the spiritual realm.
Once more the law of sympathetic vibrations asserts itself, and the note
of lofty aspiration is answered by a note of its own order, by a
liberation of energy of its own kind, by a vibration synchronous with
itself. The divine Life is ever pressing from above against the limits
that bind it, and when the upward-rising force strikes against those
limits from below, the separating wall is broken through, and the divine
Life floods the Soul. When a man feels that inflow of spiritual life,
he cries: "My prayer has been answered, and God has sent down His Spirit
into my heart." Truly so; yet he rarely understands that that Spirit is
ever seeking entrance, but that coming to His own, His own receive Him
not.[303] "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my
voice, and open the door, I will come in to him."[304]

The general principle with regard to all prayers of this class is that
just in proportion to the submergence of the personality and the
intensity of the upward aspiration will be the answer from the wider
life within and without us. We separate ourselves. If we cease the
separation and make ourselves one with the greater, we find that light
and life and strength flow into us. When the separate will is turned
away from its own objects and set to serve the divine purpose, then the
strength of the Divine pours into it. As a man swims against the stream,
he makes slow progress; but with it, he is carried on by all the force
of the current. In every department of Nature the divine energies are
working, and everything that a man does he does by means of the energies
that are working in the line along which he desires to do; his greatest
achievements are wrought, not by his own energies, but by the skill with
which he selects and combines the forces that aid him, and neutralises
those that oppose him by those that are favourable. Forces that would
whirl us away as straws in the wind become our most effective servants
when we work with them. Is it then any wonder that in prayer, as in
everything else, the divine energies become associated with the man who,
by his prayer, seeks to work as part of the Divine?

This highest form of prayer in Class B merges almost imperceptibly into
Class C, where prayer loses its petitionary character, and becomes
either a meditation on, or a worship of, God. Meditation is the steady
quiet fixing of the mind on God, whereby the lower mind is stilled and
prese