Enneads IV 9: Are All Souls One?

IV 9: Are All Souls One?

The Soul is an ideal-form, not a body—it cannot be cut up into little pieces. This ideal suffuses everything derived from it, but is also eternal and complete. In this way it is something like geometry, where geometry itself is a whole and unified thing, and the many propositions of geometry are not, and yet within every proposition of geometry the whole is latent. Individual souls are specializations of the Soul, but while each possesses a unique identity, are all still part of a great continuum: there are no firm boundaries between soul and soul.

Indeed, this principle seems to explain many phenomena, such as how one can themselves feel sympathy pain at the sight of another's or how magic spells can operate even over distances.

I might say that, to Plotinus, the light emanating from the sun may also be called the sun. We are trained to think of light as interchangeable—as if the source of that light is irrelevant and it is merely an inert messenger—but is it? Certainly sunlight seems to affect things in ways that other lights do not...

So, in that sense, what you give voice to is you, is it not? One should be careful what one does, or says, or even thinks.