A Happy Pull of Athene

In this book, I focus on the Plotinian henosis, which is defined as a unitive experience with the One. I argue that Plotinus attained his first henosis, expressed as a happy pull of Athene, unexpectedly when he was twenty-eight years old and he started studying philosophy in order to understand it. In the process, he developed a mystical philosophy that is individualistic. In addition, the modern research of religious experiences reveals a close affinity between the Plotinian concept of the human soul (psyche) and the extended concept of consciousness, which is claimed by various schools of modern psychology such as Jamesian psychology, depth psychology, and transpersonal psychology. Put simply, Plotinus developed an early form of an unchurched mysticism or a religion of no religion. Thus we can find the seeds of a radical spiritual or mystical individualism in Plotinus, which he succinctly presented as the flight of the alone to the Alone. The seeds will later develop in the history of Western mysticism and esotericism into more and more individualist expressions.