Plotinus was a philosopher who lived during the peak of the Roman Empire.
Remarkably, separated by the entire Mediterranean, Middle World, and Persia, his ideas are close to the Indian system of thought called Vedanta.
He built a worldview on the foundation of Plato, taking it even further into questions about God, the soul, and what is truly real.
His system is called Neoplatonism.
For Plotinus, God is everything. He is The One.
God is the source of all things, but not limited by any rule or description.
You can’t say God is “good” or “beautiful” or even “a mind.”
Saying any one, single thing about God means leaving out something else.
God is beyond all things, that even human language can describe.
God is Ineffable.
God is not even a separate thing looking at the world, because that would make two things: God and whatever God sees.
God is everything, so there can’t be two things.
God simply is.
The world comes from God the way light comes from the sun.
From our human perspective, the Sun doesn’t sacrifice anything when it gives off light that makes its way to Earth.
Similarly, God didn’t give anything up when the world came to be.
The world flows out of God’s fullness.
God is complete, perfect, and present inside everything in existence.
Plotinus also talked about the World-Soul.
This is the conscience of the universe.
It’s a kind of creative force that gives shape and life to the physical world.
Below God and the World-Soul is matter.
For Plotinus, matter is the lowest level of reality. It can pull the human Soul toward selfishness, and making bad choices.
How to Find Happiness?
Plotinus said the Soul gets trapped when it becomes too attached to the Body and its desires.
To be free, a person has to turn away from earthly desires and focus on what is real, true, and closer to God.
Through deep practice and discipline, the soul can rise.
Discipline and focus and elevate the soul past ordinary thinking, past feelings, past factions and division, until it touches God directly.
Plotinus called the highest state ecstasy.
It’s similar to what some Indian traditions call samadhi: a state of complete stillness and union with the Absolute.
Plotinus is said to have experienced this union with God several times during his life.
Some scholars think his ideas were shaped by his travels to the East, where he may have encountered Indian philosophy firsthand.
He described union with the One as: everything is open and clear, nothing is hidden, and each thing contains all other things within itself. Light moves through light. The big is small; the small is also big. When a person finally reaches that state, they can no longer say they are looking at something separate from themselves. In that moment, there is no “self” and no “other.”
There is only the One: God.
These ideas are strikingly similar to what the ancient Indian teacher Yajnavalkya described in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad — one of the oldest and most important texts in the Vedanta tradition.
