24 Chapter 1
those sensory imaginings are also phantasms. Some of our phantasms come from memories of other things, others are cut from whole cloth, and some come from the Nous. In fact, we are constructing a phantasm whenever we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel something. We never really taste matter or see matter: we experience only the phantasm we build in our mind around that sensory experience. This is why memories can emotionally move us: they are as real as the phantasms created from our direct sensory experiences. Phantasms can also come from the Nous. Our Nous is the Mind, not the little to-do-list scribbling mind of our morning errands, but the mind that can think eternal thoughts. Let me show you how. Visualize a point. Move that point any distance in one direction, tracing out a line. Now move that line 90 degrees to itself, perpendicular, so it traces out a plane. You now have a square. Now move that square perpendicular to the direction of the plane, so it forms a cube. Now take that cube, and move it perpendicular to itself, 90 degrees away from itself: this object is a hypercube, an object that does not exist in our world. Yet with enough practice, we can visualize it. It may not be easy at first, but I assure you that it’s possible with enough practice to visualize a hypercube. This image does not exist in physical matter, but it exists in the Nous as an idea, and we have access to it through our minds, and then can build phantasms of it. So how does this model and similar models help us understand the nature of the divine or rise up to henosis? For that matter, why rise up to henosis at all? Is there something wrong with the lives we live, something wrong with matter? Again, opinions of the Neoplatonists are diverse and opinions of the Hermetic philosophers even more diverse. Plotinus regards matter as evil, at least at some points in his Enneads. And the Hermetica argue both that matter is evil and insist that it’s not. I find no reason to condemn matter, since the ancients couldn’t agree on the issue anyway. I like to think of it this way: We are physical beings, true, but that’s not all we are. We’re capable of being, of doing more. And if we are capable, isn’t it worth striving for those goals? Any physical goals we have, as valuable as