Mead introduces a passage from On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead V.8) as Plotinus giving "his yoga-system, so to speak", and, he thinks, "the method of the school whereby" ecstasis was reached. The word is Mead's, borrowed from India through his theosophical vocabulary. What follows is an exercise of imagination: picture the cosmos as one transparent sphere, strip it of mass and place, and pray that its maker come. The exercise aims at a doctrine, and Taylor's Select Works on this shelf quotes it from an earlier chapter of the same treatise: in the intelligible world all things are transparent to one another, and each star is the sun and all the stars. Read together, the two books give the method and the vision it serves.
Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. I — G. R. S. Mead (1906)
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" It probably also imparts the preliminary teaching to the Servant of God,3 that if he cannot be worthy of Him who made the cosmos, he should nevertheless without ceasing strive to be worthy of that cosmos; for when he has [once] been clothed with its likeness,4 he is bound forthwith, by carrying about the image of the model 5 in his head, of his own self to change himself as though it were from man into the nature of the cosmos, and, if we ought to say so 6 — nay, he who speaks on truth ought to speak truth ! — be [himself] a little cosmos." 7
THE YOGA OF PLOTINUS
With these most instructive indications we may compare the intensely interesting passage of Plotinus in his essay " On Intelligible Beauty," where he gives his yoga-system, so to speak. It is perhaps the most important passage that has come down to us from the corypheeus of Later Platonism, giving, as it does, in every probability, the method of the school whereby ecstasis was attained.
1 irapa.K\-frrcf — as paraclete, or intercessor, or defender (a term of the law courts), or comforter.
2 a.(i.vi}ffTfiatr — lit., amnesty, or forgetfulness of wrong.
3 rbv TOV 6tov dtpaTrtvT-fiv — the Therapeut.
4 The dress of the High Priest, then, symbolised the cosmos — the elements, etc. May we deduce from this that in one of the Therapeut initiations the approyed candidate was clothed in such a symbolic robe ?
6 Sc. the Logos as cosmos.
6 Signifying a religious scruple as referring to a matter of initiation.
7 De Vii. Mos., iii. § 14 ; M. ii. 155, P. 673 (Hi. iv. 212, 213).
"Let us, then, form a mental image of this cosmos with each of its parts remaining what it is, and yet interpenetrating one another, [imagining] them all together into one as much as we possibly can, — so that whatsoever one comes first into the mind as the ' one ' (as for instance the outer sphere), there immediately follows also the sight of the semblance of the sun, and together with it that of the other stars,1 and the earth, and sea, and all things living, as though in [one] transparent sphere, — in fine, as though all things could be seen in it.
" Let there, then, be in the soul some semblance of a sphere of light [transparent], having all things in it, whether moving or still, or some of them moving and others still.
"And, holding this [sphere] in the mind, conceive in thy self another [sphere], removing [from it all idea of] mass; take from it also [the idea of] space, and the phantom of matter in thy mind ; and do not try to image another sphere [merely] less in bulk than the former.
"Then invoking God who hath made [that true sphere] of which thou holdest the phantom [in thy mind], pray that He may come.
" And may He come with his own cosmos,2 with all the Gods therein — He being one and all, and each one all, united into one, yet different in their powers, and yet, in that one [power] of multitude all one.
" Nay, rather the One God is all [the Gods] for that He falleth not short [of Himself] though all of them are [from Him] ; [and] they are all together, yet each again apart in [some kind of] an unextended state, possessing no form perceptible to sense.
1 Presumably the seven " planetary spheres " of " difference,"
as set forth in Plato's Timceus.
3 Sc. the intelligible or spiritual world-order.
" For, otherwise, one would be in one place, another in another, and [each] be ' each/ and not ' all ' in itself, without parts other from the others and [other] from itself.
"Nor is each whole a power divided and proportioned according to a measurement of parts ; but this [whole] is the all, all power, extending infinitely and infinitely powerful; — nay, so vast is that [divine world-order1], that even its ' parts ' are infinite." 2
THE EACE OF GOD
But to return to Philo. The rational soul or mind of man is potentially the Intelligible Cosmos or Logos ; thus he writes :
"The great Moses did not call the species of the rational soul by a name resembling any one of the things created, but he called it the image of the Divine and Invisible, deeming it a true [image] brought into being and impressed with the soul of God, of which the Signet is the Eternal Eeason (Logos)." 3
All of which the disciplined soul shall realise in himself. Of such a man Abraham is a type, for :