/lit/ - Literature

>>14410555
God does not allow permanent union [while in body].
It's definitional, categorical, the One is without body, so logically you can't be the One while in body. To be in union with the Good is to be everyone and everything and no one and no thing. Henosis is to be the very light of the One instead of an "Enlightened Eye" (beyond enlightenment of Nous and Knowledge), but the One is not even the light, not Beauty, not Truth, and not Proportion; yet he is all of these for it is the knowable One.

Even Shankara has the concept of "Jivanmukta", which implies something more of a Faith beyond knowledge that you are already there and have always been ("our" undescended Intellect and Soul) and upon our death the descended shall return to the eternal; this is exactly what Socrates was and talked about, and what Plotinus revealed how to be.
You say Shankara wrote "thousands of pages of how to": the entire Enneads is teaching how, every part of it participates in "how to ascend" since all acts and virtues and goods are inter-connected. And just as I said >>14409740 there's not one way to the Good and the best way is practicing all ways, being the meaning of Proportion and Beauty and Good. Something shankara didn't seem to grasp or at least most easterners only did "navel gazing" (as Anon aptly put it).
The obsession of seeking the One is to obsessively think it as other and different, it's impossible to force Henosis, you fall into it like sleep (except it is the opposite of sleep) and this is to converse with Zeus (shiva).

>Now if this is well said, it is also correct to defend the position that the One is all things. For the Unified of every plurality is a co-aggregate. [And if the Unified] is an all as undifferentiated, just as the plurality is an all as differentiated, and if prior to the unified of each thing, there is a one that is each thing, then as many things as the Unified is, so many things the One is. Indeed, the One is so many things because it has proceeded into so many things. Nor has the One descended into a one, but into a unified, nor has the Unified descended into a unified, but into a distinct totality, and that is obviously where we situate all things. But just as the circle and all the rays deriving from the center converge in the center, so in the Unifi ed is the entire multiplicity of distinction. And according to the same analogy, the center itself and the lines converging in the center and all things equally become single in the One. And in this way we say that all things are the One, and that the One is all things, and still more, because all things are in the One. And yet all things are not exactly the One, while that One by all means is all things.