Return to the One (8 page)

One Is Overall

S
O WHERE IS
this wonderful One? Plotinus has gotten us excited about finding it. He says that it is “beauty most of all” and “the best of visions.” [I-6-7] A man or woman who deserved such praise would be seen on the cover of newsstand magazines. An uncommonly lovely spot of nature would be featured in travel guides. An extraordinarily beautiful work of art would be reproduced in art books, or displayed in a gallery. How, then, do we see
the One
?

Plotinus gives us a hint when he says that only by leaving and overlooking earth, sea, and sky will we be able to turn to That which is incomparably more desirable than anything we know now. In the final section of this book we will learn more about how the soul is able to return to the One. The key to making this journey is that the One is both everywhere and nowhere; ultimate reality is both present in all and separate from all.

Therefore he must fill all things and make all things, not be all the things he makes.
[III-9-4]

Don’t be misled by Plotinus’s choice of words here. “He” does not refer to a personal God. Plotinus occasionally refers to the One as “father,” but this is literary license and doesn’t match with how Plotinus generally describes the nature of the highest Good. John Kenney says, “Personality, extrinsic orientation, purposive planning, volition, even self-consciousness and intellection, are all denied the One, not because the One lacks these theologically positive attributes but because they are deemed inadequate to it.”
¹

In other words, whatever we can say about the One doesn’t begin to capture the true nature of the One. Nevertheless, Plotinus does his best to point us in the right direction, which eventually will lead to a direct experience of unity that is the only way the One can be known. Here is a simple description of the overall scheme of creation:

For from that true universe which is one this universe comes into existence, which is not truly one.
[III-2-2]

The One, then, is the source of physical and spiritual existence. Why? Only the One knows. Obviously, though, if it had remained itself alone we would not be here asking the question. But it is not the creator of what exists within material existence. This is the role of spirit, the first emanation from the One. And neither is it identical with manifold existence, for this would negate the absolute unity of the One.

The One is all things and not a single one of them…. It is because there is nothing in it that all things come from it: in order that being may exist, the One is not being, but the generator of being.
[V-2-1]

It isn’t possible to grasp the source of physical existence through what already exists. This would be like a baby looking at its own body, and trying to figure out what part of itself—fingers, toes, arms, legs?—caused it to be born.

But what is above life is cause of life; for the activity of life, which is all things, is not first, but itself flows out, so to speak, as if from a spring For think of a spring which has no other origin, but gives the whole of itself to rivers, and is not used up by the rivers but remains itself at rest.
[III-8-10]

The One, then, is the cause of both material and spiritual domains of creation, and even of itself. Trace anything in existence back to its ultimate source, and you always will arrive at the One.

How then can it be that this power behind all other powers is so well hidden? Precisely because it is everywhere and everything. But we shouldn’t think that this is like a grain of sand hiding out on a beach. The grain of sand is disguised because it is so similar to all its brethren. The One, however, is difficult to discern because it is so utterly unlike anything we know now, and requires a different sort of looking to discern.

I once saw a television moderator on a public affairs program ask a minister, “How can you be sure that God exists?” The reply: “Because I see Him reflected in the face of a newborn baby.” Now, this was a sincere answer and certainly has an intuitive appeal. Still, we have to ask: Why didn’t the minister see God in a poisonous snake, a nuclear power plant, or an ax murderer? If God is omnipresent, why does this power seem to appear in some places and not in others? And why is it that he sees divinity in a baby’s face while others just see a plain baby?

Plotinus indicates that considerable subtlety is required to even begin to understand the answer to the question, “Where is God, or the One?” First, we have to entertain the possibility that the One can simultaneously be everywhere and nowhere, in everything and in nothing.

How then does multiplicity come from one? Because it is everywhere, for there is nowhere where it is not…. Now if it itself were only everywhere, it would itself be all things; but since it is also nowhere, all things come into being through him, because he is everywhere, but are other than him, because he is nowhere.
[III-9-4]

So the One is neither to be found up in the heavens nor down here on earth. It indeed is overall, yet also is underall. Everything in creation is filled with the One but the One remains separate from every created thing. Without the One we would be nothing. Without the unity that is the hallmark of the One we would not be what we are. Thus every part of creation, including ourselves, stands as indirect evidence of the One.

It is by the one that all beings are beings…. For what could anything be if it was not one?
[VI-9-1]

Something, Plotinus says, makes everything exist. Without that something there would be no cosmos. Just as a human being and life are inseparable (without life, a human does not exist) so is something holding the cosmos together. For lack of a better term, he calls this “the One.”

Why do space and time provide a solid foundation for the universe? From where do the immutable laws of nature originate? What is the source of the energy that keeps the subatomic realm whirling in constant motion, without which all matter would cease to exist? What makes something separate and distinct from everything else? How is it that we are able to point to this one and that one, rather than physical existence being just a featureless blob? There is a single answer to all these questions.

For all that is not one is kept in being by the one, and is what it is by this “one.”
[V-3-15]

To return to the One, then, doesn’t require any precise navigation skills. Pick up a dart, put on a blindfold, spin around, and throw the dart in any direction. Wherever it lands, there is the One. Anywhere in the physical universe you might throw the dart, whether it be right where you are now or a black hole at the center of a galaxy billions of light years away, you still will pinpoint the One. It is impossible to miss your mark. So why is it so difficult to make the journey to our true spiritual home?

Not because the One has left us, but because we have left the One. We could say that God’s distance from us is zero, and our distance from God is as far as scattered attention has taken us.

Where is the One? At the heart of everything that exists, whether animate or inanimate. But the One can be realized only by those living beings able to turn back upon themselves and contemplate their own center. I cannot find the One within you, and you cannot find the One within me. Everyone has an equal opportunity to know the highest reality, because it is separate from none and present to all.

God is present to all beings, and he is in this world, however we may conceive of this presence; therefore the world participates in God. Or, if God is absent from the world, he is also absent from you, and you can say nothing either about Him or the beings which come after Him.
[II-9-16]
²

There are, however, degrees of separation from conscious awareness of God’s presence. For Plotinus this is analogous to the length of a radius extending from the center of a circle. As souls we are free to travel as far as we like or as far as is possible from the center of existence, the One. When we have grown weary of our journeying and long to return to our source, the way back is the way in. The center of each of us is the same as the center of the cosmos.

For a god is what is linked to that center, but that which stands far from it is a multiple human being or a beast.
[VI-9-8]

The great Plotinian quest is to realize this common unifying center of being. This is the place where we know ourselves to be at one with the creation. When a person is united both with his true self and with the highest reality, nothing more is left to be done. All our striving, all our longing, all our yearning is for this alone.

First Is Formless

P
LOTINUS GIVES
us our goal: God, or the One. He has told us where the One can be found: everywhere, which also means nowhere because if the One was in some particular place it could not be in all places. So, how can the One be recognized? How would we know we have reached it?

As might be expected from a mystic philosopher, Plotinus’s answer initially appears to be nonsensical.

Truly, when you cannot grasp the form or shape of what is longed for, it would be most longed for and most lovable, and love for it would be immeasurable…. The nature of the best and the nature of the most lovable is in the altogether formless.
[VI-7-32, 33]

It is difficult for us to imagine having so much love for someone or something that can’t be grasped by the senses. Still, when you think about it, isn’t love itself ungraspable? Can we put a finger on love or delimit love’s boundaries? Perhaps, then, it is not so strange that what is most lovable of all, the One, has no form—even spiritual—just as love is formless.

We will not be surprised to see the object which produces such ardent desire completely free of all form, even intelligible.
[VI-7-34]
¹

Indeed, how could the wellspring of physical and spiritual existence have any form? The ultimate must not be limited in any fashion. Whenever we say, “This is hot,” coldness is denied. “It’s over there,” means the thing isn’t here. If the One possessed any characteristic of its own that would enable it to be described, it could not be infinitely productive.

Every positive attribute implies a simultaneous limiting negation. If the One was to think, it could not be without thought; if it was in motion, it could not be at rest; if it was a certain size, it could not be bigger or smaller; if it was a particular age, it could not be older or younger. Lawrence Hatab observes that Plotinus’s perspective added a new dimension to Greek philosophy.

With his distinct vision of the One Plotinus undermines a principle that had apparently been fundamental to Greek thought—that the limited and finite is the perfect, while the unlimited and infinite is the imperfect. In contrast, Plotinus claims infinity, unlimitedness and formlessness to be the One’s nature, and then calls this the ultimate ground.
²

If we are to contact the One, says Pierre Hadot, it will be as “pure, simple, undecomposable presence.”
³
As soon as you try to take hold of the One, it slips away. The One hides when called by any name, revealing itself only when beckoned by silence. If we think we know what the One is like, we don’t. Nothing created bears any resemblance to the One, for it is the source of form, not a form itself. It cannot even be said to have being, nor is it non-being.

Form is only the trace of that which has no form; indeed, it is the latter which engenders form…. But if all things are in that which is generated [from the One], which of the things in it are you going to say that the One is? Since it is none of them, it can only be said to be beyond them. But these things are beings, and being: so it is “beyond being.”
[VI-7-33
⁴
, V-5-6]

As dryly philosophical as these words may sound, the formlessness of the One is central to Plotinus’s vision of a spiritual life. God cannot be known by turning to anything God has made, for the creator is beyond all that has been created. Since everything that has being necessarily possesses some form (or there would be no way to distinguish creation from the uncreated) the formless One must be beyond being.

This conception of God is disconcerting because there is nothing in it that can be conceived. Plotinus urges us to expand the boundary of our spirituality beyond the familiar since we spend almost all of our waking hours immersed in sensual perceptions. Such are the foundation of our worldly lives: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches. We speak fondly of feeling grounded, implying that we yearn for the reassuring solidity of the earth beneath our feet rather than the empty ethereality of the sky above our heads.

Yet who can say that they haven’t been drawn toward the unknown, the mysterious, the darkness beyond light? When I was ten years old I remember going out one night to the backyard of my country home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains and gazing at the stars. Then I wrote a poem that began:

Look up to the heavens.

What do you see?

Tiny pinpoints of light.

But is that all?

Look past the stars,

Into the blackness of the void.

This is what Plotinus asks us to do within ourselves, to look past sensations and thoughts of materiality. One’s inner vision then comes to gaze upon the psychic equivalent of deep space, the dark void that remains when familiar material and mental preoccupations are discarded. Find a quiet place, close your eyes, focus your attention within, and this emptiness will be immediately evident.

But not for long. Even if you are able to detach yourself from external sights and sounds, it is almost certain that your mind will quickly dispel the inner darkness and silence. Mental images, memories, and imaginings will pop up. The voice that speaks your thoughts will start chattering away. At the very least, what has been called the emptiness of emptiness soon will be papered over with concepts about nothingness, which obviously are not nothing at all. The idea, “I’m immersed in the void,” is five words away from being true.

Plotinus is well aware of this strong and almost universal reluctance to come face-to-face with formlessness because he confronted, and overcame, this fear himself. In Plato’s parable of the cave, the escaping prisoner initially can’t stand a vision of bright, formless light and turns away to gaze upon familiar shadows. Similarly, when long-incarcerated criminals are released they often find the shock of freedom unbearable. They may commit another crime just to regain the reassuring structure of prison life: four walls and a locked door, but at least a place to call their own.

For Plotinus, perceptions and thoughts are the “crimes” the spiritual seeker commits to avoid embracing the liberating formlessness of the One.

But in proportion as the soul goes towards the formless, since it is utterly unable to comprehend it because it is not delimited and, so to speak, stamped by a richly varied stamp, it slides away and is afraid that it may have nothing at all.
[VI-9-3]

There is the One, or God, and then there are our ideas about this supreme reality. Every idea, every thought, every concept is necessarily limited. The One is infinite. Unbounded. Beyond being and not-being. Not constrained in any fashion. So the closer a person’s consciousness comes to the utter formlessness of the One, the less able it is to hold onto its rigid, preconceived imaginings. Truth trumps supposition. What is triumphs over what might be.

It is not possible to know the One without absolute surrender. Surrender of what? Of everything that is not one. In Plotinus’s mystic philosophy, true knowledge is gained through union of the knower and what is known. Since the One is formless those seeking to know this ultimate reality must become similarly formless. Formless, though, is not the same as nothing. In fact, the All lacks any specific form precisely because it contains all forms.

A vast number of things of all sorts of shapes and sizes could be put into a huge warehouse. But the warehouse couldn’t hold a similarly huge warehouse. Construct a building as large as the universe and it still wouldn’t be capable of holding another building of the same dimensions. So the One, containing all that could possibly be, must necessarily have no shape or size of its own, or any other sort of quality.

So that no other form is left outside it, the One must be without form.
[V-5-6]

We begin to see, then, the method behind Plotinus’s seeming spiritual madness. The soul resists giving up all it presently has and all it considers itself to be because nothingness appears to be a crazy means of attaining the All. We think that if we already are something—not everything, certainly, but at least
something
—isn’t tossing all of it aside a step in the wrong direction?

No, because there is an unbridgeable gap between the whole and any of its parts. Union, the goal of divine love, means near-absolute identity. Whatever is other than the One cannot be united with the One. Whatever possesses some form, no matter how elevated or refined, cannot merge with the formless.

Even our worldly loves imperfectly reflect this principle. When I love someone I often try to adjust to his or her needs, not my own. I may go to a movie I don’t really want to see and eat at a restaurant that serves food I don’t really like because my love will enjoy that film and meal.

The same applies to other sorts of passions. Someone who loves Shakespeare reads the playwright’s work with an open mind, allowing the eloquent words to flow freely into his own consciousness. If he also loves Mozart then he listens to the composer’s music with rapt attention, completely immersed in the sublime tones and melodies. If the doorbell rings while he is reading or listening with such absorption he may not even notice it. For at that moment it is Shakespeare or Mozart with whom he desires to be united and his normal preoccupations have been supplanted.

Similarly, says Plotinus, love for the One means putting aside all other concerns. Whatever the One is, that also is what we wish to be. Rather than open-minded, we seek to be open-souled. Just as lovers embrace tightly, their desirous bodies separated by as little as possible, so does the soul yearn to unite even more closely with the One. If there is anything between us and the One it must be discarded. Since the One is formless all that possesses any sort of shape—physical, mental, or spiritual—is a barrier between us and what we truly long for.

When the soul feels passionate love for him, she puts aside all shape she has, including whatever form of the intelligible may be within her, for it is impossible either to see him or to be adjusted with him while possessing and acting upon anything other than him. Rather, we must keep nothing else at hand—whether good or evil—so that the soul alone may receive him alone.
[VI-7-34]
⁵