HUMANISM is human-
centric to its core. It regards human life, as it reveals itself from each living moment to the

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next, as the only basis from where we could allow for the non-dual simplicity of our natural
condition to unfold. SPIRITUAL HUMANISM argues its case for the non-dual truth of life,
not from a presumed eternal Ground of Being, but from the reality of human experience
alone. It rejects the notion of some Substance of which human life is presented as but a
temporary modification or manifestation, and rather suggests that human nature, freed from
the self-created obscurations to the simple truth of our natural, non-dual condition, will reveal
itself as whole, sane, loving, intelligent and effectively functional.

However, Spiritual Humanism not only takes issue with the Substance-based Brahmanical
tradition. It also questions the insight of the Secular Humanist movement which believes that
rationality and scientific materialism are adequate instruments to deal coherently and
creatively with the complexity of human life. (For critical essays relating to both the
Brahmanical Substance theory and the Secular Humanist notions, please visit my webpage:
www.spiritualhumanism.co.za).

Whereas the spiritual traditions, therefore, present transcendental living in terms of

something eternally Other than human life, the Secular Humanists are critically skeptical of
the notion of anything transcendental, referring to all forms of transcendent experience as
nothing but altered states of consciousness which may serve some useful purpose, but which
ultimately have to be verified by, and contextualized within, the rational, scientific
framework. SPIRITUAL HUMANISM suggests that there is indeed a transcendent truth to be
realized and lived, but that this truth is founded upon nothing but human life itself. What has
to be transcended is the limited and limiting view of the separate self-sense in order for us to
come upon that which is truly human and humane. Duality is of the order of the presumption
of self. Non-duality is that which remains in each and every living moment when this self-
projection no longer intimates itself as the core of our being. And this is to be realized and
actualized in nothing but our human condition.

Freed from the baggage of conceptual and mere philosophical bias, SPIRITUAL
HUMANISM looks at human life afresh and brings new and challenging insights, not only to
how we function in relation to the challenges of life, but also, how we approach the question
of integral living from a human-centric perspective. And it is with regard to this last question
that we may attempt to give meaningful consideration to the question: What is
Enlightenment?

To give coherency and substance from a humanistic perspective to the notion of

enlightenment, it may be useful to remind ourselves that we will be entering new and
somewhat turbulent waters as this notion has never before been described in purely
humanistic terms. It may therefore be useful for us to put aside all preconceived ideas about
what enlightenment might be or feel like, and discover with a new and open mind and heart,
if there may indeed be a form of freedom from self which is founded entirely within the
human condition. Throughout history our investigations in this regard have always fluctuated
between either God or materialism. We were guided to accept either the materialistic
viewpoint of science and rationality, or seek for the answers to life in some or other
representation of the Great Other. And as enlightenment has never been an aspect of scientific
enquiry, we were generally left with the religious/spiritual notions of this phenomenon. This

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deeply conditioned our approach to this matter and left us at the mercy of whichever
philosophy might appeal to our prior conditioning or present state of anxious seeking.

SPIRITUAL HUMANISM suggests that there is no permanent state we could call

enlightenment. Human life, because of its unique circumstance, is presented from moment
to moment with new and varying challenges and it has to deal with these as best it can from
both its conditioned and free disposition. We are so deeply conditioned and these pre-
determined mental and emotional responses to the challenges of life have become such an
integral part of our response-ability, that the notion of a permanent state of enlightenment
could be seen as a somewhat unrealistic projection from within the dream which supports the
separate self-sense. Despite what we have been led to believe, there is no clear state or
condition which could universally be described as enlightenment.

Each so-called enlightened being manifests many diverse personal characteristics, and
although many may make mention of feeling unified with some eternal Substance such as
Brahman, Consciousness and so on, or feeling one with the Essence of Mind, God, or even
life itself, these folks often exhibit qualities of response which are still very circumstantially
influenced. So, if enlightenment is to be associated with perfect freedom from worldly
circumstances, (such as we have been led to believe) then it would seem that such
enlightenment has yet to appear on the face of the earth. Perfect freedom from circumstantial
influence is simply a myth perpetuated by the spiritual traditions to lend support to its
programs of strategic detachment from the world without appreciating that any willful
detachment from the world is integral to the dilemma created and sustained by the presumed
separate- self.

In fact, the entire notion of a perfected state has its foundation in the unsubstantiated idea of
some Ultimate Truth which exists prior to manifest human existence and to which the latter
can only aspire. The possibility of perfection of human life has its origin in the projection of
the perfection of this Ultimate state. But as this state remains elusive and not clearly
verifiable under all conditions as a sustainable truth of actual present experience even by
those who claim to stand in the presence of Consciousness, Brahman and so on perfection
within our living human reality remains little more than a comforting mental and emotional
hedge against our inability to deal effectively with the problems and challenges facing us
every day. Many past and present masters of enlightenment have shown to have feet of clay.
Life is not easy even to those who present themselves to their followers as perfected ones.

The insight that SPIRITUAL HUMANISM suggests in this regard is that once we have left
behind the need for our gods (in whichever form they have been presented) in our quest for
integral, holistic living, the notion of perfection need no longer concern us. Enlightenment
or freedom from self-created dilemma is true of us during those times when we are open to
the intelligence and love manifesting from our deeper being. Although we may yearn and
seek to have such freedom as an ongoing theme in our lives, the truth is that we are unlikely
to stand free from all possible circumstances under all conditions. Human life is not, and need
not be perfect as measured against some culturally, or personally, idealized norm of
perfection.

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 Human life is an ongoing experiment in living. It challenges us in many different ways and
our concern should rather be to investigate our responses to these challenges sufficiently in
order to minimize the stress we put on the psychophysical being as a whole as a consequence
of uninspected, self-centered living. Such realism will free us from the added stress of trying
to live up to some kind of projected ultimate perfection. We need to become realists, not
idealists. Enlightened moments are periods of intense reality where we are the circumstance
which previously we abstracted as something we are in, and separate from. The true import of
all human development is to discover a realistic foundation for sane, intelligent, loving co-
arising on as many levels of our being as possible. We need to become fully human, not
gods. The traditional notion of perfect spiritual Enlightenment is part of our idealistic heritage
mistaken for revealed truth. It is empty of true experiential evidence and brings only guilt and
disdain to the already fragmented self-state of which it is a manifestation. No doubt some
individuals may enter into interesting and deeply integrated states of experience, but it would
seem that these states suffer the dilemma of all other states they are circumstantially
influenceable, not perfectly free under all circumstances.

And as freedom is a term generally associated with the enlightened state, we could ask: what
is freedom? Freedom from what? What kind of freedom does SPIRITUAL HUMANISM
suggest is possible during periods of free being?

To answer this question we need to look briefly at the human condition as it functions in its
ordinary pre-inspected fashion. Here we are immediately faced with five fundamental errors
of functioning:

1) Unconscious conditioning. We have the ability to be conditioned and at this stage of

our evolution it seems that we are generally vulnerable to becoming conditioned into all sorts
of misdirected assumptions about life and living. The power of conditioned responses
determines much of our interaction with life. In fact, we may not generally be aware of it,
but each time we act conditionally, we enter into a state of self-hypnotism whereby we take
on the form of the content of the conditioned response. Here no separation exists between
ourselves and this state of self-hypnotism. Action from this perspective is mechanical and
mostly fragmented and unrelated to the challenge at hand.

2) The unconscious association of attention and thought (in chapter three of

SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD I describe a process of inner debilitation I refer to as the
Thought-Attention knot) which creates a reality of living experience founded not upon the
directness of experience, but which is rather created and sustained by thought and attention.
We are not only chronic thinkers (or conceptualizers) we are also most profoundly immersed
in the world of thought. Through the illusory power of the thought-attention reality, we are
so completely identified with our thinking processes that we generally cannot discern
between that which is created and sustained by thought and that which is not. For instance,
our metaphysical projections appear to us as real as any actual present experience. Our gods,
and the religious and spiritual practices (including the notion of spiritual enlightenment)
founded on these beings or presumed states of metaphysical reality are as real (and in many
cases considerably more real) to us than any actual sense experience we may have. Whereas
life as living reality is a process of ever-fresh present arising, we allow ourselves to be

9
conditioned and controlled by uninspected ways of inner functioning which limit the
revelation of our natural, non-dual, free condition.

3) The presumption of the separate self-sense. This could be seen as perhaps the most
fundamental error we commit from moment to moment. The separate self-sense presents
itself as the core of our being, whilst it is nothing but a creation of thought, given life and
reality-status through the thought-attention knot. We are completely identified with this
projection of who and what we are, and live our lives on the basis of this presumption. The
separate self-sense could be seen as the essence of dualistic vision and the active functional
component of all fragmentation - inner and outer.

4) The controlling power of thought over the entire spectrum of our emotional responses.
Our emotions cannot discern between actual happenings and happenings created by
thought. As we think, so we feel. And this close working relationship between thought and
our emotions is made possible through our lack of insight into the domination of thought over
the entire spectrum of human experience.

5) Emotional conditioning which manifests as unrelated and disproportionate emotional

reactivity. Here we notice a series of habitual emotional responses to all sorts of situations
which could only be described as conditioned. Given a certain circumstance and we tend to
react conditionally to these reactions which have debilitating and deeply disturbing
consequences on the coherent functioning of the entire psychophysical structure. As we seem
to have this inherent capacity for emotional memory, it may not be correct to call this
function an error. However, it is nevertheless something we do, and as such forms part of our
ongoing dysfunctional dramatization of all present experience.

Between these five fundamental errors/dysfunctions we get established in a limited,

fragmentary, disempowering, and altogether inhuman way of life which lacks intelligence,
love, compassion and relational integrity. Through the subtle interaction between these we
could say we are established in a profoundly unenlightened condition of self-contraction,
most fundamentally characterized as a feeling of bewilderment, separation, alienation and
unlove.

SPIRITUAL HUMANISM suggests that these are misappropriations of functions which

could in fact be inspected through diligent self-observation, recognized for what they are,
and gradually transcended. We need not suffer a mere series of functional errors.
Enlightenment in a humanistic context could therefore be seen as sustained periods of
freedom from the inhibiting and debilitating consequences of these misdirected functions.
That is, enlightenment based on a coherent functioning of the many subtle instruments which
influence our behavior from moment to moment, would naturally result in freedom from the
ability to be conditioned; freedom from the thought-attention reality, freedom from the sense
of self; freedom from the unconscious hold of thought over our entire psychophysical being
and freedom from both our ability to be emotionally conditioned and emotionally reactive.
( In SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD I describe a complete path which may lead the
practitioner, through insight and meditation, beyond these into a sustainable condition of non-
dual, free being)

10
But for enlightenment to become effective as a dynamic, living principle, it cannot only be
described in terms of what it is not. Such a description of freedom from these unnecessary
patterns of dysfunction needs to be complimented by some indication of what may result as a
consequence of this freedom from our forms of uninspected living. We need to discover
what happens to the being when these errors are sufficiently inspected and gradually
transcended. What qualities could therefore be considered to be unique to the disposition or
condition of free being we may refer to as enlightenment?

Enlightenment embraces all aspects of human functioning: its demand for pleasure and
enjoyment; its need for relationship and relational integrity; the expression of our creative
potential; the need for human love and warmth; the necessity of compassion and care for one
another; the use of our deeper intelligence which is not based on conditioned reflexes; an
open and free emotional response-ability; emotional equanimity; the correct and appropriate
use of all forms of conditioning and, lastly, a quality of humaneness not generally associated
with the self-serving, contracted, separate self-sense.

These are natural to our human condition. They cannot be created as some conceptual
counter-mechanism and dramatized and displayed on the stage where the presumed separate-
self goes through its daily dance of bewilderment. Freedom from that which obscures the
manifestations of our natural disposition exists prior to all effort and doing and it may be
important to realize that such freedom cannot be positively approached it can only be
allowed for. And this process of allowing without strengthening the very mechanisms which
hold our self-limiting state in place, is the challenge human life faces. It is also the challenge
any aspirant to enlightenment has to recognize as a subtle process of gradual self-
transcendence founded upon clear self-observation, self-knowledge, insight and self-
transcendence. Once the unfolding of our natural condition starts to establish itself in our
daily functioning, the bodymind as a whole begins to resonate with the deeper intelligence
associated with this condition and gradually assumes the form of love and intelligence
inherent in the non-dual, free condition of being.

In such moments of clarity, and periods of openness of heart and mind, these qualities
become self-evident as manifestations of the non-dualistic truth of human life. And as we
gradually find our measure in the reality of these qualities of being, and leave behind the old
uninspected ways of functioning, our lives become infiltrated and regulated by the expression
of our natural condition. At first there may only be the rare moments of insight, clarity,
compassion and care. Over time these moments become longer periods of sustained integral
living. And perhaps, for some of us, such enlightenment may become the dominant force in
our lives with only the rare and intermittent shift back into the limited world of self-centered
activity. In time, and with diligence and regular, careful practice, our old ways begin to fall
away by non-use. They may present themselves in our field of awareness, but they become a
vague memory of something that once dominated our lives, but which now has lost its value
and reality-factor. This is true self-transcendence.

At this point of our discussion the reader might sense the valuable insights Spiritual
Humanism brings to the enquiry into the possibility of an enlightened condition. No mention
is made of any ultimate Substance, God or spiritual path to be followed. The enquiry starts
with the human condition and ends with the human condition. This is the only realistic way

11
to approach the very human dilemma of fragmented living. Unless we address those aspects
of ourselves which shield us from that which is truly human and humane, the longing for the
ending of suffering through what we may project as enlightenment will remain just that: a
projection within the creative potential of thought. There is no-one to merge as little as there
is any Thing or ultimate Condition to merge into. What remains when the factor of
separation and fragmentation has been transcended is not of One Taste, as some
philosophers suggest. Rather, when the inner disturbance of the separate self-sense comes to
its natural dissolution, what remains is simply a condition where separation between
experience and any form of present arising is no longer evident. Wholeness is neither One
nor two. It includes the diversity of all forms of present arising. Wholeness and diversity
are not inimical to one another. The experience of wholeness is not of Oneness. Rather in
the enlightened, non-dual condition there is simply no self and therefore not-two. This is
what the term Advaita means: not two. It is the philosophical mind, conditioned into the
notion of the Brahmanical Substance theory that interprets nottwo as One. From this all
sorts of mischief results. Not least what I have called the Neo-Advaitist movement which is
nothing but philosophy. It takes the absurd position that because everything is already of one
Substance, (including all human experience) no practice is possible, as any form of practice
would only lead the practitioner away from that which they already are. This is thought
elaborating on thought. It talks a mere imitation of enlightenment, but cannot deliver, as it
does not address the vast complexity of that which obscures the presumed Substance they
proclaim to be already the case. This philosophy leads only to confusion and further
bewilderment while it presents itself as revealed truth.

We all have the ability to stand free in the disposition of love and intelligence. How we
approach ourselves in order to allow for this freedom to become a real and dynamic force in
our lives, will greatly determine to which extent our lives will become the living reality of
such refined human qualities.

Freedom, like all forms of experience, takes place in the now. There is only one reality and
that is the total, non-dual present circumstance. The enlightened moment is when the
individual stands experientially as this present arising. In this moment his or her
enlightenment is real and genuine. There is no concern for the next moment and in this
condition of wholeness the question: What is Enlightenment? loses its relevance.

Mller welcomes any discussion on the topic and may be contacted at:
mollerdlr@telkomsa.net

Note from Dennis Waite: "This essay does not represent the Advaitin view of non-duality. In
particular: I would say that Enlightenment is not a 'state', 'condition' or 'experience'; is not
associated with 'freedom from worldly circumstance' in an empirical sense; has nothing to do
with 'perfection of life', 'human functioning' or 'self transcendence'; is not a 'force'. There is
no such thing as 'transcendental living' and 'enlightened moments' do not constitute
enlightenment' "

http://www.spiritualhumanism.co.za/
http://www.nonduality.com/hl2947.htm

12
Spirituality Without God, by Moller de la Rouviere

Available through Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Without-God-Moller-

Rouviere/dp/1595261419/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3204061-3748924?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191669508&sr=1-1

Moller de la Rouviere has been a long-time contributor to the online nonduality

communities. He expresses a humanistic nonduality. He writes about his book in the current
American Chronicle. An excerpt follows:

SPIRITUAL HUMANISM - Humanism beyond religion, rationality and science.

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=39371

Once we are willing to question every aspect of our conditioned knowledge which dictates to
us what it means to be human, we may become receptive to a new vision for humanity,
founded in realism, not idealism. We have lived long enough with incomplete models
instructing us how we should live and what human life is all about. These have become
stagnant pools of toxic, outmoded information which controls much of our lives. What is
required now is for us to re-examine many aspects of our functioning to discover the inherent
potential within our nature to deliver us from our misguided, unsuccessful ways of
conducting our affairs. Such an enquiry alone can reveal to us a life of openness and freedom
from self-imposed dilemma.

Spiritual Humanism affords us with all the instruments with which to observe the
mechanisms of our dysfunction and bondage, as well as giving us clear guidelines for how to
allow for true healing to take place from deep within our being. One of the pivotal proposals
that Spiritual Humanism brings to the quest for well-being and integral living, is that we need
to allow ourselves the space and freedom to discover for ourselves the truth or falsehood
about how to conduct our human affairs. No doubt we may learn a tremendous amount from
those who have gone before us, but ultimately each of us has to travel their own path of inner
investigation and self-exploration.

Spiritual Humanism affords us with many practical and realistic ways for investigating
ourselves; methods of practice by which to deconstruct conditioning and allowing us to have
penetrating insights into our own everyday functioning to help us break free from all forms of
mental, emotional and physical preconditions about life and living. It also gives us clear
guidelines on how to achieve human development informed by true intelligence, love and
deep humane values through self-observation, self-knowledge and self-transcendence.

It holds only one fundamental view of human life and that is that it lacks absolutely nothing
for the complete fulfillment of its natural demand for well-being, emotional equanimity,
intelligent living, and the expression of love and relational integrity.

But to come to such clarity, and to have the courage to enquire into life for ourselves and to
find our own measure as human beings, we need to develop a healthy skepticism toward
every aspect of what we socially regard as necessary and valuable.

13
We are caught in a never-ending cycle of confusion, misapprehension, alienation and
unrelatedness. To develop sensitivity toward these, and to see for ourselves how these limit
and control the free expression of our being, we need to develop the art of self-observation
and a fearless spirit of enquiry.

The book: SPIRITUALITY WITHOUT GOD describes a complete path away from the
agony of self-contracted, confused and alienated living to experiencing the freedom of our
natural condition which is the fountainhead of happiness, order, true intelligence and
emotional well-being.

We cannot maintain our complete dedication to all the paradigms of confusion which we
generally use as guidelines for living, while at the same time attempt to gain insight into
where and in which ways these have failed us.

An inner attitudinal shift with regard to our absolute belief in these has to take place. We need
to start our enquiry with an open mind - a mind ready for exploration, risk taking and self-
investigation where nothing is too holy, too definite, too obvious, too true or too pure to be
investigated.

Only in such a mind may flower a new understanding as it makes itself available to insight
and a deeper grasp of reality. This is the valuable starting point for a radically new
investigation into human life which Spiritual Humanism explores and describes. The true
enquiring mind leaves nothing unturned.

Read the entire article here: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?

articleID=39371

~~~

Spirituality Without God, by Moller de la Rouviere

Available through Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Without-God-Moller-

Rouviere/dp/1595261419/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3204061-3748924?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191669508&sr=1-1

2
Now to return to the Swamis Preface
Even those who acknowledge that such a thing as enlightenment exists and is
possible of attainment often find themselves helpless to acquire the one-pointedness of
mind prerequisite to its attainment; ( what does this mean? There exists many types of such
one-pointedness, musicians have it, actors, sportsmen, mathematicians, philosophers, etc all
develop intense one-pointedness) and even those who are capable of reaching such a state of
focused devotion at some time in their lives often find it impossible to retain it (not so, many
professions require this) for a prolonged period. Why some are so divinely (conditioning,
training and personality-types) inspired while the great majority of

14
men are devoid of such inspiration is a matter that can only be explained from the standpoint
of evolutionary soul-development(meaning? No) and/or divine grace.(meaning? No see
Moller de la Rouviere in the previous section.)
Late in his life, in order to share his revealed knowledge with future generations, he wrote
fifty-four treatises of various length expounding diverse elements of his mystical vision.
(These expositions are what I am interested in. Not just what they are, but how they are
presented? What kind of narratives, what type of expositions, arguments, argumentation,
reasoning, etc, being employed. Do the expression, representation and communication of
mystics states require special types of expression, description, argumentation, reasoning or
complete different kinds of expression? Compare for example the Psalms or the poems of
John of the Cross.)
Here we find ahint of some of these things in Plotinus writing and the editing done by the
Swami. An additional difficulty is added as a result of Plotinus' lack of economy and
continuity of expression, which may
be partially explained as a result of his failing eyesight, which prevented him from
editing or even rereading what he had written in his spontaneous outpourings of
thought.
This book therefore attempts a systematic presentation of Plotinus' thought, with
selections from his own writings on distinctly separate elements of his metaphysics, in
order to facilitate an understanding of his integral vision. I have arranged these
selections topically, and while each topic may certainly be read independent of the rest,
they are arranged in an order from first to last that seems to me to best conduct the
reader progressively to a clear understanding of Plotinus' metaphysics. I have left out
of my selections much of what may be considered obscure or redundant, and also a
great deal more in the interest of keeping this book focused and succinct.
(Reasons for good editing) attempted to form a coherent, readable, and hopefully
instructive and illuminative collection of excerpts from his writings for
the benefit of those students interested in mystical philosophy.
Page 12 he usually framed his thoughts in terms familiar to students of Plato; and for that
reason he became labeled in much later times as the founder of Neoplatonism (the new
Platonism).
This is a misleading title, however, for it tends to detract from the fact that, though Plotinus
regarded Platos philosophy as the foundation of his own, his message was ultimately
founded on his own personal realizations. (Hopefully we will discover the nature of these
personal
realizations as this is what it is all about, his personal mystical experiences or being ones
with The One.)

The following quotations from the Swami page 13, concerning what Porphyry, Plotinuss
student said about his master merely evokes many question in me. These descriptions are
typical of disciples presenting their masters, teachers or gurus as being special and/or having
special powers, attitudes and abilities.
In his meetings with his friends and students, Plotinus would explain in an imaginative
and compelling manner the truths of the spiritual life. Says Porphyry:
When he was speaking, the light of his intellect visibly illuminated his face; always of
winning presence, he became at these times still more engaging: a slight moisture
gathered on his forehead; he radiated benignity.1 Plotinus, said Porphyry, lived at
once within himself and for others; he never relaxed from his interior attention unless in

15
sleep; and even his sleep he kept light by an abstemiousness that often prevented him
taking as much as a piece of bread, and by constantly concentrating on his own highest
nature. 2 ...He was gentle, and always at the call of those having the slightest
acquaintance with him. After spending twenty-six years in Rome, acting, too, as arbiter
in many differences, he had never made an enemy of any citizen. 3
Plotinus taught and wrote and discussed questions with his devoted students,
but much of his time was spent in solitary contemplation, leading his soul to union with
its divine Source. Porphyry states that, during the time he knew him, Plotinus attained
that exalted state of awareness four times. (Whatever this means?)When, in his later
years, he became gravely ill, suffering from malign diphtheria, Plotinus retired to the
estate of a nobleman disciple in Campania. A friend who visited him there, reports that
Plotinus, weak and scarcely able to speak, whispered, I am striving to give back the
divine in me to the divine in all. He died soon thereafter at the age of sixty-six.
1. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 13., from Plotinus: The Enneads, trans. by Stephen
MacKenna, abridged by John Dillon, Penguin Books, London, 1991; p. cxii.
2. Ibid. 8., p. cix
3. Ibid. 9., p. cx
Now compare these descriptions with that from the
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/#2
Consequently, there were at least two avenues for originality open to Plotinus, even if it was
not his intention to say fundamentally new things. The first was in trying to say what Plato
meant on the basis of what he wrote or said or what others reported him to have said. This
was the task of exploring the philosophical position that we happen to call Platonism. The
second was in defending Plato against those who, Plotinus thought, had misunderstood him
and therefore unfairly criticized him. Plotinus found himself, especially as a
teacher, taking up these two avenues. His originality must be sought for
by following his path.
The context of his teaching. They seem to be occasional writings in the
sense that they constitute written responses by Plotinus to questions and
problems raised in his regular seminars. Sometimes these questions and
problems guide the entire discussion, so that it is sometimes difficult to
tell when Plotinus is writing in his own voice or expressing the views of
someone else. Typically, Plotinus would at his seminars have read out
passages from Platonic or Aristotelian commentators, it being assumed
that the members of the seminar were already familiar with the primary
texts. Then a discussion of the text along with the problems it raised
occurred.
His views on Plato and Aristotle. But with Plotinus, Aristotle, it seems, was
assumed to be himself one of the most effective expositors of Plato.
Studying both Aristotle's own philosophy as explained by commentators
such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd -- early 3rd c. C.E.) and his explicit
objections to Plato was a powerful aid in understanding the master's
philosophy. In part, this was owing to the fact that Aristotle was assumed
to know Plato's philosophy at first hand and to have recorded it, including
Plato's unwritten teachings. In addition, later Greek historians of
philosophy tell us that Plotinus' teacher, Ammonius Saccas, was among
those Platonists who assumed that in some sense Aristotle's philosophy
was in harmony with Platonism. This harmony did not preclude
disagreements between Aristotle and Plato. Nor did it serve to prevent
misunderstandings of Platonism on Aristotle's part. Nevertheless, Plotinus'

16
wholesale adoption of many Aristotelian arguments and distinctions will
seem less puzzling when we realize that he took these both as compatible
with Platonism and as useful for articulating the Platonic position,
especially in areas in which Plato was himself not explicit.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plotinus/#2
The three basic principles of Plotinus' metaphysics are called by him the One (or,
equivalently, the Good), Intellect, and Soul (see V 1; V 9.). These principles are both
ultimate ontological realities and explanatory principles. Plotinus believed that they were
recognized by Plato as such, as well as by the entire subsequent Platonic tradition.

The One is the absolutely simple first principle of all. It is both self-caused and the cause of
being for everything else in the universe. Note the nature of the narrative, the kind of
reasoning and the type of arguments/ation employed by Plotinus. The One is the absolutely
simple first principle of all. It is both self-caused and the cause of being for everything else
in the universe. There are, according to Plotinus, various ways of showing the necessity of
positing such a principle. These are all rooted in the Pre-Socratic philosophical/scientific
tradition. A central axiom of that tradition was the connecting of explanation with
reductionism or the derivation of the complex from the simple. That is, ultimate explanations
of phenomena and of contingent entities can only rest in what itself requires no explanation.
If what is actually sought is the explanation for something that is in one way or another
complex, what grounds the explanation will be simple relative to the observed complexity.
Thus, what grounds an explanation must be different from the sorts of things explained by it.
According to this line of reasoning, explanantia that are themselves complex, perhaps in
some way different from the sort of complexity of the explananda, will be in need of other
types of explanation. In addition, a plethora of explanatory principles will themselves be in
need of explanation. Taken to its logical conclusion, the explanatory path must finally lead to
that which is unique and absolutely uncomplex. So on to THE One. If the One is absolutely
simple, how can it be the cause of the being of anything much less the cause of everything?
The One is such a cause in the sense that it is virtually everything else (see III 8. 1; V 1. 7, 9;
V 3. 15, 33; VI 9. 5, 36). The causality of the One was frequently explained in antiquity as
an answer to the question, How do we derive a many from the One? Although the answer
provided by Plotinus and by other Neoplatonists is sometimes expressed in the language of
emanation.the derivation was understood in terms of atemporal ontological dependence.

The first derivation from the One is Intellect. Intellect is the locus of the full array of Platonic
Forms, those eternal and immutable entities that account for or explain the possibility of
intelligible predication. Plotinus assumes that without such Forms, there would be no non-
arbitrary justification for saying that anything had one property rather than another. Whatever
properties things have, they have owing to there being Forms whose instances these
properties are. But that still leaves us with the very good question of why an eternal and
immutable Intellect is necessarily postulated along with these Forms.

Plotinus is often presented, especially by the more spiritually inclined as presenting us with
that what he experienced directly in/as the divine, The One, etc (for want of more
appropriate notions), but it is clear that his ideas are interpretations and developments of his
interpretations of Plato and Plato viewed through, Aristotle, or rather his interpretations of
Aristotle. Those so inclined read his words as if they refer to or represent real objects or
existing things, but they are merely concepts, ideas that he arrived at partly from his

17
readings of Aristotle/Plato and drawing out the conceptual implications of his interpretation
of their ideas.

This is why he requires another notion, Intellect, apart from The One. For clarity sake he
could just as well have labelled these notions as x, z, etc. Intellect is the principle of
essence or whatness or intelligibility as the One is the principle of being. Intellect is an
eternal instrument of the One's causality (see V 4. 1, 1-4; VI 7. 42, 21-23). The dependence of
anything below Intellect is owing to the One's ultimate causality along with Intellect, which
explains, via the Forms, why that being is the kind of thing it is. Intellect needs the One as
cause of its being in order for Intellect to be a paradigmatic cause and the One needs Intellect
in order for there to be anything with an intelligible structure.

But, Intellect is not sufficient to explain everything he wants it to do, or fulfil all the functions
he wishes it to execute, so he requires another term, it could be called p so as to prevent it
from becoming loaded with meanings associated with certain ideas, he he prefers to refer to it
as Soul. In addition, the One may even be said to need Intellect to produce Intellect. This
is so because Plotinus distinguishes two logical phases of Intellect's production from the
One (see V 1. 7). The first phase indicates the fundamental activity of intellection or thinking;
the second, the actualization of thinking which constitutes the being of the Forms. This
thinking is the way Intellect returns to the One.

The third fundamental principle is Soul. Soul is not the principle of life, for the activity of
Intellect is the highest activity of life. Plotinus associates life with desire. But in the highest
life, the life of Intellect, where we find the highest form of desire, that desire is eternally
satisfied by contemplation of the One through the entire array of Forms that are internal to it.
Soul is the principle of desire for objects that are external to the agent of desire. Everything
with a soul, from human beings to the most insignificant plant, acts to satisfy desire. This
desire requires it to seek things that are external to it, such as food. Even a desire for sleep,
for example, is a desire for a state other than the state which the living thing currently is in.
Cognitive desires, for example, the desire to know, are desires for that which is currently not
present to the agent. A desire to procreate is, as Plato pointed out, a desire for immortality.
Soul explains, as unchangeable Intellect could not, the deficiency that is implicit in the fact of
desiring.

Soul is related to Intellect analogously to the way Intellect is related to the One. As the One is
virtually what Intellect is, so Intellect is paradigmatically what Soul is. The activity of
Intellect, or its cognitive identity with all Forms, is the paradigm for all embodied cognitive
states of any soul as well as any of its affective states. In the first case, a mode of cognition,
such as belief, images Intellect's eternal state by being a representational state. It represents
the cognitive identity of Intellect with Forms because the embodied believer is cognitively
identical with a concept which itself represents or images Forms. In the second case, an
affective state such as feeling tired represents or images Intellect (in a derived way) owing to
the cognitive component of that state which consists in the recognition of its own
presence

I am not here particularly interested in all the concept and the reasoning that are required so
as to try and present his ideas as meaningful, coherent or consistent, but I quote the following
so as to show that when he, or any philosopher attempts to express some model of ideas,
and try to convince others of their meaningfulness, they are in need of more concepts,

18
executing more functions, etc, etc. There is another way in which Soul is related to Intellect
as Intellect is related to the One. Plotinus distinguishes between something's internal and
external activity (see V 4. 2, 27-33). The (indescribable) internal activity of the One is its own
hyper-intellectual existence. Its external activity is just Intellect. Similarly, Intellect's internal
activity is its contemplation of the Forms, and its external activity is found in every possible
representation of the activity of being eternally identical with all that is intelligible (i.e., the
Forms). It is also found in the activity of soul, which as a principle of external desire images
the paradigmatic desire of Intellect. Anything that is understandable is an external activity of
Intellect; and any form of cognition of that is also an external activity of it. The internal
activity of Soul includes the plethora of psychical activities of all embodied living things. The
external activity of Soul is nature, which is just the intelligible structure of all that is other
than soul in the sensible world, including both the bodies of things with soul and things
without soul (see III 8. 2). The end of this process of diminishing activities is matter which is
entirely bereft of form and so of intelligibility, but whose existence is ultimately owing to the
One, via the instrumentality of Intellect and Soul.

According to Plotinus, matter is to be identified with evil and privation of all form or
intelligibility (see II 4). Plotinus holds this in conscious opposition to Aristotle, who
distinguished matter from privation (see II 4. 16, 3-8).If matter or evil is ultimately caused
by the One, then is not the One, as the Good, the cause of evil? In one sense, the answer is
definitely yes. As Plotinus reasons, if anything besides the One is going to exist, then there
must be a conclusion of the process of production from the One. The beginning of evil is the
act of separation from the One by Intellect, an act which the One itself ultimately causes. The
end of the process of production from the One defines a limit, like the end of a river going out
from its sources. Beyond the limit is matter or evil.

Just look at the many problems he causes for himself, for example, he needs to connect
Intellect and Soul, and of course the The One, the GOOD, Perfect One, but now he ends up
with the problem of imperfection or evil, and in some way he feels compelled to explain the
origin, nature and function of this negative concept, while at the same time allowing The
One to remain pure and perfect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneads#How_to_quote_and_refer_to_The_Enneads

This does not apply to the translation, below, I am using - How to quote and refer to
The Enneads
Since the publishing of a modern critical edition of the Greek text by P. Henry and H.-R.
Schwyzer (Plotini Opera. 3 volumes. Paris-Bruxelles, 1951-1973) and the revised one
(Plotini Opera. 3 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964-1984) there is an academic
convention of quoting the Enneads by first mentioning the number of Ennead (usually in
Romans from I to VI), the number of treatise within each Ennead (in arabics from 1 to 9), the
number of chapter (in arabics also), and the line(s) in one of the mentioned editions. These
numbers are divided by dots, by commas or blank spaces (there is no absolute consensus
about this).

19
E.g. For Fourth Ennead (IV), treatise number seven (7), chapter two (2), lines one to five (1-
5), we write:

IV.7.2.1-5

E.g. The following three mean Third Ennead (III), treatise number five (5), chapter nine (9),
line eight (8):

III, 5, 9,8

3,5,9,8

III 5 9 8

Author(s): Plotinus
MacKenna, Stephen (Translator)
Page, B. S. (Translator)

Publisher: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Grand Rapids, MI

According to the Swami, who presents us with a systematic account around certain themes of
Plotinus. The systematized ideas are of course not found in Plotinus as will be seen from even
a superficial glance at his writings. I am especially interested in two claims made by the
Swami. One, his return and direct vision of God, as stated here, Plotinus was the first
Western philosopher to make an explicit declaration of his own
mystical experience, asserting that he had directly known God and the nature of
Reality, and describing the nature of that experience. He made it clear that, under
certain rare circumstances, one is able to reverse the outward direction of one's
conscious attention, turning it inwardly, so as to have clear and direct experience of
one's original emanating Source. It is Plotinus' discussion of this return to union with
the Divine Source which comprises some of the most inspiring and elevating passages
in his written works. He was one of the great Adepts, proficient in this "return"; and
what he has to say about the nature of God, and about the means to attain direct knowledge of
Him,.
The second aspect or claim that I am interested in is that he seemed to have employed a
method to realize this return to The One. We cannot
come to this knowledge by discursive thinking, nor by the study of philosophy, though
both are valuable insofar as they lead us in the right direction. The words of those who
have "been there" can, however, inspire us, and resonate within us to awaken us to the
truth of that pure Divine Self that is the perennial object of our quest. Plotinus had, on
numerous occasions, attained intimate "vision" of the universal creative process through
contemplative union with the One,. Note that this return is not possible by means of
discursive thinking or philosophy, so what method is to be used? As the swami already
informed us, a simple, systematic reading of Plotinus will not reveal these things to us,
we would have to search through all his writings to find clues concerning these things,
and I suppose then we would have to use a special method, our imagination?, to organize
the insights we discovered.

20
I quote from the swami certain hints that might assist us in finding or identifying that what
We are looking for in Plotinuss writings. I find his style of writing perplexing as it seems
To me it consists merely out of claims or statements after statements. He does not reason for
The claims he makes and to me it is mostly unclear why he is making such statements or
claims, as they do not lead to or are not followed by conclusions, but more, unrelated,
statements
and claims. I do not accept that his style of expression has anything to do with his subject-
matter,
mysticism or spirituality, because there exist numerous other texts concerning this subject
that
are expressed in a clear and systematic manner. Many of the mystical texts of the world
religions
or work on mysticism such as that of FC Happold or Evelyn Underhill are good examples.
The swami page 15 the mystic perceives, through the upliftment of his soul to
identity with that eternal One, the expansive outpouring of the creative Thought-energy
which becomes manifest as the vast universe in which we live. And All who have
experienced their
oneness with the Eternal One say that, from the standpoint of the Eternal, the creative
production of the universe is of the nature of thought; that is to say, that it is an "image,"
or "projection" which emanates from the Creative Power of the One. And yet, while the
Creative Power is produced from the one Reality, it is not that Reality Itself.
The One, the Real, transcends Its own manifestory Power. It is the ultimate Self
of all beings, and It exists alone, giving birth to all that is below It.
I think the word thought is used here in several different ways, see the following on thought,
When we, who live within this thought-world, try to take the world apart to
examine it and discover what it is made of, we find nothing substantial; we find only
emptiness wed to invisible force, creating the image of form. So thought or thinking
or thinking about the world or the thought-world, or as said earlier philosophical reflection
will not be able to assist us as a method to grasp this world, The One, or anything? I suppose
sciences, or their methods, will also not be relevant as the swami continues, To discover its
essence by empirical methods is as futile as it.. Here we find a hint of the method employed
by those who did grasp the one, elsewhere we have treated of some of those individuals
who
have thus awakened to realize this common, eternal Self.
It occurs, they say, quite unexpectedly in a moment of concentrated
awareness focused inwardly. The mind ascends, (ascends?)as it were, to its subtler state, and
from
there to what Plotinus calls the "All-Soul," all the while drawn on by its inherent thirst
to know its Source. When it comes inwardly to a perfect, concentrated stillness, it
emerges from its time-bound isolation as an individual creature, and awakes to its
identity as an all-inclusive creative Power. And yet above that creative Power, at a yet
subtler stage of consciousness,(?) it knows itself as the eternal One from which the creative
Power takes its origin. It knows This, not as an object is known to a knowing subject,
but as its own primary and eternal Identity, much as one knows the existence of his
own integral consciousness while aware also of his inherent capability for multiple
thought-production.
Then follows the type of claim or statement I mentioned earlier, instead of explaining the
Relationship between man and the one, we are presented with a statement, a claim: Man,
Plotinus asserts, is an evolute of the One, containing within himself all
levels of manifestation, from the absolute Unity to the creative Energy, to the soul, to

21
mind, and finally to the gross physical body; and is capable of returning in
consciousness to his Origin.
If we were to search in Plotinuss own writings we will not find an explanation of this in the
next sentence,
but the Swami, by his systematized reading presents us with this explanation:
The soul, seeking God, scans the inner darkness, as though to discover another,
as though awaiting something external to itself to make its presence known. But as
ones concentration focuses within, the mind becomes stilled, and suddenly the seeking
soul awakes. No external has made its appearance; it is the soul itself, no longer soul,
which knows itself to be the All, the One. Like a wave seeking the ocean, the seeker
discovers that it is, itself, what it sought. Here follows a sort of description of the beatific
life, the life in the hereafter, but already lived in this life here and now: Through
contemplation and selfless devotion
to that highest Self, we discover that we are the Life in all life, the integrated Whole of
which all manifest creatures and things are a part. And, at last we awake to the
supremely ultimate Identity, knowing ourselves as the one Light of existence, the
Source of all manifestation, the one God who is the true Self of all, and from Whom all
else follows. But wait for it, there is more to come, more exact details, in fact including
and explanation of what occurs and how or why it occurs.
Those who have risen yet higher (or more inwardly) toward their Source have
experienced themselves no longer as individual separate identities, but rather as
ideational wave-forms on the one integral ocean of Cosmic EnergyThey no longer identify
with the composite of body, mind, and soul, but know themselves as having
their real identity in the entire undivided ocean of creative Energy in and on which
these temporary forms manifest. The conscious awareness focused on this clear vision
of the subtler level of its own reality then moves, as one moving through a fog comes to
a clearing where the fog is no more, to the ultimate and final level of subtlety, the
Divine Source, the Unmanifest. Then, it knows the pure unqualified Consciousness that
is the Father, prior even to the creative Power which acts as creator; and it knows, "I and
the Father are one."
From that vantage point in Eternity one sees Gods own creative Power
manifesting all that has manifest existence in a cycle of creation and dissolution.
Page 18 One witnesses this from that transcendent vantage point,
aware of ones Self as the Eternal One, totally unaffected and unaltered by the
expansion and contraction of the out-flowing creative Forceas a man might watch the
play of the breath or the imagination without being at all affected by its rise and fall.
That One is the final irreducible Reality, and It is experienced as identity. Nothing
could be more certain than the fact that It is who one really is, always was, and always
will be. The swami continues about Plotinuss Philosophy, so we our feet on the ground we
may
be presented with less mystical notions and more philosophical ones.
The Philosophy of Plotinus
Plotinus wrote explicitly of his own mystical experience and the metaphysical
understanding gleaned from it. Throughout history, mystics have attempted to describe
in word and symbol the unitive relationship revealed to them between the transcendent
eternal Reality and the immanent temporal reality. Many, in their desire to explain what they
have come to
know through mystical experience, have attempted to formulate a complete
metaphysical system; that is, an explanation of the entire process of manifestation from
the First Principle (God) to the phenomenal world; from the One to the many; from the

22
eternal unitive Consciousness, which is the source of all, to Its manifestation as soul,
mind and body in this temporal and phenomenal world. Naturally, given the nature of
the mystical experience and the unfitness of temporally-based language to speak of
what is eternal, some conceptual differences exist
Here we are presented with philosophical speculations about the one and the many and other
topics that are familiar to us from the history of philosophical ideas. And this is what we are
informed about,
: Yet despite their linguistic differences, their vision of reality is virtually identical.
And this is to be attributed to the fact that both Plotinus and the authors of the
Upanishads had entered deeply into the nature of their own reality through
contemplation, and had experienced their own natures as identical with ultimate
Reality. We will find the same metaphysical philosophy whenever we look into the
expressed thought of any of those throughout man's history who have experienced
Truth in its fullness through inward contemplation: whether it be the Taoists, Jesus, the
Buddha, Shankara, or any of those others who have reached the summit of human
attainment known as enlightenment.
In such a mystical tradition as the Vedantic (yogic) or the Neo-Platonist, God is
not thought of as someone or something that is extraneous to man, but is rather one's own
innermost identity, one's subtlest (highest) Selfremote from one's normal,
worldly awareness, but never separate from one's individual conscious existence, as it is
the substratum of the individual soul. God, called "Brahman," "Shiva," "the One," or
any number of other names, was never regarded by these traditions as other, as "a
being" extraneous to man, high above him in some actual heaven, as in the Judaic
Biblical tradition, but was always regarded as lying inward or upward at the subtlest
degree of human consciousness. This was the mystical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth as
well: "The kingdom of God is within you," he taught; "You (i.e., the real You, the inner,
eternal You) are the Light of the world."
All those who have seen into the subtlest levels of Reality agree that in the
Eternal, the One, there is a creative faculty, much as in our human consciousness there
is a faculty of thought-production, which, while not separate from the consciousness in
which it inheres, has a capacity unlike that of its source. In the One, the Eternal, the
unchanging primal Consciousness, such a distinct faculty resides. It may be called the
Creative Power. Thus, the One and Its Creative Power compose a duality that is truly
a Unity, as the one is inherent in the other.
Though there were some pre-Socratic philosophers who hinted at such a duality-in-
Unity, it was Plato (431-351 B.C.E.) who gave it detailed expression in his Dialogues.
He explained the "projection" or emanation of the world from God as the manifestation
of "Ideas" produced by His creative Power, which he called the Demiurge. This Power
(referred to in the Vedantic tradition as Shakti, Maya, or Prakrti), is referred to by
Plotinus as Nous (a word used first by Anaxagorus), which is sometimes translated as
"The Intellectual Principle," but which I have rendered as "The Divine Mind."

Here we have examples from the Western history of Philosophical Ideas that we are familiar
with.
One of the many implications and consequences of what we have read so far about Plotinus
is:
The influence these ideas, notions of first principles, the absolute, the underlying ground or
foundation,
etc had and still have on western everyday thinking as well as on philosophy and other
disciplines.

23
This is the point I wish to make and emphasize, that we have internalized and
institutionalized
Many of these mystical notions as if they and the worlds and phenomena they imply,
assume and
refer to are meaningful, functional and necessary ideas. When reading the following from the
Swamis book Plotinus, identify some of the many speculative notions that have become
institutionalized in western philosophy as if they are scientific discoveries based on fact. It is
not only common folk(lol) who
suffer under these contrived, speculative notions, but many disciplines and discourses and
much of
Western culture. We only need to explore some of the notions concerning ethics, law,
religion, beauty, happiness, etc by Plotinus to become aware of the weight of biased,
speculative baggage that are institutionalized and that we internalized, and that are learned
and taught, both formally and informally.
Plato's metaphysics was his assertion that the forms in
the material world correspond to the Ideational forms in the subtler Spirit-world, and
approach perfection as they approximate those Ideal forms. His concept of these
"Ideas" or Ideal Forms which, according to him, exist as perfect archetypal images of
every single material form that exists on earth or in the heavens, was, even in his own time, a
hotly controversial concept. Aristotle (384-348 B.C.E.), though a disciple of Plato
in his youth, found this concept "unnecessary," and challenged it in his Metaphysics.
Plotinus, who lived more than 500 years after the death of Plato, found in Plato's
explanation of reality his own model; and, though he occasionally departed slightly
from Plato's description, he wholeheartedly adopted most of Plato's metaphysics and
terminology. In fact, all of the subjects treated in the following collection by Plotinus
had been treated much earlier in a similar fashion by PlatoPlotinus, in order to explain
the transition from Thought in the Mind of God to material universe, depicted the
process of world-manifestation figuratively as subtle
layers or phases of Divine Thought emanating out from the center, each phase
unfolding at a greater remove from the source, each more deeply enwrapped in
complexity, and therefore cognitive darkness, than its predecessor. At the center he
placed the absolute Consciousness (The One), (how many of our unfounded notions
concerning consciousness date back to such speculative notions?) which precedes
the creative Power (the Divine Mind) just as our own pure consciousness precedes and gives
birth to our
thought-producing faculty. From the Divine Mind comes the All-Soul, in which exist
all the subtle forms of spirits, angels and individual souls, which manifest on three
levels of activity: the intuitive, the intellectual, and the sensible; and, finally, the world
of "matter," which he viewed as the darkness at the outermost reaches of the
illuminating emanation from the Divine. Today, of course, we see the universal
manifestation as occurring nearly fourteen billion years ago, as a Big Bang or Great
Radiation, corresponding to the flash of Thought-energy from the Divine Mind, the
light of which evolved to become the material particles that make up all the forms
within our expanding universe.
Plotinus retained Plato's vision of the multiple "Ideas" inherent in the Divine
Mind, and he speaks frequently of the "Intelligible" or "Spiritual" world, the realm of the
subtle Ideational reality,.. As to his "method" of contemplation, Plotinus offers little in the
way of
instruction. In his treatise on Dialectic, he states that his contemplative method is one of
dialectic, by which he does not intend the ordinary kind of dialectic (this does not matter

24
as his ideas and those of other speculative metaphysics are valued on the basis of
other types of authority than reason, reasoning or argumentations)consisting of a
reasoned consideration of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but rather what we might
regard as "discrimination," such as is indicated by the term viveka in the Indian yogic
system: the discrimination between the Real and the unreal, the Eternal and the non-
Eternal.6 But, of course, this is only one of the elements which he describes as essential
to the process of attaining union with the One. The process he describes is a gradual
one consisting of conformity to virtue,7 purification and disengagement from the
sensual,8 one-pointed love for God,9 the receipt of Divine grace (implied, though not
stated),10 and a contemplative focus on the "Intelligible" realm.11 ..
To sum up: Plotinus describes the original Source of all as the absolute and
transcendent Existence, the unmanifest One. He states that It is beyond all predication
(just thinks of all the word and logical games we still play today concerning term
Such as predicate, predication, etc) as it cannot be described in terms indicative of
any qualities at all. It is the Source of all,and yet is Itself unmoving, inactive; or,
more accurately, beyond motion or activity..
The mystical vision, culminating in the experience of union
with the absolute One, reveals the nature of this First and ultimate Reality. (Just think
of all the terminologies with continue to contrive and how we twist and turn our
thoughts to explain the real, reality, external reality, how we experience, perceive
and think it we truly have not come much further than those archaic notions and
metaphysical speculations in our own philosophical thinking.) Sometimes
Plotinus argues for Its existence as the First Principle by citing his own personal
experience of It as a perceived Reality known through mystical union with It; at other
times he argues merely from the philosophic point of view of logical necessity, in order
to persuade his readers through reason.
This Reality, (The One) self-contained, unqualified, contains within Itself a principle
of Movement, which Plotinus calls Nous (the Divine Mind), the second Hypostasis of
Divinity
Plotinus then posits a third stage of emanation within this one Divinity: the
universal Soul (the All-Soul), which is the active projection of all that is contained
within the Divine Mind. This universal Soul appears particulate as each individual soul;
what we call matter, including all corporeal bodies, results as a later evolute of this
process of universal manifestation. Again, let us remember, these stages of emanation
(hypostases) are not separate individual entities, or gods, but are "evolutes" or "levels of
manifestation" of the One, originating in and from the One, never being severed from It
. The One, The Divine Mind, and the Soul, are treated extensively by Plotinus
in the following first three sections. In subsequent sections, he treats of love, divine
beauty, the soul's free will, (ha ha! Another term that still keeps us captive!) its ultimate
purification and return to Unity, and the freedom and joy inherent in the soul's
awakening to God-consciousness. Pages 23-24.

In this section I will attempt to deal with what Plotinus says about the Good, or he One

NINTH TRACTATE.
ON THE GOOD, OR THE ONE.

25
 1. It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings. (Obviously the notion of unity
plays an important role in his thinking. Unity is that what will happen, or be,
to the soul at the end when it resembles The Unity or The One).
quite other things as many others, precisely, as possess unity.
Health, similarly, is the condition of a body acting as a co-ordinate unity. Beauty
appears
when limbs and features are controlled by this principle, unity. Moral excellence is of
a soul
acting as a concordant total, brought to unity.
Come thus to soul which brings all to unity, making, moulding, shaping, ranging to
order there is a temptation to say Soul is the bestower of unity; soul therefore is
the
unity. But soul bestows other characteristics upon material things and yet remains
distinct
from its gift: shape, Ideal-Form and the rest are all distinct from the giving soul; so,
clearly,
with this gift of unity; soul to make things unities looks out upon the unity just as it
makes
man by looking upon Man, realizing in the man the unity belonging to Man

2. It may be suggested that, while in the unities of the partial order the essence and the
unity are distinct, yet in collective existence, in Real Being, they are identical, so that when
we have grasped Being we hold unity; Real Being would coincide with Unity. Thus, takin the
Intellectual-Principle as Essential Being, that principle and the Unity Absolute would.. We
found that anything losing unity loses its being.
Now the being of the particular is a manifold; unity cannot be a manifold; there must
therefore be a distinction between Being and Unity. Thus a man is at once a reasoning living
being and a total of parts; his variety is held together by his unity; man therefore and unity
are different man a thing of parts against unity partless. Much more must Collective
Being,
as container of all existence, be a manifold and therefore distinct from the unity in which
it is but participant.
Again, Collective Being contains life and intelligenc

(It seems to me that Plotinus creates all sorts of problems in an attempt to argue for
unity, the many different ways in which he uses this notion.)
Above all, unity is The First: but Intellectual-Principle, Ideas and Being, cannot be so;
for any member of the realm of Forms is an aggregation, a compound, and therefore
since components must precede their compound is a later.
Other considerations also go to show that the Intellectual-Principle cannot be the First. .. nce
Thinker and Object of its Thought, it is dual, not simplex, not
The Unity:.. In sum: The Unity cannot be the total of beings, for so its oneness is annulled; it
cannot
be the Intellectual-Principle, for so it would be that total which the Intellectual-Principle is;
nor is it Being, for Being is the manifold of things.

3 What then must The Unity be, what nature is left for it?
No wonder that to state it is not easy; even Being and Form are not easy, though we
have a way, an approach through the Ideas.
The soul or mind reaching towards the formless finds itself incompetent to grasp where

26
nothing bounds it or to take impression where the impinging reality is diffuse; in sheer
dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is painful; (This pain is described by
most mystics, eh Underhill, Ruysbroeck, etc. Plotinus gives as reason for this pain to be that
the soul
does not, yet, find unity, the unity it thinks it needs and desires.) often it seeks relief by
retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense, there to rest as on solid ground,
just as the sight distressed by the minute rests with pleasure on the bold.
Soul must see in its own way; this is by coalescence, unification; but in seeking thus to
know the Unity it is prevented by that very unification from recognising that it has found;
This state sounds like what John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Underhill labels as the
Dark Night of the Soul. A state common to Western or Christian mystics. Perhaps it is real,
or perhaps it is part of their socialization, acculturation, part of the customs of their
tradition?)
it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this intuition. Nonetheless, this is our one
resource
if our philosophy is to give us knowledge of The Unity. (Here we now see why Plotinus
analysed
unity in many different ways and gave all sorts of illustrations of what it is and what it is not.
The
notion of unity here seems to function as the means as well as the end to be attained?)
We are in search of unity; we are to come to know the principle of all, the Good and
First; therefore we may not stand away from the realm of Firsts and lie prostrate among the
lasts: we must strike for those Firsts, rising from things of sense which are the lasts. Cleared
of all evil in (Western mystics emphasize this purification, often as the initial stage of the
journey.)
our intention towards The Good, we must ascend to the Principle within ourselves; from
many,
we must become one; only so do we attain to knowledge of that which
is Principle and Unity. We shape ourselves into Intellectual-Principle; we make over our
soul in trust to Intellectual-Principle and set it firmly in That; thus what That sees the soul
will waken to see; it is through the Intellectual-Principle that we have this vision of The
Unity; it must be our care to bring over nothing whatever from sense, to allow nothing even
of soul to enter into Intellectual-Principle: with Intellect pure, and with the summit of
Intellect..

The Unity, then, is not Intellectual-Principle but something higher still: Intellectual-
Principle is still a being but that First is no being but precedent to all Being; it cannot be a
being, for a being has what we may call the shape of its reality but The Unity is without
shape, even shape Intellectual.
Generative of all, The Unity is none of all; neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor
intellect nor soul; not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time: it unique in form or,
better, formless, existing before Form was, or Movement or Rest, all of which are
attachments of Being and make Being the manifold it isNote, similarly, that, when we
speak of this First as Cause, we are affirming something
happening not to it but to us, the.

(In the following we see more of the passion that drives the mystic, and the philosopher(?) in
his quest.

27
4. The main part of the difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by
knowing nor by the Intellection that discovers the Intellectual Beings but by a presence
overpassing all knowledge. In knowing, soul or mind abandons its unity; it cannot remain
a simplex: knowing is taking account of things; that accounting is multiple; the mind, thus
plunging into number and multiplicity, departs from unity.
Our way then takes us beyond knowing; there may be no wandering from unity;
knowing and knowable must all be left aside; every object of thought, even the highest, we
must pass by, for all that is good is later than This and derives from This as from the sun all
the light of the day. (Here are practical advice for disciples, for those who wish to walk this
path,
we often find that in the sayings of the Desert Fathers as well.)
Not to be told; not to be written: in our writing and telling we are but urging towards
it: out of discussion we call to vision: to those desiring to see, we point the path; our teaching
is of the road and the travelling; the seeing must be the very act of one that has made this
choice.
There are those that have not attained to see. The soul has not come to know the
splendour There; it has not felt and clutched to itself that love-passion of vision known to
lover come to rest where he loves. Or struck perhaps by that authentic light, all the soul lit
by the nearness gained, we have gone weighted from beneath; the vision is frustrate; we
should go without burden and we go carrying that which can but keep us back; we are not
yet made over into unity.
From none is that Principle absent and yet from all: present, it remains absent save to
those fit to receive, disciplined into some accordance, able to touch it closely by their
likeness..

5.
Those to whom existence comes about by chance and automatic action and is held
together by material forces have drifted far from God and from the concept of unity; we are
not here addressing them but only such as accept another nature than body and have some
conception of soul.
Soul must be sounded to the depths, understood as an emanation from Intellectual-
Principle and as holding its value by a Reason-Principle thence infused. Next this Intellect
must be apprehended, an Intellect other than the reasoning faculty known as the rational
principle; with reasoning we are already in the region of separation and movement: our
sciences are Reason-Principles lodged in soul or mind, having manifestly acquired their
character by the presence in the soul of Intellectual-Principle, source of all knowing.
Thus we come to see Intellectual-Principle almost as an object of sense: ..

Before it there is That which must transcend the noblest of the things of Being: there
must be a prior to this Principle which aiming towards unity is yet not unity but a thing in
unitys likeness. .. That awesome Prior, The Unity, is not a being.
the nearer approach to it is through its offspring,
Being: we know it as cause of existence to Intellectual-Principle, as fount of all that is best,
as the efficacy which, self-perduring and undiminishing, generates all beings and is not to
be counted among these its derivatives, to all of which it must be prior.
This we can but name The Unity, indicating it to each other by a designation that points
to the concept of its partlessness while we are in reality striving to bring our own minds to
unity.

6.

28
 In what sense, then, do we assert this Unity, and how is it to be adjusted to our mental
processes?
transcending, most utterly without need.
Any manifold, anything beneath The Unity, is dependent; combined from various
constituents, its..
The sovranly self-sufficing principle will be Unity-Absolute, for only in this Unity is
there a nature above all need, whether within itself or in regard to the rest of things. Unity
seeks nothing towards its being or its well-being or its safehold upon existence; cause to all

7 (on concentration see for example Moller de la Rouviere who suggests many techniques
and
Practices for this)

In our daily affairs we cannot hold an object in

mind if we have given ourselves elsewhere, occupied upon some other matter; that very
thing must be before us to be truly the object of observation. So here also; preoccupied by
the impress of something else, .. In sum, we must withdraw from all the extern, pointed
wholly inwards; no leaning to
the outer; the total of things ignored, first in their relation to us and later in the very idea;
the self put out of mind in the contemplation of the Supreme; all

Is then this centre of our souls the Principle for which we are seeking?
We must look yet further: we must admit a Principle in which all these centres coincide:
it will be a centre by analogy with the centre of the circle we know

Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when
we put otherness away. It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion:
we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become present. We are always before it: but
we do not always look: thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, may turn
away from that centre to which all should attend: let it but face aright and it sings with
beauty, present effectively. We are ever before the Supreme cut off is utter dissolution;
we can no longer be but we do not always attend: when

That our good is There is shown by the very love inborn with the soul; hence the constant
linking of the Love-God with the Psyches in story and picture;
The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a
daughter for a noble father;
Those to whom all this experience is strange may understand by way of our earthly
longings and the joy we have in winning to what we most desire remembering always
that here what we love is perishable, hurtful, that our loving is of mimicries and turns awry
because all was a mistake,
we must put aside all
else and rest in This alone, This become, This alone, all the earthly environment done away,

10.
But how comes the soul not to keep that ground?

29
Because it has not yet escaped wholly: but there will be the time of vision unbroken, the
self hindered no longer by any hindrance of body
In our self-seeing There, the self is seen as belonging to that order, or rather we are
merged into that self in us which has the quality of that order. It is a knowing of the self
restored
to its purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help talking in
dualities, seen and seer, instead of, boldly, the achievement of unity. In this seeing, we neither
hold an object nor trace distinction; there is no two. The man is changed, no longer himself
nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it:

(The state of the beatific life or the Unitive Way or state described)

11. This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate:
the Supreme is not to be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to
the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see. There were not two; beholder was
one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed
by this mingling with the Supreme must if he only remember carry its image impressed
upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity;
no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning
is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self; caught away,
filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns
neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become
very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the beautiful; he has risen beyond

There, indeed, it was scarcely vision, unless of a mode unknown; it was a going forth
from the self, a simplifying, a renunciation, a reach towards contact and at the same time a
repose, a meditation towards adjustment. This is the only seeing of what lies within the
holies: to look otherwise is to fail.
Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God
is known; the instructed priest reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the
vision of the inaccessible.
Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they
will know their source and Principle since by principle they see principle and are linked
with it, by like they have contact with like and so they grasp all of the divine that lies within
the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still craving something, that which only
the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have overpassed all, is the All-
Transcending.
.When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self;
thus detached, (John of the Cross talks of absolute detachment) it is not in nothingness
but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.
There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes
identical with the Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the
Supreme: if from that heightened self we pass still higher image to archetype we have
won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we awaken the virtue within until
we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the burden and move
by virtue towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme.
This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the
alien that besets.

30
6

In this section I will present how the swami interprets Plotinuss ideas of The One as
described in the last section (number 5).
THE ORIGIN OF WESTERN MYSTICISM
Selected Writings of Plotinus
Edited, with Introduction and Commentaries, by
Swami Abhayananda
According to the Swami the revealed transcendent source of all is known by many names in
world religions, this is what Plotinus calls The One. although, as has often been stated, It is
beyond conceptionas a pure
Consciousness, prior to Thought, which, since It is the primal Source of all that is
manifested by Thought, is by extension, the Self of all, our own eternal Identity.
It may be termed "pure Consciousness," but even this is inaccurate as It is
Consciousness prior to the act of being conscious of anything. Even to say, "It is," is
misleading, since It is beyond Being; even the word, "prior," connotes causal or
temporal sequence, and It is beyond both Time and Causation. Nothing can be rightly
said of It, but we must settle upon a name in order to speak of It, and so we may choose
"Consciousness," "the Self," "The One," The First," or "The Good," despite their
inadequacy.
The One, we must remember, is not something standing behind the manifold, as
a separate thing, but is the One by which, in which, and from which all that is manifest
exists. The manifest universe comes forth from the Divine Mind which is the active,
creative Power of The One. But we must not think that The One and the Divine Mind,
are different realities, they are one, perhaps different perspectives on one. Though it is
undoubtedly difficult to imagine a One which has none of the qualities of its parts, the
One, in fact, possesses no qualities precisely because It alone is.
Nothing at all of what applies to the manifold may be predicated of It (in fact
Nothing can be predicated of it.) not being, not movement, not knowledge, not
substance, not temporal or spatial relation. It has nothing outside of Itself with
which to relate. It is the absolutely Alone. Just as our own consciousness, while
being the source of mind and mentation, containing its potentiality within it,
yet stands silently, detachedly, above mind and mentation, so does the One,
while being the source of the Divine Mind, stand wakefully above it.
And, just as, while our own consciousness contains nothing of what
since it is the source of mind, and may yet be said to contain those contents in a
transcendent senseso does the One contain nothing of what is in the Divine Mind,
and yet It may be said to contain all potentially, as It is the source of the Divine Mind.
Plotinus, in concession to Plato, also terms it "The Good," as it is the final irreducible
good to which all souls aspire.
What is amazing is that the One, that pure transcendent Consciousness, may be
directly known as the sole Source and sole Identity of those individualized souls who
emanate from and are contained within It. (This then gives the possibility for the
Union realized by mystics with the source or The One).Because in an ultimate sense It is
everything, everything may trace its being There. It is Consciousness, and all within It
is consciousness. It is the Self of all.
Those of us who have experienced this eternal Self continue, even in these days,
to speak of It, declaring the truth of this experiential knowledge, and adding(his own

31
 descriptions or expressions of the nature of being united or one/d with the source of all.
What he presents to us is not philosophical speculation or a metaphysics he is trying
To develop by means of reasoning and arguments, as he is merely informing us of his
Experience, of or when being united with The One, and the knowledge he obtained
During that experience.)
When we speak of The One and when we speak of The Good we must recognize
an identical nature. We must affirm that they are the samenot, it is true, as venturing
any predication with regard to that [primal] Person, but simply as indicating it to
ourselves in the best terms we can find. (Therefore his terms and descriptions, like
those of all mystics do not fully or completely express The One or an experience
of it, but they are the best verbal means or tools we have for this task.)
Even in calling It The First we mean no more than to express that It is the most
absolutely simplex. It is the Self-Sufficing only in the sense that it is not of that
compound nature which would make it dependent upon any constituent. It is The Self-
Contained because everything contained in something other must also exist by virtue of
that other.
Deriving then from nothing other, entering into nothing other, in no way a
comprised thing, there can be nothing above It.
We need not, then, go seeking any other Principles. ThisThe One and The
Goodis our First. Next follows the Divine Mind, [which is] the Primal Thinker. And
upon this follows Soul. Such is the order in nature. The Spiritual realm allows no more
than these and no fewer. 5
He [the One] has no task, we hold, because nothing can present itself to Him to
be done. He is sufficient; He need seek nothing beyond Himself, He who is over all. To
Himself and to all He suffices by simply being what He is.(Think of the statement in the
Bible
About who, what, or how It is. I am who I am or rather will be)
And yet this "He is" does not truly apply: the Supreme has no need of Being.
The One is all things and none of them. The Source of all things is not all things;
and yet It is all things in a transcendental sense But [how can there be] a universe
from an unbroken unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality?
It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from It.
In order that Being may be brought about, the Source must be no Being but Being's
generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking..
The One, as transcending Mind, transcends knowing. Above all need, It is above
the need of the knowing which pertains solely to the Secondary nature. Knowing
remains a unitary thing, but defined; the First is One, but undefined. A defined One
would not be the One-Absolute. The absolute is prior to the definite.
Thus The One is in truth beyond all statement..
The Transcendent, thus, neither knows Itself nor is known in Itself.
How, then, do we ourselves come to be speaking of It?
No doubt we are cognizant of It, but we do not describe It; we have neither
knowledge nor intellection of It.
But in what sense are we even cognizant of It when we have no hold upon It?
We do not, it is true, grasp It by (or know it as a subject knows or have knowledge of an
object)
knowledge, but that does not mean that we are utterly void of It; we hold It not so as to
describe It, but so as to be able to speak about It. And we can and do state what It is not,
while we are silent as to what It is. We are, in fact, speaking of It in the light of Its sequels;
unable to state It, we may still possess It.

32
Those divinely possessed and inspired have at least the knowledge that they
hold some greater thing within them, though they cannot tell what it is.
What then must The Unity be? What nature is left for it?
The soul or mind reaching towards the Formless finds itself incompetent to
grasp That which is unlimited or to take impression where the impinging reality is all
encompassing.
In sheer dread of holding to nothingness, it slips away. The state is
painful; often it seeks relief by retreating from all this vagueness to the region of sense,
there to rest as on solid ground, just as the sight distressed by trying to see the minute
rests with pleasure on the bold. (here the swami also quotes and refers to the pain felt by
mystics in the dark Nights, of the spirit and the soul that I mentioned, terms we receive
from John of the Cross.)
He continues quoting from Plotinus, The soul must see in its own way; this is by
absorption,
unification; but in seeking thus to know the Unity it is prevented by that very unification from
recognizing that it has found; it cannot distinguish itself from the object of this knowing.
(because
that would imply duality and not true unification.)
Nonetheless, this is our one resource if our philosophy is to give us knowledge of The
Unity. We must ascend to that Principle within ourselves. From many, we must become one;
only in
doing so may we attain to knowledge of That which is Principle and Unity. (we notice many
words
that are typically employed by mystics, for example ascend. Of course it is not real ascend
but a
limited and restricted verbal way to try and express the going to something higher by
something
lower.)
With a pure intellect, and with the height of intellect, we are to see the All-Pure.
The Unity, then, is not the Divine Mind but something higher still. The Divine
Mind is still a being but that First is no being but precedent to all Being. It cannot be a
being, for a being has what we may call the form of its reality, but The Unity is without
form, even spiritual form.
Generative of all, The Unity is none of all: neither thing nor quantity nor quality nor
intellect nor soul. It is not in motion, not at rest, not in place, not in time. It is the selfdefined,
unique in form or, better, formless, existing before Form was, or Movement..
When we speak of this First as Cause we are affirming something happening
not to It but to us; [we are affirming] the fact that we derive from this Self-Enclosed.
Strictly speaking, we should put neither a "this" nor a "that" to It. We hover, as it were,
about It, seeking the expression of It in an experience of our own, The main source of the
difficulty is that awareness of this Principle comes neither by knowing nor by the
intellection that discovers the Spiritual Beings, but by a presence over passing all
knowledge For This is utterly a self-existent, with no concomitant whatever.
This self-sufficing is the essence of Its unity. Something there must be supremely
adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly without need.
The sovereignly self-sufficing principle will be absolute Unity, for only in this
Unity is there a nature above all need, whether within Itself or in regard to the rest of
things. Unity seeks nothing for its being or Its well-being or Its safehold upon
existence. Cause to all, how can f the Unity be seeking, It must inevitably be
seeking to be something other than Itself; [in other words,] It would be seeking Its own

33
destroyer. Whatever may be said to be in need is needing a good, a preserver; nothing,
therefore, can be a good to The Unity.
Neither can It have will to anything; But It is the Self-Sufficing. Yet this absence of self-
knowing, or
self-intellection, does not imply ignorance; ignorance is of something outsidea
knower ignorant of a knowablebut in the Solitary there is neither knowing nor anything
unknown As one wishing to contemplate the spiritual nature will lay aside all the
representations of sense and so may see what transcends the sense-realm, in the same
way one wishing to contemplate what transcends the spiritual attains by putting away
all that is of the intellect, taught by the intellect, no doubt, that the Transcendent exists
but never seeking to define It.
Its definition, in fact, could be only "the Indefinable"; That Source, having no prior, cannot
be contained. It is not within any of those
other forms of being which are within It; It is orbed round all, but not so as to contain
them as constituents. It possesses but is not possessed. Holding allthough Itself
nowhere heldIt is omnipresent, for where Its presence failed, something would elude
Its hold.

But God never was the All; that would make Him dependent upon the universe.
Transcending all, He was able at once to make all things and to leave them to their own
being, He above.
... Thus we rob It of its very being as The Absolute Good if we ascribe anything
to It, existence or intellect or goodness Thus is revealed to us the primarily Existent, the
Good, above all that has
being, good unalloyed, containing nothing in itself, utterly unmingling, all transcending,
cause of all . If that Good has Being and is within the realm of Being, then It is present,
selfcontained,
in everything. We, therefore, are not separated from Being; we are in It; nor
is Being separated from us. Therefore all beings are one. 16
[How did The One come to be?] There has been no "coming" This, then, It is; This and no
other. Simply what It must be, It has not "happened," but is what by a necessity prior to all
necessities It must be.
And even "so" is false; it would imply limit, a defined form. To
know This is to be able to reject both the "so" and "not-so."
The One, therefore, is beyond all things that are so. Standing before the
Indefinable you may name any of Its sequents but you must say "This is none of them."
say. We may inquire into the origin of His sequents but not of Himself who has no origin. 17
But this Unoriginating, what is It?
We can but withdraw, silent, hopeless, Besides, we must remember that all questioning
deals with the nature of a thing, its quality, its cause or its essential being. In this case the
Beinginsofar as we can use
the wordis knowable only by Its sequents. The question as to cause asks for a
principle beyond, but the Principle of all has no principle. The question as to quality
would be looking for an attribute in That which has none. The question as to nature
shows only that we must ask nothing about it.. He is the First, the Authentic, immune from
chance, from blind effect and happening. God is cause of Himself. For Himself and of
Himself, He is what He is, the
first Self, the transcendent Self.

34
From page 42 onwards the swami gives a summary of the Divine Mind, as described by
Plotinus. I already dealt with that by means of quotations from the descriptions of Plotinus in
the previous section. Here we might
find insights concerning some details. AS usual he starts off with comparisons with Eastern
thoughts for example from Vedanta, to indicate the similarities between Plotinus and mystics
from cultures and religions
on other continents.
To make clear the meaning of "The Divine Mind," it may be helpful to reiterate
what was said in the Introduction about the similarity between the philosophy of Non-
Dualistic Vedanta and the philosophy of Plotinus. Like the great Vedantic seers,
Plotinus sees The One (i.e., Brahman or Shiva) as the transcendent First Principle which
is beyond predicationprior to all movement or changeand yet which is the Origin
and Source of all that follows. What follows initially, he explains, is "the Creative
Power": what the Upanishads call Maya, Shakti, Prakrti, etc., and what Plato calls the
Demiurge. Plotinus' name for it is Nous, which is translated as "the Divine Mind." From
this, or rather as an extension of this, comes "Soul," which is both one and many; one at
its highest level, but appearing as many at its more manifest level. And Soul, being
merely an extension of the Divine Mind, is in essence and in reality the Divine Itself,
possessing the same freedom and bliss as God. This is the basis for Plotinus assertion
(in subsequent chapters) of the freedom of the individual soul. This is what makes
possible the soul's return in awareness to its Source; i.e., the soul's liberation. For, as
that great Vedantin, Shankaracharya, stated, "jivo brahmaiva napara" ("The soul is none
other than Brahman"). Indeed, the whole of Plotinus philosophical scheme is identical
to that of Vedanta, and yet it is stated in that rather difficult language of philosophical
reasoning typical of the early Greek and Roman philosophers.
When Plotinus speaks of the Divine Mind, the creative Power inherent in the
One, it is important to remember that it is inherent; it is not a new category of thing that
is produced from the One, and it does not really "go out" from the One, despite the
metaphor of emanation. By the fact that it is given a new name, "The Divine Mind," it
appears to be something other than the One; but it is merely the active and creative
faculty of the One, which Itself remains unmoved, diluted or diminished. Our consciousness
is an
undivided unity; only with the arising of mind, Its other aspect, does duality arise.
There exists a duality between the static witnessing consciousness and the active form
Producing mind, where before mind there was only unity. This duality is reflected in
The Divine Mind as Thinker and thought, or subject and object, even though they
remain within itself. From eventually becoming almost blindly unreceptive at the
outermost level of manifestation. (The following description of the creative Power
reminds one of the function of Jesus, the Son of God in Christianity through whom,
for and by whom all things are, the alpha and the omega of all.)
The Divine Mind represents the creative Power by and from which is initiated
the bursting into manifest activity of the Ideational Universe which is inherent within it.
The Divine Mind may therefore be thought of as God, the Creator. The One we must
think of as above the Creator, as Godhead, or Father, prior to the activity of creation.
Like the One, the Divine Mind is eternal; for it is the indwelling Power of the One. It is
the Potentiality of all multiplicity, and it holds this potential multiplicity within it, not
yet thrusting outward into manifestation; that subsequent act of manifestation is the
activity which Plotinus labels "Soul".

The following section deals with the Swamis quotations and summaries of Plotinus

35
 on the Divine Mind. I have already worked through what Plotinus himself wrote
concerning this in the Enneads, in the previous section. But me might obtain more
information and insights from the Swamis approach to Plotinuss notions of the
Divine Mind. As I mentioned earlier, its nature and function appears very similar
to what Christianity believes and expresses concerning the second person of the Trinity,
the Son of God, or Jesus. For the Swami, as stated in another book, Jesus is another,
great mystic, who realized the unity experience, with The One, or in his Judaic terminology,
the father, or as Meister Eckhart terms The One, The Gottheit. This word is usually
translated into English as Godhead, but to me its meaning appears to be something
more like Godness. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gottheit
From Middle High German gotheit, from Old High German gotheit, goteheit, equivalent to
Gott + -heit. Compare English godhead, Dutch godheid. Noun Gottheit f (genitive Gottheit,
plural Gottheiten)

1. deity (essential nature of a god, divinity)

2. (elevated) The state of being a god; divinity

1. Worttrennung: Gott|heit (gehoben) Gott

2. nicht eindeutig bezeichneter Gott bzw. Gttin

3. (gehoben) das Gottsein; Gttlichkeit, gttliche Natur

Gottheit: divinity ; divineness ; godhood ; God

Die Idee der Gottheit: eine philosophische Abhandlung, als ...
https://books.google.com/books?id=zKNSAAAAcAAJ - menhangs, in
welchem der Begriff der Gottheit die wissenschaftlich fr ihn gehrige
Stelle findet. - A Z w e i t es C a pit el. Dialectische Ableitung der

There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is The One, (Thus The One is prior to
Being)
whose nature we have sought to establish insofar as such matters lend themselves to proof.
Upon The One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Divine
Mind.
Third comes the Principle, Soul. Thus our soul, too, is a divine thing, belonging to
another order than sense;
All that is fully achieved engenders. Therefore the eternally achieved
engenders eternally an eternal being. At the same time, the offspring is always minor.
What then are we to think of the All-Perfect but that It can produce nothing less than
the very greatest that is later than Itself? This greatest, later than The Unity, must be
the Divine Mind, and it must be the second of all existence, for it is that which sees The
One on which alone it leans while the First has no need whatever of it.
From such a Unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at
all come into substantial existenceany multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the
Primal not remained self-gathered so that
[In other words, how does there come to be] a universe from an unbroken
Unity, in which there appears no diversity, not even duality?

36
It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from It.
In order that Being may be brought about, the Source must be no Being but Being's
generator, in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing,
possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has
overflowed; and Its exuberance has produced something new; [and] this issue has
turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so a
Divine Mind.
That which perceives The One establishes Being. That vision directed upon the
One establishes the Divine Mind. Looking to the One for the purpose of vision, it is
simultaneously Divine Mind and Being; and attaining resemblance in virtue of this
vision, it repeats the act of the One in pouring forth a vast power. This second outflow
is an image or representation of the Divine Mind as the Divine Mind represents its own
prior, The One. This active power sprung from the Divine Mind is Soul. 5 (The way Plotinus
uses the notion Soul, appears to resemble the third person of the Christian Trinity, namely
the Holy Spirit.)
The Divine Mind in its mentation thinks itself; the object of the thought is
nothing external: thinker and thought are one. Therefore in its thinking and knowing it
possesses itself, observes itself and sees itself not as something unconscious but as..
He [ The Divine Mind] will know himself to be a unity existing by virtue of the
one Eternal Life, and in this sense unlimited. And his knowledge of the Unity will not
be as of something seen from outside but as of something embraced in true knowledge,
for this Unlimited is an eternal indweller within himselfor, to be more accurate,
eternally follows upon himand is seen by an indwelling knowledge. God knows his
own unlimited life, and, in that knowledge, knows the activity that flows from him to
the Cosmos; but he knows it in its unity, not in its process. 7
The duality [between The One and the Divine Mind], is [in fact] a unity; but how
is this unity also a plurality?
The explanation is that in a Unity there can be no seeing [for seer and seen
require at least the semblance of Duality]. In Its contemplation the One is no longer a
Unity; if it were still a Unity, the Divine Mind would not exist. The Highest began as a
Unity but did not remain as it began; all unknown to itself, it became manifold. It
became pregnant, so to speak: desiring universal possession, It
from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of
Intellect, and of the Universe. And what will such a Principle essentially be? This
Principle on the thither side of Life is the cause of Life [and not the manifester of Life]
Every particular thing has a one of its own to which it may be traced; the All has
its one, its prior but not yet the absolute One; through this we reach that absolute One,
where all such reference comes to an end.
The Absolute is none of the things of which It is the sourceIts nature
is that nothing can be affirmed of It

Another approach:
The Divine Mind is a Seeing, a Seeing which sees itself; therefore it is a
potentiality [within The One] which has become effective.
This implies the distinction of matter and form in itas there must be in all
actual seeingthe matter [and form] in this case being the Intelligibles [i.e., the
Thought-forms] which the Divine Mind contains and sees. All actual seeing implies
duality; before the seeing takes place there is the pure Unity. That Unity acquires
duality, and the duality is a Unity. (Plotinus employes the word duality with different
meanings, it would have been clearer if he employed other concepts.)

37
Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realization,
so the vision in the Divine Mind demands, for its completion, The Good [i.e., the One].
It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or to perform
any other act; for The Good is the center of all else, and it is by means of The Good that
every thing has act, while The Good is in need of nothing and therefore possesses
nothing beyond Itself.

Do not even say that It has Intellection [i.e., Thought]; you would be dividing It;
It would become a duality, The Good and The Divine Mind.
The transcendent Being [The Good, the One] neither strives, since It feels no lack,
nor attains, since It has no striving
The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect; nor can It be an abundant Power: It
must have been before Intellect and abundance were; these are later and things of lack;
abundance had to be made abundant and Intellection needed to know.
These [i.e., Intellect and abundant Power] are very near to The Un-needing, to
That which has no need of knowing; they
Here [in the Divine Mind] is contained all that is immortal: there is nothing here
but Divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every soul. Here is rest unbroken: for
how can that seek change, in which all is well?
beingsbut the Divine Mind is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously
present in that identity.entire.
Divine Mind by its intellective Act establishes Being, which in turn, as the object
of intellection, becomes the cause of intellection and of existence to the Divine Mind
Now while these two are co-existents, having their existence in common, and are never
But how and what does the Divine Mind see and, especially, how has it sprung
from That which is to become the object of its vision?
The mind demands the existence of Being, but from such a Unity as we
have declared The One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence,
any multiplicity, or dual principle, or quantity? Why has the Primal [The One] not
remained self-gathered so that there be none of this profusion of the manifold which we
observe in existence and yet are compelled to trace to that absolute Unity?
In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in
that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by
aspiration, alone towards the Alone. But if we seek the vision of that great Being within
Given this immobility in the Supreme, It can neither have yielded assent nor
uttered decree nor stirred in any way towards the existence of a secondary.
What happened, then? What are we to conceive as rising in the innards of that
immobility?
It must be a circumradiationproduced from the Supreme but from the
Supreme unalteringand may be compared to the brilliant light encircling the sun and
ceaselessly generated from that unchanging substance.
The Divine Mind stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a
certain necessity that the First should have its offspring, (Why this necessity?)
carrying onward much of its quality, in other words that there be something
[of Itself] in Its likeness as the sun's rays tell of the sun. Yet the One is not
an intellective principle; how then does It engender a
Divine Mind? Simply by the fact that in Its self-searching It has vision: this very seeing
is the Divine Mind.
For the moment let us define the Nature of the Good as far as the immediate
purpose demands:

38
The Good is That on which all else depends, towards which all existences aspire
as to their source and their need, while Itself is without need, sufficient to Itself,
aspiring to no other, the measure and Aim of all, giving out from Itself the Divine Mind
and Existence and Soul and Life and all Thought.
All until The Good is reached is beautiful; The Good is beyond beautiful, beyond
the Highest, holding kingly state in the Intellectual [Spiritual] World, that realm
constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as intelligence in us.
The Divine Mind is the first Act of The Good and the first Existence; The Good
remains stationary within Itself, but the Divine Mind acts in relation to It and, as it
were, lives about It.
And the Soul, outside, circles around the Divine Mind, and by gazing upon it,
seeing into the depths of it, through it sees God.

1)

Plotinus states that The One (Good, etc) is the source of all (ontological?)

2)

It precedes (incorrect word as nothing can be predicated of The One as he conceives of IT)
Being.

3)

The Divine Mind originates, without originating from The One. He calls it circumradiation.
The Enneads of Plotinus: THE FIFTH ENNEAD: FIRST TRACTATE ...
www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plotenn/enn421.htm
It must be a circumradiation- produced from the Supreme but from the
Supreme unaltering- and may be compared to the brilliant light encircling
the sun and ..
What does encircling mean - Definition of encircling - Word finder
https://findwords.info/term/encircling
It must be a circumradiation--produced from the Supreme but from the
Supreme unaltering--and may be compared to the brilliant light encircling
the sun and ..
Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in Western ...
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1134935994
April D DeConick, Grant Adamson - 2016 - History
It must be a circumradiation produced from the Supreme but from the
Supreme without alteration ( ,
) and ...
The Plotinian One - The formation of number - YouTube
3:30

39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93Vy_6qnpM8
Oct 9, 2015 - Uploaded by Metaphysical Reflections
The symbolic 'circumradiation' around the point 'may be compared to the
brilliant light encircling the sun .
Mystery and Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi Collection and Other Ancient ...
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=9004212078
Christian H. Bull, Liv Lied, John D. Turner - 2011 - Religion
It must be a circumradiationproduced from the Supreme but from the
Supreme without alteration ( ,
)and ...
[PDF]The Upper Triad Material The Enneads
www.uppertriad.org/Chapters/4_TOP_371.pdf
the second is movement (circum-radiation, induced by the primary
(being); the third is consequence (the result of movement). The one is the
potentiality of all.

4)

All is contained in The One.

5)

The One is ineffable. It can only be seen by its image, by its like, by that
what is similar to it ,
eg the Divine Mind who contemplates it, or the purified, inward turned,
ascended Soul (the Third
principle), and the individual soul.

6)

Religious Experiences - The Student Room

https://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/attachment.php?
attachmentid=148137&d...
Happold's types of mysticism. Rather than develop a set of criteria to
identify mystical experiences, F.C. Happold developed a way in which
people could think

Characteristics of religious experience

There is an infinite number as each is unique, but there have been
attempts to classify them based upon the results. The main classifications
are; visions, conversion and mystical experiences.

40
Visions when an individual believes they seen or heard something
supernatural from a supernatural being. There are 3 ways an individual
may experience a vision:
1. Intellectual vision brings knowledge and understanding e.g. a
revelation from god. Connected with the consciousness of the
presence of God.
2. Imaginary vision something that strengthens faith is seen with the
minds eye e.g. Jacobs vision of a ladder to heaven. St. Stephen
who saw 'the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing on the
right hand of God'.
3. Corporeal vision The figure is externally present e.g. St
Bernadettes 18 visions of the Virgin Mary, who instructed her to
build a chapel on the site of the healing spring water at Lourdes.
Plotinus appears to fall under number 1.
Numinous, and volitional, a gradual change.
2 types of conversion:
1. Volitional conscious and voluntary.
2. Self-surrender unconscious and involuntary.

The volitional type features a gradual change. It consists of the slow

development of new moral and spiritual habits. The person can become
suddenly aware one day. Its the most common and the most permanent.

Mystical experience a direct and intimate experience from God. An

individual feels a sense of union with a perfect being that is omnipotent
and incomparable to anything human.
Examples include:
The reception of knowledge not known by humans.
A sense of freedom.
A sense of oneness or unity with God.
A sense of bliss or serenity.

Can be described as when,

God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. Margaret
Smith, An introduction to the History of Mysticism. (Shows wider reading)
In William James The Varieties of Religious Experience, he offers four
characteristics in which people can identify their religious experience as
mystical:
1. Ineffability
2. Noetic quality
3. Transiency
4. Passivity

Ineffability the experience cannot be communicated in normal speech.

Religious experiences are private events; the recipient goes through
certain sensations that are beyond verbal description.
I wish I could give a description of at least the smallest part of what I
learned, but, when I try to discover a way of doing so, I find it
impossible... St. Teresa of Avila.

41
 I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said that the state is
utterly beyond words? British poet Alfred Tennyson.

Noetic quality the mind gaining knowledge and understanding through

intuition and perception, and the certainty of Gods presence. Mystical
experiences provide insights into unobtainable truths.

Transiency refers to the fact that religious experiences only last for a
limited time. A few minutes-2 hours and can be difficult to remember but
nevertheless, life changing.

Passivity refers to the fact that the religious experience occurs without
any action on the part of the recipient. William James suggests that while
undergoing the experience, one loses control to a higher being. Effects
include; individuals assuming different personalities, writing/drawing
prophetic visions or messages with the opposite hand, or speaking in a
different voice/language. Theyre beyond human control.

Happolds types of mysticism

Rather than develop a set of criteria to identify mystical experiences, F.C.
Happold developed a way in which people could think about and discuss
their mystical experiences with others. In Mysticism: A study and an
Anthology, he divides mysticism into 2 types:
1. The mysticism of love and union
2. The mysticism of knowledge and understanding
Plotinus appears, like I have seen in other mystics, both aspects of 1 and
of 2. Plotinus sees
It as union with THE UNITY, but he realizes it by 2. Knowledge and
understanding.

The mysticism of love and union the longing to escape loneliness and
the feeling of separation from the world. However, a conflicting urge is the
desire to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Therefore, despite
our need to be individuals, we are always trying to get back to God.
He (mankind) feels himself to be a pilgrim of eternity, a creature in time
but a citizen of a timeless world. Happold.

The mysticism of knowledge and understanding another urge

inherent in all of us to find out the secret of the universe. We
look for answers to such an ultimate question through experiential
knowledge of God which isnt logical, but gained through intuition.

Aspects of mystical experience

Happold also says that there are 3 aspects of mystical experience:
1. Soul-mysticism
2. Nature-mysticism
3. God-mysticism

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Soul-mysticism The concept that the soul is something numinous and
bigger than you, yet within you. The mystical experience is the idea of
finding the soul and completing self-fulfilment. This type of mysticism
relates to Hindu and Buddhist philosophies.
The chief object of man is the quest for his own self and of right of
knowledge about it F.C. Happold.

Nature-mysticism the belief that God is immanent and can be united

with in many aspects of nature. Observing the beauty or vastness of
Nature triggers a mystical experience.

God-mysticism the claim that the souls of humankind desire to return to

their immortal and infinite ground, which is God. Mystical unions with the
Divine requires the human soul to be deified meaning it almost becomes
God, whilst retaining its own identity. Sufi Muslims seek this through
worship.

Plotinus at a first quick glance appears to describe soul-mysticism. But he

argues for The One as immanent and he also describes his journey as that
of a return, to the infinite, THE
ONE, the ground of all.

7) If we apply some of Underhills insights to Plotinus we have the

following
He appears to have gone through the five stages she describes. In the examples she quotes we
find almost the exact expressions of Plotinus.

The dark Night in the fourth stage has been described by Plotinus as pain. And he describes
the fifth stage or the Unitive Life in his own terms.

She divided her map of "the way" into five stages: the first was the "Awakening of Self". She
quotes Henry Suso (disciple of Meister Eckhart):

That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he had of it a joy
such as he might have known in the seeing of shapes and substances of all joyful things. His
heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and his
hopes were fulfilled. (Cropper p. 46)

Underhill tells how Suso's description of how the abstract truth (related to each soul's true
nature and purpose), once remembered, contains the power of fulfilment became the starting
point of her own path. The second stage she presents as psychological "Purgation of Self",
quoting the Theologia Germanica (14th century, anonymous) regarding the transcendence of
ego (Underhill's "little self"):

43
We must cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them and refrain from claiming
anything for our own.

The third stage she titles "Illumination" and quotes William Law:

Everything in ...nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a. ..visible
outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness.
..from it, we find. ..it in its eternal state.

The fourth stage she describes as the "Dark Night of the Soul" (which her correspondence
leads us to believe she struggled with throughout her life) wherein one is deprived of all that
has been valuable to the lower self, and quoting Mechthild of Magdeburg:

...since Thou hast taken from me all that I had of Thee, yet of Thy grace leave me the gift
which every dog has by nature: that of being true to Thee in my distress, when I am deprived
of all consolation. This I desire more fervently than Thy heavenly Kingdom.

And last she devotes a chapter to the unitive life, the sum of the mystic way:

When love has carried us above all things into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by
the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus
we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us, and penetrating us.
(Ruysbroeck)

8) Here is the Contents of her famous book on Mysticism I have highlighted the sections.
That I applied, above, to Plotinus.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.pdf

Mysticism:A Study in Nature and Development of

Spiritual Consciousness
Author(s):Underhill, Evelyn
Publisher:Grand Rapids, MI:
Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Contents
1
Title Page
2
Preface to the Twelfth Edition
6
Preface to the First Edition
9
Part One: The Mystic Fact
10
I. The Point of Departure
30
II. Mysticism and Vitalism
46

44
III. Mysticism and Psychology
69
IV. The Characteristics of Mysticism
92
V. Mysticism and Theology
119
VI. Mysticism and Symbolism
141
VII. Mysticism and Magic
155
Part Two: The Mystic Way
156
I. Introductory
164
II. The Awakening of the Self
184
III. The Purification of the Self
215
IV. The Illumination of the Self
247
V. Voices and Visions
276
VI. Introversion.
Part I: Recollection and Qui
302
VII. Introversion.
Part II: Contemplation
329
VIII. Ecstasy and Rapture
349
IX. The Dark Night of the Soul
379
X. The Unitive Life
407
Conclusion
413
Appendix:
Historical
Sketch of Mysticism
434
Bibliography
466
Bibliographical Note
ii
470
Index
501
Indexes
502
Index of Scripture

45
References
503

9)

I am not interested in all aspects of what William James says about religious experience,
but if aspects of it concerns philosophy, philosophizing and the philosopher. The reason
for this is that Plotinus studied philosophy and thought that what he did is philosophizing.

He distinguished between two types of judgements, and went on to say value judgements are
like spiritual judgements, as they involve our personal interpretation.
Existential judgement a primary question, and is concerned with the nature of something
how it came into existence, what it does, and of what it is made.
Value judgement a secondary question, is concerned with the meaning, importance and
significance of something.
When considering religious experience, we are asking 2 questions:
1. What happened?
2. What does it mean?
William James was aware that people dismiss religious experience as a product of a faulty
mind. Instead of rejecting the view, he accepted it but saw no obvious problem with it. He
spoke of religion and neurosis as perfectly compatible.
What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by complete
minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular
purpose. James quotes D.H. Maudsley.
This is my first question could it be the case that creative-thinking individuals, for example
philosophers, share some of the characteristics of certain mystics? For example their
passionate concern with questioning, searching and living for the quest of more general
questions and answers to their existence or aspects of their existence? Plotinus was quite
aware of and asked and tried to answer basic philosophical questions, for example
epistemological ones concerning the subject, who thinks and knows or seeks knowledge, and
the object and contents of his knowing and knowledge. He realized that THE ONE should be
omniscient and should not be in need of anything for example knowing or to be a knower of
anything. Thus The One includes everything already and therefore does not have to be a
knower of anything or seeking knowledge of anything.
As for the two questions James posed, Plotinus does give a descriptions of what happened
during his experiences and he gave explanations of what they mean. The philosopher also
presents us with answers to these questions what did Kant or |Hegel or Socrates search for,
what did they question and they provide us with answers to their questions, to what they were
searching for and what they thought they found of course expressed in some sort of
philosophically relevant terminology, like Plotinus also does, or at least attempt to do.

The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it
must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. William James
Whilst under the influence, that is at certain stages of the process of theorizing (of which
doing philosophy represents certain, aspects, features, steps or stages) mystics (and
philosophers) feel a greater depth of understanding. (I think the euphoria accompanying this
forms part of what mystics and philosophers seek to repeat and this is an aspect of the
passion felt for their subject and drives or motivates the mystic and the philosopher, and
perhaps other theorists, or theorists in other disciplines). This may be lost as the influence
fades, but a sense of profound feeling is retained. Experiences are unique.

46
William James makes these conclusions -
Religious (and intellectual?) life centred on the following beliefs:
The world we see around us is a part of something much bigger (or of something more
meaningful? Or are more meaningful than viewed or perceived by ordinary folk) which we
consider to be very important.
Union (identifying, grasping, explaining and understanding it) with that spiritual
something is (possible) our (the philosopher and mystics) ultimate purpose.
Communication/prayer (or other forms of contact for example by thinking or contact for
example by understanding of or) with that deeper meaning or higher, spiritual thing is
possible for the mystic, the philosopher, the thinker in other disciplines and the theorist.
Its been pointed out that religious experience is like emotion as its a personal response, and
any form of empirical testing is useless.
James has 2 arguments that counter this in different ways:
1. He sees no problem with religious experience (the experience when having
philosophical or other theoretical and intellectual insights) being seen as emotion. Its
only the theories of different religions or disciplines and philosophical schools) that
distinguish between them. The feelings are remarkably similar. As emotion is an
important part of religion (intellectual, socio-cultural practices, for example painting,
composing music, involved in sport, acting, etc) it is reasonable to accept these
feelings and emotions that come about as evidence.
2. One cannot be scientific when considering religion (this aspects of creative, socio-
cultural practices. I think one can and these things can be experimentally researched).
William James believed that we would always find two, universal areas:
A certain uneasiness (i.e. the feeling that there is something wrong with us).
The solution to this (i.e. the way in which we can be saved from this wrongness).
The way we find this solution is that we become conscious of the being (or the insights, the
life-worlds, the discourse of disciplines, their realities) that is higher than us. The doorway
to this higher being is through religious (creative- and original thinking or as James puts it,
direct, personal)experience. The cause of the experiences which people have and are affected
by is real; therefore, if that cause if believed to be God (music, film making, painting,
sculpting, doing philosophy, sport, creative writing, poetry, novels, theorizing or doing
science, etc) then God (the particular socio-cultural practice one is engaged in, sport,
football, philosophy, etc, is worthwhile, valuable, to be valued, a value, a cultural value, a
value for a certain institution or community, academic communities, sports organizations,
football crowds and clubs, thus the individuals activities have a rationale and is meaningful
or) exists.

Challenges to religious experience or the experience/s accompanying socio-cultural practices

for example, doing philosophy, playing football, composing music, painting or new media,
theorizing or doing science, writing poetry, novels, acting, dancing, making films or videos,
taking selfies, etc -
According to Freud and perhaps other psychological theories or speculations:
People are completely material. If we could understand everything about the
physical/biological side of life, we would fully understand human beings. It rules out
the possibility of a soul (or the experiences accompanying creative activities).
He suggested the urge people felt towards religion was no more than psychological
obsession.
Freud saw religious (or those of any creative activity) experiences as illusions. He
believed they were projections of the oldest and most profound ideas people had.

47
 Individuals are simply projecting their attitudes and values (of certain institutions,
communities, cultures, sub-cultures etc) that value their particular socio-cultural
practice.
Freud wasnt even concerned with the truth of religious (or other creative-related)
claims, and would dismiss any attempt to use such experiences as evidence for the
existence of God (or the value projected on creative acitivities).

V.S. Ramachandran is a neurologist.

He carried out research related to temporal lobe epilepsy from which he concluded
there is important evidence linking the temporal lobes to religious experience.
He compared brains of people with and without temporal lobe epilepsy.
He measured the patients changes in skin resistance, in particular how much they
sweated when looking at different types of imagery.
Bodies of temporal lobe patients produced a dramatic change in skin resistance when
shown religious imagery (or those related to someones socio-cultural practices, eg
music scores, works of philosophy, philosophical arguments, etc?)
He concludes that figures such as St. Paul (and all creative thinkers, composers,
sportsmen, philosophers, artists, etc?) could also have had the condition.

Do religious types merely have a Jungian arche-type of God innate in them? Do

philosophers, artists, sportsmen, composers, etc merely have internalized ideas and
attitudes that their socio-cultural practices are values, valued, have rationale, etc?

Michael Persinger
Cognitive neuroscience researcher who agrees temporal lobes have a significant role
in religious experiences.
He argues religious experiences are no more than the brain responding to external
stimuli.
By stimulating the temporal lobes with a unique machine, he can induce in almost
anyone a moment that feels like a genuine religious experience.
Over 900 people that have taken part in the experiments claim to have had some form
of religious experience. (What about experiments on philosophers when they are
doing philosophers, sportsmen, artists when they paint, dancers when they dance,
composers when composing, etc?)

Researchers have used a brain scanning technique on Tibetan Buddhists during

meditation and a Catholic nun after 45 minutes of deep prayer.
They found that the superior parietal lobe, the centre that processes information about
space, time and orientation of the body in space, is suppressed, while the pre-frontal
cortex which controls attention is highly active.
The result is that any sense of space, time or being in the world is suppressed, and not
feeling in the world leads to an other-worldly experience.
Persinger reproduced this by electrically suppressing activity in the superior parietal
lobe, and they all reported the feeling was identical to what they experienced in their
own meditative practice.

Problems with verifying religious experience or perhaps the experience accompanying other
socio-cultural practices, such as doing philosophy, playing sport, composing, etc -

48
Objective statements are open to testing. They can be empirically verified. (Experimental
philosophy and other disciplines involved in cognitive science are increasingly testing all
sorts of socio-cultural practices, experiences involved with or accompanying them).

Subjective statements are decision based and based on a personal conviction.

Religious experiences are subjective because no objective criteria can be applied to them in
order to judge their authenticity. (This is what X-Phi and other disciplines involved in
cognitive sciences are now beginning to do. Not mere statements about an alleged
experience, or experiences accompanying socio-cultural practices, but experimenting with,
identifying and testing such experiences.)
A subjective statement cannot be offered as scientific. Experiences happen to
people, and will always be open to interpretation. (see above on cognitive sciences)
It may be the case that whatever experience takes place is only perceived as religious
by the recipient. E.g. when the individual claims to have actually seen God. This
causes theological problems, as even the Scriptures dont feature any physical
appearances of God. (or what about the belief in the value and meaning of other
socio-cultural practices, eg doing philosophy, sport, theorizing, etc?)
There are 2 suggestions as to why this may occur:
1. Psychopathological they suffer from a medical condition (all creative
thinking individuals in all socio-cultural practices suffer from this?).
2. The mind can misjudge experiences e.g. mirages in the desert.
Some would suggest that conversion is a form of religious experience that can be
objectively verified. (What occurs when an individual is converted to the value of a
certain socio-cultural practice or discipline, eg football, philosophy, playing a musical
instruments, writing etc?)

Problems in conclusion:
Only an individual undergoes the experience, therefore we have only one persons
testimony as to what happened (so test more than one person involved in those socio-
cultural practices.)
Empirical testing is useless, as like emotion, its a personal response. (Do
experiments)
Drugs and alcohol can produce similar effects to a religious and other creative
activities and accompanying experience.
Objective/subjective distinction.

Truth theories
1. Correspondence theory
2. Coherence theory
3. Pragmatic theory

Correspondence theory Something is true if it matches with reality.Looks at whether

something corresponds with the real world. E.g. if someone says the earth is flat, scientific
test can prove this wrong.
Cant contact God (the muse of the artist, the discourse or the socio-cultural practice)
to see if someone had a religious or another kind of creative experience.
Therefore, this theory is inappropriate when finding out the truth about religious
experience. (do experiments to prove or disprove it).

49
Coherence theory A theory is true is it is logically consistent with other truths that have
been proved already. Can be used either to prove or disprove religious experience. E.g. if we
are told Spiderman exists, but we havent seen him, we can apply the coherence theory.
Spidermans existence isnt logically consistent so is untrue, as it would go against my beliefs
that humans can walk but not fly/climb walls. (So why are scientific theories, philosophical
systems and arguments accepteable when this standard is employed?)
However, its difficult to identify whether a statement should be dismissed or the set of
cohering statements (original beliefs). Thus, its difficult to identify the truth of a religious
experience. We dont know whether to dismiss the statement or the initial system of
understanding about God.

Pragmatic theory something is true if accepting the consequences of the experience are
beneficial for me. Can be used to prove religious experience. E.g. prisoner converting to a
religion and making them a better person.
Acceptance of a religious experience would have to produce beneficial results.
Beneficial results prove the experience to be authentic and from God because the truth
is always life-enhancing.
If believing in God makes you a better person, then it is pragmatic and therefore, true.
(Apply these queries and questions to other socio-cultural practices doing
philosophy, sport, composing music, acting, doing science, etc are they beneficial in
this way? Do they modify or transform the whole person? Are they all life-enhancing
etc?

Authoritarianism
People have been given great status at the result of having (or claiming to have had) a
religious experience.
Padre Pio has had a worldwide following because of his stigmata (the reproduction of the
wounds of Christ). According to William James, those who undergo religious experiences
carry, a curious sense of authority. Though no one can claim authority on the grounds of
religious experience, many become the focus of attention, and even worship. (We do the same
with famous people or celebrities in other socio-cultural areas, famous film stars, painters,
sportsmen, writers, scientists, politicians, pop music singers and bands etc. Even their
pronouncements on areas outside their disciplines are treated as sensational, meaningful and
often valued, at least by their supporters)

The principle of credulity

If it seems to a subject that X is present, then probably X is present; what one seems to
perceive probably is so. Richard Swinburne.
What we perceive is usually the case. Those who reject religious experience (or the
experiences accompanying other socio-cultural practices) usually do so on the grounds of
scepticism. The principle of credulity says that you have to believe someone unless you can
prove otherwise.

other challenges:

50
 The circumstances in which the experience occurred generally produce unreliable
results (e.g. under the influence of alcohol/drugs) or the person is unreliable (e.g. a
pathological liar).
The recipient doesnt have the ability to interpret the experience (e.g. if the recipient
is very young).
It is possible to show that whatever/whoever the recipient is claiming to have
experienced was not there.
It is possible to show that whatever/whoever the recipient is claiming to have
experienced was there, but wasnt involved in or responsible for the experience.

The first 2 can be countered by arguments by William James.

For the 3 and 4, we cant check with God to see if he was there or is responsible for the
experience. His argument so far shows we should accept the perceptions of others, and the
criticisms of the principle have been dealt with.

Credulity whether the argument itself is good/bad and can prove God exists (doing
philosophy is meaningful, playing sport is meaningful, composing music is meaningful. What
external or meta-standards do we apply in these cases?)
Testimony Whether the person is telling a truth or a lie.

Can the finite experience the infinite? Mathematicians, scientists, astro-physicists,

philosophers, etc Assume this all the time when they theorize and execute activities in their
discourses.
How is it possible for humans to experience God? Immanuel Kant.
It is not possible for finite humans to experience an infinite God. This is because humans can
only experience the world as it appears to them through their 5 senses. The 5 senses can only
detect objects that are within space and time. Since God is not an object within space and
time, humans are denied the experience. (Apply this standard then to all socio-cultural
practices, eg philosophy, theoretical sciences or theoretical areas of sciences, music, abstract
art, etc)
A believer who accepts religious experiences as genuine would argue that for God, anything
is possible, and therefore the infinite God is able to communicate with finite beings. (Similar
as rationale employed by philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, etc who assume that their
discourse, discipline or socio-cultural practice has value, has meaning, is valuable, has a
purpose, etc).

10

I concentrated on a few ideas of Plotinus as some kind of case study. He is a fairly original
thinker, but he unquestioningly and uncritically accepts many pre-suppositions from the
Platonic tradition of his day. Some of these ideas are the foundation, the leading ideals of his
entire theoretical or speculative system. These things were of lesser importance to me than
the fact that he is a philosopher (both as far as his subject-matter goes as well as his
methodology, by employing the types of arguments common in his day and the tradition he
probably was educated in and accepted.)
The philosophical side of his work, considering the customs of the tradition he was educated
in, determined the ideas he considered to be essential and that formed the basis of his

51
theoretical system for example the one = the good, mind, as in the divine mind, realizing
the one in the world, or as the contents of the cosmos, and thirdly, on a lower level, the soul.
The latter being differentiated as individual souls in a descending manner and thereby
enabling individual souls to ascend to the one, by realization and unification.
He feels that coherence and unity are essential features of a system, not only does he attempt
to develop a coherent system, without inconsistences, but whos parts are inter-connected (as
a unity), but THE UNITY is an idea that he repeatedly emphasizes. The notion of the unity
plays an important role in his system and he requires it to fulfil many, crucial functions. Like
many other concepts, the notion of unity, is employed by him in many different ways,
apparently without him being aware of the fact. If he were he would have used other concepts
rather than employed the same concept or word in several ways and without clearly
distinguishing between the different functions they are expected to fulfil. Again, I wish to
state, this perception or criticism of his writing is of no great importance to me and I am
merely explicitly stating these things so as to get the feel of his work and style, or allegedly
of those who wrote down and systematized his work, as it is said he himself did not do that.
What are his intentions, what did he try to do and what did he think he was doing? Did he
develop metaphysics or metaphysical systems like Aristotle and Plato, did he intend to
develop a metaphysical system? Did he have or wish to develop and describe and ontology?
He frequently provides us with descriptions of knowledge, different types of knowledge, of
knowing, for example a subject who knows, have thought of or knows and object. Therefore
he was quite aware of epistemological questions of his day, his tradition and his cultural
environment. Are the hypotheses he states, the questions he asks and explores and the
problems he poses, and the conclusions he comes to intended to develop a philosophical
model or some kind of metaphysical system?
And/or was he more concerned about his mystical journey or the contemplative path he
found himself on and the metaphysical system he developed was unintended? In other words
he did not set out to devise some kind of philosophical system, but instead was concerned
about and committed to his inner quest and the questions and problems that personal quest
led him to encounter and ask. And, the fact that what he described has the nature of
metaphysical speculation and the appearance of a philosophical system of kinds, are merely
accidental.
I do not merely transform the case of Plotinus into a problem to be solved, because I am
specifically concerned about or interested in the fact if he was primarily a philosopher or a
mystic, or both, or if he intended to employ the discourse of philosophy or the socio-cultural
practice of mysticism. No, I ask these questions concerning Plotinuss intellectual activities
and intentions because I see his case in a more general context, the context of the
philosophical discourse and the doing of philosophy and the values, norms and attitudes of
that discourse, or rather of being involved in or practising that discourse.
What are the reasons an original- and creative-thinking individual is drawn to the
philosophical discourse? Why does Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Kant, Hume, (von) Schelling or
Fichte become involved in and adhere to doing philosophy? Or philosophy instead of another
socio-cultural practice? What is it in the personality-types, values and attitudes of these
individuals and the rational, values, customs, norms and traditions of the culture and
discourse of philosophy that causes a mutual attraction and a life time of interaction with
philosophical ideas. An attraction that is so powerful that they devote their entire life to that
discourse and practice and that they construct their life-worlds and constitute their realities
around and in terms of them?
We thought we discovered the answer in the case of Plotinus what motivated him to live the
life he did and that incidentally and accidentally he occasionally expressed ideas about that
life and he, or others, wrote down descriptions of his mystical journey. That his entire life was

52
motivated to realize THE UNITY, to become one with THE ONE, the personally develop and
undergo the unity experience (with the one, the good, god, the beloved, the real self, etc).
But why was he so motivated, as motivated as Husserl, Kant, Wittgenstein et al was?
Has an involvement, a love affair, an intimate and intense interaction with philosophical
ideas, dealing with such ideas, exploring them, questioning them, developing them, rejecting
ones insights concerning them in the process of searching for seemingly more meaningful,
more valid, more logical, sound, coherent, consistent ideas, sets of ideas, insight, truths, good
explanations, sound arguments and reasoning and understanding, etc the same hold over an
individual, the same obligation, the same need as that of the mystic who seeks to be/come
one/d with his leading ideal (be it god, the beloved, the realization of the Buddha-mind or the
one real self of Vedanta, etc)?
What is the nature, the magnetism, the obsession, the attraction, the passion for that what the
Psalms tell us how the lover go out and seek his beloved, that what St John of the Cross
describes as
The Living Flame Of Love .
Original and creative-thinking philosopher, artist, writer, composer,
athlete, scientist, etc do you recognize yourself, your passion for your
socio-cultural practice in the words, the love, the passion, the need
expressed by these words, of this mystic? For those who have not yet
noticed, these were my conjectures, these are my hypotheses, this is the
theory I put forward concerning that what underlies original, creative
thinking, composing, writing, etc. This is the IT Plotinus talks about, THE
UNITY he describes and mentions over and over again, this is The One,
that draws you, for whom you have the need, the desire philosopher,
creative thinker, mystics and artist even if you call it by another, other
names, like true, logic, consistency, coherency, meaningfulness, etc etc.
This is the non-philosophy of the one, it that drives you on and on, and
that you might execute by means of sound logic, reasoning,
argumentation, conceptual analysis, solutions to solve problems, search
for relevant hypotheses and draw conclusions. What you call philosophy
of being, of what is and for what you fabricate all sorts of isms, realism,
neo-realism, soft or hard naturalism, etc, etc.
Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God.

O living flame of love

that tenderly wounds my soul
in its deepest center! Since
now you are not oppressive,
now consummate! if it be your will:
tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!

53
 O sweet cautery,
O delightful wound!
O gentle hand! O delicate touch
that tastes of eternal life
and pays every debt!
In killing you changed death to life.
O lamps of fire!
in whose splendors
the deep caverns of feeling,
once obscure and blind,
now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely,
both warmth and light to their Beloved.

How gently and lovingly

you wake in my heart,
where in secret you dwell alone;
and in your sweet breathing,
filled with good and glory,
how tenderly you swell my heart with love.

The Dark Night

One dark night,

fired with love's urgent longings
- ah, the sheer grace! -
I went out unseen,
my house being now all stilled.

In darkness, and secure,

by the secret ladder, disguised,
- ah, the sheer grace! -
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

On that glad night

in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything
with no other light or guide
than the One that burned in my heart.

54
 This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
- him I knew so well -
there in a place where no one appeared.

O guiding night!
O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united
the Lover with his beloved,
transforming the Beloved into his Lover.

Upon my flowering breast,

which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

When the breeze blew from the turret,

as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

I abandoned and forgot myself,

laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
The Spiritual Canticle (Redaction B)

Songs between the soul and the Bridegroom

Bride

Where have you hidden,

Beloved, and left me moaning?

You fled like the stag

after wounding me;

55
 I went out calling you, but you were gone.

Shepherds, you who go

up through the sheepfolds to the hill,

if by chance you see

him I love most,

tell him I am sick, I suffer, and I die.

Seeking my love

I will head for the mountains and for watersides;

I will not gather flowers,

nor fear wild beasts;

I will go beyond strong men and frontiers.

O woods and thickets

planted by the hand of my Beloved!

O green meadow,

coated, bright, with flowers,

tell me, has he passed by you?

Pouring out a thousand graces,

he passed these groves in haste;

and having looked at them,

with his image alone,

56
 clothed them in beauty.

Ah, who has the power to heal me?

Now wholly surrender yourself!

Do not send me

any more messengers;

they cannot tell me what I must hear.

All who are free

tell me a thousand graceful things of you;

all wound me more

and leave me dying

of, ah, I-don't-know-what behind their stammering.

How do you endure

O life, not living where you live,

and being brought near death

by the arrows you receive

from that which you conceive of your Beloved?

Why, since you wounded

this heart, don't you heal it?

And why, since you stole it from me,

do you leave it so,

57
 and fail to carry off what you have stolen?

Extinguish these miseries,

since no one else can stamp them out;

and may my eyes behold you,

because you are their light,

and I would open them to you alone.

Reveal your presence

and may the vision of your beauty be my death;

for the sickness of love

is not cured

except by your very presence and image.

O spring like crystal!

If only, on your silvered-over faces,

you would suddenly form

the eyes I have desired,

which I bear sketched deep within my heart.

Withdraw them, Beloved,

I am taking flight!

Bridegroom

- Return, dove,

58
 the wounded stag

is in sight on the hill,

cooled by the breeze of your flight.

The Bride

My Beloved, the mountains,

and lonely wooded valleys,

strange islands,

and resounding rivers,

the whistling of love-stirring breezes,

the tranquil night

at the time of the rising dawn,

silent music,

sounding solitude,

the supper that refreshes and deepens love.

Catch us the foxes,

for our vineyard is now in flower,

while we fashion a cone of roses

intricate as the pine's;

and let no one appear on the hill.

Be still, deadening north

59
 wind; south wind, come, you

that waken love,

breathe through my garden,

let its fragrance flow,

and the Beloved will feed amid the flowers.

You girls of Judea,

while among flowers and roses

the amber spreads its perfume,

stay away, there on the outskirts:

do not so much as seek to touch our thresholds.

Hide yourself, my love;

turn your face toward the

mountains,

and do not speak;

but look at those companions

going with her through strange islands.

Bridegroom
Swift-winged birds,
lions, stags, and leaping roes,
mountains, lowlands, and river banks,
waters, winds, and ardors,
watching fears of night:

By the pleasant lyres

and the siren's song, I conjure you

60
 to cease your anger

and not touch the wall,

that the bride may sleep in deeper peace.

The bride has entered

the sweet garden of her desire,

and she rests in delight,

laying her neck

on the gentle arms of her Beloved.

Beneath the apple tree:

there I took you for my own,

there I offered you my hand,

and restored you,

where your mother was corrupted.

Bride

Our bed is in flower,

bound round with linking dens of lions,

hung with purple,

built up in peace,

and crowned with a thousand shields of gold.

Following your footprints

61
 maidens run along the way;

the touch of a spark,

the spiced wine,

cause flowings in them from the balsam of God.

In the inner wine cellar

I drank of my Beloved, and, when I went abroad

through all this valley,

I no longer knew anything,

and lost the herd that I was following.

There he gave me his breast;

there he taught me a sweet and living knowledge;

and I gave myself to him,

keeping nothing back;

there I promised to be his bride.

Now I occupy my soul

and all my energy in his service;

I no longer tend the herd,

nor have I any other work

now that my every act is love.

If, then, I am no longer

62
 seen or found on the common,

you will say that I am lost;

that, stricken by love,

I lost myself, and was found.

With flowers and emeralds

chosen on cool mornings

we shall weave garlands

flowering in your love,

and bound with one hair of mine.

You considered

that one hair fluttering at my neck;

you gazed at it upon my neck

and it captivated you;

and one of my eyes wounded you.

When you looked at me

your eyes imprinted your grace in me;

for this you loved me ardently;

and thus my eyes deserved

to adore what they beheld in you.

Do not despise me;

63
 for if, before, you found me dark,

now truly you can look at me

since you have looked

and left in me grace and beauty.

Bridegroom

The small white dove

has returned to the ark with an olive branch;

and now the turtledove

has found its longed-for mate

by the green river banks.

She lived in solitude,

and now in solitude has built her nest;

and in solitude he guides her,

he alone, who also bears

in solitude the wound of love.

Bride

Let us rejoice, Beloved,

and let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty,

to the mountain and to the hill,

to where the pure water flows,

and further, deep into the thicket.

64
And then we will go on

to the high caverns in the rock

that are so well concealed;

there we shall enter

and taste the fresh juice of the pomegranates.

There you will show me

what my soul has been seeking,

and then you will give me,

you, my life, will give me there

what you gave me on that other day:

the breathing of the air,

the song of the sweet nightingale;

the grove and its living beauty

in the serene night,

with a flame that is consuming and painless.

No one looked at her,

nor did Aminadab appear;

the siege was still;

and the cavalry,

at the sight of the waters, descended.

65
Copyright ICS Publications. Permission is hereby granted for any non-commercial use, if this
copyright notice is included. All of the poems of St John of the Cross are available in the
Collected Works, available from ICS. http://onetruename.com/StJohn.htm

Appendix
(Compare Underhills description of the 5 stages to what Plotinus tries to describe.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Underhill
Mysticism (1911)
Underhill's greatest book, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man's
Spiritual Consciousness, was published in 1911, and is distinguished by the very qualities
which make it ill-suited as a straightforward textbook. The spirit of the book is romantic,
engaged, and theoretical rather than historical or scientific. Underhill has little use for
theoretical explanations and the traditional religious experience, formal classifications or
analysis. She dismisses William James' pioneering study, The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902), and his "four marks of the mystic state" (ineffability, noetic quality,
transcience, and passivity). James had admitted that his own constitution shut him off almost
entirely from the enjoyment of mystical states, thus his treatment was purely objective.
Underhill substituted (1) mysticism is practical, not theoretical, (2) mysticism is an entirely
spiritual activity, (3) the business and method of mysticism is love, and (4) mysticism entails
a definite psychological experience. Her insistence on the psychological approach was that it
was the glamorous science of the pre-war period, offering the potential key to the secrets of
human advances in intelligence, creativity, and genius, and already psychological findings
were being applied in theology (i.e., William Sanday's Christologies Ancient and Modern).[1]

She divided her subject into two parts: the first, an introduction, and the second, a detailed
study of the nature and development of human consciousness. In the first section, in order to

66
free the subject of mysticism from confusion and misapprehension, she approached it from
the point of view of the psychologist, the symbolist and the theologian. To separate mysticism
from its most dubious connection, she included a chapter on mysticism and magic. At the
time, and still today, mysticism is associated with the occult, magic, secret rites, and
fanaticism, while she knew the mystics throughout history to be the world's spiritual pioneers.

She divided her map of "the way" into five stages: the first was the "Awakening of Self". She
quotes Henry Suso (disciple of Meister Eckhart):

That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he had of it a joy
such as he might have known in the seeing of shapes and substances of all joyful things. His
heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and his
hopes were fulfilled. (Cropper p. 46)

Underhill tells how Suso's description of how the abstract truth (related to each soul's true
nature and purpose), once remembered, contains the power of fulfilment became the starting
point of her own path. The second stage she presents as psychological "Purgation of Self",
quoting the Theologia Germanica (14th century, anonymous) regarding the transcendence of
ego (Underhill's "little self"):

We must cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them and refrain from claiming
anything for our own.

The third stage she titles "Illumination" and quotes William Law:

Everything in ...nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a. ..visible
outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness.
..from it, we find. ..it in its eternal state.

The fourth stage she describes as the "Dark Night of the Soul" (which her correspondence
leads us to believe she struggled with throughout her life) wherein one is deprived of all that
has been valuable to the lower self, and quoting Mechthild of Magdeburg:

...since Thou hast taken from me all that I had of Thee, yet of Thy grace leave me the gift
which every dog has by nature: that of being true to Thee in my distress, when I am deprived
of all consolation. This I desire more fervently than Thy heavenly Kingdom.

And last she devotes a chapter to the unitive life, the sum of the mystic way:

When love has carried us above all things into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by
the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus
we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us, and penetrating us.
(Ruysbroeck)

Where Underhill struck new ground was in her insistence that this state of union produced a
glorious and fruitful creativeness, so that the mystic who attains this final perfectness is the
most active doer not the reclusive dreaming lover of God.

67
We are all the kindred of the mystics. ..Strange and far away from us though they seem, they
are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us; the giants, the heroes of
our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only but also to the society that
brought it forth;...the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also. ..our guarantee of
the end to which immanent love, the hidden steersman. ..is moving. ..us on the path toward
the Real. They come back to us from an encounter with life's most august secret. ..filled with
amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance. ..urge them to
pass on their revelation. ..the old demand of the dim-sighted and incredulous. ..But they
cannot. ..only fragments of the Symbolic Vision. According to their strength and passion,
these lovers of the Absolute. ..have not shrunk from the suffering. ..Beauty and agony have
called. ..have awakened a heroic response. For them the winter is over. ..Life new,
unquenchable and lovely comes to meet them with the dawn. (Cropper, p. 47)

The book ends with an extremely valuable appendix, a kind of who's who of mysticism,
which shows its persistence and interconnection from century to century.

"The Mysticism of Plotinus" (1919)

An essay originally published in The Quarterly Review (1919),[25] and later collected in The
Essentials of Mysticism and other essays (London: J. M. Dent 1920) at pp. 116140.[26]
Underhill here addresses Plotinus (204270) of Alexandria and later of Rome.

A Neoplatonist as well as a spiritual guide, Plotinus writes regarding both formal philosophy
and hands-on, personal, inner experience. Underhill makes the distinction between the
geographer who draws maps of the mind, and the seeker who actually travels in the realms of
spirit. [page 118] She observes that usually mystics do not follow the mere maps of
metaphysicians. [page 117]

In the Enneads Plotinus presents the Divine as an unequal triune, in descending order: (a) the
One, perfection, having nothing, seeking nothing, needing nothing, yet it overflows
creatively, the source of being; [121] (b) the emitted Nous or Spirit, with intelligence,
wisdom, poetic intuition, the "Father and Companion" of the soul; [121122] and, (c) the
emitted Soul or Life, the vital essence of the world, which aspires to communion with the
Spirit above, while also directly engaged with the physical world beneath. [123]

People "come forth from God" and will find happiness once re-united, first with the Nous,
later with the One. [125] Such might be the merely logical outcome for the metaphysician,
yet Plotinus the seeker also presents this return to the Divine as a series of moral purgations
and a shedding of irrational delusions, leading eventually to entry into the intuitively
beautiful. [126] This intellectual and moral path toward a life aesthetic will progressively
disclose an invisible source, the Nous, the forms of Beauty. [127] Love is the prevailing
inspiration, although the One is impersonal. [128] The mystic will pass through stages of
purification, and of enlightenment, resulting in a shift in the center of our being "from sense
to soul, from soul to spirit," in preparation for an ultimate transformation of consciousness.
[125, 127] Upon our arrival, we shall know ecstasy and "no longer sing out of tune, but form
a divine chorus round the One." [129]

68
Among the mystics, Ruysbroeck was to her the most influential and satisfying of all the
medieval mystics, and she found herself very much at one with him in the years when he was
working as an unknown priest in Brussels, for she herself had also a hidden side.

His career which covers the greater part of the fourteenth century, that golden age of
Christian Mysticism, seems to exhibit within the circle of a single personality, and carry up to
a higher term than ever before, all the best attainments of the Middle Ages in the realm of
Eternal life. The central doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, and of the soul's power to become
the Son of God, it is this raised to the nth degree of intensity...and demonstrated with the
exactitude of the mathematician, and the passion of a poet, which Ruysbroeck gives us...the
ninth and tenth chapters of The Sparkling Stone the high water mark of mystical literature.
Nowhere else do we find such a combination of soaring vision with the most delicate and
intimate psychological analysis. The old Mystic sitting under his tree, seems here to be
gazing at and reporting to us the final secrets of that Eternal World... (Cropper, p. 57)

(Compare the following by Underhill on Ruysbroeck with the descriptions of the stages of
Plotinus)

The drama of this giving and receiving Love constitutes a single act, for God is as an "ocean
which ebbs and flows" or as an "inbreathing and outbreathing". [75, 76] "Love is a unifying
power, manifested in motion itself, 'an outgoing attraction, which drags us out of ourselves
and calls us to be melted and naughted in the Unity'." [76][20]

Next, the spiritual development of the soul is addressed. [7688] Ruysbroeck adumbrates
how one may progress from the Active life, to the Interior life, to the Superessential life;
these correspond to the three natural orders of Becoming, Being, and God, or to the three
rles of the Servant, the Friend, and the "hidden child" of God. [77, 85] The Active life
focuses on ethics, on conforming the self's daily life to the Will of God, and takes place in the
world of the senses, "by means". [78] The Interior life embraces a vision of spiritual reality,
where the self's contacts with the Divine take place "without means". [78] The Superessential
life transcends the intellectual plane, whereby the self does not merely behold, but rather has
fruition of the Godhead in life and in love, at work and at rest, in union and in bliss. [78, 86,
87][21] The analogy with the traditional threefold way of Purgation, Illumination, and Union, is
not exact. The Interior life of Ruysbroeck contains aspects of the traditional Union also, while
the Superessential life "takes the soul to heights of fruition which few amongst even the
greatest unitive mystics have attained or described." [7879]

At the end of her chapter IV, she discusses "certain key-words frequent in Ruysbroeck's
works," e.g., 'Fruition' [89], 'Simple' [8990], 'Bareness' or 'Nudity' [90], and "the great pair
of opposites, fundamental to his thought, called in the Flemish vernacular Wise and Onwise."
[9193][22] The Wise can be understood by the "normal man [living] within the temporal
order" by use of "his ordinary mental furniture". [91] Yet regarding the Onwise he has
"escaped alike from the tyrannies and comforts of the world" and made the "ascent into the
Nought". [92][23] She comments, "This is the direct, unmediated world of spiritual intuition;
where the self touches a Reality that has not been passed through the filters of sense and
thought." [92] After a short quote from Jallu'ddn, she completes her chapter by presenting

69
eighteen lines from Ruysbroeck's The Twelve Bguines (cap. viii) which concern
Contemplation:

Contemplation is a knowing that is in no wise ...

Never can it sink down into the Reason,
And above it can the Reason never climb. ...
It is not God,
But it is the Light by which we see Him.
Those who walk in the Divine Light of it
Discover in themselves the Unwalled.
That which is in no wise, is above Reason, not without it ...
The contemplative life is without amazement.
That which is in no wise sees, it knows not what;
For it is above all, and is neither This nor That. [93]

(Compare this poem with the poems of John of the Cross describing his ascent to the
unitive life)
http://www.jesus-passion.com/John_of_the_Cross.htm
THE WORKS OF SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS

ASCENT OF MT. CARMEL

DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

LIVING FLAME OF LOVE

SPIRITUAL CANTICLE

MINOR WORKS

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/john_cross/canticle.html

http://www.catholictreasury.info/books/spiritual_canticle/cn_1.php

Introduction To The Spiritual Canticle

70
 The Theme and Origin of the Poem

Though the lyric verses of The Spiritual

Canticle do not mention Christ explicitly, St.
John of the Cross, according to his
commentary, sings in them about the loving
exchange between a soul and Christ, the
Bridegroom. The soul undoubtedly
represents John himself and the stanzas
disclose the colloquy of love that must have
occurred between himself and Christ.

Asking ourselves why John expressed this

loving communication in poetry, we find the
clue to an answer in his Prologue. There he
explains that the stanzas are utterances of
love flowing from mystical understanding.
In stanza 25, he tells how the Beloved can
set the soul ablaze by a loving touch, like a
hot spark leaping from a fire. The will is
then enkindled in loving, desiring, praising,
and thanking God. The bride calls these acts
"flowings from the balsam of God." Born
out of the mystical understanding that was
communicated to John's soul in the touch of
the spark, these stanzas or canticles are,
then, like flowings or outpourings from the
balsam of God.

St. Teresa in chapter 16 of her Life tells

explicitly how the mystic sometimes feels
the impulse to express in poetry a deep
spiritual experience, even though talent as a
poet may be lacking: "Oh, help me God!
What is the soul like when it is in this state!
It would want to be all tongues so as to
praise the Lord. It speaks folly in a thousand
holy ways, ever trying to find means of
pleasing the one who thus possesses it. I
know a person who though not a poet
suddenly composed some deeply felt verses
well expressing her pain."

Expression of the Ineffable

71
 Although these canticles resulted from a
love flowing out of abundant mystical
understanding, they cannot declare fully the
understanding or experience. John asks in
the Prologue: "Who can describe in writing
the understanding he [the Beloved] gives to
loving souls in whom he dwells? And who
can express with words the experience he
imparts to them? Who, finally, can explain
the desires he gives them? Certainly, no one
can! Not even they who receive these
communications." Always, as John explains
in stanza 7, there is an "I-don't-know-what"
that strives to be articulated, something
further to say, something unknown, not yet
spoken, a sublime trace of God still
uninvestigated but revealed to the mystic.
The effort to convey the contents of the
experience becomes sheer stammering.

Faced with an inability to make their

experience clearly known and at the same
time feeling a loving impulse to convey it
outwardly, these persons who speak of
mysteries and secrets seem to be uttering
absurdities. But the apparent absurdities of
the poetic images and similes are a more
powerful means than rational explanations
for expressing the mystical experience; they
can suggest so much more about its
contents. John, in fact, points out that his is
the method of the Holy Spirit who, "unable
to express the plenitude of his meaning in
ordinary words, utters mysteries in strange
figures and likenesses," as for example in
the Song of Songs.

In fact the Song of Songs is the principal

source of The Spiritual Canticle. In this
biblical work John found an expression of
his own profound experience, and also
found the scenes, images, and words, even
though sometimes foreign to his
environment, with which to create his own
work.

That the figures and similitudes of poetry

speak about the inexpressible exchange of
love between Christ and John of the Cross

72
 more adequately than do ordinary words
does not mean that every mystic must be a
poet. The work of art, as such, is the creation
of the poet, not of the mystic. Still, the
mystical understanding and experience will
doubtless have an impact on the activity of
the poet. The lines of poetry may flow from
the impulse of the mystical understanding or
they may be composed in the love that
endures for some days after the spark of the
divine touch has passed. This love, says
John, lasts together with its effect a long
while, and sometimes a day or two, or many
days, though not always in the same degree
of intensity.

The Spiritual Canticle may be divided this way:

I. The Search for the Beloved (stanzas 1-12).

The initial burst into song; the bride laments the absence of her bridegroom.

First steps of the spiritual journey.

Longings and the weariness of impatient love.

II. Preparations for Perfect Union (stanzas 13-21).

Encounters of loving union.

Urgent desires for complete freedom from inner and outer

obstacles.

III. Full Union (stanzas 22-40).

The mutual, total surrender and gift of self in spiritual marriage.

Comparison of the present with the past.

Delights of union and desires for the vision of glory.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill

73
Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
First published in 1911, Mysticism remains the classic in its field. (This is clear from its many
different printings.) The Princeton Theological Review praised this book as 'brilliantly written
[and] illuminated with numerous well-chosen extracts . . . used with exquisite skill.'
Mysticism makes an in-depth and comprehensive exploration of mysticism. Part One
examines 'The Mystic Fact,' explaining the relation of mysticism to vitalism, to psychology,
to theology, to symbolism, and to magic. Part Two, 'The Mystic Way,' explores the
awakening, purification, and illumination of the self; discusses voices and visions; and delves
into manifestations from ecstasy and rapture to the dark night of the soul. It also contains a
useful Appendix, which details the 'mysticism' of different figures in Western history. A
hundred years old or so, Mysticism still remains the key secondary text on mysticism.

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.html

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.pdf

Mysticism:A Study in Nature and Development of

Spiritual Consciousness
Author(s):Underhill, Evelyn
Publisher:Grand Rapids, MI:
Christian Classics Ethereal Library

Contents
1
Title Page
2
Preface to the Twelfth Edition
6
Preface to the First Edition
9
Part One: The Mystic Fact
10
I. The Point of Departure
30
II. Mysticism and Vitalism
46
III. Mysticism and Psychology
69
IV. The Characteristics of Mysticism
92
V. Mysticism and Theology
119
VI. Mysticism and Symbolism
141
VII. Mysticism and Magic
155
Part Two: The Mystic Way
156
I. Introductory

74
164
II. The Awakening of the Self
184
III. The Purification of the Self
215
IV. The Illumination of the Self
247
V. Voices and Visions
276
VI. Introversion.
Part I: Recollection and Qui
302
VII. Introversion.
Part II: Contemplation
329
VIII. Ecstasy and Rapture
349
IX. The Dark Night of the Soul
379
X. The Unitive Life
407
Conclusion
413
Appendix:
Historical
Sketch of Mysticism
434
Bibliography
466
Bibliographical Note
ii
470
Index
501
Indexes
502
Index of Scripture
References
503
Latin Words
and Phrases
505
French
Words
and Phrases
506
Index of Pages of the Print Edition
iii

75
76