ce.
An attitude of perfect generosity, complete submission, willing
acquiescence in anything that may happen--even in failure and
death--is here your only hope: for union with Reality can only be
a union of love, a glad and humble self-mergence in the universal
life. You must, so far as you are able, give yourself up to, "die
into," melt into the Whole; abandon all efforts to lay hold of It.
More, you must be willing that it should lay hold of you. "A pure
bare going forth," says Tauler, trying to describe the sensations of
the self at this moment. "None," says Ruysbroeck, putting this
same experience, this meek outstreaming of the bewildered spirit,
into other language, "is sure of Eternal Life, unless he has died
with his own attributes wholly into God."

It is unlikely that agreeable emotions will accompany this utter
self-surrender; for everything will now seem to be taken from
you, nothing given in exchange. But if you are able to make it, a
mighty transformation will result. From the transitional plane of
darkness, you will be reborn into another "world," another stage
of realisation: and find yourself, literally, to be other than you
were before. Ascetic writers tell us that the essence of the change
now effected consists in the fact that "God's _action_ takes the
place of man's _activity_"--that the surrendered self "does not act,
but receives." By this they mean to describe, as well as our
concrete language will permit, the new and vivid consciousness
which now invades the contemplative; the sense which he has of
being as it were helpless in the grasp of another Power, so utterly
part of him, so completely different from him--so rich and
various, so transfused with life and feeling, so urgent and so
all-transcending--that he can only think of it as God. It is for
this that the dimness and steadily increasing passivity of the
stage of Quiet has been preparing him; and it is out of this
willing quietude and ever-deepening obscurity that the new
experiences come.

"O night that didst lead thus,
O night more lovely than the dawn of light,
O night that broughtest us
Lover to lover's sight--
Lover with loved in marriage of delight,"

says St. John of the Cross in the most wonderful of all mystical
poems. "He who has had experience of this," says St. Teresa of
the same stage of apprehension, "will understand it in some
measure: but it cannot be more clearly described because