It is, of course, easy to find many passages which link the way of the Christian Knower with that of his brother in the East. They bear witness to the same efficacy of method and they too use the intellect just as far as it will go and then suspend all effort whilst a new condition of being is instituted and a new state of awareness supervenes. St. Augustine says:

"Just as that is ineffable out of which the Son leaps from the Father in the first procession, so there exists some occult thing behind the first procession, intellect and will."

Meister Eckhart links himself with the Oriental Knowers in the following words:

"The man of the soul, transcending his angelic mode and guided by the intellect, pierces to the source whence flowed the soul. Intellect itself is left outside with all named things. So the soul is merged into pure unity."
- Pfeiffer, Franz, Meister Eckhart, pages 338, 144, 66, 101.

Thus, the great schools of intellectual meditation (devoid in the final stages of feeling and emotion) all lead to the same point. From the standpoint of Buddhism, of Hinduism, of Sufism, and of Christianity, there is the same basic goal: Unification with Deity; there is the same transcendence of the senses, the same focusing of the mind at its highest point, the same apparent futility of the mind beyond that point to carry the aspirant to his objective; there is the same entering into the state of contemplation of Reality, the same assimilation into God, and awareness of identity with God, and the same subsequent Illumination.

All sense of separateness has disappeared. Unity with the Universe, realized Identity with the Whole, conscious awareness of the Self and assimilation in full waking consciousness with both interior and exterior Nature - this is the definite goal of the seeker after knowledge.