Who you really are, is an immaterial soul and the body is an external thing that's sort of an encrustation your soul. So this has important implications for Plotinus' ethics, because his ethics are basically all about encouraging us to turn away from the body and turn towards these higher principles, so universal soul, universal intellect and ultimately the One.

The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.

In fact one of the things about Plotinus is that he maybe not singlehandedly, but I think more than anyone else, killed off the variety and dissension among the philosophical schools of antiquity.

There's a stronger and more kind of controversial element of Plotinus' view of matter, which is that he actually identifies it with evil, or at least the principle of evil, and the reason for this is that he thinks that the the One, the highest principle, can also be thought of as the Good, and that's kind of surprising like, because he has this negative theology which doesn't allow us to say anything about the One. But he believes that it can be seen as the principle of goodness as well as unity, and that if you think about it, goodness and unity sort of go along with each other.

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.

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.

If you think about for example, proportionality and beauty, things like that, these seem to be some kind of representations of a kind of unity.