Compare Emerson, discoursing of Intuition and the height to which it raises men:—
‘Fear and hope are alike beneath it. It asks nothing. There is somewhat low even in hope. We are then in vision. There is nothing that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul is raised over passion,’ &c. So, again: ‘Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.’[[198]]
This elevation above petition and above desire, towards which many a Sufi toiled, watching, fasting, solitary, through the ‘seven valleys’ of mystic discipline, is cheaply accomplished now-a-days by mere nonchalance, and is hit off by a flourish of the pen. It is the easy boast of any one who finds prayer distasteful and scoffs at psalm singing—who chooses to dub his money-getting with the title of worship, and fancies that to follow instinct is to follow God. The most painful self-negation and the most facile self-indulgence meet at the same point and claim the same pre-eminence.
The eastern mystic ignores humanity to attain divinity. The ascent and the descent are proportionate, and the privileges of nothingness are infinite. We must accompany the Sufi to his highest point of deification, and in that transcendental region leave him. His escape from the finite limitations of time and space is thus described,—
On earth thou seest his outward, but his spirit
Makes heaven its tent and all infinity.
Space and Duration boundless do him service,
As Eden’s rivers dwell and serve in Eden.
Again, Said, the servant, thus recounts one morning to Mohammed the ecstasy he has enjoyed:—
My tongue clave fever-dry, my blood ran fire,