From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Aug 21 2004 - 23:47:02 BST
Scott, Paul and all:
Scott Roberts said:
Plotinus says that Intellect DOES guide everything, while Pirsig is saying
that it doesn't guide evolution.
dmb says:
Again, you're confusing labels with contents. They share the same view even
if they use different words to describe it. Concluding his description of
Plotinus' view, Bruno Borchert writes...
"Plotinus was fond of using the illustraton of the midpoint. Consider a
universe with the Sun at its center, and elinimate the Sun while kepping the
light-source. Each being, including each man and women, is a universe of
this sort. The midpoint in each thing is the same creative Spirit.
Everything flows from this Spirit and everything has a tendency to become
one with the One again. This tendency is a cosmic stream, an impulse, a
cosmic eros, which Plotinus calls insight. Thus, for him, mystical insight
is not something that has to be bestowed, it is a discovery of what
everything is. It is not an intellectual pursuit, but obedience to the
deepest law of nature: an ardent desire to be at one with existence and so
to become complete."
dmb continues:
The "creative Spirit" described here is what Pirsig calls DQ. Its the cosmic
stream out of which all things flow and toward which all things strive. Its
this mystical kind of evolutionary view that they share, and is not to be
confused with Darwinism. Plotinus' cosmic eros is what guides evolution, and
that's miles away from Pirsig's intellectual level of static qualtiy. Bruno
Borchert even takes the time to translate Plotinus' ancient terms in a
related case, one that express one of Plotinus' cental concerns. Plotinus
puts it something like this...
"Often when I awake from the body to myself and step from otherness into
myself, I behold a most wondrous beauty. It is then that I believe most
strongly in my belonging to a higher destiny... I don't know how it can be
that the soul once got into my body, considering what the soul is in itself,
as it has now revealed itself to me even though I am in the body."
Borchet explains...
"We think of it as the connection between mystical self-awareness and the
self-consciousness of everday life, between the 'true I' and the ego, but
Plotinus did not have this terminology at his disposal."
dmb says:
Plotinus speaks of body and soul, but thanks to guys like Bruno we can see
that Plotinus refers to the distinction between the static social and
intellect patterns that make up the ego self and the Dynamic reality
revealed in a mystical experience. All this talk of spirit, body and soul
can give one the false impression that is bible-babble or worse, but Wilber
defends Plotinus's heirarchical system as being based on experience, not
faith...
"Scholars usually take Plotinus's system to be primarily a form of
philosophy of 'metaphysics': the various levels, particularly the higher
ones, are imagined to be some sort of theoretical contructs that are
deduced, logically or postulated, speculatively, to account for existence
and manifestation. But in fact these systems are, through and through, from
top to bottom, the results of actual comtemplative apprehensions and direct
developmental phenomenolgy. The higher levels of these systems connot be
experienced or deduced RATIONALLY, and nobody from Plotinus to Aurobindo
thinks they can. However, AFTER THE FACT, of direct and repeated
experiential disclosures, they can be rationall reconstructed and presented
as a 'system'. But the 'system', so called, has been discovered, not
deduced, and checked against direct experience in a community of the
like-minded and like-spirited. (Its no accident that Inge refers to
Plotinus's spiritality as being based on 'experimental verification'. -
'faith begins as an experiement and ends as an experience.) Not a single
component of these systems is hidden to experience or nestled safely away in
a 'metaphysical' domain that cannot be checked cognitively with the
appropriate tools... In short, they follow all three strands of valid
knowledge accumulation - and one can 'dismiss' these higher levels of
development only on the same grounds that the Churchmen refused to look
through Galileo's telescope; dogmatic stubbornness tells them that there's
nothing to see." Ken Wilber
Thanks,
dmb
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