/lit/ - Literature

what works should i read beforehand to understand plotinus?
can i just jump in blind and read his works or do i need to have some context?

>>16328055

>the author received divine revelation

i want a metaphysics/theology that includes an afterlife

but i also want to be able to fuck qt traps (preferably both on earth and in eternity)

what are my best bets? Neoplatonism?

>>16007331
>maybe the real forms were inside us all along

>>15948998
Is this hairstyle essential for understanding the One?

Seeing how Buddhism vs Advaita always comes to a draw where should we go from here?

Could it be that the Neoplatonists refuted both of them? Or is Heidegger our man?

my boy Plotinus

Can all the new faggots read moby dick and get filtered already ?

Where does the principle of emanation/reflection come from?

Is it imperative to read Plato before reading Plotinus? I'm just extremely impatient. Also, I'm reading Inge's Gifford lectures.

Hello frens, gonna make this quick : I am fucking struggling with the enneads some concepts are very hard to grasp because it seems that I am reading something more complex than it really is. Should I read a guide to plotinus or something??? Any recomendations on what to do anons to make this a tad bit easier

recommendations for neoplatonism/esoterism? gone thru lots of the normie stuff, looking for more interesting finds.

>Try to raise the divine in yourselves to the divine in the all
I miss him bros

>>15260124
>Arabs are better than Persians

Imagine having this take.

>buy greek and roman lit online
>Amazon suggests me gay novels

>>15065631
No because it was irrational and mostly ignored by the smartest people alive over 2000 years ago, you have no excuse to believe it now. Now Platonism/Neoplatonism, that’s something that everyone should be.
>>15065681
I know someone who claims to be a Hellenic Dionysus worshiper, they are a mixture of tumblr and reddit in human form. Those are the people you will have as compatriates

Plotinus says that once our soul leaves the material world it will "gradually forget the memories of this world" and eventually become one with nous and the eternity.

However, according to Plato in the Timaeus, there is no time in eternity, so how can something be "gradually happening" in it?

Is Plotinus rejecting the doctrine of Plato?

This is all Bertrand Russell saying (History of Western Philosophy) so maybe he fucked up with the interpretation somewhere or is it just me that is not understanding a thing?

>Okay, materialists, here's my take on your retarded views
>Matter is a ruse, it doesn't exist, it's fake, it's immobile and falls downwards, while intelligible things like the wind have a movement because they're above matter and are not affected by inertia
>But how can we account for the transformation of matter due to fire, water etc. if it doesn't exist?
>matter is unchangeable and immobile, only bodies change, and to say that matter able to change it would imply it was a body

>matter bad
>number one good
There, I saved 12 hours of your life.

>>14852015
Kabbalah makes up for what Western esotericism has with [detailed] structure. Perhaps it is just because the practices of something like Gnosticism has died out in its original form, but I still think it was always simpler in intention. And that is precisely because a culture cannot exist with these detailed functions, that is a sort of character-of uneven equal attribution of value to various symbols and greater truths and continuing. The metaphysical principle is the innermost state of truth or representation. Both a centre and presence of Being, but that is presence being a part of Being but not a being in itself. This Kabbalah is nothing other than the "fanciful imaginations" or the state spoken of by the Tibetan Buddhists as well as Jung, where in an array of aesthetic and aesthetics, symbols and values and archetypes on the reaches of human ability, or the creeping occultist may say structuring are projected and appreciated and through it are drawn some deeper meaning, themselves as far as my own experience and suspicion be, of definite unconscious intention and therefore not completely a state of meaningful chaos. These "karmic illusions" and such. However they lack a centre of life, they are just that, illusions with all their very real demons. It can make one insane, and often does if you don't have -considering the lack of- a religious interpretation and means to use it, though if one may he can attribute it on an individual level, only these trans-individual ideals can really do that. So the blood of Christ, as one. Where in the structure is not merely a help, but a real truth of the experience. Kabbalah projects this fanciful array with no actual background, only borrowed cultures, and the jew at last is seen to-even in his spirituality- be a materialistic being and lack any true understanding. Of which we see most evidently in Plato. Sometimes the complexities are completely true, but they are never complexities without depth and themselves connect to the many areas-now separate- ways of life. The jewish mysticism does not do this, it has no depth, it has only shallow dispercity.

Some common things can be drawn from it to help Western practices and beliefs, such as Christian "Kabbalah" which actually held this fanciful array to true value (though even this on a whole is temporary -literal esoterica or mysticism that is- however is un-corrupted for a number of reasons but precisely because it is aware of its temporality, and through that by religion; Christ) but most almost always they are immediately dropped -these little fragments- when done with them. The wandering jew is a wanderer forever! The value of nothing; hah! It is a reflective image, a fanciful self describing portrait, maybe some thing of an other is drawn, but it is not the pretty pictures themselves, and a metaphor of pretty pictures only creates more pretty pictures. The jews are cursed and curse us more with this garbage!

Don't waste your time.

>>14833015
Why would they defend themselves against monists? Monism is pagan and most modern pagans that care at all about philosophy/metaphysics seems to be monists.

>>14776239
Agreed.

>no plotinus
sad