HinesSight

My "Return to the One" book gets a pleasing recommendation

I don't often plug my book about Plotinus, the 3nd century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic. Return to the One continues to have slow but steady sales, with good reader reviews on Amazon. 

Recently, though, my book got a pleasing recommendation from Christine McGinley, who founded a small book publishing company called Gleam of Light Press. Here's the email message I got from her.

Dear Brian, 

We want to let you know that the launch of Gleam of Light’s “Other Great Finds” is now up on the website: https://www.gleamoflightpress.com/ and we are pleased and proud to have Return to the One among our first offerings. 

One of the many things Emerson and the Transcendentalists have concretized for us is the recognition of intrinsic rewards as the greatest of riches. Please know that among the great rewards this project has yielded is the response from the authors and publishers involved – people who also appreciate intrinsic rewards.

We look forward to sharing many more great finds as we move forward slowly and thoughtfully.

Thank you so much for your graciousness and support.

Very best regards,  
Christine Mary McGinley

Gleam of Light Press has a web page called "Other Great Finds." Return to the One is in some excellent company there.

I enjoyed seeing my book's cover one row down from Emerson's Essays and Walden. Not that I in any way compare myself to Emerson and Thoreau. I'm just pleased to be on the same web page as them.

This is how Gleam of Light Press describes Return to the One.

Plotinus, the third-century Greek philosopher and mystic, considered himself a devoted follower of Plato. He has since been recognized as the ultimate Platonist and the embodiment of hundreds of years of Greek thought.

As scholars have pointed out, Plotinus shed new light on Plato’s philosophy minus the political and social elements. In other words, Plotinus dealt with the inner life, the life of the soul, and gave little attention to the worldly. This in itself is most telling of Plotinus’s philosophy, which many have described as an expansion of Plato’s mysticism.

As Brian Hines describes it, “Plotinus taught that no matter what we’re doing with our lives, it’s all pretty much worthless if we’re not yet in touch with our genuine beings.” And being in touch with our genuine beings has nothing to do with our outward identities or even the knowledge we accumulate over our lifetime. It has to do with the attention we give to the attainment of inner wisdom.

Plotinus believed that all of the urges we experience as human beings – to love, to create, to be moral – even to find our way as spiritual beings – are manifestations of the same primal yearning to “return to the One” – to be reunited with our true source, the source of all.

As Hines makes clear, Plotinus’s philosophy, which was a germinating force in major world religions, was in perfect alignment with the original root meaning of “religion”– religare – “to bind back to God.”

For those who wish to understand the spiritual teachings of Plotinus, Brian Hines’s Return to the One makes the “mystic Plato” thoroughly accessible. He explains Plotinus’s ideas about the nature of spirit, about the soul as the essence of identity, about the power of a contemplative life.

He also sheds light on the enormous role Plotinus and Greek philosophy have played in the formation of religious and spiritual thought throughout the world. He even explains why The Enneads, the writings Plotinus left behind, are impenetrable for those of us who have not spent years in deep study.

Plotinus wrote solely for his inner circle of disciples who were already deeply versed in his philosophy. He did not anticipate that one of those students, Porphyry, would one day publish The Enneads in their raw, unedited form.

Return to the One is a complete and inspiring introduction to Plotinus. One comes away from it with a deep sense of Plotinus’s philosophy, his unique presence in the evolution of spiritual thought, and the great value of his ideas for every seeker of wisdom.

The Gleam of Light Team

Return to the One
Brian Hines
2004, Adrasteia Publishing

Anxiously analyzing Amazon’s text stats

Just what I didn’t need the first “work” (using that term in a writer’s sense, extremely loosely) day after a relaxing vacation in Maui. In the course of checking on my book’s miniscule sales status, I discovered that the geniuses at Amazon.com have added some new features to their already filled-to-the-gills web site that can make an author anxious:

Readability statistics for books included in their Search Inside the Book program (where authors/publishers send Amazon a book to be scanned, after which every darn word can be searched for and sample pages perused). Plus a concordance of the 100 most frequently used words in a book. And a statistically improbable phrases feature helpfully described by Amazon in a pop-up window:

“Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or ‘SIPs’, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.”

I was thrilled to see that “Return to the One” garnered five SIPS: mystic philosophy, mystic philosopher, intuitive intelligence, first emanation, inward contemplation. I would have been disappointed if there weren’t any interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases in my book.

I also enjoyed looking at the graphically enhanced concordance (elsewhere on the page linked above). Of the 100 most common words in a book, Amazon apparently puts the most common of the common in a larger, bolder font. So I could quickly see that my book talked a lot about soul, Plotinus, spirit, and spiritual—which is absolutely true.

It wasn’t quite as much fun to anxiously analyze the readability statistics. At first I fantasized that my score of 14.6 on the Fog Index sounded admirably low. But then I saw that 7-8 is considered ideal, and anything over 12 means the book is difficult to read. OK, I’ll admit to “Return to the One” being more or less guilty as charged.

Yet let’s see the developer of the Fog Index write a really easy to read book about one of the densest and most profound philosophers of all time. (Oops, make that “mystic philosopher”—might as well use my special Statistically Improbable Phrases as much as I can.) So I decided to check out some of the related competition, a few of the Books on Related Topics that Amazon lists on my book’s page.

Yeah, baby. Let’s go head to head with Pierre Hadot’s “Plotinus or the simplicity of vision,” which is one of the most popular (in the sense of both best-selling and easy to read) books about this Greek philosopher.

Fog Index: Hines scores 14.6 and Hadot 17.5. Yay, a point for Hines!

Flesch Index (90-100 appropriate for 5th-6th graders, 0-30 means you need a college degree to understand the book): Hines scores 51.5 and Hadot 44.0. Boo, a point for Hadot.

We’ve got a tie, one point each. It all comes down to the Flesch-Kincaid Index, a refinement of the Flesch Index that relates the score to a U.S. grade level. You would think that Hadot would win out again here, but no…

Flesch-Kincaid Index: Hines scores 11.5 and Hadot 14.2. Yay, another point for Hines! He wins 2-1! If you just made it halfway through your senior year in high school, you can still enjoy “Return to the One”—no need to plow onward into the junior year of college just to be able to understand Hadot’s book.

Plus, take a look at Amazon’s Fun Stats: with my book you get a whopping 10,324 words per dollar; with Hadot’s book you just get a measly 2,755. Where can you get 10,324 of anything for just a buck? And here you get 10,324 words of profound mystic philosophy for your $1 (to work in another SIP; by the way, Hadot only managed to come up with two SIPS, “total presence” and “our true self”; you get five in my book.

Sure, you could get your philosophy from the “Tao of Pooh” and only need a 6th grade education to understand it. But come on: the concordance shows that you’re going to read “Pooh said” over and over and over. For about $4 more you can get almost 100,000 additional words in “Return to the One” and learn about a mystic philosopher who wrote that the nature of God, the One, can’t begin to be expressed in language.

To get at the root of that paradox you’re going to have to buy the book.

Ranting reaps a review

Proving either that ranting results in a rapid response from the cosmos, or, more likely, that magical thinking is alive and well in my twisted mind, after yesterday’s posting I was pleased to find an email from the Radical Academy waiting for me when I turned on my computer this morning. My book had been reviewed!

My fingers were trembling slightly as I clicked on the link to Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty’s review. For while I have been eager to have “Return to the One” reviewed, naturally I was envisioning positivity at the end of the Review Rainbow, not negativity. Thankfully, a quick read through Dr. Dolhenty’s thoughtful analysis of my book about Plotinus allayed my anxieties.

He ends with these words: I highly recommend "Return to the One" to all those interested in the philosophy of Plotinus, the general history of Western philosophy, religious philosophy, or mystical philosophy. The subject is interesting and important and Brian Hines' prose is crisp, concise, and easily understood.

Well, I may have to revise my potential (and so far utterly unrealized) sales projections. As noted in the posting below, I’ve been considering that this book would appeal to enthusiasts of mysticism and Greek Philosophy. But, hey, if we open the door to “the general history of Western philosophy” and “religious philosophy,” a lot more readers could enter in.

The Radical Academy is an interesting website. On the home page it says, We discuss traditional philosophical, moral, and religious questions; contemporary political, social, and cultural problems and policies; current scientific and technological issues and speculations; challenges to the "conventional" wisdom, "popular" ideologies, and "accepted" paradigms of our culture; and the application of commonsense realistic principles to all human affairs.

Dr. Dolhenty lives in Port Orford, so the Radical Academy has Oregon roots. He is President and Webmaster of the Academy and its parent organization, the Center for Applied Philosophy.

A lot of people would consider a Center for Applied Philosophy about as useless an enterprise as you could think of, especially since it has a significant emphasis on classic Western philosophers. And a lot of people would be mistaken.

I’ve been re-reading what Thoreau has to say on this subject in his “Reading” chapter in Walden. Maybe one day the New Age Retailer reviewer who declined to write a review of my book because it was “not relevant to today’s issues” will read Walden’s words and change his or her mind:

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, because it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

…I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him, --my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are under-bred and low-lived and illiterate.

…How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book. The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhat uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Since “Return to the One” was published I’ve been told by several people, “I’ve started your book, but I haven’t been able to get past the opening chapters. It’s heavy.” Well, yes, it is. And also exceedingly light if you allow yourself to soar with Plotinus’s spiritual vision. At the risk of sounding like George W. Bush, I’ll say that “Reading a classic philosopher is hard work. You have to be steadfast.”

Thoreau: To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

I get an exclusive interview with myself

It’s been three months since my non-fiction book about Plotinus, a 3rd century Greek philosopher, was published. So I thought I’d catch up with myself and provide an exclusive update to my HinesSight weblog readership about what is happening with “Return to the One.” I found Brian outside, enjoying an unusually warm October Oregon day on his deck.

Me: Thanks for taking the time for this interview.

Brian: No problem. I’ve managed to fit you in between reading the Oregonian sports page and taking my Sunday afternoon nap. Always got time for someone I’m so close to and admire so much. Fire away.

Me: Well, let’s start with how book sales are going. Are they meeting your expectations?

Brian: I’ll put it this way. “Return to the One” is a wonderfully-written, extensively-researched, skillfully-edited book about a philosopher who is recognized as one of the greatest mystics and metaphysical thinkers in Western history. My book is inspiring, profound, and easier to read than any other book about Plotinus. It describes a highly persuasive, scientifically compatible, non-religious system that is as close to a universal spirituality as you’ll find anywhere.

Me: So, book sales must be…

Brian: Absolutely awful, naturally. The book is staying on the downhill side of Amazon’s million ranking, but not by much. Embarrassingly, according to Amazon my out-of-print book, “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” is selling better than “Return to the One.” And I note that Mitch Albom’s “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” is #24, while my book is, well, it’s too depressing to say. That’s one difference between the Albom book and my book. Another difference is that I can pretty much guarantee that none of us really is going to meet five people in heaven, while I am quite confident that we are indeed going to encounter the One after death, because the One is what is really real.

Me: Are you surprised by how poorly your book is selling?

Brian: No. As I say in the book, most people don’t want to know the truth about what lies beyond the world that we know now. They want to remain with their own comfortable beliefs about what happens after death, what “heaven” and “God” are like, all that stuff. So religious writings that reinforce existing beliefs naturally are going to be more popular than mystical writings that say, “You’ve got to find out the truth for yourself.”

My intuitive pre-publication projection was that maybe 5% of readers are interested in mysticism, and maybe 1% in Greek philosophy. Since my book is billed on the back cover as “Greek Philosophy/Mysticism,” I multiplied 100 million potential readers by 5% and got 5 million. Then I multiplied 5 million by 1% and got 50,000 possible sales to aficionados of mysticism and Greek philosophy. But somewhere along the mathematical line I must have omitted a zero multiplicative term, because zero is much closer to actual sales than 50,000.

Me: How much publicity has the book gotten? Maybe that is the problem.

Brian: “Maybe”? For sure. The publisher and I have sent pre-and-post publication copies out to lots of reviewers. So far, nada, nothing. I do feel, however, that I’m able to track the review copies through used bookstores that have “Return to the One” for sale. For example, if I send a book to a reviewer with an address on Broadway in New York City, a few weeks later a used book will pop up for sale—guess where!—at a bookstore near Broadway in New York. I like to fantasize that the clerk from the New York Times Book Review glances at my book before she plops it down on the store’s used book buying desk and says to herself, “This looks pretty interesting.”

Me: It doesn’t sound like reviewers have been very kind to you.

Brian: They haven’t been kind, and they haven’t been unkind. The nastiest thing about book reviewers is that often you don’t even get a rejection letter. They just ignore you, which is the cruelest cut of all. I did hear back from the “New Age Retailer” folks, though. They said in an email: “This is to let you know the reviewer who read ‘Return to the One’ by Brian Hines decided not to review the book. He found the book a bit dry, not relevant to today's issues. I regret to say we will not publish a review on this title.” I loved the “not relevant to today’s issues” comment. Hey! Understanding the nature of reality is relevant to today’s issues, New Age Retailer!

Me: You seem bitter. Does it bother you that reviewers aren’t giving your book the attention you feel it deserves?

Brian: No, not exactly. It bothers me that reviewers and publishers didn’t give my book the attention it deserved. If I had been able to get “Return to the One” published by a more mainstream publisher, maybe my sales wouldn’t be languishing. But I’m not alone in having such a “are all you guys idiots?” attitude toward book publishers. A friend recently turned me on to a great web site by Ashland author Gerard Jones. It’s amazing. And often hilarious. He includes actual email correspondence between he and countless agents and publishers. This is one of the publisher pages. Scroll down and you’ll have some good laughs, especially if you’re a writer. Take a look at his agent pages and you’ll learn why it’s so important for a writer to have a good vocabulary: you need to have a wide variety of swear words at your command to be able to respond appropriately to the fools who, sadly, so often end up evaluating book proposals at publishing houses.

Well, it’s almost nap time.

Me: OK. Let’s end with a quick peek at your next book project.

Brian: Given my experience so far with “Return to the One” I’m strongly leaning toward something with more popular appeal. “The Five Pets You Will Meet in Heaven” is my working title. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Plotinus and me: Spirituality is seeing, not believing

One of the worst things about writing is that your thoughts are visible, always to yourself and often to others. This also is one of the best things about writing. Worst, best? To me it depends on how honest my writing is, and how well my words comport with my actions.

I hate to re-read something I’ve written and realize that I don’t believe my own words. Yet, even if I’ve written something true to my beliefs, it is painful to read if I’m not acting as if I believe my purported beliefs. Is there anything worse than hypocrisy? Well, a root canal comes to mind.

But physical pain is direct and true. The mental pain of hypocrisy is more bothersome because it can’t be faced directly. My hurt rankles in a corner of my psyche that I don’t want to enter. No relief is possible when the patient hides in the shadows.

This afternoon I was happily reading some critiques of Ken Wilber’s books, as I’ve been asked to write an essay about how Plotinus’s teachings relate to Wilber’s “integral” philosophy. I was trying to better understand why I frequently pen question marks in the margins of Wilber’s “A Brief History of Everything” even though Plotinus is lauded as a 3rd century exemplar of what integral philosophizing is all about.

I nodded appreciatively when one critique noted that while Wilber claims an intuitive spiritual apprehension is the only way to know ultimate reality, his arguments to support this claim are closely reasoned and highly intellectual. So is Wilber really practicing what he is preaching?

In the same vein, another critique questioned whether Wilber has directly experienced the higher mystic truths that he pontificates about. Wilber doesn’t speak much about his own spiritual experiences, but he isn’t loath to put forward confident and detailed descriptions of God’s nature and criticize others who don’t share his views. What gives him the right?

At first I smugly enjoyed reading these “the emperor has no clothes!” critiques, just as I am rooting for each and every basketball team in the Olympics to beat the unduly cocky (until they lost to Puerto Rico) United States squad. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing the unjustifiably proud and mighty brought down to earth?

But then I felt the boomerang of my smugness circle around and strike me in the back of my head. “Good god,” I said to myself. “What has been rightly said about Wilber could just as correctly be said about me. Haven’t I written almost 400 pages about a mystic philosopher who taught that the highest reality is far beyond words? Didn’t I claim that Plotinus’s teachings are true without ever having experienced the truth of those claims?”

For a few minutes I felt a serious depression coming on. Why the hell did I spend several years writing a book that amounts to nothing more than guesses about God? Isn’t this sort of religious presumption what I railed on about for page after page, arguing for the supremacy of Plotinus’s empirical/experimental approach to spirituality over the usual religious dogma/faith approach?

Doubt was setting in. Which is fine, if doubt is justified. However, I then recalled that the central concluding message in “Return to the One” is that vision is its own veracity. When a mystic sees, really sees, what is seen essentially is identical with the seer—with vision itself. It isn’t belief that leads to God, the One. Oneness leads to the One.

I didn’t feel so hypocritical when I remembered that, unlike Wilber, along with Plotinus I never claim that any rational description of divinity bears any resemblance to divinity as it actually is. And I let Plotinus’s first-hand descriptions of his mystical experiences do the talking, not my own (fortunately, for otherwise I’d necessarily be nearly mute).

I re-read some of my own words. Thankfully, they sounded fine.

“So we arrive at a classic chicken-and-egg situation that has vociferous adherents on both sides of the question. Do our beliefs about life flow from our actual life experiences or do our actual life experiences flow from our beliefs? This question can be framed as a choice between ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ which assumes the primacy of experience, and ‘I’ll see it when I believe it,’ which assumes the primacy of belief.

“…If I’m on a sinking ship, my belief that there may be lifejackets aboard will lead me to look for one in the storage locker. However, that belief won’t produce a life jacket if none are on the ship. When I open the locker, what I see doesn’t depend on what I subjectively believe is inside; it depends on what is objectively there.

“…Hence, the best thought is the concept that leads to no further thoughts, the best emotion is the feeling that leads to no further emotions, and the best perception is the sensation that leads to no further perceptions—at least during the period of contemplation when we seek to experience spirit and the One, the All. In essence, the only belief a spiritual seeker should aim to retain is, ‘I will see it when I stop believing in, and seeing, what is not it.’”

All quotations are from “Return to the One,” by yours truly.

Plotinus and me: To think or not to think?

To think or not to think, that indeed is the question—the endlessly repeated question that consciously or unconsciously gets asked and answered almost every waking moment. I spend a lot of time pondering the pluses and minuses of thinking, though not infrequently a still small intuitive voice inside of me whispers, “Are you using the right tool for this investigatory job?”

Thinking about thinking is a peculiarly human enterprise. Even if animals think, that seems to be the end of the road. I don’t see any sign that our dog agonizes whether she is too attached to thoughts of chasing chipmunks and squirrels. Serena just fully does what she does, and when she isn’t doing one thing she is doing some other thing. Seemingly she has no regrets about the past or frets about the future. Her dog mind isn’t divided. I envy her.

Not that I want a dog consciousness. But I’d like to have a truly human consciousness, which to me is synonymous with “soul.” The 3rd century Greek philosopher Plotinus follows right along in the tradition of the great contemplative traditions (such as Buddhism and Christian mysticism) when he says, “The soul experiences its falling away from being one and is not altogether one when it has reasoned knowledge of anything; for reasoned knowledge is a rational process, and a rational process is many.”

As I wrote in my book, “Reason would be a wonderful vehicle if it could get us to our final destination: lasting wisdom and well-being. But the danger, says Plotinus, is that we mistake the movement of all those thoughts in our heads for actual progress.” Just prior to those lines is one of my favorite passages in the book, two sentences that I remember writing without recourse to reason. They just flowed out of me. I’d like to always be immersed in the pool of consciousness they came from.

“When someone responds to a broken silence with, ‘You interrupted my train of thought,’ they are speaking truly. Generally that train keeps on rolling down the track of each person’s consciousness almost all of his or her waking hours, spewing out thick plumes of ideas and prodigious sparks of inspiration, a noisy rolling mental thunder that, strangely, never makes much progress in spite of all its frenzied motion.”

Ever since I started studying yoga and meditation in 1969, for the past thirty-five years I’ve engaged in some sort of mantra repetition. You know, the repeating over and over of some word or words in order to still the mind. A well-known Christian mantra is “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.” The most famous Hindu mantra is “Om,” or “Aum.” In the ‘70s you couldn’t go to the airport without hearing “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare, Hare.”

I’m still trying to figure out what a mantra is good for, which probably shows that I haven’t learned much, spiritually speaking, in those thirty-five years. Or, maybe I have. I’ve mantra’d away like crazy for months on end, and I’ve let the mantra slide for months on end. And in the end? I seem to be the same Brian I was before.

I’m beginning to suspect that a single thought (which describes a mantra, using “thought” as meaning any self-produced content of consciousness) is still a thought. And the thought of a thing is not that thing. Hence, thinking about thinking takes us farther afield from the simple truth of thinking; and thinking anything at all takes us farther afield from the simple truth of undivided consciousness—or “soul” if you like.

Plotinus points out the obvious: Whatever we want, we want that, not a thought of that. And this includes my own self, of course. If I want to be true to my self, I have to be my self, not a thought of my self. Concerning the Good, or God, Plotinus says, “For in general thought, if it is of the Good, is worse than it….But being clear of thought it is purely what it is, not hindered by the presence of thought from being pure and one.”

So I’m trying to learn how to simply live life, rather than thinking about myself living life. I strongly suspect that I could get through the day just fine with, oh, about 5% of the thoughts that normally course through my head. Most of the time I could just see, and hear, and feel, and touch, and smell, and go about doing whatever needs doing without adding an overlay of self-awareness to my already evident awareness.

Really, I should listen to my own advice:

“It isn’t necessary to go through life as a sort of double image: a me that does things and a largely unnecessary hanger-on inside my head who watches and comments on the doer. The internal mental dialogue most people take for granted is akin to a play-by-play announcer who never stops gabbing about what is happening on the field of our awareness. The problem is that I already know what is going on because I’m directly experiencing it. I should be able to simply wash the dishes without an inner voice telling me the obvious: ‘I’m washing the dishes.’”

Less thinking, more living. Now, there’s a mantra. Not to be repeated, but to be experienced.

All quotations are from “Return to the One,” by yours truly.

Is Paris Hilton hot and heavy with Plotinus?

Not likely, since Plotinus is a long-dead 3rd century Greek philosopher and Paris Hilton is, well, Paris Hilton. But Google has taught me that it is weblog postings with subjects like this that lead to popularity in the blogosphere.

Not that I have a huge desire for HinesSight to have lots of readers, of course. If I did, I’d write about my relationship with Paris Hilton (see “Family” category) more than the two times I have. For my daily perusal of TypePad Visitor Stats has led me to a not very astounding conclusion: Internet users are a lot more interested in sex and politics than in philosophy and spirituality.

Ever since I wrote about my Hilton family genealogy and the fact that Paris and I are second cousins, I’ve observed on my TypePad statistics that Google/Yahoo “paris hilton relatives” and similar searches lead Paris acolytes to my weblog with wonderful regularity. However, I am quite sure that they do not stay around to peruse my profound and eloquent musings on so many other subjects, such as Plotinus.

Thus, I need to find a way to somehow associate Paris Hilton and Plotinus in a fashion that is both true and transparent (Plotinus would not want it any other way). I would feel bad luring people to my weblog with a provocative mention of Paris’ philosophical tastes—though admittedly I may be doing just that in this posting—which is not founded in rock-solid Hiltonesque reality.

So if a Paris Hilton publicist happens across this writing in a “what are people saying about Paris?” Internet search, here’s my pitch: Imagine Paris and Nicole sitting down with a Hilton relative at his home in rural south Salem to discuss his book about Greek philosophy. Great stuff. Much better than most of what was shown on “The Simple Life.” Like Paris, we’ve got an absolutely charming dog (see “Serena” category) and my wife has long blonde hair, so there are some connections we can build on.

Her person could call my person. Except, I’m my own person. So you can email me and we’ll take a lunch. Private jets are most welcome at the Salem airport. We can hang at the Coffee House café and do some organic chai.

If this plan doesn’t pan out, I’ll have to go the politics route. A few days after I wrote a posting called Hilarious “This Land” Bush/Kerry download, I was thrilled to log onto TypePad and find that thousands of visits were being made to HinesSight. The peak was 1,900 on one day, I think, and visits stayed over 1,000 for the rest of the week. (Without divulging my baseline popularity, let's just say that this was an above-average week--to put it mildly).

The first time I saw this action on the TypePad stats page, for a nano-second I said to myself, “Yes! Plotinus has finally hit the big time! People all over the world are flocking to learn more about mystic Greek philosophy!” But after that nano-second I saw that virtually every referrer was from a search engine query for “bush kerry this land,” or such. Somehow Google and Yahoo had plopped me near the top of their search results. Go figure. The power of weblogs, I guess.

I’m pleased that HinesSight has been able to guide quite a few people in the direction of the wonderful Jib-Jab “This Land” animation. It is both hugely entertaining and right on politically. Throughout the Democratic convention I couldn’t help but think of the “and I’ve got three Purple Hearts” line every time (and it was often) mention of Kerry’s war hero-ness came up.

I also thought: Hmmmm. When did the Vietnam War become such a great memory for liberals? All I remember in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were protests against the war. Bring the troops home! Watching the convention, I could almost believe that Vietnam was a high point for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Democratic operatives are as good at spinning history as Republican operatives. They just spin to the left rather than to the right.

Imaginary Keith, Real Keith

Yesterday I got to sign and sell a copy of my book about Plotinus to two people who share one body. Reading Keith’s posting today on his always-entertaining blog, it seems that I sold the copy to Imaginary Keith, who then took it home to Real Keith. Or maybe it was the other way around. No matter. I’m just happy that “Return to the One” is in the hands of two more readers, who just happen to inhabit the same brain.

I also was happy to learn from the posting that whichever Keith it was who fixed our sprinkler head is only going to charge for the few minutes of actual garden maintenance he put in during the several hours he was at our house. The rest of the time Keith and I talked about our blogs and writing, which is ever so much more interesting than trying to figure out why some spots in the lawn aren’t getting watered.

Luckily, landscapers don’t bill like lawyers. If Keith was an attorney I could expect to get a bill from him any day now: “Sprinkler repair, five minutes--$3.75; pre-repair conversation with client about miscellaneous matters, ninety minutes, $67.50. Total--$71.25.”

We covered quite a bit of “miscellaneous matters” ground standing in the shade by the front door while Keith’s two man crew bustled around in the hot sun doing our annual pruning. Maybe they thought we were engaged in a deep discussion about the Hines’ landscaping needs. Yeah, right…

We had bigger fish to fry that day, like talking about how it is that authors can stay (minimally) sane when they spend years writing a book, and then (1) publisher after publisher rejects the manuscript, until finally the book is printed and (2) reviewer after reviewer sits on their hands rather than review the book, after which (3) distribution glitches lead to online retailer after online retailer screwing up the book’s listing and stocking status, until at long last the book is finally ready to be bought and then (4) prospective reader after prospective reader decides to watch Jeopardy instead of delving into some Greek philosophy.

Oh, did I say “authors” in the paragraph above? I should have said “Brian.” But things probably aren’t as bad as 1-4 sound. I’m just in the one-month-after-publication stage, the authorial version of post-partum depression. You look forward so much to getting your book born after a seemingly endless four-year gestation. Yes, it will be so great to nestle the little tyke in your arms and have people come up and say, “She’s so cute! Can I pick her up?” Sure, at Amazon for $16.99 plus shipping. Take her home with you.

But the Real book adoption process always takes longer and is more involved that the Imaginary process in the author’s dreams, Oops, there I go third personing again. My dreams. My Erica Jong-like fantasy is not for zipless body f__ks but for effortless book s__es. Which actually happened with Imaginary and Real Keith, but they’re a special case: natural born philosophers, born to be wild--ly enthusiastic about a 3rd century Greek named Plotinus who they want to have coffee with.

I liked how the Keiths could write so much about my book after reading just two paragraphs of it. Good writers can weave a rug from a single thread. It will be interesting to see what happens when they get to the “Myself Is Multiple” chapter. Will they agree with it?

Plotinus and me: Living the life I claim to espouse

In my ongoing crusade (oops, politically incorrect verbiage, make that “effort”) to apply Plotinus’s 3rd century Greek philosophy to my 21st century life, I made a small step forward last week at Office Depot. I consider myself to be an environmentalist, a Green believer, a worshipper at the shrine of Sustainability.

Yet throughout the past several years of my book-writing, every time I needed more paper I came home with reams of regular “92 Bright” Office Depot paper. I liked the extra brightness of the paper. It seemed to make my Plotinian prose shine more brilliantly, or so I fantasized. Meanwhile, Laurel used EnviroCopy Recycled Copy Paper, and her words shone forth upon a muted base of only 84 Brightness.

Thursday I made another stop at Office Depot and reached out to grab my usual paper choice. As my hand touched the ream, I heard my mind quoting my own words. This usually is a writer’s delight. But that day I was brought face-to-face with my hypocrisy. For in the “Philosophy as a Way of Life” chapter, I say:

“The face we present to others when we respond to the question ‘What do you believe in?’ generally is a mask that disguises, to a lesser or greater degree, our hidden heartfelt beliefs and desires. By contrast, the goal of a person who aspires to philosophy as life is to significantly narrow, if not eliminate completely, the gap between his philosophy of life and his life.

Then there is no need for him to utter a word when queried about what he believes in, because his everyday actions, including his demeanor at the very moment the question is asked, comprise the complete honest answer. The philosophy he espouses then is not something that explains his life; his life explains the philosophy he espouses.”

OK, I admit I didn’t hear all of that playing back inside my head. However, I definitely did see His Life Explains the Philosophy He Espouses flashing on the inner marquee of my mind. And that made my hand draw back from my previously beloved bright white copy paper. I walked down the aisle and picked up five reams of EnviroCopy. After I paid for them and put them into the back compartment of our Prius, I felt like I had made a small but significant step in the direction of philosophical honesty and consistency.

Pierre Hadot, a Classics scholar, says that what differentiates ancient from modern philosophy is this: in the good old philosophical days anyone who truly lived like a Stoic, for example, was considered a Stoic philosopher and even a Stoic sage, even if he or she never wrote or taught a lick of philosophy. Now, Hadot says, “In modern university philosophy, philosophy is no longer a way of life or form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.”

I hate hypocrites. I hate it when George Bush promises in 2000 that he will be a compassionate conservative and will pursue a humble foreign policy, then in 2004 (and before) does just the opposite. But if I hate George Bush’s hypocrisy, I also have to hate my own. Or, being more gentle with myself, to dislike it. For I’m very much attracted to the idea that my life should explain my beliefs, that if people want to know my philosophy of life, all they have to do is look at my life. This has to be more than an idea, though. It has to become reality.

I’m a long ways from achieving such consistency between my words and my actions. Still, I give myself a small psychic pat on my own back every time I see those reams of EnviroCopy paper sitting on the shelf.

All quotations are from “Return to the One," by yours truly.

Plotinus and me: “Therefore I will speak out”

I’ve decided that what I want to do in these Plotinus posts is talk about how a long-dead Greek philosopher has changed how I look at life, and, more importantly, how I live life. So I’m going to quote less and speak in my own voice more, changing my previous intention (a writer’s prerogative).

You and I are different; yet we also are the same. What appeals to me in Plotinus may leave you cold. Still, we all struggle to understand the same questions that occupied the ancient Greeks: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going after death? What is the purpose of life? What is the nature of ultimate reality? The answers to these questions should be ours, not anyone else’s.

As a Greek philosopher, we can be sure that Plotinus agreed with Plato: “But a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.” Plotinus didn’t slavishly echo Plato’s teachings, though he considered himself a Platonist. His biographer, Porphyry, says that after a student would read a commentary by another philosopher on a text from Plato or Aristotle, “Plotinus borrowed nothing at all from these commentaries; on the contrary, he was personal and original in his theoretical reflection.”

We surely need more of this attitude today: blind acceptance neither of someone else’s purported truth, nor of our own conception. Plotinus was respectful of his fellow philosophers, both alive and dead, but he didn’t reverence them. Now people tend to go overboard in both directions.

They don’t respect those who hold different opinions (just listen to conservative talk radio and Air America for proof that the right and the left are equally disrespectful of anyone who calls in with a contrary perspective). And they are overly reverential of those who hold opinions similar to their own (how many avid conservatives will disagree with George Bush about anything? how many avid liberals found anything to disagree with in “Fahrenheit 9/11”?).

I long for a modern Plotinus to appear on the national stage, a philosopher-king as it were, in the best sense of the term (not in Plato’s aristocratic sense; more in Marcus Aurelius’s humble sense). This person probably couldn’t be elected to any important office, because he or she wouldn’t offer up simplistic answers to complex questions. Yet most people want someone else to do their thinking for them. Not me. I like Plotinus’s approach.

After observing that the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus has left us guessing about what he really meant, Plotinus makes a telling statement that could apply equally to his own teaching method: “He has neglected to make clear to us what he is saying, perhaps because we ought to seek by ourselves, as he himself sought and found.” Right on, Plotinus.

All quotations are from “Return to the One," by yours truly.

Plotinus, a page a day: Day 1

Everyone is looking for something…. In honor of the great Greek mystic philosopher Plotinus, and the upcoming Athens Olympics, here’s Day 1 of a Page-a-Day excerpt from each chapter of my book about Plotinus's teachings. Fifty-four chapters to go. I’m pleased to be able to gradually share with the blogosphere a healthy taste of Plotinus’s matchless blend of rationality and spirituality.

From the “Introduction” chapter:
Looking at the world, people appear to be going in myriads of different directions. It is difficult to discern much rhyme or reason in the wondrous diversity of human pursuits. Some devote their lives to selfless service, others to egotistical self-aggrandizement. Some avidly pursue scientific knowledge, others spiritual wisdom. Some hold family and friends dear, others find companionship in solitude. Where, in all this chaotic activity, is there any sign of the universal order Plotinus speaks of in the Enneads?

The sign is in the seeking, not in what is being sought. Everyone is looking for something—desperately, passionately, ceaselessly. There is no end to the number of different “somethings,” but the looking is common to all. So we are drawn to ask: What if the seeming multiplicity of the cosmos is an illusion and a clearer vision would see that unity underlies all this manyness? Then the quest for any particular thing would, in truth, be a quest for that single thing.

Perhaps all of the seemingly random motion of life on Earth, with six billion people scurrying here and there, each seeking a unique this and that, actually results from an astoundingly simple and largely unconscious impulse: to return to the One. Here is how Plotinus puts it (see the “Reading the Writings of Plotinus” chapter for a description of the numbering scheme, such as “VI-7-31,” used in the Enneads):

“The soul loves the Good [the One] because, from the beginning, she has been incited by the Good to love him. And the soul which has this love at hand does not wait to be reminded by the beauties of this lower world, but since she has this love—even if she does not realize it—she is constantly searching.” [VI-7-31]

Almost every one of us is looking for meaning and well-being everywhere except the most obvious and closest place: the center of one’s consciousness. This is, of course, the place where we are right here and right now, for if you or I were not conscious, we could not be reading or writing these words. The problem is that we are aware not only of a conscious core but also of the many peripheral sensations, thoughts, and emotions scattered throughout the consciousness.

The great Plotinian goal is to discard from consciousness all that is not the One. What remains is, logically, the One—divine reality, plain and simple. In this sense, then, Plotinus is highly religious; the root meaning of “religion” is found in the Latin religare, to bind back, or reconnect, the individual with God.

Plotinus's Philosophical Viagra

After plugging my new book about Plotinus yesterday to everybody in my Outlook address book, I got a great idea in a response from one of the recipients. Richard Smith said, “I knew it would happen sooner or later – spiritually oriented junk mail!” “Damn!” I thought, “Why didn’t I think of this myself? Philosophical spam!”

Right away I visualized a whole different approach I could have taken in my email message.

Have trouble keeping it up?
Are you embarrassed when you can’t keep up your side of philosophical conversations? Do you find your arguments getting all limp and soft just when you want them to be Rock Hard and Penetrating?

Relief is at hand: Philosophical Viagra, a maxi-dose of Greek mystic philosophy. For only $16.99 “Return to the One” will be delivered right to your door in a plain box that looks exactly like it contains a book (which it does). Soon you’ll be feeling much more potent and confident. No more worrying about those frustrating Premature Explanations that fail to satisfy.

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So buy now. Automated systems are waiting at Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and BookSense to take your order. Click here if you want to learn more about the benefits of Philosophical Viagra.

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Top Ten Reasons to buy my book

At long last, my book about Plotinus, a third century mystic Greek philosopher, is available for purchase. At the moment a photo of the “Return to the One” cover is missing from some of the Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookSense listings. You can mosey on over to this Unlimited Publishing “Return to the One” page if you want to read more about the book and have a vision of what the book looks like.

Why did I write this book? Hard to say. Like life itself, and consciousness itself, what we do in our lives with our consciousnesses is a mystery. We make up reasons for why we do something, but whether the reasons we weave bear any relation to rock-bottom reality is another question. What I do know is that I've come to love Plotinus, in the best Platonic sense.

On p. xvii of the book I say, “Up to a few years ago I knew next to nothing about his teachings. But I was strongly drawn to his mystic philosophy once I started to seriously study the Enneads. For most of my fifty-five years I’ve cast my intellectual net widely in the world’s ocean of philosophical, religious, mystical, and metaphysical literature. Yet I’ve never found a spiritual system so simultaneously appealing to the mind and the heart, to reason and intuition, to logic and passion.”

So here’s my Top Ten Reasons to read “Return to the One.” Half are serious, half are light-hearted. That fits with the style of this book, which one advance reviewer said is “written in a lively, accessible way.”

10. Plotinus espouses a universal non-religious metaphysics that is wonderfully refreshing in these times of “my God is better than your God!” pseudo-spirituality.
9. Most of the chapters are just 4-6 pages long. This is a book that begs for bathroom reading.
8. The philosophy of Plotinus and Plato was highly praised by St. Augustine, who incorporated many Platonic notions into his metaphysics. So Christians will find in Plotinus strong echoes of their own faith.
7. With the Athens Olympics slated for August, no coffee table will be trendily complete without a Greek-related book on it (so buy two, one for the bathroom and one for the living room).
6. Plotinus doesn’t ask you to leave your rationality at the church/ temple/ mosque/ wherever door. His spiritual philosophy makes tremendous sense, and also is tremendously inspiring.
5. You’ll be able to casually throw “Well, as Plotinus says…” into your conversations, thereby simultaneously perplexing and impressing those with whom you speak.
4. The spiritual truths Plotinus points us toward are to be found within our own selves, not without. So there’s no need to run around looking for wisdom and well-being in all the wrong places. Meaning, anywhere outside of your own self.
3. You won’t be able to write and get a response from Bill Clinton after you read “My Life.” But if you let me know what you think of “Return to the One,” we’ll have a real interchange.
2. This book can be read again and again (I’ve done so dozens of times), and you’ll never fully plumb the depths of Plotinus’ meaning. Colloquially speaking, this dude is deep, man.
1. Plotinus’ philosophy is called Neoplatonism. Its central feature is the One (or what many call “God”). In the Matrix, Keanu Reeves’ character is named “Neo,” and Morpheus believes that Neo is the One. So is Plotinus cool, or what?

In honor of my book’s release, I have added a “Plotinus” category to HinesSight. Here I will place Plotinus-related postings, which hopefully will include laudatory reviews. Or, maybe not. As much as I like praise, I try to remember than with writing it’s the from-the-heart saying that is important, not how others respond to what I’ve said.

“Return to the One” revealed

click to enlarge
Here’s the cyberspace unveiling of the cover of my soon-to-be-published book, “Return to the One—Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” This afternoon I sent the laboriously-compiled index (see posting below) off to the book designer, Charles King, which means that I’m done! Done with the book, that is. Soon come the practicalities of helping to sell and publicize the book. Which I guess I’ve already started doing in this low-key fashion.

You can be sure that I’ll let HinesSight readers know, via the weblogging equivalent of a trumpet chorus, when the book is published and possible to be purchased (you’ll get a wealth of spiritual inspiration and Greek philosophy for $16.99).

I like the cover. Charles of Cox-King Multimedia did a fine job. About all I told Charles was that I wanted a modern feel for the cover, rather than the Classic Greek Look favored by most scholars who write about Greek philosophy, because I wrote this book in an informal, popular style, with a healthy dose of 21st century scientific facts and attitude mixed in with Plotinus’s ageless mystic wisdom.

Charles copy-edited the manuscript, so he has a good understanding of Plotinus’s teachings. The One, or “God” if you like, is far beyond human the bounds of human reason, utterly ineffable, without any qualities that we can begin to comprehend. So I like how Charles reflects some central elements of Plotinus’s philosophy on the cover.

The One is the source from which the cosmos emanates, the light from which all lesser lights draw their radiance. This includes the light of each person’s consciousness, which we may call “soul.” Plotinus’s message can be summarized simply: self is the soul is spirit is the source, the One. To know God is to know our true self. So returning to the One also is returning to our own self.

I have to admit that I like how Charles made the circular light “rays” line up directly from the central shining radiance to the corner of my photo. Sounds a bit egotistical, but Plotinus says that everyone, me, you, and everybody else, has a direct connection with the One. The trick is finding it, and tracing it back to our source.
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Plotinus and “The Passion of the Christ”

This is the first time I’ve commented on a movie without having seen it. But I’m pretty sure that Laurel and I won’t ever see “The Passion of the Christ,” so I might as well throw in my two cents now rather than later. We’d probably see the movie if either (1) we were Christians, (2) the film had a significant spiritual message, or (3) we relished watching people get tortured. Since none of these things is true, Mel Gibson will have to get along without our $16, or whatever outrageous amount Regal Cinemas is demanding for entry these days.

I have, however, read lots of reviews and articles about “The Passion of the Christ,” the best being David Denby’s “Nailed” in the March 1 issue of The New Yorker. I’d much rather that you read this brilliant review directly rather than any summary I could attempt of it. I’ll simply quote Denby’s last paragraph:

“What is most depressing about ‘The Passion’ is the thought that people will take their children to see it. Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ not ‘Let the little children watch me suffer.’ How will parents deal with the pain, terror, and anger that children will doubtless feel as they watch a man flayed and pierced until dead? The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson’s timing couldn’t be more unfortunate: another dose of death-haunted religious fanaticism is the last thing we need.”

Amen! At its best, Christianity is strangely weird. At its worst, Christianity is insanely bizarre. If Christianity wasn’t a worldwide mainstream religion, but rather was limited to a few villages in some backwater African nation, most of the world would look upon the Christian totems and idols—crown of thorns, nails through palms and feet, ritual eating of a man’s flesh and drinking his blood—as truly freaky. Which is the way Laurel and I see these aspects of Christianity, the aspects Gibson has chosen to focus on in “The Passion of the Christ.”

Having written a book about the spiritual teachings of Plotinus, the Neoplatonist Greek philosopher (“Return to the One,” to be published soon), I’ll share some brief excerpts from the book on how the teachings of Plato and Plotinus had already prefigured Christian theology/metaphysics, leaving out only the person of Christ. Since Greek philosophy emphasized universal truths, rather than individual instances of such verities, the life of one man, Jesus, simply didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. As I say, to 3rd century Neoplatonists, it was the Christians who were putting forth irreligious suppositions that challenged Plotinus’s elevated teachings about God (the One), spirit (nous), and soul (psyche).

After immersing myself in Greek spirituality for several years, I confess that I no longer can even pretend to believe that Christianity is anywhere near to being true, or correct. I don’t mind if a religion doesn’t make perfect sense, as ultimate reality almost certainly lies beyond human logic. But a religion should make some sense, especially its central tenets. Let’s see: Christianity says that God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to die for our sins. O.K. This is weirdly anthropomorphic, and I find it hard to accept that God has human sons and daughters (since God created the universe fourteen billion years ago, some 13.9999999999 billion years before humans came along). But let’s say it is true.

So God sent Jesus to die, and Jesus died on the cross. God’s will was fulfilled. Hallelujah! Pontius Pilate did God’s will. Judas Iscariot did God’s will. The Roman soldiers did God’s will. The Jewish priests did God’s will. If Jesus hadn’t been killed, the sins of the Christian faithful wouldn’t have been washed away. Why, then, aren’t all of the “bad guys” in Gibson’s movie “good guys”? For if they hadn’t played out their roles as the divine design had written in the script, Christianity would have been stillborn, and sins never would have been absolved.

To Plotinus, as to me, a universal providence guides human affairs. Call it providence, call it karma, call it what you will—the universal prevails over the particular. Similarly, science knows that universal laws of nature guide every niche and cranny of the space/time continuum, from the atoms that make up our bodies to the galaxies billions of light years away. This makes so much more sense than the idea that God intervened personally in human affairs two thousand years ago, after which the course of spiritual evolution changed completely. This is simply superstition, which goes by the name of Christianity.

I had a very bright classmate back in high school, Keith Glentzer, who was fond of saying “Christ was a Jew.” Keith was a good Christian, and back then (circa 1965) this statement sounded shocking. That was because I was ignorant of the fact that Christ was indeed a Jew, as so many articles about “The Passion of the Christ” have been pointing out. Indeed, the March 8 issue of US News and World Report that came in the mail today says this about the early quest for the historical Jesus:

“While of great interest to scholars, the resulting picture of Jesus as a Jewish teacher of his day was troublesome for many Christian theologians, especially in Germany. ‘Scholars said there’s nothing new in Jesus,’ says Susannah Herschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. ‘So then what’s new about Christianity? Where does it differ from Judaism? It touched a sensitive nerve.’”

Christ wasn’t a Christian. Christianity was cobbled together from many sources, and for many reasons. But Christ wasn’t the real source, and Christ wasn’t the real reason. So I don’t think you can be a true follower of Christ and also be a Christian. I’m quite sure that the “pagan” Plotinus was much more in tune with the genuine teachings of Christ than 99% of modern-day Christians are. So I’m proud not to be a Christian, because this is the only way I have a chance to follow Christ.

Plotinus passed on

Anti-climatic but deeply meaningful: that’s how I recently viewed the slowly moving “…% complete” Norton Antivirus indicator as my rather large (2 mb) Return to the One file passed into cyberspace on its way to Charles King, the book designer who works with Unlimited Publishing—with whom I’m co-publishing the book, under the guise of Adrasteia Publishing, my newly established (and largely illusory) publishing identity.

So now the book is out of my hands, though it will return to me, certainly, for review, proof-reading, and (ugh…) preparation of an index after the interior design is complete. After years of work on this philosophical labor of love, it’s hard to believe that all that labor is soon going to result in a delivery—a baby book!, so adorable, so hard to resist, I certainly hope.

But as I told Charles at the end of my cover-email message, it hardly matters to me how many copies of Return to the One are sold. And that, really, is the truth. As is true of so much else in life, in writing the process is the main product. Why else would writers write? It can’t be for the money—picayune—or for the fame, usually equally negligible. No, it has to be because writing is its own reward. After all these years I still haven’t figured out what that reward consists of, for it is almost impossible to describe, or define. But I feel the satisfaction inside me with every word that passes from my mind to screen, or paper.

Taking a Plotinian, or Platonic, perspective, seemingly what is going on with writing is somehow connected with the mysterious interface between the ineffable, intuitive, inner World of Forms, and the obvious, objective, outward sensible world, where what is within the psyche is transferred, via the medium of matter, to what is without. According to Plotinus, this microcosmic creative process mirrors the macrocosmic creation—in which the all-powerful Soul of the All, source of the laws of nature, transfers the spiritual logos into this material realm.

Well, if that last paragraph didn’t make sense to you, you’ll just have to buy the book. Which, the gods of publishing willing, should be available in the spring. I also told Charles that even if I hadn’t written this book, it still would be one of my favorite metaphysical/philosophical books. And I’m confident this will be true for other like-minded people also. Not so much because of my writing, though, in my unhumble opinion the writing is quite good, but because Plotinus is such a marvelous thinker and sage. Non-religious yet deeply spiritual; highly rational yet deeply mystical. What’s not to like about him? Answer: his often exceedingly dense and confusing prose.

Thus I’m both pleased and proud to be, to my knowledge, the first person in some seventeen hundred years (Plotinus died in 270, and his writings were edited into their present form soon thereafter) to write a truly popular book about his teachings. Maybe someone else has done so, but their work isn’t evident on Amazon.com, whereas fairly soon Return to the One will be. I don’t want to get too worked up about finishing this book—Howard Dean just showed us the drawbacks of expressing too much outward emotion—yet every time I read through the manuscript (and that is lots of times), I feel like I’m touching the edges of the truth about our cosmos, and the way the world works.

That is, the truth isn’t being expressed by Plotinus, or, even more so, by me. But Plotinus, is equal to the greatest mystical writers of all time in being able to point the reader toward the capital T Truth that lies within every human soul. So I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have been able to tag along, so to speak, on the coattails of Plotinus during all the time I’ve been working on this book. I almost feel like I know the guy, I’ve spent so many hours, days, and months inside his head, via his writings. I never get tired of hearing him speak of the One that we seek, but never find, in outward pursuits, but who constitutes the core of our innermost being—and indeed can be said to be us, when we’ve let go of all that is not truly us.

Anyway, it’s great to have taken another significant step on the publishing road. I never tire of going to the Unlimited Publishing web site page where I can read that Return to the One is “coming soon.” Inward. Outward. Whatever. I look forward to it happening.

Trusting truth

Here's a question: if we had a choice between knowing the absolute 100% truth about existence, or remaining with our current beliefs, what would we do? I posed this question during a talk I gave in Seattle last year, and I remember being met with a lot of quizzical faces (which isn't unusual for me when I speak, but I don't necessarily consider this to be a bad thing; if an audience is looking quizzical, at least they aren't asleep).

It's a good question, though. Most of us believe in God, somehow or other. And most of us believe in life after death, in some form or another. Each of these beliefs is comforting. But what if both are wrong? What if the cosmos lacks any sort of divinity behind it, and humans are just a bunch of material molecules hooked up in an intriguing fashion that gives us life for 70-80 years, or whatever, and then we die, and that's it. One life that is purely physical. There's no God who cares about us, and there's no meaning to all this living except what we each decide to ascribe to it.

Now, I don't really believe this is true--that life is meaningless, Godless, and a one-time deal. However, it could be, and that's a scary thought. So, I'm not sure what I would do if I was given the choice of knowing with complete certainty what the cosmos is all about, or remaining with my comfortable beliefs, which, even though I have doubts about them, still give me something to hang onto when the darkness starts to close in.
The concluding chapter of my book about Plotinus addresses this theme, particularly at the very end. In the course of writing "Return to the One," I had to think a lot about faith, and what it means to make a leap of faith. The chapter is called "Stuck at Lake Partway," and that sure describes my spiritual progress.

Along these lines, I'm looking forward to reading John Horgan's new book, "Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality." He wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education that addresses some of the themes in this book, including the limits of both faith and skepticism. Horgan says that at first he looked at Zen Buddhism as an efficient garbage-removal system that clears out all those beliefs and assumptions that prevent us from seeing reality as it is. But then, pondering how a box of garbage bags become garbage itself after the last box is used, Horgan realized that "every garbage-removal system generates garbage."

Truth and untruth. Faith and skepticism. Reality and unreality. There has got to be something more than these warring pairs of opposites. That must be what we're looking for. What is neither garbage, nor the garbage of not-garbage. The first one to find it, let everyone else know.

Plotinus and coyote-control

It's nice to make connections between various aspects of your life. Here I am just now, editing my Plotinus (3rd century Greek philosopher) manuscript, and I come across a passage wonderfully apropos to our efforts to stop the killing of coyotes in our neighborhood. This bit is about Plotinus' attitude toward meat-eating, but I think he would be equally (if not more) aghast at the idea of killing an animal just because it is doing what comes naturally to it, and isn't harming any human. The quote in italics at the end is from Plotinus' Enneads, the collection of his writings.

Excerpt from “All is Alive” chapter of “Return to the One”:

“Plotinus refused to countenance the oft-heard rationale for meat-eating: ‘Animals are not like us.’ He considered this to be a shoddy bit of philosophizing. If humans are entitled to pursue happiness, one of the inalienable rights enshrined in the United States constitution, then why should other living things be denied their own right to seek well-being, insofar as it is possible? Humans differ from animals and plants in what we are capable of doing and experiencing, but all life is able to do and experience something. So one should be cautious about denying the good life to any form of life.”

Suppose we assume the good life and well-being to be one and the same.…For whether one considers the good life as consisting in satisfactory experience or accomplishing one’s proper work, in either case it will belong to the other living things as well as us.…Why will it not seem absurd of him to deny that other living things live well just because he does not think them important?…If pleasure is the end and the good life is determined by pleasure, it is absurd of anyone to deny the good life to other living things. [I-4-1]