Numenius (fl. 160) and Plotinus (207-270)

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 54 of 54

Numenius (fl. 160) and Plotinus (207-270)
Version 1
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, December 17, 1985

Transcript:

This is the lecture that was delivered by Roger Ware at the Whirling Rainbow School on December 17th, 1985. The subject is Plotinus.

Um Numenius and Plotinus. And you Numenius. Numenius, Plotinus. Plotinus, our great grandfather. Plotinus. Of venerable memory. We're going to try and round out. This year's investigation. And as you can see, some of you who have been coming and most of you have been coming, that we keep discovering again and again that. No one knows anything. The scholars who know little bits don't know anything beyond the two years that they've looked at for 40 years, and the people who colloquially know an overall have no idea of any of the details and have taken third hand and fourth rate, the kind of shmear understandings. And so no one knows anything. And we're finding out that our method of educating ourselves, of patiently holding on like bulldogs to the people, to the events and trying to understand how how does this happen? Who are these people? What did they do? What's likely? How did this come about? What would we have done in these kinds of situations? How are these people different from us? What would they have done? And so forth. And we keep coming up with surprising insights that this is all very important material. We've tried to keep the focus in Alexandria, and we've seen again and again that Alexandria is like a prison. It keeps diffracting its rays, its influence all over the classical world, from India to Britain. So we're having a problem trying to bring it to some kind of a juncture, some kind of a close for the year.

And next year I'm going to take up the hermetic tradition, which is cutting through this material in a different form and taking it ahead, because the Hermetic tradition begins in ancient Egypt. And gathers, um, power around the time of Herodotus, which is about 450 BC, and has a tremendous revival in the torrential second century AD, and the hermetic um material becomes a diamond hard by the beginning of the third century, and at the end of the third century, it goes underground, and it is the core of the esoteric Western tradition, the Hermetic tradition. So all next year, we're going to look at that and try to see how the quintessential Egyptian mystery tradition became irradiated by the Greek, uh, mind in its mobility, so that the multifacetedness of Greek experience, um, made a jewel out of the Egyptian mystery tradition and that that, um, survives all this while hermetic tradition is still intact, there are still individuals who live that way and can trace their spiritual ancestry back unbroken through, um, to the origins of civilization. So we're going to do that next year. So we're trying to close up and tonight we're going to look at Plotinus. But in order to look at Plotinus, which will take us some time, it'll take us the next 2 or 3 meetings tonight before we are able to quite get to Plotinus, we have to look at Numenius.

Numenius, who lived in the second century roughly 120 to about 180. He was contemporaneous with Marcus Aurelius. He was from Apamea. Apamea, which is in Syria. And you have to sort of envision to yourself now that the, um, Eastern Mediterranean is a very viable trading coast, had been from Phoenician times and places on the coast, uh, seaports like Tyre and Sidon, um, modern Beirut, uh, Haifa and so forth, always have been international um, exchange points. But we often fail to understand that the interior also of that eastern Mediterranean coast is also exchange um junctures um, Jerusalem, Jericho, uh, Damascus and further north, um Apamea, so that the inland cities, there were exchange points between what we call the Levant, the, um, the Orient and the further inland of um, Asia, and that those caravan routes were ancient. Abraham lived about 2000 BC, and Abraham's caravans went completely along the Fertile Crescent because Sargon, 300 years before Abraham, had made an empire of the whole thing, that one could have gone from the Persian Gulf over to the Eastern Mediterranean without any kind of a passport needed. Apamea was a staging place like Palmyra, which was nearby in this, uh, inland valley, an inland valley much like the San Joaquin, fertile, capable of supporting, uh, uh, with foodstuffs and trade and so forth. A very large population. Apamea was also like a university town, and had been the site the birthplace, the origin of the last of the great stoic philosophers, Posidonius, who was the teacher of Um Carneades, who was a teacher of Cicero.

And a lot of the Roman wisdom. The Roman Stoic wisdom comes from Posidonius. He's one of the great minds of the ancient world. There isn't a single book in English on him. Nobody knows anything. I've been to the universities I've taught there. I know no one knows anything. So Numenius comes a couple hundred years later, the same place Apamea and the Syncretistic movement has gained tremendous steam at that time. Now, Numenius in his background, obviously was educated in many places in the classical world. Alexandria one of them. He's the only classical philosopher, classical quote pagan philosopher who has read Genesis, who understands, um, Moses, who understands the Jewish tradition. But we can see from his fragments, and that's all that we have, are fragments. His major book on the good. In six chapters or six books, we have just fragments of and assorted fragments in other writers, mainly in Plotinus, because Plotinus understood Numenius extremely well, because Numenius was like the city of Apamea, he was an exchange point. Numenius was the first of the great comparative religionists. He studied the ancient Egyptian religion, the ancient Hebrew religion, the ancient Persian religion, the ancient Brahmanical religions of India, and the Christian religion. He studied them all. So he's the first great comparative religionist, not believing in any of those traditions, but understanding them like a very great mind would, but also translating in the meantime the religious understanding into philosophic.

Discursive description. And so the mind of Numenius is extremely important. And the fact that the tremendous chaos mentally of the second century AD, where the popular mental mind was, um, like it is today, increasingly fractured, uh, characterized by paranoia, um, habituated to all kinds of phobic responses and neurotic imaginings and unable really to, um, uh, live in basic human experience. So that a mind like Numenius in this time period is almost obsessive on the other pole, in the opposite way, trying to understand. What is the common denominator of human experience? And so Numenius is that way. And his whole program was to educate. And the education had to become philosophic because that was the only stance that one could take. You couldn't believe in any particular one religion, but you could abstract the essence of each one of them. And then the only basis that you can put those essences together is from a philosophic stance. And so he becomes, on the surface, eclectic. But in order to forestall the awareness that he was becoming eclectic, Numenius also becomes extremely self-reflective upon the limitations of the mental process. So he becomes the first individual to really offer an in-depth critique of the limits of logic, and the critiques of Numenius were not appreciated. Until the 19th century. The end of the 19th century. Logicians like George Boole understood that, um, logic is only a viable as long as one has finite, uh, forms to work with.

That logic is only operable as a functional, dependable mental construct with finite values that it can't handle zeros and infinities at all, and it can't handle open endedness at all. And it can't handle problematics or ambiguities, or time tenses, or anything else that is characteristic of relational reality. That when you bring in relational elements into a logic, you begin to have what is called a meta logic, and right away you have really serious problems. Because that's where dissociation comes in exactly at that point. So Numenius is extremely important to us. And because he brought all of the various traditions together, he found that we are all that human beings are all culpable for a basic flaw, that there not only is an interior person who is unified, but there is also an exterior person who is multiple. And that all this becomes complicated because there is a third person which is involved, not with the interior or the exterior, but with what he called the image, which is a projected value. And it projects outwardly as well as inwardly. So one is dealing with man as a tertiary form. He has an interior, which is a unity. He has an exterior which is a multiplicity, and he has an image faculty, which is always ambiguous, always problematic, and always leading him away from any kind of a focus. So that this problematic character of man makes it incumbent upon the philosopher to lead what was called the philosophic life.

And right away, we begin to understand why Plotinus was the way that he was. Plotinus was exquisitely refined, the most refined person in the classical world. He was what we would call a saint. If anybody was a saint, he lived in Rome. Plotinus. Now we're talking about lived in Rome in the most corrupt time. And he never made a single enemy, if you can imagine. He lived 27 years at the top of Roman society. Roman senators, the emperor. His family were students of his. He was the person who was chosen very often for arbitration. All sides agreed. Whatever Plotinus decides, that's got to be it. Orphans and widows were often entrusted people who were not of age, yet their whole estates were put in Plotinus's hands. And he administered all these things. He was the only honest man in Rome. But we have to go to Numenius to understand that this coming, to understand the intelligible world of unity is complicated by the exterior multiplicity, but it's made absolutely demonically impossible as long as the image base is confused that there is no way in the world as long as the image projective base Exteriorly and Interiorly is still a wild card, one hasn't got a single chance of understanding anything. And as long as one is caught in a kind of a phony dualism of the bad world out there and the good person in here, if one is not aware that the whole relation is smeared and covered and obfuscated and created into a labyrinthian subterfuge by the projected image base that you can't even get started, you don't have any traction at all, because everything that you decide is decided upon a wild card image base.

That in fact has very little relationship to one's self as a person, but has every kind of affinity to what we would call archetypal stream of consciousness reality. So that the more that one becomes aware, the more that one begins to be critical of life and of others and of one's self, without first having dealt with this wild card image base, it's the image base that gains in power and gains an obfuscating complexity. And simply raising awareness is feeding power to the demonic, giving it more and more energy to play with and more and more then the transpersonal. Or in fact, we could say at this point, non-personal archetypal strings begin moving man as if he were a puppet and there is no one to blame. There are no bad people. It's that these large scale archetypal forms have their own autonomous realm, and they don't care at all about a human life or a human life span. They're meant to work over eons. And it's exactly this perception that creates the poignancy of Gnosticism and the incredibly precise critique that Plotinus exacts against Gnosticism.

And so we have very complex issues to try to understand. Almost no one in the classical world understood it. They never knew what hit them. They died of a disease, a mental disease that they had no idea of what happened and the supposed cure. Christianity simply encased the disease in a assimilable form and we inherit it today. We inherit the sickness, the insanity, but in assimilable form. And as long as we play according to the puppet rules, everything would be all right. But the fact is, is that we can't. We just can't. The rules are irrelevant to the lives that we actually live in. Numenius, in some of the fragments that we have. And this is a very difficult work to find. This is a translation of the fragments of Numenius, um, done in 1917. Kenneth Guthrie, who was the father of the great, uh, uh, K.C. Guthrie, who, uh, has just finished the big six volume history of Greek philosophy for Cambridge University Press. Well, this was his father back before the First World War. Uh, these books were privately printed, and, um, they just were never available. Um, comparative Literature Press Grantwood, new Jersey, privately printed for Guthrie. A friend of mine got this from a philosopher in northern Wisconsin up near Lake Superior, and passed it on to me in Numenius. He often writes in dialogue form, as one would expect of a Platonist. The platonic tradition to teach and interpret in the best way needs to have it fused with the teachings of Pythagoras.

In other words, Platonism. Understanding Plato according to the dialogues is a partiality. The dialogues of Plato are the material, but the ordering of the material of the dialogues is not in the dialogues. The ordering of the material of Plato has to be done in a Pythagorean manner, so that the hidden structure which is necessary to bring Plato's writings out so that they begin to scintillate and form a unity, is to understand the Pythagorean secret character of them. The structural element. And so Neoplatonism is not a rehashing of Plato, but bringing out explicitly the Pythagorean structure that was always given verbally with Plato's doctrines. But the Pythagorean structure was always a secret teaching, always given just orally, was never committed to writing until the time of Numenius, because it was apparent by that time that there were not going to be any mystery traditions that they were on their way out. So that Neoplatonism is actually what was originally there in Plato, only with the oral instructions added to it, which are Pythagorean. There is a statement from Numenius that bodies have to be perceived by tokens which reside in contiguous objects, but not from any cognizable object. Can the good be deduced. Only by an illustration can we explain how to achieve an understanding of the good. It is as if one were sitting. And this is a classic description from Numenius.

It is as if we are sitting on an observation tower, and we are watching intently, and we're watching the ocean intently from an observation tower. This is, incidentally, classic, uh, Alexandrian, um, oral mystery, uh, teaching. They would be taken up to the top of the lighthouse at Pharos, where one had a it was about 400ft up, 40 stories high, and one could look out into the horizon. So this description is like this. All right. As if one then Numenius is saying in the fragment is if one is up in an observation tower and looking intently at the face of the ocean and watching intently, should in a particular glance become aware that there is a boat out there on that ocean, a little boat in that immensity. Solitary fishing boat. The classical, uh, Pythagorean and classical Daoist also image of man in this world, a fishing boat going to get something from the depths, but all alone on the ocean. Solitary sailing along between the waves. Right. Energy forms waves. There's a there's a pattern to this ocean. One. As long as one is in the boat, limited to the boat. One thinks that this is geography. But when one is in an observation tower looking, one sees topographically that it's not just geography, but is a world pattern and understanding that then the perspective changes, and the solitariness of that boat in Among the Waves transforms itself into something else.

And and this is classic thus far from the visible world. Must he commune with the good being alone with the alone, being alone with the alone. And I guess in our time we would, um, make a language change here. Being alone with aloneness, we'd add a ness. Probably. Plotinus, uh, talks like this too. It comes from Numenius being alone with the alone, far from man or living being, or any body, great or small, in an inexpressible, indefinable, immediately divine solitude, the oceanic feeling, the actual present awareness that the wave form that one is experiencing is a cosmic pattern, and that one's aloneness, which was bleak or stark or or immediately, um, uh, noticeable at first, becomes the poignant focus of a quality which permeates the all. And one realizes then, that the terrific delusion of the image base of life was that one could be lonely, and that piercing through that image delusion to the interiorization of the realization that there is no such thing as loneliness at all. There is aloneness are none, none loneliness, only aloneness, so that solitude becomes a religious experience of the divine. This is absolutely essential for Neoplatonism, absolutely essential. Without that experience, nothing can be understood. Without that experience, it means that one has not torn the veil of the deluding image base aside and looked at oneself for real and not having looked at oneself for real. One doesn't know that one has immediate, immediate connectedness to the pattern of the all.

And so to imagine Numenius still writing in the fragment, to imagine the image base, to imagine that one sees the good floating up to oneself is entirely wrong. To see it only as an image is wrong. It's like the quintessence of idolatry. To think that the divine would come to oneself in an image, no matter how pristine, no matter how electrically charged, no matter how surrounded by choirs of Cecil B DeMille angels, is absolute delusion that none of that can possibly be true. Why? Because it is all still in the horizon of image projection. We've told the story one time about, um, in the Vajrayana tradition of how Milarepa passed the Kagyupa tradition onto Gampopa and Gampopa famous professor and intellectual giant and everything, and then realized that he didn't really understand exactly himself and went to study under Milarepa. And how Milarepa said, well, you've got to just think it through a little bit more. And he said, send Gampopa back to his hut. And he said, now, if you have a dream, I want you to come and wake me up in the, you know, even if it's the middle of the night. And for 27 days, 27 nights, Gampopa had better dreams and better dreams. He'd go wake up Milarepa and he'd tell him the dream and get all excited. And he'd say, I had this image of, you know, 18 of this and 24 of that.

And Milarepa would say, no, that's not it. Go back, go back to sleep, go back. And finally, on the 28th day, he slept right through and in the morning went to Milarepa and said, well, I guess I've failed. I didn't have any, I didn't have any dreams at all. And Milarepa said, well, I guess then it's you're finished here. And it wasn't until years later that Gampopa realized that that was enlightenment. There were no more images. There were no more daydreams. There were no more of any of that sort of thing. But being masterful, Milarepa didn't tell him, well, that's it, because that would have caused a recursive image in him that he had to live with that for a while, and in his own way become acclimated to the fact that that's right, you don't have to have an image of the divine that that's idolatrous. You. Can't paste any kind of mask on. God. But what kind of tape are you going to use? He's nourishing you like sunshine and you're busy trying to scotch tape things onto the sunshine. It's totally inappropriate. It's the. It's the devices of mad people. Well, what do you do with sunshine? You don't tape masks onto it. You grow things. That's what you do. So the experience of the divine is like this. And he's saying, here, Numenius is saying, and then Plotinus will take this and open it up completely to imagine that one sees the good floating up to oneself as entirely wrong, and to suppose that he has approached the good is nothing less than impudent, so long as he dallies with the sense world to think that you can make any journey, or any kind of a quest, or any kind of a mythological cycle that you're going to live by to approach the divine.

All of that is, is, Numenius writes, impudent. It's the height of egotism. It's the height still of projecting. Only one is projecting out in thinking one can make an approach. Well, we're going to we're going to really do it this time. We're going to mount a sacred expedition to Nepal. We're going to take all of the professors and all of the people, and we're going to go to all the caves and all the monasteries, and we're going to really have religious experiences and all that is impudent. There's nothing to do with anything except projecting. And the other way to think that one's going to through go through all kinds of mortifications and in the full moon and all that, and have some image of the divine come up, is how does he say entirely wrong? So in Numenius, right away, in the midst of the crisis of consciousness, which was a fracturing of character, that's where the crisis of consciousness really comes to. It's a fracturing of character. In the second century AD, Numenius strikes the bell of truth, and that resonance coming out from Apamea gets picked up, especially in Alexandria, especially in Alexandria.

The cue to it all is that there is an invisible structure which has a Pythagorean flavor to it, like number that there is a, a, a mathematical relationship that the, uh, that the focus of the inner self has like a mathematical relationality, and that in some way this intuition has to be kept, um, as a guiding star, that there is a structure entirely to the self which forestalls all of these obfuscating tendencies. Here's how Numenius would write it, and dead. In fact, in a fragment 14, he says that Pythagoras applied the name of unity to the divinity, but to matter applied the name of Doubleness doubleness of polarity, if you will, or sometimes a manifoldness. But it's more accurate to say doubleness, because that's how Pythagoras would have would have said it, that the interior is a unity, or, as Ficino later would use the terms in its more a superlative exactness, a unitus, but that the um but matter is always doubleness. And to use the terms polarity now has odd connotations for us. But doubleness, he says, if off this doubleness is indeterminate, then it cannot have been generated, which could have been the case only if determinate or limited. In other words, it was unborn and ungenerated before it was created or adorned. But when so created and adorned or irradiated by the adjusting divinity, it was generated. However, inasmuch as the fate of being generated must surely fall into a time that is posterior, it must have happened back then.

Then must that uncreated and unadorned and ungenerated be considered as contemporary with the divinity by which it was organized or put into order? In this way the mind begins to sense that God is uncreated. Numenius insists that some Pythagoreans had not. Correctly apprehended this statement, for they thought that even beyond indeterminate and incommensurable, doubleness had been organized by a single unity through the following process. And here's and here's the flaw. That's the very fatal flaw. It's almost impossible to detect mentally, and only spiritual experience can can make apparent that this is a flaw. And it's a flaw which is a characteristic of the mind. The mind cannot help making this flaw. There's no way it can can do otherwise. Here's how the mind thinks that unity receded from its singleness and was transmuted into the form of doubleness. This flaw exists even until today. You can. You can find it once you understand it. It's like a telltale sign. And you can see it in all kinds of modern metaphysical jargon, the kind of patois that people spread over other people's minds, like rancid butter. There is no way to understand unity in a sense that unity can withdraw and thus create a doubleness by its withdrawing and then leaving a not. That is a mental flaw. What fills that space when one would say unity withdraws and leaves a not.

Well, then creation is a projection of imagery into that nothing. What is that saying? That is absolutely symptomatic. It's like taking the pulse absolutely symptomatic of somebody who is paranoic, who would believe that that is the very essence of paranoia. Numenius says correctly, this is wrong. This is wrong. It is for thus would unity have ceased to be, unity would have ceased to be unity, and would have been replaced by a premature doubleness. And that's right, because the mind preempts its lack of understanding by creating a worldliness which it then believes in more than in itself. And in this we have to use a firm that Martin Heidegger used uses in being in time. In this thrownness into the delusion, man loses himself and frantically tries to find himself in terms of that image base, in terms of that delusion, in terms of that thrownness and that projection, and cannot but remembers through memory that there is a structure and an order. And so he tries to order the imagery, he tries to order the thrown state of his being and out of this comes all of these phony universes. This is the realm of the Demiurge. And it doesn't matter how many times you organize it, or how sophisticated you organize it, or how cleverly you make permutations in the that image base, you're always working with sand. There's never anything that's going to going to hold can't, cannot hold this.

Numenius writes this would thus would matter be converted out of divinity and incommensurable and indeterminate doubleness out of unity. Such an opinion would not seem plausible to people of even mediocre education. Well, that's true if one is together, if one is capable of being natural. But the world was not natural. It was anything but natural. It was torrentially, chaotic and paranoiac and so the paranoiac solution seemed like the right ones. And the real solution seemed like daydreams. And so they were rejected, and the few individuals who brought the truth out were thrown away. Literally thrown away. Um, their work was just thrown away, their lives were thrown away. And the paranoiac solutions which fit the paranoiac world were held up to be the great solutions. And we inherit that today. We inherit the civilization founded on that. Krishnamurti brings out in, um, his latest series of dialogues with David Bohm, The End of Time. The book is called, he says, it seems that man has made a chronic mistake somewhere in his past, because man is always concerned with becoming. This, that and the other. He thinks that he can become something other than what he is. A contemporaneous figure with Numenius is Marcus Aurelius. This one likes that. Marcus Aurelius. I'm going to read a couple of lines from this book called Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety. E.r. Dodds, who was extremely famous. One of his great books was called The Greeks and the irrational, published by the University of California Press about 35 years ago.

He also was a New Testament scholar. Uh, Saint John was his fourth. He writes, as the earth is a pinpoint in infinite space. So the life of man is a pinpoint in infinite time, a knife edge between two eternities. His activities are smoke and nothingness. His prizes are a bird flying past. Vanished before we can grasp it. That's a quotation from Marcus Aurelius. The clash of armies is the quote. Quarrel of puppies over a bone. The pomp of Marcus's own Sarmatian triumph is the self-satisfaction of a spider which has caught a fly. For Marcus is. This is not empty rhetoric. It is a view of the human condition and is meant in deadly earnest. Associated with it in Marcus Aurelius is the feeling that man's activity is not only unimportant, it is also, in some sense, not quite real. This feeling. Feeling is like an in the second century is increasing deja vu, feeling that not this is not quite real at all. That sort, that sort of a of a nightmarish, um, looming, uh, revulsion coming closer and closer to the surface. This feeling was expressed in another ancient topos. The comparison staled for us by much repetition of the world to a stage and men to actors or marionettes. All the world's a stage. It has a long history, starting from two passages in Plato's Laws.

That's his last, um, work, the laws, where we are told that men and women are puppets, chiefly having in them only a small portion of reality, whether God designed them as playthings only, or for some more serious purpose, remains in doubt after Plato. The image, the image, the what is the image? The image is that we are on a stage and we are actors on a stage, or worse, we are puppets on a stage. Or even worse, that this is not quite real. After Plato, the image was exploited by the early cynics and skeptics. Chance was seen to be the authoress of the drama. Sometimes what we call reality was seen as just a stage set, and our experience of it no more than a dream or a delusion. The Stoics, from Chrysippus onwards, use the comparison more conventionally to point the battle moral that it takes all sorts to make a world, or to emphasize later, as Seneca and Epictetus do, that one should make the best of even a minor part. But it is only finally in Marcus Aurelius that the suggestion of unreality reappears, for example, where he jots down a series of images for human life, beginning with stage plays and vain pomp of processions and ending with puppets jerking on a string. In between comes sham fights, the throwing of bones to puppies or crumbs to fish, the futile industry of ants, and the futile scurrying of panic stricken mice.

All of these are images of man ants, panic stricken mice. This is the man who is the emperor of the Roman Empire, one of the wisest men of his time. Because the nightmare by this time was in their conscious, waking life all the time. And we're going to see that in our our time very shortly that it's bad enough to have nightmares, but it's even worse not to be able to wake up from them at all. Much the same feeling underlies the long and splendid passage where Plotinus, in his last years drawing both on Plato and the Stoics, interprets the grandeurs and miseries of human life in terms of a stage performance. For him, as for the aged Plato, Man's Earnest is God's play performed in the world theater by fair and lovely living puppets, puppets who mistake themselves from. Men and suffer accordingly, though in truth they are but external shadows of the inner man. The only truly existent, truly substantial person. This is linked with Plotinus's general doctrine that action is everywhere, a shadow of contemplation, and an inferior substitute for it. And in Plotinus realization finally disperses the image base Exteriorly and Interiorly, and reconciles the duplicity that was mistakenly brought up by logic and interior experience becomes focused so that the Pythagorean structure of the interchange becomes finally realizable in a in a life, in a person. Plotinus, in trying to keep away from analogy his which have an image um, correlation which yields them up to polarization, sometimes does an end play around the problem by using, um, similes, which are kinesthetic.

That is to say, they have movement rather than a visual structure. And the simile that works best in this way is to use a the simile of the dance. The dance, not just any dance, but a particular kind of a dance, um, called the chorea, a Greek dance that was used in Greek tragedy and used also in the classical Greek lyric. Like in Pindar, Pindar's poetic form is based on the, uh, chorea, the dance movement which discloses the esoteric nature of the real. How does it do so? One moves around in one way, almost to a closure of a circle, turns metanoia, and moves back around the other way, almost to the closure and stops. So that one describes almost like an infinity sign, which is open, and one can go on indefinitely. In this and in that motion, one sees that the quality of presence is created by the unity of form that all form in its unitas discloses presence. For Plotinus, he will say that the unity of the form of all forms is the good, and the presence that is disclosed is the real and the protagonist, the self, the real person who experiences this is the intelligible, so that the intelligible is able to move along towards the good in the sense not of a quest for it, but of a forming of it in terms of a universal all, and that discloses the presence of the real.

This is the Trinity in Plotinus, and it is Plotinus's Trinity that Esoterically is adopted by Christianity, but Christianity, not just Christianity. Saint Augustine encloses it in a cocoon of imagery which commits it back into a mental idea. And so the truth is there. But the truth is there only in an approximate form, so that to understand the truth, one has to be willing to live in the mind. And this is what's wrong with Christianity. It is true, but that its truth is only mental. It is not experiential. So one can opt one way or the other. One can understand the truth and never be able to live it. Or one can live without understanding. And it's that bifurcation. It's that schizophrenia built into Western civilization that destroys every attempt at unity. It's like a short fuse that every time anything gets close to unity, it blows up. That's why the world today is in a arms race that yields itself into two camps that are perfectly polarized and perfectly willing to outdo the other. It has that structure in it. What structure is that? Well, the Soviet Union is the inheritor of the Byzantine Empire and the. As the inheritor of the Western Christian tradition, and they're still fighting the same theological structure of mental delusion that was created in the third century AD.

So the dance, the choreo, each. That's a simile of the choral dance. Each part of the universe participates in the dance of the whole, in accordance with a numerical pattern or numerical pattern. That is to say, it's not that number, it's not numerological. It's not that at all. That would be misunderstanding. That would be going that would going for the image bait to think it was numerological. What is said here is that a numerical pattern is intelligible. That is to say, one can understand so that the each part of the universe participates in the dance of the whole in accordance with an intelligible pattern. And the reference here is to Aeneid four, part four, return to McKenna's beautiful, Stefan McKenna's beautiful translation of it, and we come here. And the fourth tractate bears, um, the title problems of the soul, problems of the soul. And let's start with the beginning of this problems of the soul. And this is Plotinus. Now, in a very good translation, Stephen McKenna devoted his entire life to patiently translating Plotinus. He was an Irish mystic who was a contemporary and friend of people like Yeats and Joyce and so forth. Superb human being. Here's Plotinus. What, then, will be the soul's discourse? What? Its memories in the intellectual realm, when at last it has won its way to that essence? Obviously, from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order and have its act upon the things among which it now is failing.

Such contemplation and act. Its being is not there of things of earth. It will know nothing. It will not, for example, remember an act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had been it had contemplation of the Supreme. When we sees anything in the direct intellectual act, there is room for nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object. The subject is not included in the act of knowing, but asserts itself, if at all, later, and as a sign of the altered. This means that one it's purely in the intellectual. No one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further, if all intellection is timeless, as it appears from the fact that the intellectual beings are of eternity, not of time, there can be no memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things, but none whatever all is presence there. For there is no discursive thought, no passing from one point to another. Well, now you can see that this is extraordinarily startling and difficult. So we have to understand a little bit about Plotinus now, and we'll do a little bit this week. And then next week we'll, uh, go deeper, deeper into it. Here's something about Plotinus, the work that we have, the Aeneid. These are actually transcriptions of talks that Plotinus gave. His eyesight was extremely bad, but more than that, Plotinus was the sort of precise, spiritual individual who did not like to write anything down.

He didn't like to write anything at all, and if he wrote anything, he never went back and reread it. He never reread anything that he wrote. And he was a notorious mis speller. He was notorious about his bad handwriting, and it wasn't until he was 59 years old that he consented to write anything down at all. His form was much like we're doing here of just speaking. They called them in Rome at the time. Conferences. They were lectures. You know, this kind of thing started in Alexandria. What we're doing here, this is all very Alexandrian and the Alexandrian. Um, um. Crowd took this to Rome. So there were lectures or conferences at homes. Usually that's what it was, but they were homes when he was 59. He was asked to make a selection of some of his conferences and to write them out. And he did. And in fact, we have a list from porphyry, one of his students, of just what, what they were. And he lists in here some of 21 tractates which Plotinus wrote out and which had to be rewritten because they were such terrible autographs. When anybody would raise these tractates to Plotinus suggestion, he would tell them, that's not it at all. If we don't talk about it extemporaneously fresh now, we're not understanding anything at all. And people would take this to be kind of weird.

But if you're seeing it from a spiritual standpoint, you can see that Plotinus is merely being accurate. He's saying, let's not bait ourselves into thinking that we have a mental stance which is trustable, from which to experience the real, that we have to constantly remind ourselves that the mind is a wonderful tool, but that the spirit has to use the mind and the spirit in order to use the mind, has to be outside the mind and free that the condition of the spirit is. It has to be free. It can't be forced to walk on any of the lines that are drawn by the mind. Why? Because the way in which the spirit moves is in terms of the disclosure of the form of the all. Because that's the way that the soul is. The only dance the soul does is the dance of the unity of the universe. But the mind can't do that dance. And so it likes to clip the wings. It says, you've got to stay on these lines. How come? Well, because these lines make the form. But the soul can't stand those lines. It has to be covered with a kind of a projected imagery, which then baffles so that it can stay on those lines. This is this is why the corrosiveness of phony understanding. But Plotinus has within his work a saving grace. He says, we have tutelary spirits. We have. And the notion of a guardian spirit comes from Plotinus.

We have a guardian spirit, every one of us, whose specific task is to help us to the real, will not let us rest until we have disclosed the real to ourselves. And if we refuse to learn, the tutelary spirit has to, like a good disciplinarian, set up situations so that we're going to not get along too well. Not because we're we're needing to have evil, but that we're not understanding and we're not understanding specifically because we're trusting projected imagery inside and out, and also thinking in dualistic terms, and also not really having the belief that insight is accurate enough to discern the real, or that the real must be some kind of an object or some kind of an image, which has to be made by refining our capacity to make images. And so the obsession with carving ever and ever finer gods prevents us specifically from ever experiencing the divine. So in Plotinus, the fourth tractate of the third Aeneid is called our tutelary spirit. And I think next week we're going to come to this. But this is the first paragraph of it, and it's very difficult. It's hard to hear Plotinus because he doesn't speak in an image base. He doesn't speak in a paranoic way. He speaks so directly that when we first hear someone talk this way, our first reaction is, huh? And it's only later when we have a spiritual quality to let it really resonate with us, that we get tuned and we get harmonized, so that then Plotinus is clear.

And when we look up, we can see the nightmare madness of the world. Here's how the first paragraph goes, and we'll just end here for tonight and take up with it exactly here next week. Some existence, not existence as an existence, but existence. Absolute unity and intellectual principle remain at rest while their hypostases or expressed ideas come into being. But in our view, the soul generates by its motion, generates the sensitive faculty considered as expression form, and the faculty of growth in which soul extends to the vegetable order even as it is present in human beings. The soul carries this faculty of growth with it, but it is not the dominant sense. It is not the whole man in the vegetable order. It is the highest, since there is nothing to rival it. But at this phase it is no longer reproductive, or at least what it produces is of quite another order. Here life ceases, all later production is lifeless. What does this imply? Everything the soul engenders down to this point of sheer lifelessness, comes into being shapeless and takes form by orientation towards its author and supporter. Therefore, and even more certainly, the thing engendered on the further side can be no image of the soul. Since it is not even alive, it must be an utter indetermination, no doubt, even in things of the nearer order there was indetermination, but within a form they were undetermined, not utterly, but only in contrast with their perfect state.

At this extreme point we have the utter lack of determination. Let it be raised to its highest degree, and it becomes body. By taking such shape as serves its scope, then it becomes the recipient of its author and sustainer. This presence in body is the only example of the boundaries of higher existence running into the boundary of the lower. So we have our first brush now with the tragedy of the ancient world. In order to disclose the real in the third century AD, one had to grind so fine that it became unintelligible to those persons for whom it would have been a necessity. And we can see that the problem in our time is not to grind the point so fine that it will break like it did before, so that the problem is not one of refining learning and language so much, not so much as describing the dance in a simile, but of doing the dance so that the spiritual form of the 21st century will be an actual kinesthetic choreo, rather than some description of it. Because this is the only way to forestall the tragedy of the third century happening again. One can talk eloquently about the dance of life, and completely delude oneself into thinking that one has done it. The only way to forestall that is simply just to do the dance. Well, we'll take this up again next week.

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