Prayers and Meditations

August 20, 1914

To see the goal from a new angle which may usefully light up the others, we should constantly renew the experience of the inner discovery and return to the extreme limit of consciousness without at any time postulating beforehand what the end of our journey will be.

But instinctively the mind remembers the impression that it received from one or from some of the former contacts of our consciousness with the ultimate centre, and tells itself: "That is what one finds at the end of the road." It does not realise that the "That" which is in its thought is only one of countless ways of translating the goal or even of travestying it, nor does it perceive that the intellectual conception should follow the experience and not precede it.

To retrace the path in all innocence as though one had never before travelled it, is the true purity, the perfect sincerity—the sincerity that brings an uninterrupted progress, growth, an integral perfectioning.

Despite myself, in the silence of all thought, that is, of all conscious formulas, something in my being, deeper than words, turns to Thee, O ineffable Lord, in an ardent aspiration, giving Thee in offering all its activities, all its elements, all its modes of being, and imploring for all these the supreme illumination.

...O Thou, whom I cannot think, but whom with certitude I know!

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