Exciting Enlightenment

I have been a student of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) for several years. Also, for the past 6 months, I've been slowly plowing my way through Plotinus' Enneads. I am not even half way through, up to the third Ennead.

Every few days, I find some gem of an idea buried in Plotinus. Often, these gems overlap with a principle of ACIM. My understanding of Plotinus, who was a Platonist (studied the Greek philosopher Plato), is framed in principles which overlap from ACIM. I'm taking the principles themselves to be general truths and as such should be true for all humans and all religions and philosophies.

Not Christianity, but Christ Himself. (imo)

A key principle of ACIM is "forgiveness" which doesn't have the same meaning as most people think. It means looking beyond to the Christ Principle within, beyond this world. If this idea is translated into Platonism using Ideal Form, Reason Principle, Authentic Existence, and others; we get a unified explanation of ACIM. So truth is true and completely practice-able by ordinary humans. (er, or anyone who really wants to).

I can't offer a sound bite of two books, each of which is over 700 pages. I offer my excitement to know I am happily on a path of truth.

If you are a student of ACIM, you will recognize Christ Vision and forgiveness in the following key cut from Plotinus 3.8.7:

"All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision-manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is towards knowledge, all that springs from vision exists to produce Ideal-Form, that is a fresh object of vision, so that universally, as images of their engendering principles, they all produce objects of vision, Ideal-forms. In the engendering of these sub-existences, imitations of the Authentic, it is made manifest that the creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal.

When living things reproduce their Kind, it is that the Reason-Principles within stir them; the procreative act is the expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many forms, many objects of contemplation, so that the universe may be filled full with Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as nearly as possible, endless: to bring anything into being is to produce an Idea-Form and that again is to enrich the universe with contemplation: all the failures, alike in being and in doing, are but the swerving of visionaries from the object of vision: in the end the sorriest craftsman is still a maker of forms, ungracefully. So Love, too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form."

I am happy I continue to shamelessly follow Jesus. I am excited and enlightened. The Compassionate Spirit has worked within my heart and brought me a vision of The Real World.