On Distinctions of Form

I continue to make slow progress through Plotinus, but this morning I read an interesting paragraph indeed:

In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one; ours is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present undistinguishably; there is no separation of head and hand: their distinct existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not Authentic Existence.

That is to say, here in the misty world of images, our various parts and capacities are seen distinctly, but in the higher realm, they blend together into a union.

I am reminded of two things.

First, it is commonly reported among those who experience Near-Death Experiences a lack of distinction of parts—they can see and touch and so on, but they don't experience having eyes or hands. To quote Raymond Moody's Life After Life: Despite it's lack of perceptibility to people in physical bodies, all who have experienced it are in agreement that the spiritual body is nonetheless something, impossible to describe though it may be. [...] Words and phrases which have been used by various subjects include a mist, a cloud, smoke-like, vapor, transparent, a cloud of colors, wispy, an energy pattern, and others which express similar meanings. He quotes several people describing their experiences: My being had no physical characteristics, but I have to describe it with physical terms. I could describe it in so many ways, in so many words, but none of them would be exactly right. It's so hard to describe. or [When I came out of the physical body] it was like I did come out of my body and go into something else. I didn't think I was just nothing. It was another body... but not another regular human body. Its a little bit different. It was not exactly like a human body, but it wasn't any big glob of matter, either. It had form to it, but no colors. And I know I still had something you could call hands. I can't describe it. or It was like I was just there—an energy, maybe, sort of like just a little ball of energy.

Secondly, years ago, I asked my deity about whether I should consider Them a god or goddess, and They said to me, "It's complicated: it is more like both, though not like the kind of 'both' in your world [e.g. hermaphroditism]." Plotinus here is hinting at why: the very distinction of male and female fades, and you are left instead with unified capacity.

Enneads II 6: Quality and Form-Idea

A very short, but very difficult tractate: not because the concepts themselves are difficult, but because the ramifications of them are sprawling, complex, and many-faceted.

II 6: Quality and Form-Idea

A quality is something that is not essential to a thing. For example, paper may have the quality of being "colorful," because if lost its color, it would still be paper; but a rainbow cannot be said to have the quality of being "colorful," because if it weren't colorful, it wouldn't be a rainbow.

Qualities, therefore, may only exist where there is the potential for the quality to exist, and they are therefore limited to the lower worlds. We might say of fire that it is warm, it is bright, it is destructive, etc., and of a material fire that may be so. But let us consider ideal Fire: it has no potential, only actuality; it does not have qualities, it acts. Rather than being warm, it warms; rather than being bright, it brightens; rather than being destructive, it destroys; etc.

The lower worlds aren't Real because they have a qualified existence; Reality is that which exists of itself.

Our souls reside, of course, in the empyrean, and so one wonders what one's own Real form is when all quality is stripped away.

Enneads II 7: On Complete Transfusion

This is a strange little tractate, concerned strictly with physics rather than metaphysics.

II 7: On Complete Transfusion

Even though physical objects possess bodies, their qualities and, indeed, Matter itself is bodiless. So there is no reason why two bodies—say, two fluids—may not be mixed, since their bodies may be disintegrated into Matter and reintegrated into a mixed form either combining the qualities of the two, or else being re-Mattered anew as their Ideals dictate, depending on the circumstance.

Enneads II 8: Why Distant Objects Appear Small

II 8: Why Distant Objects Appear Small

The more distant an object, the more concentrated that object's light must be to fit into a pupil. This concentration strips the apparent qualities (magnitude, color, detail, etc.) from an object.