Authors: Brian Hines
I
T’S A JOURNEY
like no other, this return to the One. Our progress is most rapid when we move the least. Indeed, we’ll arrive at our destination only when we’re absolutely still.
If this sounds paradoxical, it’s because our experience of reality currently is firmly rooted in the physical. Here on Earth we move from physical place to physical place by transporting our physical bodies through physical space. Even if our movement is from thought to thought or perception to perception, this sort of meandering still takes time, and time is motion.
Thus, presently few of us know what it is like to be truly at rest. Since change is continuous in everyday life, it’s understandable that most people’s spirituality is based on activity rather than stillness. Prayer. Good works. Worship. Reading of holy books. All this entails motion of body or mind. Where, though, does such movement lead us?
While it is commonplace to speak of being on a spiritual path, Plotinus teaches that most of what we do in the name of God actually leads us farther from divinity rather than closer. Movement is what produces separation from the One, so the notion of an active spirituality contains an inherent contradiction.
For this reason Movement, too, was called Otherness, because Movement and Otherness sprang forth together.
[II-4-5]
Everything that is not the One is, obviously, part of the otherness to which Plotinus refers. Spirit, however, remains exceedingly close to the source from which it emanates. Though separate from God, it eternally embraces the highest Good, as intimately connected with what is beyond being as possible. This is our goal: to enjoy, with spirit, the intimate companionship of the One.
Movement, says Plotinus, is what primarily distinguishes soul and spirit. Soul would be essentially the same as spirit if not for its motion. The activity of soul, both of the universal Soul of the All and of individual souls, is directed toward the One, for all things aspire to God. But this lofty aspiration is sidetracked by our sensual and bodily inclinations. Our innate longings for the One become transmuted into desires for the many.
The soul thus becomes bound by matter and keeps on circling within the cage of the physical universe. We know we are missing something, so keep on searching. However, this very movement is what prevents us from experiencing the presence of spirit and the One. We keep on in this fashion, life after life, both out of ignorance and out of a desire to be separate.
Tolma
(self-assertion) makes the soul want to move in manyness rather than rest in oneness.
And it
[soul]
is one being, but makes itself many by what we may call its movement…. For if it appears as one, it did not think, but is that One.
[VI-2-6]
Separateness, self-consciousness, and movement are all interrelated. Desiring to exist as parts of creation rather than as the whole, we naturally want to know that we are parts. So we as soul contemplate our own selves and thus become conscious of ourselves as distinct entities. This unique capacity of humans to be self-aware allows us not only to think but to think about thinking. Now we can move in directions other animals cannot. Books can be written, cultures created, philosophies developed, sciences structured.
This is wonderful if our goal is to explore and experiment with the creation rather than return to the creator. However, if our goal is the One, then there is a problem with all of this thinking, for that, Plotinus says, “is the cause of its appearing many.” [VI-2-6] Intuitive spiritual intelligence is worlds apart from discursive (step by step) mental reasoning. Neither spirit nor God think in the way we do, but they are infinitely wiser.
Any movement of our minds can only take us farther from the calm, pure consciousness that each of us already is, but has covered under layers of sense perception, emotion, and cogitation. Our inner essence is virtually identical with that of spirit. This is why we need to cultivate stillness, for spirit is forever at rest. The more a person contacts the unmoving center of his own being, the closer he comes to the stationary center of universal being. As we read earlier:
It
[spirit]
has therefore everything at rest in the same place, and it only is, and its “is” is for ever, and there is no place for the future for then too it is—or for the past—for nothing there has passed away—but all things remain stationary for ever, since they are the same, as if they were satisfied with themselves for being so.
[V-l-4]
On the face of it, we’re caught in a vicious circle. Since we always have a longing for some indefinable “more,” some aspect of each of our consciousnesses is in constant motion (with the possible exception of dreamless sleep). This constant motion, however, prevents us from rising up to the spiritual world, the only place where what we long for can be found. So our seeking leads to more seeking, never to finding.
It’s no wonder that so many people turn to prayer. For it certainly seems that, unaided, the soul is powerless to extricate itself from this material maze. Blind alleys abound. Running aimlessly leads nowhere. What we know how to do, think, emote, perceive, imagine, remember, won’t enable us to reach a realm beyond thought, emotion, perception, imagination, and memory. It’s as if we had studied hard for an all-important exam only to find that none of the material on the test was covered in the classes we had attended.
“Help me, God!” is an understandable reaction to this perilous condition. Death awaits us all and though we may feel that we’re competent to get through life, the afterlife is
terra incognita,
unknown territory. Faced with the uncertainty of what will happen to us after our last breath, an appeal to a power stronger and wiser than ourselves is entirely in order. However, says Plotinus, there is a proper way to pray. And it doesn’t involve words.
Let us speak of it in this way, first invoking God himself, not in spoken words, but stretching ourselves out with our soul into prayer to him, able in this way to pray alone to him alone.
[V-l-6]
What, indeed, could we possibly say to God that needs saying? We pray because we believe God is all-knowing and all-powerful. Yet praying in words belies our belief, since this implicitly conveys the message that God is incapable of doing what needs to be done unless we help him out.
“My mother is ailing, Lord. Please take care of her.” Thoughts like these imply there is an off-on switch to divine providence that prayer somehow manipulates. Utter a prayer and, click, God comes to life and is in charge of the situation. Stop praying and God goes on a break, uninvolved in earthly affairs until another prayer calls him back to duty.
To Plotinus, this sort of thinking is hopelessly at odds with the true nature of the One, spirit, and soul. Genuine prayer is simple presence, a wordless turning toward the One who is always turned toward us. J.M. Rist says, “Prayer is a means of uniting the One in ourselves with the One in itself…. When a man prays ‘alone to the Alone’, he has come to recognize that the One is always present and that it is up to himself to look towards him if he wishes…. The One is always turned towards us; in the highest act of prayer we turn again towards him.”
1
This turning is neither a physical nor a mental action. What we must do is try to merge the unity that is us with the unity that is the cosmos. This can’t be accomplished by an act of will, for will involves duality: a doer and a thing to be done. Hence, any fervent effort to become one will prevent us from simply being one. Rather, the sage seeks a state of rest that, nonetheless, carries him away.
But he was as if carried away or possessed by a god, in a quiet solitude and a state of calm, not turning away anywhere in his being and not busy about himself, altogether at rest and having become a kind of rest.
[VI-9-11]
Mountaineers who aspire to reach the lofty heights of Everest or K
2
must train mightily to prepare for the rigors they will face. Muscles must be strengthened, climbing skills perfected, endurance expanded, determination deepened. The mystic philosopher must also transform his being into a fit vehicle for ascending to the One, but the training method is considerably different. For a climber needs to perfect his ability to move, while a mystic must become expert at remaining motionless.
And the soul is so disposed then as even to despise intelligence, which at other times it welcomed, because intelligence is a kind of movement, and the soul does not want to move…. It does not even think that it does not think.
[VI-7-35]
The intelligence to which Plotinus refers is the ever-moving train of human thought that possesses one object of knowledge after another, not the all-encompassing intuitive intelligence of spirit. When Plotinus wrote the
Enneads,
word by word and sentence by sentence, to some extent he necessarily used a lower power of his consciousness: discursive reason. His moving pen reflected his moving thoughts.
But when Plotinus contemplated the unchanging One, it was with true intelligence, a power of
the psyche
far beyond thinking. God’s truth is absorbed by the soul through a spiritual osmosis in which the knower communes so intimately with the known that seeing becomes sight. It is fruitless to expect or force this vision, since the One is utterly unlike anything that we know now, or could possibly imagine knowing.
J.M. Rist says, “If we ‘pursue’ the One, of course we shall always tend to specify it, to see it under some particular aspect. We must learn instead to be passive, to let it come, as it will come if we take away our own restlessness, that very restlessness which prevents us from being like it.”
2
Suddenly, a light bursts forth, pure and alone. We wonder whence it came: from the outside, or from the inside? Once it disappears, we say, “It was inside—and yet, no, it wasn’t inside.” We must not try to learn whence it comes, for here there is no “whence.”
The light comes from nowhere, and it goes nowhere; it simply either appears or does not appear. That is why we must not chase after it, but quietly wait for it to appear, preparing ourselves to be spectators, as the eye waits for the rising sun.
[V-5-7, V-5-8]
3
We’re reminded of John
3:8
. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Spirit and God are neither outside of us nor inside of us. Spiritual illumination accompanies a change in consciousness, not a shift in space or a traversing of time. When divine light fills the soul, its source is a mystery. Indeed, as Plotinus says, the radiance comes from nowhere and it goes nowhere, for it is the root of all that exists.
The only thing we must do to quietly contemplate the One is to stop actively contemplating the many. The sun appears to rise as the world turns, but actually it is always shining. Similarly, as our attention turns from the multiplicity of matter to the singleness of spirit, illumination
will
occur. But in its own fashion, not ours.
I
N THE PRESENT
moment, you and I are as happy as we will ever be.
On the face of it, this thoroughly Plotinian sentiment appears both nonsensical and unappealing. Nonsensical because it’s obvious that day by day (if not hour by hour or minute by minute) our level of happiness rises and falls, pushed higher or driven lower by external and internal circumstances. Unappealing because belief in the prospect of greater future happiness helps us endure present pain and unpleasantness.
Still, there is undeniable delight in the notion that happiness is here. Here now, here tomorrow, here where I am, here where I will be. Who wouldn’t prefer to go through life enjoying the ever-present companionship of happiness rather than always expecting to meet up around the next corner? The older we get the more corners we have turned and the harder it is to believe that the unalloyed happiness we seek ever will be found.
We’re right. It won’t be found. At least, not so long as we look for the source of happiness anywhere outside of us. Marcus Aurelius, the philosophical second-century Roman emperor (whose Stoic conceptions closely resemble aspects of Plotinus’s teachings) says, “Happiness, by derivation, means ‘a good god within.’ “
1
Such is the meaning of
eudaimonia,
the Greek word for happiness. Thus happiness and spirituality go hand in hand.
Being happy pertains only to that which has an excess of life…. Perfect, true, and genuine life consists in that intellective nature…. That person’s life is complete who possesses not only the faculty of sensation, but also rationality and true Spirit…. The person who is happy here and now [is] the one who is this form of life in actuality, and has reached the stage of becoming this life itself.
[I-4-3, I-4-4]
2
The sage is always happy because he or she is always turned toward God, the ultimate Good, not the lesser goods offered up by the physical world. As noted before, our attempts to find well-being through interactions with people, places, and things are stymied by the fact that these entities lack true being. So no matter how closely we physically hug them to our breasts or mentally absorb them into our consciousnesses, they fail to satisfy us. What we long for is within so the search for happiness without, in time and space, is bound to be fruitless.
Happiness, or well-being, isn’t a will-of-the-wisp that flutters here and there, always escaping our grasp, frustrating us by remaining just out of reach. This is true only of the dim reflection of genuine happiness that is able to manifest in the physical world. Time pushes a present moment of enjoyment into the past, so if our happiness is dependent on the ever-changing circumstances of materiality, our well-being is bound to fluctuate.
The Good, however, is eternally present at the core of all that exists, including our own selves. By inwardly contemplating spirit and the One, the mystic philosopher forges a direct connection between his soul and the wellspring of happiness. No longer dependent on the trickles of physical and mental pleasure that most of us try so assiduously to collect in our cups of consciousness, the sage enjoys a torrent of divine bliss that flows freely and continuously, like an artesian well, in his own soul.
He is his own good for himself, thanks to what he possesses. The cause of the Good within him is the transcendent Good…. The person in this state no longer seeks anything; for what could he seek? Certainly not for anything inferior to him; and as for what is best, he is with it already.
[I-4-4]
3
We see here how far removed Plotinus’s philosophy is from the extreme sense of asceticism, a hatred of the material world. The good man doesn’t shun worldly pleasures because he considers them evil, ungodly, sinful, or depraved. Rather, he possesses something better, the Good itself, and so has no need for anything that is less than the best. Happiness, probably better termed “bliss,” turns out to be inseparable from being, as in the Hindu description of the highest reality as
sat-chit-ananda,
or truth-consciousness-bliss.
To ask a sage, or realized soul, “How happy are you?” would be as absurd as someone saying to us, “How existent are you?” For just as existence is part and parcel of our present state of being, so is happiness part and parcel of the being of those who have united their soul with spirit. Happiness then is not something that we have, a changeable quality like blood pressure, weight, or body temperature, but an integral aspect of what we are.
This explains why some people, though poor or sick, are happy, while others are miserable notwithstanding their wealth and health. Well-being is a state of the soul, not of outward circumstances. Plotinus says that each of us has the potential to enjoy unalloyed happiness but generally this remains a possibility not reality. Thus most people look upon the good life as something separate from themselves, envisioning that it will make an appearance when they retire, move to a nicer climate, strike it rich in the lottery, or get the kids through college.
Rarely does a person consider that happiness is something he or she already possesses but has misplaced under all the myriad thoughts and perceptions that clutter consciousness. Virtue, as Plotinus uses the term, means eliminating from the
psyche
all that is not spirit or the One. What remains will not be anything good in particular, but the Good in itself.
If he is virtuous, he has all he needs for well-being and the acquisition of good; for there is no good that he has not got.
[I-4-4]
Feeling unhappy, most people think, “What can I do that would make me happier?” Sometimes this is as simple as going to a movie, walking in a park, reading a book, talking with a friend, or eating chocolate. Sometimes we seek more radical changes: moving to another city, changing jobs, getting a divorce, losing lots of weight. These sorts of actions may assuage our malaise temporarily but they aren’t lasting solutions. For happiness doesn’t depend on what we do but on what we are.
It is one’s inner state which produces both well-being and any pleasure that results from it. To place well-being in actions is to locate it in something outside virtue and the soul.
[I-5-10]
Some people work amazingly hard at trying to be happy. For example, they may put in a twelve-hour day on the job to make money that will enable them to buy things or go places that will, they hope, bring them satisfaction.
One problem with this circuitous approach to gaining happiness, in which a person engages in external actions to produce an alteration in his or her internal state of being, is that it is terribly inefficient. The periods in which we rest content are eclipsed by all the time we spend straining and sweating to reach a state of ease. By contrast, through inward contemplation it is possible to tap directly into the soul’s source of happiness: spirit and the One. Then well-being is enjoyed continuously, rather than episodically
This is as it should be, teaches Plotinus, for happiness is like breathing. I can remember that my lungs were filled with air a moment ago but after being punched in the stomach and losing my breath that remembrance is of no use to me. I need air!—not a memory of air. Similarly, all that matters is present happiness, for a memory of prior well-being is like a memory of spent money: it can’t buy current satisfaction.
And besides, what pleasure is there in the memory of pleasantness—for instance, if someone remembers that yesterday he enjoyed some nice food? And if it was ten years ago that he enjoyed it, he would be even more ridiculous. The same applies to the memory that one was virtuous and intelligent last year…. Memory, surely, can play no part in well-being; nor is it a matter of talking, but of being in a particular state.
[I-5-8, I-5-1]
We shouldn’t expect that recording a memory of a good or wise act and playing it back inside the mind when we’re no longer virtuous or intelligent is a suitable substitute for a live performance in the present moment. A thought of a thing is not that thing. Similarly, remembering or anticipating happiness is not the same as being happy. Nor can imagining union with God be equated with actually returning to the One. Plotinus urges us to realize the actual living presence of what we long for. To be content with anything less is to never truly be content.
This is the reason why one would not find acceptable the feeling produced by something one has not got…. Nor do I think that those who find the good in bodily satisfaction would feel pleasure as if they were eating when they were not eating or as if they were enjoying sex when they were not with the one they wanted to be with.
[VI-7-26]
Consider three people reading, respectively, a romance novel, a pornographic magazine, and a religious scripture. Each finds enjoyable the feeling of love, broadly speaking, that their reading material produces in them. In one person this love has a romantic tinge, in another a lustful flavor, in the last a sacred sense. But the common element between them is that they are experiencing a feeling that approximates, to some degree, the sensation they would have if they actually possessed the object of their desire.
“Oh, to be swept away by the man of my dreams.” “Oh, to make passionate love to the woman of my fantasies.” “Oh, to be in the presence of my blessed God.” The feelings that accompany such thoughts, says Plotinus, are pleasurable only in a severely limited sense because what we really want are not the feelings that accompany thought, but the feelings that accompany reality.
Ersatz feelings of the sort just described can become an unhealthy substitute for the real thing. It’s wonderful if reading stimulates us to find a real man, a real woman, or a real God that can satisfy our longing. But if we remain content with, in Plotinus’s words, “the feeling produced by something one has not got,” then it can be argued that we are worse off with that false feeling. The danger here is the same sort of danger faced by a seriously dehydrated person who hallucinates that he is drinking water when a well is within his reach.
Certainly the good which one chooses must be something which is not the feeling one has when one attains it; that is why the one who takes this for good remains empty, because he only has the feeling which one might get from the good.
[VI-7-26]
We need to recognize that there is a big difference between (1) the full feeling that accompanies the actual attainment of a good, and (2) the empty feeling that accompanies the imaginary attainment of a good. What we crave is the real thing, not a thought or emotion produced by a conception of that thing. This seems obvious and almost trite when we look at specific examples such as romance novel, pornography, and religious addicts, people who spend their days in a fantastical haze, immersed in a seductive world of subjective imagination that they never try to convert into objective reality.
Plotinus says that anyone who believes happiness can be found in physical pleasure or mental sensation is equally deluded. And this, it must be admitted, includes almost all of us. The purpose of philosophy is to awaken us to the fact that we’re grasping after empty external material images even though we possess the fullness of spirit within our own selves.
And he must have the doctrines of philosophy implanted in him; by these he must be brought to firm confidence in what he possesses without knowing it.
[I-3-1]
Pleasure is the image of happiness, as the physical universe is the image of the spiritual world. If someone hasn’t realized the happiness within his soul, then he will mistakenly consider that well-being springs from sensual delights. However, every sort of pleasurable physical sensation bears the same relation to genuine happiness as a photograph has to what was photographed, or an imaginary feeling that one possesses something has to the actual immediate presence of it.
This allows Plotinus to argue that the presence or absence of worldly goods has no effect on the well-being, or happiness, of the mystic philosopher.
But suppose there were two wise men, one of whom had all of what are called natural goods and the other their opposites, shall we say that they both have well-being equally? Yes, if they are equally wise.
[I-4-15]
One person is healthy, the other sick. One person is wealthy, the other poor. One person is famous, the other not known. One person has many friends, the other has none. Yet if they both have an equal knowledge of the Good, or the One, then they are equally happy.
What most people call pleasure the sage considers mere bodily sensation, irrelevant to his or her inner well-being. For what really derives benefit from eating a tasty meal, engaging in passionate sex, imbibing delicious drink, soaking in scented water, lying on a warm beach, or any other of the physical activities normally valued as pleasurable? It isn’t the higher aspect of soul that needs or wants these sorts of feelings. Rather, it is the body and the lower aspect of soul which drive us to fulfill physical desires.
If our desire is directed toward the One, then actions properly aimed at fulfilling this desire will end up satisfying us. But if our longing is misdirected toward the ever-changing and illusory objects of the material world, then we will be continually frustrated. How can people and things that fail to last succeed in bringing us lasting happiness? Plotinus provides a simple and straightforward criterion for determining what is truly good: when we get it, we don’t want anything else.