WISDOM
- for Iamblichus, the wise person is one who understands, accepts and engages reality as it truly is; the task of ripening into wisdom requires accurate knowledge of personal and cosmic nature, and cultivation of proper relations between them
- a wise life first entails respect for the forces of one’s physical and psychological environments; this respect can be nurtured through ritual acts of reverence for the ordering forces of these environments in their personified forms, derived from popular devotional religion
- on the foundation of this humble, realistic attitude, awareness of the unitive dimension of self and cosmos is awakened; meditation on symbolic objects and visualized images draws the attention toward the depth of things, and thus toward the depth of self
- through practicing these disciplines the soul is purified of the tendency to over-value the surface features of perception and thought; intuition of the One can be further enhanced by contemplating the mathematical regularities of the outer and inner domains, as these patterns trace the path of erotic circulation between One and Many
- mature persons thus grow a double awareness to match their double identity; they are aware of the variegated surface of reality, but this consciousness is suffused with the glow of underlying oneness; the cosmos appears as a flow of Eros, which is experienced within oneself as pneuma (spirit); every mature action is consciously a gesture of Eros, or Love
- modern science reveals the world as indeed mathematically structured and interwoven; perhaps the other insights of Iamblichus contain hints on how we too can deeply feel, as well as know, that this world is our home