THE BRAIN is stilled. It does not cease from its natural and joyful activities. But it ceases from that terrified and joyless quest which was inevitable to it as long as its own existence, its own foundation, its own affiliation to the everlasting Being was in question and in doubt.

The Man at last lets Thought go, he glides below it into the quiet feeling, the quiet sense of his own identity with the self of other things—of the universe. He glides past the feeling into the very identity itself, where a glorious all-consciousness leaves no room for separate self-thoughts or emotions.

He leans back in silence on that inner being, and bars off for a time every thought, every movement of the mind, every impulse to action, or whatever in the faintest degree may stand between him and That; and so there comes to him a sense of absolute repose, a consciousness of immense and universal power, such as completely transforms the world for him.

All life is changed; he becomes master of his fate; he perceives that all things are hurrying to perform his will; and whatever in that region of Inner Life he may condense or desire, that already is shaping itself to utterance and expression in the outer world around him. The winds are his messengers over all the world, and flames of fire his servants; and the clouds float over the half-concealed, dappled and shaded Earth—to fulfill his will, to fulfill his eternal joy.

For the ceaseless endeavor to realise this identity with the great Self, there is no substitute. No teaching, no theorising, no philosophising, no rules of conduct or life will take the place of actual experience. This is the Divine yoga or union, from which really all life, all Creation proceeds.

And for its realisation it is necessary that at times, as already said, all thought, all plans and purposes, should be obliterated from the mind, leaving it free to fall back and touch absolutely to its own source.

What is learnt by this actual experience is so much more, and so much more important than anything that can be learnt by teaching or philosophy, that at any rate without it the latter can hardly be accounted of much value. —From Edward Carpenter’s The Art of Creation.