kapoore said:
How does the One become the Many? The Neo-Platonists (Plotinus's tradition) have a graded movement from the One to the Many. The Gnostics...
I myself am Gnostic, and there is variety within that classification--into dualistic and unitary, for example. Anyway, Plato himself saw this as the interaction of the undivided, hence eternal, with the durationless present to produce that which is of finite duration (gotten in part from
The Republic, chapter 19). To this a 'Judeo-pagan' Gnostic of my stripe would add that the map of the span from eternal to durationless is the Kabbalistic Tree, or at least its equivalence in planetary 'spheres': 1) stellar energy (conserved, hence eternal), 2) great year, 3) Saturn, 4) Jupiter, 5) Mars, 6) the year, 7) Venus, 8) Mercury, 9) the month, 10) the day--today, in other words. (The planets beyond Saturn, invisible to the eye normally, are essentially counterweights, as their motion is retrograde relative to the solar system's
inertial frame, which revolves relative to the stars with a period between that of Saturn and Uranus.)
Moreover, there is the very
real tripartite division of a conscious self, based on Plato's analysis mentioned above: the knower (of the eternal), the thinker (about what is of finite duration), and the doer (who must act in the present instant). This of course leaves out body, soul,
and spirit, because they are of nature, not of self: the body is made of countless elemental units of matter, of cells, of tissues, of organs, of systems, and so on, while spirit and soul are the active and passive aspects or 'sides' of the unit that holds all these units into coherent shape-and-progression, a breathing soul or breath-form--the quintessence (of nature).
And as for mind, are there not several distinct 'minds', or sources of thought? There is the body itself (which houses the senses), meaning
its effect on the psyche or doer, a doer being distinct from the body in which it dwells. Then there is feeling, or that in the doer which expresses what comes from without--which
fully expressed is BEAUTY--and there is desire, or that in the doer which expresses what arises from within (which fully expressed is Power). Then there is conscience, or rightness--the GOOD--or that in the thinker that deals with what is without; and reason itself, that in the thinker that deals with what is within (or what has been
taken in). Then there is I-ness--as in "I know"--or that in the knower
on which TRUTH (what is eternal) stamps itself (as knowledge); and self-ness, that in the knower which stamps the self's
own existence
on TRUTH. Seven in all.
Some moderns have reduced perception to the mere sensual level, some to the mere rational level.
Too true.
My rationality only believes in cause and effect.
Yes, the mind of rightness is harsh in that respect and does not let us 'pass the buck', nor does reason accomplish anything without that limitation.
My intuition understands how to govern the appetites and the rationality.
You see, here we differ, for I would think of intuition as
being reason-combined-with-rightness, without whose guidance the doer would (and does, since it mostly ignores the thinker) flounder under the bombardment of the senses. For as Plato acknowledges (in
The Republic, ch. 19), the present in which the doer must act cannot be known or thought about (only that which has duration passing
through it can be thought about or known). The doer therefore needs guidance from its thinker and knower to act responsibly, whereas in us it usually follows sensation instead.
(By the way, the passage is usually translated as speaking of 'what exists, what exists and exists not, and what exists not', but from the context the meaning is, rather, 'what abides, what abides and abides not, and what abides not'.
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Warm regards back at ya (that is, returned in kind).
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