MacKenna - Plotinus

Every living thing is a combination of SOUL and body-kind: the celestial sphere, therefore, if it is to be everlasting as an individual entity must be so in virtue either of both these constituents or of one of them, by the combination of SOUL and body or by SOUL only or by body only. Enneads II,1,2
Of course anyone that holds body to be incorruptible secures the desired permanence at once; no need, then, to call on a SOUL or on any perdurable conjunction to account for the continued (…)

1. What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It? The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting (…)

With regard to time, if it is to be thought of as a measure, we must determine what it is that applies this measure. It must clearly be either SOUL or the Present Moment. If on the contrary we take time to be something measured and regard it as being of such and such extension a year, for example then we may consider it as a quantity: essentially however time is of a different nature; the very fact that we can attribute this or that length to it shows us that it is not length: in other (…)

The Third Hypostasis of the Divinity - the All-Soul, the Universal Life-Principle - includes, and is, all the souls: the human soul is, therefore, the All-Soul: but it is the All-Soul set into touch with the lower: it is the All-Soul particularized for the space, at least, of the mortal life of man.
This particularization is necessarily a limitation: it sets bounds: it comports a provisory application to this rather than that; we may, therefore, discern phases of the All-Soul in us. These (…)

As for Things of Process or for Eternal Existents whose Act is not eternally invariable we must hold that these are due to Cause; Causelessness is quite inadmissible; we can make no place here for unwarranted “slantings,” for sudden movement of bodies apart from any initiating power, for precipitate spurts in a SOUL with nothing to drive it into the new course of action. Such causelessness would bind the SOUL under an even sterner compulsion, no longer master of itself, but at the mercy of (…)

1. In the Intellectual Kosmos dwells Authentic Essence, with the Intellectual-Principle [Divine Mind] as the noblest of its content, but containing also souls, since every SOUL in this lower sphere has come thence: that is the world of unembodied spirits while to our world belong those that have entered body and undergone bodily division. Enneads IV,1,1
But there is a difference: The Intellectual-Principle is for ever repugnant to distinction and to partition. SOUL, there without (…)

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat? Clearly, either in the Soul alone, or in the Soul as employing the body, or in some third entity deriving from both. And for this third entity, again, there are two possible modes: it might be either a blend or a distinct form due to the blending. Enneads I,1,
Now what could bring fear to a nature thus unreceptive of all the outer? Fear demands feeling. Nor is there place (…)

All this accomplished, it gives up its touring of the realm of sense and settles down in the Intellectual Kosmos and there plies its own peculiar Act: it has abandoned all the realm of deceit and falsity, and pastures the Soul in the "Meadows of Truth": it employs the Platonic division to the discernment of the Ideal-Forms, of the Authentic-Existence and of the First-Kinds [or Categories of Being]: it establishes, in the light of Intellection, the unity there is in all that issues from these (…)

As in Man before the organization or shaping by the All-Soul, so everywhere else there is Matter, always the same: there is a certain tendency to think of Matter as being ‘material’, e.g. in man as flesh or clay, in the world at large as some sort of powdery beginning or residue of things: this misconception must be carefully guarded out. ‘Matter’, says Jules Simon, ‘is rather a demand of thought than a reality of existence’: this is perhaps to state the case rashly, but it is certainly (…)

Thus it is not easy, without knowledge and the training of habit, to quiver with any very real rapture over the notion of becoming ‘wholly identified with the Intellectual-Principle’; when it is understood and at each moment deeply realized that ‘The Intellectual-Principle’ is the highest accessible ‘Person’ of the Godhead, is very God, is the Supreme Wisdom immanent within the human soul and yet ineffably superior to all the Universe besides, then perhaps we may feel the great call to the (…)