condition, and the duration and power or intensity of it
increase by degrees. It feels that my soul is projected or travels for
incalculable distances beyond my body--(long afterwards I
understand through experience that this is not the mode of it, but that
the soul _remaining in the body_ is by some de-insulation exposed
to the knowledge of spirit-life as and when free of the flesh)--and I
learn to comprehend and to know a new manner of living, as a
swimmer learns a new mode of progression by means of his
swimming, which is not his natural way.

By the end of three weeks I can remain nightly for many hours in
this condition, which is always accompanied by an intense and vivid
consciousness of God.

As this consciousness of God becomes more and more vivid so my
body suffers more and more. By day I can only eat the smallest
morsels of food, which almost choke me, but I drink a great quantity
of water. I am perfectly healthy, though I have hardly any sleep and
very little, indeed almost no, food--the suffering is only at night with
the breathing and the heart when in this strange condition. But I
have no anxiety whatever; I am glad that He shall do as He pleases
with me. Nothing but love can give us this supreme confidence.

During the whole of these experiences I live in a state of very
considerable abstraction. But this now suddenly increases, increases
to such an extent that I hardly know whether to call it abstraction or
the extremity of poverty. I now become divested of all interests
outside and inside, divested of the greater part of my intelligence,
divested of my will. I am of no value whatever, less than the dust on
the road.

In this awful nothingness I am still I. My consciousness continues
and is not confounded with or lost in any other consciousness, but is
reduced to stark nakedness and worth nothing: and this worthless
nothing is hung up and, as it were, suspended nowhere in particular
as far from earth as from heaven, totally unknown and unwanted by
both God and Man. I am naked patience--waiting. I have a few
thoughts, but very few: I think one thought where in normal times I
should think ten thousand. I feel and know that I am nothing, and I
feel that this has been done to me; just as before, all that I had was
also done to me and was a gift. So I acknowledge that I once had
and was perhaps something and that now I possess and certainly am
nothing--I acknowledge it, I accept it, without hesitation,