I am striving to give back the Divine in myself
to the Divine in the All. ~ Plotinus
I
Fallen from Solitary to solitary:
what was that first image
to stir your singular eye
from sleep of inchoate multiplicity,
a shoreline swept away into dark oceans,
never to return?
Facing a greater harmony,
the polyphony of movement
recollected in the mind’s ear,
beauty reflected herself in remote
music—reflected again in silence:
what kept calling you on?
No echo of your name—it was
beyond name: in the earth,
in the veins of the leaf,
in the raincloud, in the sun,
the light behind the light. One
glimpse of the insistent thread
gleaming in the labyrinthine world,
and you could not but follow, retrace
footsteps yours and not yours.
An odyssey eastward, then inward
and back again, a cartographer of the soul
and the Soul, you returned
with maps of kosmos and microkosmos,
the numinous vision:
not theory, but θεωρία.
II
Not the lotus, but its enfolding.
It mirrors the plenary world
within its own emptiness.
I will not speak the icon’s silence,
the hidden breath in flower and fruit:
the unseen radix.
But the root was a door, and the door
was a sun—and where is there not
this articulate luminescence,
each expressed word a single Word?
Upon its threshold, I felt a hunger
far older than an orphaned infant’s cry.
Not the lotus, but the dream of the lotus,
asleep in every hand. A pathway.
The North Star.
I will not offer an image of an image
of the imageless—the marble stone
masks the divine face beyond
and within every face: emerging
forth, will I learn at last to see
the transparency with its eyes?
hear the primeval wind with its ears?
speak the Logos with its tongue?
I have been a long time waiting.
Not the dream of the lotus, but
the perfect flame, perfectly still, a flower
completely and simply: lotus.
III
And yet we could not sustain
your intenser gaze, enticed by claims
of facsimiled truths—or, drowned in aporia.
Ascent was all: cut away
everything. Failing eyesight, feverish scribe
of fire and flux, the poem flowing
too nimbly now, almost indecipherable,
swifter than stuttering flesh can carry or speak:
you had been a long time waiting.
Leaving the icons of the temple behind,
the waking hour you sought was not
a final cadence: a doorway opened
to a familiar but blazing shore and you,
intoning and intoning the hymn, even
as the lyre strings snapped, useless:
the eye dazed by light scattered
over the ocean, light enfolded upward
as a holy offering, light rising,
rising from solitary to Solitary:
the sun’s radial beams unravelling, eyelid
and tripartate universe both flung apart,
past the penumbra, past
the blindness where no shadow stands,
past the irreducible mantra
eternally spoken from the mouth
of being’s beginning:
one one one one—
One.
Joshua Sellers
2011
Fullness, of course, is fitting and proper to what is one. Thus, unity, which is also being, coincides with maximumness, and if such unity is completely free from all relation and contraction, it is clear because it is absolute maximumness, nothing is opposed to it. Accordingly, the maximum is the absolute one that is all things, and all things are in this maximum, for it is the maximum.
Nicholas Cusanus, De docta ignorantia, chapter 2
The letter is a veil. The veil is a letter.
…
The letter does not know me.
What knows me is neither from the letter nor in the letter.
The letter speaks with the tongue of the letter.
The tongue has not witnessed me.
The letter has not known me.
…
What appears, appears to you
from the species of its fixed form.
Fixed knowledge
is fixed ignorance.
The letter does not enter presence.
The people of presence pass by the letter.
They do not stay.
…
The presence-chamber doors
are numerous as the doors of heaven and earth.
Muhammad ibn ‘bd al-Jabbar ibn al-Hasan an-Niffari, from The Book of Standings
havenharry asked: Hey again , sorry for bothering but I couldn't help myself but to ask you to tell me something more about yourself. You are very philosophycal, but also you've got this depth that is very intriguing.
No worries—it is never a bother at all! …I really tried to keep my response brief as possible, but I knew it would turn into this long-winded meandering thing (all off the cuff). But here goes:
I’m really just an autodidact with unfortunately little sense of discipline, so I am constantly having to rein in my interests in order to stay focussed. There’s simply too much out there that interests me. As I like to say, ‘Too many pies and not enough fingers!’
Over the years, I have at least been able to focus more on the things that matter most to me. But philosophy has always been the thing that has driven me more than anything else since I was very young (though I didn’t necessarily recognise that at the time). Certain poets I find expressing philosophical themes too that I value.
Many years ago, I pursued a degree in music composition, which I never completed (though music is the one luxury that I’m not sure I could do without). But I’ve only taken one introductory philosophy course around the same time. I used to be a voracious reader, though because of work, I am unable to devote the same amount of time to reading as I would like. But most of my education has been on my own (which means there are gaps to be sure—the perils of being an autodidact!).
In my pre-teen years, it was not philosophy that interested me, but astronomy. And seeing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series in 1981 at age 11 (and then reading the book) pushed me not into science, but philosophy. One of the central ideas Sagan addressed was a point of view that was clearly not anthropocentric: we are not the centre of the universe. And this has long been my chief philosophical objection to theism, and I think underlies my strong dislike of provincialism in any form (themes which are, incidentally, found in Stoic philosophy). From a more experiential point of view, I lived in Italy for three years when I was young (my dad was in the military) and I know this has also shaped my attitude toward provincialism—and during that time, my friends were from different parts of the world.
The basic common thread that has run through my life (though buried at a certain time in my life, only to be gradually recovered later) is the relation between the universal and the particular—but in a way that does not rely on anthropocentrism. I don’t know why this is so important to me, but it is something that has driven much of my thinking. The answer has changed over the years, or has become more nuanced in some cases—but the question has consistently been the same, though I haven’t always been able to articulate it clearly.
Even though I was raised a nominal Catholic (with two open-minded parents), I own thoughts on religious issues was largely agnostic. My agnostic tendency was only strengthened when we moved to northeast Louisiana, which is heavily Christian fundamentalist—in fact, before living there, I was not actually aware of the existence of it. I was 13 when we moved there in late 1983. The day we arrived in Monroe, the front page of the newspaper had an article about a local church burning Care Bears because… they were deemed ‘satanic.’ This simply blew my mind. I was approached frequently in school by fellow students trying to convert me, trying to sell their god to me, though I wanted to have nothing to do with any of them. This went on for about another six years.
Without getting into too long of a story, at age 19, in a fit of emotional insecurity, I sold myself out and was baptised into the heavily fundamentalist Church of Christ. During this time I dealt with a lot of cognitive dissonance, to say the least! And it only got worse: some Christian friends and I were basically told we were no longer welcome there—we had been involved in some of our own ‘Bible studies’ which proved to be even more fundamentalist than the Church of Christ, which is saying a lot! For a brief time we had a so-called ‘house church.’ What is worse, we ended up being involved (through literature, not directly) with the so-called ‘Christian Identity’ movement. All of this I am embarrassed and ashamed about now, but I admit it only so I can say: I intimately know the fundamentalist mindset and how it operates. To make things even more bizarre, I was interested in the writings of Ayn Rand (!!!)—and although she was an atheist, it was her two-dimensional epistemology that especially appealed to me (it does not strike me odd that some Christians, such as Paul Ryan, can at the same time like Ayn Rand).
In this kind of thinking, there is a sort of sickness at work fueled by insecurity and fear: thus the need for absolutist ideologies, a rigid epistemology, and a need to have absolute consistency at every point—everything is clear cut: ambiguity does not exist. And yet there were certain things that I could not accept, even as I tried to force myself into this mould. Part of this was experiential—I personally knew people that did not fit the two dimensional stereotypes that religious fundamentalism attempts to foist upon them. I had boxed myself into an ideological corner—no one had done this to me: I had done it to myself.
The ‘house church’ thankfully did not last, and gradually fell apart. Through a creative writing workshop I attended, I was introduced to Zen Buddhism, Wittgenstein and postmodernism which made me question the entire epistemological foundation of fundamentalism and of certain assumptions we commonly make about language. I was an agnostic again, but still leaning toward theism of a different kind, more of a kind of ontological principle than a personal god.
In 1995, I met a became dear friends with someone I like to refer to as a very unorthodox Greek Orthodox priest—and he introduced me to Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross and many other mystics (including some eastern mystics too). I had begun to call myself a Christian again, though with several footnotes and disclaimers. But I still encountered some cognitive dissonance, though nothing at all like my fundamentalist days. Though the problem for me now was especially historical: I had to gradually accept that, while I may have used Christian terminology, what I meant was very different from what actual Christians believed. I discovered this again and again (with disappointment) in the various churches that I would attend (though I still have a great deal of admiration for the Quakers).
For all my interest in mysticism, I myself had not experienced anything of the sort, until one day in February of 2001. It wasn’t anything spectacular or even really unusual—I can only clumsily describe it as a moment of peace where everything was precisely perfect just as it was: everything was pure IS. But the funny thing was there was no god in any of this. My experience was quite the opposite of the commonly cited theist experience—I had this sublime epiphany and it led me to realise that there was no god!
For the rest of the year I tried to come to terms with this experience, but I had come to the realisation that I was an atheist—though the ‘god’ I believed in in the mid and late 90s was hardly what most people would call ‘God.’ Since then, I explored existentialism further (I was already interested in it anyway), and a period of prolonged depression (for very different personal reasons). Much later I became interested in (Soto) Zen Buddhism for about a year, but ultimately found it unsuitable for myself as a practice—though there is much that is great in Buddhism, especially the Mahayana idea of ‘emptiness.’ What I found especially inspirational about it however was that it pointed in the direction of an anti-metaphysical philosophy—existence without any reference to any metaphysical foundation apart from existence itself.
With all this turning over in my mind, I began to formulate—but in my own words—this idea of what I call ‘the Whole’ and following the consequences of the idea. My interests came full circle around the globe to western philosophy again: I revisited Plotinus and finally got around to reading a few writings on Parmenides. Eventually, I returned to Stoicism (via Pierre Hadot’s writings) in greater depth, but not as just abstract philosophy, but as a way of shaping my life. Since then, and now in my early 40s, I have also revisited other old philosophical favourites of mine, but in a new light.
All this has come about slowly, with patience and with plenty of mistakes and missteps (and I still make plenty of them every day!). But isn’t it better to have our very own errors become our teachers than to live in an impermeable ideological shell? To me, there’s no greater hell than the one that we create for ourselves, within ourselves. We owe it to ourselves, the only life we have, to discover that inner necessity that drives us—whatever it may be. And yet, there is no point of arrival, where one can say ‘This is IT, I have found IT.’ There is no ‘it’ because self inquiry is a continual lifelong process and, personally, I find it far more rewarding than petty gods and narrow ideologies. What self inquiry really means is not just introspective navel gazing, but learning to embrace the entire universe, from which no one thing or person is separate—the universe expresses you, and everyone and everything, right now: one big THIS. I can’t imagine anything more sublime than that.
Plotinus (c. 204 - 270 CE)
“Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.” ~ Enneads, I.6
‘I am striving to give back the Divine in myself
to the Divine in the All.’ ~ Plotinus
I
Fallen from Solitary to solitary:
what was that first image
to stir your singular eye
from sleep of inchoate multiplicity,
a shoreline swept away into dark oceans,
never to return?
Facing a greater harmony,
the polyphony of movement
recollected in the mind’s ear,
beauty reflected herself in remote
music—reflected again in silence:
what kept calling you on?
No echo of your name—it was
beyond name: in the earth,
in the veins of the leaf,
in the raincloud, in the sun,
the light behind the light. One
glimpse of the insistent thread
gleaming in the labyrinthine world,
and you could not but follow, retrace
footsteps yours and not yours.
An odyssey eastward, then inward
and back again, a cartographer of the soul
and the Soul, you returned
with maps of kosmos and microkosmos,
the numinous vision:
not theory, but θεωρία.
II
Not the lotus, but its enfolding.
It mirrors the plenary world
within its own emptiness.
I will not speak the icon’s silence,
the hidden breath in flower and fruit:
the unseen radix.
But the root was a door, and the door
was a sun—and where is there not
this articulate luminescence,
each expressed word a single Word?
Upon its threshold, I felt a hunger
far older than an orphaned infant’s cry.
Not the lotus, but the dream of the lotus,
asleep in every hand. A pathway.
The North Star.
I will not offer an image of an image
of the imageless—the marble stone
masks the divine face beyond
and within every face: emerging
forth, will I learn at last to see
the transparency with its eyes?
hear the primeval wind with its ears?
speak the Logos with its tongue?
I have been a long time waiting.
Not the dream of the lotus, but
the perfect flame, perfectly still, a flower
completely and simply: lotus.
III
And yet we could not sustain
your intenser gaze, enticed by claims
of facsimiled truths—or, drowned in aporia.
Ascent was all: ‘cut away
everything.’ Failing eyesight, feverish scribe
of fire and flux, the poem flowing
too nimbly now, almost indecipherable,
swifter than stuttering flesh can carry or speak:
you had been a long time waiting.
Leaving the icons of the temple behind,
the waking hour you sought was not
a final cadence: a doorway opened
to a familiar but blazing shore and you,
intoning and intoning the hymn, even
as the lyre strings snapped, useless:
the eye dazed by light scattered
over the ocean, light enfolded upward
as a holy offering, light rising,
rising from solitary to Solitary:
the sun’s radial beams unravelling, eyelid
and tripartate universe both flung apart,
past the penumbra, past
the blindness where no shadow stands,
past the irreducible mantra
eternally spoken from the mouth
of being’s beginning:
one one one one—
One.
Joshua Sellers
19 November 2011
[Amelius] was a lover of sacrifices; he never missed the new-moon ceremonies, and he used to celebrate every festival in the cycle. One day, he wanted to take Plotinus along with him, but Plotinus said to him: ‘It is up to the gods to come to me, not up to me to go to them.’
Porphyry, The Life of Plotinus
Withdraw into yourself and look. And of you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, smooths there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity—when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step—you need a guide no longer—strain, and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brough an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sun-like, and never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.9 (translated by Stephen MacKenna)
CANTUS FIRMUS
An eternity before the rose and curious hands,
rain and ocean’s myriad rhythms, words and words,
the silence of mountains, the astonished eye—
an eternity after parched earth and parched breath,
the sun’s final brilliance and decay into shadow,
the forever unknown losses:
the choir of stars hum the one undying song,
an eternity heard once only—on the shore of whose ear?
And the night breeze brushed against my face.
~elegus
I rarely write poetry much these days, but this was one that hit me rather suddenly last year in a flash of inspiration that surprised me. The last time I wrote something this good was over ten years ago. At any rate, I am quite proud of it.
RETURN: AN ODE
‘I am striving to give back the Divine in myself
to the Divine in the All.’ ~ Plotinus
I
Fallen from Solitary to solitary:
what was that first image
to stir your singular eye
from sleep of inchoate multiplicity,
a shoreline swept away into dark oceans,
never to return?
Facing a greater harmony,
the polyphony of movement
recollected in the mind’s ear,
beauty reflected herself in remote
music—reflected again in silence:
what kept calling you on?
No echo of your name—it was
beyond name: in the earth,
in the veins of the leaf,
in the raincloud, in the sun,
the light behind the light. One
glimpse of the insistent thread
gleaming in the labyrinthine world,
and you could not but follow, retrace
footsteps yours and not yours.
An odyssey eastward, then inward
and back again, a cartographer of the soul
and the Soul, you returned
with maps of kosmos and microkosmos,
the numinous vision:
not theory, but θεωρία.
II
Not the lotus, but its enfolding.
It mirrors the plenary world
within its own emptiness.
I will not speak the icon’s silence,
the hidden breath in flower and fruit:
the unseen radix.
But the root was a door, and the door
was a sun—and where is there not
this articulate luminescence,
each expressed word a single Word?
Upon its threshold, I felt a hunger
far older than an orphaned infant’s cry.
Not the lotus, but the dream of the lotus,
asleep in every hand. A pathway.
The North Star.
I will not offer an image of an image
of the imageless—the marble stone
masks the divine face beyond
and within every face: emerging
forth, will I learn at last to see
the transparency with its eyes?
hear the primeval wind with its ears?
speak the Logos with its tongue?
I have been a long time waiting.
Not the dream of the lotus, but
the perfect flame, perfectly still, a flower
completely and simply: lotus.
III
And yet we could not sustain
your intenser gaze, enticed by claims
of facsimiled truths—or, drowned in aporia.
Ascent was all: Cut away
everything. Failing eyesight, feverish scribe
of fire and flux, the poem flowing
too nimbly now, almost indecipherable,
swifter than stuttering flesh can carry or speak:
you had been a long time waiting.
Leaving the icons of the temple behind,
the waking hour you sought was not
a final cadence: a doorway opened
to a familiar but blazing shore and you,
intoning and intoning the hymn, even
as the lyre strings snapped, useless:
the eye dazed by light scattered
over the ocean, light enfolded upward
as a holy offering, light rising,
rising from solitary to Solitary:
the sun’s radial beams unravelling, eyelid
and tripartate universe both flung apart,
past the penumbra, past
the blindness where no shadow stands,
past the irreducible mantra
eternally spoken from the mouth
of being’s beginning:
one one one one—
One.
~elegus
[I] was incapable of formulating my experience, but after the fact I felt that it might correspond to questions such as What am I? Why am I here? What is this world that I am in? I experienced a sentiment of strangeness, of astonishment, and of wonder at being there. At the same time I had the sentiment of being immersed in the world, of being a part of it, the world extending from the smallest blade of grass to the stars. This world was present to me, intensely present. Much later I would discover that this awareness of belonging to the Whole was what Romain Rolland called the “oceanic sentiment.” I believe that I have been a philosopher since that time, if by philosophy one means this awareness of existence, of being-in-the-world. At the same time I did not know how to formulate what I felt, but I experienced the need to write, and I remember very clearly that the first text I wrote was a sort of monologue in which Adam discovers his body and the world around him. From this moment on I have had the sentiment of being apart from others, for it did not seem possible that my friends or even my parents could imagine things of the kind. It was only much later that I realized that many people have analogous experiences, but do not speak of them.
I began to perceive the world in a new way… This experience has been the discovery for me of something overwhelming and fascinating that was absolutely not connected to Christian faith…
It was an experience that was entirely foreign to Christianity. This seemed much more essential, much more fundamental than the experience I could have in Christianity, in the liturgy, in the religious offices. Christianity seemed to be tied rather to everyday banality…
Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness
