Plotinus is offering comfort here, and the comfort is the thing to watch. The soul, he tells us, never stops thinking — its contact with Intellect is unbroken, continuous, a kind of eternal hum beneath whatever noise fills the surface. What fails is only our awareness of it. The perception lapses; the intellection does not. The soul is always already home. It only forgets.

This is the pneumatic move at its most elegant. The suffering is re-described as forgetting, and forgetting implies a prior fullness that sleep and sensation and bodily life temporarily obscure. If you accept the frame, the entire project of philosophy becomes a technology of remembering — of thinning the image-taking faculty until the deep intuition rises through. Ascent as remedy.

What it cannot account for is the experience in which the lapse is not incidental but constitutive — in which the soul's being-in-a-body is not noise obscuring signal but the signal itself, refusing to be sublimated upward. The recipient in us, Plotinus says, absorbs from both sides. He intends that as a structural problem to be solved. It is worth asking whether the double absorption is not a defect in the receiver but the soul's actual grammar — two-sided, middle-voiced, unable to be purified into one direction without losing something that is not recoverable by remembering.