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 importance of Plotinus is not only his own philosophical ideas which are quite interesting, but his historical impact as the founder of neo-Platonism which is the main philosophical tradition of late antiquity.

When you're seeking after bodily pleasure of food and drink for example, this is going to prevent you from doing what you should be doing which is contemplating.

Plotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The intellect must be different from the soul.

If you think about even very common examples like, say, something that you would build, like a clock or a car or a group of people trying to accomplish something, it fails when its unity breaks down. So when it stops having a single form, which is functioning all together, then it sort of falls apart into discrete elements.

In fact Plotinus does believe in divine providence, though when he talks about divine providence, he talks about that providence being exercised by the intellect and the soul of the world, rather than the One.