Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/891

Rh flood of pleasure, but the sensory elements may be of any and all kinds.

One form is characterized by the appearance of a beautiful light, far more pure and brilliant than any commonly experienced. It is probable that this light is due to the hypertrophy of the vague visual sensations which we always experience in darkness—what the Germans call the eye's Eigenlicht, Plotinus, the Neo-Platonic philosopher {circa 204-269 ), seems to have experienced this type of ecstasy, and has left us many descriptions of it, and of his methods of attaining it, albeit couched in rather obscure language. "Often," he says (Ennead IV, book viii, chap. 1), "I awake from the body to myself, I come to be outside all else but within myself, I see a great and wonderful beauty. Then am I most assured of the supreme happiness of my lot, for I have entered into the best life and am become one with God. . . . After thus abiding in the Divine, I descend from intuition to thought, and while descending I can not tell how I descend, or how my soul has got within my body." He thus describes his method (Ennead VI, book ix, chap. 7): "In your contemplation cast not your thought without, for God is not in any one place, depriving other things of himself, but is present there to him that can touch him, and to him that can not he is not present. As in other cases one can not think anything while thinking and attending to something else, but must add nothing to that which is thought, that it alone may be that which is thought; so also here one must know that he can not, while he has the image of anything else in mind, apprehend God, that other image being active the while, nor can the soul, while possessed and controlled by other things, receive the image of their opposite. . . . Every soul must let go all without and turn within, must not be attracted toward any outer thing, but must lose consciousness of all such, first of her condition and then of her thoughts, and after losing consciousness of herself also must be given over to the vision of God." In another passage (Ennead V, book v, chap. 7) he draws a distinction between light proper and that which is illumined by it; usually we see the latter only, but we can become conscious of the former also. For example, with closed eyes and in total darkness we see a pure light which is generated by the eye itself. "So also the mind, wrapping itself about from other things, and withdrawing within, seeing nothing, will behold light, not here and there, but pure light alone, of itself suddenly shining, so that" (chap. 8) "it can not tell whence it shone, whether from without or from within, nor can one say, after it has departed, that it was within or not within. One should not ask whence, for there is no whence; it does not come, nor does it go any whither, but shines, and then ceases to shine. One should not therefore