If something has been lost and you’re not sure where to look for it, there’s good reason to start searching right where you are rather than far afield. Most of us have had the experience of wandering around the house looking for our car keys, only to find that they were sitting unnoticed in our pocket or purse the whole time. Can we apply this lesson to finding meaning and well-being in life? I believe we can.
     This book is about the spiritual teachings of Plotinus, a third-century Greek philosopher and mystic. He left a collection of writings known as the Enneads, so-called because one of his students, Porphyry, edited that collection into six sets of nine treatises each (enneades in Greek means “nines”).
     A central message of the Enneads is that what each of us truly longs for, even if we don’t consciously realize it, is to return to the One—which may be thought of as “God,” if this more familiar term for ultimate reality is stripped of its personal or theistic connotations.
     The One, for Plotinus, is unequivocally and indisputably one. It is the root of everything in existence, for the One is both the source of being and the ground of being (even though, as we will learn, it also is beyond being). So at a deep mystical level you are the One, I am the One, this book you are holding is the One, and everything else outside and inside of us is the One.

Sign is in the seeking

     Why is it, then, that the world appears to be constituted of so many distinct entities? I certainly seem to be separate from you, and you from me. Each of us feels closer to some objects, people, and concepts than to other objects, people, and concepts, but always there remains a gap between one's self and all that is other than one's self.
     It is natural to try to bridge this gap because humans have an innate longing for intimacy and union, not isolation and separation. Indeed, every urge—such as to worship, to act rightly, to love, to create, to know—flows from a primal drive for fulfillment. We want to make whole what has been broken, to find what has been lost, to do what demands to be done, to return from where we have come.
     Looking at the world, people appear to be going in myriads of different directions. It is difficult to discern much rhyme or reason in the wondrous diversity of human pursuits. Some devote their lives to selfless service, others to egotistical self-aggrandizement. Some avidly pursue scientific knowledge, others spiritual wisdom. Some hold family and friends dear, others find companionship in solitude. Where, in all this chaotic activity, is there any sign of the universal order Plotinus speaks of in the Enneads?
     The sign is in the seeking, not in what is being sought. Everyone is looking for something—desperately, passionately, ceaselessly. There is no end to the number of different “somethings,” but the looking is common to all. So we are drawn to ask: What if the seeming multiplicity of the cosmos is an illusion, and a clearer vision would see that unity underlies all this manyness? Then the quest for any particular thing would, in truth, be a quest for that single thing.

     Perhaps all of the seemingly random motion of life on Earth, with six billion people scurrying here and there, each seeking a unique this and that, actually results from an astoudingly simple and largely unconscious impulse: to return to the One.