Taking the Reciprocal

[sdi]

Paraphrasing Plotinus, the body is matter to the soul, the soul is matter to the Intellect, and the Intellect is matter to the One. But if we are correct in the association of the soul to light, then we can go the other way, too: the One is light to the Intellect, the Intellect is light to the soul, and, as we have said, the soul is light to the body.

In many ways, the relation of each level of being to the next reminds me strongly of yang (among other things, sky and light) to yin (among other things, earth and darkness).

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

This is great fodder for reflection.

In this sense, "light" is not physical, but is physical light is analogous to how each level of being illuminates its participant, with perhaps observable, physical light as the material instantiation...?

Wondering if this is not, in a sense, how the "etheric" illumines its participant material nervous system and the latter's various electrical impulses...

[sdi]

I wonder if one could make the case that we are talking about physical light, for a few reasons:

First, the speed of light is the rate at which information (in the information-theoretic sense) propagates across the material universe. That sure sounds like the definition of "thinking" to me.

Second, light is weird. No matter where you are or how fast you're moving, light always moves at the same speed. This is unique in the material world, and it means that light is always out of reach for material things: it's the limit, in a sense, of the material world. (And the limit of the material world would, by implication, be the boundary with the next.)

Third, it seems conceivable to me that the reason we can see material things is that the light has the quality of a slow vibration (that is, "frequency"); perhaps angels—as is so frequently said—really are beings of light, plain and simple, but their frequency is much too high to be perceived by our eyes, and we would need some other kind of organ sensitive to those frequencies (...the pineal gland? the "sense organs of the soul" themselves?) to perceive them.

To tie it all together, maybe soul is the familiar, semi-physical light, plain and simple. Intellect would then be analogous, it's a higher principle of light which composes light, but is as out of reach of the soul as the soul is from matter (visible but not reachable); then the One is, again, beyond the Intellect in the same way. This becomes very like the Game of Life analogy I posted way back, where "light" is the building block of this particular level of reality, and we have no way of peeking behind the curtain to see the meta-light which light itself is made of. (In a sense, our bodies are made of those OTCA metapixels, and those are the tools we're stuck with; we can just barely get OTCA metapixel gliders, but seeing "real" gliders is way beyond our capacity.)

[sdi]

"All the fifty years conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question, 'What are light quanta?' Of course, today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself." (Albert Einstein, 1951)