/lit/ - Literature

The worldview of the ancients, sages, and mystics is therefore diametrically opposed to ours. For moderners, something exists only if it can be weighed, touched, measured, tasted, felt, smelt, heard, or the like. Anything else is held to either be an illusion, a figment of the imagination, or the like. But for the ancients, emotions and thoughts were just as “real” — no more nor less real — as the physical, sensate body and its sensations. We think, we feel, and these are no less real than our physical senses — hence, their recourse to the division of reality into different realms, a subtle psychic world just as there may be a causal abstract intellectual world, corresponding to the Forms of Plato, which both animate and manifest through the physical sensate world in the form of life itself.

As we today believe that somehow consciousness and life arose somehow from blind, inconscient matter, so, conversely, did the ancients believe that if life and consciousness are in us, they must therefore somehow be residing in and inherent in the nature of the universe itself, and therefore our own lives and consciousnesses have been derived from a greater source of consciousness and life. This cannot be “seen” as with the eyes or “proven” as in a laboratory, because the body of the One is everything seen, heard, felt, tasted, touched, experienced, felt, or thought about. It IS both what you are seeing and “where” you are seeing from, the seer, the seen, and the seeing. Hence, such a doctrine of non-duality and of monism cannot be “proved” or “disproven” in a lab, it is clearly not “strictly empirical,” but, for Plotinus and his like, can be intuited, known, meditated on, which is a recourse to higher faculties of cognition, a level of consciousness prior to and transcendent above dependence on the physical world and senses.

>We must close the eyes of the body, to open another vision, which indeed all possess, but very few employ.
—Plotinus, Ennead 1.6.8.25–26

A description of the emanation of the hypostasis of Soul from the hypostasis of Nous, corresponding to the mega-dump of info on ancient and various religious and occult conceptions of a distinction between the lower psychic/imaginative/subtle soul, and the higher intellectual spirit, Nous, causal body, or what-you-will:

>...just as the fire contains the latent heat which constitutes its essence (being), and also the heat that radiates from it outside. Nevertheless, the Soul does not entirely issue from within Intelligence [Nous]; [the Soul] does partly reside therein, but also forms (a nature) distinct therefrom.
—Plotinus, Ennead 5.1.3.9–12

For Plotinus, intuition and non-discursive thought is a higher faculty of the human being, a higher faculty of consciousness, residing in the Nous, than non-intuitive and discursive thought is (which is more analogous to the activity of the Soul).

>>21017966
I love Schopenhauer because he believed in ghosts, paranormal phenomena and esp. based Schopenhauer.

>>21008751
>the memes write themselves
The power of gnosis

Books on how to know your immortal soul?