Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
The Turn Inward
Turn attention away from the senses and the outer world, inward and upward, letting fall everything extraneous until what remains is the simple inner self.
In 5 lines: Notice how your attention is scattered across outer things. “Withdraw into yourself and look” — draw attention back from the senses into the quiet interior. Let the extraneous fall away; let the self grow simple and gathered. Then incline the simplified attention upward, toward the source. Carry the gathered quiet back into your day.
What it is
This is the first move of the whole Neoplatonic ascent: stop looking outward, and turn the attention inward and upward. Plotinus’s most famous instruction is direct — “Withdraw into yourself and look” (Ennead I.6.9).
The senses scatter the soul across many outer objects; the practice is to gather it back from that dispersal, drawing attention away from the noise of sensation and toward the quiet interior, and from there toward the source above it.
Crucially, the turn is also a self-simplification. For Plotinus the soul is “many” when it clings to a thousand outer things, and becomes “one” as it lets them fall. So the inward turn is not adding anything; it is subtracting — letting go of the extraneous, the borrowed, the merely sensory — until what is left is the bare, simple self that is closest to the One.
It operationalizes the deeper Self at the soul’s ground (All Is One), the liberating inner knowing (All Is One), and the recognition that what is sought was already nearest within (All Is One).
(Distinct-file note: this is Plotinus’s withdrawal-and-simplification of attention — outward → inward → upward. It precedes, but differs from, (which uses beauty as the ladder) and (the unitive rest at the top).
It differs from, which reads the same Plotinian move through Christian faith toward a personal God.)
The Method
Drawn faithfully from the Enneads (described, not reproduced):
- Notice the soul scattered outward. Begin by honestly seeing how attention is spread across sensations, opinions, and external objects — the soul made “many.”
- Withdraw into yourself. “Withdraw into yourself and look.” Gently draw attention back from the senses into the interior, away from outward dispersal.
- Let fall the extraneous. Release what is borrowed and merely sensory — possessions of attention you do not need. Plotinus’s image elsewhere is of removing rather than acquiring.
- Simplify toward the one. As the extraneous falls away, let the self grow quieter and simpler, gathered into itself rather than dispersed.
- Turn the simplified attention upward. Once gathered, let attention incline not back to the senses but upward, toward the source above the soul — the inward turn becoming an ascent.
- Return gently. Carry the sense of a quiet, gathered interior back into ordinary life rather than treating the turn as a one-off event. (Sourcing note: the quoted phrase is from MacKenna’s public-domain translation of I.6.9; the numbered steps render Plotinus’s inward turn and self-simplification (I.6, VI.9, IV.8) as a contemplative practice, not a drill he set down in order.)
Source & Lineage
Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE), founder of Neoplatonism, taught in Rome and left the dense treatises his student Porphyry edited into the Enneads. The inward turn is the practical face of his metaphysics: reality emanates outward and downward from the One, and the soul retraces that descent by turning inward and upward. → (author id Plotinus).
It is the headwaters of a whole lineage of interiority: Augustine’s “return into yourself”, Christian apophatic contemplation, and, much later and indirectly, New Thought’s “going into the silence.” Plotinus’s distinctive flavour is the pairing of withdrawal with simplification — becoming one by letting the many fall away.
Common refinements
Adding instead of subtracting. The turn is a letting-go, not the acquiring of a special inner experience; straining to “get somewhere” re-scatters the soul.
- Stopping at introspection. Plotinus’s turn is inward then upward; cataloguing one’s inner contents is not the goal.
- Forcing concentration. Gentleness; the interior is settled into, not seized.
- Despising the senses violently. The practice withdraws from sensory dispersal calmly; aggressive self-denial is not required and tends to backfire.