and to enter wholly
into the Love of God. . . . This, however, was not possible for me to
accomplish, but I stood firmly by my _earnest resolution_, and fought a
hard battle with myself. Now while I was wrestling and battling, being
aided by God, a wonderful light arose within my soul. It was a light
entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I recognized the true
nature of God and man, and the relation existing between them, a thing
which heretofore I had never understood."[57] In one of his other
autobiographical passages, he says that after much earnest seeking and
desire and many a hard repulse, "the Gate was opened!" These are {202}
characteristic accounts of a profound mystical experience. There had
been long stress and inward battle, the tension of a divided self, and
then a great ground swell of earnest will--a resolve, he says, to put
my life in hazard rather than give over, when "a wonderful light arose
within the soul" and "the Gate was opened." And "when this mighty
light fell upon me, I saw," he says, in still another description, "in
an effectual peculiar manner, and I knew in the spirit."[58]

The central aspect of his experience was plainly an overmastering
_conviction_ of contact with, an immersion into, a deeper world of
spirit and of inner unity of life and spirit with this deeper world.
His own personal spirit united, as he once put it, "with the innermost
Birth in God and stood in the Light."[59] He discovered that "God goes
clean another way to work" than by the way of reasoning or of sense
experience[60]--instead of waiting for man to climb up to Him, He
climbs up into man's soul.[61] By a new and inner way, to change the
figure, the tides of the shoreless Divine Sea break in upon the life of
a man and bathe his entire being. It seems to Boehme, at one time,
like the rising of a mid-noon Sun, with illuminating rays, and he
describes the experience in terms of Light and enlarged Vision, or,
again, it appears like the bursting open of a secret door into a world
of new dimensions, and he calls it the opening of the Gate, or now
again he feels as though the elemental creative power of God had burst
into operation within him and that a mighty birth-process had lifted
him to a new kingdom, or to a new order of nature, or, finally, hushed
and soothed and healed as though he had suddenly found the breast of an
infinite Mother, he describes his state as "the innermost Quiet"--the
return to