SOCRATES AT HIS FINEST, if you don't read it, then you're missing out big time!

"It appears there is a narrow path which brings us safely to our journey's end, with reason as our guide. As long as we have a body, and this evil can mingle with our soul, we shall never completely attain what we desire, namely truth.For the body is forever wasting away our time with its demands. Whenever it is ill it hinders us in our pursuit of real being. It fills us with passions, desires, fears and all kinds of imaginings and foolishness. It is always preventing us from thinking properly. The body alone, and its desires, cause wars, social divisiveness, and battles: for the origin of all war is the desire for wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we are enslaved by the wishes of the body. On account of all this, we have no leisure for philosophy. Even if we manage to free ourselves from the body for a while , and try to examine some matter, it hinders us at every step of our inquiry, causing confusion and trouble and panic, so that we cannot see the truth for it. Truly we have learned that if we are to have any pure knowledge at all we must be freed from the body. The soul by itself can see things as they truly are. Only after we are dead, it seems, can we gain the wisdom that we desire and for which we claim to have a passion. But this cannot happen while we are alive, as my argument shows. For if it is impossible to have pure knowledge while we have a body, one of two things must be true: either we can never gain any true knowledge, or we can only gain it after we are dead. For then, and only then, will the soul exist by itself, separate from the body. While we live we come closest to true knowledge if we have no use for or communion with the body beyond what is absolutely necessary, and if we are not defiled by its nature. We must live pure of the body until God releases us. When we are thus pure and released from follies of the body we shall dwell, I imagine, with others who are pure like ourselves, and we shall of ourselves know all that is pure."

-Socrates talking from Phaedo by Plato