 Monotheism and Hegelianism cannot rescue us from the vast arbitrariness of the physical universe: that these things exist and not others, that these things are here and others are there; that these things happened now, and not later, and that these things will happen later but not now: all these are tossed in a sea of contingency, all are de trop. But Plotinus does provide an answer: it is not only our notions of things that can overcome separation: is the things themselves, which contain a dimension of the divine. This leads to the new metaphor of the “Plotinian hemisphere”. Consider the liberated inhabitants of the cave as scattered along the equator of a sphere. Each individual is intersected by a meridianal line, and these lines rise and converge on the pole. These metaphorical lines of hemispheric “otherworldly geography” include the points they intersect, so each thing at the equator is also part of what exists at the pole, at which and in which their differences disappear. (Take a square inscribed within a circle and shrink it to a point; the result will be a point-like round square.) The pole here is the Plotinian One, the “absolute” to which Findlay will devote an entire subsequent book, Ascent to the Absolute. But in the Gifford lectures, it is the lives of the individuals as their meridians approach the pole that is the detailed object of description. Findlay leans here heavily on Plotinus’ portrait of the Realm of Mind, and the portrait of the spirit world of the Buddha, as given in the Gandavyuha, in which individuals can exchange places without crossing the space between, in which every mind is accessible to every other, and in which the shoes of the other become one’s own shoes: