This series covers events from 12/07/1983 - 03/07/1984

This stunning series of classes amplifies and provides insight into many of the paras on the practice of philosophy as the love of wisdom from category 20, “What Is Philosophy?” of Paul Brunton’s Notebooks.

Drawing upon his previous work on the double knower in Plotinian philosophy, Anthony Damiani shows that the philosopher has both intrinsic self-cognition and the ability to understand the changing world and their place in it. The highest phase of soul recognizes itself as pure awareness, but there is also a lower phase that seeks embodiment in order to develop its faculty of understanding through manifesting the World-Idea and then identifying with a body included in that Idea. These two phases are a unity, yet not a unity that negates the duality. The realization of this paradoxical combination of unity and multiplicity is the key to being a philosopher.

Damiani explains that the World-Mind functions as individualized teacher, with each person receiving precisely the education they need through karmically adjusted life experiences, an education that eventually, over the course of many incarnations, results in the development of the faculty of understanding, and then when attention investigates itself, the birth of insight.

How does this work? The phase of soul that seeks embodiment is continually manifesting the World-Idea it receives from the World-Mind, and in that process, it assimilates some of the intelligence of that Idea. In other words, it is universalizing itself. When the soul applies this intelligence to itself and how it lives in the world, it actualizes philosophy, the love of wisdom.

The culmination of this process is the birth of insight, which Damiani describes as life’s nondual, immediate understanding of itself. But without a balanced development of the psyche, the illumination from the Overself can’t be maintained and the glimpse of reality, if it comes, is lost. Thus the soul must fully develop and then balance all of its powers—for example, knowing, willing, and feeling—before insight can be stabilized. However we can get a hint of insight’s fullness from those who temporarily live in a dynamic state of being as the Witness-I, for example, a musician who knows a piece of music, feels all its nuances, and plays the piece with grace and inspiration.

For PB, balance means many things, including the balance of complementary qualities and powers, for example—faith by understanding, peacefulness by energy, feeling by intellect, aspiration by humility. Damiani interprets balance as meaning that you are freed from the identification with the degrees in your natal chart and so can respond to a situation with whatever understanding is necessary, which might mean applying an idea (or degree) that is not one of your natal degrees. This is possible because all 360 degrees, or ideas, are included in the soul’s nature insofar as the entirety of the world-idea is within it.

Thus this series shows that the authentic philosopher is a sage who has actualized the Plotinian concept of the double knower, or what Plotinus sometimes calls “the We,” the nondual combination of the higher I AM and the lower Witness-I, abiding in unity and peace while living in the world as a wise human being who cooperates with the World-Mind’s divine idea of the world.

Classes and documents available in this series