holds that one may have an immediate vision of God, in which the intellectual principle alone is active; and he exhorts the worshipper or thinker “to retire within himself,” to possess a soul “converted to itself” or “converted to intellect,” to be oblivious of external conditions, to command the body and all influences, that bear upon the mind through it and from without, to be quiescent;[1] all which rhetoric means simply that we should banish all finite notions from our mind and think metaphysically in order to rise to real worship and that to do so is to worship.
Reasoning in the same way Porphyry considers the imagination as a veil to our apprehension of an eternal essence;[2] since the imagination is knowledge that arises from without. Olympiodorus applies the principle to “enthusiasm” or the process of becoming God-like, which is the attainment of the highest good.[3] Spinoza has the same theory.[4]
Now what particular intellectual conception is it that brings us to the state of highest blessedness or rather is the state of highest blessedness? It is the conception of the worshipper or thinker that all reality is God; that all creation, including himself, is but the reflection of God, that God and his reflection, like the form and its image in the mirror, are one principle. Recall especially Mrs. Eddy's sentence: “Mortality will cease
