ustomed light, which now seems to you a darkness,
may clarify your eyes, and that you may be transformed from a
visitor into an inhabitant of that supernal Country which St.
Augustine described as "no mere vision, but a home."

You are therefore to let yourself go; to cease all conscious,
anxious striving and pushing. Finding yourself in this place of
darkness and quietude, this "Night of the Spirit," as St. John of
the Cross has called it, you are to dwell there meekly; asking
nothing, seeking nothing, but with your doors flung wide open
towards God. And as you do thus, there will come to you an ever
clearer certitude that this darkness enveils the goal for which you
have been seeking from the first; the final Reality with which you
are destined to unite, the perfect satisfaction of your most ardent
and most sacred desires. It is there, but you cannot by your efforts
reach it. This realisation of your own complete impotence, of the
resistance which the Transcendent--long sought and faithfully
served--now seems to offer to your busy outgoing will and love,
your ardour, your deliberate self-donation, is at once the most
painful and most essential phase in the training of the human
soul. It brings you into that state of passive suffering which is to
complete the decentralisation of your character, test the purity of
your love, and perfect your education in humility.

Here, you must oppose more thoroughly than ever before the
instincts and suggestions of your separate, clever, energetic self;
which, hating silence and dimness, is always trying to take
the methods of Martha into the domain of Mary, and seldom
discriminates between passivity and sloth. Perhaps you will find,
when you try to achieve this perfect self-abandonment, that a
further, more drastic self-exploration, a deeper, more searching
purification than that which was forced upon you by your first
experience of the recollective state is needed. The last fragments
of selfhood, the very desire for spiritual satisfaction--the
fundamental human tendency to drag down the Simple Fact and
make it ours, instead of offering ourselves to it--must be sought
out and killed. In this deep contemplation, this profound Quiet,
your soul gradually becomes conscious of a constriction, a
dreadful narrowness of personality; something still existing in
itself, still tending to draw inwards to its own centre, and keeping
it from that absolute surrender which is the only way to pea