This condition of uncertainty and unrest in the Roman Empire might explain why at Plotinus' philosophy encourages us to sort of flee from the physical world and towards the world of ideas.

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.

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.

Basically the problem is that if the intellect is looking at or beholding the forms, what it will get is some kind of representation or image of the forms, but it won't actually have the forms, it won't touch them as it were, or it won't incorporate them.

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.

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.

The forms are part of the mind, or really are the mind, they're just the contents of this universal night.