Currently reading Pierre Hadot on Plotinus (Plotinus: The Simplicity of Vision) and a bit of the man himself (Enneads—more difficult and more interesting than the commentary.)
Brought up Christian in a “secular” culture that remains soaked in its religious unconscious, I’m curious about the function of belief. It seems impossible to imagine a mind without beliefs. Or, for that matter, a religion. However, there is a difference between holding beliefs reflexively, as a kind of Kantian necessity for thinking about anything, and raising belief to the status of a moral and/or spiritual value. This is a peculiarly Christian innovation (later adopted by Islam). “Believe…and you shall be saved.” From one perspective it is, perhaps, a strange spiritual exercise: the exertion of will on conjecture — inevitably huanted by its shadow, doubt. So far as I understand Buddhism (strictly as an outsider), it’s possible to evolve an entire religious tradition that lacks this spiritual investment in belief, and indeed regards belief with suspicion (“If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.”)
So back to Plotinus, who shares with Buddhism—if I have understood either party—an empirical bent. The sublime is revealed not by a moral battle against doubt, but by an intense discipline of observation. You don’t struggle to believe. You sit still and look.
I recall a devastating line from the 15th century Indian mystic Kabir: “If you haven’t experienced it, it isn’t true.”