There's going to be this realm of Platonic forms and then there's going to be this single mind, the 'nous', which grasps them.

The soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects.

This is in a way the most important thing about soul is that it's a kind of principle which mediates between the universal intellect and the material world.

The world around you is some kind of distraction at best, and evil at worst, and you should be turning away from it.

Plotinus is usually called the Founder of Neo Platonism and what that means is that in this philosophical circle, he was founding a kind of renewed attempt to understand the thought of Plato which however they were combining with the thought of other philosophers, including Aristotle, the Stoics and Pythagoreans and so on.

The forms in intellect are some kind of blueprint or model on which the physical world is based, and something needs to come along and shape the matter in accordance with that blueprint. What does that is soul.

In fact Plotinus thought not only that soul in general is eternal so that you always have soul, but he thought that each person's soul is eternal.