In order fully to lay open the unconscious to the influence of suggested ideas, the surface mind must be called in from its responses to the outer world, or in religious language recollected, till the hum of that world is hardly perceived by it.

The body must be relaxed, making no demands on the machinery controlling the motor system; and the conditions in general must be those of complete mental and bodily rest.

Here is the psychological equivalent of that which spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state defined by one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who are in this prayer," says St.Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or our ground.

In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state of maximum receptivity.

"The best and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping silence and letting God work and speak ...