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exploration into uncharted territory in search of hidden treasure: a bracing and perhaps dangerous enterprise.” 1
    Contrast this with the modern perspective of what philosophy is all about. When people envision a philosopher, a likely image is of a gray-haired intellectual ensconced in a high-backed leather chair surrounded with floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with musty tomes, holding forth with his or her fellow philosophers on some abstruse question that has little or nothing to do with everyday life.
    There is considerable truth in this image, for much of what passes for philosophical inquiry today is little more than word-play, abstract ideas having sport with other abstract ideas in a conceptual arena far removed from everyday life. This is much different from the goal of Greek philosophy during Plotinus’s lifetime.
    Philosophy, an art of living
    I N HIS BOOK , Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot says, “Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists…. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy” 2
    As an ancient rather than a modern philosopher, Plotinus isn’t asking us to merely intellectually believe in a philosophy of life; he extends a much more significant invitation to embrace philosophy as life, inseparable from our very being. This is why Plotinus’s mystical philosophy seems so exciting, challenging, and adventurous: so is life.
    Hadot notes that for the ancients, “Philosophy … took on the form of an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being, the goal of which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom. Philosophy was a method of spiritual progress which demanded a radical conversion and transformation of the individual’s way of being.” 3
    In the age of Plotinus, the word “philosophy” had not yet lost its original meaning: love of wisdom. Philo, in Greek, means love. Sophia, wisdom. Just as philodendrons are climbing plants that love to entwine themselves around trees (dendron), so did the ancient Greek philosophers seek to embrace wisdom. For them philosophy wasn’t an academic exercise but a way of life that led to the greatest possible well-being, eudaimonia.
    Wisdom and well-being are intimately connected in Plotinus’s philosophy because the highest truth is also the highest good—the One (often termed the Good, with a capital G, indicating its superiority to all lesser goods). Hence, the key to achieving eudaimonia is realizing what truly exists. Without a solid foundation of being there is no possibility of achieving well-being.
    This is why Plotinus taught that no matter what we’re doing with our lives, it’s all pretty much worthless if we’re not yet in touch with our genuine beings. We are like children playing make-believe who don’t realize the princess is really a plastic toy, her castle is a cardboard box, and her precious gems are cheap trinkets. However important this children’s play may seem to us when we are young and impressionable, with the coming of maturity these things are seen for what they really are.
    Plato’s cave
    P LOTINUS, following Plato, did not cleanly divide creation into what exists and what doesn’t exist, or into being and not-being. Instead, he envisioned a great chain of being connecting everything, all the way from what is most lasting and real down to the things in this physical universe, which possess the least being of anything. Thus, something can exist yet barely be. And this, of course, includes one’s own self.
    Plato, in The Republic, provides a vivid metaphor of our human condition: we are prisoners in a cave. The cave is both without and within us, for we are aware of both external and internal reality. Plato says that we human beings