During the helenistic period after Alexander the Great and, later on, in the Roman Imperial period, several philosophy schools were developed. Among them they stand out the one of the cynic ones, the one of the stoic ones and the one of the epicurists. Although they are schools with very own characteristics, all they had for starting point Sócrates' teachings or of the pré-socráticos Democrit and Heráclit.But, without a doubt some, the most important, beautiful and orignal of the schools of the end of the Antiquity were inspired by the genius of Plato. That she is called neoplatonism, although she is, in fact, an extraordinary improvement of the Greek philosophical thought, with much more original and structured shades than had the thought platonic. In fact, the school neoplatônica seems us extremely current, nowadays, due to them great similarity among the vision and world conception that emerge of its basic philosophical presuppositions and the current world vision that it appears of the modern Physics, of the General Theory of the Systems and of the Transpersonal Psychology. The most important illustration of the movement neoplatonic was Plotinus.

Plotinus was born in 205 of the Christian era, in Licopolis, in Egypt,almost staying the whole youth in Alexandria up to 243 A.D., when he/she left the city to follow emperor Jordano in its oriental expedition. Dead Jordano in the middle of its expedition, Plotinus deicide to go to Rome, where it arrived in 244 A.D., founding a school, espelhando-if in its master's example and real modelador of the movement neoplatonic: Ammonium Saccas.

For the a famous pupil's of Plotinus writings, Porphírius, knows that Ammonium was a brilliant youth, educated in the breast of a Christian family. But after he/she passed being devoted to the philosophy, Ammonium, for inclination and own will, returned again to the paganism (perhaps for finding more freedom for looking for an own road of understanding). According to Porfírio, he had a high knowledge of the philosophy of its time, and, just as later he/she would make Plotinus, it was deepened in a such way in the existence of the philosophy to the point of " having a direct experience it is of the philosophy practiced by the Persians, be of that preponderant one among the Hindus " (Porfírio, Life of Plotinus). Other references to Ammonium are found in works of Teodoreto, that was a Christian bishop, Hiérocles of Alexandria and in Nemesius, bishop of Emesa.

Ammonium was preferred not to give to public, rejecting to belong to the consecrated celebrities' of its time circle, perhaps for feeling a certain emotional instability in the air among the Christian and pagan schools, and, that he/she lived in a modest way and it avoids, standing back of the burburinho of the world and cultivating the philosophy doesn't just eat an intelligence exercise, but also of life and of spiritual improvement, looking for a direct perception, of mystic stamp (in the transpersonal sense of the term), of the reality, or of the essence, of the existence, together with some pupils, as Plotinus, more indentifies with its message. Just as they made Sócrates and Jesus, Ammonium nothing left written, but its doctrine was carried on and improved by the genius of Plotinus, just as, before, Socrates' message was perpetuated by the testimonies of Plato and Xenofonte.

Ammonium is presented as a philosopher that, rising above the disputes and of the polemics of the other philosophical schools, he knew how to reconcile Plato and Aristotle and to transmit to its pupils, above all to Plotinus, a philosophy free from the polemic spirit, resulting of the mere vanity a lot of times for the intellectual dispute. It is counted that Plotinus, arriving Alexandria, he would have heard all the celebrities of the time, Christians and pagans, but it continued unsatisfied. Taken by a friend to Ammonium, after having heard to speak to it just once, he would have said: " This is the man that I looked for "!, and he becames his pupil for eleven years. It is not without a rason that come us to mind that the relationship between Ammonium and Plotinus has some likeness with the one that it existed between the one of Sócrates and Plato. Other famous pupils of Ammonium they were Origenes, the Pagan, Longino (Longinus), Erênio (Erenyus) and Origenes, the Christian.

After founding yours school in Rome, Plotinus passed of 244 A. D. to 253 A. D. just ministrando lessons, without anything to write, for respect to a pact that he had done with Erenio and Orígines, the Pagan, in the sense of not disclosing the doctrine of Ammonium. But soon its colleagues broke the treatment, allowing to Plotinus to write agreements, us which it fastened its lessons. All its writings were later orderly for its pupil Porphyrio, that divided them in six groups of nine agreements, from where the title came Enneads (read the English translation in the internet: The Six Enneads by Plotinus -), because, in Greek, nine it is written ennea. These writings arrived integrally even us, for luck, and they are, together with the platonic dialogues and Aristotle's occult writings, one of the highest and sublime philosophical messages of the Antiquity. Through them, we can notice the degree of spiritual deeply of the thought of Plotinus, intensely loaded of poetic images, where we see beautifuly explained such phenomenons as the exit of the soul of the body (projection), the analysis of the Unite (holos), as and because a physical world and another one exist spiritual, etc.

Plotinus possessed a special charisma, and he enjoyed enormous prestige in its time. And its fascination was such that arrived to exercise a deep influence on the own Christian theology, as we know for the testimonies of Eusebio, of bishop Teodoreto, etc. Its lessons were attended even for emperor Galiano and its wife Solonina, and it was such the impact that Plotinus exercised on them that the emperor got to examine a project of founding a city of philosophers that should call her Platonópolis. The project was not ahead due to the courtiers' plots.

Plotinus died to the sixty five years, in 270 A. D. Theirs last words to medical Eustóquio was: Always " seek to conjugate the divine that there are in you with the divine that there is in the universe ".

According to authors Reale & Antiseri, the school of Plotinus didn't resemble each other to none of the previous philosophical schools: Plato had founded the Academy for the men's formation that you/they could renew the State; Aristotle had founded Liceu to organize and to systematize the search of the knowledge; Epicuro had founded its movement seeking to give to the men the peace and the peacefulness of the soul.

The school of Plotinus already sought to teach to the men a way of they enter in direct contact with an including reality, and to meet with the divine, in a way that today would call a direct experience of transpersonal stamp. He said that the mere knowledge intellectual not very it will be before the certainty, of the direct experience of the supply-sensitive realities. These possessed a wealth and a transformer force of the human perception that difficultly could be put in words. In fact, that is also what all the great and true mystics, saints and the humanity's thinkers say, as Master Eckhart, São Juan of La Cruz, etc. The fact is that, just as it happens in some psychotherapy forms, notedly the psychology junguiana and the approach ones existential, there are significant factors in our psychic development that are placed as indefinable, but highly significant at intuitive level, since we have abstract they are not suficentes for you describe them.

While for most of the people, in our days, the only approach comprehensible of the reality it bases on the definition of everything through literal, lineal, rational and impersonal conceptuations, some other ones rediscover that the intuitive universe can be so or including as this causal rational universe. Among these people we can mention Albert Einstein and Carl Gustav Jung. In fact, Jung judged to be the intuition and the feeling indispensable abilities for an adapted existence of the psyche, because is just through all its elements (thought, feeling, sensation and intuition) that can try to understand it.

The difficulties that the modern person finds when trying to understand the true approach " mystic " (not the easy and simpleton mysticism that we see being sold the crooked and to right in each corner and in the banking of magazines, but the real mysticism that comes from within from the soul) it bases on the fact that, as reaction to the tendency highly introverted, superstitious and to the obscurantism of the medieval Church, the recent western scientific development emphasized the abstract, lineal and rational objective thought excessively. This development worried exclusively about the practical use of external objects and external needs and, in our days, it culminated in the extreme logical and impersonal rationalism of our society. Thus, the capacity to feel and the one of sensing doesn't receive value or they are not taken in consideration; the feelings are even having considered as something dispensable, and the intuitions are seen with distrust. This is an approach one that already comes demonstrating to be flaw there is a long time, since it is not capable, among other things, of understanding the basic motivation of the human being moral behavior, for example, that bases on emotional foundations.

These areas can be rationalized, but the reason in itself difficultly reaches them, therefore if it went like this the cientists they would already have solved problems as the violence, the suicide, the apathy, the depression (that today already turned epidemic) and other evils of the soul. The rational appels is not very efficient when compared to the emotional ones. Our culture is gone back to the logic, but, when working with deeper problems, this same logic is unable to offer answers adapted to the understanding of the life and of its mysteries. Why, then, do we deny as fantasies or irrealities the mystic phenomenons? Perhaps the vigil state - considered the state normal pradão - it is just one of several levels of possible conscience to the human psyche. For larger details, see the Transpersonal Psychology.

The Plotinus' Message

Plotinus, second Jostein Gaarder, saw the world and the human as something that is among two poles: In an extremity it is the divine, from where everything comes and where everything is going, to which he called of I Unite. Plotinus hugged a holistic conception of the universe (it is feather that the word holism is, nowadays, mixed with a fallacy of garbage pseudo-mystic, that remove it the real meaning). Plotinus sometimes called it I Unite of God. In the other extremity it would be that that Plotinus called kingdom of the shades, where a tiny fraction of the divine light just arrived. But Plotinus just used these metaphors as a didactic figuration. He said, for example, that these darkness didn't have a concrete existence. They were just the momentary absence of the Divine Light, as later Master Eckhart would say that the matter was the condensation of something spiritual. Thus, being this just carries to an extreme light absence, the darkness are not. They are just in the darkness. The only real existence is the existence of the implicit order that causes the phenomenic changeable world. Thus, God is only the Real. But, as well as a light source little by little gets lost in the darkness, we can also imagine a place where the divine rays arrive very weak, which Plotinus identified with the matter. But even the matter it possesses a little of the divine light. We know nowadays, for the Physics, that the matter is nothing else that a condensation of something subtler: the energy.

Eis a beautiful summary of the poetic analogies of the work of Plotinus (and, for connection, of Amônio Saccas) given by Jostein Gaarder: " Imagine an enormous bonfire burning in the middle of the night. Of the middle of the fire flashes jump in all the directions. In a wide circle about of the fire the night is lit up, and to some kilometers of distance it is still possible to see the light shine of this bonfire. As we stood back, the bonfire is going becoming a minuscule light point, as a weak lantern in the night. It is been we stiller move away ourselves, we will arrive to a point in that the light of the fire not more it gets us to reach. Somewhere the luminous rays get lost in the night and if it is very dark we won't see anything. On that moment, contours and shades stop existing ".

" Now imagine the reality as being this enormous bonfire. What burns it is God - and the darkness that are outside are the cold matter, where the light is weak, of the which men are made and you encourage. Close to God is the eternal ideas, the all the creatures' causes. Above all, the human soul is a ' it twinkles of the fire'. But for the whole part in the nature appears a little of this divine light. We can see it in everybody you be they alive; yes even a rose or a campanula they possess a divine shine. In the most distant point of the alive God it is the inanimate " matter.

"I say that everything that we see has a little of the divine mystery. We can see the shine of this some thing in a sunflower or in a papoula. We noticed a more little of this unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that landed in a branch, or in a gold fish that anything in the fishbowl. But the closest point in than we met of God it is inside of our own soul. It is only there that can re-join with the great mystery of the life. In fact, in some rare moments " - as they speak to Jung and Maslow - we can feel that we are, ourselves, this divine " mystery. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow made exhaustive studies proving the existence of these culminating experiences, frequently impossible of they be expressed in words without they get lost a great part of its force extraordinarily beautiful and luminous, and the one where the sensation of close friend encounter with something transcendete is the dominant leitmotiv.

The images that Plotinus uses, and that Jostein Gaarder has just summarized, they send us to the myth of the cave of Plato. But while Plato is an dualist, distinguished in a tight way the opposition between the spirit and the matter, Plotinus aims us for the reality that the this is also linked to the that (as well as he/she spoke Buddha), that the universe is an immense net of relationships where everything is its right of being in the group, in the holos. Everything is tied up to everything, and everything is ONE ONLY THING, because everything competes for the course of the work of God. Even the shades they have a fine part of this " Unit " (holism).

In some moments of its life, Plotinus tried the vivid sensation of uniting, to melt its soul with God. In our century, Abraham Maslow made an enormous research to prove that the healthiest and charismatic people tried, at least once in a lifetime, a type of pick experience (Peak Experiences of Maslow) where it seems that the conventional divisions of the human intellect seem to lose the whole sense, and the person feels full of a peace and of a more intimate contact with something transcendetal. We called to this type of experience of mystic experience. Plotinus, even so, as we know, it was not only to live that experience. As speaks to us Jostein Gaarder, people of all the cultures, in every time, they have been telling similar experiences. Today the study of those experiences is made by the Transpersonal Psychology. And a basic point of these reports is it that, although they happen variants in the description of those phenomenons - due to the cloth of cultural fund and to the subject's faiths -, those reports have many and surprising points in common.

Mysticism

In practically all the reports on them called ecstasies mystics, from Plotinus (and even before him) until the days today with the patients - clients of the transpersonal psychotherapy, what sees it is a type of intimate union with something that transcends our reality concepts, that it is difficult of for in words. In our Christian culture - although own Christ has told a lot of times that he felt one with the Father, of saying that " you are gods " and that " Kingdom is in you " - him priests, shepherds and several theologians inculcate us that God made the world without if it involved with the world, that is to say, that there is an abyss between God and its creation. God would have made the things and it would be just observing the course of the universal drama, sometimes interfering momentâneamente in something, called us miracles. But in the east, especially in the Buddhism and in the Taoism, and in the occident, in the original religions of the Celtic ones and gauleses (druidas), as well as in some of our Indians from North America and of the South, in in all the mystics of any religion, which he/she/it experiments is an union sensation, where this abyss is ignored (he/she sees him the reports of Ávila Teresa and la Juan Cruz). THE ONE that him - or her - he/she knows it is an elevation to God (Gaarder, 1995; Grof, 1988; LeShan, 1994).

Carl Gustav Jung and Plotinus, they tell us that that that we called eu"não commonly is ours me true, it is just a mask, the ego. In moments of deep love or emotion or peace we can feel quickly a type of contact with a me deeper, that Jung called self, and that some mystics call interior Christ. Some are still going beyond, and they feel united to the own God, or to a " cosmic " conscience - term very used in the Transpersonal Psychology.

Now, the ego can riot against the possibility of losing the control and the person to get lost to herself " in this intimate coalition with the cosmic conscience, but, as very well Jostein Gaarder, this pseudo-loss said (actually the ego is not eliminated, it continues to exist) it is something very insignificant before that that is won (see Jesus' parable on the sower that finds a pearl in the field, and he/she sells everything that has to buy that field). The mystic notices that its ego is just a tiny part of himself. He/she understands that the " me " Real is something infinitely larger. He/seh understands that is part of the whole universe, that is part of God. It is that that the Hindus say that the ME am the largest friend of the ego, but the ego is the worst enemy of the Me. Now, as he/she tells us Jostein Gaarder, if we feared ourselves to lose while individuals in a world that is the reality for us (the common world), perhaps serve as comfort and incentive to know that a day in any way we have to lose this " me daily " one way or another. Why not to try to try the true Me being gotten to free of the jugo of a egocentric me? " That that he/she wants to conserve its life, lose this, and that that he/she wants to lose its life, for love to the truth, will win " it, Christ already said.

Jostein Gaarder points with a lot of property that we found mystic slopes in all the great religions of the world. " And everything that the mystics write about its experiences presents visible likeness, in spite of all the cultural differences. Only when the mystic tries a religious or philosophical interpretation for its experience it is that the cloth of cultural " fund is evidenced. (Jostein Gaarder, Sofia's World, 1995, p. 155).

For the works in Psychology, especially in the Junguian Psychology, in the Gestalt Terapy and in the therapies humanists, and mainly in the Psychotherapies of Transpersonal orientation, we know that people that don't belong to any religion have been passing and told mystic experiences. Them experiences espontaneausly something that you/they call, among other things, of " cosmic " conscience or, as Freud called, of " oceanic " experiences: at this time, time and space and other physical limitations don't pass of imaginative figurations of the human perception. The only thing that exists is the completud sensation and conscience of her to be immerged and lucid of a larger and more beautiful reality.

Bibliography

Campbell, Joseph, O Poder do Mito, Palas Athenas São Paulo, 1990
Porfírio. Vida de Plotino/Eneadas I-II, Editora Gredos, Madrid, 1996.
Grof, Stanislav. Além do Cérebro - Nascimento, Morte e Transcendência em Psicoterapia, McGraw-Hill, São Paulo, 1988
Reale, Giovanni & Antiseri, Dario. História da Filosofia Vol. I, Ed. Paulus, São Paulo, 1990
Gaarder, Jostein. O Mundo de Sofia, Companhia das Letras, São Paulo, 1995
LeSham, Lawrence. O Médium, o místico e o físico, Summus Editorial, São Paulo, 1993

Return to The Western Spiritualism

João Pessoa, 29/12/1996

Translated in 03/15/98

Copyright (C) 1996 by Carlos Antonio Fragoso Guimarães

Seja honesto consigo mesmo: não plagie.

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