Plotinus (Lecture 3)
Presented on: Tuesday, May 27, 1986
Presented by: Roger Weir
Hermetic Tradition: From Egypt to America, From Osiris to Benjamin Franklin
Presentation 21 of 24
Plotinus Lecture 3
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, May 27, 1986
Transcript:
Sometimes in my state of mind I look at machines and I wonder about their nature. You're gonna wear that shawl?
Audience Member: Maybe later
Throw it back there. sure enough. I don't fear them at all. No.
Audience Member: **inaudible few words**
There's a chair in here Bill if you want. Or you like the back row next to Mary Beth there. Say hello to her.
Audience Members: Hi. Hello, how are you?
Plotinus three. Plotinus three.
We come tonight to the last of the three lectures on Plotinus. And this is the last time that we will see the Hermetic tradition public. After the lifetime of Plotinus, the condition of the world required those of wisdom, those who were the safe guarders of the spiritual blood of our race, to take the wisdom teachings underground. And when they went underground in the 4th century A.D. there was no way of telling when they would be able to surface again. But I would venture to say it was not in the minds of any of those blessed ancestors that it would be a thousand years. When you think of waiting ten years for something or fifty years for something you can think of a thousand years. And yet it was fully a thousand years before it became public again.
In all that time, in all that thousand years, there was only one sage, John Scotus Erigena, who was at the court of Charles the bald and the Carrol...and founded the Carolingian Renaissance. Grandson of Charlemagne. Someone once described John Scotus Erigena as a pinnacle of excellence in a plain of mediocrity. With four or five centuries in either side of him.
We'll see in the continuation this summer how at the end of the 1100's, the beginning of the 1200's a brave attempt was made by some of the most archetypal magicians of all time to try and bring the tradition public again. Michael the Scot, who is the traditional wizard with the pointed cone cap decorated with stars and moons. And a long flowing Arab robe. Who was the Magus for Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick the second. And Roger Bacon of course. but none of them were successful. And it will not be until the Italian Renaissance that our tradition surfaces again. And when it comes to the surface again of course it reserved revised the whole of Western civilization.
And it's archetypal and synchronistic that the first modern translation of Plotinus would be in 1492 of the year that America was visited by Columbus. And we're coming up to the 500th year of that event and it will be quite an event. In synchronistic terms you can bet your boots that 1992 will be supercharged. Supercharged. Kind of like a cosmic Olympics. And so those of us who are expensive to this, have been sensitive to this since birth are doing everything possible to hold aloft a beacon of decency and intelligence without promotion. Because that's not so far away.
What became the most esoteric of all secrets is public in Plotinus. His lectures were delivered in Rome in the Eternal City. They were free. And as we saw Plotinus was held an extremely high regard. And many families were broken up in the Rome of the third century. It's like the Los Angeles of the 20th century. And many children were entrusted to Plotinus' care. To be their guardian. And he had a very large house. And the house was filled with boys and girls of various ages that he looked after. And he took care to do all of the bookkeeping for their estates himself. And looked after their health. and after their moral development. After their schooling. And so, Plotinus was a very practical man of the world. Wisdom people usually are. They're the most practical. They look with the piercing vision to see what is absolutely essential, what is really necessary, and they do that.
We saw also that Plotinus came from Egypt. That he was not a typical Greco-Roman citizen. In fact, he came from Upper Egypt. the town today is called Asyut. Asyut. It was called in those days Lycopolis. Which means in Greek wolf city. But the God who was worshipped there was not a wolf but was Anubis. And Anubis is the counterpart to Thoth. Anubis is the jackal-headed God who oversees the dead. Oversees to the accuracy of the scale in the psycho Stasia, the weighing of the soul. Where you see the soul must be pure. And the purity of the soul is gauged by an ostrich plume. The proverbial feather was actually an ostrich plume. And of course, the ostrich plume was a sign of nobility. So, the purity of the soul was not just its physical lightness but was its excellence. and we in our proverbial ignorance today forget this.
It's not just the ascetic cutting away of the world from ourselves that is the point at all. There's no point in stupid asceticism. Just as there's no point in idiot compassion. But it's the ennobling of the soul. And it's this royal aspect that has to be brought out.
How is it brought out? By contemplation. The central word, the central motion, the central concept in Plotinus in the Hermetic tradition is the envisioning power of contemplation. That contemplation is not thought. But thought leads us to an appreciation of the powers of contemplation. That in fact contemplation is a return motion of emanation. And that emanation is the way in which the divine, the way in which God creates. That he doesn't create piecemeal. He doesn't create logically. He doesn't create by building up something from little fragments. But he creates in a holistic way. That the emanation that comes out is whole. It's just like the, the fertilized egg in the womb. The whole being is there. when the, the sperm and the egg come together. That is all. Everything is there. Everything is there. the unfoldment comes from that seed which is fertile. And in the same way that emanation as divine creation it is fulsome. And in this emanation what is sent out is the wholesomeness of the divine. And what is returned through contemplation is this wholesomeness.
So that in order to be able to contemplate, in order to learn this, man must in noble his soul. Because it is his soul that through the act of contemplation returns the emanation back to the divine. and in this way the cosmic cycle is completed. And that the, the look of man in his spiritual vision looks through all of the realms of the cosmos. And there are many realms. But look through directly to of the divine. And as Plotinus says just as all of the features on the face have a physical sensate quality and character, what counts for us is not the physical sensate quality or character but the expression on the face. And that what we see through contemplation is the person of God. the person. And it is it is this return that is man's responsibility. That no one else can do this. No one else will do this. That we as beings are, it is incumbent upon us to do this.
If we do not do this. If we fail in this. If we shirk from this. The universe is not real. Then it is but a fiction. And the divine but a sham. And in a way then in Plotinus we are the guarantees of the spiritual integrity of the divine. And we must play our part. Nature is, in Plotinus, not an evil at all. nature is a good. And in his tremendous writing Against The Gnostics, which is in The Aeneids. It's the ninth tractate of the second of the six books of The Aeneids. "Against the Gnostics or against those that affirm the creator of the cosmos and the cosmos itself to be evil."
Plotinus is specific that there is no such thing as an evil creator. That nature is not evil. That the cosmos is not evil. that to assume this. That to believe this. Involves in the mind in many flaws and many machinations. And the worst part of these machinations is that they detract us from our power of contemplation. Because we get our attention siphoned off into trying to follow the intricate laced patterns that we think are necessary to be understood. And this energy is misspent. The Greek word was energae. This energea is misspent. For we must collect that energea together and focus it as it were. Just like a laser. Focused light coherently. So, our vision, our envisioning capacity, should not be squandered and wasted and dribbled away on all of these false concerns. But it should receive this empowerment to be brought together and to penetrate through to the divine.
So that in Against The Gnostics Plotinus writes here, "They will scarcely urge upon us the doubling of the principle in act by a principle and potentiality. It is observed to seek such a plurality by distinguishing between potentiality and actuality in the case of the material beings whose existence is an act." The very existence is already the act. And that to enter into the dualism of thinking that one has a potential. And that one then could actualize it. And that somehow the actualization is a different phase from the potential. This is an error. This is a flaw. This is a, a trick of the mind as it were. Because existence itself, the capacity for potentiality is already an act. And that it's this integral quality of being that we must understand. Because the very root of this false lace mentation of fictitious mental states founds itself basically upon the splitting of the mind into act and potential.
And in fact, in the thousand years that the Hermetic tradition went underground, the major concern of so-called thinkers or so-called philosophers during all that time, all of medieval thought, concerned itself with that dualistic act and potential. Actual and potential. And from this comes subject and object. And from this comes the split in the modern mind. The Cartesian, the Newtonian, the all of the all of the qualities of mentality that have weighed us down.
Plotinus writes quite clearly,
That we cannot conceive a duality in the intellectual principle. One phase in some vague calm another all astir. Under what form can we think of repose in the intellectual principle as contrasted with its movement of utterance? What would the quiescence of the one phase be is against the energy of the other? No, the intellectual principle is continuously itself. Unchangeably constituted in stable act.
And this is one of the qualities of the Hermetic tradition. This is one of the envisioning powers. To be able to understand that we are a unity. That our being is a unity. That nothing is held in reserve for some later activity. That whatever it is that we are is fully in play. All the time. All the time. And coming to recognize this means learning not to let the world distract you. And in this sense Plotinus is aesthetic. Not that the world is evil. Not that involvement with people as evil or involvement with life. None of that. It's simply the realization that in order to manifest your unitive power, your penetrate unitive power of vision, you must understand that your being is fully universally activated all the time. it's there all the time. And that it is unchangeably itself.
The largest amplification of this truth is that when we see the divine, when we see the person of God, God seeing us makes real our person. We are that person. We're not some abstract principle. We're not some transcendental, ephemeral phantom. We're not just a, a quality of supernal in the universe. We are a person. And is the salvation of the individual person in this way that is the stake. And so, the Hermetic tradition guards this and has always guarded it. Has guarded it since time immemorial. Since we were hunters in the Sierra desert 25,000 years ago.
He writes in Against The Gnostics then that, these persons seek to find in Plato ideas of punishments. There are rivers of the underworld and the changing from body to body reincarnation. And as for the plurality they assert in the intellectual realm. The authentic existent. The intellectual principle. The demiurge is a sacred creator, separate creator. And the soul. All this is taken from The Timaeus, but they misunderstand Plato, Plotinus says.
"They conceived one mind passively including within itself all that has being. Another mind a distinct existence having vision. A third planning the universe." And so forth. And in this he says,
They are in fact quite outside of the truth in every way they misrepresent Plato's theory as to the method of creation. As in many other respects they dishonor his teaching. They, we are to understand, have penetrated the intellectual nature while Plato and all those other illustrious teachers have failed. They hoped to get the credit of minute and exact identification by setting up a plurality of intellectual essences. But in reality, this multiplication lowers the intellectual nature to the level of just sense kind.
And that this makes a darkening then of philosophy. That philosophy then becomes distasteful. That we don't care really to learn because it becomes complicated. And we, we shy away from it. Or if we're interested in it, we have to change ourselves. We have to make ourselves a dilettante. Or we have to garner in ourselves and an effete attitude in order to get interested in these word plays. In these games. in these false definitions. Because there's nothing alive in it for us. We don't respond to it.
Whereas when someone is presenting us with spiritual truth it's alive. It's just simply there. One can sense it. One doesn't even have to understand the language of the words. Because that one could speak truth to you in Chinese. The tone would be there. You would feel it.
Why is this? Plotinus says because the universe is a unity. And then he uses an example in Against the Gnostic. He says, when the eye looks to see something, to see this rose appear, there's nothing physical in between the eye and that rose. The sight occurs, the object and the eye seeing it occur together. And this is how it works. This is how it happens. It's just occurring together because the rose and the eye exist in the same level, the same universe. Just so, Plotinus says, that all of us exist together in a unity. And when we are open, we are able to hear truth. We're able to respond to it.
Now he says that the constitution of the all of the unity of this world is very different from that of any of the single separate forms of life. The natural movement in this plan would be injurious to anything whose natural tendency would be an opposition. If in fact we were not part of a unity there would be this movement, glacial and certain, towards a complete chaos and anarchy. There would be no possibility of concord whatsoever. For the structure that would hold us together would become more and more delicate. More and more refined. And so, the world would eventually fall apart through this brittleness. But in fact, it doesn't. It doesn't at all.
What becomes brittle is the mental fiction that people try to live by. And so finally they are led through their own failure to feel that the soul, their soul, is in jeopardy. And this is where there is a metanoia, a turning around. When they feel that somehow their they are hungry for the truth. there comes a time when one has got to know regardless of what content truth must finally be. one must know. And so, it is, is this quality that leads us together.
He writes,
Now in the first place if the soul had not actually, has not actually come down, but has illuminated the darkness how can it be truly be said to have declined? The outflow from it of something in the nature of light does not justify the assertion of its decline. For that it must make an actual movement towards the object lying in the lower realm and illumine it by contact. You find the other hand the soul keeps its own place. And illuminates the lower without directing any act toward that end. Why should it alone be the illuminant? Why should not the cosmos draw light also from the yet greater powers contained in the totality of existence? Again, if the soul possesses the plan of the universe, and by virtue of this plan illuminates it why do not that illumination in the creating of the world take place simultaneously? Why must the soul wait till representations of the plan be made actual? Then again, this plan, the far country of their terminology, brought into being as they hold by the greater powers could not have been the occasion of decline to the creators. Further how explained that under this illumination the matter of the cosmos produces images of the order of soul instead of merely bodily nature. An image of soul could not demand darkness or matter. But whatever formed it would exhibit the character of the producing element and remaining close union to it. is this image a real being? Or as they say just an intellection? If it is a reality in what way does it differ from its original.
And Plotinus is going to say that for the mind, when it first begins to learn about the spirit, the provisional differentiation that we use is that of symbol and reality. Symbol. The Greek words symbolia means to put together or to bring together. That is the visionary power of the symbol in the mind. That is our first clue of unity. For the symbol exceeds a mere image. Or exceeds a mere idea that symbols have the quality to not only represent something. They not only stand for something. But that they present themselves. And it is the self-presenting quality of symbols that give us the clue. Because it would not be possible for the mind to have experience of, to understand, a self-presenting symbol on the soul itself were alive to this capacity.
And when the soul realizes this, when, when it knows then there is no differentiation between any content between what is known and the knower. There is no meta mind which is aware of knowledge which is known. That the unitate structure of being comes into experience. For this is the power of the symbol. Of bringing it all together, symbolia. bringing it together symbolize.
And so, the ability to engender symbols in the mental vision is the fulcrum of maturity in the Hermetic tradition ever after this. And we will see that in fact when it goes under ground in the 4th century one of the little wisdom books that will be made up. And we have a copy of it that survived from the 4th century A.D. It's a collection of pictures. It's the original tarot deck. And the collection of pictures was made by a Hermetic priest. He named himself Horus Apollo. And ran the two names together. So, he's known in history as Horapollo.
And Horapollo around 370 A.D. left Alexandria. It was in shambles. It was in ruin. The serapaym had been desecrated. The wisdom tradition in the city had been outlawed and painted dead. And Horapollo, as we'll see next week, will take a series of sacred hieroglyphs which were symbolic of visionary presentations, pictures. And it's through this collection of symbolic of pictures that Horapollo took with him. He went out into the deserts. He went across that area of the Sahara known as the natrin (?). And made his way through the fiam, a large farming area, and down to the Nile. And they are very close to where the first monasteries, Christian monasteries, were set up by Pachmius.
The hieroglyphics of Horapollo were committed to memory. Out of this incidentally comes the classic Hermetic memory training. That if you are shown spiritual images in a pattern, in a wholesome pattern, you will eventually respond to that. You will have awakened in you the sense of the real. The first the first awakening comes is that you find that that you're getting curious. Or you're getting interested. And a further development, you find that you're becoming to, you have a sense of irony. You're starting to have a sense of irony. A sense of irony about yourself. These are usually the first two stages. The, the ABC. And then the C and that from curiosity to irony to a sense of lightness. That that this is for you. Familiarity. You see something and, and you respond to it. It calls out to you. And you see the crescent moon in the sky with a couple of stars nearby and somehow that pattern speaks to you. And you can't tell why but that's significant. You know that. And you will not forget that. you won't let it go. And so, by these ABCs one can be brought back to the alphabet of creation. And can be brought back to the geometry of meaning and the spirit can be reinstated.
For as Plotinus says spiritual knowledge is a matter of recollection. Recollecting it. Not just collecting it for the first time but recollecting it. Bringing it back together. For we had that unity from the beginning. God gave us that unity. He has shirked nothing. We have been given in the emanation the complete truthfulness. So, in our recollection of it we harmonized ourselves with the act of giving which is always going on. Always happening. Because it wasn't a giving that happened in the past or is going to happen in the future but it's continuously happening. And so, as we come closer and closer to spiritual harmony, we realized that all of these moments are fruitful. They're fertile. That we are loved in a very personal real way. And what do you do when you discover that? Of course, you return the love. Just that. Just that. Not complicated at all.
But what gets in the way? What gets in the way are the false ideas, the false images. And so, they have to be worked on. And this is why all of this complicated writing. To be able to take by the hand, the confused mind, the chaotic life, the scrambled feelings and through guidance and teaching bring it back into a semblance of, of unity and order. You can't do it by preaching. and you can't do it by force. And you can't do it by alluring. Plotinus in Against The Gnostics rails against those who think that by some magical spells they can force the universe to do certain actions. Or by some ceremonial acts they can draw energy from the universe for, for their purposes. He says all of this kind of thinking is very shallow. That it doesn't understand. It doesn't understand the basic Hermetic truth that the creation of the lovingness of the unity of the universe is going on all the time. It's never partial. It is always full. So, it's the ultimate stupidity to try and do some limited kind of action to draw some limited kind of power down. Because you could have the whole thing if you would just receive it. So, it's not a question of magic in the sense of spells or incantations or ceremonies or any of that at all. It's a question of wholeness of one soul. It's a question then of contemplation. And the contemplation is not a passivity. The contemplation is an envisioning of the fullness of one's person and sending that fullness out and it meets the fullness of the person of the Divine. And all of this can happen and does happen continuously.
So, he writes in here,
In yet another way they infringe still more gravely upon the in viability of the supreme. In the sacred formulas they inscribe purporting to address the supernal beings. Not merely the soul but even the transcendence. They're simply uttering spells and appeasements and evocations. In the idea that these powers will obey a call and be led about by a word from any of us who in some degree train to use the appropriate forms in an appropriate way. Certain melodies. Certain sounds. Especially directed breathings. Syllabic cries. And all else to which is ascribed magic potency upon the supreme. Perhaps they would repudiate any such intention. Still they must explain how these things act upon the embodied. They do not see that the power they attribute to their own words is so much taken away from the true majesty of the divine.
And so, Plotinus constantly reminding us as the Hermetic tradition does that the, the fullness, the unity is not a matter of manipulation. It never has been and never can be.
So, stopping to manipulate is one of the first signs of maturity. That stopping to manipulate frees ones hands, frees ones eyes, frees one's mind to pool together. And that it's very easy to pull oneself together because this is our natural state. And as we come into this natural state the, the receptivity of the harmonies becomes intinuated. It's just like if you still a body of water it will record on its surface the vibrations around it. So that the stilled quality of the person, of the soul, when it's tilled it records the vibrations. The harmonies. And one sees that the pattern does not occur from out their in. But that one participates in this already all the time. And that there was in fact nothing that one had to do other than to be. And this is the quality of contemplation that Plotinus is talking about.
In this understanding in Plotinus love is a person. Love is not a quality which is transpersonal. it's not a principle but is a person. It is a person in the sense that it that it is the very form of personability. And so, love is sacred in this way.
Now, I'm going to skip over here to. This is professor Emile Brehier, The Philosophy of Plotinus published by the University of Chicago Press. And I like what he has to say. And there are some scholars in places like Oxford who don't much like what he has to say. But sometimes the French just go ahead and say it. And guys like me are not so fashionably addicted that we don't go back forty or fifty years and choose the older over the newer. He writes in here,
In the first century of our era, the first century A.D., in opposition to the stoic schools there was a preparation for the practical life. A practical spiritual life. And movements arose of an entirely different kind which isolated themselves from the normal conditions of civil and political life. And devoted themselves wholly to the contemplation of divine things. The work of Philo of Alexandria gives evidence of these new tendencies throughout. From it we learn that the contemplatives formed societies.
And we have indeed seen that in the Hermetic tradition that seekers, spiritual seekers, starting in the 1st century B.C. and by the 2nd century of this development around 50 A.D., 70 A.D. these societies communities of seekers these societies have become in fact very well developed.
And we will see next week how these societies become strung out through time. So that instead of belonging to a society where all the members are alive now belongs to a society where individuals who live centuries apart are in the same society. And someone will do some kind of a work and set it up for someone else to carry on who might leave, live two or three hundred years later than oneself. And one might set up the kind of a work where it could only be carried on if there's a certain quality of envisioning practice. And social conditions would have to rise to a certain level in order to produce the sophistication for someone like that to come along. And that in the meantime nobody would understand what this was for. And we'll see that all of these things in fact were done. It makes most science fiction look like what kind of writing that you find in cereal boxes. All of this was done.
So, these contemplatives formed societies. And communities organized like that of the therapeutae outside of Alexandria. Which Philo describes in this book On The Contemplative Life led a strictly ordered life whose details were all subordinated to the exchange of thoughts and divine things. And we've seen in this where in these secret societies, in these spiritual communities, what they discovered was that the individual spirit is not separate from someone else's individual spirit. You can think of it that at a certain level we are all related spiritually. But it's more real than that. It's that at that quality of refinement we are together.
And one way to teach this to persons who, who don't understand that yet. Who don't believe it. It's a question to believe when one is naive. Was to sing together. To form choirs. And that's where the that's where the image that the heavenly host sings together. What do the angels in heaven do? They sing to God together. Well it's this, this whole notion of trying to give some sort of a symbol so that it becomes apparent to you. That just as our voices harmonized together our logos would harmonize together. We all would form a choir. And that the living of a life on the premise that we are separate individuals in this sense is in fact an illusion. Is in fact if we live by it, delusionary.
And so, the spiritual communities began to discover by the time of Jesus that this in fact was true. that spiritually we are not only related but we form a choir. And that the voice of the choir sings in a harmony which is unitative. That is to say the voice, quote the voice of the choir is them is the voice of every member in that choir.
Choir machines. You get used to it. When we're young we're like the mus...machines we can only record so much. Because we're trying to record it see. We don't have to record it. Just let it flow in and out there's no need to retain it. It's nothing that you don't know. It's just a question of tuning in and just letting that melody play.
END OF SIDE ONE
So Brehier writes, "So that the first three centuries of our era especially in Egypt." We have to understand now that Egypt was the focus of this. Not India. Not Israel. Not Italy. Egypt. Egypt was the focus. And it was first in Alexandria and when Alexandria was, was mashed it was a horrible thing. What Christian Roman power did to Alexandria in the 4th century. when it was mashed, those people fled out and filtered out into the deserts and collected along the Nile River.
Why did they go to the Nile River? Because the archetype, the symbolic archetype, for spiritual wholeness was in the sacred places along the Nile. The pyramids, Luxor, Abydos. All these places had been kept sacred. They were still sacred spaces. So that when one is spiritually alert, spiritually alive, you like a homing pigeon go to find the sacred space. This is like Los Angeles today. The 1980's is a sacred space .it seems like on the surface that there's no more profane place in all the world. But in fact, Los Angeles is a sacred space. Because it's been guaranteed and been kept sacred by those who care. And have not let it become desecrated. Will not let it become desecrated.
So, they went in Egypt along the Nile. and there were numerous communities like this. And we have proof in the existence in the Hermetic writings which give us access to the discussions within these schools. The discussions we've gone through in these 10 or 15 lectures that we had on the Hermetic writings, The Corpus Hermeticum. And we saw that the, the way in which a person was taught. And was taught to bring oneself to a certain level of balance and then to let it go. Let it float free. Because it was not a quality of keeping track of your balance but a quality of living that balance. And so, one had to be brought to a certain spiritual maturity and then let be. And out of that quality of thusness then of a true recollection, the true recording, of the spiritual tone of the unity would occur to one. And what would happen then was that one would be able to utter a sacred hymn and sing with the teacher. And when the teacher and the student were able to sing together, it was like that that kind of a sounding key then that was held up. And every time that happened that that sacred key of someone having learned that from a teacher would reverberate. And the spiritual communities would sense that, and this is how they survived and grew. Cleverness will never save us at all.
"So, one should distinguish," writes our French friend, "rather precisely. These groups of contemplative persons from religious groups proper." They weren't people who were going to church. Or going to Temple. Or going to sacrifices. Or going to the, the regular religious services. they were not doing that. They were not the religious people. They were different. If we can speak colloquially, they were too serious for the churches. They were also different from the philosophers. They were not philosophers. And this is true. They were neither philosophers nor were they religious, but they were in fact spiritually practical. In a sense they had to do this. That no, they left themselves no choice. They couldn't go back and live the way that they had.
So, there arose, especially on Egyptian soil, a new type of contemplative. A new type of person. Different from the philosophers of the Hellenic tradition. They were not Greeks. And different from the practitioner of religions. They were not Jews nor were they Romans. Nor were they Persians.
A work such as that of Plotinus is unintelligible if one attempts to connect it directly with the Greek tradition. And if you try to make Plotinus a Greek philosopher as many people have done, he becomes more and more incomprehensible. As a good teacher should. A good spiritual teacher should be able to confound the mind enough so that no one would be able to ultimately understand. That's one of the signs of a spiritual teacher. If you try to understand it intellectually purely you just get more and more confused. And that should be it.
But he is also unintelligible if you try to see him as just a part of the religion of the mysteries. Many people today are very glib about transformation. As if transformation were the catch all, the end all. But not understanding that that the, the kind of movement and transformation is a, a middle term. Initially you have to think of it as a middle term. As a separation then a transformation then an integration. But in the Hermetic tradition the understanding, the whole purpose of becoming contemplatives, of becoming unitate in one's of spiritual sense is to see that there is no transformation. There is no movement. because there was never any separation. It never was a part. It always was together. It always is together. And when one is in that mode the, the reality of the universe is Hermetically sealed. This is the meaning of that phrase. Hermetically sealed. God's person and one's person are unity. Where will, will they not be at unity? Where is, where's there as a space or a gap for a movement? Where is there a differential that allows for a change?
So, you see there's a poignant specific practical difference in the Hermetic tradition from all of their other religious experiences. From all of the other philosophic stand points. That when one grasps this it's like, it's like having a talisman of truth. When you grasp that slowly as you acclimate yourself to it, you're able to look at things and see the lie in them. Or you able to hear someone and hear the spiel in what they say? And it, it after a while it becomes tinny. You don't even have to concentrate too much. It's like walking down Hollywood Boulevard and you overhear the conversations of 500 people. If you walked around in the day and are you gonna get upset about any of it. No. Why? Because it's irrelevant. It's all extraneous. All of the problems are extraneous. this is part of, of the joy of the spirit. Spiritual person is disposition is basically a cheerful. It may not be ha-ha cheerful but there's a kind of a delight that's there. Saint Francis used to manifest that. spiritual cheer.
So, the Plotinian theme par excellence, the one to which the contemplative mystics of every age will return, is that of the solitude of the seeker who is alone with the supreme principle. Which he has attained because he has successively abandoned all finite and definite reality. This solitary country in which the seeker no longer seems to have friends, seems to have family, seems to have fellow citizens, is the counterpart of that world beyond. And the contemplative then by withdrawing himself from the world, when he reaches that unitate stage realizes that the world is on all his family. When one returns, one returns with this a fulsome vision that all are to be blessed. Without stint.
What happens to this though, and we will see some of it next week, is that the initial purifying stages become codified in an intellectual structure known as the via negative, the negative way. And that mystics then are supposed to be world negators. Mystics are the ones who shunned the world. Who shunned the body. Who in fact if they're really good at shunning the body mortify the body. And this is absolute garbage. I would find a better word but that's exactly what I mean to say. That is a junk attitude. Because it has nothing to do with that at all it's a collecting together so that in the real focus the emanation comes back out again to the world. One collecting together and going to the divine. The divine is at the same time coming back to the world and blessing it and making it happen. Making it happen.
And so, when we go to Plotinus. when we really understand him. And we, we come into possession of his writings he tells us that we should not understand that the process is against nature. It's not against nature at all. It's a in fact nature is part of the reality of the divine in this way. And that the, the, the earth is beautiful. And the universe is beautiful. The cosmic, cosmos is a, a thing of beauty. And that this must be understood.
He writes in here,
Now the sight of beauty excellently produces upon recognizing features in a face. How much more the mind when it recognizes in that fulsome sphere sees the loveliness lavish in this world. The vast orderliness. the form which the Stars even in the remoteness display. No one could be so dull-witted, so immovable as not to be carried away by this recollection. And gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this. That it is so great, so true. And sprung now from that greatness not to answer this but not only to have not understood this world but to have never had a vision of the other.
And so, we're going to leave Plotinus with this. And with it we're going to leave the Hermetic tradition the last time that it was public and open before the Renaissance.
And next week we're going to see how shortly after the death of Plotinus in 270 A.D. the 3rd century took a turn for nightmare. And in this devastating archetypal psychological nightmare. Very much like what the first part of the 20th century has been. In a way the early part of the 20th century is the complement to the last part of the 3rd century A.D. And all of the nightmare that we've been going through is a, is the other part of the parenthesis. And we're just coming out of that now. And as we're coming out of that we are dazed not only by events in our own time. But we're, we're numbed in our deepest symbolic sense because we're, we're asked not only to realize what has happened to us here but to remember and recollect what has happened to us all this time since then. That all that time since then adds up to a, I have to use a computer term here, adds up to a glitch in our sense of history. And in a way we have to wake up from that history. Pythagoras said that history was a geometry. And this is so.
But we have to learn to look up from that mental image, that mental textbook image, that we have that this has been our history. And to see that we are quite real as we are in terms of the universal fullness of love of God. And whether the history is there or not that love is still true. And is still real. Whenever we can return it. This is a salvation.
Well we're coming back to this next week. Thank you
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