Categoria: Enéada I

THE SUPERIOR PRINCIPLE NOT ALWAYS UTILIZED. 11. But is the superior principle not “ours” also? Surely, but only when we are conscious thereof; for we do not always utilize our possessions. This utilization, however, takes place when we direct this middle part of our being towards either the upper or lower worlds, and when we…

13. And the principle that reasons out these matters? Is it We or the Soul? We, but by the Soul. But how “by the Soul”? Does this mean that the Soul reasons by possession (by contact with the matters of enquiry)? No; by the fact of being Soul. Its Act subsists without movement; or any…

12. But if Soul is sinless, how come the expiations? Here surely is a contradiction; on the one side the Soul is above all guilt; on the other, we hear of its sin, its purification, its expiation; it is doomed to the lower world, it passes from body to body. We may take either view…

11. In childhood the main activity is in the Couplement and there is but little irradiation from the higher principles of our being: but when these higher principles act but feebly or rarely upon us their action is directed towards the Supreme; they work upon us only when they stand at the mid-point. But does…

10. It will be objected, that if the Soul constitutes the We (the personality) and We are subject to these states then the Soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the Soul. But it has been observed that the Couplement, too- especially before our emancipation- is…

9. That Soul, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the Animate, the Couplement. But there is a difficulty in understanding how the Soul can go guiltless if…

8. And towards the Intellectual-Principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the Intellectual-Principle, but The Intellectual-Principle itself (Divine-Mind). This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have It either as common to all or as our…

7. The truth lies in the Consideration that the Couplement subsists by virtue of the Soul’s presence. This, however, is not to say that the Soul gives itself as it is in itself to form either the Couplement or the body. No; from the organized body and something else, let us say a light, which…

6. It may seem reasonable to lay down as a law that when any powers are contained by a recipient, every action or state expressive of them must be the action or state of that recipient, they themselves remaining unaffected as merely furnishing efficiency. But if this were so, then, since the Animate is the…

5. Now this Animate might be merely the body as having life: it might be the Couplement of Soul and body: it might be a third and different entity formed from both. The Soul in turn- apart from the nature of the Animate- must be either impassive, merely causing Sense-Perception in its yoke-fellow, or sympathetic;…

4. Let us consider, then, the hypothesis of a coalescence. Now if there is a coalescence, the lower is ennobled, the nobler degraded; the body is raised in the scale of being as made participant in life; the Soul, as associated with death and unreason, is brought lower. How can a lessening of the life-quality…

3. We may treat of the Soul as in the body- whether it be set above it or actually within it- since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that…

2. This first enquiry obliges us to consider at the outset the nature of the Soul – that is whether a distinction is to be made between Soul and Essential Soul (between an individual Soul and the Soul-Kind in itself).1 If such a distinction holds, then the Soul (in man) is some sort of a…

1. Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either…