Return to the One (31 page)

Whoever has the greater virtues must necessarily have the lesser ones potentially, but it is not necessary for the possessor of the lesser virtues to have the greater ones.
[I-2-7]

A seed of evil can only sprout when there is some ground to grow in. When the soul has been purified of its inclination toward matter, the battle is over, and the spiritual seeker rests in peace. Pierre Hadot writes: “Thus the purificatory virtues correspond to a complete transformation of inner life, in which one could say that all our spiritual energy flows back inside and upwards…. Lower things are no longer of interest; we don’t really pay attention to them anymore, and they therefore no longer present a problem. All our activity is turned towards God.”
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It comes down simply to
presence.
The presence of spirit, the presence of the One, the presence of ourselves as soul—at heart it’s all the same presence, the sublime reality that lies beneath appearances. This is the presence we long for, the presence we’ve been missing since we separated from the spiritual world, the presence we look for and never find in other people and outside things.

Plotinian virtue, says Hadot, “is only a continuous attention to the divine, and a perpetual exercise of God’s presence…. The Good acts on the Spirit by its mere presence; the Spirit acts on the soul, and the soul on the body; all by their presence alone.”
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The soul receives into herself an outpouring that comes from above….

The Good is gentle, mild, and very delicate, and always at the disposition of whomever desires it. [VI-7-22, V-5-12]
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Simplicity Is Superior

S
CIENCE AND MYSTICISM
often are at loggerheads, notwithstanding their common interest in knowing the truth about ultimate reality. In large part, this is because the outwardly observable methods of scientists necessarily limit them to investigating the material, while the inward observations of mystics are directed toward the spiritual.

So it is wonderful that science agrees so heartily with a central tenet of Plotinus’s mystic philosophy: simplicity is a reliable guide to truth. This principle often is termed Ockham’s razor, as William of Ockham (a fourteenth-century scholastic) held that the simplest explanation is the best: “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”
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Plotinus echoes this sentiment.

For that which generates is always simpler than that which is generated.
[III-8-9]

Findings of modern science have confirmed the validity of using Ockham’s razor to pare away layers of unnecessary complexity to arrive at a core of primordial simple truth. Physicist James Trefil says, “If I had to pick out a single overall characteristic of the evolution of the universe, it would be the development of complexity from simplicity. The universe seems to get simpler as we move backward in time.”
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In the beginning, according to current theories about the origin of the universe, there was only a single substance, an unimaginably potent unified energy. Much as a huge banyan tree springs from a single seed, and a person grows from a single cell, the amazing variety of life and non-life now evident in material existence sprouted and branched from one root.

For many does not come from many, but this [intelligible] many comes from what is not many.
[V-3-16]

Science accepts that the development of complexity from simplicity occurred on the physical level over time. Plotinus teaches a deeper mystic truth, that simplicity also produces complexity in a metaphysical and timeless sense, since on both the macrocosmic and microcosmic levels what is less unified continuously emanates from what is more unified. Hence, simplicity is superior for those who want to know the source, rather than what flows from the source. Creation is complex, while the creator is simple. It’s up to us to decide which way to face.

Returning to the One means embracing an inner simplicity. Presently the ensemble known as “me” comprises three primary entities: body, a lower reasoning and emotional aspect of my consciousness (mind), and a higher spiritual aspect of my consciousness (soul). This is two too many if I seek unity. What has to go is what I am not: the complicated accretions to my simple soul.

Previously we read, “The soul alone may receive him alone.” The simplicity of the One can be known only by a soul that is almost equally simple. For what is simple is single, pure, unified, one. Each of these words points to the same undivided reality. Another synonym is self-sufficient, since anything that exists solely and always as itself needs nothing else.

And we call it the First in the sense that it is simplest, and the Self-Sufficient, because it is not composed of a number of parts; for if it were, it would be dependent upon the things of which it was composed.
[II-9-1]

Complexity and neediness are linked, since anything that is not a simple unity needs the parts that make it up to preserve its being (which helps explain why the partless One is said to be beyond being). Thus neediness serves as a gauge of our spiritual progress. As the soul becomes purified, it becomes simpler, and thus increasingly self-sufficient. We might consider, then, to what extent we look to the outside world to fulfill us. Are we able to spend a few quiet hours absorbed in spiritual contemplation without feeling that we’re missing something?

What then is more deficient than the One? That which is not one; it is therefore many.
[V-3-15]

Matter is the most deficient of all that has emanated from the One, because it possesses the least unity, the least being, the least substance. We mustn’t be misled by matter’s seeming simplicity. For even though its emptiness of all form superficially mimics the formlessness of the One, the inescapable nature of matter is multiplicity, not unity.

This is because the spiritual forms always remain distinct from matter, so the unified reality that lies behind physical appearances never can be known in this world. Reaching out for reality, the senses are limited to grasping a bunch of separate perceptions devoid of true meaning. This existential emptiness is a sort of simplicity but not the kind that satisfies the soul.

A simpleton stays silent because he has nothing to say; a sage abstains from speaking because he possesses a wisdom beyond words. Their silences are outwardly similar but inwardly flow from markedly different states of being.

Likewise, Plotinus teaches that nature’s apparent simplicity is more accurately viewed as a last gasp of the One’s creative energy. Matter is like a car that has run out of fuel, for it is a completely passive receptacle of the spiritual forms. Its activity is simple—nothing, nothing some more, and then more nothing—because it can’t do anything. By contrast, the One’s activity is simple—all, still all, always all—because it does everything.

For the activity of the last and lowest is simple as coming to a stop, but of the first is all activities.
[VI-7-13]

What the mystic philosopher seeks to contemplate within is not the void of matter, but the fullness of spirit and the One. Yet this true All is unlike anything that we know now. So how is it possible to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap between our personal consciousness, currently firmly enmeshed in shadows and illusion, and the light of universal consciousness?

Thankfully, each of us possesses a lifeline that is capable of pulling us back to our divine source, if we are able to attach ourselves to it, and let go of all else.

They
[souls]
are linked to the brevity of intellect by that in each of them which is least divided.
[IV-3-5]

“Brevity,” Shakespeare tells us, “is the soul of wit.”
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According to Plotinus, brevity also is the soul of the soul, so to speak. The soul, like spirit and the One, is without parts. Thus, whatever can be split off from consciousness isn’t soul but something else. Since thoughts, emotions, perceptions, memories, and imaginations continually come and go within consciousness they can’t be our link to the unchanging reality of true being.

Spiritual contemplation requires a delicate touch. It is all about simple presence, not complex movement.

It turns out that the source of our wanting is what we truly want. If we could only reverse the flow of attention, tracing our cravings back to the lofty headwaters of desire instead of moving downstream with them into the marshes of materiality, we would find the simple unity from which all else comes.

And the All could not any more come into being if the origin did not remain by itself, different from it. Therefore, too, we go back everywhere to one.
[III-8-10]

Soul, like the One, creates. God creates objective reality; our souls create subjective reality. From a spiritual perspective, the contents of these worlds within are much less important than the powers that produce them. The powers of the soul are universal and God-given. How these powers are manifested is largely a matter of individual whim and personal circumstance. Physical desires, for example, differ in various sorts of people, while the power of desire operates the same in all.

Thus it is unfortunate that few people seriously try to trace the creations within consciousnesses back to their source. Most of us remain absorbed in what is showing on the screen of consciousness and never make much of an effort to discern how those images are projected. This keeps us imprisoned in Plato’s cave of illusion, absorbed in counting the shadows on the cavern wall and debating among ourselves which comes first and which after, which is most desirable and which least desirable, all the while failing to turn around and learn the source of the light that produces the shadows.

We aren’t going to be able to approach the single source of consciousness, the One, so long as we are occupied with its many products. The most basic of these products is a primal division between consciousness and self-consciousness. Somehow
psyche
creates a sense of self along with all the other thoughts, emotions, images, and what-not it brings into being. This duality between our simple awareness and our more complex awareness of being aware is an insidious barrier to the unity we seek. Insidious because self-awareness seems so natural to us it is difficult to imagine existing without it.

For intimate self-consciousness is a consciousness of something which is many: even the name bears witness to this.
[V-3-13]

Adhering to the adage “know yourself” means being present to one’s self
as
one’s true self, not looking upon one’s self as if it was an object, something to be perceived or pondered. We can perceive an apple, a galaxy, and a starfish, or ponder truth, justice, and love. We can’t perceive or ponder what is at the root of all our diverse perceiving and pondering just as an eye cannot see itself and a finger cannot touch itself.

The goal of spiritual contemplation is to merge the knower, what is known, and the process of knowing into a unified whole. So living daily life un-self-consciously is a preparation for the favorable forgetting of the lower self upon reaching the spiritual world. There, we are drunk with divinity and don’t remember who we were before our intoxication.

How does it
[the soul]
remember itself? It will not even have the remembrance of itself or that it is the man himself Socrates for instance, who is contemplating, or that it is intellect or soul.
[IV-4-2]

In all that the sage does, whether it be in the world without or the world within, he or she seeks to be spontaneously guided by spirit’s intuitive intelligence. His or her locus of action becomes increasingly natural and universal, mimicking the effortless activity of the Soul of the All, which always does exactly what needs doing when it needs to be done.

It isn’t necessary to go through life as a sort of double image: a me that does things and a largely unnecessary hanger-on inside my head who watches and comments on the doer. The internal mental dialogue most people take for granted is akin to a play-by-play announcer who never stops gabbing about what is happening on the field of our awareness. The problem is that I already know what is going on because I’m directly experiencing it. I should be able to simply wash the dishes without an inner voice telling me the obvious: “I’m washing the dishes.”

Indeed, what we do and what we are is clearly separable from our self-awareness of those actions, thoughts, and inner states. This self-consciousness doesn’t add to reality but rather runs the risk of diffusing our attention between what is and what we believe “is” to be. Plotinus asks if a good man is still good if he isn’t conscious of being a good man. Absolutely, he answers.

But if he does not know that he is healthy, he is healthy just the same, and if he does not know that he is handsome, he is handsome just the same. So if he does not know that he is wise, will he be any the less wise?
[I-4-9]

It’s a wonderful mystery. By losing ourselves, we find ourselves.

The seer … cannot then see or distinguish what he sees, nor does he have the impression of two entities [the seer and the object seen]; rather, it is as if he has become someone else, and no longer himself.
[VI-9-10]
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