Plato had written about the inadequacy of mere words to express reality—one reason he often turned to myth and allegory.28 The Pythagorean alternative had been to turn to the eternal truths of number and mathematics. But to Plotinus mathematical reasoning, too, seemed a series of clumsy symbols or signs, just as language did, compared with the raw truth of spirit and the One. The trail out of the cave suddenly seemed a dead end. Plotinus decided there was only one way out: a leap of mystical illumination. According to his student Porphyry of Tyre, Plotinus experienced this mystical union at
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