Return to the One (34 page)

Return Is Reunion

E
MANATION AND RETURN
. These are the two grand currents in the cosmos that carry everything in creation either farther from, or closer to, the One. “Farther and closer” refer, of course, to a spiritual distance that can’t be measured in feet and inches. What separates matter, soul, and spirit from the One is their degree of being, or level of consciousness. The more being an entity has the nearer it is to the source of being, even though the One is said to be beyond being.

But we exist more when we turn to him and our well-being is there, but being far from him is nothing else but existing less.
[VI-9-9]

These sentiments are shared by most, if not all, religious traditions. The highest reality, whether called God or some other name, is considered to be a haven in which we are protected from evils and suffering. But Plotinus differs from many spiritual belief systems and theologies in his contention that the soul’s turning to God is actually a re-turn. Lloyd Gerson says, “As incarnate individuals, we are separated from our ideal state. To speak of this separation as a decline is to indicate that the ideal state is a state that we did possess.”
¹

Do we turn to God or return to God? The presence or absence of two letters, “re,” speaks volumes about our view of the cosmos and the means by which the soul is able to know its creator. For if God put us here on earth newly-formed, with no experience of the spiritual world, then it would seem that God also is completely responsible for taking us to him. The gap between our current and ideal state is just too large to be bridged in any other fashion.

But if we once were with the One and indeed still remain in contact with the highest divinity through the undescended aspect of soul, then spirituality becomes an active discovering of what we already are, not a passive prayer that God will make us into what he wishes us to be.

And when it
[the soul]
comes to be there it becomes itself and what it was.
[VI-9-9]

When the spiritual quest is reduced to its essence, as Plotinus would have us do, we are left with a simple goal: reunion. Once we were with the One. Now we are not. To return to the One is to be reunited with our source, whom it is fitting to call our father.

The soul then in her natural state is in love with God and wants to be united with him; it is like the noble love of a girl for her noble father.
[VI-9-9]

Poets and mystics wisely advise us not to try to pin down the nature of love, for whatever love is, it isn’t anything that can be described, discussed, calibrated, or created. In fact, to analyze love in any fashion is to pass right by it, for true love is nothing but union. To break love into separate parts is to destroy its nature.

The divine love Plotinus points to isn’t an emotion, nor is it a thought, for emotions and thoughts are passing fancies, not unchanging reality. Though the state of the soul he speaks of is somewhat akin to the love of a child for a parent, it also is unlike such familiar worldly love, for here the bond between a lover and his or her beloved never can be complete. Bodies may entwine and minds meet but always a distinction remains between one person and another.

Our current loves thus are shameful, Plotinus says, because we’ve been lured away from spiritual union by material and mental enticements: sensual pleasures, intellectual attainments, worldly successes, emotional passions. Still, our central longings are worthy, and can be trusted: to be happy, to know things as they are, to live the good life. However, the direction in which our desires generally take us, toward matter rather than spirit, outward rather than inward, is away from the only One who can fulfill those wantings.

Lloyd Gerson says, “The central notion of Plotinus’s philosophy of religion is that of return. All creation is disposed by nature to return to the source whence it came, in so far as it is able. It is on this basis, first of all, that Plotinus can make a distinction between phenomenal and real desire. Appearances notwithstanding, what all things really desire is to be united or reunited with the source of their being.”
²
As we read before:

If anyone sees it, what passion will he feel, what longing in his desire to be united with it, what a shock of delight!
[I-6-7]

The divine father hasn’t gone anywhere. He waits for our return where he has always been, ready to embrace us. We, on the other hand, race about hither and yon desperately searching for what will bring us happiness and well-being. The crazy thing, of course, is that all this running around prevents us from realizing that the One we’re looking for is right here, for he is the center of our selves.

A child, certainly, who is outside himself in madness will not know his father; but he who has learnt to know himself will know from whence he comes.
[VI-9-7]

In this world, people often travel long distances for a family reunion. Traveling is necessary when two or more things have been separated and need to be brought together again. This also is true as regards the soul and God, but with a crucial difference: the One is already here, present as the essence of every person’s being.

Thus the distance we must travel to return to God is precisely zero, no distance at all. It is traveling in time and space that takes us away from our source. This is why the mystic path is traversed through stillness, not motion—through inward contemplation, not outward perception.

We human souls have reached the end of the line of divine emanation. The emptiness of matter is an impassible blank wall beyond which none can travel farther. It is tempting to run along this wall exploring all that physical existence has to offer, hoping that somewhere there is a hidden passageway leading from matter, thoughts about matter, or feelings about matter, to spirit. But there isn’t. The wise soul turns inward, returning to the One by reversing the process of emanation that originally brought it outward and downward.

But if it
[the soul]
runs the opposite way, it will arrive, not at something else, but at itself…. And if one goes on from oneself, as image to original, one has reached “the end of the journey.”
[VI-9-11]

To return to the One is purely and simply to return to our own selves. Not our shadowy ego-selves, the personalities that presently absorb almost all of our attention, but our bright soul-selves, the pure consciousness that remains when everything external and extraneous has been eliminated.

Some would say that this is a terribly self-absorbed, solipsistic mystical philosophy. How could it be that you and I are God, the sole reality? Doesn’t this make a mockery of divinity, to reduce the highest to the lowest, turning the sacred into the profane?

No. For Plotinus doesn’t consider our true selves to bear any resemblance to the people we are now. Lloyd Gerson calls the thoroughly human being who is writing or reading these words the “endowed self,” endowed, that is, with an ego and body that foster a sense of particularized individuality. I am me, you are you, and each of us recognizes this difference.

By contrast, the ideal self is what each of us truly is: soul. Gerson says, “Plotinus believes, however, that one’s ideal self is eternally real and that it is the same in kind for everyone…. Thus return is also discovery. Paradoxically, the idea is of a return to what we are, not a return to what we were…. The idea is to recover oneself, but this is not a recovery of the endowed self. It is a recovery of what in one sense we (the endowed self) never were and yet in another sense what we (the ideal self) eternally are.”
³

To consider ourselves to be God isn’t blasphemy, teaches Plotinus, but the truth. For what remains after the soul has reunited with the One is nothing, really, but the One. So only God is God, and we can know God by becoming God insofar as it is possible for a drop to become the ocean.

When the soul has the good fortune to meet him, and he comes to her—rather, once he, already present, makes his presence known—when she turns away from all other things present, having made herself as beautiful as possible, and has achieved resemblance with him—just what these preparations and adornments are is obvious to those who are preparing themselves—then, suddenly, she sees him appear within her; there is no longer anything between them, and they are no longer two, but both are one.

Indeed, as long as he is present, you could not tell the two of them apart; an imitation of this is when, in this world, lovers wish to be united to one another. The soul is no longer conscious of her body nor aware of being within it, and she no longer claims to be anything other than him: neither person nor animal; not individual or even the All.
[VI-7-34]
⁴

In this state of union, the soul makes no claim to be a separate entity, for all sense of individuality has been dissolved. The One appears in the mirror of one’s consciousness when the reflection of everything that is not the One, including the lower aspects of one’s own self, have been eliminated. Then there is no distinction between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, soul and God, because one’s essence has blended with the essence of the cosmos to such an extent that no one can tell them apart.

How do we know we have attained this incomparable state of divine union? When, says Plotinus, there is nothing left to attain, nothing left to desire, nothing left to love, because the soul has become what she has always yearned for. To know ourselves as soul is good; to know ourselves as spirit is better; but to know ourselves as the Good is to finally come to rest in the best.

Once, however, a “warmth” from the Good has reached her, she
[the soul]
is strengthened and awakened; she becomes truly “winged,” and although she is seized with passion for what is close to her, nevertheless she is lifted up, as if by memory, towards another, better object.

As long as there is an object higher up than the current one, she keeps rising, by a natural movement, raised up by the giver of love. She rises up beyond the Spirit, yet she cannot run beyond the Good, since there is nothing lying above it.
[VI-7-22]
⁵

The soul’s memory (albeit largely unconscious) of her long-lost love, the One, keeps her soaring upward through the spiritual planes of consciousness even though the wonders within the World of Forms are more glorious than anything she has experienced in the physical world. Discarding all that can be discarded, including the beauty of spiritual sights and sounds, she reaches the source from which all else has emanated, the Good.

And there, she is satisfied. Fully. Indescribably. Eternally. Pierre Hadot says, “Once the soul has no more possessions, and has stripped herself of all form, she is at one with the object of her love, and becomes the Good. She
is
the Good.”
⁶

Vision Is Veracity

T
HE MOST IMPORTANT
question to ask about any religion or spiritual teaching can only be: “Is it true?” For while there is room in the world for a wide variety of beliefs about the nature of God, all of these beliefs can’t be equally valid.

Why? Because a spiritual reality that changes to fit my conception of it isn’t a reality worth wanting. If my idea of divinity can alter the essence of the divine, then I am more powerful than God and have no need to seek anything beyond myself. But since I am unable to make even matter conform to my thoughts, it is highly unlikely that my thinking creates any substantial metaphysical reality.

Science knows that the physical creation is undeniably objective, not subjective. The same laws of nature have been found to operate everywhere. If the creator has gone to such lengths to establish a material reality founded on these all-pervading laws, then it seems reasonable that spiritual reality likewise obeys universal, not personal, principles.

Why is it, then, that after thousands of years of seeking the truth about God, mankind has failed to arrive at any sort of satisfying consensus? Scientists the world over are in close agreement about the nature of physical reality—but randomly select any two people and they will almost certainly argue to some degree about the nature of God.

Understandably, this causes many to wonder whether there is any such nature to discover. Perhaps, they say, religions are simply the product of wishful thinking that refuses to acknowledge the insignificance of life and the finality of death.

Plotinus does not shrink away from such skepticism. He isn’t one to deflect a critical questioner of his mystic philosophy with the familiar adage, “Just have faith.” Faith is worthless if it is based on an erroneous conception of reality. Many people have lost their money to swindlers in whom they had faith, as others have lost their health to quackish healers. Hence, in spirituality as elsewhere in life claims need to be backed up by something more substantial than a glib “Trust me.”

But Plotinus teaches that the means by which we test the veracity of our spiritual convictions has to be in tune with the unique nature of what is hypothesized to lie beyond the reality we know now.

In the higher world, then, when our knowledge is most perfectly conformed to Intellect, we think we know nothing because we are waiting for the experience of sense-perception, which says it has not yet seen; and it certainly has not seen, and never will see things like these.

It is sense-perception which disbelieves, but it is the other one who sees; and for him to disbelieve would be to disbelieve in his own existence: for he cannot after all put himself outside and make himself visible so as to look at himself with his bodily eyes.
[V-8-11]

Physical objects can be sensed. Or, if beyond the capacity of the senses to perceive (as is the case with subatomic particles) they can be represented by mathematical equations or other symbols that
can
be perceived. In contrast, according to Plotinus, when the soul is conformed to intellect (spirit) there is nothing to be seen by the physical body. So if you ask the senses, “Is the spiritual world real?” they must answer, “No, we didn’t perceive anything.”

Spiritual vision is its own veracity. That is, there is no external criterion in the spiritual world by which one can assess the truth or falsity of what is experienced. This is because the World of Forms is a one-many where all the separate forms are in the whole, and the whole is in each form. There is no place in the spiritual world where the soul can stand apart from what is perceived, since each individual soul is also a form.

If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming one in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self … if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision.

Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.
[I-6-9]
¹

Consciousness is its own confirmation. I may be misled about how real something is within my consciousness, since it is possible to see and hear things that exist only within my own mind. But consciousness itself must be accepted as a given, the bedrock on which stands all else I am and do.

This allows Plotinus to move beyond what the Greek Skeptics considered an impassible barrier to knowing absolute truth: the seeming fact, as Richard Tarnas puts it, “that any conflict between two apparent truths could be settled only by appeal to some criterion; yet that criterion could itself be justified only by appeal to some further criterion, which would thereby require an infinite regress of such criteria, none foundational. ‘Nothing is certain, not even that,’ said Arcesilaus.”
²

In contrast, Plotinus teaches that the One serves as the immutable foundation of reality. Everything in existence emanates from the One and the human soul is able to return to the One, sharing in a universal consciousness of what is true and eternal.

This is accomplished not by perceiving the One as something separate from ourselves, for then, as the Skeptics argued, we would indeed need some means of determining whether the object within consciousness was real or unreal, and then need some means of determining the reality of that means, and on and on and on it would go, endlessly seeking validation of the highest truth but never finding it. Rather, Plotinus says, when the soul is purified its seeing is identical to what is seen. To disbelieve in the sight of God at that point would be to disbelieve in our very seeing, consciousness itself, an impossibility.

For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen.
[I-6-9]

If we want to know God, then all we must do is develop the capacity to know as God knows.

There one can see both him
[God]
and oneself as it is right to see: the self glorified, full of intelligible light—but rather itself pure light—weightless, floating free, having become—but rather, being—a god.
[VI-9-9]

The innocent phrase “all we must do” does, of course, point toward a lifetime of effort devoted to becoming spiritually purified. To realize one’s consciousness as pure light isn’t easy or common. The number of souls on Earth who are enlightened always has been an infinitesimal fraction of those who are endarkened. But the potential of enlightenment is open to all.

Everything we need to return to the One is within us and indeed
is
us. The soul already is clear light and divine knowledge, for the essence of each person’s consciousness is none other than the essence of the cosmos. Yet most of us are unaware of the wonder that lies at the spiritual center of our being, for our attention is occupied with the physical and mental periphery.

Plotinus tells us that the means by which we now know the creation must become the end we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns his attention back upon the consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage’s own self. We’ve seen this quotation before but it is well worth repeating:

We must believe that we have seen him when, suddenly, the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from him and is identical with him…. This is the real goal for the soul: to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is that light by means of which she is able to see.
[V-3-17]
³

Presently, we try to know external objective reality through physical sensation and mental cognition, perceptions and thoughts. Emotions are a sort of perception of how we subjectively respond to the outer reality. Thus, perceiving, thinking, and feeling (or emoting) may be thought of as lights human consciousness shines upon physical reality in an attempt to reveal its nature. Those who can see material reality more clearly than most we admire as great scientists, artists, philosophers, and moralists.

But it is only the mystics, such as Plotinus, who seriously seek to know the subtle nature of that by which the obvious nature is known. Instead of using the energy of their
psyche
to power flashlights of sensation, cognition, and emotion that are only able to illumine small patches of knowledge about the cosmos, they switch off these limited instruments of knowing. What remains within their consciousness is the powerhouse itself, the One, the light by which all lesser lights are illuminated.

If then thinking is light, and light does not seek light, that ray which does not seek light would not seek to think, and will not add thinking to itself for what will it do with it?
[VI-7-41]

When purified of all connections and concerns with materiality, the soul intuitively knows the reality of spirit and the One. It doesn’t even need to think, “I know.” Thinking is engaged in only by those who seek intelligence, not by those who have it. Thinking is an eye for blindness, a means of giving partial sight to those who otherwise would be completely in the dark.

The sun, if offered a candle, would refuse it. Why would the source of light need light? The mystic philosopher, during his or her time of inward contemplation, similarly rejects any lesser means of knowing God than direct perception by the soul.

This, then, is what the seeing of Intellect is like…. When it turns its attention to the nature of the things illuminated, it sees the light less; but if it abandons the things it sees and looks at the medium by which it sees them, it looks at light and the source of light.
[V-5-7]

Almost certainly Plotinus is not speaking metaphorically here. Clearly, he means that when a person turns his attention away from external reality and becomes completely absorbed in what lies within, he will see the light of consciousness itself, a real light, the only true light.

The light by which we see matter, whether some natural illumination or a manmade radiance, is really nothing but darkness, for physical light is itself material. Matter can be illumined by matter but not known by matter. Hence the sage seeks to be united with the medium, pure consciousness, that is the foundation of all knowing.

What we generally see, both within and without ourselves, is not reality as it is, but reality as it is not. The true form of each and every entity in existence can only be realized by reaching the World of Forms, the spiritual realm. There, things are known as they are, not as they seem to be. Every sort of material knowledge is necessarily limited, because matter only is able to reflect a dim image of the spiritual forms.

Presently each of us lives in a realm of duality. There is an individual and there are entities other than that individual. It is extremely difficult to break out of this manner of being, even to merely envision the possibility of existing as simultaneously one with ourselves and one with the cosmos. Thus Plotinus warns us not to assume that spirituality can be confined within the boundaries of what is familiar.

To be spiritual isn’t a matter of moving this way or that along the customary dimensions of everyday life: time and space. We can’t know God by becoming as small and insignificant as an atom or by becoming as large and momentous as the universe. Spirit and the One do not lie in a particular direction, nor is divinity realized by having more or less of anything possessed now.

Returning to the One means embracing mystery cultivating another way of seeing, leaving aside visions and becoming sight.

Carried off, as it were, by the wave of the Spirit itself, lifted up high by it, as if it were swollen, “he suddenly saw, without seeing how.” But the spectacle, filling the eyes with light, did not cause some other object to be seen by its means; rather, what was seen was light itself.

It is not that there were two things within it: on the one hand a visible object, and on the other its light, nor was there the Spirit and then what is thought by the Spirit; there is only a dazzling light, which engenders all these things later on.
[VI-7-36]
⁴

There, in the higher reaches of the spiritual world, the light that dazzles the soul doesn’t illuminate anything, for manyness has not yet emanated from oneness. Here, we see things that are separate from the light that makes seeing possible. But when all separateness and multiplicity have been eliminated from the soul, what remains is awareness of the conscious power that produces separateness and multiplicity, spirit, the creative energy of the One.

Such is to be experienced, for it cannot be spoken about. As we read before:

For this reason the vision is hard to put into words. For how could one announce that as another when he did not see, there when he had the vision, another, but one with himself?
[VI-9-10]

Those who have been able to realize higher truths, and I am confident that Plotinus is among this exalted company, know what they know. They tell us how to reach the spiritual heights but cannot bring divinity down to our level, for the One is far removed from many.