Esoterism and symbol

When one beholds the emotional reactions of the animal --envy, hate,
fidelity, love, joy, sadness, devotion to his master to the point of
self-denial -one says that an animal sometimes seems human. This is a
mistake: it is man who is still animal. All emotional reactions are
based on egoism, the first cerebral consciousness of oneself, a mirror
of the object, a freed slave. From a moral point of view, these
emotional reactions are natural. But only man has in him that gift
allowing him to free himself from all these reactions; to attain
aristocratic liberty by fusing with the WHOLE -love without cause,
without aim, with out reward and therefor with out deception.

The stages of this liberation are therefore stages of fusion. The
inscription is no longer seminal; it is only a degree of detachment.
Mastery of the body and all its members, mastery of thought, mastery
of the passions are stages of a liberation which allows this soul as
in natural sleep to live in full consciousness


Thus initiatory texts is far less a logical one than it is to provoke
shocks, emotional reactions, or to grate against the cerebral need for
sequential logic. Paradox, improbable images, the justapposition of
unconnected phrases are freely employed.
(this is almost exactally how koan is defined in a book I have)