‘We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related,—the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.’ And again:—‘Time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of abolishing them both. The spirit sports with time—
‘Can crowd eternity into an hour
Or stretch an hour to eternity.’
So Angelus Silesius:—
Rise above Space and Time, and thou canst be
At any moment in Eternity.[[199]]
The following passage from Jelaleddin exhibits the kind of identity with God claimed by the more extravagant devotees of Sufism:—
Are we fools, we’re God’s captivity;
Are we wise, we are his promenade;
Are we sleeping, we are drunk with God;