The body distracts your soul.

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.

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 must be distinct from intellect because even at its best, what the soul does when it's thinking, is it thinks linguistically, it thinks in a temporarily extended way, so it for example, might go through the steps of an argument chain, as if you were going through a syllogism and seeing that something followed from the premises, whereas intellect simply grasps the forms.

I think it's important to realise that what happens in Neo-Platonism beginning with Plotinus and Porphyry and then going on for the next several centuries, is a real kind of contest for the ideas and convictions of the intelligentsia of the later Roman Empire. So that you have Christians slowly converting more and more powerful people until of course actually Constantine and then other emperors after him, become Christian, and the empire becomes a Christian empire rather than Pagan empire.

We do each have an intellect but there's a universal intellect which is the same for everybody, as it were. And this single intellect is grasping the platonic forms.

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.