Stoicism

"The reason why we have two ears and one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less." (Zeno, founder of Stoicism)

Stoicism was a highly systematic and influential philosophy (and quasi-religion) that appeared in ancient Greece a few decades after the death of Aristotle. It became popular in the Roman Empire and Marx described it as, "The form in which Greece migrated to Rome." Its logic, ethics and physics all derived from a single concept - the Logos - first introduced by Heraclitus. The Logos may be regarded as a cosmic intelligence that gives the universe its order, organisation and wholeness. 

For the Stoics, the cosmos is a living, intelligent Being (God) whose essence is Reason. Reason guides everything in the cosmos, and the goal of human existence is to act in agreement with Reason.

The Stoics were the first explicit pantheists, believing that the cosmos and everything in it is God, hence everything that happens is according to God's divine plan, resulting in Stoics having a deterministic and fatalistic approach to life. Chance had no part to play in the Stoic cosmos, and "free will" had a narrow meaning i.e. humans are free only to decide their attitude towards events, but have no ability to alter those events. We can struggle against the direction fate has taken us in, and cause ourselves distress, or we can cooperate and avoid the needless pain. We can't escape from where we're going, so why futilely resist? The Stoic should adopt an attitude of acceptance, of realising that whatever happens, no matter how painful, is for the greater good. Even though the Stoic might not perceive the reason why his pain is necessary, he understands that if he could make contact with Reason (with a capital "R"), all would be clear. Reason never acts capriciously or maliciously. To attach the label "evil" to something is to misunderstand Reason. Reason cannot do evil. Everything is rational; everything is necessary. At all times, Reason provides the right answers, and charts the correct path for the cosmic journey.

Stoicism has many parallels with Buddhism. It advocated acceptance, passivity, the pursuit of union with the transcendent Cosmic Mind. It rejected desire and any form of immoderation.

God is the Logos - the Word - but he is also the "seed-bearing word" (Logos Spermatikos). If he is the cosmic Mind (with a capital "M"), he also gives rise to many "seeds" or individual minds (with a small "m") - the logoi spermatikoi - which are all directly connected to the Logos. And amongst these are human beings. 

The logoi spermatikoi are all the sources of life that shape the non-life that we call matter. They don't have to be conscious - in fact they're usually not - but they do have to create via the laws of Reason (and we might say the Laws of Science). They are the active principle in the cosmos, while matter is the passive principle, waiting to be given form by the logoi spermatikoi. They are the living force of reason and form, dynamically operating on and shaping inanimate matter. The logoi spermatikoi interact with matter and seed it with the reason of God. 

Human beings, belonging to one of the highest orders of the logoi spermatikoi, have the chance to participate in the divine life via their conscious reason.  

In this view, Nature is subject to a force directed to the production of the Good, a force expressed and implemented by the logoi spermatikoi, the seeds of the cosmic Logos, the seeds of God. 

We may not individually perceive the Good, but that is because we can't see the divine plan. If we could, we would have no doubt that everything was happening exactly as it should to produce the best outcome for the cosmos. 

We can think of the Logos itself as transcendent, above all the hustle and bustle, thinking the Divine Plan at the highest level, and the logoi spermatikoi as immanent, directly interacting with matter, getting their hands dirty and putting into effect the Great Architect's plans.

So, God as the Rational Law guiding the cosmos is called Logos, while the logoi spermatikoi are the vitalising force implementing the Logos throughout the cosmos. We might think of Logos as relating to God thinking his own thoughts, facing inwards in a manner of speaking (God the Father in Christian terms), and Logos Spermatikos as God turned towards the cosmos and ready to seed it with life and reason, with the "Word" (God the Son in Christian terms: note that Jesus Christ is often referred to as the Word) and the logoi spermatikoi as the actual seeds of the Word, the agents of the Word, operating in the material world and creating new things and a profusion of life. The logoi spermatikoi may therefore be equated with God the Holy Spirit in Christian terms, and we ourselves are therefore part of the immanent Holy Spirit.

Although we have mentioned "Spirit", the Stoics were in fact strict materialists. For Stoics, everything, including God, has a physical body, although there are grades of physicality, from coarse to extremely fine. Basic matter exists as the four elements of Empedocles: earth, water, air and fire. A special mixture of fire and air creates pneuma (the divine "breath") which permeates the cosmos and through the physical medium of which God can direct matter (and which is the physical basis of the logoi spermatikoi). Pneuma is described as intelligent and as "artistic fire". We might conceive of pneuma as minded-energy or rational Will, as a vast multitude of mind "seeds" (might we even make a reference to photons conceived in terms of the light of reason?).

Pneuma is highly active and interpenetrates everything i.e. everything is in physical contact with it, hence is subject to its forces. (This resembles quantum field theory. In fact, Stoicism is astoundingly similar to modern physics, with the Laws of Physics taking the place of God's Reason. The only difference lies in the statistical emphasis of quantum physics, which the Stoics would never have accepted. Einstein, with his concept of an impersonal, rational God of laws that "does not play dice", was very much a Stoic.)

The cosmos, for Stoics, is depicted as a finite, perfect sphere "floating" in infinite void. (This resembles Big Bang theory whereby a finite but expanding bubble of space-time grows in the midst of infinite void.) But it is a living sphere (not any kind of clockwork mechanism), with a soul and the highest possible intelligence.

Animals have souls that are unconscious whereas humans have conscious souls than express rational intelligence. When we act irrationally it's because of a malfunction of our reason rather than surrender to non-rational impulses (everything is in fact rational in its own way because the whole cosmos is rational).

The cosmos, the Stoics say, will end in a great conflagration (like the Germanic Götterdämmerung), bringing one cycle of existence to an end. A new one will then begin. (This resembles the idea of a "divine suicide" followed by divine reincarnation.) These cycles of birth, life, death and rebirth will continue forever. 

The Stoics also subscribed to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, meaning that each time the cosmos is "reincarnated", God always guides it in exactly the same rational way to produce the best possible outcome. Since divine reason doesn't alter in each new cycle then exactly the same things happen each time round. Nietzsche, who was well versed in the thinking of the Stoics, was highly influenced by this view and made eternal recurrence one of his central motifs.

The Stoics saw no reason for temples to God since the cosmos itself was his temple. They were enthusiasts for astrology and divination since, in a rigidly deterministic universe, there was every reason to conclude that the future could be literally worked out as the unfolding of a grand rational equation. There was no reason why rational clues should not be provided by the stars, the planets and all manner of natural phenomena. After all, everything reflected the divine plan.

In short, Stoicism says that God is the fiery mind of the cosmos. The cosmos is his body. His Reason pervades everything. The cosmos is directed by Providence. Everything has a set destiny. Despite appearances, everything is for the rational best. The best approach to life is to accept the Divine Plan in its entirety. There's no point in struggling against it. Any such struggle is futile and changes nothing.

For Stoics, reality comprises passive matter and active reason which orders the matter. Reason is the causal agency in the Cosmos and it belongs, ultimately, to God. Thus the cosmos is a living, intelligent rational Being with a mind and a body. The cosmos is completely rational and determined. Everything that happens is for the best. We live in the best of all possible worlds. God's divine plan provides the greatest perfection possible, and if we do not perceive that to be the case it's because we don't see the true picture. We, as rational agents, are part of God's Reason, and we can have a direct relationship with God through our reason. Everything is fated to happen as part of the Divine Plan, so there's no point in resisting the inevitable. We must learn to accept any misfortunes that befall us, and we should be indifferent towards the body. Our essence is that of rational beings of the mind, not bodily creatures of physical desires. If we had sufficient control over our minds, we could block out all bodily pain and feel nothing.

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Justin Martyr, a second century Christian, argued that the divine Logos, which had become incarnate as a human being in Jesus Christ, was just a special case of the logos spermatikos, which was present in all of humanity i.e. the seeds of the Logos (logoi spermatikoi - or "divine sparks") were already everywhere and always had been. When Socrates spoke of his "daimon" guiding him, he was surely referring to the highest type of seed of the Logos within him. Therefore was he not a Christian before the arrival of Christ? This is a much more benevolent idea of pre-Christianity pagans than is usually found in Christianity. (According to the Church, everyone went to hell before Christ's Atonement, and then the Jews, the Chosen People, were freed when Christ went to Hell on Holy Saturday to retrieve them.)  All those who had cultivated the seed of the logos within them were true Christians, Justin thought. It was he who began the process of making Christianity philosophically respectable to the educated pagan elite. It was a tragedy that Christianity failed to prove as enlightened as Justin himself was.

Matter and Form

Plato regarded matter as a kind of clay that could be sculpted into shapes in accordance with the Perfect Forms (also called Ideas), which existed in a perfect realm beyond ours. That realm was the real world, and ours just an inferior copy. Matter left to itself would be eternally formless. Plato thought of matter and form as separate things that could be combined to produce material copies of ideal reality. He argued in effect that at one extreme of existence there was pure matter without any form (formless matter), and at the other was pure form (matterless form). Our world results from Ideas being used to shape matter, but they always do so imperfectly due to the intractability and impurity of matter. 

Aristotle, while agreeing with Plato that there could be formless matter and matterless form at the two extremes of existence, taught that form and matter always go together in all other cases rather than form being impressed on matter from a transcendent source. Form is IN matter, not separate from it. Things of this world - "matter-forms" - are not mere copies of reality: they are reality. 

So, for Plato, there are two realms: one of form and one of matter. The one of forms is perfect and unchanging. The one of matter is imperfect and always changing. It is a bad copy of the perfect realm because the perfect forms can only be impressed on matter with difficulty, and in an unstable way.

For Aristotle, there aren't two separate realms. Rather there is one realm that has the form of a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder is formless matter and at the top matterless form. In a sense, everything is trying to climb the ladder to the top. All formless matter would like to evolve into matterless form, the highest form of existence. At every rung of the ladder other than the top and bottom, matter and form are combined. The lower rungs of the ladder have a lower proportion of form, and those higher up have a much greater degree. Human beings have much more form than rocks. God has much more form than humans. In fact God is perfect form, beyond the world of matter. 

Aristotle's scheme is like an alchemical scale allowing lead to be finally transformed into gold. It is also a ladder of teleological evolution. Whereas Darwinian evolution contains no suggestion of anything intentionally trying to climb the evolutionary ladder (if life forms do so, it is by random natural selection, not by design), Aristotelian teleology hints that everything is actively striving to evolve (albeit at an unconscious level). All entities have an inescapable inner drive towards higher states.

Alexandria, apart from being home to many Stoics, also entertained an assortment of Gnostic cults, and different schools following Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras. Gnostics who looked to Aristotle subscribed to a system along the following lines: 

1) The world is a combination of form and matter. They come together in different ways, and with different quality, creating different things. 

2) The soul (a special type of form) can act upon matter like conventional form. 

3) In living beings, matter is the substance and soul is the form.

4) God - perfect purity/soul/form - has no contact with matter. 

5) Evil resides in matter.

6) The Demiurge created the material world.

7) When a soul is in a body it is of necessity partaking of evil. 

8) The soul's goal is to be free of matter and to ascend from it as far as possible. 

9) The Demiurge and his material world are the source of evil, God the source of good. 

10) The incarnation of the soul in a body can be considered as a "fall" from the divine heights.

11) The soul fell because it was curious about the material world, fascinated by it, lustful for it, and also because it wanted to exercise its own powers of creativity in this domain, to shape and mould matter. But it didn't realize what it was getting itself into. It became enmeshed and entangled and didn't understand how to escape.

12) The closer to God a soul is, the freer it is and the more knowledge it has. 

Plotinus' Metaphysics

Plotinus' system starts with a source of existence called the One from which everything emanates. The One is not Being, but "being's begetter". It can be thought of as God in himself, in his most abstract form. The first and most important thing that emanates from the One is Nous (Mind, Intelligence). This is the Mind of God, like the Logos of the Stoics. And just as the One emanated the Nous, so must the Nous emanate. Its emanation is the Psyche, the Soul. This is another intelligence, but of different, inferior character to the Nous. Whereas the Nous is outside space and time, and thinks intuitively (meaning that it thinks all things at once, with complete interconnectivity and clarity), the Psyche is the source of space and time and thinks in a slow, sequential manner, one thought at a time. The Psyche must emanate too, and its emanation is the physical arena of space and time - Nature. By now, the process of emanation is losing its momentum, but Nature is able to emanate one more domain, that of living bodies, including humans. Living bodies cannot emanate anything else other than their own offspring. Below life is matter. This is the inanimate cosmic clay shaped by living intelligences.

This simple outline conceals a host of ingenious, illuminating and challenging ideas. If you wish to understand the subsequent course of Western esoteric thought, you need to be au fait with Plotinus' philosophy, starting with the One.

The One 

The One is transcendent, beyond description and definition. It is the source of all existence, but is itself beyond being. Infinity is its most fundamental characteristic. The One takes the role of what Plato describes as The Good. (But, for Plato, The Good was the ultimate Idea, whereas for Plotinus it transcends idea.) 

The One operates according to the "principle of plenitude" - emanation from the One cannot cease until everything that can possibly come into existence has done so. It must cascade downwards through all possible levels of being and imperfection.  The One does not "create" the cosmos through a deliberate act of will (as the Abrahamic God supposedly does), but rather it simply emanates all of existence spontaneously without any conscious thought. Strictly speaking, it triggers a sequence of emanations, and its direct responsibility is for the first emanation - the Mind.  

The overflow or emanation of the One into Mind, the first level of true being, is termed by Plotinus a hypostasis ("that which stands under"). Each hypostasis gives rise to another, each at a lower level than the last, and more distant from the One, thus slowly degenerating into increasing fragmentation, illusion, ignorance, confusion and imperfection. 

Nous (Mind/Spirit)

The Nous is the One's Mind by which it contemplates itself. It is the light of Reason, the light in which the One sees its image reflected. It is the Realm of Being - thinking and being are defined by Plotinus as the same thing. Only things that can be thought can be. Nous contains the eternal Ideas/Forms spoken of by Plato. These Ideas are the Mind's thoughts. In thinking them, it gives them being, and they are thus separate intelligences within the greater single Intelligence. The Nous is the equivalent of Aristotle's Prime Mover (thought thinking about itself). The Nous is a "One-in-Many" i.e. it is one thing in many parts (Ideas/Forms/separate intelligences). 

From Nous emanates Psyche: the Soul from the Mind. Soul, like Mind, is intelligent, but at a lower level.

Psyche (Soul)

The Psyche contains the seminal reasons (the logoi spermatikoi of the Stoics): the individual minds that will shape the Psyche's emanation - Nature. The Psyche is everywhere in the physical world, yet also transcends it. The "higher" part of the Psyche contemplates the Nous and the eternal and perfect Ideas it contains.  From the "lower" part of the Psyche emanates the physical world, which is guided, shaped and controlled by the seminal reasons. Whereas the Nous is One-in-Many (i.e. it is One Intelligence containing many intelligences that have no existence outside it - just as a human mind is composed of many thoughts, none of which can exist outside the mind), the Psyche is "One-and-Many" i.e. the higher part is a single unity, but the lower part fragments into many individual psyches (the logoi spermatikoi) including those of animals and humans, but also the "World Soul" and the psyches/souls of all the objects in the world.

Stars, planets, moons etc all have a soul. Thus the cosmos is a living organism with a collective soul, and with each part having an individual soul.  All of the individual souls have a higher part that belongs to the unity of the single Soul that contemplates the Nous, and a lower part that descends into the physical world to inhabit a corporeal body of some type. The Nous and the Psyche (higher part) constitute the intelligible realm, while the Psyche (lower part) and Nature constitute the sensual, physical realm. Existence thus has three tiers: an ineffable highest tier of supreme transcendence (the One), an intelligible realm of thought (the Nous and higher Psyche), and a material world of the senses (fragmented lower Psyche and Nature). We might say that existence has a Body (realm of the senses), a Mind (intelligible realm) and Soul (the ineffable Oneness itself). 

The physical cosmos is a living image of the eternal Cosmos of the Mental Realm: the "real", the intelligible cosmos. Individual souls order or govern the physical cosmos.

By contemplating the higher part of the Psyche a human being is brought into the Psyche's contemplation of the Nous, at a higher level still, the Nous's contemplation of the One. So there is a direct link from the human soul/psyche through to the One itself, mediated by contemplation. Through the power of contemplation, a human being can enjoy mystical union with the One. Individual psyches (the logoi spermatikoi) link the world of the senses to the intelligible world. 

Humans can be defined as "amphibians". Although we think of this word as referring to creatures that live both on land and in water, it actually means "having two modes of existence". It is derived from the Greek words amphi "of both kinds" and bios "life". Human beings are amphibians in that we are partly in the higher world and partly in the lower. 

The Physical World/Nature

Nature is the Psyche's emanation. Psyche generates the things of the physical world by impressing the Forms of the Nous onto matter by way of the seminal reasons (the logoi spermatikoi). 

Matter occupies the lowest level in Plotinus' hierarchy. Being furthest from God it is the source of "evil". It is not evil in the sense of an intelligent, malevolent will but as a consequence of the harmful effects it invariably has on psyches. 

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Plotinus places two processes at the centre of reality: emanation and contemplation. 

Emanation

The One, the Absolute Source, emanates the Nous (the Divine Mind), which is eternal, transcendent and outside space and time. The Nous emanates the Psyche (the Divine Soul), which is the dynamic, creative power of the cosmos and is both a unity and a multiplicity. Its higher part (the unity) is linked to the Nous, while its fragmented lower part gives rise to space, time, Nature and living beings, including human consciousness. Psyche bestows cosmic pattern and order, and the seminal reasons (logoi spermatikoi) provide individuals. Each soul should strive to attain "likeness to God as far as is possible".

Contemplation

Human consciousness contemplates Nature (which is directed by higher souls than those of humans), Nature contemplates the Soul, the Soul contemplates the Mind, and the Mind contemplates the One. By following the ascending scale of contemplation through all of the stages (all of which exist in a human being), human consciousness can make its way to direct communion with the One.

Emergence

Plotinus takes the position that any principle used to account for something must have the feature it explains. Therefore Soul, the principle of life in our world, is itself alive. How could it confer life if it did not possess life? The Greeks were opposed to the notion of ex nihilo creation (creation out of nothing) because how can nothing give rise to something given that nothing does not contain anything by the common definition of the word? Nothing does not have the property of being something, so cannot be the source of something. 

The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides was the first to formally oppose any idea of creation from nothing. He argued that the fundamental level of reality is being and being is eternal, hence it did not come from nothing. Nothing by definition cannot produce something, he reasoned, thus anything that exists must always have existed. 

The Soul has intelligence, but is not the source of intelligence. It is the Mind that is the principle of intelligence and which confers it upon the Soul. The Mind, like the Soul, is alive but in a different sense from the Soul since it is outside space, time and contact with the material world, so it cannot confer the same type of life that the Soul does. Instead, it provides pure intellectual life, so to speak. If we keep going backwards to find higher explanatory principles, we eventually reach a terminus: the ultimate principle that needs no further explanation, and about which no further questions may be asked. For Plotinus, the ultimate principle is the One i.e. it contains the ultimate explanations for everything else. If we call the One the fundamental "substance" of existence - the arche - then it must contain the essential seeds of the properties that are observed, for where else could they possibly have come from? 

So, the One contains the essence of mind and life: mind and life in their barest state, and it is for that reason alone that they are observed in the cosmos. If the One did not have life and mind then where did they originate? 

There is a modern materialistic theory called Emergence which asserts that life and mind "emerge" from non-life and non-minds when you arrange lifeless and mindless material in certain ways (as in DNA, for example) i.e. what emerges from the material was not contained in the material, but was possible depending on the precise way in which the material was configured. 

Thus we have a clear distinction between two principles: 1) Plotinus' position is that any feature we are accounting for must always have existed (so we observe a cosmos containing life for the straightforward reason that life was always present as a feature of existence) or 2) the materialist principle of Emergence which states that life and mind did not always exist, but came into existence (out of nothing) when matter randomly found itself in a certain configuration which just happened (by chance) to create that feature.

When sodium and chlorine react to make sodium chloride (salt), the taste of salt with which we are familiar is something that emerged from this specific combination: it did not exist prior to the first appearance of salt. Similarly with mind and life. 

For a moment, this seems a powerful refutation of Plotinus. But, in fact, salt has no taste independent of living creatures possessing the sense of taste. It's living creatures that confer the quality of taste on substances, and all substances will have some sort of taste ranging from bland to powerful, and it's as much connected with the thing doing the tasting as the thing being tasted. So the taste of salt does not in fact "emerge". It is defined by entities capable of taste discrimination. 

"Taste" is an attribute of sensing beings, so it is a function of life. It would be meaningless to say that salt has a taste if there were nothing capable of tasting, so how can it be said that an objective quality called "the taste of salt" emerged from the combination of sodium and chlorine?

The real question is whether life emerges from a particular configuration of "lifeless" atoms or whether living atoms arrange themselves (unconsciously) into particular configurations where they express the life they contain much more vividly, ultimately achieving consciousness.  An exponent of the latter view would be happy to say that higher order life (consciousness) naturally emerges from lower order life (non consciousness), but not that life emerges from lifelessness. Lifelessness does not contain the principle of life, but a higher order of life is a logical progression of a lower order of life, a greater actualisation of potential.  

If life is not contained in atoms in some form, then how can a particular configuration of lifelessness come to life? It is on a par with something popping out of absolute nothingness. It makes no sense at all. But if life is contained in atoms then there is no mystery regarding the appearance of life. 

Life is in fact everywhere. Sometimes it is vividly expressed, and at other times barely expressed. It is a question of to what extent the life potential inherent in atoms is actualized, not one of whether or not atoms contain life. 

As Above, So Below - the Birth of the Concept of the Ego

It has been said that Plotinus was the first person to clearly introduce the basic concept of ego (self) into philosophy. His definition of the prototype ego/self is contained in a statement concerning the soul: "The soul is many things, linked to the realm of sense by what is lowest in us, linked to the intelligible realm by what is highest. For each of us is an intelligible cosmos. By what is intellective, we are permanently in the higher realm; by our lower part, we are prisoners of sense."

"For each of us is an intelligible cosmos" = Man as microcosm of the Macrocosm = as above, so below. What is a self, an "I" (ego), a soul? - it is the universe in miniature. Until Descartes, this was the primary way of thinking about the self. (With Descartes, the body became a kind of machine and the ego something akin to a free-standing thinking entity with only a mysterious connection to the body.) 

We differ one from another to the extent that we choose to be intellective or sensual. The seeds of Jungian personality profiles (based on thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition) are sown here. And the idea that we have a "low" mind and a "high" mind is suggestive of the unconsciousness versus consciousness dichotomy championed by Freud. 

We are separated by our relative attachment to worldly things, but at the highest level of thinking, we are not separate at all. 

The relationship of the individual to the State is prefigured here. The idealised State could be considered as a reflection of our highest level of consciousness where we fully cooperate with each other because we are completely linked at this level.   

Plotinus saw a human as essentially a thinking being. Human intelligence is an approximation of Divine Intelligence. We are linked to the divine realm through mind and thinking, not through faith, which is the opposite of intelligence since it has no need of the power of reason.

Each ego/self/soul has an objective - to ascend to the highest levels of consciousness and ultimate union with God. But some individuals are so sunk in materialism they don't clearly perceive what their goal is. 

Life and society consists of all of these individual selves trying, with greater or lesser success, to align themselves with the macrocosm, and with the highest principle of all - God. 

The Journey of the Human Soul

"Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the loftier realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in a voluntary plunge: if it turns back quickly, all is well; it will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as well never have been even there, if destined never to come into actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known that suppressed and inhibited total."

Plotinus

The troubled return of the Greek hero Odysseus, the cleverest of the Greeks who fought at Troy, to his homeland of Ithaca is often taken as an allegory of the soul's difficult journey back to its divine origins. Odysseus endured many trials, tribulations, setbacks, disasters, horrors, temptations and disappointments, but survived them all and returned as a higher being: tried, tested and enlightened.

Why have souls forgotten their divine origins? Because they are alienated from their true selves. Abrahamism increases the alienation, enlightenment resolves it.

Daimons

In Plotinus' cosmology, daimons exist as guardian angels and chastisers of the wicked.

"Pure, not yet fallen to evil, the soul chooses man and is man, for this is the higher, and it produces the higher. It produces also the still loftier beings, the Celestials [Daimons], who are of one Form with the soul that makes Man: higher still stands that Man more entirely of the Celestial rank, almost a god, reproducing God, a Celestial closely bound to God as a man is to Man. For that Being into which man develops is not to be called a god; there remains the difference which distinguishes souls, all of the same race though they be. This is taking 'Celestial' ['Daimon'] in the sense of Plato.

"When a soul which in the human state has been thus attached chooses animal nature and descends to that, it is giving forth the seminal reason - necessarily in it - of that particular animal: this lower it contained and the activity has been to the lower."

Plotinus

God Inside Us

"God is outside of none, present unperceived to all; we break away from Him, or rather from ourselves; what we turn from we cannot reach; astray ourselves, we cannot go in search of another; a child distraught will not recognize its father; to find ourselves is to know our source." 

Plotinus

Plotinus enjoined human beings to attain "likeness to God as far as is possible." This likeness is brought about by raising the lower soul to the level of the higher. It's a knowledge, not faith-based, activity. It is philosophical more than religious. Salvation is for smart people, not for the credulous, brainwashed, mind-controlled masses who scream, "I believe!" because an old man with a beard and a "holy" book told them to. 

The collective Higher Soul from which all individual souls originate never comes into direct contact with the material world, hence is never corrupted by it. It remains eternally pure. It is part of all of us. We are all linked through it, and through it we may ascend to God.

Plotinus (like Hegel) considered philosophy to be the primary means for making soul contact and raising ourselves to the highest heights of which we are capable. Whereas Hegel thought that religion and art could also bring us into contact with the Mind of God, albeit less successfully than philosophy, Plotinus maintained that salvation of the soul was attainable only through philosophy. Thus philosophy is a divine activity in this view, the only activity that purifies each soul and removes the stain of living in the sensual, material world where we were exposed to so much corruption, selfishness and ignorance.

Plotinus taught that it was possible to achieve glimpses of the permanent ecstatic union with the Oneness that philosophy would ultimately accomplish. Not just philosophers could enjoy such ecstasy: musicians and lovers could too. For musicians, the beauty of "shaped sound" could emulate the "harmony of the Intellectual Realm" and musically transport them to union with the divine. As for lovers, provided their love was of the highest spiritual type rather than mere physical lust, they would automatically experience the ecstasy of the higher world. 

The Hypostasai (Emanations)

The One (the Good) overflows into the Nous (Mind) at which point being comes into existence via the thinking of the Mind. The Nous overflows into the Psyche (Soul), which then splits into two: a unified higher part and a lower fragmentary part. The lower part overflows into Nature (where the most advanced souls guide matter but are not, so to speak, enmeshed in it: they perform activities such as controlling planetary and stellar motion) and then further still into living bodies where matter is now in direct contact with soul. 

All of this, from the Nous to the lowest souls, is the realm of being (the One, on the other hand, transcends being), and all of it can return to the One through the process of contemplation. The implication is that to contemplate God is to become God.

Below the realm of being is the domain of non-being: indefinite, indeterminate matter that has no mental content as part of its nature, hence cannot return to and be integrated with the One. All being originates from the One, but matter is not being, yet it is the "image" of a higher non-corporeal matter that does have existence, hence the matter of our world both does and does not come from the One. Plotinus gives a clever but paradoxical explanation of this: "The Matter in the Intellectual Realm is an Existent, for there is nothing previous to it except the Beyond-Existence; but what precedes the Matter of this sphere is Existence; by its alienism in regard to the beauty and good of Existence, Matter is therefore a nonexistent."

Nature generates a hypostasis in the form of living bodies. But body is so weak that it cannot generate another hypostasis; it can simply generate more bodies of the same kind. It's at the bottom of the hierarchy of being. Its lack of self-sustaining vitality makes it susceptible to degeneration, degradation and corruptibility. The disease of non-being attacks the souls present in bodies. They must ascend back towards their origin in the One to recover full being and vitality. If they can't, they'll keep sinking lower into the non-being of bare matter. Theoretically their being could be entirely negated by non-being and they would fade into the domain of "nonexistent" matter.

The One is not technically a hypostasis (even though it is often called one) since it stands at the top of the hierarchy and is the source of everything else. The Nous is a hypostasis, as is the Psyche, and Nature may be considered one too since it generates bodies. (Each hypostasis is an emanation of the level above and the source of the emanation / hypostasis below it, hence is both an emanation and source of emanation.) Bodies generate nothing new below them hence are not a hypostasis. Neither is hyle (matter) a hypostasis: there is nothing beneath it. It is a "formless darkness on which form is superimposed." It can't be said to have true being, and it interferes with those things that do have being with which it comes into contact, diminishing their qualities of mind. It is "negative" type of being that negates being to a certain extent. It is this property that caused Plotinus to describe it as evil, and which formed the basis of Saint Augustine's definition of evil as an absence of good. Evil for Plotinus is a sort of confusion that takes place when a soul is locked in matter. The soul becomes deluded, irrational, driven by wild impulses.

Plotinus on Form and Matter

Plato argued that Form is transcendent i.e. fundamentally above and separate from matter, while Aristotle regarded Form as immanent in the world of matter i.e. it exists everywhere and is fully integrated with it: Form is inside matter, directing it from within. Although this may seem like an abstract issue, it's of crucial importance because it acts as a proxy for the more familiar debate concerning mind and matter. Plato's position is the forerunner of Descartes mind/body dualism. Plato, like Descartes, completely separated the world of Form from the world of matter, thus raising the problem of how these two separate worlds could possibly interact since they appear to have nothing in common and no connection. 

Plato addressed the problem by invoking a benevolent cosmic craftsman called the Demiurge (unlike the malevolent Demiurge of Gnosticism) who acted as an intermediary between the worlds of Form and matter. Using the Forms as his archetypes, he imprinted these on the clay of matter, like a sculptor. 

Aristotle's position amounts to dispensing with the Platonic Demiurge and instead locating the function performed by the Demiurge inside the world of matter rather than external to it. Aristotle retains one element of transcendence - a Supreme Being of perfect Form that exists outside material existence. But Aristotle still hasn't addressed how Form and matter (formlessness) actually interact. In Plato, the mind of the Demiurge is what brings together Form and matter; in Aristotle Form just naturally exists inside matter, so the two are always together. But to replace the Demiurge with Nature hasn't actually answered anything. 

Where is Form in relation to matter? If matter is formlessness, hence excludes Form, then where is Form? We know it isn't matter, so it's therefore something else that exists independently of matter. So where does it exist, and how does it interact with matter? What's the mechanism? We're still deep in the territory of mind-body dualism. 

In truth, no dualistic system has ever made much sense, and the problems get worse if any more ingredients are added to the mix to create polyistic systems. Monism - the idea that there is just one fundamental substance - avoids these dilemmas, but then has to account for how just one thing can give rise to all of the multifarious phenomena of existence. 

Modern science rejects the idea of any freestanding Forms and advocates a monism based on materialism. But just as it cannot account for mind, science offers no explanation regarding the origin of Form and how it gets into matter and how it directs matter. How do the molecules that make up DNA create living human beings with conscious minds? Science doesn't have the vaguest idea, yet it puts itself forward as a tool that can allegedly solve all problems.  

Have a go for yourself. Can you explain the interaction of Form and Formlessness? It's the same question as how mind interacts with matter. What is the origin of Form/Mind? What is the origin of Formlessness/Matter? How do the two combine? This, more or less, is the fundamental question of ordered, organized existence leading to conscious minds that are able to contemplate existence. ANYONE who claims to have absolute knowledge of existence must be able to answer this question. Plato failed, Aristotle failed, Abrahamism fails, Eastern religion fails, science fails. We would suggest that for any system of thought to be taken seriously it must put forward its answer to this question, and if it is unable to do so then it should be explicitly rejected, or treated with the utmost circumspection. The "revealed" religions of Abrahamism simply say that God sorts it all out, which is no answer at all. Science ignores the question (because it knows it can't answer it.) By the end of this article you will see the essence of our solution. We are the only group on earth that explicitly answers this fundamental question of existence.

Plotinus favoured Plato's position concerning form and matter, but he added some refinements with an Aristotelian flavour, thus cleverly reconciling the two systems. He agreed with Plato that our world is a copy of a higher world, but whereas Plato completely separated matter and Forms, Plotinus said that even in the higher world matter and form go together. But how? If matter is extended and Forms/Ideas are not, how could matter exist in a realm of pure Ideas? 

In order to make this system work, Plotinus had to introduce a radical innovation: incorporeal matter - matter without extension. 

This is quite simply an astounding idea of the very highest order that has never been given the attention it deserves. It is the first time that dimensionless matter - energy, to call it by its modern name - makes its appearance in the public record. This idea equates matter and energy 1650 years before Einstein created the most famous scientific equation of all time linking mass and energy via the square of the speed of light: E = mc². (Note that in scientific terms, mass and matter are not considered identical. Photons, for example, are regarded as part of material existence even though they have no rest mass. In our system, matter is dimensional energy with mass, and "mind" is dimensionless energy without mass. Thus photons belong to the domain of mind rather than matter. Of course, scientists reject this definition because they do not believe in dimensionless mind.) 

Since Descartes, we have been accustomed to thinking of extended matter and unextended mind. Since Einstein, we have been accustomed to thinking of energy and mass as different forms of each other. Mass is said to be "bound" energy, concentrated energy, giving it volume, size and extension. 

But what of energy - does it have extension or not? Photons don't have mass or dimensions, so aren't they extensionless? Scientists never pose the question of whether energy is extended or unextended, but in fact, at its ultimate level, energy is always massless and unextended. It is fundamentally incorporeal "matter" i.e. dimensionless energy i.e. mind. Plotinus was far ahead of his time. 

There is just one basic substance - energy - and it can either be extended or unextended. When it is extended we call it matter, and it is from matter that our world is made. But it is in permanent and inextricable contact with unextended energy that is literally everywhere and connected to everything.

So, for Plotinus, forms are stamped on incorporeal matter in the higher world and in the lower world on corporeal matter, but, either way, form and matter are always together, as required by Aristotle (excepting his two limiting cases of formless matter and matterless form).

The corporeal matter of our world is but an inferior image of the incorporeal matter of the higher realm, just as the forms of our world are inferior images of the forms of the higher realm. 

Plotinus' system is beautifully symmetric. But a still higher degree of symmetry is possible that reveals the misconceptions of Plato, Aristotle and even Plotinus.

Plato is wrong that there are separate realms of formless matter and matterless form. Aristotle is wrong that there is a ladder of existence beginning at formless matter and stretching up to matterless form. Plotinus is wrong that form and matter, although always co-existing in our world and in the higher world, are separate.

The reality is that there is just one substance, one with an inner drive to actualize its potential: it is psycho-energy - energy with an inbuilt mind and will.

What we have is a ladder of evolution such as Aristotle described, except at the bottom is psycho-energy as pure formlessness with maximum potential and minimal actualization. Although it is formless, it has the will to take form. As time passes, it evolves. What does evolution actually mean? Nothing other than increasing form - increasing information - increasing directed will. When it has climbed all the way to the top of the ladder of existence - to the Omega Point - it has maximized its form, but it is still, as it has always been, psycho-energy. Its potential for form/information/knowledge has been maximized. It has achieved optimal actualization of its initial potential.      

So, the new supersymmetry is this:

Matter, energy, dimensionlessness, dimensionality, mind, will, form, information, life: these all exist in the cosmic arche, the fundamental substance of existence. Thus, although they may all appear different, at the ultimate level they are all the same.

The reason that life manifests itself in the cosmos is that life, in its most basic form, is and always has been present in the arche. There is no division between life and non-life. Things express their life with more or less effect, more or less meaning. Things that don't express life in a meaningful and evident way we regard as non-life, but that is a misconception and misperception. Everything is alive to a greater or lesser degree. Life does not mean consciousness. Plants are alive but no one would consider them conscious. Consciousness is what appears as life reaches the higher levels of actualization.

Similarly, the reason that mind and consciousness manifest themselves is that they are, and always have been, present in the arche, at least in their rawest form.

Nothing can exist that wasn't already a property or quality of the arche right from the get-go. Mind doesn't appear from non-mind. Life doesn't come from non-life. Energy doesn't come from non-energy. Form doesn't come from non-form. Everything that manifests itself in the cosmos was always present in the cosmos as seeds of potential. It's impossible for something to appear from nowhere and nothing. We could call something and nothing two different "substances" of opposite nature. There is no dualism of incompatible substances.

The cosmos is about potential and actualization. The arche, from the outset, contained everything that was possible. All cosmic potential resided here. 

Evolution turns potential into actuality. That's its function. Evolution adds form and information. Everything is evolving. Everything is on an ascending scale: the degree of mind, the degree of life, the degree of intelligence, the degree of consciousness. To define a separation between life and non-life, mind and non-mind, consciousness and non-consciousness is absurd. Is an ape non-conscious in relation to a human or just less conscious? Did the entity that preceded the very first cell that scientists called "living" contain no life, or simply a little less life, life less clearly expressed? Does a banana that contains something like 30% of the same DNA as a human being contain no mind or mind at a much more elementary level?

There are no sharp cut-off points in qualities such as life, mind and consciousness. They are all on a continuum from low expression to high expression of that particular quality, a continuum of potential and actualization.   

*****

One of the central enigmas of existence is how form and formlessness coexist. It would be possible for formlessness to exist on its own forever because it doesn't require anything. But how could form exist on its own forever? What would the form be, and how did it come into existence in the first place? Why wasn't it preceded by formlessness? Since the less formed always precedes the more formed, doesn't formlessness always precede form? Formlessness is a sine qua non for form, but the converse isn't true.

This debate is really a proxy for the one concerning the existence of God. If we regard God as the ultimate, perfect form then how could such a form have always existed? Isn't it a logical necessity that formlessness precedes form? Isn't form something that is imposed ON formlessness. Form only has meaning in relation to the pre-existing state of formlessness. Form is what shapes formlessness, hence it cannot exist without formlessness. Form needs something formless in which to be lodged, and to which to give form.

The Abrahamic God, as a form preceding formlessness, is IMPOSSIBLE. Form EVOLVES from formlessness then imposes itself on formlessness. But the only way form can evolve from formlessness is for the formlessness to have had the capacity for form right from the beginning. And what is form if not the activity of something capable of order, logic, and organisation? We all have experience of something that imposes order, logic and organisation. MIND! Form is impossible without mind. Form is a function and expression of mind. There can be no form without mind. Mind is the essence of form. Form is the proof that the cosmos has a mind, that mind is one of the fundamental properties of the arche.   

The question of the origin of Form is as critical as that of why there is something rather than nothing. No body without shape has ever existed in the cosmos, so where did shape come from? Form cannot randomly emerge from formlessness. Formlessness does not have the capacity to generate form, just as completely random chaos cannot create order.     

The formless arche LEARNS to have form, and it does so via mind i.e. an entity capable of learning and of creating order. In fact ONLY a mind is capable of learning and of organisation. Evolution is a minded process. Each stage of evolution learns from the previous stage. That's why things get more complex and better adapted. Darwin called this "natural selection" but how would he distinguish that from "natural learning"? Things that have learned better tricks for surviving in their environment will, of course, be naturally selected over those that are slower learners (and also over those that have learned too quickly and are "out of time" in a sense). So, how could any Darwinist ever prove that minded learning isn't occurring in the evolutionary process? If we speak of psycho-genes (minded genes) rather than conventional mindless genes, haven't we introduced an enormously more powerful concept, one that is much more able to account for the evolution of what we call mind and life? Isn't Richard Dawkins' metaphor of "selfish" genes already strongly suggesting that genes ARE minds. Why not abandon the metaphor and assert that genes (or rather psycho-genes) really are as selfish and self-interested as the organisms they create? As above, so below. 

EVOLUTION IS LEARNING. LEARNING IS A PROCESS OF MIND. THEREFORE EVOLUTION IS A PROCESS OF MIND. EVOLUTION HAS A GOAL: THE OMEGA POINT OF ALL EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES. 

THE COSMIC TERMINUS. 

GOD.

Evolution is teleological. It is a process directed towards converting potential into actuality. The maximum actualization of the evolution of the cosmos is God.

Schopenhauer defined the arche in itself (i.e. as noumenon) as irrational, purposeless Will that gives rise to the phenomenal world of space and time. It is alive but not trying to achieve anything. All it does is bring struggle and suffering, only occasionally lit up by fleeting moments of happiness. Therefore, Schopenhauer concluded, Will is evil. It would have been better if nothing had ever existed, and the best we can hope for is to will ourselves out of existence by achieving the most negative possible form of "nirvana" - extinction.    

Nietzsche replaced Schopenhauer's Will with Will to Power and turned it into a quasi-scientific principle (i.e. he got rid of the idea of Will as a metaphysical noumenon). In his book Beyond Good and Evil, he said, "Granted that nothing is 'given' as real except our world of desires and passions, that we can rise or sink to no other 'reality' than the reality of our drives - for thinking is only the relationship of these drives to one another: is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this which is given does not suffice for an understanding even of the so-called mechanical (or 'material') world? I do not mean as a deception, an 'appearance', an 'idea' (in the Berkeleyan and Schopenhauer sense), but as possessing the same degree of reality as our emotions themselves - as a more primitive form of the world of emotions in which everything still lies locked in mighty unity and then branches out and develops in the organic process (also, as is only fair, is made weaker and more sensitive), as a kind of instinctual life in which all organic functions, together with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion and metabolism, are still synthetically bound together - as an antecedent form of life? In the end, it is not merely permitted to make this experiment: it is commanded by the conscience of method. Not to assume several kinds of causality so long as the experiment of getting along with one has not been taken to its ultimate limits (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so): that is a morality of method which one may not repudiate nowadays - it follows 'from its definition', as a mathematician would say. In the end, the question is whether we really recognize will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of will: if we do so - and fundamentally belief in this is precisely our belief in causality itself - then we have to make the experiment of positing causality of will hypothetically as the only one. 'Will' can of course operate only on 'will' - and not on 'matter' (not on 'nerves', for example): enough, one must venture the hypothesis that wherever 'effects' are recognized, will is operating upon will - and that all mechanical occurrences, in so far as a force is active in them, are force of will, effects of will. Granted finally that one succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will - as will to power, as is my theory; granted that one could trace all organic functions back to this will to power and could also find in it the solution of procreation and nourishment - they are one problem - one would have acquired the right to define all efficient force unequivocally as: will to power. The world seen from within, the world described and defined according to its 'intelligible character' - it would be 'will to power' and nothing else."       

Nietzsche's Will to Power is extremely close to the concept of psycho-energy. Implicit in the idea of Will to Power is that every part of that Will seeks MORE power. It thus has a purpose. It wants to grow, to evolve, to gain more knowledge, hence more power. Its ultimate expression, its Omega Point, would be the maximum power of the cosmos contained in one consciousness: God. It is always striving, exploring, probing, adventuring. Within Will to Power lie all of the same ingredients that comprise the concept of psycho-energy dialectically converting all of its potential into actualization and reaching a Omega Point of maximum power, freedom and knowledge.

So, even though Nietzsche was an atheist, his scheme implicitly contains God! Not the childish God of Abrahamism (whom Nietzsche declared dead), but the God of the logical culmination of Will to Power. Nietzsche's philosophy is actually staggeringly close to Illuminism. Even his concept of the Superman is virtually the same as the idea of man becoming God. All Illuminists study the full works of Nietzsche. He was an "intuitive" Illuminist.

His idea of the "mechanical world" as an "antecedent form of life" is exactly the sort of insight that scientists have totally failed to grasp. If matter contains the seeds of life then it is no surprise that life emerges from it. If matter is an expression of will, it is no surprise that conscious creatures with free will should emerge from it. These are the keys to any correct view of life. The idea of matter as sterile, inanimate, and mindless - as scientists would claim - is unable to account for the presence of conscious, living intelligences in the cosmos.    

Hegel's concept of Geist - a German word expressing the idea of both mind and spirit - perhaps best conveys the psycho component of psycho-energy. The mental component of energy is not only rational but also full of irrational will, desire, spirit and striving. A robot may be rational, but it needs will if it is to become a self-motivating entity.

Schopenhauer said that music captivates us because it is a direct copy of the Will. When we hear music we are tuning into the cosmic pulse, the irresistible, unquenchable lust for life, power and glory that reverberates throughout the fabric of existence. Nietzsche said that he would never believe in a God who did not know how to dance. 

When experts in artificial intelligence talk of programming robots to act like humans, they always forget the most basic task. It's not enough to program a computer-mind with rational tasks that it performs like a poor mimic of a human. A robot has to be programmed with WILL. That's the real challenge. How would you know when a robot had attained a human level of consciousness? Only when you saw it wrestling for hours for the right word to finish a poem to the girl it loved. How can you tell if a word is "right"? How could you program a computer to understand the infinite meaning that the right word can convey? All of his passion, his love, his soul, must be in that word. Only a mind full of will can measure such things. It is not a rational choice. It is a choice of the Will. 

A man with the most brilliant rational mind is nothing without will. He will struggle to get out of bed. A strong-willed fool could dominate the world. How would you go about programming strong will into a machine? Will is the magic ingredient of existence, the X factor. Here is wisdom - nothing is possible without will. The cosmos could never evolve if it did not have an inner compulsion to do so. It would never crave information, it would never seek higher forms, never strive for consciousness, if it did not have an obsessive drive to grow and maximize itself. Our individual wills reflect the cosmic will. A robot would be alive if we could give it will. 

Scientists make the impossible claim that something (the cosmos) appeared out of absolute nothingness. They make an equally ridiculous claim when they assert that all the observed order in the universe is just some side effect of a randomly selected set of rules known as the Laws of Physics. They don't pause to ask how the Laws of Physics are possible at all. Where do they come from? From nothing, from nowhere? Where are they located? Where are they stored? How do things "know" what the laws are and how to follow them? Scientists say in effect that things "just do", which is as feeble as saying that things happen simply because God wills it. It's no explanation at all.

How does spacetime "know" how to organize itself? Rules, laws and order can, according to scientists, just magic themselves into existence. Form can suddenly spring (perfectly formed) from formlessness, which it then proceeds to shape. This is ridiculous. Form cannot exist without mind. Form is the proof of mind. Form IS mind. The Laws of physics are therefore the proof of mind. The cosmos has a mind. Mind is alive by definition. Therefore the cosmos is alive. The cosmos is God, but not a perfectly formed God that precedes the cosmos, but rather God that evolves towards perfection. The cosmos proceeds from the hidden God of potential to the revealed God of actualization. And we are on that same trajectory. We are actualizing and maximizing our potential. We are becoming God. 

This is the gospel of the Illuminati.

The Difference between Nous (Mind) and Psyche (Soul)

Nous (mind) and psyche (soul) are so similar that they are often combined into one idea. In the modern world, for example, we define psyche as mind (as in the word "psychology", the study of the mind). The difference between the two is subtle. 

Plotinus regarded Nous as intuitive thought. This is the highest type of thinking where all thoughts are connected. When you have a profound intuition, everything falls into place in a blinding flash . You instantly "get it". An enormous number of connections are made between disparate thoughts. It's "all-at-once" thinking, and it reveals every aspect of a problem simultaneously. Many of the greatest thinkers in human history have been those able to summon the highest powers of intuition. They would never have got anywhere if they had plodded step by step through a problem. Intuitive thinking is like parallel processing compared with sequential processing. It's much faster, much more powerful, linking far more thoughts. 

Thinking based on the psyche is rational, linear and systematic. It's slower and more self-conscious than intuitive thinking, hence less effective and a lower form of thought. Psyche, unlike nous, can only contemplate objects in succession, one at a time, moving steadily from one to another. This is the type of thinking characteristic of space and time rather than the instant, integrated thinking of nous that occurs outside space and time.

So, Nous = intuitive thinking outside space and time.

Psyche = linear thinking inside space and time.

The Nous generates the Psyche and the Psyche generates Nature (Physis). The Psyche, as the source of space and time, generates Nature based on space and time. In the non space-time domain of the Nous, the only type of thinking is the intuitive type. Hence anyone who can transfer their mental processes from the Psyche to the Nous will effectively become God. The complete switch from Psyche to Nous is what Gnostics refer to as gnosis. As soon as it happens, the mind enters a new domain and embraces a brand new way of thinking based on a chain reaction of the most astonishing intuitions. The "Mind Reactor" goes critical and reveals the Mind of God. What is the Mind of God if not the means to think all possible thoughts at the same time? That is what Nous, but not Psyche, accomplishes. 

In Nous, subject and object are one. Plotinus says, "In the Nous we no longer have upon one side the object of contemplation and on the other that which contemplates…In the Nous the two things are one. This means that it is a living contemplation whose object does not inhere in something else…All life is thought, thought of greater or lesser obscurity…The highest life is the highest thought: the lower life, the lower thought; the lowest of lives, the lowest of thoughts…All beings are contemplations. If the truest life is life through thought and is identical with the truest thought, then the truest thought must be alive. Then contemplation and the object of this contemplation are alive and are life, and are identical." 

Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge. If the latter is associated with psyche and the former with nous then there is no question that he was right. 

When Pierre Teilhard de Chardin introduced the concept of the Noosphere, he was implying that the human race could create a Mass Mind, a collective consciousness, that would transform the human race and give it a collective glimpse of the mind of God. 

The internet is sometimes described as an early stage in the creation of a noosphere. At any time of the day, hundreds of millions of human minds are accessing cyberspace, absorbing data, interacting, carrying out enormous parallel processing. If all of that activity became focused within a single mind, think how powerful that mind would be. It would contain virtually the entire collected wisdom of the human race. It would be humanity as a single consciousness.  

We might define the One as transcendent consciousness, the Nous as Superconsciousness, the Psyche as ordinary consciousness and matter as the unconscious. Nature adds the principle of life and growth to the dead arena of matter and unconsciously directs it via the laws of Nature (physics). 

Human beings are microcosms of reality. Reality consists of the One, Nous, Psyche, Nature and matter, and so do human beings. As above, so below. The type of life and afterlife a human being will have is determined by the level to which he directs his consciousness. He could enmesh himself in the sensual contact with matter and become totally degraded, or set his sights towards the realm of divine intuition and beyond. It's his choice. By contemplation, meditation and intellectual discipline, a human mind can climb the ladder to Higher Soul then Nous, then direct contemplation of the One - the equivalent of ecstatic union with God.

We are not separate from the One. It is "intimately present in the centre of our souls", or, looking at it another way, we are all in it, being sustained by it. In another way of speaking, we are in God, and he in us. 

The hypostasis of Nous is without body (but it is associated with incorporeal matter). It is entirely intellectual. It has no physical extension. It is an infinitely small point, and it is also infinite in its being. It is outside space and time, beyond spatial or temporal measurement. It is a lesser infinity than the One because its task is to think in terms of the finite, of limits, definition, and determination, whereas the One is limitless, undefined and indeterminate. The perfect infinity of the One is, through the prism of being, rendered as a less perfect infinity.

Plotinus and the logoi spermatikoi

Plotinus said, "No Idea is different from The Intelligence but is itself an intelligence." 

Each Idea - each intelligence - is a potentiality or "seed" capable of actualising as an entity distinct from the Nous. Plotinus employed the Stoic term logoi spermatikoi or "seminal reasons" in this regard. The Nous produces the logoi spermatikoi that then serve as the essence of the Soul, as its productive power. So, while the Nous is passive, the Soul is active. It is the generative principle within Being. The Soul is Active Mind, the agent that implements the contents of the Nous in the physical world.

All beings are contained as potentialities in the Nous. Through the Soul, through the logoi spermatikoi, they are made actual. They become differentiated entities in the arena that we call Life (spatio-temporal existence). Thus, the Nous is the r = 0 domain outside space and time and the Soul is the r > 0 domain of space and time, the location in which the cosmos assumes an objective shape and a determinate, physical form, where ideas are extracted from the domain of the abstract and transformed into the concrete. For Plotinus, the physical world is where the Soul's thoughts - the logoi spermatikoi - are impressed on matter, giving rise to all of the forms and shapes we see in the world. The Nous does not make contact with matter; only the Soul does. The world consists of logoi spermatikoi actualised in matter. The matter of the physical world is the "space of the possible"; it is dark, indeterminate, indefinite, and fertile with potential. Into this, the Soul shines its vivifying light and makes matter determinate, definite, actualized. Matter is the clay worked by the logoi spermatikoi.

Plotinus likens the Soul to an eternal and pure light consisting of a single wondrous ray that is refracted through the prism of matter. The ray is broken into an enormous number of multi-coloured rays, each of which seems unique, but all of which can be traced back to a common origin. The Soul is thus both one and many and it is the precious light of life and mind that illuminates the dark realm of matter and infuses it with form.

All of the separate rays of light must find their way back to their source. This is reminiscent of a stereographic projection, a geometrical mapping that projects a sphere onto a plane. Every point on the sphere, with a single exception, can be projected onto the plane. The exception is the top point, the projection point itself. Points on the sphere close to the projection point map onto the plane extremely far from the sphere, so the projection point is called the plane's "point at infinity". The Soul of Plotinus' system is the equivalent of the point at infinity (outside space and time), with all of the rays projecting from it representing individual souls in space and time.

The Soul generates a material cosmos that is the spatio-temporal living image of the spiritual cosmos contained as a single, unified, all embracing thought within the Nous. In terms of the cosmic equation r >= 0, the r > 0 domain is the r = 0 domain reflected in space and time. If we strip away space and time, we arrive at pure Nous. In terms of science, we might say that the event known as the Big Bang was when Nous generated Soul, which then gave rise to material existence, based on the contents of Nous. To put it another way, the ideas in God's mind, which previously had only mental existence were thus given physical existence.

Above all, God's Mind is based on complete mathematics. It is "living mathematics" that spills out into the material cosmos, originating in the perfect Platonic Form of Complete Mathematics. The laws of physics are the rules established by God's mathematical mind. God is the Supreme Mathematician, incapable of mathematical error. The material world reflects a type of order called doxa which is but a pale imitation of the Order of the Intelligible Realm, which is called logos. For Plotinus, the logos is the supreme organizing principle of existence.

The unified higher part of the Soul remains in constant contact with the Nous. When any mathematician makes remarkable breakthroughs, he has effectively managed to tune into this higher soul which has a profound understanding of God's Mind. Each of us, through the use of our intuitive abilities, can grasp this higher world, albeit briefly in most instances. The reason why the Illuminati consists of mostly intuitive introverts can now be understood. The people most attuned to the higher world are intuitive introverts. Nearly all of the world's greatest thinkers, visionaries, dreamers, poets, writers, shamans have been intuitive introverts. They are born with a higher degree of interaction with the higher domain. 

Extravert sensers are the least in touch with the higher realm. They are firmly locked into material existence. They are the lower souls that descended too far into matter and thus experienced the negative effects of matter. Tragically, there are enormously more extravert sensers than intuitive introverts - hence the materialistic, shallow, self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking society we live in. Alchemy was about trying to elevate ordinary consciousness, the arena of "leaden thoughts", to the level where sequential thinking is transformed into multi-dimensional intuitive thinking - "golden thoughts" - where the solution to any problem can be glimpsed all at once. 

The pursuit of gnosis is about training the mind to access the intuitive world. The "Eureka" moment sums up the intuitive experience. You see everything in a trice. If that is expanded to the ultimate level then you can enter the Mind of God and intuitively grasp the whole of the cosmos in a flash. You would literally understand everything that can be known, because everything thinkable exists in the Mind of God. Anything that cannot be thought by God cannot exist.

The right hemisphere of the brain is the domain of intuitive thinking. Our everyday consciousness resides in the left brain. So, if you want to become a visionary and make contact with the higher world, you have to engage the remarkable capacities of your right brain. The dialectical thinking championed by Plotinus consists of an alternation between left brain analytical thinking and right brain thinking based on achieving synthesis (the whole). This process will raise the mind to the highest levels. 

The Nature of the Supreme, the One

In the Enneads, Plotinus provides a fascinating, but highly complex account of the One: "We maintain, and it is evident truth, that the Supreme is everywhere and yet nowhere; keeping this constantly in mind let us see how it bears on our present enquiry. If God is nowhere, then not anywhere has He "happened to be"; as also everywhere, He is everywhere in entirety: at once, He is that everywhere and everywise: He is not in the everywhere but is the everywhere as well as the giver to the rest of things of their being in that everywhere. Holding the supreme place or rather no holder but Himself the Supreme all lies subject to Him; they have not brought Him to be but happen, all, to Him or rather they stand there before Him looking upon Him, not He upon them. He is borne, so to speak, to the inmost of Himself in love of that pure radiance which He is, He Himself being that which He loves. That is to say, as self dwelling Act and Intellectual-Principle, the most to be loved, He has given Himself existence. Intellectual-Principle is the issue of Act: God therefore is issue of Act, but, since no other has generated Him, He is what He made Himself: He is not, therefore, "as He happened to be" but as He acted Himself into being. 

            "Again; if He preeminently is because He holds firmly, so to speak, towards Himself, looking towards Himself, so that what we must call his being is this self looking, He must again, since the word is inevitable, make Himself: thus, not "as He happens to be" is He but as He Himself wills to be. Nor is this will a hazard, a something happening; the will adopting the Best is not a thing of chance.

            "That his being is constituted by this self-originating self tendence at once Act and repose becomes clear if we imagine the contrary; inclining towards something outside of Himself, He would destroy the identity of his being. This self-directed Act is, therefore, his peculiar being, one with Himself. If, then, his act never came to be but is eternal a waking without an awakener, an eternal wakening and a supra-Intellection He is as He waked Himself to be. This awakening is before being, before Intellectual-Principle, before rational life, though He is these; He is thus an Act before Intellectual-Principle and consciousness and life; these come from Him and no other; his being, then, is a self-presence, issuing from Himself. Thus not "as He happened to be" is He but as He willed to be."

The Champagne Cascade

To use a modern analogy, we might compare Plotinus' model of reality with a champagne cascade. Imagine that the top glass in the cascade is God and the champagne is "being" (or psycho-energy). It pours out of the fount of God and then flows down into the other levels of the cascade. The excellence of the champagne is progressively degraded and diluted as it falls. The champagne at each level has less quality, and the bottom level has the least quality of all: it is the furthest from the nature of God. If the "champagne" of God starts off as bright, glowing and vital, by the time it reaches the bottom level it is dark, dim and lifeless: "matter".

So, Plotinus envisages a ladder of existence stretching up from matter to ineffable divinity. The human soul has a place on that ladder and its task is to rise up to the top level and be one with the transcendent source of all things - God in himself, as abstraction.

The One is a power that emanates energy as the Sun emanates light. This emanation, coming as it does directly from the One, is not just simple energy but psycho-energy - mind. So, using the Sun as a symbol of the One, we might think of the light of the Sun as its first and most important emanation: its Mind. The ideas and thoughts of God are contained in the light. And what do they contemplate? Well, they contemplate their origin: the Sun, the ineffable One. Thus this is the light by which the One sees itself. But the light has to fall on something. What is that thing? Plotinus calls it the Soul. Just as the Mind is the emanation of the One, the Soul is an emanation of the Mind, dependent on the Mind for its existence. The Soul is one step removed from the One. The Mind stands between it and the Ultimate. Just as the Mind contemplates the One, the Soul contemplates the Mind. The Soul must emanate too. What comes from Soul is Nature (or we might say the Laws of Physics). It's not "Creation", but Emanation. Nature emanates individual bodies and things. But there is no further emanation from this level: it has run out of emanatory energy. The only thing below this level is matter, which has a very mysterious status. It is formless, shapeless, imperfect, lacking any thinking capacity and is "evil" since it is furthest removed from the One where pure goodness resides. Matter at this level is described as "non-being" and "non-existent" and yet it must be something in order to be used by the "existent" order. It has its origins in the non-corporeal matter of the intelligible mental realm, so can be regarded as a specific emanation of higher matter, but with virtually no properties other than the capacity to be given form by higher things.

When Plotinus defines matter as "non-being" he means it not in the sense that it doesn't exist but that it does not partake of "authentic being", which he associates only with thinking and agencies of thought. For Plotinus, matter has no such thinking capacity. So non-thinking is non-being, and "evil" is the effect that non-being has on thinking; it makes it stupid; it makes it lose control of its rational faculties, and it is in that benighted state that souls are capable of doing things they would never do otherwise.

For Plotinus, evil is literally thoughtlessness. Matter is the domain that kills proper thinking. (But Plotinus' opinion about the evils of the material world are much weaker than those of Gnosticism; he does not subscribe to the material world being the realm of an evil Demiurge. In this respect, he is also anti-Christian because he acknowledges no figure like the Satan of Christianity.) We do not have to let matter corrupt us, to make us sinful. Many of us remain good. It is our free choice to sin, to commit evil, to act with utter thoughtlessness towards others. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

The Soul is irresistibly drawn towards this realm of non-being and non-thought because it wants to give it shape, form and "being", to perfect it. It wants to bring to bear its creative faculties and imagination. It "descends" into it, not realising the dark power of matter. The combination of Soul and matter is what we call the Physical World. But as much as the Soul shapes matter, matter shapes the Soul, imbuing it with lust, desire, selfishness, cruelty, ego - attacking the foundations of rational thought and good behaviour. The Soul is now split. Its higher part contemplates the divine Mind, but its lower part is locked in the prison of matter, its gaze focused on lowly, unworthy things.

The Soul's task is to raise itself up to its higher level so that none of it remains in the world of the senses where it is corrupted by matter, subject to illusion, ignorance, pain, suffering and mortality.

The ultimate goal of Neoplatonism was liberation from the sensual world and union with the Mind, and through that with the One i.e. the Soul's task was to achieve ultimate enlightenment.

With its objective being final immersion in the transcendent source of all things, Neoplatonism is remarkably similar to Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism and represents a clear bridge between Western and Eastern religious and philosophical thinking.

The Trinity

When Catholic Christianity sought to defend the idea of the Holy Trinity on a philosophical basis, it turned to Plotinus. The One is God the Father, the Nous (the Logos, the Word) is God the Son, and the Higher Soul is God the Holy Spirit. Christians simply took the framework furnished by Neoplatonism and laid it over the idea of God as Three in One. But virtually no modern Christians understand this intellectual defence of the Trinity. Nearly all contemporary Christians, if asked carefully about the nature of the Trinity, would unquestionably fall into one of the innumerable heresies that afflicted the early Church, particularly regarding the relationship between God the Father and his "Son". 

Evil

Plotinus puts the blame for the existence of evil on something that he defines as having no being i.e. matter. But how can non-being be responsible for evil? How can something passive, without thought, be the agent of evil? 

Plotinus had to account for evil somehow, but because he had rejected the Gnostic concept of the evil Demiurge there was nothing in his optimistic and benevolent system that provided any scope for evil, so logic forced him to blame the entity furthest from God - matter. It was the only place left where he could dump the problem of evil. This is an example of how flawed axioms compel philosophers to travel down absurd paths. It would have ruined the rest of his scheme to introduce evil at any higher level, so rather than wreck what he had already constructed he simply chose the least destructive option of attributing evil to non-intelligence.

Plotinus is famous for attacking the Gnostic position that the Demiurge is the agent of evil. But how can evil enter the world passively and unthinkingly, without any choice or expression of free will? Plotinus' position is untenable. Evil is always a choice, always an exercise of free will. Hence it is the product of consciousness. It exists nowhere else other than in consciousness. A single type of being commits all acts of evil: the conscious type. 

For ancient Gnostics, evil, in cosmic terms, was the product of an immensely powerful conscious free will - that of the Demiurge - systematically devoted to the choice of the evil over the good. The Demiurge created a domain where he could exercise that will without interference: the material world. Thus evil has a specific location (the material world) and a conscious cause (the Demiurge). Even to someone who knows nothing about Gnosticism, this must seem a plausible account of the origin of evil. But Plotinus had no option but to attack this position because it undermined his own.  

It is hard to comprehend Plotinus' position given his own logic. If evil can be thought (which it can) then, so his own line of thinking goes, it must have being and it must be part of the Nous. It is a Platonic Form, accessible to all thinking beings. 

Gnosticism asserts that this world of ours is so unremittingly unfair, unjust, cruel, unequal, spiteful, compassionless, hateful, violent, selfish, greedy, self-interested etc that no one could be in any doubt that this is no accident, no passive side-effect of non-being. Therefore the being that acts as Creator of this world, who fashions this world, is evil. Evil Creator = Evil World. It's a simple and powerful equation that anyone can grasp instantly. But Perfect Creator = Evil World makes no sense. And a dichotomy between Perfect Being and Evil Non Being is equally incredible. Why should non-being be "evil"?

In the Gnostic interpretation of Neoplatonism, the most dominant of the lower souls that emerge from the Higher Cosmic Soul is the Demiurge (Satan), who actively shapes material existence into a thing of evil, according to his personal and dominant will. The Demiurge gets his template for evil from the Evil Form present in the Nous, and, since the Nous emanated from the One then the One is, in that sense, the author of evil (which is precisely the conclusion that Plotinus, like the Christians, was so keen to avoid because it detonated his most cherished concept of a perfect One). 

Plotinus, despite his brilliance, fell foul of the age-old problem of how to explain the presence of evil in the cosmos. He had all of the tools to do so, but like so many others he failed to grasp the key point. The One is NOT pure goodness. It is beyond good and evil. The Nous does NOT contain only good thoughts. It contains the Form of the Good AND the Form of the Evil, and they are in a dialectical struggle with each other, which is finally resolved in the synthesis of "beyond good and evil."

The Janus soul

Our soul is split according to Plotinus. The lower part is linked to the realm of the senses (the physical world) and the higher part to the spiritual realm. We might think of our soul as resembling the twin-faced Roman god Janus, looking two ways at once. The lower soul points towards Satan (towards individuation in a world of multiplicity) and the higher towards Lucifer (towards all things being as One), and thence Abraxas. The task of the soul is to reorient itself away from Satan's prison of the senses and towards the light of reason.   

The higher part of the Soul lies on the border of the Nous. That divine part of the Soul has an unchangeable identity. It is aloof from the lower part (having different qualities and properties), and it is through it that the lower part receives its life. The lower part is the seat of the personality, and the part subject to desires, passions, vices, sensuality and so on. 

Plotinus did not develop any moral or ethical philosophy since his system was not based on good and right conduct but on attaining the higher knowledge that would allow the lower soul to ascend and enter into union with its higher part.

Reincarnation

Plotinus advocated a particularly direct karmic version of reincarnation. Any crime committed in a previous life is suitably punished in the next one. He gives an extreme example of a son killing his mother. In the son's next life he will be a mother murdered by her son. Thus everyone learns their lessons and, over many incarnations, they become perfect and attain enlightenment. (It's also possible for bestial humans to come back as actual beasts, or empty-headed people who whistle or hum tunes to come back as songbirds!)

Plotinus and Hegel

The One is extremely mysterious. It is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is not existence, nor essence; it is neither intellect nor intelligible. Instead, it gives rise to all of these. It is the supreme generative principle, the source of All. The One is everywhere, permeating the entire universe. It is without boundaries. It is infinite. It is beyond the senses. It is said to be transcendent to all differentiation and form. 

We might say that what Plotinus means is that the One is pure potentiality and contains no actuality, but is the source of everything that will become actualised. It is not something and nor is it nothing. It is, in a sense, pre-existence rather than existence. In Hegel's language, we might say that it is the dialectical combination of abstract being and nothingness, leading to the synthesis of becoming. It is the dialectical drive that ensures that potential becomes actuality. It is the source and driver of all becoming. Its purpose is to make things become.

We can imagine a world of existence not driven by the force of any type of becoming. Such a world would be static, bloodless, lifeless - because there would be nothing bringing change to it. We can also imagine a world of existence and basic becoming - things moving around aimlessly forever, transforming from one thing to another but not in any meaningful way. The crucial factor that makes all the difference is "purposeful" becoming - the dialectic.

It is the dialectic that animates the cosmos, pushes it forward, causes meaningful change and transformation, that converts the potential into the actual. Existence is possible without becoming, and existence and becoming are possible without meaning. Only dialectical becoming - teleological change - can make existence meaningful. The force of becoming is what manifests itself in the universe as motion and the dialectic. Heraclitus said that there is nothing permanent except change. Change is the dialectic, the eternal force of becoming. This force is life and mind in its rawest form. It is the Cosmic Will. It is the will to exist, the will to survive, the will to grow, the will to meaning and the will to power. If we define Will as psycho-energy: as minded energy with a purpose, with the desire to maximise its potential, then we have captured what the One is. 

We might say that the One is Will, the core Will that underpins all existence and drives everything forward. It is the source of everything and the engine of all that happens. It is the precursor of everything else, the uncaused cause, the Prime Mover. It is not, of itself, intelligent, but it has the power within itself to ensure that the cosmos that emanates from it becomes, in due course, Absolute Intelligence, the supreme and maximum intelligence of which the cosmos is capable. In other words, the One - the Will - is God as potential, and its purpose is to become God as Actuality. It is entirely different from the Abrahamic God. It is the God of Evolution.

For Plotinus, the One sits at the apex of existence, and yet is not of itself part of existence. Rather, it is the source of existence. 

For the Illuminati, the One, the Will, is the hidden God that evolves into the manifest God. It is the source of existence and from it, dialectically, the Omega Point of existence (the cosmic terminus) will emerge. Thus the One is the first and last, the beginning and end, the Alpha and the Omega. It can be depicted by the symbol of the Ouroboros - the snake that eats itself.     

The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of Gnosticism and Hermeticism, of cosmic cyclic Ages. It is linked to the symbol of the Phoenix. A new Age, a new life, begins upon the death of the old. Alpha goes to Omega, which becomes Alpha once more at the start of a new Age. The "Divine Suicide" of Illuminism is inextricably linked to the Phoenix and Ouroboros. When every possibility has been fully explored, when all potential has been actualized, understood and enjoyed, what then? The cosmos has a choice: to go on forever in its final state - an eternal sterile stasis in which all meaningful change has ceased (akin to the Heat Death predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics) - or to turn that final state (Omega) into a new beginning (Alpha), and dissolve actualisation back into potential. What would you do if it were your choice? (And one day in a time far beyond this one, it will be.)  

The Nous/Intelligence/Mind is something akin to what Hegel described as the Absolute Idea. It is God in himself in whom all abstract, pure thought has been perfected: mathematics, the laws of logic and reason, the framework of form (but not yet with any content).

The task of Hegel's Absolute Idea was to alienate itself in order to return to itself. The Absolute Idea - the contentless framework of form - must create content and then, through the understanding of that content, learn Absolute Knowledge of itself. The Absolute Idea thus becomes self-conscious and knows in concrete rather than abstract terms exactly what it is. Only through the process of alienation and then dialectical self-discovery can it reach this Omega Point of Absolute Knowledge and Freedom. At this stage, Absolute Idea has been transformed into Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind is the Absolute Idea that has achieved self-consciousness and full awareness of itself.

In Plotinus, the Nous contemplates both the One and its own thoughts (which are equated with the Platonic Forms). All individual beings (including ourselves) are eternal and unchangeable thoughts within the Nous i.e. everything that can exist already exists as a thought with a unique identity in the Nous. We are immortal because Nous cannot forget anything or erase any thoughts or any beings. 

If something is not in the storehouse of thoughts of the Nous then it can never become "real". It can never exist. Being and thought are identical for Plotinus. If the Nous can't think it (whatever it is) then it can have no being. A unicorn might have no instances on earth but if it exists as a thought of the Nous then it has being, and potential existence on earth or somewhere else. (In fact, according to the Plenitude Principle, it will certainly become "actual" in the material world at some point.)

Plotinus states categorically that "to think and to be are one and the same." The being of the Nous is its thoughts, and its thoughts are Being, and moreover are individual beings. So, the Nous is both being and the source of all being (although the One, as the source of the Nous, is the ultimate source of being). The Nous contemplates that which it cannot truly think - the One - which has no formal being. If the Nous could think the One, then the One would have being and hence not be the One. The One is the ultimate enigma for the Nous, and it can contemplate the mystery of the One for eternity.

It is the nature of Being to be fecund i.e. thoughts and ideas in the Nous, the Cosmic Mind, seek to actualise themselves as things outside Nous. Within the Nous, all ideas are together and unified; outside they are separate. Outside, they enter the realm of individuation where space and time operate and split the Unity into the Many.

The realm of space and time is where life as we know it takes place. A being in space and time contemplating the Platonic Ideas will not see them in the same way as the Cosmic Mind perceives them, which is all at once as a unity. It is the task of the individual being in time and space, if it wishes to ascend to a higher level, to try to bring together all of the disparate ideas of ordinary existence. Their separateness is only an illusion brought on by space and time. If space and time are transcended, the truth can be seen as a great Unity. This is similar to Eastern religious thinking. Also, it resembles the Hegelian idea of overcoming alienation - the Mind understanding its true contents and no longer being deceived by space and time.

Space and time first enter the cosmic equation through the entity that Plotinus labelled the Soul. The Soul (the Psyche) acts as the bridge between dimensionless and dimensional existence. The unified higher part is within the dimensionless zone, and the fragmented lower part is within the dimensional domain. Life as we experience it unfolds in the dimensional domain, but eternal life is found in the dimensionless domain. 

It is within the domain established by the lower aspect of the Soul that the cosmos takes objective shape and determinate, physical form. The being of mind is transformed into the more familiar physical being of the material world. 

Just as the Nous contemplated the One and its own contents, the Soul contemplates the Nous and its own contents.

The Soul's domain is an image, a copy, a reflection of the Cosmic Mind, where space and time are "written" on matter and Platonic Forms take on a physical rather than mental existence. The eternal ideas of the mind are brought to "life" (as we understand it), like sculptures being animated, like Pygmalion's Galatea coming to life, filled with the breath of the gods. 

A horse in the Cosmic Mind is the perfect Form of horse while the horse of the domain of the Soul is a real thing running around in a real field, but it is only an imperfect copy of the Divine Idea of a horse. The "perfect" horse is not subject to space and time. Physical, "imperfect" horses are. 

The Soul has a purely contemplative part (the higher part) that remains in constant contact with the Nous. The lower part of the Soul descends into the sensible realm of space and time in order to govern it and craft it. The higher part of the Soul remains a unity (because it has not entered into space and time), but the lower part fragments into all the souls (including human souls) of things. In other words, the higher part of our individual human soul is the part we have in common with the rest of humanity. It is only our lower soul that exists as a separate thing - a self, an ego, ignorant of its higher nature. But it can eventually ascend to the higher level when it becomes enlightened through contemplation. 

The world as we know it comprises Soul and matter, the Soul giving shaping to shapeless matter. But the degraded properties of matter are what cause the Soul to be deceived, and to forget its higher part. 

The Higher Soul's great task is to bring the world that the Lower Soul has created with all of its separate souls back to the great unity and Oneness of the Nous - the Divine Mind i.e. the ideas are alienated from their true origin by the Lower Soul, and are then returned by the Higher Self to their proper divine positions. The cycle is completed. We enter the domain of the Higher Soul through rational contemplation. 

As with Hegel, the central concept of Plotinus is that the world/Nature is a place of alienation of the Mind, and only after a long and difficult process does the alienated mind return to itself. In Hegel, it is at a much higher level than before, but for Plotinus it is more a case of rediscovering its true origins rather than attaining a higher state.

Hegel's is the much grander and nobler conception. In Hegel, the Mind learns new things; in Plotinus, the Soul purifies itself and learns how to contemplate the Mind properly, but the Mind itself has not learned anything.

There is a great deal of similarity between Hegel's thinking and Plotinus', but Hegel solves the problems inherent in Plotinus' beautiful but somehow futile scheme.

For Plotinus, the lower part of the Soul undergoes the drama of existence while the higher part remains unaffected. But even within the lower Soul, there are different levels. The highest of the lowest souls are the entities that set the framework for cosmic existence and govern such things as the motion of the heavenly bodies (stars and planets are regarded as actual beings with souls - bringing to mind the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock), but which stay aloof from the messy business of human-style life in the cosmos. They don't get their hands "dirty", so to speak. Their minds are attuned to higher things.

Since every embodied soul forgets, to a greater or lesser extent, its origin in the Divine Realm, the drama of return consists of three distinct steps: the cultivation of Virtue, which reminds the soul of the divine Beauty; the practice of the Dialectic, which instructs or informs the soul concerning its origins and the true nature of existence; and finally, Contemplation, which is the proper mode of existence of the soul. 

The higher part of the Soul remains forever as part of the Divine, Intelligible Realm. That is its essence. The lower, active part of the Soul, while being essentially divine too and indeed identical to the higher Soul if it chooses to be so, nevertheless decides to attach itself to the realm of phenomena rather than noumena, and forgets its true origins in this bewildering new domain of space and time - the material world. 

It fragments into individual souls located in specific bodies. The presence of souls within matter is the state known as Nature. The purpose of the fragmented lower Soul is to give form to formless matter and maintain order in Nature. The principle of as above, so below ensures that the lower Soul will (imperfectly) reflect the beauty, harmony and perfect order of the Intelligible Realm. The order of the material realm is called doxa and that of the Nous logos.

Plotinus and the Dialectic

Plotinus' system is centred on a dialectical return to origins, an overcoming of the "illusion" of multiplicity. For Plotinus, the dialectic is an interrogative technique by which a human being gradually extracts from all of the apparent diversity and multiplicity around him, the underlying unifying principles. It is something akin to chemists creating the Periodic Table and explaining the whole of chemistry according to this single idea of order, organisation and the properties of atoms.

Our thoughts are contaminated and confused by endless different things, but as we think about them, we begin to see how they relate and connect to each other, how they reflect a hidden order based on unifying rather than diversifying principles. It's the hidden order that gives rise to visible order. 

Our task is to discover the secrets of the hidden order, and by doing so we may start to integrate ourselves with that higher, more divine order. We can keep ascending the scale of understanding until we are at one with the cosmic principles of existence - until we are in direct communion with the Mind of God. 

Plotinus talked of an approach based on the alternation between analysis and synthesis, and surely this is the right approach. It is wrong to be too reductive (over analysis), and wrong to ignore analysis (over synthesis). The optimal idea is to take things to pieces then put them back together again, and also to understand how the Whole is more than just the sum of its parts.

But Plotinus had a much less grand idea of the dialectic than Hegel. For Plotinus, the dialectic was about revealing the true nature of the cosmos, which was already perfect at its highest level. For Hegel, everything is evolving dialectically, including the "highest level" of the cosmos and existence. With Plotinus, "God" does not evolve: it is our task to use the dialectic to approach him. With Hegel, God evolves, we evolve, everything evolves, and the highest point of existence - the Omega Point - is yet to be attained. The Hegelian dialectic doesn't just reveal the true nature of things, but actually creates the final truth, the absolute perfection of the cosmos, the actualization of all the initial potential of existence.

It is Hegel's that is the true dialectic and the one endorsed by the Illuminati.

Existence is not complete. Its potential is not yet fully actualized and expressed. We are part of the cosmic evolution that is converging inexorably on the Omega Point.

Plotinus on Universal and Individual Forms

Plotinus introduces a radical and profound new ingredient into Plato's treatment of Forms. Whereas Plato's Forms were all "universal" (e.g. all the horses on earth are particular versions of the universal Form of Horse/Horseness that exists in the realm of Forms), Plotinus also admitted individual Forms. So, although all horses reflect the universal Form of Horse, each horse also has an individual Form - its essence - that is immune to the fluctuations that time in space bring to all beings. Each human being has a unique and immortal essence (Form) that persists regardless of our mortal lives and deaths. Although, in this life, we partake of the universal Form of human being, we each have an individual Form that has no fundamental connection with the Form of human being. Our unique Form could choose to partake of non-human universal Forms. 

Like many of Plotinus' ideas, this one has attracted insufficient philosophical attention. For one thing, it enshrines the concept that we have a unique and immortal Self. It philosophically underpins the concept of reincarnation - we can continually adopt new universal Forms while maintaining our own individual Form. And it provides a whole new way of thinking about the debate concerning universals and particulars. 

Plato considered the universal Forms as the ultimate reality - the only things that are truly real. All "particulars" - instances of the universals - are mere shadows and copies, of a radically inferior reality. Other philosophers contended that universals have no existence at all and that the only real things are individual objects. Each human individual exists, but there is no universal Human representing Humanity, of which all particular humans partake. Rather, "humanity" is just a name given to the collection of all particular human beings. 

Plotinus links every particular to its own, unique particular Form. Thus the question of whether universal Forms exist is extended to particular Forms. An advocate of ordinary particulars might find this a much harder problem to attack. 

Scientists, advocates of materialism, are those in the present day who are obsessed with particulars and who deny any kind of eternal Forms, whether universal or particular.  

Plotinus' argument that universal and particular essences exist in the eternal mind and continually interact is profound and stands in direct contradiction of scientific materialism. 

Each of us ages and changes with every passing day. Our appearance is constantly changing. But if a great painter were to capture our individual Form, it would be something that would transcend our appearance at any one time. It would represent our quintessential self - our soul, in other words. The question of whether we have an eternal individual Form is the one that determines what happens to us when we die. If we have no essential Form, then we are gone for good. If we do have an individual Form then we simply return. We can then partake of one of the universal Forms of being to clothe our essential self in the matter of the physical world of time and space.

Can science disprove that you have a Form that exists outside space and time? No it cannot. "Form" is in fact the biggest issue facing science. Science has no idea what shapes the material world other than the catch-all phrase "the laws of science" - which of course is a statement and not an explanation. Yet it has the arrogance to dismiss the existence of Forms. Why? Because Forms are not in the material world and science dogmatically rejects the existence of anything that is not material. It does so even though light is immaterial, massless, dimensionless and exists outside space and time. Scientists are blind to the truth staring them in the face: the dimensionless domain is the key to reality and is what shapes the scientific world.  

In ancient Egypt, the essence of a person - his "Ka" - was said to be created at the time of his birth and to remain in the immortal world while his mortal self (a spatio-temporal aspect of his Ka) lived on earth. At death, the estranged, mortal aspect of Ka rejoined its essential self.

All religions subscribe to some form of an essential self except, perhaps, Buddhism. But even this religion with its explicit concept of the anatman - the "no self" - has many subtler layers that have the distinct flavour of the essential self. 

Science totally rejects the essential self despite being unable to account for life, mind and consciousness. It cannot even explain where the laws of science come from, and how a universe can emerge out of nothing. One would therefore expect science to be rather more humble in the claims it makes and the way it so casually dismisses anything that does not conform with its narrow and dead system of scientific materialism. This is effectively a religious position, unsupported by the facts of existence. Scientists are believers too, though they never see themselves in that light.  

Difference Between Plato and Plotinus

In Plato's philosophy, there is a domain of perfect Forms and a domain of formlessness (matter). Forms are eternal, absolute, immutable, always the same, universal and they are known only through the mind via reason and not through the senses.

The world architect - the Demiurge - brings together Form and formlessness to create the things of the world, which are imperfect copies of the perfect Forms because matter, by its nature, distorts Forms, introduces flaws and errors, and twists them out of shape. The Demiurge also creates a World Soul which regulates the cosmos. It acts in accordance with the laws of its own nature. It is the source of order, organisation, cosmic law, motion, beauty, harmony, and of life, mind and knowledge in the cosmos. 

In addition, the Demiurge created souls for all the stars and planets, and all the living beings we find in our world. These souls were created at the dawn of existence and were able to see the domain of perfect Forms. But they were not themselves Forms, and they were created rather than eternal. While eternal souls imply reincarnation and created souls imply resurrection, there is another category of souls that are said to have pre-existence. These are souls that are created rather than eternal but were created long before their physical bodies existed. Since resurrection theory tries to establish an enduring link between a soul and a body, pre-existence indicates that souls do not need bodies and hence pre-existence logically is suggestive of reincarnation rather than resurrection. This becomes a crucial point when considering the philosophy of the Christian philosopher Origin, who accepted the Platonic pre-existence of souls.

When a Platonic soul enters a body, it forgets the absolute knowledge it previously had of the realm of Forms. The body clouds its thoughts, confuses it and debases it. It is as if the soul has entered a prison from which it must escape if it ever again wants true knowledge. The human soul is a fragment of pure reason, but is prevented by the body from exercising its reason properly. Because each soul existed before it entered a body, it also exists after the body has perished. The soul, once created, is immortal. 

Plato does not explain where matter, the domain of perfect Forms or the Demiurge  originally came from. They are simply taken as given.    

Plato's scheme is:

1) Domain of Perfect Forms, of which the highest is the Form of the Good. This can be equated with a perfectly rational God, guiding the Whole of existence. It is the supreme guiding principle of all things, and it shines the light of reason on the cosmos. 

2) The Demiurge, the World Architect who creates all souls.

3) The World Soul, created by the Demiurge and which gives rise to Nature.

4) Matter, which is shaped by the Demiurge according to the perfect Forms, and then regulated by the World Soul (Nature).

Plato's Form of the Good may be considered the equivalent of Plotinus' One, although they are in fact radically different in conception. Plato's Demiurge may be equated with Plotinus' Nous, although it also has much in common with Plotinus' Soul. Plato's World Soul is related to Plotinus' Soul. Souls for Plotinus are eternal Forms rather than immortal creations of the Demiurge.

So, there are many similarities between Plato's worldview and Plotinus' (hence the designation Neoplatonism in relation to Plotinus' philosophy), but there are also considerable conceptual and intellectual differences. Plotinus' system is better thought out, more comprehensive, more logical and more in accord with reality. With Plato, the Demiurge appears out of thin air. Plotinus' Nous is altogether more sophisticated and credible.

The Demiurge is best understood in the Gnostic rather than Platonic sense: it is an inferior "emanation" that understands neither itself nor the cosmos and it wreaks havoc with its deluded, selfish, self-interested and narcissistic attitude. It is the supreme creature of time and space, but knows nothing of the domain beyond.      

Last Words

Plotinus' last words encapsulated his entire philosophy (and indeed that of Illuminism): "Strive to bring back the god in yourselves to the God in the All." 

At the moment of his death, a serpent was witnessed sliding out from under his bed and vanishing through a hole in the wall, as though his brilliant mind had been transferred into the most ancient symbol of wisdom.

Julian the Apostate

One of the most interesting of the Roman emperors is the man known to history as Julian the Apostate, but more accurately as Julian the Philosopher. He was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire, reversing, temporarily, the succession of Christian emperors. Perhaps the cleverest emperor of them all, Julian recognised the deadly danger posed by Christianity and tried to roll back the tide set in motion by the Emperor Constantine, the first emperor to embrace Christianity. Julian was a philosopher, social reformer, man of letters, intellectual and soldier. He wanted to restore the most glorious traditions of Rome and saw how the Christian poison had fatally undermined these. He rejected Christianity in favour of Neoplatonic paganism, and he was also a Mithraist. It was said that he considered himself the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. Tragically, his reign as emperor was all too brief: he was killed in battle during a campaign against the Persians.

The Christian tide rolled on, sweeping all before it. Yet again a chance to halt the disease had tragically slipped away.  

Logos

Logos is a word meaning "reason", "word", "speech". It was first used as a technical term by Heraclitus for whom it meant the principle of rational order and natural law in the cosmos. 

For the Stoics, the Logos was God, pervading the cosmos with life and reason. Each human possesses a spark of the divine Logos.

For Christians, God the Son was the Logos, through whom all things were made. The Gospel of John famously begins: "In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God." Jesus Christ was identified as the "Word made flesh" i.e. the Logos incarnate.  

Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE - 50 CE) was a Jewish philosopher whose ideas had a great influence on Kabbalistic thinking. 

For Philo, a great hierarchy of beings (emanations) stood between God (pure Idea) and the "evil" material world. The Logos was at the top of this intervening hierarchy and was described by Philo as "the first-born of God." (In Christian terms this represents the Arian heresy that defined the Son of God as unequal to God the Father, and as his first creation.) The Logos was the principle of order holding the world together. Additionally, it contained the Platonic Ideas. (In Plato's philosophy, the Ideas are real entities located in a transcendent domain: Philo was the first to relocate the Ideas into the Mind of God and make them God's eternal and perfect thoughts.) The Logos acted in the physical world on God's behalf (since God himself would never have any kind of presence in the evil material world). The term "Angel of the Lord" that frequently appears in the Old Testament is equated to the Logos by Philo.  It is the Logos, and not God, that created the material world.

For the psychologist Carl Jung, Logos is the masculine principle of rationality, in contrast to Eros, the feminine principle of love and empathy. Logos is objective, reductive and analytical and Eros is subjective and concerned with synthesis and harmony.

But Jung could have found a different principle to contrast with Logos. He might have chosen female wisdom represented by the goddess Sophia. This goddess is sometimes regarded as the feminine dimension of divinity, and sometimes she is called the wife and companion of God.

Part II concerns Hermeticism, Alchemy, the Emerald Tablet, Rosicrucianism, Forms, Matter, Universals, Particulars, Morphic Resonance and the origins of Mind.