Return to the One by Brian Hines Read Free Book Online Page A

“shelf space” in the world’s grand storehouse of spiritual options. When someone feels a strong attraction for one of these faiths he steps forward and buys into its beliefs. Or, as is becoming more and more common, he cobbles together theological bits and pieces from a variety of religious practices and forms his own unique faith: the Religion of Me.
    Since there is no objective proof that one religion or philosophy is truer than the others this sort of religiosity often is called a leap of faith. Yet it is more accurately described as a sideways step toward one set of spiritual dogmas and a commensurate distancing from all others. Such a movement is a matter of changing the shell of one’s beliefs, not the core of one’s being. Hence, conversion can occur almost instantly. Yesterday I was a non-believer, today a believer. Stepping from one set of thoughts to another isn’t difficult.
    And it does not get us very far. Plotinus, echoing the teachings of many other mystics, holds that spiritual reality lies on the other side of belief, reason, and sense perception. A person enters this reality by a leap like no other leap, a leap of the whole of his or her consciousness across the boundary that separates whatever can be named from the Nameless.
    Have faith in nothing
    T HE NAMELESS is the One, the source of names and forms. The source, teaches Plotinus, is completely separate from its products, in the same sense as consciousness is completely separate from thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. When we cease to think, feel, and sense, we still are, just as the One is. It isn’t anything particular, not even being, for to be is to be something, and the One is not any thing. Michael Sells says, “After speaking of absolute unity as that which is most powerful in an animal, a soul, or in the all, Plotinus writes of ‘the one’:”
But should we grasp the one of authentic beings, their principle, wellspring, and ‘dynamis’—will we then lose faith and consider it nothing? It is certainly nothing of the things of which it is the origin, being such, as it were, that nothing can be attributed to it, neither being, nor beings, nor life. It is beyond those. If then by withdrawing being you should grasp it, you will be brought into wonder [‘thauma’]. [III-8-10] 3
     
    Sells comments on this passage: “After contemplating the world view of his tradition, the mystic then withdraws being from the source. At this moment the soul ‘fears that there be nothing’ (VI-9-3)…. At this point Plotinus writes of not losing faith. This faith is not a faith in anything but a willingness to let go of being. Such a letting go results in wonderment (thauma). ” 4
    I’m struck by how Plotinus and St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, have almost exactly the same attitude toward faith. Many people would be surprised that a “pagan” Greek philosopher and a Catholic friar agree on anything, much less the nature of faith, but they do. Since they are mystics, the strongest bond between Plotinus and St. John of the Cross is not their theological or metaphysical beliefs but their conviction that God, the One, transcends any and all beliefs, including their own.
    In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, a writing about the soul’s ascent to union with God, St. John of the Cross speaks of the secret ladder by which the soul climbs higher:
The secret ladder represents faith, because all the rungs or articles of faith are secret to and hidden from both the senses and the intellect. Accordingly the soul lived in darkness, without the light of the senses and intellect, and went out beyond every natural and rational boundary to climb the divine ladder of faith that leads up to and penetrates the deep things of God.
… Consequently, a person who wants to arrive at union with the Supreme Repose and Good in this life must climb all the steps, which are considerations, forms, and concepts, and leave them behind, since they are