“The dynamic relevancy of meditation for the mystic is vehicular. It is not an end in itself. It is so important to remember this. It is a means, but a means or course that perhaps cannot be separated from the end. I am not smart enough to know that, but I do know that it is descriptive of the way, the passage through which he goes. And the vital instrument that facilitates the rite of passage is meditation and prayer. They are not ends in themselves. And, of course, this is the temptation. There is something so exquisitely aerating to the soul about meditation when it is deeply entered into, you know. You, if you could just build a tabernacle and just stay there, and that’s the trap. I am not the goal in meditation. It is not merely for the clarification of my own mind and the fumigating of my own ego. It is to swing wide the door that opens into his Presence …
“God, the Creator of life, the living substance, the bottom of existence has only one great unfinished task in his creation and that is to come to himself in all aspects of his creation: come to himself in me, in my dog, in poison ivy, in tubercular bacilli, in the wild frantic passion of cancer cells. In all of his creation he is working so he can claim himself in himself. And sometimes I think that all existence is a process by which God is engaged in trying to become self-conscious …
“The mystic uses meditation as a means. The degree to which the experience of meditation is vital, the temptation is to use it as an end. So you have to bear in mind in reading all this…whether you read in Plotinus or Eckhart or Boehme or any of these people, remember this is a part of the problem with which they are wrestling.”
