sdi: Photograph of the title page of Plotinus' "The Six Enneads." (enneads)
[personal profile] sdi

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.

Date: 2022-05-29 03:35 pm (UTC)
emmanuelg: sock puppet (Default)
From: [personal profile] emmanuelg
Oddly, this is the same sort of idea I ran into a couple of years ago in a Chemistry Journal - The title of the article was "Chemistry by Number Theory. Here's a link to the full text, well worthwhile just to look at the pictures:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258769036_Chemistry_by_Number_Theory

Boeyens makes a strong case that the world we experience is only a 3D shadow of its 4D reality-- or put another way, all that we experience is just one or another 'quality,' while our real form, down to the molecular level, has 4 or more dimensions.

July 2025

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