Here the reality behind appearance is still mediated to the mystic under symbols and forms. The variation of these symbols is great; his adoring gaze now finds new life and significance in the appearances of nature, the creations of music and of art, the imagery of religion and philosophy, and reality speaks to him through his own credal conceptions. But absolute value cannot be attributed to any of these, even the most sacred: they change, yet the experience remains. Thus an identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative’s sense of personal intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass: “Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the way To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea, No word the Vedas say. “Not thus the Manifest. How fair! how near! Gone is our thirst if only He appear— He, to the heart so dear.” So, too, the Sūfi mystic who has learned to say: “I never saw anything without seeing God therein;” Kabir exclaiming: “I have stilled my restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself;” the Neoplatonist rapt in contemplation of the intelligible world “yonder”; Brother Lawrence doing his cooking in the presence of God, reveal under analysis an identical type of consciousness. This consciousness is the essential; the symbols under which the self apprehends it are not.