5 - The Luminous Sphere

Summary

This chapter discusses the famous Plotinian image of the transparent, luminous sphere, appearing in several versions in different treatises. Psychic contemplation is divided into two levels: imaginative and dianoetic. The first corresponds with the level of Nature by virtue of our higher imagination, while the second one corresponds with the level of the World Soul by virtue of our reason. At the imaginative level, we overcome the sense that we are located in our head and experience a sort of the expansion of our self, in which we feel ourselves permeating the whole of the sensible world. At the dianoetic level, we find ourselves to be present everywhere in a completely non-localised and non-extended way. Our reason becomes the transparent sphere in which we see all the sensible world, but this doesn’t mean that we use discursive thinking or that we analyse the world. Reason is an intuitive, “transparent eyeball”, in which we see everything as united and through which we see the sensible qualities in their archetypes, the higher logoi in the World Soul. It is freedom from anything spatial, temporal, and sensible. The world is seen as existing in ourselves, but we are not the world.