Trippy Old Plotinus...and Us

In last Tuesday’s group we continued our discussion of the difference between the enlivened world of tripping and the regular world we live in, the one where the walls don’t bend and carpet designs don’t very often tell us about the secrets of the universe. It’s not that I need the walls around me to be bending all the time, but it can be frustrating to know that there is so much more possible living to do in any moment, and now that I’m back here “on earth,” I can’t penetrate those interesting multi-dimensions. That’s sad, and we pondered how to make sense of it.

 Somewhere in all of the group discussion I realized that we generally come to psychedelics, let’s face it, for the sake of “me.” It might be for “my healing,” “my growth,” or even “my” loss of self. That’s fair enough, after all I am the one who is responsible for me, and it’s me who benefits if I take the trouble to do “inner work.” But one thing psychedelics may show us is how tenuous the “me-focus” can be, and we can wonder what would happen if we reverse the telescope of introspection and instead of inviting in the divine to help in our personal healing, offer ourselves in some kind of service to the divine?

 Here our thoughts may drift to our good old Third Century friend, Plotinus. He was a Neo-Platonist, writing his footnotes to Plato like everybody else, but inadvertently making up a new system of his own on the way. He saw all there is as coming from what he calls the One, or the Good, what we commonly call Source. This One, like the Tao of Taoism, is ineffable and indescribable because as the source of everything it is beyond all qualities and all description. As the Tao Te Ching says, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” I’m also thinking of the original Greek word for mystic, mustes, which means lips or eyes closed, suggesting that people who were initiated into the mystery cults, had been in the presence of something so enormous that silence was the only adequate response.

 A core idea of Plotinus was of Procession and Recession. Procession is the natural outflowing of energy from this One, this Source, radiating like a fountain that overflows with water, or as heat radiates from a star. That overflowing energy crystalizes into the Nous, the Divine Intelligence, who Plotinus tells us, is the most ultimately smart thing there can be, and might be equated to our normal idea of a God; from there the energy emanates down to Soul, first the World Soul and then our individual souls, and it finally lands in Matter, which, being so solid and dense, is as low as you can go. He puts it like this:

When there enters into it a glow from the Divine, the soul gathers strength, spreads true wings, and, however distracted by its proximate environment, speeds its buoyant way to something greater; ... its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the Giver of that love. ... Surely we need not wonder that It possesses the power to draw the soul to Itself, calling it back from every wandering to rest before It. From It came everything; nothing is mightier.

                                                                                                Ennead 6:22:23

Who knew they were thinking so hard way back in the Third Century? Once the divine energy has given all there is to give, the process of Recession begins. Recession is a complementary movement of energy back up the chain, from Matter through to Soul, from the individual soul to the World Soul, to the Divine Mind and then back into the One, the ineffable origin of being. The act of moving back up the chain of reality is an act of love, as the things of matter (like us) bring themselves to their true source. And the thought is, maybe that’s what we are here to do, join the awareness of the divine with our regular common awareness, whether we are watching the steam coming out from a kettle, or feeling the sensations of brushing our teeth. As William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

  One way of describing a trip is that it gives us a jumpstart in the process of Recession. During the trip that Default Mode Network we sometimes talk about is pretty much like a sedated guard dog; with it not chewing away at its favorite old bones, beliefs and stories, I may then encounter energies that – well, blow my mind, at least temporarily blasting away all my previous values and preoccupations. Here is Marguerite Porete, a Medieval mystic not on acid, in The Mirror of Simple Souls:  

Ah, sweetest, pure, divine Love, says this Soul, how sweet is this changing by which I am changed into the thing that I love better than I love myself! And I am so changed that I have therein lost my name for the sake of loving, I who can love so little; and I am changed into that which I love more than myself that is, into Love, for I love nothing but love.

And since this was around 1296, she couldn’t have been doing MDMA either. I wonder in this world of shopping carts, traffic jams and Zoom calls, if some people who have taken psychedelics, bufo especially, and found themselves gazing upon something so profound, indescribable, and ineffable, that they literally can’t recall the experience afterwards, if they, (as well as Marguerite) have been gazing on the One, upon Source. It would have been an experience so outside of experience that there would be no associations to link it to. Marguerite on the other hand, being more evolved than us, did bring back a report from that experience:  

If you properly realize your nothingness, you will do nothing, and this nothing will tell you everything. If you cannot properly appreciate your nothingness, the truth, then in truth you must do something, or risk losing what you have been given. If God has drawn you into his being, then you must remember what you were when he first made you, what you have been, are now and ever will be, except for those parts of you which are God in you.

Phew! You can’t say things lightened up at all between the Third and the Thirteenth Centuries. And if, in our own tiny way, we are moving our perspective out of the Me-centric and into the divine, then the value of tripping might be that we move this along by having a close encounter, a sort of contemplative worshipping. We are doing our bit in the process of Recession, of returning energy back to the Source, where it will probably feel most at home.

 Our modest contribution is still an act of worship if we intend it so, as we reach out with our poor hearts towards the Divine. Many people say things like, “I never was very spiritual before I took the psychedelics, but now I am.” And even here in the world of street lights, shopping carts and shoe adverts we can rethink our project from “self-development” to some version of worship or prayer, being confident that psychological me will be taken care of in this spiritual project. T.S. Eliot says:

 If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

 Eliot goes on to point out that the prayer he is talking about is not the prayer of formal religion or of asking for stuff from some imaginary Maker, but a gesture of the heart towards that energy which it may have been lucky enough to experience while tripping (Well fair enough, his poem doesn’t have the tripping part in it.) For the tripper it could be a prayer-based remembering of what happened during the trip, taking time out to attempt to reconnect with the divine.

 This makes me think of the book title, Eat, Pray, Love just the title, not so much the book. My task in life is to be an active portion of Matter remembering itself, participating in the process of Recession. That doesn’t need to supplant our self-help projects or our projects to help the world. It’s good surely to help ourselves and to help this sorry world take better care of itself and its children. Nor do I need to regret the more intimate contact with the divine that I may have had while I was tripping: my work is to move up the ladder of Recession, from wherever I am standing.  It’s just that now there can be a firm ground for all these enterprises to rest on: love and prayer. The eating part, I think we can take care of ourselves, and now that I have finished, that is exactly what I am going to do.