Prayer

With this view of prayer we shall not be surprised that, in devotion to prayer, the greatest mystics found the best training for what they were seeking in mystic contemplation. They guided their souls by means of prayer to the point where they were able to ignite the spark previously mentioned. It is just the study of the past that can give us the deep intimacy that comes over us in true prayer. Experience and living in the external world really estrange us from ourselves, just as in the past they prevented the unknown and more powerful ego from coming to the surface. We are given over to external impressions, wasting our energies in the variety of external life, thereby upsetting our composure. It is this that prevented the higher and stronger divine force from unfolding in us. Now, when we unfold it in such deep intimacy with God, we no longer feel ourselves given over to the dissipating effects of the external world. Rather are we filled with that wonderful and ineffable warmth, as with an inner blessedness, that we really may call divine. It is the heat in the cosmos that appears in higher beings as physical inner warmth and it originally created the higher beings; the lower beings, of course, have the same body temperature as their surroundings. As this physical heat interiorizes a being, so the psychic warmth, born of prayer, can make a soul that is losing itself in externalities collect itself in inwardness. In prayer we are warmed in the feeling of God. We not only feel warmth but we find ourselves intimately within ourselves.