IV. 8. 1
(Plotinus’s own experience.)
Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out from all other things. I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part. I have lived to the full the best life and come to identity with the Divine.1 Set firm in It I have come to That Supreme Actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Nous. Then after that rest in the Divine, when I have come down from Nous to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.
IV. 3. 12-13
(The descent of souls is not complete; their highest part, their Nous, does not come down. It is brought about by an overwhelming natural impulse, a desire pre-ordained by universal law for embodiment in the body which it has assigned to them.)
The souls of men see their images as if in the mirror of Dionysus, and come down to that level with a leap from above: but even they are not cut off from their principle and their Nous. For they do not come down with their Nous: they have gone on ahead of it down to earth, but their tops are firmly set above in heaven. They have had to come down farther because their middle part is compelled to care for that to which they have gone on, which needs their care. . . .
The inescapable rule of right (which governs their descent)
is thus set in a natural principle which compels each to go in its proper order to that to which it individually tends, the image of its original choice and disposition: each form of soul is close to that to which it has an internal disposition: there is no need of anyone to send it or bring it into body at a particular time, or into this or that particular body: when its moment comes to it, it descends and enters where it must as if of its own accord. Each has its own time, and when it comes, like a herald summoning it, the soul comes down and goes into the appropriate body; the process is like a stirring and carrying away by magic powers and mighty attractions. It is like the way in which the ordered development of the individual living thing comes to its fulfilment, stirring and producing everything in its time — sprouting of beard and horn, special impulses, new flowerings, the ordered growth of trees springing up at their appointed time.
The souls go neither of their own free will nor because they are sent; or at least their free will is not like deliberate choice but the leap of natural impulse, passionate natural desire of sexual union or an unreasoned stirring to noble deeds. Each special kind has its special destiny and moment, one now and one at another time. Nous which is before the universe has its destiny too, to remain There in all its greatness and send out: and the individual, which is subordinated to the universal, is sent according to law. For the universal bears heavily upon the particular, and the law does not derive from outside the strength for its accomplishment, but is given in those who are to be subject to it, and they bear it about with them. If the time comes, what it wills to happen is brought about by the beings themselves in whom it is present; they accomplish it themselves because they bear it about and it is strong by its firm establishment in them: it makes itself a sort of weight in them and brings about a longing, a birth-pang of desire to come there where the law within them tells them to come.
IV. 8. 5
(Solution of the difficulty caused by the apparent inconsistency in the teaching of Plato, who represents the descent of the soul sometimes as a voluntary fall and sometimes as caused by universal law and necessary for the good of the universe. Plotinus explains that both accounts are true, and the descent of the soul is both necessary and voluntary.)
So there is no inconsistency between the sowing to birth and the coming down for the perfection of the whole, and justice and the Cave, and necessity and free choice, if necessity includes free choice and being in the body, which is evil: nor is the teaching of Empédocles inconsistent with this, the flight from God and the wandering and the sin which is justly punished, nor that of Heraclitus, the finding refreshment in the flight,2 nor altogether the willing descent which is also unwilling. For everything which goes to the worse does so unwillingly, yet, if it goes of its own motion, when it suffers that worse fate it is said to be justly punished for what it has done. When, however, it must act and suffer this way by an everlasting law of its nature, and its descent from That which is above it is to meet the approach and help the need of something else, if anyone said that a god sent it down, he would not be out of accord with the truth or with himself. For final results are referred to the principle from which they spring, even if there are many intervening stages. And since the ‘sin of the soul’ can refer to two things, either to the cause of the descent or to doing evil when the soul has arrived here below, (the punishment of) the first is the very experience of descent, and of the lesser degree of the second the swift entrance into other bodies according to the judgment passed on its deserts — the word ‘judgment’ indicates what happens by divine decree — but the excessive kind of wickedness is judged to deserve greater punishment in charge of chastising spirits.
So then the soul, though it is divine and comes from above, enters into body and, though it is a god of the lowest ranks, comes to this world by a spontaneous inclination, its own power and the setting in order of what comes after it being the cause of its descent. If it escapes quickly it takes no harm by acquiring a knowledge of evil and coming to know the nature of wickedness, and manifesting its powers, making apparent works and activities which if they had remained quiescent in the spiritual world would have been of no use because they would never have come into actuality; and the soul itself would not have known the powers it had if they had not come out and been revealed. Actuality everywhere reveals completely hidden potency, in a way obliterated and non-existent because it does not yet truly exist. As things are, everyone wonders at what is within because of the varied splendour of the outside and admires the greatness of soul because of these fine things which it does.
VI. 4. 16
(The descent of soul into body does not mean that a soul literally moves down into a body, but that a body comes to share in the life of a soul. This is an evil for the soul, because it means that its activity is no longer universal, but is confined to the sphere of its particular body: in the spiritual world a soul is still an individual, but with its individuality completely absorbed in universal activity.)
Since the participation (of body) in the nature of soul does not mean that soul departs from itself and comes to this world, but that bodily nature comes to be in soul and participates in it, it is obvious that the ‘coming’ of which the ancient philosophers speak must refer to the presence there of bodily nature and its sharing in life and soul; 1 coming’ is not at all to be taken in the sense of movement from one place to another; it means this kind of communion of body and soul, whatever its precise nature. So ‘ descent’ means coming to be in body, in the sense in which we speak of soul’s being in body, that is, by giving body something of itself, not by coming to belong to it; and ‘departure’ means that body has no kind of share in it. There is an order in the way in which the parts of the visible universe share in soul, and soul, since it occupies the lowest place in the intelligible world, often gives something of itself to body because it is closer to it by its power and less widely separated from it by the law which governs its nature. But this communion with body is an evil, and its deliverance from body a good. Why? Because, even if it does not belong to a particular body, when it is described as the soul of a particular body it has in some way become partial instead of universal. Its activity, though it still belongs to the whole, is no longer directed to the whole: it is as if someone who possessed a complete science concentrated his activity on one particular subject of investigation; though the good for him lies not in one particular part of his science but in the whole science which he possesses. So this soul, which belongs to the whole intelligible world and conceals its being a part in the whole, leaps out, one might say, from the whole to a part, and confines its activity to that part, as if fire which could burn everything was compelled to burn some small thing, although keeping all its power of burning. When the soul is altogether separate from body, it is individual without being individual, but when it becomes distinct from Universal Soul, not by movement in place but by becoming an individual in its activity, it is a part, not universal — yet it is still universal in a different way: but when it is not in charge of a particular body it is altogether universal, and a part then only potentially.