This series covers events from 10/14/1983 - 03/09/1984

This breathtaking series of classes, conducted from October 1983 through March 1984, develops a wonderfully original synthesis of Plotinian metaphysics, Paul Brunton's writings on the Overself, Plato’s Divided Line, Samkhyan psychology, and astrological cosmology.

It begins with a class articulating the levels of soul in Plotinus, tracing soul from the unlived life of the One through Absolute Soul, the Demiurge, star souls, the planetary souls of our solar system, and finally to the Earth Mind. Individual human souls have a part that remains in the Nous, but they also emanate a part (the I AM, unit soul) that is individuated more and more as it participates in the World-Idea at various levels. At the lowest level, the human soul receives from the Earth Mind the World-Idea, which includes the subtle body the soul identifies with, and then the World-Idea is transmitted to that body and is projected through its functioning as its sense world.

A paper on these ideas (“Overview of Levels of Soul”) is discussed in the next class, which also includes explanations about the faculty of insight, which Anthony Damiani explains as “life understanding itself without any intermediary.” PB says there are three stages of the deepening of insight, or three degrees of penetration into the Void, and Damiani explains these in a Plotinian context as a progressive deepening into the levels of the divinity of our Sun: its soul, its intellect, and its unity in the One.

Next there is a class discussing a paper on the intertwining of cosmology and epistemology (“Deliberate Repetition: Cosmic Epistemology; Soul as Double Knower”)—that is, how the various levels of the spiritual universe provide the necessary context for understanding how we can come to know anything. This class goes into detail about the four levels of the divinity of the sun, or Solar Logos, and how these are mirrored by the unity of the I AM and its three levels of subjectivity: spiritual, psychic, and bodily, which correspond to the inerratic sphere, the planetary spheres, and the Earth Mind.

The next class focuses on the paper “Essence of Soul as Indivisible and Divisible; Omnipresence of Soul to the Cosmos,” which further amplifies the paradoxical notion of soul as one and many, indivisible and divisible, to explain the oneness and manyness of soul and, and the manyness of the World-Idea in relationship to the unity of the I AM.

The following classes focus on the four levels of the Solar Logos and how these correlate to the four parts of the Divided Line of Plato and the tattvas of the Samkhya system—in particular, Buddhi, Ahamkara, and Manas.

The series ends with an amazing class on the unit soul as a double knower, which possesses both self-cognition, or insight, and cognition of other—that is, an understanding of the universe. The unit soul has the Nous within it as an intellectual cosmos, and it acquires self-knowledge when it is able to identify itself with this, but to acquire this self-knowledge it must project itself as the Witness-I into a series of bodies in varied environments, on this planet and others, in which it is educated by its experiences of the World-Idea. The “We” of Plotinus is the soul as the double knower, the I AM and the Witness-I, which knows both itself and the world.

Edited versions of several of the papers (or parts of them) discussed in this series were included in the chapters “Soul” and “The System of Nature” in Astronoesis.

Classes and documents available in this series