The soul in its nature loves God and longs to be at one with Him in the noble love of a daughter for a noble father; but coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.
Interpretation
The soul inherently seeks a connection with the divine but can become distracted by earthly desires.
In this quote, Plotinus explores the idea that the soul's true essence is to love and connect with the divine, likening this relationship to that of a loving daughter and her noble father. However, he points out that upon entering the physical realm, the soul may become enchanted by worldly attractions and mortal relationships, leading it away from its true source, resulting in a fall from grace.
In practice
This quote could be used in a spiritual discussion to illustrate the tension between divine aspiration and earthly distractions.
Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.
Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us.
The stars are like letters that inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other. Everything breathes together.
I am striving to give back the Divine in myself to the Divine in the All.
All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.
The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
So often we think that Allah only tests us with hardships, but this isn't true. Allah also tests with ease. He tests us with na`im (blessings) and with the things we love, and it is often in these tests that so many of us fail. We fail because when Allah gives us these blessings, we unwittingly turn them into false idols in the heart.
Let us not make the poor our friends by our alms, not our enemies by our scorns. We had better have the ears of God full of their prayers, than heaps of money in our own coffers with their curses.
Almost everybody accepts that some people can be killed. 'The concept of 'brain death' - the belief that people on respirators can legitimately be killed - shows that.
But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.
Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.
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