Virtue was understood to be that which leads one to God, through the interior transformation of one's being. "Without virtue," Plotinus said, "God is only a word." The practice of asceticism and the cultivation of virtue, as Plotinus understood it, was meant to lead to an extremely simple attitude. The goal of the philosophical life, then, was not to remove oneself from society, but to be so transformed inwardly that one was able to live within society with a freedom which came from a simple regard for "the One."
Plotinus claims that "each of us is an intellectual cosmos," that the journey of the soul is "a voyage of self-discovery ... [I]f we wish to know the Real, we have only to look within ourselves." Such self-exploration teaches one to distinguish between a lower self-consciousness - the ego's awareness of its own activity - and a higher consciousness - the secret inner person who is "continually in the intellectual realm." Because the hidden center of this inner self coincides with the center of all things, the self may hope at times to achieve total unification, that is, "become God" or, as Plotinus says, to be God.
DOUGLAS BURTON-CHRISTIE:
The Pagan Philosopher's Quest for Holiness: Plotinus and his Circle
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2 comments:
I like this. I like how you can get knowledge from any source. Not that every source is valid.
of course every source is valid. why would one source be any more or less valid than another. who would proclaim such validity? we all express our faith and each expression is uniquely and equally valid. the purpose of education is to learn from the many traditions and points of view. none of us possess the truth, we all grasp for it and only see its image, but that is enough to propel us to reach ever deeper for that understanding which has no words. Ultimately, truth cannot be expressed for if it were it would no longer be timeless and infinite. truth is best understood from a blank page than a book. a book can only attempt to explain what the blank page is saying.
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