Excerpts from The Six Enneads by Plotinus (vegetarian) – How to be Happy, Part 2 of 2

The issue of happiness is one of Plotinus’ greatest imprints on Western thought, as he was one of the first to introduce the idea that happiness is attainable only within consciousness. Plotinus' final words were: “Try to raise the Divine in yourselves to the Divine in the all.”

Section 14 “Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race: still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendors could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true life; the tyranny of the body, he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims; the rulership, he will lay aside.”

Section 15 “But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while the other meets only with the very reverse: do we assert that they have an equal happiness? We do, if they are equally wise. What though the one be favored in body and in all else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to?”

Section 16 “And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on that, becoming like to that, living by that. He can care for no other term than that: all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there. He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not prevented from abandoning the body, necessarily leaving it at nature’s hour, he himself always the master to decide in its regard.”