The body distracts your soul.

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

Your soul existed before your birth, your soul will exist after your death.

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.

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.

Sometimes clichés are true.

The idea is that to grasp an idea like equality or justice, you can't look at the equal and just or unjust things in the world around you, you have to somehow ascend to or maybe remember some kind of idea of equality and justice and this would be a Platonic form, and it would be different from the things that partake in the form.