Authors: Brian Hines
A
PERSON
splits himself into two when he professes beliefs that are decidedly at odds with his behavior; that is, when his philosophy differs significantly from his life. To become whole, he has to find a way to make his philosophical thoughts and his worldly experience consonant.
Materialists obviously find this easier to do than people who profess spiritual beliefs. Everyday experience of the physical world confirms the reality of material existence, so a materialistic philosophy of life is appealingly honest: I experience matter and I believe in matter. There is no conflict here between inner belief and outer reality.
A spiritually-inclined person, on the other hand, has thoughts running through his head that are at cross-purposes to the sights, sounds, and other impressions entering his consciousness through the senses. A spiritual philosophy of life is open to being accused—if not actually convicted—of hypocrisy: I experience matter yet I believe in spirit. This produces an unavoidable tension between what is believed to be ultimately true and what is immediately apparent.
The philosophical tension a materialist feels isn’t so extreme because he doesn’t believe in anything that can’t be experienced within the physical world. Naturally he recognizes he doesn’t know everything that can be known about materiality; but what he
can
realize as truth is on the same level of reality as the life he is experiencing now. A spiritual believer is in a less comfortable position, having one experiential foot set firmly on Earth and one conceptual foot up in the air, stretched out toward an unknown Heaven he hasn’t yet been able to touch.
Believing versus seeing
I
T ISN’T SURPRISING
, then, that so many religious people come to embrace a rigid fundamentalism that gives them the support spirituality otherwise lacks. A true adherent of fundamentalism holds onto his beliefs so strongly he loses sight of the fact that they aren’t grounded in a directly experienced reality.
Religious fundamentalism takes to the extreme the leap of faith that, in most religions, is necessary to bridge the gap between a believer’s philosophical concepts (or theology) and a believer’s experience of the truth of those concepts (which I’ll call salvation). In effect, a religious person is asked to accept a promissory note for truth that reads, “The holder’s faith eventually will be exchanged for salvation.” Belief is considered to be an essential prerequisite for divine experience.
The problem, though, is that while all sorts of holy books and holy people claim to know the truth about God and the cosmos, generally the claims are self-validating. That is, a skeptic is referred to the very scripture or person making the claim for proof of the claim. Christians often cite a biblical quotation to defend the truth of the Bible, as Muslims do with the Koran, Jews with the Talmud, Sikhs with the Adi Granth, and so on.
In like fashion, even if we heard Jesus speak these words from St. John (14:6) with his own lips, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” what independent evidence do we have that these sentiments are true?
So we arrive at a classic chicken-and-egg situation that has vociferous adherents on both sides of the question. Do our beliefs about life flow from our actual life experiences or do our actual life experiences flow from our beliefs? This question can be framed as a choice between “I’ll believe it when I see it,” which assumes the primacy of experience, and “I’ll see it when I believe it,” which assumes the primacy of belief.
The scientific method, by and large, is founded on the first assumption: what we experience is an objective reality that is independent of human beliefs or cognition. If observation, either perceptual or mathematical, proves the scientist wrong, then his beliefs change to match the actual observational experience.
Observations, of course, are not made in a conceptual vacuum, so there is a continual interplay between believing and observing in both everyday life and scientific inquiry. At the most basic level, a belief that there is something real to be observed lies at the root of every act of observation. Physicist Shimon Malin suggests this is one implication of Einstein’s statement “it is the theory which decides what we can observe.”
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But this is a far cry from the more extreme position that theories, or beliefs, actually bring into being the object of observation. If I’m on a sinking ship, my belief that there may be lifejackets aboard will lead me to look for one in the storage locker. However, that belief won’t produce a life jacket if none are on the ship. When I open the locker, what I see doesn’t depend on what I subjectively believe is inside; it depends on what is objectively there.
By contrast, most religions assume a person comes to be saved spiritually after believing in salvation. Thus, to experience salvation one has to have a firm faith in the possibility of salvation. This is the flip side of a null hypothesis, which helps explain why science and religion are so frequently at odds. Science sees religion blindly accepting unproven beliefs as truth whereas religion sees science as shutting its eyes to truths proven only to those who believe.
Now, if salvation could occur during a person’s earthly life, we would not have such a great conflict between science and religion. For even if salvation was a personal affair, unobservable (and hence unconfirmable) by others, at least the person who had been saved would have convincing proof, the goal of science, that the theological tenets of his or her chosen religion were true. The problem, though, is that religions traditionally teach salvation occurs only after physical death, not before.
Stripped-down spirituality
A
RELIGIOUS BELIEVER
is expected to accept a philosophy of life that can’t be proven to be true until the believer’s life is over. From Plotinus’s perspective this isn’t so much a leap of faith as an irrational dive. Plotinus is a mystic, and a mystic wants to make his spiritual beliefs consonant with his experience by experiencing, in this life, all that his beliefs hold to be true.
What distinguishes Plotinus is that he is a supremely rational mystic whose intense love for God is balanced by a deep appreciation for reason. In the
Enneads
his mystical side passionately urges us to leap across the divide separating our consciousnesses from the One while his rational side urges us to carefully consider, before we leave the ground of our reason behind, what we are leaping from and to. If we don’t, we may find that our efforts to traverse the spiritual path are bringing us no closer to divinity.
Plotinus teaches that when the
psyche
, or soul, is cleansed of matter and multiplicity, what is left is the irreducible foundation of being:
nous
, or spirit, the first emanation of the One. In the
Enneads
Plotinus clearly describes, given the limits of language, the nature of spirit, and how consciousness can be united with it. Spirit is the reality that lies behind the illusion of matter, so if our purported spirituality is mixed with materiality, it isn’t truly spiritual, no matter how we may conceive of the situation.
Somewhat paradoxically, Plotinus’s philosophy is so spiritually pure it doesn’t seem spiritual to many people. Today, most of us want our religion or spiritual path to address human concerns, along with providing metaphysical guidance. We expect that our spirituality will help us make friends, feel less lonely, and solve social problems. We want happy gatherings with like-minded people, uplifting talks, communal prayer and music, tasty food and drink in a spirit of brother- and sisterhood.
Plotinus doesn’t offer us any of that in the
Enneads.
His sole focus is on uniting one’s soul with universal truth. To do this, one must become more than human, and pass beyond everyday human concerns. Refreshingly, he reminds us that spirituality has everything to do with spirit. Nothing else matters, especially matter.
Worshipping in a holy place? If the place is physical, this isn’t spiritual. Reading a sacred book? If the book is physical, this isn’t spiritual. Being in the presence of a saintly person? If the person is physical, this isn’t spiritual. Thinking divine thoughts? If the thoughts are physical, this isn’t spiritual. Doing good works? If the works are physical, this isn’t spiritual.
“Well, gosh!” one feels like crying out in exasperation. “What do you want, Plotinus? If none of this is spiritual, then what is?”
From the essence of his teachings, an answer comes: “What is spiritual is spirit. Spirit forms matter but isn’t part of matter. So spirituality means leaving behind all physical sensations and thoughts of materiality.”
To be sure, you were already previously the All, but since something other came to be added on to you besides the “All, “you were lessened by this addition. For this addition did not come from the All—what could you add to the All?—but from Not-Being.
When one comes to be out of Not-Being, he is not the All, not until he rids himself of this Not-Being Thus you increase yourself when you get rid of everything else, and once you have gotten rid of it, the All is present to you.
[VI-5-12]
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Subtract, don’t add
W
E HAVE TO START
on the spiritual path from wherever we are now and that place is right here, the material world, relative Not-Being. Here we think many thoughts, emote many emotions, and perceive many perceptions. Plotinus tells us that the best thing we can do is get rid of what we have within our minds now, by stopping what we are habitually doing now.
Hence, the best thought is the concept that leads to no further thoughts, the best emotion is the feeling that leads to no further emotions, and the best perception is the sensation that leads to no further perceptions—at least during the period of contemplation when we seek to experience spirit and the One, the All. In essence, the only belief a spiritual seeker should aim to retain is, “I will see it when I stop believing in, and seeing, what is not it.”
Reason, then, guides us to an understanding that spirituality is a process of subtraction, not addition. This is an eminently scientific approach to the investigation of whatever non-material reality may exist apart from the physical universe because it is founded on the ultimate null hypothesis: a mystic, or spiritual scientist, subtracts from his or her consciousness all thoughts, emotions, and perceptions concerning materiality and simply observes what remains. To my mind, the logic of this metaphysical experiment is persuasive. Elimination of what is physical and personal necessarily leaves what (if anything) is non-material and universal.
Where to leap?
S
INCE RELIGION
generally emphasizes faith over reason, it is commonplace in spiritual circles to downplay or even disparage the value of rationality in one’s search for God or the ultimate meaning of life. We’re told that all we need to do is to have faith.
Well, fine. But faith in whom, in what? In Jesus? Buddha? Muhammad? Moses? Lao Tzu? Guru Nanak? Angelic guides? Our own souls? God? Nirvana? Tao? Spirit? The Holy Ghost? Even if I accept that I need to make a leap of faith, tell me: why should I leap in
this
direction, rather than in
that
direction?
All manner of faiths—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, New Ageism (if we may use such a term), and many others—vie for our attention and “shelf space” in the world’s grand storehouse of spiritual options. When someone feels a strong attraction for one of these faiths he steps forward and buys into its beliefs. Or, as is becoming more and more common, he cobbles together theological bits and pieces from a variety of religious practices and forms his own unique faith: the Religion of Me.
Since there is no objective proof that one religion or philosophy is truer than the others this sort of religiosity often is called a leap of faith. Yet it is more accurately described as a sideways step toward one set of spiritual dogmas and a commensurate distancing from all others. Such a movement is a matter of changing the shell of one’s beliefs, not the core of one’s being. Hence, conversion can occur almost instantly. Yesterday I was a non-believer, today a believer. Stepping from one set of thoughts to another isn’t difficult.
And it does not get us very far. Plotinus, echoing the teachings of many other mystics, holds that spiritual reality lies on the other side of belief, reason, and sense perception. A person enters this reality by a leap like no other leap, a leap of the whole of his or her consciousness across the boundary that separates whatever can be named from the Nameless.
Have faith in nothing
T
HE NAMELESS
is the One, the source of names and forms. The source, teaches Plotinus, is completely separate from its products, in the same sense as consciousness is completely separate from thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. When we cease to think, feel, and sense, we still
are,
just as the One
is.
It isn’t anything particular, not even
being,
for
to be
is to be something, and the One is not any thing. Michael Sells says, “After speaking of absolute unity as that which is most powerful in an animal, a soul, or in the all, Plotinus writes of ‘the one’:”