He starts by making the point that Plotinus is an ascetic, but not because he wanted to be a joyless curmudgeon. He says that Plotinus is an ascetic because he wants to get at what is truly good, and not be distracted by lesser goods which are unsatisfying. That remark sounds a little like my thoughts about asceticism here. Then he says that we all desire the One, that we should therefore channel all our desires towards it, and that when we finally achieve the One (if we ever do) all our desires will cease.
How does it make any sense to say that we all desire the One? Don't we desire a lot of different things? Food, shelter, love and companionship, money and nice things, admiration and respect, … and on and on? Well yes, of course. But Plotinus says that these are only distractions from the One, or at best they are reflections of it; whereas if we had the One Itself, we wouldn't need all the other things.
At first hearing, this sounds bizarre. It comes from Plato defining the Good as that which we all seek, and that definition comes in turn from saying, "I want food because it is good; I want shelter because it is good; I want companionship because it is good," and so on. But to jump from saying all these things separately to saying that there is one single thing called "the Good" that we can somehow acquire and that will satisfy all our desires at once … that sounds like a joke. It sounds like Plato (or Plotinus) is playing with words to charm us or mystify us or confuse us, and in any event to get us to follow along. Of course Plato and Plotinus would deny that the Good (or the One) is a "thing" that we can "acquire." Also, they are both very smart; so if I can see that the jump from adjective to noun looks like a stretch, odds are that they see it too. Maybe there is more to it than meets the eye. Keep this question in mind as we go on.
Notice by the way that Robert Pirsig does something similar in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he introduces the term Quality but refuses to define it beyond saying "Quality is what you like." [p. 232] There are some words in there about Quality as an immediate felt experience, but nothing very exact. If the comparison helps, I think it is fair to use it.
When Plotinus says that all desires will cease he sounds for a minute like a Buddhist (I've remarked before that the Buddha dharma and the Πλατωνικός λόγος sound awfully similar) but his path doesn't sound especially Buddhist. Hines writes that, "Plotinus does not espouse the extinction of desire, but the channeling of desire. Within us is a spiritual engine, longing, that is always running strong.... [But] In truth, that hunger can only be satisfied by the One." [p. 40]
Is the difference real, or only apparent? I'm not sure yet. This is another question to keep in mind as we go, to see if it is answered later. I admit that when I hear that the way to the One involves using all our power of longing and desire but simply channeling it, the first thing I think of is William Blake's remark in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that "at the end of six thousand years …. the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment." [plate 14] But I'm probably wrong: at any rate I make no claims here that Blake and Plotinus are saying anything like the same thing.
So if we all want the One, where do we find it? Plotinus says that the One is everywhere, that it is the source (but not the creator) of all existence, and that the only way to see it is to look back on ourselves in contemplation, screening out all the other distractions that occupy our attention. Here again, the advice sounds quasi-Buddhist: meditate quietly in order to understand the true nature of reality. Right now my working hypothesis is that the methods and experience which Plotinus is teaching may turn out to be very similar to the methods and experience taught by the Buddha, but that the language and conceptual structure in which he describes them are rather different. Let's see if this hypothesis holds up.
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