The reason should transcend every interest of the body and its desires; it should seek to know the universe through contemplation and abstraction, as it is to the mind, not just as man might perceive it through the senses alone.

Ralph M Lewis, The Conscious Interlude

Consider also:

  1. “Then there is the Self, or Higher Self (Tiphareth), which we seek to express in and through the little self, and in the functions of the various levels of our unconsciousness. These levels are designated as unconscious for the obvious reason that they exist and function within our psyche regardless of whether we are aware of them or not. We only become conscious of the effect they have in our lives when we seek to break through the layers of external conditioning that have been used as reference points for our sense of being.”
  2. “The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts.”
  3. “To the Ancient Egyptians the most eminent man was he who had by hard training gained supremacy over the Elements, from which his own body and the Manifested World were alike formed; one whose Will had risen Phœnix-like from the ashes of his desires; one whose Intuition, cleansed from the stains of material illusions, was a clear mirror in which he could perceive the Past, the Present and the Future.”
  4. “I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know”
  5. “For he who is not pure in body and mind he who is enslaved by passions and desires, or by bondage to the material interests of this world, is, by the very fact of his uncleanness, prevented from passing on. Nothing unclean or that defileth a man, we are told, can enter into the kingdom; and, therefore, our candidates are told that if they have ‘money or metals about them’; if, that is, they are subject to any physical attraction or mental defilement, their real initiation into the higher things, of which our ceremony is but a dramatic symbol, must be deferred and repeated again and again until they are cleansed and fitted to pass on.”