Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/494

To know God one must become God is the dictum of mysticism. Religions have looked to divine revelation as the real source of divine wisdom. The faculties of the human mind, it is believed by men of mystic temperament, cannot give the true knowledge of God. Knowledge gathered through the senses is illusive. Reason is not capable of comprehending God. To attempt to see him through the medium of reason is to lose him. Intuition is higher than reason. Though reason may conduct the adept to the divine portal, intuition alone can enable him to penetrate into the sanctuary and have a vision of God. Human intelligence is debarred from entering this inner sphere. Divine wisdom dawns upon the mind when it renounces its own thoughts and reflection, and loses all self-consciousness. In such an entirely passive and receptive state of ecstasy, the mind is divinely illumined. It is the outcome of immediate contact of the pure mind with God. The mind that yearns to know God must seek its union with the divine mind. The transcendental insight gives a supra-rational apprehension of divine wisdom. Truth dawns thus upon him, and shines in its effulgence, while an ecstatic insight is aroused in him and in a moment of ecstasy, when the devotee transcends all self-consciousness, the wave of the occult light surges in upon him, and the mysterious something sweeps, like a meteor, over his soul giving a sudden flash that illumines the inner world. The nightingale in its transport of joy sings to the glory of God, until it becomes half frenzied. When the mystic is bathed in devotion, he is so intoxicated with the divine wisdom that he thinks himself one with the Divine. In this condition the devotee does not meditate upon God, he feels him; he does not think of God, he owns him.

The allegorical method of interpreting religious texts. From very early times some theologians of both the East and the West