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.

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

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

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.

I'm sure that Plotinus wasn't that impressed by the Christians.

The soul is the principle of life, and it's also something much closer to our own awareness and consciousness of our existence because fundamentally for Plotinus what we are is souls, we're not intellects.

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.