Again, in the case of Jacob Boehme, the German mystic, although he left tomes of manuscript, it is asserted authoritatively, that he “possessed no learning” as that word is understood to mean accumulated knowledge.

In “The Spiritual Maxims” of Brother Lawrence, the Carmelite monk, we find this: 

“You must realize that you reach God through the heart, and not through the mind.”

“Stupidity is closer to deliverance than intellect which innovates,” is a phrase ascribed to a Mohammedan saint, and do not modern theologians report with enthusiasm, the unlettered condition of Jesus?

In the Orient, the would-be initiate shuts out the voice of the world, that he may know the heart of the world.  Many, very many, are the years of isolation and preparation which such an earnest one accepts in order that he may attain to that state of supra-consciousness in which “nothing is hidden that shall not be revealed” to his clarified vision.

In the inner temples throughout Japan, for example, there are persons who have not only attained this state of consciousness, but who have also retained it, to such a degree and to such an extent, that no event of cosmic import may occur in any part of the world, without these illumined ones instantly becoming aware of its happening, and indeed, this knowledge is possessed by them before the event has taken place in the external world, since their consciousness is not limited to time, space, or place (relative terms only), but is cosmic, or universal.

This power is not comparable with what Occidental Psychism knows as “clairvoyance,” or “spirit communication.”

The state of consciousness is wholly unlike anything which modern spiritualism reports in its phenomena.  Far from being in any degree a suspension of consciousness as is what is known as mediumship, this power partakes of the quality of omniscience.  It harmonizes with and blends into all the various degrees and qualities of consciousness in the cosmos, and becomes “at-one” with the universal heart-throb.

A Zen student priest was once discovered lying face downward on the grass of the hill outside the temple; his limbs were rigid, and not a pulse throbbed in his tense and immovable form.  He was allowed to remain undisturbed as long as he wished.  When at length he stood up, his face wore an expression of terrible anguish.  It seemed to have grown old.  His guru stood beside him and gently asked:  “What did you, my son?”

“O, my Master,” cried out the youth, “I have heard and felt all the burdens of the world.  I know how the mother feels when she looks upon her starving babe.  I have heard the cry of the hunted things in the woods; I have felt the horror of fear; I have borne the lashes and the stripes of the convict; I have entered the heart of the outcast and the shame-stricken; I have been old and unloved and I have sought refuge in self-destruction; I have lived a thousand lives of sorrow and strife and of fear, and O, my Master, I would that I could efface this anguish from the heart of the world.”