The Flight of the Alone to the Alone
The Teaching
Often I have woken to myself out of the body and entered into my own interior, having abandoned all other things. I have seen a beauty wonderfully great, and I have felt assured that then chiefly I was a partaker of the better life. I have actualized the best life and come to identity with the divine.
Firmly established in the divine, I have attained that perfect self-activity, placing myself above all intelligible being. Yet after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from intellect to reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down.
This is the life of the gods and of the divine and blessed among men — the flight of the alone to the Alone.
Commentary
The flight of the alone to the Alone, perhaps the most beautiful phrase in all of Neoplatonism. The individual soul (the alone) returning to the universal ground (the Alone), alone not as isolated but as undivided, singular, non-composite.
This is Dogen's 'body and mind drop away.' This is the Buddhist Nirvana, not extinction but the extinction of the separate-self illusion. This is what Merton experienced in Louisville and what Eckhart spent his life pointing at.
The puzzlement upon returning, 'how did I come down from that?', is the universal mystical grief of the contemplative who has glimpsed the ground. Rumi's Reed Flute is the same lament: the reed cut from the reed bed, longing for return.