We are all cognizant that each of us is an individual soul that is distinct and unique in its development and experience, and, in the manifest world, has an “identity” of its own, regardless of its unitive identity with other souls in the one Oversoul. This simultaneous unity and multiplicity is readily acknowledged by Plotinus; but neither he nor any other has been able to satisfactorily explain the manner in which the one Soul becomes a multitude of individualized souls; how Soul, though one and indivisible, is also, at the same time, divisible and manifold, becoming separate, individually responsible, souls.
That such individualized souls exist is clearly evident to us who know ourselves as separate, individualized, self-governing, units of self-awareness. We may understand that Soul is nothing less than an emanate of the Divine consciousness; and yet, we must also acknowledge that each soul's perspective is unique. Differences in perspective seem to arise and persist through the accumulation of individual experience, inference, and intent. And so there appears a multitude of souls, united in the Divine Consciousness, but separate in manifestation. Body-bound souls formulate desires and set out to fulfil them in the (lower) material world, thereby losing sight of their Divinity. And so, in place of the one Soul, which is truly their common Source and Reality, a multitude of separate selves comes into existence, each driven by its own independent desires and circumstances.
These individualized souls, one can plainly see, are founded on error; they are cases of mistaken identity. Nonetheless, they have a certain kind of reality, just as dreams do; they are transient idea-forms that continue to inhabit bodies, and pass through experiences that over time quite naturally instruct those 'individualized souls' in the error of their ways, and return them by various and sundry ways to the awareness of their true nature, guiding them by the most blessed path to the reformation of their loving intent and the restoration of their natural bliss. This is known as ‘the evolution of the soul’.
The Divine Mind, in its infinite wisdom, allows more than one 'incarnation' for the soul to traverse this evolutionary path. The soul's excursion into the material realm is frought with difficulties and dangers, and may bring with it many painful or dreadful impressions. These must be resolved and released in order for the soul to regain its blissful freedom. And so the process of soul-evolution may be prolonged and stretched over a number of soul-incarnations. Whatever necessity requires will inevitably find a means for its accomplishment in the evolutionary journey toward truth and freedom.
Jesus put it well when he said, "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free." According to this understanding, a man is free insofar as he is cognizant of his essential identity with the Highest, and bound when he departs from the knowledge and awareness of his Divinity, identifying with the body/soul complex. He then succumbs to the rule of earthly necessity, and is moved willy-nilly by the causative forces inherent in Nature. He has the power, as the Divine Self, to will freely, unencumbered, uncompelled by circumstance; and, for that reason is responsible for his individual actions. All souls are linked by inclusion to the one Soul, and by extension to the Divine Mind; but only he who is cognizant, aware, of his Divine Identity, is truly free.
Meanwhile, along the way, in the soul’s evolutionary journey, an inescapable justice continually operates. As Saint Paul warned, “Be not deceived: God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” 3 Plotinus, acknowledging this same universal law of justice, then known as adrastieia, and today known as “the law of actions, or karma”, says:
No one can ever escape the suffering entailed by ill deeds done. The divine law is ineluctable, carrying bound up, as one with it, the fore-ordained execution of its doom. The sufferer, all unaware, is swept onward towards his due, hurried always by the restless driving of his errors, until at last, wearied out by that against which he struggled, he falls into his fit place and, by self-chosen movement, is brought to the lot he never chose. And the law decrees, also, the intensity and the duration of the suffering while it carries with it, too, the lifting of chastisement and the faculty of rising from those places of pain—all by power of the harmony that maintains the universal scheme 4
Thus a man, once a ruler, will be made a slave because he abused his power and because the fall is to his future good. Those who have misused money will be made poor—and to the good poverty is no hindrance. Those who have unjustly killed, are killed in turn, unjustly as regards the murderer but justly as regards the victim, and those who are to suffer are thrown into the path of those who adminster the merited treatment.
It is not an accident that makes a man a slave; no one is prisoner by chance. Every bodily outrage has its due cause. The man once did what he now suffers. A man who murders his mother will become a woman and be murdered by a son. A man who wrongs a woman will become a woman, to be wronged. 5
We humans are, undoubtedly, of a two-fold nature: we are, in essence, identical with the Divine Consciousness, our Divine Self, which assures us of a free will; and we are only secondarily projected souls, with their accompanying karmic tendencies. We are a combination, a duality, of identities: we are the Divine Self, and we are also the projected (superimposed) individual soul (jiva). Our essence, the one Divine Consciousness, is the only true ‘I’ in all the universe and beyond; It is everyone’s eternal Identity. But, by God’s mysterious Power of illusion (Maya), everyone born into this world takes on a limited set of characteristics as well, constituting the limited temporal identity of each, otherwise known as the jiva, or individualized soul. According to that soul’s previous history and its corresponding mental tendencies, the characteristics of each soul are made manifest.
The ‘soul’ is in essence the Divine, but as it appears within the material universe, it manifests both the Divine and the illusory—just as in a dream, we partake of both our true conscious selves and an illusory self. The analogy is exceedingly apt, as in both instances, we retain our fundamental reality, while operating in an illusory ‘imaged’ reality. The individual soul is, to a great degree, who we experience ourselves to be in this world; and we operate in this life from the past karmic tendencies we embody. However, at a more fundamental level, we are identical with the Divine Self, which comprises our freedom to will and act from a level of consciousness beyond our soul properties and characteristics. The past karmic tendencies are very powerful in their influence; and they can lead us where we don’t necessarily want to go, unless we are able to identify with our true nature as the Divine Self and turn those inherent tendencies to Divine purposes.
Here is Plotinus again, with some pertinent comments on this subject:
If man were… nothing more than a made thing, acting and acted upon according to a fixed Nature, he could be no more subject to reproach and punishment than the mere animals. But as the scheme holds, man is singled out for condemnation when he does evil; and this with justice. For he is no mere thing made to rigid plan; his nature contains a Principle apart and free. 6 …This, no mean Principle, is… a first-hand Cause, bodiless and therefore supreme over itself, free, beyond the reach of Cosmic Cause.7
We may indeed identify solely with our projected self as an individualized soul;
…[But] there is another [higher] life, emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher realm, towards the Good and Divine, towards that Principle which no one possesses except by deliberate usage. One may appropriate [this Higher Principle], becoming, each personally, the higher, the beautiful, the Godlike; …For every human Being is of a twofold character: there is that compromise-total [consisting of soul conjoined to body], and there is the authentic Man [the divine Self]. 8
The great Vedantic sage, Shankaracharya, taught, “the soul is in reality none other than Brahman” (jivo brahmaiva naparah). And this is true; for, in essence, the soul is identical with the transcendent Source of all, and is supremely, absolutely, free. In its transcendent aspect, it is always free, immutable and unaffected by the bodily conditions or worldly circumstances of individuals; however, when the soul identifies with the conditional, it is bound; it is subject to being carried along in the floodwaters of the archetypal forces of Nature. Only when it knows and identifies with the One, the Divine Self, does it realize and manifest its true freedom. This is the view of Vedanta, and the basis for its concept of “liberation”; and this is the view of Plotinus as well.
Soul is the essential radiance of the Divine Mind, and individualized souls partake of that same reality, though by their connection to body, they are confined to time and space. These souls, enamored of the material world, become disoriented, bound by their own attachment to matter; but by a deliberate reversal of its intention, an individualized soul is able to look back within itself and ‘see’ its Origin, thereby regaining awareness of its true identity. Since both Soul and Matter are the Thought-products of the Divine Mind, and both consist of the Divine essence, an individual soul inhabiting a body may look within and come to realize that both its conscious self and its material casing consist of the one Divine Mind; that truly he is nothing else but that one eternal Reality.
Plotinus describes, from his own experience, the vision of a soul turned inward to its own Source:
Once pure in the Spirit realm, [gazing intently inward toward the Divine Mind] the soul too possesses that same unchangeableness: for it possesses identity of essence. When it is in that region it must of necessity enter into oneness with the Divine Mind by the sheer fact of its self-orientation, for by that intention all interval disappears; the soul advances and is taken into unison, and in that association becomes one with the Divine Mind—but not to its own destruction: the two are one, and [yet] two. In such a state there is no question of stage and change. The soul, motionless, would be intent upon its intellectual act, and in possession, simultaneously, of its self-awareness; for it has become one simultaneous existence with the Supreme. 9
Here is no longer a duality but a two-in-one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades. It is as lover and beloved here [on earth], in a copy of that union, long to blend. The soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will give herself no foreign name, not man, not living being, not Being, not All. Any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them. This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know.
Once There she will barter for This nothing the universe holds; not though one would make over the heavens entire to her. There is nothing higher than this, nothing of more good. Above This there is no passing; all the rest, however lofty, lies on the downward path. She is of perfect judgment and knows that This was her quest, that nothing is higher. 10
The soul wishes to remain forever in that unitive vision,
But it leaves that conjunction; it cannot suffer that unity; it falls in love with its own powers and possessions, and desires to stand apart; it leans outward, so to speak: then, it appears to acquire a memory of itself [as an individualized soul once again].11
My own experience of this unitary vision was identical in all respects with that of Plotinus, and I agreed with his conclusions; but I was puzzled regarding souls. There was no soul in my (mystical) vision! There was no soul in that vision because the “soul”, in its vision of its prior, is “taken into unison” with its prior, the Divine Mind, and is made transparent and unaware of itself as something apart. It is the soul that is seeing, experiencing its underlying source, its subtler Self, as a wave’s sense of individuality might disappear as it becomes aware it is the ocean. Likewise, the soul merged in the Divine Mind doesn’t see any other souls, because the Divine Mind is causally prior to the manifestation of souls.
Duality-all duality-comes into existence with the separation of the soul-identity from the Divine Mind identity. Then, instead of the one all-inclusive Identity, there are two identities: an ‘I' and a ‘Thou'. From this initial duality, all other dualities are born: the dualities associated with time and space, such as "now" and "then", or "here" and "there" or "near" and "far", "night" and "day"; the dualities associated with personal identity, such as "life" and "death", "pleasure" and "pain", "joy" and "sorrow", "sound" and "silence", "moving" and "still"; and the dualities associated with possessiveness, such as "mine" and "yours", "love" and "hate". All these are born from the establishment of an identity, an ‘I', separate from and other than the one all-inclusive Mind. 12
When the separate soul-identity is once again merged in the one Divine Mind, all these dualities disappear. Time and space also disappear, and all is Eternity once again. "No I, no Thou, no now or then". In its vision of the Divine Mind, the soul, now transparent, sees its own eternal Self. The soul ‘sees' now that: ‘I' am all-pervading, ‘I' am the one Consciousness-Energy constituting all minds and bodies and all this universe, wherein all things move together of one accord and by a universal assent. And this liberating knowledge and the conviction of its eternal and indivisible identity remains with it always.
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