“As for the prayer of the heart, it is associated in Sufism with dhikr, or invocation of God’s Names. This quintessential form of prayer begins with invocation of the tongue, then with the mind and with our imaginal faculty, and finally with and in the heart, where the Divine Spark has always resided… The dhikr is in the final analysis the act of God Himself within us. In reality only God can utter His Name, and in the dhikr we become simply the instrument through which God utters His own sacred Name… In ordinary prayer men and women address God in an I-Thou relationship. In the prayer that is intertwined with love, the I and the Thou melt into each other. In contemplative prayer, the inner intellect or spirit, which is itself a Divine Spark to which Meister Eckhart refers when he says that there is in the soul something uncreated and uncreatable…is able to transcend the I-Thou dichotomy altogether. This faculty is able to plunge into the Supreme Reality and, in drowning in the Ocean of Divinity, to know it. It is to these realities that Plotinus was referring when he spoke of the flight of the alone to the Alone…As human beings, we have the ability to reach the state of extinction and annihilation and yet have consciousness that we are nothing in ourselves and that all being belongs to God. We can reach a state of unitive consciousness prior to bifurcation into object and subject.”

– Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth