The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

– J.M. Keynes (via @tnSPOKES)

We have to face also the question as to whether the Creator has planned well or ill…… like our souls, which it may be, are such that governing their inferior, the body, they must sink deeper and deeper into it if they are to control it.

No doubt the individual body- though in all cases appropriately placed within the universe- is of itself in a state of dissolution, always on the way to its natural terminus, demanding much irksome forethought to save it from every kind of outside assailant, always gripped by need, requiring every help against constant difficulty: but the body inhabited by the World-Soul- complete, competent, self-sufficing, exposed to nothing contrary to its nature- this needs no more than a brief word of command, while the governing soul is undeviatingly what its nature makes it wish to be, and, amenable neither to loss nor to addition, knows neither desire nor distress.

This is how we come to read that our soul, entering into association with that complete soul and itself thus made perfect, walks the lofty ranges, administering the entire kosmos, and that as long as it does not secede and is neither inbound to body nor held in any sort of servitude, so long it tranquilly bears its part in the governance of the All, exactly like the world-soul itself; for in fact it suffers no hurt whatever by furnishing body with the power to existence, since not every form of care for the inferior need wrest the providing soul from its own sure standing in the highest.

Plotinus, The Enneads, IV, 8

When I was eight years old, if someone told me that there would come a morning when, before dawn, I would be getting ready to get on a train to discuss my new company’s website, while at the same time sending e-mails discussing the acquisition strategies of Indian and Chinese conglomerates and the efforts of Japan’s food and beverage brands to globalize, and that I would, later that day, be submitting an application for a visa to travel to India to meet with bureau chiefs of major global media outlets, before getting a hepatitis shot, and that finally, I would, the whole time, in the back of my mind, be thinking about neoplatonic philosophers, about the architecture of slide from idealism to theurgy, and about all the attempts to reconcile emerging Christian thought with classical philosophy, and vice versa, before what ended up coalescing into doctrine, I’m not sure I would have even known how to believe it, let alone whether. 

And to be writing a blog post about it, which I would then share on Facebook and Twitter as well… In fact, even at twenty-eight, it would have been an enormous stretch of the imagination, to be living in 2011, and to be living in 211 and 311 and 411, too. Such strange paths there are in this world!