Light, Life, and Love: Selections from the German Mystics of the Middle Ages · Chapter 60On the First Mode of This Highest Meeting
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THE most interior life is practised in three ways. Sometimes the interior man operates, above all activity and all virtue, by simple introspection in joyous love. And here he meets God without intermediary. And from the unity of God a simple light shines in him, and this light shows him darkness, nakedness, and nothingness. He is enveloped in darkness, and falls into the absence of mode as one who loses his way. He loses, in nakedness, the power of observing and distinguishing all things, and he is transformed and penetrated by a simple brightness. He loses, in nothingness, all his works, for he is overcome in the work of the unlimited love of God; and in the joyous inclination of his spirit he triumphs in God and becomes one spirit with Him. This is the first mode, which is inactive; for it empties a man of all things, and lifts him up above works and virtues.