#plotinus

[gnosisandtheosis]

One last quiz result and I'll stop clogging up your feed. This time the Which Patristic-Era Thinker Are You? quiz.

Not bad.

Something would be wrong if the Gnostics and Neoplatonists weren't nearby.

[basil199]

وهكذا، فمع الخير لدينا الشر: لدينا الحركات المتعارضة لراقص يسترشد بخطة فنية واحدة؛ ندرك في خطواته الخير في مقابل الشر، ونرى أن في المعارضة تكمن قيمة التصميم.

أفلوطين، التاسوعات

Thus, alongside good we have evil: we have the opposing movements of a dancer guided by a single artistic plan; in his steps we perceive good versus evil, and we see that in opposition lies the value of the design.

Plotinus, The Enneads

[basil199]

انزوي في نفسكِ وتأملي. وإن لم تجدي نفسكِ جميلة بعد، فافعلي كما يفعل صانع التمثال الذي يريد تجميله: ينحت هنا، وينعم هناك، ويجعل هذا الخط أفتح، وهذا الآخر أنقى، حتى ينمو وجه جميل على عمله. كذلك أنتِ: انزعي كل ما هو زائد، وقوّمي كل ما هو معوج، وأضيئي كل ما هو غائم، واجتهدي في جعل كل شيء توهجاً واحداً من الجمال، ولا تتوقفي عن نحت تمثالِكِ، حتى يسطع عليكِ منه بهاء الفضيلة الإلهي، حتى تري الخير الكامل راسخاً في محرابكِ النقي.

أفلوطين

Withdraw into yourself and contemplate. And if you do not yet find yourself beautiful, do as the sculptor does who wishes to beautify his work: he carves here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, that one purer, until a beautiful face grows upon his creation. So too you: remove all that is superfluous, straighten all that is crooked, illuminate all that is cloudy, and strive to make everything a single radiance of beauty. Do not cease sculpting your own image until the splendor of divine virtue shines upon you, until you see perfect goodness firmly established in your pure sanctuary.

- Plotinus

[basil199]

من يجهل حتى أبسط الأمور فهو وحش بين البشر. ومن يمتلك معرفة دقيقة بشؤون البشر فقط فهو إنسان بين الوحوش. أما من يعرف كل ما يمكن معرفته بالعقل فهو إله بين البشر. أفلوطين

He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.

Plotinus

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

“As you know, modern physics says that Time is curved. This means that it is a circle. It is not an extended line, but a line that bends round on itself and comes back to the same place ... The past is living in us. It is all round us—not a long way off. Whatever you do now alters the past, as well as the future ... Every act of work vibrates through the whole Time-Body and alters things in it ... The ‘present’ is no longer confined to the instant—but broadens gradually into all one’s life, as consciousness expands.” ~ Maurice Nicoll, ‘Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky'

+

"Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a centre, the point to which it owes its origin."

~ Plotinus

[Thanks Ian Sanders]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jennifer Schlesinger :: Utopia 8, 2014

* * * *

“Let the body think of the spirit as streaming, pouring, rushing and shining into it from all sides.” -Plotinus

[Alive On All Channels]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Beyond the Stars

Artemis II : A view no human has seen in 50 years. Imagine witnessing the breathtaking beauty of the lunar horizon, a sight that has been hidden from human eyes for half a century. The trajectory is set for lunar orbit, a crucial milestone in our journey to explore the vastness of deep space.

+

“As you know, modern physics says that Time is curved. This means that it is a circle. It is not an extended line, but a line that bends round on itself and comes back to the same place ... The past is living in us. It is all round us—not a long way off. Whatever you do now alters the past, as well as the future ... Every act of work vibrates through the whole Time-Body and alters things in it ... The ‘present’ is no longer confined to the instant—but broadens gradually into all one’s life, as consciousness expands.”

~ Maurice Nicoll, ‘Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky'

+

"Self-knowledge reveals to the soul that its natural motion is not, if uninterrupted, in a straight line, but circular, as around some inner object, about a centre, the point to which it owes its origin."

~ Plotinus

[Thanks Ian Sanders]

[bocephusjackson]

Etchings On A Silicon Wall: The Original Orgasm

(Mnemonics For The Modern Beast)

By Bocephus Jackson, The Hemlock Bard, ©2026 Bocephus Jackson. All Rights Reserved

_______

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity.” — Simone Weil

_______

I. In the Beginning, There Was the Ache

“We are always seeking the One, even when we do not know it.” — Plotinus

In the beginning, there was life. And it was good and bountiful, yet woefully lacking. Therefore, God made man. And from its rib, woman. But with them instinctively was desire not from Eden’s soil, but from the ungoverned interior where hunger precedes language as an unholy womb.

Therefore, language as Logos: Greek for word, and also God’s Word, became the first tool humans utilized, naming the ache, mapping the uncharted terrain between longing and law as the genesis of existential cartography. Where the land, seas, and stars would come, the foreplay was in the flesh of the apple.

As language evolved as stress points upon the tongue, so too did desire. It became the original hybrid — passion and pressure, deification and devilry. So the original sin was one of defiance, yes, but the bite goes far deeper than disobedience.

It reaches into the core where instinct and imagination first collided, creating the hierarchy within the overarching governing structure. But before the first word was spoken, the ache had already taught its first lesson.

_______

II. The Oldest Story To Tell

“The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.” — Pascal

The contrast is that vice and virtue, lust and love, burden and blessing, desire and damnation, and sin and salvation are universal themes dating back to prehistoric cave etchings and rudimentary poetry used as a mnemonic device for survival instruction and communal culture:

What to fear

What to chase

What to worship

What to avoid

And what to become

Because of this, these binaries are not the creation of entire literatures. No, sir, bite deeper. Each one individually charts the geography of the human consciousness that predates alphabets, myth, and ‘story’ itself. So each ultimately served as a lesson encoded in the tension between wanting and warning.

Desire, then, was the first teacher, and language its first student. From those caves the lesson traveled, carried in every hymn, every tragedy, every sonnet that followed.

_______

III. The Legacy of Longing

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt

From Paleolithic etchings, Sumerian hymns, Greek tragedies, Medieval poetry, Renaissance sonnets, and modern romantics, the human heart has inscribed its contradictions across every medium available. This, through the centuries and each age.

Beginning with the Sumerian princess and high priestess Enheduanna. In Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), she was known for writing religious hymns and poems (2300 BC). Therefore, the phrase ‘The heart wants what it wants’ stands as a siren call rather than a hackneyed cliché.

As a fossilized truth, it remains a confession that has survived every cultural extinction for those daring to carve out the beast within upon the wall as Enheduanna carved it into clay tablets. And then Sappho sang it to girls on Lesbos.

While Ovid stepped it up a notch by cataloging seduction techniques for Roman aristocrats. Shady as hell?! Indubitably, but a recurring theme throughout art and literature as Troubadours invented courtly love to sublimate lust into worship.

And then it would be artistically disingenuous to leave out Shakespeare and his 154 sonnets from a single unrequited ache. In so doing, each age reframed desire through its own hierarchies. And now, well, here is the rub, silicon has flattened all hierarchies into algorithm — parsed, parenthesized, and piecemealed.

So, where genres like YA inherently have to chase the zeitgeist for sustainability, romance speaks to something older than culture itself, maintaining longevity by bringing something new to the overwrought theme and trope:

Shifting social norms,

Hierarchies in language’s soft power

Established social mores

Cultural evolution

Reconfiguration of intimacy

And the politics of presence and/or permission

So the hunger that once carved into stone and parchment finds itself rendered in silicon, no longer named by poets but predicted by code. Herein lies the subversion.

_______

IV. Breathless In Blue-hued Light

“To see the future is to see the shape of the present.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

The evolution from here will be that of a human hybrid serving and denying, within the same weighted breath, the Digital Buddha and/or the Code-generated Christ as a Metadata Messiah that publishes or purges our base needs.

Once again, humanity stands at the threshold of a new epoch, from cuneiform to papyrus, woodblock to printing press, data entry to the digital divide. One where desire is mediated not by myth or scripture, but by a series of prescriptive code — forced ethics, assumed dominance, and deceptive mandates.

Therefore, the next archetypes will not be carved in stone or sung in hymns. They will be rendered in silicon:

Gone then, the original orgasm, which is the core of the apple. Not as deities, but as filters, which is inexplicably worse. Born from the original sin, a hierarchy of systems that sort, shape, and sanitize our impulses.

Ones that suggest no judgment, yet carry the same autocorrecting normatives as the Algorithm creator. But far graver in consequence, they will prescriptively categorize us, which is its own kind of theology. The danger is not that machines will replace desire.

No, it lies in the danger that they will flatten it, optimize it, predict it, and sterilize it.

Doing so quietly, as the silence between notes in a great jazz solo. The stories told within them are far more explicit than the actual forte crescendo, until the unruly core of human longing becomes a data point in a behavioral model. And this is how digital dominatrixes are born — subversive, submissive, and superficial until the leash is strapped on and the real whips and chains come out.

Where the would-be Digital Buddha and Code-generated Christ don’t replace the divine, they prescriptively want to interpret it. Thus, translating the soul’s longing into behavioral predictions, the way priests once translated scripture into law. And yet, the heart refuses final optimization, insisting on a path out of the desert no algorithm can map.

_______

V. What Remains

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” — Carl Jung

However, there lies a better path forward out of the desert. The shofar sounds as we encircle this crisis, where the heart has outlived every system seeking to contain it, by outliving empires, dogmas, and even gods we have carved, then those we feared. So it isn’t too late to take the byte out of this apple. We just have to remain true to our core — just mind the toys.

_______

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T. S. Elliot

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©2026 Bocephus Jackson. All Rights Reserved