ation of everything in this
world.

"Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will
find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.

"Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you;

"Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;

"Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others hold
the same;

"To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.

"To know all things, learn to know nothing.

"To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.

"To be all things, be willing to be nothing.

"To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever
experiences you have no taste for.

"To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.

"To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.

"To be what you are not, experience what you are not."

These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contradiction which
is so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical,
for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion
of the All.

"When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All.

"For to come to the All you must give up the All.

"And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it, desiring
Nothing.

"In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest.
Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it can be
assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longer
desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for its
desires alone are the causes of its woes."[182]

[182] Saint Jean de la Croix, vie et Oeuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99,
abridged.

And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all
our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a
psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will
quote the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you
will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his
autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious
document.

"He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and when
this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; and he
sought by many devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He
wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood
ran from him, so that he was obli