The Dreaded Hounds

Certain things he declared mystically, symbolically, most of which were collected by Aristotle, as when he called the sea a tear of Saturn; the two bear (constellations) the hand of Rhea; the Pleiades, the lyre of the Muses; the Planets, the dogs of Persephone; and he called be sound caused by striking on brass the voice of a genius enclosed in the brass.

(Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras XLI, emphasis mine)

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And before [the halls of Hades and Persephone] a dreaded hound, on watch, who has no pity, but a vile stratagem: as people go in he fawns on all, with actions of his tail and both ears, but he will not let them go back out, but lies in wait for them and eats them up, when he catches any going back through the gates.

(Hesiod, Theogony ll. 769–, emphasis mine)

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The sensible world is Hades, and the planets are the guardians of it. But Hesiod says that they don't keep the living out of Hades, but rather they keep the dead in. The natures the planets bequeath to us, then, aren't the way out, but they're the very thing holding us back! Maybe that's why Plotinus was so ambivalent about them.

I think, also, that this is why meditation is so crucial. What is beyond the planets? Being. Therefore, to move beyond them is simply to be—not to be something in particular, but merely to be. Walk back your bodily senses, walk back your chattering mind, and simply observe.

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Can you coax your mind from its wandering
and keep to the original oneness?
Can you let your body become
supple as a newborn child's?
Can you cleanse your inner vision
until you see nothing but the light?
Can you love people and lead them
without imposing your will?
Can you deal with the most vital matters
by letting events take their course?
Can you step back from your own mind
and thus understand all things?

(Laozi, Tao Te Ching X, as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Levels of Being

hypostasis	element	cardinality¹	computability²		vehicle³	temporality⁴	sufficiency⁵	veracity⁶
Good	fire	transcendent	transcendent			transcendent	transcendent	transcendent
Intellect	air	uncountably infinite	definition			immutable	providential	definition
Soul	water	countably infinite	hypercomputable		soul	eternal	self-sufficient	truth
Nature	earth	finite	Turing-computable	{	imagination	immortal	content	right opinion
					body	mortal	insatiable	variable opinion

1. I am following the intuition that the continuum hypothesis is true and relates to the universe of discourse in a Neopythagorean system. In brief, the Good cannot be discriminated at all; the nous is too big to be measured even in theory; the world of soul is infinite in size even if it can be measured in theory (e.g. it is measurable, but only by the nous); and the world of matter is puny and boring.
2. I have already discussed the computability of the various levels of reality.
3. The term "imagination" is due to St. Synesius. Plutarch calls it "the mind" (which I really like but don't use because the Neoplatonists give that name to the nous), while Plotinus calls it "the lower soul." Prophyry and Proclus are more persnickety and call the soul-body, the "luminous vehicle;" the imagination-body, "the pneumatic vehicle;" and the physical-body, "the shell-like vehicle."
4. The Intellect exists outside of time and can comprehend all things simultaneously. The soul exists outside of time but can only comprehend things one-at-a-time (and this sequential comprehension is what gives rise to time). The imagination exists within time but, if it is idealized, can live forever. The body is, of course, mortal. The body and imagination come into being more-or-less together, but the imagination-body dies slower than the physical body does (owing to its lesser neediness).
5. The natural bodies always require external sustenance; the imagination-body ideally always has enough, while the physical-body never does.
6. The nous is the definition of all truth. Souls have a perfect understanding of truth from a given perspective. The imagination-body ideally has an intuition of truth (that is, it knows the right answers but does not know why), while the physical-body has only guesswork.