(We remain ourselves in the world of Noûs; our particular personalities at their highest are Intellect-Forms in Noûs, distinct without separation and united without losing their individuality; on these our souls depend, being expressions of them on a lower and more divided level of being.)
(Universal Soul is one-in-many; the individual souls in it are distinct but not separate, all springing from and remaining in a single principle.)
(The problem of the unity of soul in connexion with the different kinds of relationship of soul to body; in the last resort it is the attitude, the degree and kind of concern with body, which determines, within the universal order, how far a soul is universal or limited, body-bound or transcending body.)
(The union of soul and body comes about through a drive of body towards ensoulment; there is a pre-established harmony between them.)
(Desire begins in the body; nature (the lower soul) takes it over and tries to bring it to its fulfilment; but the ultimate decision whether the desire shall be satisfied or not belongs to the higher soul.)
(Body has a principle of life of its own, distinct both from the higher soul and the lower soul, or ‘nature’, a ‘shadow’ or ‘trace’ of soul (the immanent form). This, in its aspiration to communion with soul, is the source of physical pain and pleasure.)
(When we speak of ourselves, we may mean by ‘ we’ either our souls alone or the joint entity made up of body and soul: the former is our true self.)
(There are three parts of our soul, one directed to the contemplation of Noûs and the One, one concerned with body, and one intermediate; and our spiritual state depends on whether the intermediate part is attracted upwards or downwards.)
(Plotinus has just rejected the absolute determinism of the Stoics. For him the individual soul is to some extent the free and responsible cause of its own actions. In its higher life, out of the body, it is altogether free, but in so far as it is involved with the body it is subject to the necessity which controls the visible universe. And the degree of its freedom or involvement depends very much on itself.)
(Plotinus’s own experience.)
Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out from all other things. I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part. I have lived to the full the best life and come to identity with the Divine.1 Set firm in It I have come to That Supreme Actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Noûs. Then after that rest in the Divine, when I have come down from Noûs to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.
(The descent of souls is not complete; their highest part, their Noûs, does not come down. It is brought about by an overwhelming natural impulse, a desire pre-ordained by universal law for embodiment in the body which it has assigned to them.)
(Solution of the difficulty caused by the apparent inconsistency in the teaching of Plato, who represents the descent of the soul sometimes as a voluntary fall and sometimes as caused by universal law and necessary for the good of the universe. Plotinus explains that both accounts are true, and the descent of the soul is both necessary and voluntary.)
(The descent of soul into body does not mean that a soul literally moves down into a body, but that a body comes to share in the life of a soul. This is an evil for the soul, because it means that its activity is no longer universal, but is confined to the sphere of its particular body: in the spiritual world a soul is still an individual, but with its individuality completely absorbed in universal activity.)