Categoria: Tratado 6 (IV,8)

THE EXPERIENCE OF ECSTASY LEADS TO QUESTIONS. 1. On waking from the slumber of the body to return to myself, and on turning my attention from exterior things so as to concentrate it on myself, I often observe an alluring beauty, and I become conscious of an innate nobility. Then I live out a higher…

QUESTIONS RAISED BY PLATO’S THEORIES. 2. Plato’s theories about the soul lead us to ask how, in general, the soul has, by her nature, been led to enter into relations with the body. Other questions arise: What is the nature of the world where the soul lives thus, either voluntarily or necessarily, or in any…

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUMAN AND COSMIC INCARNATION. 3. Consider now the human soul which undergoes numberless ills while in the body, eking out a miserable existence, a prey to griefs, desires, fears, sufferings of all kinds, for whom the body is a tomb, and the sense-world a “cave” or “grotto.” This difference of opinions about the…

INCARNATE SOULS WEAKEN BECAUSE THEY CONTEMPLATE THE INDIVIDUAL. 4. There are individual souls which, in their conversion towards the principle from which they proceed, aspire to the intelligible world, and which also exercise their power on inferior things, just as light, which does not disdain to throw its rays down tu us though remaining suspended…

SOULS DESCENDING TO HELP ARE SENT BY GOD. 5. Without any inherent contradiction it may therefore be asserted either, that the souls are sowed into generation, that they descend here below for the perfection of the universe, or that they are shut up in a cavern as the result of a divine punishment, that their…

CONTINUOUS PROCESSION NECESSARY TO THE SUPREME. 6. Unity was not to exist alone; for if unity remained self-enclosed, all things would remain hidden in unity without having any form, and no beings would achieve existence. Consequently, even if constituted by beings born of unity, plurality would not exist, unless the inferior natures, by their rank…

6. Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried, shapeless within that unbroken whole: none of the real beings (of the Intellectual Kosmos) would exist if that unity remained at halt within itself: the plurality of these beings, offspring of the unity, could not exist without their own nexts taking…

4. So it is with the individual souls; the appetite for the divine Intellect urges them to return to their source, but they have, too, a power apt to administration in this lower sphere; they may be compared to the light attached upwards to the sun, but not grudging its presidency to what lies beneath…

2. Enquiring, then, of Plato as to our own soul, we find ourselves forced to enquire into the nature of soul in general – to discover what there can be in its character to bring it into partnership with body, and, again, what this kosmos must be in which, willing unwilling or in any way…