"The kingdom of heaven is within you" is also a sufficiently explicit statement on the part of the Christian Scripture to substantiate the possibility of such an experience. In an article published in the _Monist_ of January, 1898, and bearing on this subject, there occurs the following passage, accompanied with extracts from the works of several Christian mystics:-- "The Buddhist idea, that salvation consists mainly in dropping our own self, in becoming nothing, in self-annihilation for the sake of becoming Buddha--viz., divinely incarnate--can be found in many Christian writers. The highest religious aspirations are not the result of an anxiety for the salvation of one's own soul, but a yearning for a union with God." Scotus Erigena writes: "In God all things will be put to rest and remain One, Indivisible, and Immutable."... "God does not perceive what is Himself." According to St. Augustine: "If the soul is to comprehend God, it must forget itself, for if the soul sees and comprehends itself it neither sees nor comprehends God." "If the soul loses itself through God and forsakes all things, it finds itself again through God."... "Whenever the soul comes to uniting itself with God it becomes annihilated."... "All perfection and all bliss consists in this, that man enters into the ground that is groundless."... "How shall I love God? Thou shalt love Him as He is--a not God, a not spirit, a not person, a not image; but rather as He is--a true, pure, clear One, separated from all two-hood; and in this One we shall eternally disappear _from nothing into nothing_."[AN]... [AN] I. O Bhikshus, the uncreated, the invisible, the unmade, the elementary, the unproduced, exists (as well as) the created, the visible, the made, the conceivable, the compound, the produced; and there is an uninterrupted connection between the two. II. O Bhikshus, if the uncreated, the invisible, the unmade, the elementary, the unproduced was nonentity, I could not say that the result of their connection from cause to effect with the created, the visible, the made, the compound, the conceivable, was final emancipation. III. O Bhikshus, it is because of the real existence of the uncreated, the invisible, the elementary, the unproduced, that I say that the result of their connection from cause to effect with the created, the visible, the made, the compound, the conceivable, is final emancipation.--(_Verses from the Buddhist Canon_, translated from the Thibetan of the Bkah-hgyur, by W. Woodville Rockhill.) Erckhart says: "How shall that man be who shall behold God? He shall be dead. Our Lord says: 'No man shall see me and live.'" According to Buddhistic teaching, "He who has conquered ignorance and got rid of desire enjoys the supreme reward already in this life. His outer man may still be detained in the world of suffering, but he knows that it is not he himself whom the coming of the Sankharas[AO] affects."