Authors: Brian Hines
R
EINCARNATION
, for Plato and Plotinus, is both real and reasonable. This may surprise those who believe that rebirth into a succession of bodily forms is a peculiarly Eastern doctrine. Actually, reincarnation is a central tenet of a surprising number of otherwise diverse spiritual traditions including early Christianity and Judaic mysticism—plus, of course, Hinduism and Buddhism. And since rebirth makes sense, it fits comfortably into the schema of Plotinus’s rational mysticism.
It is certain that bodies are born, live for a time, and then die. What is uncertain is whether some non-bodily essence of a human, or other living being, continues to exist after its body dies. If this doesn’t happen then spirituality as we normally conceive it is moot. For even if God or a higher creative power exists our existence ends after a single life, which makes our earthly stay both exceedingly precious and largely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
Alternatively, if this essence, or soul, lives on after the body dies, then we are led to ask: When did the soul come into being? If the soul is deathless, seemingly it also is birthless. For if the soul was created by a divine power at some time one would think that this same power could uncreate it at another time.
Yet even in the physical realm, science tells us that energy and mass cannot be created or destroyed; they only change form. So does it make sense to hold that a subtle immaterial soul pops into existence within time while comparatively crude material energy and mass are eternal?
In truth, taught Plato and Plotinus, each of us existed before the life we are living now, and we will continue to exist in one form or another until our return to the formless One.
For Plato says that the souls’ choices take place according to their previous lives…. The souls, changing their bodies, appear now in one form and now in another, and also, when it can, a soul takes its place outside the process of becoming and is with the universal soul.
[IV-3-8,
III-2-4]
The passage back to God thus is through a revolving door, which makes the traveling more difficult. For the spiritual path would be much easier to traverse if the journey to higher realms was through a door that could be approached and then opened by a simple act of will. However, one problem among several is that our conscious choice to try to open that door or not is largely determined by tendencies brought with us from previous lives. We may be carrying too much baggage with us to even want to leave this material world.
Death, of course, eventually takes all people on a trip out of the body regardless of whether or not they want to go. But what generally happens at death is that a soul enters the revolving door of reincarnation, catches a fleeting glimpse of inner planes of reality without being able to fully enter them, and then is whisked around back into another earthly body with all memory of the revolving, glimpsing, and whisking having been erased. Only occasionally are souls able to remain with the Soul of the All, and even more rarely with spirit, or the One.
Pure souls when they are set free abandon what was plastered on to them at their birth, but the others remain with it for a very long time.
[IV-7-14]
It isn’t easy to become a pure soul, fit to remain in the spiritual world at death, because most of us are born with innumerable earthly connections that only grow stronger during the course of our lives. If we just needed to discard the worldly impurities we’ve accumulated since birth perhaps this cleansing could be accomplished fairly easily. But the darkness that dims the soul, like the ashes covering Pompeii, contains many strata. Each lifetime adds another layer of ignorance and illusion and the soul gradually becomes accustomed to its degraded condition, dirt being attracted to dirt.
What was formerly the soul of a man may become the soul of an ox; so that the worse being is justly dealt with…. And one must carry back the reckoning to what happened in previous lives, because what happens afterwards depends on that too.
[III-3-4]
The reckoning that can turn a man into a beast, or the reverse, isn’t an arbitrary affair, as when someone casually says, “Oh, I reckon I’ll have salad instead of soup.” Providence assures that each soul receives its just deserts, nothing more and nothing less.
J.M. Rist says, “The soul descends … to whatever aspect of the material world it itself resembles. If it is itself humane, it will therefore enter a human body; if it is bestial, it will enter the body of a beast. All evidently still depends on the nature of the soul itself and on its own power to choose its own fortune.”
1
We’ve already learned that providence is pervasive. The presence of the Soul of the All in every particle of the physical creation results in a universal and inescapable order. No thing and no one stands alone, separate and distinct. What is done by a part affects the All; what is done by the All affects a part. The ceaseless weaving of providence creates ever-changing patterns of causes and effects, a monumental living tapestry, yet each soul is aware of only a few threads, not the entire pattern.
Most people know only about the life being lived now, not what has brought a person to this body, this place, this time. We can, however, take heart in Plotinus’s teaching that whatever our present circumstances may be, they are just and well-deserved.
The soul’s descent to this world encompasses two sorts of “sins,” remembering that, to Plotinus, sin is a distancing from the Good. One is the descent itself, the act of self-will in which soul desired to be part of the many rather than united with the whole. The second variety of sin includes any further embracing of multiplicity and concomitant separating from the One after the soul arrives here on Earth. Each, the descent and what follows it, is within the purview of providence. The soul gets what it deserves.
And since the sin of the soul can refer to two things, either to the course of the descent or to doing evil when the soul has arrived here below, the punishment of the first is the very experience of descent, and of the lesser degree of the second the entrance, and a very quick one, into other bodies according to the judgment passed on its deserts.
[IV 8-5]
So the natural consequence of descending from the spiritual world is living in this physical world. That is punishment enough for the soul’s
tolma,
or self-assertion, that led to our separation from spirit. Loneliness is what comes from being alone; leaving the warmth of our home takes us into the cold. In such cases cause and effect follow so immediately upon the other as to be virtually indistinguishable.
But once we start acting on the stage of this world, the situation gets murkier. The justice of providence still rules the roost yet the connection between an action and its consequences often lies hidden beneath coverings of time and space. Though the randiness of a rooster leads to the hatching of an egg, it takes a practiced eye to recognize the link between what happens one day in the chicken yard and another day in the henhouse.
If we possessed the clear sight of spiritual wisdom, says Plotinus, we would see that we have become what we’ve done. The body inhabited now is the just result of actions performed in the past.
Those, then, who guarded the man in them, become men again. Those who lived by sense alone become animals…. But if they did not even live by sense along with their desires but coupled them with dullness of perception, they even turn into plants.
[III-4-2]
Even if we’re mostly acting like humans, rather than plants or other animals, providence assures that there is a wide choice of
Homo sapiens
forms to reincarnate into. Consider how many different sorts of people there are. Two sexes, all kinds of nationalities and ethnic groups, so many varieties of shapes and sizes, wide ranges of intelligence and physical prowess, talents and proclivities beyond counting. All of these characteristics too, not just the species a soul becomes, are formed by the hand of providence.
Each soul comes down to a body made ready for it according to its resemblance to the soul’s disposition.
[IV-3-12]
Here’s the general rule of reincarnation: we become what we do. Those who act divinely become divine. Those who act humanly become human. Those who act beastly become beast. Hence we need to carefully choose our actions as well as thoughts, since thoughts are seeds that bear the fruit of actions. At present it may seem that what I do and think has little effect on what I become. After all, I can fantasize about being as ferocious as a lion for my whole life, and I will never be transformed into a real lion. But after death, who knows?
In this city [of the world] virtue is honored and vice has its appropriate dishonor … giving to each his fitting portion in changes of lives as a consequence of the deeds he did in previous existences; he who ignores this is one of the rasher sort of humans who deals boorishly with divine things.
[II-9-9]
These are strong words but Plotinus wasn’t one to mince a phrase. Many people find it impossible to believe that a person can become a plant, or a bee a buffalo. Fine, there is nothing truer than the truth, as the
Enneads
put it. After each of us dies we may learn, if only momentarily whether reincarnation is fact or fiction. And Plotinus says that the soul, which is able to remain in the spiritual world for some time after death, will eventually remember previous earthly incarnations.
What then would the other soul say when it has been freed and is alone? The soul which drags after it anything at all [from the body] would speak of everything which the man had done or experienced. But as time goes on after death, memories of other things would appear from its former lives, so that it would even abandon with contempt some of these memories [of its immediately past life].
[IV-3-27]
So it is wise to place our present lives in proper perspective. If we knew that after death we would “abandon with contempt” memories of the lives we are living now, perhaps our sufferings and tribulations are not so awful as we currently believe, nor are our pleasures and delights so wonderful.
A belief in reincarnation broadens our horizons. It expands the possibilities open to us. We begin to realize that we’re responsible for choosing the course of our lives. We can rise to the most radiant spiritual heights or descend to the darkest material depths. This body that currently covers the soul is not a permanent cloak. It is up to us how finely ethereal, or how crudely physical, we appear.
The souls when they have peeped out of the intelligible world go first to heaven, and when they have put on a body there go on by its means to earthier bodies, to the limit to which they extend themselves in length.
[IV-3-15]
Heaven, it seems, is within the domain of the Soul of the All, the region immediately below the spiritual world. Here, says Plotinus, the soul puts on an ethereal body, what other metaphysical traditions speak of as the causal or astral body.
Clothed in this covering, the soul is able to descend further, much as a diver is able to remain below the surface of the sea with a wet suit and breathing apparatus. To go deeper, a stronger shell is needed such as a bathyscaphe or submarine. Similarly, the soul puts on increasingly denser bodies, changing from a body of “air” to one of “fire” to that of “earth,” the physical form.
Now there are two ways of soul entering body; one is when a soul is already in a body and changes bodies, or passes from a body of air or fire to one of earth (people do not call this change of body because the body from which entry is made is not apparent); and the other, passage from bodilessness to any kind of body, which would of course be the first communication of soul with body.
[IV-3-9]
Clothes cover bodies. When we want to be most intimate with our physical beloved, we take off our clothes and embrace skin to skin.
Bodies cover souls. Plotinus teaches that when we want to be most intimate with our spiritual beloved, God, we take off our bodies and embrace soul to spirit.
To return to the One, we need to get spiritually naked. Completely. Unashamedly. Gloriously. Reincarnation is a re-covering of the soul. Rebirth results in another physical incarnation but this is not the sort of life the mystic philosopher seeks.
I
MAGINE A HAMMER
hitting your thumb,
hard.
Ouch, it hurts! Physical pain is undeniably real. But what about the mental suffering that almost always accompanies physical injury or illness? This sort of suffering also is real to the sufferer. However, it mostly flows from the subjective meaning we ascribe to our afflictions. Consider these two hammer-hitting scenarios:
Here I am at my workbench fixing a rickety birdhouse. As I’m about to pound in a loose nail, the phone rings, momentarily distracting me. Bam! I hit skin instead of steel. My mental reaction? I’m irritated that I hurt myself but accidents happen. I find a bandage to stop the bleeding and get back to work. The next day, my thumb is still a little sore. Otherwise, the incident is out of mind.
Alternatively, here I am at a restaurant studying the menu. A waiter walks up to my table and asks if I’m ready to order. Yes, I am. He reaches into his apron and instead of bringing forth a pen he brandishes a hammer. Bam! He hits my thumb. My mental reaction? Shock, anger, bewilderment. I have been attacked for no reason. The order of my world has been violated. The next day, my thumb is still sore, and so am I. Visions of lawsuits dance obsessively through my head.
In each case, the physical pain was the same. My suffering, however, was much more extreme when there seemed to be no good reason to explain my aching thumb. It’s arbitrary randomness (bolts of lightning striking out of the blue, hammers hitting when we least expect it) that makes us think, “Life is not fair.”
Yet, Plotinus taught, it
is.
If we possessed a broader vision, we’d realize that a hidden order underlies the events of life. What seems to arrive unbidden at our doorsteps is, in truth, delivered by providence in response to invitations penned by our own hands.
And the injustice which one man does to another is certainly an injustice from the point of view of the doer, and the man who perpetrates it is not free from guilt, but as contained in the universal order it is not unjust in that order, or in relation to the sufferer, but it was ordained that he should so suffer.
[IV-3-16]
While some readers may jump to the conclusion that this is a simplistic blame-the-victim philosophy, rest assured that this isn’t what Plotinus is saying. It just takes a bit of study to wend our way through the “buts” in the quotation above and understand the subtleties of his teaching.
Plotinus begins by affirming that there is indeed right and wrong. If we hurt others we are guilty of harming them. The pain they feel isn’t illusory nor is our recognition that we have caused them to suffer. But these understandings are on the individual level, one person’s action having an effect on someone (or something) else. Plotinus quickly takes a big jump up to the universal order, a view that encompasses the entire vast tapestry of physical existence, not just the few threads of space and time with which we presently are acquainted.
From this much broader perspective, no action is unjust. All is ordained: good and evil, pleasure and suffering, causes and effects. In Plotinus’s cosmos nothing is left to chance.
We must say that all always have a cause for coming to be; nothing uncaused can be admitted.
[III-l-l]
As parts of the whole, it is exceedingly difficult to envision the interconnectedness of all life. If we could truly grasp unity, we assuredly would be unity. This is why Plotinus observes in another quotation that the universal order keeps its reasons hidden. Knowing only that a waiter hammered my thumb instead of taking my order, I conclude that I’ve experienced an inexplicable absurdity, a miscarriage of justice, a random act of meanness.
Yet what if I could look back upon the countless incarnations in which the waiter and I had existed in various physical forms? Possibly in a life long, long ago I had hurt him in a like degree and the inexorable wheels of justice had turned in such a manner as to bring us together at that moment of dining, with providence having implanted a malevolent intent in my server’s mind and a hammer in his apron.
Or let’s look into the future after I had left the restaurant in a huff and returned home. Turning on the television, I hear a news announcer say, “A few minutes ago a gas line explosion destroyed a downtown restaurant. Many are feared dead or injured.” A close escape. Thank heavens for crazy waiters.
The point is, we don’t know what we’ve done to others in previous lives, or what they’ve done to us. We also don’t know what is good for us or what is bad. But we think we do and confidently cast ourselves and others as victims or victimizers when the truth is considerably more involved.
Plotinus teaches that apparent gross injustices would appear in a different light if we could see what has happened in other incarnations. A murderer in this life may have been the murdered in another life, or a slave owner a slave, a captor a prisoner, an abuser the abused. Providence returns to us the just consequences of what we have done to others even though our memories of the deeds for which we suffer now have been removed by reincarnation.
There is certainly no accident in a man’s becoming a slave, nor is he taken prisoner in war by chance, nor is outrage done on his body without due cause, but he was once the doer of that which he now suffers.
[III-2-13]
I realize that these sentiments sound harsh. They appear to lack compassion and are decidedly politically incorrect. In the same passage Plotinus goes so far as to say that “one who has raped a woman will be a woman in order to be raped,” not a saying likely to adorn the wall of a women’s crisis center. But let’s try to see things from Plotinus’s point of view.
He offers some wonderfully persuasive answers to the vexing questions, “Why do bad things happen to good people? And why do good things happen to bad people?” First, a person can’t look only to the events that have occurred since his birth for an explanation of why something is happening to him now. There’s a reason for everything but often that reason won’t be apparent since someone only knows what he or she has done in this life alone (and even these memories are selective).
Second, Plotinus says that we’re jumping the gun if we try to answer these questions without knowing the meaning of good and bad. Armed with that knowledge, the questions may answer themselves. For what we presently think is good and bad flows from a limited understanding of what produces genuine well-being. This leads us to wrongly believe that virtuous people are being unfairly deprived of the opportunity to be happy if they suffer from poverty, ill health, a physical handicap, or the like.
Actually, happiness isn’t produced by anything external to us. It is an inward quality of the soul unaffected by what nature gives to us or takes away from us.
But why do things against nature come to the good, and things according to nature to the wicked? How can this be right distribution? But if what is according to nature brings no addition to well-being, nor, correspondingly, does that which is contrary to nature take away anything of the evil which is in the bad, what does it matter whether it is this way or that?
[III-2-6]
Plotinus begins by asking much the same question as we did above: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” He replies, in effect, “What is bad? The pure soul is unaffected by anything material, for soul is nothing but spirit, eternally immersed in love of the One. You confuse good with the Good. What most people consider to be good has nothing to do with true Goodness, which is a quality of soul, not of sense. So what does it matter if you have wealth, health, beauty, friends, family, fame, or any other worldly accouterment? The sage realizes that nothing of this world can provide well-being, nor can its absence detract from well-being.”
In other words, one reason that so many people are skeptical that destiny is deserved is that they wouldn’t know a just desert if it hit them in the face. Yet the justice of providence is doing precisely that, so to speak, all the time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. However, our unreasonable expectations about what we think we should be getting prevent us from realizing that what we
are
getting is perfectly just.
Perplexity about how there can be providence stems from a false assumption that what the world considers to be good truly leads to well-being.
But if anyone objects to wealth and poverty and the fact that all have not an equal share in things of this kind, first, he is ignorant that the good and wise man does not look for equality in these things, and does not think that people who have acquired a great deal of them have any kind of advantage.
[II-9-9]
Thinking back to when we were teenagers, most of us can remember times when we were sure that our world had come to an end because we had experienced something incredibly embarrassing or disappointing. Yet somehow we survived, often with the help of counsel from someone more mature, and now can look back upon those days with bemusement. Plotinus is a wise father in this regard. He reminds us that while we get what we deserve, we needn’t take too seriously either fortune’s slings and arrows or its rewards and delights.
Earthly existence should be considered a play in which we act out scenes written by the Master Playwright. We are not our roles, but it’s our duty to play our parts enthusiastically, knowing that real life begins after the curtain call ends.
In the true dramatic creation, which is partially imitated by people of a poetical nature, the soul is the actress, and she gets the roles she plays from the poet
[the world-creating Intellect].
Just as actors in this world do not receive at random their masks, their costumes, their expensive robes, and their ragged clothes, so it is with the soul herself: she does not receive her fortunes at random, but they, too, are in accordance with reason. If the soul adapts them to herself, she becomes harmonious and coordinates herself with the drama, as well as with the whole of reason.
[III-2-17]
1
Each of us is born at a certain time into certain circumstances in a certain part of the world. We are unable to choose this stage setting, nor can we pick our sex, physical features, inbred talents and capacities, or genetic heritage. Throughout our lives we’re influenced by innumerable factors that are largely or entirely outside of our control. We’re schooled in certain settings, become acculturated in certain milieus, work in certain economic conditions, grow up in a certain geographic environment.
Take away all of these “certain” situations and there aren’t that many “perhaps” left. Plotinus says that this play of life is tightly scripted by providence, with just a few lines left open for improvisation. What’s within our control isn’t our roles but the quality of our acting. Coming on stage at birth, a soul finds that the divine playwright and prop master have already provided everything needed to carry on the dramatic production of “My Life.” We supply only the good or bad acting.
In this way the soul, coming on the stage in this universal poetic creation and making itself a part of the play, supplies of itself the good or the bad in its acting.
[III-2-17]
Plotinus goes so far as to say that even blasphemy is part of the script.
It is just as if a poet in his plays wrote a part for an actor insulting and depreciating the author of the play.
[III-2-16]
So what does it mean to be a good actor? Well, let’s consider what distinguishes an accomplished actor of stage or screen. He or she has mastered the craft of acting through a combination of natural talent and dedication to learning technique, a mix of grace and effort, we might say. Of course, a sine qua non of becoming a good actor is knowing that one
is
an actor, good, bad, or indifferent.
This is part of what distinguishes the universal poetic creation of life itself from the particularized dramatic creations so easily recognized as drama. It’s obvious that we are playing roles when we hold scripts in our hands. But it’s not at all obvious when the script of life is so well hidden and when we have identified completely with our parts, believing that we, not providence, are responsible for directing the play in which we act every day.
But it
[the universal order]
keeps its reasons hidden and gives grounds for blame to those who do not know them.
[IV-3-16]
An actor is able to separate himself from his role. He realizes that as the plot takes twists and turns his job is to play his part as naturally and believably as possible, secure in the knowledge that what happens to his character is distinct from what happens to him, the true self outside of the script. If his character dies or suffers some terrible calamity, what of it? Plotinus urges us to cultivate a similar indifference to the tragedies and triumphs, ups and downs, honors and dishonors of this earthly drama.
Dominic O’Meara says, “Although the wicked are responsible for their acts, these acts are integrated into a larger cosmic scheme which is good; the goodness and beauty of this scheme require diversity, differences in perfection, just as a good play must include villains as well as heroes.”
2