Plotinus (Lecture 2)
Presented on: Tuesday, May 20, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 20 of 24
Plotinus Lecture 2
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, May 20, 1986
Transcript:
The Pyramid of Unas. And the text in the pyramid of Unas was just translated about 25 years ago for the first time. And we have it here along with all of the other translations. So that we have the material available to us and we've been reviewing it since January. And we have come to understand that a tremendous change happened in Alexandria about the time of Jesus. The change is verifiable without any reference to Jesus. without any reference to Alexandria. We can and we have taken a broad survey of the characteristics of human beings, the personality types, the subconscious imagery, the archetypal symbols. And we have seen that the way in which they worked in the B.C. centuries changed at about 0 A.D. So that human beings who lived in the 1st century A.D. were different, structurally, from human beings who lived in the 1st century B.C. Now this change in that two hundred years is not noticeable at first. But if you extend back so that you go back to the 3rd century BC and up to the 3rd century A.D., there the change is so noticeable that one wonders instantly are we talking about the same planet.
If you look at the writings of Aristotle and then you look at the writings of Plotinus, you notice a drastic change in focus. The confidence in Aristotle that what we are is known. And known so well that we can just assume it. And we can go from there and become interested in, in everything outside of ourselves is no longer there in Plotinus. So that the main change that we see is that the, the nature of the person has changed. And it's around this particular focus that Plotinus becomes one of the major figures in human spiritual tradition. Because Plotinus establishes for all time that the spirit is a person. Not just a transcendental function. Not just some infinite realm beyond our grasp. But that the spirit on all levels is personable. And that the highest spirit, the unknown God, is also a person.
And Plotinus spends his long life, the first half of it in Alexandria and the second half of it in Rome, establishing this for himself in a very peculiar way. The peculiar way was a focus. It's like using both eyes. On the one eye he was a as classical a Greek philosopher as one would ever expect to find. In fact, medieval scholastic philosophy in the West for a thousand years is Plotinian. It's not Aristotelian. it's not Platonic but Plotinian. So, in one eye he's a philosopher. But in the other eye he's a Hermetic sage. For the philosopher he loves to talk about words. he loves to refer to philosophic books. But with the other eye, he loves to look through those books. He loves to look through those philosophers. And see that what they were presenting was always inadequate in terms of itself. But that some of them got very close to framing viewpoints through which we can look. And if we look through those viewpoints then we make use of philosophy as it should be. But if we stop, if we misfocus our attention. And we simply look at the words or we look at the books. And we start to talk doctrine. and we start to talk meaning in terms of, of what has been sent to us we are forever spinning our wheels.
Now this looking through is the spiritual vision. And the teacher that he had for this was named Ammonius Saccas. Less is written about Ammonius Saccas than any other major human being. We just don't know anything about him at all. His name is Egyptian. Amun is the name of the Sun God. Like Amun Ra. Ammonius which was a common name in Alexandria. He was probably born around 175 A.D. and lived on until probably around 240 A.D. His last name Saccas is actually a Roman Latin name and it means the sack bearer. And so, everyone has assumed for the last four or five hundred years that Ammonius was one of these homespun philosophers who worked on the docks in the quays. In one of the poorer sections of Alexandria. Sort of an Eric Hoffer type of a character. but this is not so. This is to misunderstand.
We're not dealing with someone in Plotinus or an Ammonius Saccas, we're not dealing with someone who is ordinary we're dealing with some of the most extraordinary, exotic human beings who have ever lived on this planet. And in Plotinus' spiritual vision, his way of looking through to the real, one can see that Ammonius was in fact a Christian. Because it is only towards the end of the 2nd century A.D. in the Christian refined vision in Alexandria that one has learned to apprehend the real. Rather than to understand appearances, to apprehend the real.
This requires an inner transformation. You cannot be taught how to apprehend the real. But you can be shown how to arrange yourself in certain patterns. patterns of behavior. Patterns of life. Patterns of feeling. And that if you observe these patterns continuously for some duration of time you will acclimate yourself to this transformation, this inner transformation. And of course, what occurs through this inner transformation is a sensitivity to the spiritual personage. And the first spirit guide, spiritual personage who is there in Alexandria is the person of Jesus.
Towards the end of the 2nd century A.D. in a small group of religious individuals would become Christians by this time. These techniques had been refined enough to be able to be put into practice. And the whole purpose of the church at this time in Alexandria, the Christian church, was to provide a context for people to organize their lives in long enough durations. Years. Decades. So that they could a climate themselves to seeing through the patterns to the real. The personal real. And once they could see to the personal real of Jesus then they could begin to sensitize themselves to seeing the personal real of their fellow beings. And finally, to experience the personal real of themselves.
Now this is Christianity before all of the councils ruined it. Before all of the doctrinaire fights that went on century after century watered it down. And the place here of Jesus as a spiritual teacher was to show the way. Not as an exclusive but as the pioneer who was the first to be able to manifest this and teach this and show this.
Now the ancient Hermetic tradition in Egypt was always that instruction, spiritual instruction, for the person was given to be used after death. That's why they're called Pyramid Texts. Because the pyramids were, they were the coffin. Sometimes they call coffin text. This instruction was for after death. And generally, it was only for the royal personages who were buried in these tombs. So, there were two limitations. Two exclusions. You had to be a royal personage and you had to have died.
Now what Jesus did is that he took both these exclusions and turned them inside out. You didn't have to be a royal person. Everyone had a spiritual person that could be developed. And you didn't have to die first, the teaching was for life. And so, it was for everyone and for life. And this was the essential revolution.
Understanding that was so difficult though because it was completely out of the capacity of anyone living in a Roman mentality. There was no way someone living in a Roman mentality could even begin to approach that. And so, the early Christian church, specifically in Alexandria, was interested in developing the patterns by which one could learn to understand and see through to the spiritual real.
Now by the time of Ammonius Saccas this was developed enough in Alexandria so that there was a special school that taught this. It was called the catechetical school in Alexandria. And one of the great famous heads of that school was Clement of Alexandria. Who we have lectured on and talked about. And the successor to Clement of Alexandria was a man named Origin. and Origin, O-r-i-g-i-n. And Clement are usually grouped together as Alexandria and Christians. And here's a basic textbook published just a few years ago. And this is what you would find if you would go to theological stew...school. Clement of Alexandria and Origin. Origin is on prayer exhortation to martyrdom, various dialogues and so forth.
Now the teacher of origin was Ammonius Saccas the same teacher of Plotinus. Origin lived to about 254-255 A.D. and Plotinus died in 269 A.D. So, they were more or less contemporaries. And they shared the same teacher. And there was a third famous person in the 3rd century antiquity. A literary critic and writer named Longinus. And Longinus is one of the great stylistic writers. Elegant, beautiful Greek and Latin of the age. Ammonius Saccas was his teacher also.
So that we can see basically from the sophistication of Longinus' from, the formative Christian understanding of Origin, from the exquisite beauty of Plotinus that Ammonius Saccas is not somebody carrying sacks on the docks of Alexandria. He in fact is the traditional Hermetic sage. Who is not in the Christian community so much. He's not in the catechetical school so much. But he is like one of those living Hermetic teachers who taught the, the personal contact way. That is to say as a Hermetic teacher in this way recreates in his own psychophysical anatomy the inner penetration, the fabric of all of these patterns. So that the experience of the personality of that teacher is what eventually effectively comes through to you. And what he says, the subject matter that he might talk about, is all in a way strategically to gain your attention. To fill the mind with enough problems so that the mind does not become critically attacking. That is not filled with doubts and second-guesses and so forth. And it is in the loving concern with the subject matter and with the pattern personality of the teacher that then the teacher emanates from himself that spiritual truth. And the Greek word for that was called epiclesis. And eventually the touch of the spiritual person of that teacher becomes recognizable. And then one realizes that that quality in oneself that has become sensitized to this is one's own spiritual person.
When we come to Plotinus then, we have to understand several interrelated realities which are difficult intellectually, but which are very simple in a personal sense. The first one is how does the spirit emanate? And when one looks at books on Plotinus, university published professorial written books, you always find chapters on emanation.
Here is a Neuse as emanation. A.H. Armstrong Plotinus published in Amsterdam about 1967. And we read. This is typical of the kind of scholarly books that one finds of Plotinus. "Plotinus' doctrine of Neuse." Neuse means is the Greek word for mind. But this is capital M. Capital M. capital M, mind. "Plotinus' doctrine of Neuse is the fullest expression in his system of the universal later Hellenic belief in a totally unified cosmic order." Totally unified cosmic order. that the entirety of the universe is an order. And that it's integrated so that it is a unity. That is to say, colloquially, it's one thing.
And we read in Armstrong, "it is also the means." The means. "Neuse is also the means by which Plotinus tries to bring the absolute transcendent one into the organic unity of such a cosmos."
Now you can see, if you're following this at all, that the mind immediately has a problem. The mind immediately says ok the cosmos is one, that's fine. The transcendent one coming into the cosmos, does that mean that the transcendent one is different from the cosmos? Well then don't you have to unities. And what is unity then if you're if you're trying to get one into the other? If the mind thinks in this way it is falling into a trap. Into a flaw. The flaw is to think in terms of boxes. In terms of a kind of a space where there is a quantity. And that one takes a different quantity and puts it inside the other quantity. This kind of thinking is flawed. And in fact, it's almost impossible for the polarized mind not to think in this way. There are philosophic phrases for this. But the, the essential one is to mistake the dimensions of being as space. Race extensa. And this is a definite flaw which is inherent in the mind. In the untrained untransformed mind.
The way that Plotinus spiritually teaches how the transcendent one creates the cosmos, is that the cosmos is an emanation. An emanation from the one.
And in seeking to try to get a picture of this I'm going to go to a contemporary nuclear physics for just a moment. And introduce to you the concept which came out about five years ago. four or five years ago called the soliton. We know that in high energy nuclear physics that there is a quality to a very, very high-powered energy circuit that's integrated. When one gets up into the billions of volts. That the quality of the unity is so strong at that high energy level that when it has a slight wobble its resonant motion carries into our ordinary time-space in a unified way. So that it's like, in a colloquial way, that if you ring a bell imagine that the whole shape of that bell comes out in the sound wave. That the sound wave coming out is not just a part of the Bell. And then another part comes in. And another part. But the whole shape of the bell comes out at the same time. In the soliton the whole shape of the energy flow occurs intact. This is like Plotinus is understanding of emanation. That the transcendent one is of such absolute power that when it rings, the entire unity of God occurs in this kind of waveform emanation. And that the first emanation from this is in fact the intelligible cosmos. The, not the physical cosmos but the intelligible cosmos. Which is the structure of meaning behind it. So that that a cosmos, even though it is tentatively different from the divine it is in fact the divine complete.
For Plotinus the whole purpose of existence for human spiritual existence is to find a technique, to find a way, at this final level of reverberation where we are now. We're at the last level of revert reverberation from the divine. We have to find a way to reverse that motion away from the divine and start it returning back to the divine. that man is like the final echo of the bell of God. And his whole purpose is to find a way in his life to begin the return movement. And to send that emanation back to God.
And the word that Plotinus uses for that sending back is contemplation. That you can't grab it with your hands. You can't grab it with your your feelings so much. Or your mind so much. Although they have to be brought into play. But there is a quality of the spirit inside the spiritual person which through contemplation can gain this vision of the person of the divine. And that once having established the line between one spiritual person and Gods spiritual person, then the act of contemplation is the direct communication back. And this a cop...contemplation then Plotinus says is what he calls vision. A vision. That the spirit moves by vision. The mind moves by thought but the spirit moves by vision. And the way in which thought works is to order the patterns so that they're integrated. So that they can carry in one fell swoop, in one grand integration, the energeia of the vision.
The emanation coming out from God is called in Plotinus, the Greek word for that is dynamis. We get the English word dynamic from that. And we think of dynamic as something really going. But for Plotinus in his Greek dynamis he is like a spring that's all wound up. And it's dynamis because it has all that wound up. And the final emanation of the divine comes to man as that spring all wound up and it's only in his actualizing of his spiritual presence that he opens that spring and sends it back. And by sending it back that's this uh that's this energeia. And energy then in the universe is for Plotinus not at all the kind of indifferent thing that we think of. We think of electricity as just indifferent, nonliving, nonspiritual power. But for Plotinus the, the energy in the universe is always this spiritual being sent back. And that makes the actuality of the universe.
So that man has a very high place in this spiritual universe. He actualizes the truth of the divine. And this is why god loves him. Because of all of the areas, all of the levels, all of the beings in this universe man alone has this capacity to send the divine dynamis back in terms of his own spiritual personal energy. Energeia in the Greek. And so, this becomes the central issue in Plotinus.
Now you can see from this that if you're thinking in terms of political power, you're never going to believe that this could be possible. And if you're thinking in terms of grasping for properties. or grasping for fame. or grasping for control of other people. You're never going to consider this an important issue at all. It seems as nebulous as can be. In fact, to hear someone talk about this out of the context of a spiritual school like this it even sounds ridiculous. And in fact, when one ordinarily is first exposed to it, it, it makes no impression whatsoever. We not only don't believe it we don't have any affinity for it at all. It's like water off a duck's back.
But there comes a time. there comes a, a movement of motion in a person's of spiritual development where they become aware that they in fact are spiritually alive. That they find themselves in tune with other people who are spiritually alive. And one begins to get the sense of, of the other as a person. That the other is not just another lady or another man but it's this person. And when one gets a sense of the let's use the term mystical here, of the mystical presence of another person. One begins to see that I, I also have to have this in order to be sensitive to this. And this Plotinus says is the beginnings of the experience of love. That love is the initial experience of this.
And in the third Aeneid in the fifth treatise which is on love, what Plotinus talks about this. And, and tells us that, in these human ways we sensitize ourselves through the experiences of love. And we begin to understand that the that the ultimate love experience is to love God. And that that this is in fact bringing us up by our own roots. He writes in here. He uses the Greek term hypostasis. Hypostasis. Which Plotinus uses to mean a person. Usually people would think that a hypostasis is a level. Stasis as in static. Hypo as in above. But he means it as a person. "That love is a hypostasis. A person. A real being. Sprung from a real being. Lower than the parent but authentically existent is beyond doubt."
And Plotinus uses this term a lot, authentically existent. That the authenticity of its existence can be verified. How can it be verified? It can be verified by one's own vision being able to see through to that. Experiencing that quality in a personal way. So that spirituality is actually a science with Plotinus. Very much a science. You don't have to take anyone's word for it. One can do this oneself and, and, and check oneself out until it just becomes obvious.
So, he writes here, "For the parent soul was a real being. Sprung directly from the act of the hypostasis that ranks before it." That this this act of emanation. This sending of the spring of the unity of the divine. And that it had life. part of the quality that's inherent in the divine is that it's alive.
"It had life. it was a constituent in the real being of all that authentically is. In the real being which looks wrapped towards the very highest." He's using the term wrapped here as in rapture. That this vision is very much a love experience. That when one looks in a visionary way it's like a, a lover who, who looks at first at the beloved and learns that way. And then looks deeper and sees that loving itself is a quality. Is the personable quality. And then finally deepest evolved to see that this is the essential truthful nature of the real. and that looking with that kind of power, that kind of energeia, one sees through two in this rapture of looking, this vision one sees through to the real being that was the first object.
And in this vision, it looked towards it as towards its good and it rejoiced in the looking. And the quality of what it saw was such that the contemplation could not be void of effect. In virtue of that rapture of its position in regard to its object of the intensity of its gaze the soul conceived and brought forth an offspring worthy of itself an oath of vision. Thus, there is a strenuous activity of contemplation in the soul. There is an emanation towards it from the object contemplated. And Eros is born. The love which is an eye filled with its vision. A seeing that bears its image with it. Eros taking its name probably from the fact that it's essential being is due to the arrases, the seeing.
He uses the Greek term arrases here. The seeing. He's saying here that there's a quality that is born. And we when we are inexperienced, we think of it as erotic at first. But on a deeper, deeper level it's the whole quality that is effective there in desire. And then in the deepest level of all is that this, this quality permeates everything equally. So that there is really only, only one desire. One desire to, to see through to the real being of the divine.
So, he writes,
Of course, love as an emotion will take its name from love the person. Since the real being cannot but be prior to what lacks this reality. The mental state will be designated as love, like the hypostasis. Though it is no more than a particular act directed towards a particular object. But it must not be confused with the absolute love, the Divine Being. The Eros that belongs to the supernal soul must be of one temper with it. It must itself look aloft as being of the household of that soul. Dependent upon that soul it's very offspring. And therefore, caring for nothing but the contemplation of the God. And once that soul, which is the primal source of light to the heavens, is recognized as a person, standing distinct and aloof. It must be admitted that love too is distinct and aloft. To describe the soul as celestial is not to question its separateness or immateriality. Our own best we conceive as inside ourselves and yet something apart. And so, we must think of this love as essentially resident where the unmingling soul inhabits.
And then the pure soul of ourselves has this direct affinity with a pure soul of the all. And it's this instantaneous universal recognition that is the element in contemplation.
Plotinus is the first person to be able to write this way. He is not the first person to be able to experience this way. This way of experiencing was developed from the time of Jesus to the time of Ammonius Saccas. It was pioneered by Jesus. And it was developed so that by the time of Ammonius Saccas it could be taught quite effectively. But Plotinus is the first person to ever be able to write it down. That is to say his writings are an exercise in trying to pattern words and images so that if one follows these patterns close enough one learns to see through these patterns, through this intellectuality.
So that Plotinus gathers up all of the loose threads of thinking of the classical world. Which by his time had unraveled so far that in another generation it would come become completely undone. And so, to save the intelligibility of the human tradition it was possible to pass the Spirit on individually outside of the intellectual tradition. There was no question about that. By this time, it could be done. But man would have lost a great patterning function of his intellect had not Plotinus been able to do this. He did not sit down to write a book. The book that we have of Plotinus is called The Aeneids, which just means the nines. Because they're arranged in patterns of nine. there are always six lectures. And there are nine sets of these six. So, there are 54 of them. And they were put together after his death by one of his friends named Porphyry. Which just means purple or the Royal one. And we talked last week a little bit, it's on the cassette, about how Porphyry decided how to put these together and arrange these 54.
So that what Plotinus brought together here was not so much the written language in a single book. But the use of the extemporaneous voice intelligently to small group of people, not much larger than this, in Rome. For about thirty-five years he taught in Rome. and various people would make little records of those talks. And the Aeneids that we have, the 54, are 54 separate talks over a period of about oh 10 or 12 years. Nobody recorded anything until Plotinus was over 50 years of age. He just didn't care. He was trained to be a spiritual teacher. And there's just there's no question about fame or, or money or position or any of that it. Just doesn't enter the picture at all. It's redundant and extraneous.
So that The Aeneids that we have of Plotinus are the extemporaneous use of a spiritual sage bringing intelligence together again and again. Fifty-four separate occasions of how extemporaneously intelligence comes together to consider the patterns which are best for the mind to look through to see. To sharpen your vision to see the authentically real person of the divine.
In order that we do not project out from ourselves an image of the face of that divine, preemptively. That is to say to stop us from trying to second-guess the nature of the Divine. Plotinus does not speak of God but speaks of the one. And he always has this respect in there. And speaks of the one in the kind of a way that leaves it seemingly ambiguous and obscure. Until our sense of vision is refined enough to see that what was ambiguous is in fact paradoxical. And what was obscure is in fact mystical. And in fact, this is one way that we test ourselves to see how we're doing. how far along we are. If our sense of the ambiguous becomes paradoxical. If it tends towards becoming paradoxical, we know we're on the spiritual path. One of the first beginnings of the sense of paradox is that one begins to appreciate riddles and puns. The sense of humor comes up. And after a while the sense of humor, the sense of appreciating riddles, deepens to a sense of irony. Things become ironic. Not sardonic or cynical but ironic. And then one sense of commedia. Not so much comedy as in ha-ha but commedia in the gorgeous play of it all. And in this way the ambiguous becomes seen to become paradoxical. This is spiritual maturity of the character. And with the development in the other way, so that the obscure matures to the mystical. The obscure is obscure because one has nothing to do with it. One has no relation to it at all. But as that obscurity begins to have little bridges to oneself. And one begins then to a sense that in obscure there's wonder, there's a sense of wonderment.
The machines sense this from time to time.
So, when you begin to, when you begin to have the, the feeling tones. At first of curiosity. It's no longer so obscure that you're not even interested but you become curious. And you would like to just maybe, maybe for one hour sit down and let somebody talk about it. You don't know if you're going to respond maybe not. But you're willing to, to take it in for an hour. And this curiosity then becomes deeper. And one then becomes filled with a sense of wonder. How is this? How come I'm interested in this? Why when three or four years ago I was interested only in going to these kinds of games and entertainments. Now I find some kind of an odd pleasure and learning about this? Or hearing about this? So that one's curiosity deepens into wonder. And then one, ones sense of wonder begins to fan out and those moments of wonder start to connect. And all of a sudden, one day there's a sense that this indeed is quite mystically there.
And so, the obscure becomes mystical in this way. And the ambiguous becomes paradoxical in this way. And they come together it's like left hand in the right hand coming together in that kind of a prayer mode. And then they resonate together. And in this mystical paradox one sees that all of the occurrences of life, every single one of them, are motions that add up to a pattern of wholeness. And when one begins to sense through the mystical paradox that this wholeness actually is occurring. And it is occurring now. One has this sense then that if only one could project one's vision through this you could see what's behind it. What's behind it all. And for Plotinus the term for this is contemplation. Contemplation. And this is the spiritual quality as a of the person is that one's vision, one's energeia, one's energy, in the vision is increased and honed through contemplation. And so, as we experience contemplation more and more as we organize our thoughts and bring our feelings together. And pattern everything. The alignments arrange themselves more and more. Until there comes this time, this occasion where one finally can see through it all. And there it is. The sense that the divine is quite real and is a person.
END OF SIDE ONE
.... the one who established this. In fact, Jesus is the one who established this. But Plotinus is the first one to be able to talk about it in this kind of extended intellectual way. In this kind of extended extemporaneous way. And it's only through the teaching technique, the techne of his teacher Ammonius Saccas, that he was able to be given this gift. It's a gift of the spirit. And of course, Ammonius Saccas received it from someone else and so on in Alexandria through the Hermetic tradition.
Which increasingly in the 3rd century A.D. became Christian. In fact, almost all of the mystical philosophic understanding of the traditional Christian outlook is from Plotinus. It's not from the Church Fathers. When you look at the writings of church fathers in the 2nd and 3rd century A.D. there are no match for Plotinus whatsoever. They're like little tiny hills and Plotinus is like Mount Everest. Just no question at all.
But the difficulty with Plotinus is that he is presenting a personal spiritual contact. So that whoever reads The Aeneids will gain from Plotinus himself that spiritual vision. In other words, Plotinus does for the Hermetic tradition what the universal genius like Qui Neg (?) did for the of Chinese Buddhist tradition. The sixth patriarch. he found a way to embody in an expressive form from himself, like a master artist would. He found a way to embody in a master form the spiritual person that he was. So that ever after this if there ever came a time where there wasn't one single human being anymore who had the spiritual presence. And you had no chance whatsoever. Zero chance to find a spiritual teacher. You could go to Plotinus. Just like in the Chinese tradition. You could go to the, the platform Sutra of the 6th patriarch. You could go to them and you could find there the spiritual person embodied in this form.
In our own American tradition one poet sage who tried to do this was Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. The book became the man. Well Plotinus The Aeneids becomes the man. Becomes the spiritual teacher. But what's required is that we bring our spiritual person to this. And of course, if you just view it as philosophy there's no chance whatsoever. Because it's like looking with just one eye. And one doesn't see any depth at all. One sees what's there and it's intelligible but it's two-dimensional. It's flat. It doesn't lift off the page. There's no sense of wonder in it. And one becomes intelligent philosophically about Plotinus up to a certain point. And then after that there's diminishing returns. And this happens quite frequently. That philosophers get up to a point of understanding Plotinus and then he becomes less and less understandable. And finally, he ends up in being mysterious. So that for many of a professional philosopher if you ask them who is the least intelligible great thinker of all time, they will tell you Plotinus. Not because he's obscure but because he's paradoxical finally, with the one-eyed view. To such an extent that after a while you realize that you haven't understood anything. And yet makes sense when you puzzle it out. But it's all paradoxical. One has to take one's hand away. One has to take one's resistance away. One has to take one's ignorance away. And bring ones spiritual person to the event. Then the focus is there. Then the depth is there. Then the, the occurrence of the Hermetic tradition is seen to have undergone a massive transformation.
That what was The Corpus Hermeticum. Those Hermes Trismegistus writings. Those dialogues that we saw that started to come out about 100 B.C. and went all the way up until about 250 A.D. and then there weren't anymore. Why weren't there anymore? Why are there no Hermetic books after 250 A.D.? Because Plotinus transformed all of the Hermetic books into this spiritual personage. The book as a person. The book as a person. This is the origin of the whole confidence, the whole belief that Jesus is in the New Testament. That if you hold up The Bible to yourself and you bring yourself to it that Jesus is in that book. And just as Jesus is in The New Testament that God must be, the father must be in The Old Testament. So, if you hold The Bible, the bible scripture in this way that the book is the teacher. In this basic evangelical consciousness that somehow The Bible is holy. It's not just the Word of God but it if God is there recoverable in that form. All of this in the Western spiritual tradition comes from Plotinus. From The Aeneids. and it's not made up because he actually did it. Actually occurs.
Now we're going to take one more look at Plotinus next week. We're going to try to find out how nature then has to respond to man's contemplative energy. And we have to understand that in the 3rd century A.D. in Alexandria when this power of man's contemplation to really affect nature in a divine way was understood. That the literal outcome of that was to bring alchemy back into the picture. Not as gold-making but as reality making. That man's essential alchemical power is to change physical reality into what it needs to be. That it can be returned back to the divine. And that with Plotinus as the Hermetic key we'll be able to see how 3rd century Hermetic alchemy came to understand that this in fact was the art. the secret art. And alchemy will become then the teaching mode of this transformational capacity of human beings.
The reason why it will go into alchemy is that the power structures co-opted as much as they could grasp out of Plotinus, out of the Hermetic Tradition, and fed it into a new Roman state religion called church Christianity. Set up under the Roman Emperor Constantine, who never became a Christian himself. And that many persons were paid great sums of money and position and fame to ensure that this form of state religion would prevail. And the true spiritual tradition had to go underground. And we'll see that with Plotinus we get the first indications of how this is going to be.
And then the lecture following next week's third lecture on Plotinus. The lecture following that will be on that great Alexandrian alchemical sage Zosimos. And Zosimos of Panopolis will be contemporaneous with Plotinus. And he's the one who develops the alchemical form of transformation. Realizing that they can take the book and just read in it what they want and so desecrate it. but with alchemy the chances for desecrating are almost nil. Because if you're greedy to make gold and you can't make it eventually, you'll drop it. You'll let it go. You say well this is crap.
And the alchemist will, after Zosimos, as all underground spiritual traditions do, become expert con men. that convincing would-be manipulators. That it's only good for manipulating people. It's only good for the scam value. So just learn the scam you don't have to learn the techniques. Just learn the scam. And then they're satisfied with that. With the tricks, the jugglers tricks. And they go off to play these tricks. And so, the spiritual tradition is sealed Hermetically in its spiritual integrity. And the saying is you only get out of a spiritual tradition what you bring to it. And that's true. And that's what the meaning of Hermetically sealed really means. Because one can only get the full reality of it if one understands that it's an unbroken unity. It can't be used for anything except returning it back to its unity.
Enough for tonight.
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