Plotinus Six Enneads

translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page

In Ennead IV: Eighth tractate: The soul's descent into body Plotinus speaks as follows:

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Heraclitus, who urges the examination of this matter, tells of compulsory alternation from contrary to contrary, speaks of ascent and descent, says that "change reposes," and that "it is weariness to keep toiling at the same things and always beginning again"; but he seems to teach by metaphor, not concerning himself about making his doctrine clear to us, probably with the idea that it is for us to seek within ourselves as he sought for himself and found.

Empedocles- where he says that it is law for faulty souls to descend to this sphere, and that he himself was here because he turned a deserter, wandered from God, in slavery to a raving discord- reveals neither more nor less than Pythagoras and his school seem to me to convey on this as on many other matters; but in his case, versification has some part in the obscurity.

We have to fall back on the illustrious Plato, who uttered many noble sayings about the soul, and has in many places dwelt upon its entry into body so that we may well hope to get some light from him. ...

This is a wonderful mystic way Plotinus relates his own personal experiences to the teachings he was taught, trying to complete and add some of his views in respect to the given insights.

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THE FIRST ENNEAD.

• I: The animate and the man
• II: On virtue
• III: On dialectic [the upward way]
• IV: On true happiness
• V: Happiness and extension of time
• VI: Beauty
• VII: On the primal good and secondary forms of good [otherwise, on happiness]
• VIII: On the nature and source of evil
• IX: The reasoned dismissal

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THE SECOND ENNEAD.

• I: On the kosmos or on the heavenly system
• II: The heavenly circuit
• III: Are the stars causes
• IV: Matter in its two kinds
• V: On potentiality and actuality
• VI: Quality and form-idea
• VII: On complete transfusion
• VIII: Why distant objects appear small
• IX: Against those that affirm the creator of the kosmos and the kosmos itself to be evil:

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THE THIRD ENNEAD.

• I: Fate
• II: On providence (1)
• III: On providence (2)
• IV: Our tutelary spirit
• V: On love
• VI: The impassivity of the unembodied
• VII: Time and eternity
• VIII: Nature contemplation and the one
• IX: Detached considerations

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THE FOURTH ENNEAD.

• I: On the essence of the soul (1)
• II: On the essence of the soul (2)
• III: Problems of the soul (1)
• IV: Problems of the soul (2)
• V: Problems of the soul (3). [also entitled on sight]
• VI: Perception and memory
• VII: The immortality of the soul
• VIII: The soul's descent into body
• IX: Are all souls one?

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THE FIFTH ENNEAD.

• I: The three initial hypostases
• II: The origin and order of the beings. following on the first
• III: The knowing hypostases and the transcendent
• IV: How the secondaries rise from the first: and on the one
• V: That the intellectual beings are not outside the intellectual-principle: and on the nature of the good
• VI: That the principle transcending being has no intellectual act. what being has intellection primally and what being has it secondarily
• VII: Is there an ideal archetype of particular beings
• VIII: On the intellectual beauty
• IX: The intellectual-principle, the ideas, and the authentic existence

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THE SIXTH ENNEAD.

• I: On the kinds of being- (1)
• II: On the kinds of being (2)
• III: On the kinds of being (3)
• IV: On the integral omnipresence of the authentic existent (1)
• V: On the integral omnipresence of the authentic existent (2)
• VI: On numbers
• VII: How the multiplicity of the ideal-forms came into being: and upon the good
• VIII: On free-will and the will of the one
• IX: On the good, or the one