Plotinus

Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE) was a Hellenistic philosopher, born in Roman Egypt and trained at Alexandria under the shadowy Ammonius Saccas, who became the founder of what later thinkers called Neoplatonism.

Teaching in Rome from the 240s, he produced the dense treatises his student Porphyry edited and arranged into the Enneads (six sets of nine). His project was to draw out the deepest metaphysical implications of Plato into a single, rigorous system of reality as graded consciousness.

For the mind-power lineage, Plotinus is the great systematizer of emanation: reality flows from an ineffable source, the One, which overflows into Intellect (Nous), which in turn generates Soul, which generates the sensible world—each level a progressively dimmer expression of the level above.

Crucially, this descent is mirrored by a possible ascent: through contemplation, purification, and the turning of attention inward, the soul can retrace the chain and achieve union with the One. This established the durable template—reality as a layered hierarchy of mind, and transformation as inward ascent through those layers—that would echo through theurgy, alchemy, Renaissance magic, and ultimately the New Thought architecture of a “Universal Mind” with which the individual can consciously align.