Plotinus: Sense-Perception "Sense-perception, as Plotinus conceives it, may be described as the production and cultivation of images (of the forms residing in the Intelligence, and contemplated by the Soul).

Zeen Chin

The Spirit of the Fountain dies not. It is called the Mysterious Feminine. The Doorway of the Mysterious Feminine Is called the Root of Heaven-and-Earth. Lingering like gossamer, it has only a hint of existence; And yet when you draw upon it, it is inexhaustible.

"The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others. It works well on Kafka -- Borges's only modern equal as an allegorist, with whom he's often compared -- because Kafka's fictions are expressionist, projective, and personal; they make artistic sense only as manifestations of Kafka's psyche. But Borges's stories are very different. They are designed primarily as metaphysical arguments†; they are dense, self-enclosed, with their own deviant logics. Above all, they are meant to be impersonal, to transcend individual consciousness -- ''to be incorporated,'' as Borges puts it, ''like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.'' One reason for this is that Borges is a mystic, or at least a sort of radical Neoplatonist -- human thought, behavior and history are all the product of one big Mind, or are elements of an immense cabalistic Book that includes its own decoding." Oh man, David Foster Wallace can really return a serve.

Silvano Leonessi, adapted by Mary Jones, S.R.C., The Pythagorean Philosophy of Numbers, "Rosicrucian Digest" No. 1, p. xx (2009)

"...a mob of Christians gathered, led by a reader named Peter...They kidnapped Hypatia on her way home and took her to the 'Church called Caesareum. They then completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.' Afterward, the men proceeded to mutilate her, and finally burn her limbs."