self-gathered

It is essential to the existence of any new entity that the First remain in self-gathered repose throughout: otherwise, it moved before there was motion and had intellectual act before any intellection — unless, indeed, that first act [as motionless and without intelligence] was incomplete, nothing more than a tendency.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

A Seed is at rest; the nature-principle within, uncoiling outwards, makes way towards what seems to it a large life; but by that partition it loses; it was a unity self-gathered, and now, in going forth from itself, it fritters its unity away; it advances into a weaker greatness.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

Being cannot be dead like stone or plank: it must be alive, and that with a life unalloyed as long as it remains self-gathered: when the primal Being blends with an inferior principle, it is hampered in its relation to the highest, but without suffering the loss of its own nature since it can always recover its earliest state by turning its tendency back to its own.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

The fact is that the self-gathered content of the Intellectual Principle or of the All-Soul, desires expansion [and thereby engenders secondaries]: in its images — aspiring and moving towards it and eagerly imitating its act — is vested a similar power of reproducing their states in their own derivatives.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

Thought itself need not be an action, for it does not go outward towards its object but remains self-gathered.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

But if we seek the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary — self-gathered, tranquilly remote above all else — we begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or, more exactly to the moment, the first image that appears.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

Intellectual-Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquiring or traversing the remote — for all such experience belongs to soul — but always self-gathered, the very Being of the collective total, not an extern creating things by the act of knowing them.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

But this kosmos of life is a self-gathered entire, not divisible into constituent masses but prior to mass; in other words, the participation is of entire in entire.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

Intellectual-Principle which we have found to be identical with the truths constituting the objects of intellection, the world of Primals and Reality: for this Intellectual-Principle, by very definition, cannot be outside of itself, the Intellectual Reality: self-gathered and unalloyed, it is

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.

The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952