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From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter Eight - The Universality of Meditation
The Method in Christianity It is, of course, easy to find many passages which link the way of the Christian Knower with that of his brother in the East. They bear witness to the same efficacy of method and they too use the intellect just as far as it will go and then suspend all effort whilst a new condition of being is instituted and a new state of awareness supervenes. St. Augustine says: "Just as that is ineffable out of which the Son leaps from the Father in the first procession, so there exists some occult thing behind the first procession, intellect and will." Meister Eckhart links himself with the Oriental Knowers in the following words: "Intellect is the highest power of the soul and therewith the soul grasps the divine good. Free will is the power of relishing the divine good which intellect makes known to it. The spark of the soul is the light of God's reflection, which is always looking back to God. The arcanum of the mind is the sumtotal, as it were, of all the divine good and divine gifts in the innermost essence of the soul, which is as a bottomless well of divine goodness." "The soul's lower powers should be ordered to her higher, and her higher ones to God; her outward senses to her inward, and her inward ones to reason; thought to intuition, and intuition and all to unity so that the soul may be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity, flowing here into itself." "When a man's mind has lost touch with everything, then, and not till then, it comes in touch with God." "In this inflowing grace there forthwith arises that light of the mind into which God is sending a ray of his unclouded splendor. In this powerful light a mortal is as far [194] above his fellows as a live man is above his shadow on the wall." "The man of the soul, transcending his angelic mode and guided by the intellect, pierces to the source whence flowed the soul. Intellect itself is left outside with all named things. So the soul is merged into pure unity." - Pfeiffer, Franz, Meister Eckhart, pages 338, 144, 66, 101. Thus, the great schools of intellectual meditation (devoid in the final stages of feeling and emotion) all lead to the same point. From the standpoint of Buddhism, of Hinduism, of Sufism, and of Christianity, there is the same basic goal: Unification with Deity; there is the same transcendence of the senses, the same focusing of the mind at its highest point, the same apparent futility of the mind beyond that point to carry the aspirant to his objective; there is the same entering into the state of contemplation of Reality, the same assimilation into God, and awareness of identity with God, and the same subsequent Illumination. All sense of separateness has disappeared. Unity with the Universe, realized Identity with the Whole, conscious awareness of the Self and assimilation in full waking consciousness with both interior and exterior Nature - this is the definite goal of the seeker after knowledge. The self, the not-self, and the relation between the two, are known as one fact, without differentiation. God, the Father, God, the Son, and God, the Holy Ghost, are realized as working smoothly together as one Identity - the Three in One and the One in [195] Three. This is the objective of all the schools wherein the mystic transcends feeling, and even thought, in the last analysis, and becomes united with the All. Individuality, however, remains in consciousness, but it is so identified with the sumtotal that all sense of separateness disappears. Naught is left but realized Unity. [199]
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