Guest Blog: Plotinus - An Integral Thinker For His Time (by Mateusz Strozynski)
June 19, 2007 08:00
after having gone through all of plato's dialogues a few years ago, along with the commentary by angus taylor, i began to read the enneads of plotinus. quickly my body literally became intensely alive--something was almost jumping out of its skin, and i decided that maybe i wasn't ready for this, and put the book aside. when i came back to it, that window into something deep within--i don't know exactly what, since i turned back from it--had closed: i was able to read it quite calmly, but i was no longer getting it in the way i had before, and after awhile i gave up, because it had become merely an intellectual exercise.
now that i have studied and studied and studied 'integral spirituality', i doubt i can ever again have an immediate experience of what plotinus was conveying. inevitably i will be viewing it through a more aqal lens, but no reason to get overly romantic about this, and wish to turn back the clock.
one thing that, in particular, intrigues me is what sort of interpretation of the enneads would we get if we employed the WLC lattice. strozynski doesn't go that far, at least yet--i hope he can continue with this, say as a professor of philosophy in a polish university, since almost no one else seems to be.
in 'history of psychology: a sketch and an interpretation', james mark baldwin includes a short section on plotinus, which we can now interpret in an aqal fashion, and, in particular, in terms of the WLC lattice. i haven't yet grasped this very well, but my sense is that plotinus had largely an orange center of gravity, the highest possible at that time. with regard to states, the horizontal component, we are told, and i fully believe this, he was without comparison in ancient times in the west. only a very few have surpassed him in this regard, i understand, even up to the present, but, inevitably, it is interpreted in the enneads in an orange fashion, which makes them a very interesting and challenging read for us. i hope strozynski will be looking into this.