Plotinus

The noblest highest and grandest of all the NeoPlatonists after the founder of the school, Ammonius Saccas. He was the most enthu.siastic of the Philalethcans or "lovers of truth", whose aim was to found a religion on a system of intellectual abstraction, which is true Theosophy, or the whole substance of Neo-Platonism. If we are to believe Porphyry, Plotinus has never disclosed either his birthplace or connexions, his native land or his race. Till the age of twentyeight he had never found teacher or teaching which would suit him or answer his aspirations. Then he happened to hear Ammonius Saccas, from which day he continued to attend his school. At thirty-nine he accompanied the Emperor Gordian to Persia and India with the object of learning their philosophy. He died at the age of sixty-six after writing fifty-four books on philosophy. So modest was he that it is said he "blushed to think he had a body". He reached Samddhi (highest ecstasy or "re-union with God" the divine Ego) several times during his life. As said by a biographer, "so far did his contempt for his bodily organs go, that he refused to use a remedy, regarding it as unworthy of a man to use means of this kind". Again we read, "as he (lied, a drajron (or .SL'ri)i.*iit) that liad beeu uikUt liis bed, glided through a hole in the wall and disappeared" — a fact suggestive for the student of symbolism. He taught a doctrine identical with that of the Vedantins, namely, that the 8pirit-Soul emanating from the One deific jirinciplr was, aft.'r its pil^Tiinagc. re-united to It. Point within a Circle, in its esoteric meaning tlie first unmanifested locjos appearing on tlie infinite and shoreless expan.se of Space, represented by the Circle. It is the plane of Infinity and Absoluteness. This is only one of tlie numberless and hidden meanings of this symbol, which is the most im])ortant of all the geometrical figures used in metapliysical emblematology. As to tht- ^Masons, they have made of the point "an individual brother" who.se duty to -Cxod and man is bounded by the circle, and have added John the Baptist and John the Evangelist to keep company with the "brother", representing them under two ixTixMidicular parallel lines.