October ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Plotinus)

In October's 1-to-1 Wiseletter, I'll be looking at a quote from Plotinus, a 3rd century Alexandrian philosopher.

Quote

"Self knowledge reveals the fact that the soul's natural movement is not in a straight line...On the contrary, it circles around something interior, around a centre."

Plotinus is considered to be the founder of Neoplatonism, a philosophical tradition that emerged out of the legacy of Plato and streamed through the minds of early Western thinkers like Pseudo-Dionysus and St. Augustine into the core of Western thought.

Neoplatonists were unlike the intellectual successors of Aristotle. Whereas Aristotle the Materialist felt that matter was more real than ideas, Plato the Idealist thought ideas were more real than matter. The Neoplatonists relied on the metaphysics of Plato to map the landscape of mystical reality, an experience of total self-knowledge synonymous with the human soul's unification with the One. The Abrahamics (Christianity and Islam) call this heaven.

To Plotinus, the human soul emanates from the One, the source of all experience. When Plotinus tells us that the soul's movement is not in a straight line but a circle around a center--the One--he's saying in other words that our life's journey is an eternal, iterative process of departure and return, amnesia and remembrance, not a random meander from the birth canal to the crematorium.

Plotinus' image of a circle around a center is a diagram of the fundamental structure of experience. He understood that you wouldn't be able to comprehend reality without an orienting center. You wouldn't notice symmetry without it. You wouldn't be able to spot the center of a painting at a museum or stay in the middle of the road when you're driving. You wouldn't be able to tell when something or someone was "off". Archers aim at the center of the target when they shoot an arrow. In fact, the term sin comes from archery. It means to miss the center.

Our lives are the same. We have an unbreakable connection to the center, the straight-and-narrow path, and we choose to aim at it or elsewhere. The further we aim away from it, the more needlessly difficult our lives become.

Our life's sole purpose is to be at one with our center, for it is only out of this place that we can act in the genuine interests of morality, conscientiousness, and dutifulness as a friend, sibling, parent, lover, or professional in our lives. Many people live life in the reverse. They try, for instance, to be moral by acting moral. They act moral to get a reward like social credit or heaven. But this is putting the cart before the horse. Being at center is the means by which one acts moral. Said another way, heaven is the means to morality. Morality is not the means to heaven.

If the human soul is properly connected to its center, moral action is spontaneous. True moral action can't be forced. It's a symptom of the psychic state of at-one-ment. Doing life this way, without thinking about it (without the interference of cognition), is to act in sync with the Tao as the Taoists would put it or with the watercourse way as the Zen masters would say or in adherence to fung shui as the Chinese geomantics would advise.

Rose Window at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris

Places of religious worship are populated with beautiful depictions of Plotinus' center-in-circle structure. They please our sense of symmetry and inspire awe because they resonate with the fundamental geometry of our souls. They're unconscious projections of that geometry, put there to point you back to center.

QUESTION

What's one thing you could do to reorient your life toward its center?

Cheers,

John

November ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Etienne Gilson)

September ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Enuma Elish)