I once looked upon the world with the light of my eyes; I have now perceived the One, the All. The warmth and light drawing me to itself, so that my spiritual eye sees that One point of being within myself.
There is no longing within me that approximates the call of my heart, the melody of All existence that hums and whispers to me; directing my path to the One.
Even as I live and breath, the One lives and breaths within me, through the loving presence within of my Mother, and the enfoldment of myself within my Father’s love, that is contained in All things.
Let All things; And especially, the Human, understand that they are One with the Everlasting Father.
Father, turn the Human, in this moment in time, through Your Light and Love, to restoration of your full presence upon earth.
Let a new age be born, now, in his moment, where your love envelops all, so that the Human can dwell together in shared caring and being; in a society that is centered on the One point that connects us with you. A place where empathy and love rule the minds and hearts of mankind. A world as envisioned and promised to those who struggle to unite with you and within you. Send the Avatar to awaken us and to lead us to a place of breathtaking beauty and prefect peace. Amen.
Free us from the madness of men controlled by Demons. Free us from those that are working for the destruction of the Human. Bind the depraved Humans that are vicious and filled with hate. Bring together those that are filled with your presence, to restore the world.
Let the hate and jealousy of men, melt from within their being, replaced by your love and light. Let thousands upon thousands of the Human lift up this prayer, and thereby usher in Your Kingdom on earth. And Your Kingdom in Heaven.
Return to the One, Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization was a fascinating and transcendent read from which I offer the following quotes:
“I travel upon the road of virtue; “This is also true as regards to the soul and God, but with a crucial difference; the One is already here, present as the essence of every person’s being…Thus the distance we must travel to return to God is precisely zero, no distance at all. It is travelling in time and space that take us away from our source. This is why the mystic path is traversed through stillness, not motion– through inward contemplation not outward perception.”
“When the spiritual quest is reduced to its essence, as Plotinus would have us do, we are left with a simple goal: reunion. Once we were with the One. Now we are not. To return to the One is to be reunited with our source, whom it is fitting to call our father.”
‘The soul then in her natural state is in love with God and wants to be united with him; it is like a noble love of a girl for her father, [VI-9-9]
“The crazy thing, of course, is that all this running around prevents us realizing that the One we’re looking for is right here, for He is the center of ourselves.”
‘A child, certainly, who is outside himself in madness will not know his father; but he who has learnt to know himself will know from whence he comes.’ [VI-9-7]
If anyone sees it, what passion will he feel, what longing in his desire to be united with it, what a shock of delight! [I-6-7]
“Spiritual vision is its own veracity. That is, , there is no external criterion in the spiritual world by which we can assess the truth or falsity of what is experienced. This is because the World of Forms is a one-many where all the separate forms are in the whole, and the whole is in each form. There is no place in the spiritual world where the soul can stand apart from what is perceived, since each individual soul is also a form.”
‘If you have become this, and seen it, and become pure and alone with yourself, with nothing now preventing you from becoming One in this way, and have nothing extraneous mixed within your self…if you see that this is what you have become, then you have become vision. Be confident in yourself: you have already ascended here and now, and no longer need someone to show you the way. Open your eyes and see.’ [I-6-9]
“Rather Plotinus says, when the soul is purified its seeing is identical to what is seen. To disbelieve in the sight of God at that point would be to disbelieve in our very seeing, consciousness itself, an impossibility.”
‘For one must come to the sight with the seeing power made akin and like what is seen.” (I-6-9)
“If we want to know God, then all we must do is develop the capacity to know as God knows.”
‘There one can see both him (God) and oneself as it is right to see: the self glorified, full of intelligible light–but rather itself pure light–weightless, floating free, having become–but rather, being– a god. [Enneads VI-9-9]
“Plotinus tells us that the means by which we know the creation must become the end we seek. Like a snake that swallows its own tail, the sage turns it attention back upon consciousness that usually attends to outer things and thoughts. Uniting within himself the knower and the known, the One is revealed as the ground of the sage’s own self…”
‘We must believe that we have seen him when, suddenly the soul is filled with light, for this light comes from Him and is identical with Him…This is the real goal for the soul; to touch and to behold this light itself, by means of itself. She does not wish to see it by means of some other light; what she wants to see is the light by means of which she is able to see.’ [V-3-17]
Suddenly the light burst forth, pure and alone. We wonder whence it came from: from the outside, or from the inside? Once it disappears, we say, ‘It was inside– and yet, no, it wasn’t inside.’ We must not try to learn whence it comes, for here there is no ‘whence.’ The light comes from nowhere, and it goes nowhere; it simply either appears or does not appear. That is why we must not chase after it, but quietly wait for it to appear, preparing ourselves to be spectators, as the eye waits for the rising sun.” {V-5-7, V-5-8}
‘Carried off, as it were, by he wave of the Spirit itself, lifted up high by it, as if it were swollen, ‘he suddenly saw, without seeing how.’ But the spectacle, filling the eye with light, did not cause some other objects be seen by its means; rather, what was seen was light itself. It is not that there were two things within it: on the one hand a visible object, on the other its light, nor was there the Spirit, and then what is thought by the Spirit; there is only dazzling light, which engenders all these things later on.’ Plotinus, The Enneads. [VI-7-36]
This is the Akashic realm, the place where our physical, human body connects to our ethereal body is an indescribable place, writhing with indescribable fire-like light. A place that holds all the forms; the place of the advent of all possible outcomes. The ground of our own very existence, with the elements we cast to create our world.
“Exoteric religion promises salvation to individual souls because it assumes that souls are individual, separate and distinct from the divinity that saves. Exoteric religions ask us to love God, or an incarnation of God, because it assumes that union with God is an impossibility: the best that can be done is to love as two, not merge as One.”
“Exoteric religion thus distrusts, and often actively tries to suppress, those who aspire to know God directly and completely through a knowledge in which there is little or no difference between the knower and the known, the individual soul and the universal spirit.”
“Meister Eckhart and Mansur al-Hallaj may be offered as two examples, among many, of the antipathy exoteric religion often bears to the mystic vision. Pope John XXII condemned as heresy various articles from the teaching of Eckhart, a thirteenth century Dominican theologian. This was one of the supposedly heretical statements:”
‘We are fully transformed and converted into God; in the same way as in the sacrament the bread is converted into the body of Christ, so I am converted into Him (God),so that He converts me into His Being as One, not as like. By the Living God it is true that there is no difference.‘
“Plotinus terms the essential nature of all things the One. Hence, if we want to know God most completely, we are advised to seek for the divine within–or more accurately, as– one’s own self. Porphyry, echoing Plotinus tells us that, ‘Indeed when one is present to oneself, he possesses the existence that is present everywhere; when one departs from himself, he also departs from it.’ Thus the universal is to be found in the personal, which admittedly is a seeming paradox.”
“However, the paradoxes in the Enneads are more accurately viewed as reflections of the unfathomable unity that lies beneath appearances. For example, in addition to saying that the universal is the most personal. Plotinus also tell us that detaching from people and things leads to the greatest intimacy; in the formless is found true substance; the highest wisdom comes from embracing ignorance; and God is found by traveling nowhere.”
“The spiritual path follows a course opposite to worldly ways. It means doing what comes unnaturally: Shutting down the senses, turning away from thoughts, distancing fom desires, abjuring actions, ignoring I-ness,”
“And then, seeing what happens. Wondrously, our own seeing will, with practice become the divine happening that we seek so deeply with all our heart, Meister Eckhart speaks of this great mystic truth: ‘The eye with which I see God is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge and one love.’ “
Porphyry was a disciple of Plotinus and wrote Against the Christians. It is sad that Christianity is so fearful of ideas, and so set against an individual’s own longing which leads to a direct seeking of a connection to God; to the One. All copies of Against the Christians were destroyed. How many people have been tortured and killed because they sought to find God outside the “church” or outside some religious tradition prescribed by their society. Their love and longing for God was beyond the strict catechism of the church, because it did not allow the individual to apprehend God, without intersession and control of other fallible humans, acting as the infallible arbiters of faith.
Let the cacophony of the Human rise and fall in your spiritual ears; Let it be a distant sound that has no control over your being. Free yourself from the words, catechisms and laws; and quietly wait for the approaching light within. Even the lazy assed religions, in which we trust in the salvation outside of ourselves; one must commit, one must make a decision of what to believe. One must trust and obey.
Rather, be still and know that I am God.
All of the quotes in this piece are from “Return to the One”, Brian Hines which I highly recommend. Amazon link is on the “Books” page.