Christ the Eternal Tao: The First Ennead, Chapter One

The First Ennead/Chapter One from the book 'Christ the Eternal Tao' by Hieromonk Damascene.
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WAY
Text:
Before light was made
There was the Primal Light that was not made:
The Primal Essence,
Dwelling in the Darkness of incomprehensibility.
Of this the Ancient Prophet spoke, saying:
He made Darkness His secret place
The formless and immaterial place of knowledge,
Whither our understanding or concepts gain no admittance.
And the Ancient Sage spoke too of this,
Calling it «the Darkness within darkness,
The gate to all mystery.
There is no name whereby the Primal Essence can be named, Neither in this age nor in the age to come.
We call Him Essence,
For He is a sea of Essence,
Indeterminate and without bounds,
Spreading far and wide beyond all notion of time or nature.
He is wholly Essence, and solely Essence,
Yet He is above essence,
Because He is not of the essence of anything that is.
We call Him Being,
For before all else was, He Is.
Yet He is above being,
Above all existing things,
Even above existence itself.
We call Him the One,
For He alone is wholly Simple and without parts.
Yet He transcends the antinomy of the one and the many,
Being not limited to any concepts, even the concept of the One.
He is neither one nor unity, neither many nor multiplicity.
Finally, we call Him Mind or Thought,
For He is Himself Mind by essence,
Wholly Mind and solely Mind.
Yet He is entirely above mind and thought, too,
For every thought expresses a duality:
The relationship of the thinker and the object thought of.
Neither of these two can return to complete Simplicity in itself,
For the thinker has need of the object
And the object has need of the thinker.
But the Primal Essence is neither of those who think nor what is thought of,
For He is beyond them:
Unlimited, self-existing, free and simple, Standing in need of nothing.
To conceive or be conceived is proper to the nature of things secondary to the Primal Essence.
Thus the essence that can be conceived of as essence is not the Primal Essence.
The being that can be limited to existence is not the Primal Being.
The one that can be limited to the concept of oneness is not the Primal Unity.
And the mind that can be thought of is not the Primal Mind.
The one who still in some way possesses any thought has not yet left duality and arrived at Simplicity.
But the one who has completely abandoned it has arrived in some fashion at the Primal Mind,
Through having supremely relinquished the power of thinking.