[41] Let us now examine the following context, and inquire what Haran is and why one who goes away from the well comes to it (Gen. 28:10). Haran is, then, as it seems to me, a sort of mother-city of the senses. For it is rendered sometimes “dug,” sometimes “holes,” one thing being signified by both words.
[42] For our body has after a fashion been dug out to make places for the organs of the senses, and each of the organs has been constituted a kind of “dug-out” of each sense, which nature provides for its lair. Whenever, therefore, a man has put out from the well which is called “Oath,” as it were from a port, of necessity he forthwith arrives at Haran. For the man who sets forth on a journey from the place of knowledge, boundless and illimitable in its vastness, needs no escorting guides, but is without fail received by the senses.
[43] For our soul moves often by itself, stripping itself of the entire encumbrance of the body and escaping from the noisy pack of the senses, and often again when clad in these wrappings. What is apprehensible by intellect only is the lot of its unclad movement, while to that accompanied by the body fall the objects of sense-perception.
[44] If therefore a man is absolutely incapable of holding intercourse with the understanding by itself, he wins in sense-perception a second-best refuge, and a man who has been balked of the things of the intellect is forthwith swept down to those of sense-perception. For those who have failed to make a good voyage under the sails of the sovereign mind can always fall back upon the oars of sense-perception.
[45] But it is an excellent course even when you have fallen into this plight not to grow old and live your life in it, but feeling that you are spending your days in a foreign country as sojourners to be ever seeking for removal and return to the land of your fathers. For it is Laban, a man without knowledge of species or genus or archetypal form, or conception or of any whatever of the objects of solely intellectual apprehension, but dependent wholly on things patent and palpable, which are cognizable by seeing and hearing and the powers akin to them,—he it is that has been deemed worthy of having Haran for his country, in which Jacob the lover of virtue dwells as in a foreign land for a little while, with his mind ever set on the return to his home.
[46] We recognize this in the words spoken to him by Rebecca, or Patience, his mother: “Be up and off,” she says, “to Haran to my brother Laban, and dwell with him for some days” (Gen. 27:43 f.). Do you mark, then, that the Practiser does not brook to spend a lifetime in the territory of the senses, but a few days and a short time in compliance with the necessities of the body to which he is tied, but that it is in the city discerned by the intellect that a life-long enduring is in store for him?