Plotinus Quotes

There are times when I catch myself believing that there is such a thing as something; which is separate from something else.

The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.

Everything that makes diversity of kinds, of species, differences, properties... everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being, which is one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, death, truth, lies, good and evil.

There is a point where in the mystery of existence contradictions meet; where movement is not all movement and stillness is not all stillness; where the idea and the form, the within and the without, are united; where infinite becomes finite, yet not losing its infinity. If this meeting is dissolved, then things become unreal.

As long as we separate this oneness into two we won't achieve realization.

There is no separation between being and the manifested world, between the manifested and the unmanifested. But the unmanifested is so much vaster, deeper, and greater than what happens in the manifested.

In reality, there is only one true prayer, only one substantial prayer: Christ himself. There is only one voice which rises above the face of the earth, the voice of Christ. Prayer is oneness with Christ.

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

Relation is the essence of everything that exists.

Imagine a limitless expanse of water: above and below, before and behind, right and left, everywhere there is water. In that water is placed a jar filled with water. There is water inside the jar and water outside, but the jar is still there. The 'I' is the jar.

We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause.

Heaven invades earth when there is agreement here to what exists there. Honestly, that's how it happens.

The wave does not need to die to become water. She is already water.

Duality is always secretly unity.

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

If you want to have life, you have to die every moment for it. Life and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and the rising of the same wave, and the two form one whole.

The problem is that we have allowed our egos, the part of us which believes that we are separate from God and separate from each other, to dominate our lives.

You are the Supreme Being, and yet thinking yourself to be separate from it, you strive to become united with it. What is stranger than this?

Because our consciousness is tied to the physical manifestation of reality, we are tied to the belief in separation.

As we are - the world is.

For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it.

If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death - or shall I say, death implies life - you can conceive yourself. Not conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance, on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.

There is One Infinite Spirit and every time man says, "I am" he proclaims it.