The fundamental awareness, or knowing, we have just described can be realized as well through the practice of spiritual devotion. Such devotion, called bhakti yoga by Hindus is fundamental to Christian contemplative life, as well as to Jewish and Islamic mysticism. In her mystic text "The Seven Manners of Loving, " Beatrijs of Nazareth (c1230-68) wrote:
When love for God is awakened in the soul, it joyfully arises and stirs itself in the heart. The heart then is so tenderly touched in love, so powerfully assailed, so wholly encompassed and so lovingly embraced in love that the soul is altogether conquered by love. Then it feels a great closeness to God and a spiritual brightness and a wonderful richness and a noble freedom and a great compulsion of love, and an overflowing fullness of great delight.The soul feels that all its senses and its will have become love, that it has sunk so deeply and been engulfed so completely in love that it has itself entirely become love. Love's beauty has adorned the soul, love's power has consumed it, love's sweetness has submerged it, love's righteousness has engulfed it, love's excellence has embraced it, love's purity has enhanced it, love's exaltedness has drawn it up and enclosed it, so that the soul must be nothing else but love and do nothing else.
The great Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi wrote: "I, you, he, she, we--in the garden of mystic lovers, these are not true distinctions" In the realization produced by spiritual devotion, everything begins to be seen as God's glory and goodness. Praising God in song and prayer, meditating on God's magnificence, repeating God's name, leads to a purification that can remove all barriers between lover and Beloved, and the two become One.
In this oneness, this joy, the great Indian mystic Ramakrishna discovered the same essential identity, the same fundamental and eternal ground, that he had experienced through contemplative meditation. He was not alone in equating the two kinds of realizations. According to spiritual adepts such as Rumi and the poet Kabir, the God we know through loving prayer is the same as the One we know through self-observation.
"For ages I knocked at God's door," Rumi wrote. "But when it opened at last, I saw I was knocking from inside."
Frederic Myers, the pioneering psychical researcher, viewed prayer from the perspective of his research with paranormal phenomena and the subliminal mind. Prayer, he wrote, resembles deep hypnosis and other self-suggestive techniques in that it makes "a draft upon the Unseen."
I have urged [he wrote] that while our life is maintained by continual inflow from the World-soul, that inflow may vary in abundance or energy in correspondence with variations in the attitude of our own minds. [The] supplication of the Lourdes pilgrims, the adoring contemplation of the Christian Scientists, the inward concentration of the self-suggesters, the trustful anticipation of the hypnotized subject--all these are mere shades of the same mood of mind--of the mountain-moving faith which can in actual fact draw fresh life from the Infinite.
