The Path

Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate, individuality.

Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being.

The highest prayer is the most passive. Inevitably; for the less there is

of self, the more there is of God.  that is why the path to passive, or infused

contemplation is so hard and, for many, so painful--a passage through

successive or simultaneous Dark Nights, in which the pilgrim must die to

the life of sense as an end in itself, die to the life of private and even of

traditionally hallowed thinking and believing, and finally die to the deep source

of all ignorance and evil, the life of the separate, individualized will.

                                             Aldous Huxley  The Perennial Philosophy