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Plotinus struggles in this chapter, his analogies are difficult to follow. Alas, the curse of a mystic: when one beholds the world where all is one, how is one to communicate it here, where everything is separate? Examples do no good unless you have experienced it yourself; but if you have experienced it yourself, the example is useless.
VI 5: On the Integral Omnipresence of the Authentic-Existent (2)
Because the intellectual world is omnipresent, It is not illuminating the sensible world from somewhere off above, but imminent and supporting it everywhere all at once. Material things always "touch" their Ideas, not by physical contact (for Ideas are not spatial), but by relation to Them. The Idea (again, having no extent) doesn't "give" anything of Itself to Matter, but rather Matter is allowed to participate in the Idea, live the Idea, and thus become a temporary image of It in such ways it can.
When we say "live the Idea", that's not mere rhetoric—participation in the intellectual realm is mediated through Soul, that One Life in which we all share. But Life isn't limited, available in this place but not that one—no, It too is infinite by Its participation in the intellectual world, you possess It within you, and It is there with you everywhere you go. You don't return to the intellectual world by leaving here and going off somewhere else: you are already within It by virtue of being alive, upheld by It at every moment.
Nay, more—you are It! You have merely turned away from Yourself! Turn around, look inward again, and there You are—back Home.
I have been thinking to myself for a while that to Plotinus, Love and Truth seem to be one and the same thing—pursued as one, in tandem. I notice this in Porphyry, too; in his youth, Porphyry seemed to be motivated by Truth alone, but as he grew in Wisdom he grew in Love in equal measure. Plotinus all but makes this association explicit himself in §10.
Lest you think I am doing an injustice to Plotinus by straying into a giddy ALL ONE tirade, I refer you to §12 where he does as much himself.
HEN TO PAN 🐍
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Date: 2023-05-10 02:50 pm (UTC)What is "HEN TO PAN"?
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Date: 2023-05-10 03:02 pm (UTC)They say of Tolkien that he was skeptical of tape recorders; when people asked to record a conversation, he would recite The Lord's Prayer in Old Gothic to it and ask them to play it back to him, and if it did so faithfully, he'd say, "Good, now I know there are no demons in that thing." Back when I was working in the corporate world, I made a point of uploading that very image to as many systems as possible. (I think I managed it in about three or four dozen different systems.) This was mostly a joke to myself (well, and an excuse to lecture to my colleagues about occult topics), but I always felt a little better about having to deal with those systems when they'd display profound truths back to me. :)
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Date: 2023-05-11 03:19 pm (UTC)I misread the phrase "all is one" as "all for one", and it brought to mind the motto of the Three Musketeers... which come to think of it might fit well into the Neoplatonism cosmological framework. As would the somewhat similar "United we stand, divided we fall", which seems particularly apropos as a pithy formulation of the conditions in the Intellectual and Sensible Realms.
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Date: 2023-05-11 03:33 pm (UTC)