Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume II

3Dismiss the senses, unhappy souls, for they are impious teachers. Question only the pious mind—but on this condition: show it the soul pure, as you received it, neither enslaved to the body nor soiled with the stains of vice. The mind will answer at once that the soul is not merely incorporeal but divine. You are something great, O soul, if small things do not fill you; something of the highest good, if evils displease you; something most beautiful, if you shudder at ugliness; something everlasting, if you esteem temporal things but little. Since you are such a thing, if you desire to find yourself, seek yourself, I beg you, where such things dwell. Great things are found only where place sets no boundary as their limit; the best, where nothing adverse can befall them; the most beautiful, where there is no discord; the everlasting, where there is no defect. Seek yourself, then, beyond the world. To seek and find yourself, fly beyond it—or rather, look beyond it. You are already beyond, since you yourself embrace the world. Yet you think yourself lodged in the lowest place of the world, because you do not see yourself flying above the heavens; you see only your shadow, the body, in the depths below.

4It is as though a boy standing above a well were to imagine himself at the bottom because he did not turn his gaze upon himself, but looked instead at his shadow deep below.

5Or it is as though a bird flying in the air were to believe that it flew upon the ground because it saw its shadow there.