NHC XIII Trimorphic Protennoia 17: “I am their Father, and I shall tell you a mystery, ineffable and indivulgeable by any mouth: every bond I loosed from you, and the chains of the demons of the underworld I broke, these things which are bound on my members, restraining them. And the high walls of darkness I overthrew, and the secure gates of those pitiless ones I broke, and I smashed their bars. And the evil force, and the one who beats you, and the one who hinders you, and the tyrant, and the adversary, and the one who is King, and the present enemy, indeed all these I explained to those who are mine, who are the Sons of the Light, in order that they might nullify them all, and be saved from all those bonds, and enter into the place where they were at first.”
Additionally, the following is from Alexander J. Mazur's work, PhD from The University of Chicago, "The Platonizing Sethian Background of Plotinus' Mysiticism," at the beginning:
One of the most strikingly and apparent original aspects of Plotinus’ thought-the “end and goal” (telos … kai skips) of his life and philosophy, according to Porphyry-was his notion of a full-fledged mystical union: that is, the conjunction, assimilation, coalescence, or complete identification of the innermost core of the human subject with the transcendent One ‘above’ Being and Intellect. In several passages throughout the Enneads, Plotinus describes this event as an overwhelmingly intense subjective experience that culminates a contemplative ‘ascent.’
At the climactic moment-to give one example-the aspirant “neither sees nor distinguishes nor imagines two, but as if having become another and not himself nor belonging to himself there, having come to ‘belong’ to [the One], he is one, as if attached center to center, or, in another passage, “[T]here was not even any reason or thinking, nor even a self at all, if one must say even this; but he was as if snatched away or divinely possessed, in quiet solitude and stillness, having become motionless and indeed having become a kind of status. It must be emphasized that we are not dealing with a mere rhetorical flourish nor a conventional metaphor, but rather with something that Plotinus understood to be a discrete, transformative event. He repeatedly implies that he has himself experienced mystical union with the One first-hand-he often makes cryptic intimations to the effect that “whoever has seen, knows what I mean.”
Hence, I believe Plotinus wrote Trimorphic Protennoia.
Key moments expressing the above sentiment at 2:49 & Sign of the Cross 5:53 & 10:00 & Sign of the Cross 12:19
1 сен 2023
