The fantasies which are often produced by beginners as the valued fruits of their meditation will be regarded with repugnance when they have shifted their standpoint to a higher plane. When they follow the philosophic discipline, visions and messages which are the result of an intoxicated imagination or luxuriant fancy will then no longer be able to impose upon them and pretend to be other than what they really are. The temptation to implant our egoistic motives and to project our human feelings into the interpretations of these phenomena is so strong that only the curb of such a discipline can save us. All the psychic experiences are the ephemeral and accidental by-products of the mystical path, not abiding and essential results. They are signs of a passage through the imaginative part of the inner being. When students are so fortunate as to enter the truest deepest part of being, such experiences will vanish forever or for a time. Hence they are not to be regarded as worthwhile in themselves. The philosopher like the mystic may and often does see visions, but unlike him he also sees through them. He possesses true vision and does not merely experience a vision. But it takes time and experience to separate what elements are essential and what are merely incidental, what is enduring from what is transient, and the interpretation built up out of the original experiences from the experience itself.
-- Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 4 : Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > # 19
