The First Ennead...First Tractate:The Animate and the Man:
The First Ennead... Eighth Tractate: The Nature and Source of Evil
The First Ennead... Ninth Tractate: 'The
Reasoned Dismissal
AND TOWARDS the intellectual-principle what is our relation? By this I mean, not that faculty in the soul which is one of the emanations from the intellectual-principle, but the intellectual-principle itself [divine-mind].
This also we possess as the summit of our being. And we have it either as common to all or as our own immediate possession: or again we may possess it in both degrees, that is in common, since it is indivisible—one, everywhere and always its entire self—and severally in that each personality possesses it entire in the first- soul [ie in the intellectual as distinguished from the lower phase of the soul].
Hence we possess the ideal-forms also after two modes: In the soul, as it were unrolled and separate; in the intellectual- principle, concentrated, one.
And how do we possess the divinity?
In that the divinity is contained in the intellectual-principle and authentic-existence; and We come third in order after these two, for the We is constituted by a union of the supreme, the undivided soul—we read—and that soul which is divided among [living] bodies. For, note, we inevitably think of the soul, though one undivided in the all, as being present to bodies in division: In so far as any bodies are animates, the soul has given itself to each of the separate material masses; or rather it appears to be present in the bodies by the fact that it shines into them: It makes them living beings not by merging into body but by giving forth, without any change in itself, images or likenesses of itself like one face caught by many mirrors.
The first of these images is sense-perception seated in the couplement; and from this downwards all the successive images are to be recognized as phases of the soul in lessening succession from one another, until the series ends in the faculties of generation and growth and of all production of offspring—offspring efficient in its turn, in contradistinction to the engendering soul which [has no direct action within matter but] produces by mere inclination towards what it fashions.
9
THAT SOUL, then, in us, will in its nature stand apart from all that can cause any of the evils which man does or suffers; for all such evil, as we have seen, belongs only to the animate, the couplement.
But there is a difficulty in understanding how the soul can go guiltless if our mentation and reasoning are vested in it: For all this lower kind of knowledge is delusion and is the cause of much of what is evil.
When we have done evil it is because we have been worsted by our baser side—for a man is many—by desire or rage or some evil image: The misnamed reasoning that takes up with the false, in reality fancy, has not stayed for the judgement of the reasoning- principle: we have acted at the call of the less worthy, just as in matters of the sense-sphere we sometimes see falsely because we credit only the lower perception, that of the couplement, without applying the tests of the reasoning-faculty.
The intellectual-principle has held aloof from the act and so is guiltless; or, as we may state it, all depends on whether we ourselves have or have not put ourselves in touch with the intellectual- realm either in the intellectual-principle or within ourselves; for it is possible at once to possess and not to use.
Thus we have marked off what belongs to the couplement from what stands by itself: The one group has the character of body and never exists apart from body, while all that has no need of body for its manifestation belongs peculiarly to soul: And the understanding, as passing judgement on sense-impressions, is at the point of the vision of ideal-forms, seeing them as it were with an answering sensation (ie, with consciousness) this last is at any rate true of the understanding in the veritable soul. For understanding, the true, is the act of the intellections: In many of its manifestations it is the assimilation and reconciliation of the outer to the inner.
Thus in spite of all, the soul is at peace as to itself and within itself: All the changes and all the turmoil we experience are the issue of what is subjoined to the soul, and are, as have said, the states and experiences of this elusive "couplement."
10
IT WILL be objected, that if the soul constitutes the We [the personality] and We are subject to these states then the soul must be subject to them, and similarly that what We do must be done by the soul.
But it has been observed that the couplement, too—especially before our emancipation—is a member of this total We, and in fact what the body experiences we say We experience. This then covers two distinct notions; sometimes it includes the brute-part, sometimes it transcends the brute. The body is brute touched to life; the true man is the other, going pure of the body, natively endowed with the virtues which belong to the intellectual-activity, virtues whose seat is the separate soul, the soul which even in its dwelling here may be kept apart. [this soul constitutes the human being] for when it has wholly withdrawn, that other soul which is a radiation [or emanation] from it withdraws also, drawn after it.
Those virtues, on the other hand, which spring not from contemplative wisdom but from custom or practical discipline belong to the couplement: To the couplement, too, belong the vices; they are its repugnances, desires, sympathies.
And friendship?
This emotion belongs sometimes to the lower part, sometimes to the interior man.
http://oaks.nvg.org/enna.html *[visit link for eighth and ninth]
Namaste`A.
d.
experienced...
not unlike our minds...
Linear Mode
