"Olympius, a fellow-philosopher envious of Plotinus's intellectual superiority tried to harm him by magic spells...

...

hey i recognize that, that's Guenon. nice

>tfw reading spiritual classics and feeling highly enlightened but still haunted with vices and unemployed

>feeling
enlightenment isn't emotional it's ontological

>implying emotion is not primal to ontology
>view empedocles

>emotion is not primal to ontology
It isn't. Emotions are situated hierarchically lower on the chain of being compared to pure Being or the Self or the Spirit or whatever you want to call it. They are surface phenomena and of no essential significance, although in practice emotion can serve a very powerful role as an aid to spiritual practice (e.g. as in Bhakti yoga)

There is no philosopher without Eros. Eros and Psyche.

there also isn't any philosopher without an intestinal tract, but that doesn't mean we can't make distinctions between essential things and peripheral phenomena. pleb.

Well, I grasp non-duality. Idk why you are being nitpicky about me using the word >feel but whatever. Discursive thought is equally inadequate as emotion.

In any case, the unity of truth beauty and goodness is found in love hence the christian platonic expression that "God is Love". Love is primal to Being. Love is the Good. Love is God.

>Reads Plotinus's Enneads
>smokes weed and jerk off to porn
>Study Gaudapada's Māṇḍukya Kārikā
>waste a whole day playing video games
>Uncover the meaning of Guenon's Multiple States of the Being
>Browsing youtube for hours listening to podcasts and looking at new movie trailers
>Delve into Vasugupta's Siva Sutras
>waste a whole day tripping on acid, still unemployed
>Pore over Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
>go have meaningless sex with some thot from tindr
>Assimilate the teachings of Adi Shankara's Aparokshanubhuti
>call parents and ask for more rent money and make up excuses about why I'm still unemployed

>Idk why you are being nitpicky
Sorry if im coming off as nitpicky, mate.
>Discursive thought is equally inadequate as emotion.
I agree.
>In any case, the unity of truth beauty and goodness is found in love hence the christian platonic expression that "God is Love". Love is primal to Being. Love is the Good. Love is God
I completely agree with this as well. But, love in this context is not a psychic phenomena, it is far superior to that. Not to be crudely self promoting but i wrote a "blog" post about it, tell me what you think:
juanfitzcarraldo.wordpress.com/2017/08/11/love-in-high-and-low-places/
>Love is a terrible and irresistible cosmic force. It is, in fact, much more than a mere cosmic force. To borrow “the symbolism of the cross” (see: Guenon), it is a vertical axis running through all the modes of being and beyond them: transcendent love, divine love, cosmic love, personal love, sexual love, material love. It runs through the whole chain of being exercising always a dual function: enslaving and freeing, creating and destroying, uniting and dividing, solidifying and dissolving. It is the power which keeps us in illusion, but the same power which shatters all illusion.

If you're not totally at peace with the idea of dying in the next moment during an activity, do something else. In this way there is no wasted time.

Vices need to be killed as quickly as possible. Like Evenus says:
I say that habit's just long practice, friend,
And this becomes men's nature in the end.

>Evenus
WHo?

Emotion is a sort of way in which we can understand things. Contrary to most people's typical ideas about the nature of thought and perception, feeling is itself a sort of mentation, cognition, a way in which we perceive certain truths. The mind, according to your classical Platonists and Neoplatonists, can be used to arrive at great truths. Through formal reasoning, through an almost divine logic, one uses the mind to perceive certain ideas, perhaps even the Logos.

The body, more "crudely", is used to "perceive" in the way we typically imagine the idea of "perceiving". It perceives what we call the "external world", objects.

Emotions, too, are a certain function -- like bodily senses and our reasoning -- which can help us to perceive other truths. Though our emotions are muddled, impure, and obsessed with negativity, it is no reason to disparage emotions as a way of perceiving the truth. A person's body, or an entire society's bodies can all be unfit, malformed, habitually untrained or perhaps wrongly trained to the point of grotesqueness. Similarly, a person's mind or a whole society's minds can be entrapped, stifled, and brutally conditioned into a laughably automatic version of what it should be.

Emotions receive perhaps the worst upbringing, the worst care, the worst treatment by all of us. Negative emotions, which are totally destructive, are completely indulged in, glorified, and spread amongst people. Actually, the freeing of oneself from negative emotions would itself be an experience of bliss, because we are always filled with petty resentments, anxiety, etc. We think we have positive emotions, but really we have petty temporary joys which, due to our weak will and lack of self-control and emotional awareness, could at any time turn into negative emotions. In fact, a lot of our emotions are either outright negative emotions, or taking a particular pleasure in some forms of negative emotions! If we could get rid of "attachment" (whatever you want to call it) and constant negative emotions, again, this state of apathy would already be pure bliss.

However, if you stop here, it may indeed seem like getting rid of emotions is all that's noteworthy concerning emotions in higher spiritual experiences. Yet this is only the scouring of the rust off of the weary old machine which can now work properly and miraculously. This is only the prelude to the experience of genuine positive emotions, which humanity is mostly occluded from; genuine Love, Hope, and Faith, as opposed to the sham articles most people have.

Emotions should not be all of it -- in higher levels of experiencing, emotions and thoughts become blended. All emotions will have a cognitive, rational, intellectual component to them, and profound thoughts have a profoundly emotional import behind them. Because one will recognize that emotion and thought are both merely different windows of a house looking out at different angles.

5th century BC Greek poet

www.google.com etc.

Has anyone here listened to the podcast machine elf radio? Has some interesting discussions on neoplatonism. Appears to be shifting into a purely that kinda show as well.

This.
Nice blog.
I could die at peace in any moment. Which is fortunate. Because people might eventually kill me for being a bum.

If I see bearded man in a toga jerking it in a tub, I'll say hello to you

I agree with most of what you say here, and I don't have the patience right now to try and refute what I don't agree with point by point. I'll just say that yes, emotion is a cognition. In Hinduism the term "manas" means mind and as a concept includes both emotions and rational thought. However, rational thought is often conflated with the Intellect which is an entirely different function. Intellect isn't merely the faculty by which we perceive truth but is itself identical with that truth. From the metaphysical standpoint knowing and being are identical, and it is in the Intellect that this becomes most apparent. I don't and won't disparage emotions. I just believe that they are lower on the hierarchical chain of being than Intellect, and that this HAS to be the case.

I agree in the typical notion in which emotions and thoughts are understood. However, on a higher level of experience, a higher form of thought becomes inextricably blended with a higher form of emotions. If emotions were not ontologically important, there would be no meaning for anything, no stimulus towards anything, no valuation, no "motor". Supreme intellect must be equated with supreme positive emotion, emotion that we are mostly blocked off from barring spiritual experiences.

>if emotions were not ontologically important, there would be no meaning for anything, no stimulus towards anything, no valuation, no "motor".
I think you are reversing causality here. From the metaphysical standpoints emotions are derivative. Foremost in reality are ultimate metaphysical principles. The world and everything in it, including our thoughts and emotions, proceed FROM these principles and are dependent on them, but those principles are not in turn dependent on the world.

Existentially, emotions may be very siginificant. Here and now, for our spiritual practice. Metaphysically, even the most exalted emotion or thought is a shadow of a reality when juxtaposed with the Infinite.