Plotinus : (c.205-270), native of Egypt, who transformed a revival of Platonism in the Roman Empire into Neo-Platonism which influenced Islamic & European thought.
... person of his Master. You have put Sri Aurobindo on a par with Plotinus and Shankara and asserted that the problem whether he could be considered anything more would depend on how he would relate to Christianity. No doubt, Sri Aurobindo has given the world a monumental philosophy systematizing his spiritual experience, just as Plotinus and Shankara did, but to Page 176 miss the... served if he were placed under the category of "philosopher" alone. Just because he has philosophised his Yogic experience he cannot be kept out of the company of the supreme revealers. Can Shankara or Plotinus, just because of their philosophising, be kept outside the sacred circle of spiritual adepts? And Sri Aurobindo, Page 49 as any reader can judge, outstrips both of them in spirituality... reply as far as I can, and with a typewritten reply! In the first place when I spoke of Sri Aurobindo as a 'philosopher in the deep sense of the word', I meant one of the kind of Sankara or Plotinus and that is how I think of him meaning, of course, one who is also a spiritual master. But now as to the question of Sri Aurobindo being more than this, this depends on how one understands his relation ...
... notion not unlike certain notions of God.' " (6.6.1986) Page 90 Reading Plotinus is indeed a very good occupation. The Enneads are an old friend of mine and, in my view, next to Plato's Dialogues they are the profoundest philosophical scripture of the West. In a certain sense Plotinus, whose source is Plato, is a river that is better than its source, for though the source is the... While Plato was a superb idealist, Plotinus was a master-mystic - though we have to guard against the ultra-mundane drift of his mystical consciousness and keep hold of Plato's Socratic sense that the Divine is present even in the market-place and remember always the prayer of Socrates that the outer should be brought into tune with the luminous inner. Plotinus is reported to have had an aversion ...
... the symbolism of the Neoplatonists is central to the poem. Nor is this surprising, for from his letters we know that Coleridge had been reading their works shortly before it was written. There is Plotinus' sea, or lake, of material existence, the 'non-entity' that is the term of a descending series of orders of being. This descent itself is symbolized by a river that, in the Orphic theology, issues... image that must recall to any Platonist those shadows that, in Plato's famous fable, the prisoners saw cast upon the walls of the cave in which they were imprisoned, and mistook for realities; or, as Plotinus mythologizes the same concept (or conceptualises the myth), the image which Narcissus saw in the flowing stream of Nature, and mistook for enduring reality. The symbol of a river flowing from a hidden ...
... the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena ( ideai, nooumena ) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation ( nous ) . These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, ŗta cit , in Vedic terminology. They... and Mind, Mind into Overmind and Supermind. Now this sublimation is not simply a process of refinement or elimination, something in the nature of our old Indian nivŗtti or pratyāhāra , or what Plotinus called epistrophe (a turning back, withdrawal or reabsorption): it includes and is attended by the process of integration also. That is to say, as the lower rises into the higher, the lower does ...
... important point is not whether Krishna and Arjuna did actually exist but whether the things said in the Gita are true. At this point Dr. Manilal left. SRI AUROBINDO: I have been reading today Plotinus on Matter by Dean Inge. It is curious that what he was trying to describe in various ways with much difficulty is what we call the Inconscient in Matter. But as he had no knowledge of the Inconscient... properly. Of course he is speaking of Matter as a. principle, not as a form. This Dean Inge has a confused mind, he can't state his thoughts clearly and logically and bungles the whole thing. But what Plotinus says is that Matter is infinite, indeterminate and non-being—that means the Inconscient; and if Matter is raised to the level of the Spirit it could become divine, that is to say. Matter itself is ...
... idol. Cosmic consciousness is not the highest point of human consciousness; we do not go above the individual to reach it, but outside. It is hardly necessary to ascend in consciousness, or to become Plotinus, in order to attain the universal Spirit. On the contrary, the less mental one is, the easier it is to experience it; a shepherd beneath the stars or a fisherman of Galilee has a better chance at... in contrast to the opulent language of the illumined mind (which, through its very richness, nevertheless conveys a luminous rhythm and a truth, perhaps less precisely connoted, but warmer). When Plotinus packed the entire cycle of human effort into one phrase – "A flight of the Alone to the Alone" – he used a highly intuitive language, as do the Upanishads. But this quality also signals the limits ...
... 436-7; emergence of Gnostic being, 437ff; current evolutionary crisis, 438; Mind of light, 439; a Manifesto for the Future, 440; tributes, 440; synthesis of West & East, 440-41; compared with Plato, Plotinus & others, 441-2; with Heidegger, 442; with Gurdjieff, 442-3; with Teilhard de Chardin, 443ff; Supermind & Omega Point, 444; Sachidananda and Cosmic Christ, 445; Vedanta & Christianity, 445; Vedantic... The, 443ff Phillips, Stephen, 32 Pillai, V.O. Chidambaram, 235, 266fn, 299, 300 Pinto "Udar", 579, 739 Piper, Raymond R, 20, 515 Plato, 48, 418, 441 Plotinus, 441 Poddar, Arabinda, 26fh Prasad, Narayan, 579 Prince of Edur, The, 119,120, 152,154-55 Prince of Mathura, The, 119 Pringle-Kennedy, Mrs. and Miss, 305 ...
... and he also makes interesting comparisons between Sri Aurobindo and Western thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Hartmann, Bergson, Whitehead and others. 64 Plato, like Sri Aurobindo, was a seer and a poet, but as a philosopher he was rather less consistent than the Indian thinker. Plotinus' double trinity is paralleled by Sri Aurobindo's double quartets—the upper and the lower hemispheres ...
... Page 24 Notes and References 1. "From my reading of Plotinus, it would seem that Monchanin errs (Mother India, December 1974, p. 924) when drawing a distinction between the systems of Plotinus and Spinoza as to the coincidence of the points of departure and arrival in the Eternal, the One. In Plotinus, the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction... Sri Aurobindo's Enlargement of Spiritual Metaphysics A LETTER Your little disquisition on Plotinus vis-a-vis Abbe Moncha-nin's article on Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is delightful. 1 Especially appealing to me is your statement that according to Plotinus "the original emanation of Nous from the One is not a temporal distinction (Ennead, V. I, 6th section), for they are... controlled corona of world-initiatives. A vision similar to Plotinus's is, I believe, behind Platonism, though Plato seems to reduce it more than Plotinus to Page 20 intellectual terms, except perhaps in the Symposium. Plotinus too perhaps loses the wholeness of the vision while putting it into a philosophical system. For the problem of the One and the Many appears to be worrying ...
... I always found him exceedingly dry. It is a purely mental philosophy, unlike Plato's. 9 October 1933 Plotinus I find Plotinus very interesting. Yes. Plotinus was not a mere philosopher,—his philosophy was founded on yogic experience and realisation. 11 October 1933 Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 171]: "Intelligence is the first divine emanation.... Creation is a fall, a ... intellect.... There is, at the bottom of all individual souls, but one single soul manifesting itself infinitely in different forms: the soul of the world." What does Plotinus mean by soul and intelligence in this passage? I think simply Plotinus in speaking of soul has made a jumble of vital ( prāna ), manas and soul (ψυχή)—while by intelligence he means buddhi (cosmic), but endows the buddhi with... speaking of the cosmic mind, I suppose. In these philosophies there is no distinction made between different grades of mind or between intellect and the consciousness beyond the intellectual. Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 173]: "The intelligence, too, is creative.... Its emanation or radiation is the soul.... The soul is not, like the intellect, endowed with immediate and complete intuition: ...
... college days; but now, half a century later, I am terribly disappointed. His discussion of time and eternity is wholly derived from that of Boethius; page after page in Life Divine is watered down Plotinus. His vision of History has the bookishness of Hegel's tidy schema, Spirit fulfilling its schedule of progress with no problem whatever. But history is fatefully open-ended, for man can abuse his freedom... is not spouting mere philosophy: he is putting in intellectual terms the insights brought him by Yogic realisations. The question of plagiarising an early Christian writer or profusely pouring out Plotinus-cum-water does not arise at all. Again, an acknowledged intellectual and literary master plus Yogi does not need to cast about for adequate language from past philosophers to couch his illuminations... was very far from being immersed in the Enneads. Furthermore, I begin to doubt not only whether Nair has read Sri Aurobindo enough but also whether he has even dived sufficiently into Boethius and Plotinus. Boethius expounds the "Blessedness" of a good life according to God's self-revelation as seen by him in the Christian Bible and glimpsed in Neoplatonism — a good life with its eye all the while on ...
... the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root consciousness-forms, rta cit, in Vedic terminology. They... and Mind, Mind into Overmind and Supermind. Now this sublimation is not simply a process of refinement or elimination, something in the nature of our old Indian nivrtti or pratyahara, or what Plotinus called epistrophe (a turning back, withdrawal or re-absorption) : it includes and is attended by the process of integration also. That is to say, as the lower rises into the higher, the lower does ...
... ss: its intuition and reason cannot be reconciled with each other". 72 Plotinus' double trinity of the Divine and of the Human principles is paralleled by Sri Aurobindo's double quartets, the upper and the lower hemispheres divided by a wall of obscuration: The central idea of the double world-order of both Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo is that the higher world sets the standard for the lower ...
... which were akin to Oriental Yogas and have followed too ways of the inner life which came to them from the East. Their non-Oriental nature did not stand in their way. The approach and experiences of Plotinus and the European mystics who derived from him were identical, as has been shown recently, with the approach and experiences of one type of Indian Yoga. Especially, since the introduction of Christianity ...
... Mind also has its own types of perfection and its own absolutes. What intrusion of Overmind or Supermind could produce philosophies more perfect in themselves than the systems of Shankara or Plato or Plotinus or Spinoza or Hegel, poetry superior to Homer's, Shakespeare's, Dante's or Valmiki's, music more superb than the music of Beethoven or Bach, sculpture greater than the statues of Phidias and Michael ...
... scientific ideas on plant-growth and form and on light and colour. These extremely valuable writings oh colour and light revolutionize the materialist Newtonian view, and derive ultimately I suppose from Plotinus; or at all events do correspond to a spiritual vision of a universe in which consciousness itself rather than 'matter' is the creative principle of all that is visible. Steiner painted many pictures ...
... All of them, therefore, are Nous - the consciousness whose multiple singlehood is the formative arche-type of things here. The apex of this consciousness is the Overmind. I cannot tell whether Plotinus had a glimpse of the Overmind: perhaps it was his glimpse of it that he put into the poetic account in his Enneads of the ecstatic interfusion of glorious God-forms in the spiritual world. But ...
... Whitman, Dr. J. Trevor, Dr. R.M. Bucke, of Raja Yoga as expounded by Swami Vivekananda, Al-Ghazzali, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, and some others such as Sufi Gulshan-Raz and Plotinus. See Appendix VI (p. 131) Page 6 HOME ...
... Those who understand Hitler ought to know that Hitler will agree to anything that suits him at the moment and afterwards swallow everything. PURANI (handing Sri Aurobindo Dean Inge's book on Plotinus): It seems Krishnaprem has said that Plotinus's Nous is the same as Supermind. Somebody from outside has asked if that is true. SRI AUROBINDO (after looking at a few pages): Inge takes Nous as ...
... As Dr. Inge has. pointed out, all the great mystics have been energetic and influential, and their business capacity is specially noted in a curiously large number of cases. For instance, Plotinus was often in request as a guardian and trustee; St. Bernard showed great gifts as an organiser; St. Teresa, as a founder of convents and administrator, gave evidence of extraordinary practical ability ...
... attracting from above and love awaking and responding from below and advancing towards union by a progressive ¹ The Mother in The Bulletin of physical Education—August 1953. ² According to Plotinus the Divine is never more itself than when it "empties itself" in self-sacrificing love. ³ Described in the Purusha-Sukta of The Rigveda. Page 332 self-giving—this is the hidden ...
... understand today will gradually become evident to us. And thus it is regarding the recon quest of self by the pure Being which projects itself in its apparent opposite—the flight of the One to the One of Plotinus, the adventure of Consciousness of Sri Aurobindo. And this is precisely that to which the world is now awakening, but so slowly, notwithstanding the acceleration of History, that it appears to ...
... considerable. Moreover, “their writings are positively loaded with references to the Vedas, the Upanishads, Taoism (Bohr made the yin-yang symbol part of his family crest), Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, virtually the entire pantheon of perennial philosophers.” 35 Consequently Wilber divides the 20th century physicists into two batches: the open-minded “mystics” ...
... 1 try to make my hie a submergence in them and an emergence from them. The submergence may be called my eternity and the emergence my time. The former gives a touch of what the Neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus described as "the flight of the alone to the Alone." The latter brings the feeling of what the Upanishads figure forth as the one Fire that has become many flames. We may speak of the submergence ...
... gist's clinic, while Shankara was almost a born monist of the Spirit. Their monism was indeed "bright pink" rather than an anaemic white and stood for energy instead of enervation. And what about Plotinus, the master of the "Alone"? The wise and peaceful figure that emerges from the Enneads and from the account of Porphyry is not in the least of a man becoming a mystic through loss of nerve or ...
... Hots de categorie 'The Eternal" "The Supreme" (used by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother) Shelley's "The One". "The Many" "The flight of the alone o the Alone" (after Plotinus) A-typical 'The Divine" (The Mother) "The Ineffable" - "the Inane" (Sri Aurobindo) "The Obscure and the Mysterious" (Amal's b ...
... lonely, but if that is our Divine Mother's Will you have to accept it as the best thing for you, no matter what the appearance. Whitehead once said, "Religion is what one does with one's loneliness." Plotinus much earlier framed the famous formula: "The flight of the alone to the Alone." So surely there is an inward-pulling and upward-pushing power in the state of loneliness. But in Aurobindonian terms ...
... imagination and language, we would be inclined to see conjured up, beyond any philosopher, some high figure of spiritual history - the Upani-shadic Yajnavalkya compassing the Self of selves, the Plotinus of "the flight of the alone to the Alone", the wide-searching Eckhart, the manifold adept Ramakrishna or, best of all, our own day's Master of the Integral Yoga that would divinise all earth-life: ...
... coincides (not in expression, it may be, but in substance) with the experience of hundreds of spiritual seekers in many paths and in all parts of the world since the days of the Upanishads—and of Plotinus and the Gnostics and Sufis—to the present time. It is hardly admissible then to put it aside as the thought of a tyro or beginner in spiritual knowledge making his first clumsy potshots at a solution ...
... Arts English, First Year, is called AE 1 — and all of you must be aware that the name of a great English spiritual poet was AE. Rather, it was his pen-name: George Russell, under the influence of Plotinus, Theosophy and his own visions, once signed an article with AEON. The printer somehow knocked out the last two letters. So the author was left with the first two. A lover of mystery, he gladly accepted ...
... me with its story of your progress from modern materialism and scientism, products of a passing phase, surface glimmers of time's flux, to the Eternity which the masters of insight like Plato and Plotinus and the adepts of the imagination like Blake and Yeats have felt in the depths of their being on the one hand and on the other in the urge of the endless that is the secret carried by the sweep of ...
... a sort of map of Paradise each carries within, together with the Mountain, the Four Rivers, the Gates of the Temple, and the inner light that comes from no sun or moon but from the Source itself. Plotinus sees 'Nature' as a projection of the soul itself made in order to contemplate itself. This in the West seems a very far-fetched notion but not 1 think in India. But if the Eternal India, the India ...
... intuition, there is in philosophy actual spiritual contact with the unknown, we often get the impression of a narrow emphasis. Buddha and Shankara Page 15 and Plotinus are powerful spiritualised intellects, yet their single-track extremism is apparent. Nirvana, the featureless Brahman, the absolute Alone are indeed grand and no Yoga can be complete without them ...
... condition of nothingness that is beyond all present construction, and that is the nothingness which contains everything. (Addressing Purani) Do you know anything about the Nous, the Divine Mind, of Plotinus? Krishnaprem appears to make the Supermind and the Nous the same. Nous seems to be Intelligence. PURANI: I do not know if Divine Mind would be the same as Supermind. SRI AUROBINDO: When ...
... were to be found among the builders of the Christian civilization. Plato and Pythagoras and Heraclitus and the initiates to the Orphic and the Eleusinian mysteries continued to live in and through Plotinus and Anselm and Paracelsus and the long line 'Of Christian savants and sages. The Middle Age had its own spiritual discoveries and achievements founded Page 150 on the ...
... Lone to the Lone THE quintessence of spirituality is said to consist in, as has been described in the famous phrase of the Alexandrine mystic philosopher Plotinus, the flight of the lone to the lone. God is a solitary and the other solitary is the soul: so when one solitary mingles with the supreme solitary, the result is utter solitariness, which is spirituality ...
... Persia, 240 Pharaohs, the, 239 Phidias, 220 Phoenicia, 219 Pisa, 322 Pisacha, 201, 234 Planck, Max, 356 Plato, 1l7, 150, 211, 219, 326 Plotinus, 150, 361 Poland, 72, 127 Pole, the, 304 Polonius, 187 Pope, 212 Pound, Ezra, 192 Pragmatism, 326 Prithwiraj, 90 Prometheus, 234 ...
... absolute dualism. Spirit is the principle of good while the body, like matter in general, is the principle of evil. In his 'nobly planned and profoundly excogitated system' of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus aimed to get beyond the dualism of the Neo-Pythagoreans on both metaphysical and ethical principles. But through a curious turn of logic he too was led to declare that the 'supersensual' part of ...
... one of the most potent and pertinent grounds for the disparagement and denigration of the physical body. In ancient Greece and Rome, in the Dionysian cult and in the Neo-Platonic philosophy of Plotinus, such mystical-psychical experiences as men obtained in rare moments of exaltation described as ekstasis led to the conviction that it is the body alone that is the villain of the piece obstructing ...
... entirely separated from himself, hears resound outside of him this voice and this echo: I am God: he has an eternal way of existing, and is no longer subject to death.'"20 In the vision of God, says Plotinus, "what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.... He who thus sees does not properly see, does not distinguish or imagine two things. He changes, he ceases to be himself ...
... Whitman, Dr. J. Trevor Dr. R.M. Bucke, of Raja Yoga as expounded by Swarai Vivekananda, AI-Ghazzali, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Saint Ignatius, and some others such as Sufi Gulshan-Raz and Plotinus. See Appendix VI (p. 131) But Yoga, as distinguished from religion, is primarily a śāstra and not a system of beliefs, ceremonies, rituals and a moral and spiritual discipline related to the ...
... the world of fundamental realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena ( ideai, nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous). These archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies, the root Page 19 consciousness-forms, rita chit, ...
... PANDAVAS, the, 76 Pani, the, 164 Pantheon, 299 Paris, 242, 287, 356, 376 Pashu, the, 80 Petrarch, 209 Pharaohs, the, 200 Pishacha, the, 80,213 Plato, 34, 120, 134, 178 Plotinus, 34, 40 Pondicherry, 17 Pradyurnana,44,207 Prudhomme, Sully, 320 Puranas , the, 46 Pyramid, the, 200 Pythagoras, 180 RACINE, 210 Raghus, the, 214 Rakshasas, 46 ...
... 92. ibid., p.917. 93. ICor, iii, 16. 94. Shao Yung (Tr. by H.A. Giles). 95. Tr. from the Flemish by Jane T. Stoddart. 96. A.H. Armstrong, Plotinus (1953), p. 131. 97. Charles Gore, The Philosophy of the Good Life,p. 215. 98. Surprised by Joy, pp. 221-2. Cf. Dadu the Indian mystic: "From separation I have come to Union ...
... Must rise beyond his nature, To the highest height of being... Through his soul will flow The light of heavenly truth And he in it shall vanish... 95 Another mystic, Plotinus, describes as follows his own experience: Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and I have entered into myself, going out from all other things. I have seen a beauty ...
... with such a resounding chorus of Page 17 fervid assent. It is true that some forms of spiritual culture were prevalent in the West in the times of Pythagoras and Plato, and that Plotinus and some of the Gnostics and Stoics were regular Yogis, as also some of the Neo-Platonists and Essences. Among the mediaeval mystics of Europe and the Manicheans of Persia, there was a systematic ...
... Zeus", is the entire material Nature which imprisons the soul until the Divine Consciousness descends and redeems it, and all Nature with it. The ancients certainly knew these deeper significances. Plotinus, for instance, says, "the soul descends so that the Divine Principle may follow and shine in the dark world of matter and redeem it." Persephone and her Mother are described as in essence for ever ...
... the pre-Christian Upanishadic seers, "All this is Brahman" or "Thou art That", the pre-Christian Gita's ringing formula about Krishna, "The Son of Vasudeva is the whole world", the post-Christian Plotinus's Upanishadic leap of the human soul into the World-Soul, the similar surge of the Persian and Arabian Sufis - all these are clear and concrete realisations, experimentally verified in a decisive way ...
... consequences of its mental totalitarianism, points to Aristotle's teacher, Plato (427-347 B.C.) as more properly its initiator. Though Plato was not unfamiliar with the Spirit, and in spite of Plotinus's 3n1 c. mystical reinterpretations of his ideas, the beginnings of a problematical relationship, symptomatic of mind's disorientation from Spirit, manifests itself in his works. Plato banishes the ...
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