to make my character
perfect, to prepare my heart for meditating on God--all according to
the methods of the Sufis, as I had read of them.

"This retreat only increased my desire to live in solitude, and to
complete the purification of my heart and fit it for meditation. But
the vicissitudes of the times, the affairs of the family, the need of
subsistence, changed in some respects my primitive resolve, and
interfered with my plans for a purely solitary life. I had never yet
found myself completely in ecstasy, save in a few single hours;
nevertheless, I kept the hope of attaining this state. Every time that
the accidents led me astray, I sought to return; and in this situation
I spent ten years. During this solitary state things were revealed to
me which it is impossible either to describe or to point out. I
recognized for certain that the Sufis are assuredly walking in the path
of God. Both in their acts and in their inaction, whether internal or
external, they are illumined by the light which proceeds from the
prophetic source. The first condition for a Sufi is to purge his heart
entirely of all that is not God. The next key of the contemplative
life consists in the humble prayers which escape from the fervent soul,
and in the meditations on God in which the heart is swallowed up
entirely. But in reality this is only the beginning of the Sufi life,
the end of Sufism being total absorption in God. The intuitions and
all that precede are, so to speak, only the threshold for those who
enter. From the beginning revelations take place in so flagrant a
shape that the Sufis see before them, whilst wide awake, the angels and
the souls of the prophets. They hear their voices and obtain their
favors. Then the transport rises from the perception of forms and
figures to a degree which escapes all expression, and which no man may
seek to give an account of without his words involving sin.

"Whosoever has had no experience of the transport knows of the true
nature of prophetism nothing but the name. He may meanwhile be sure of
its existence, both by experience and by what he hears the Sufis say.
As there are men endowed only with the sensitive faculty who reject
what is offered them in the way of objects of the pure understanding,
so there are intellectual men who reject and avoid the things perceived
by the prophetic faculty. A blind man can understand nothing of colors
save what he has learned by narration and hear