The shell in which my heart slumbered burst open. With pure and generous love, a new energy penetrated into me—or emerged from me, which, I cannot say—that made me feel that I was as vast and as loaded with richness as the universe.
When the world reveals itself to us, it draws us into itself: it causes us to flow outwards into something belonging to it, everywhere present in it, and more perfect than it.
Just as there is but a single matter created to maintain the successive growths of consciousness in the cosmos, so there is but a single fundamental feeling underlying all mystical systems; and that is an innate love of the human person, extended to the whole universe.
Must I not adhere to you throughout the entire extent of the universe, must not my love drive its roots into every single thing, since it is through the entire extension of the world that you offer yourself to me, that so I may feel you and clasp you?
Consciousness of cosmic energy penetrates into the region of individual immanence.
The two earlier types of knowledge are fused together in the intuition of vast cosmic trails; in these whole groups of monads, linked together by transient forces, making up a system that tends to appear as an immanence, are organized and pursue their course under the influence of certain axial energies or collective souls.
Creation has never stopped. The creative act is one huge continual gesture, drawn out over the totality of time. It is still going on; and, incessantly even if imperceptibly, the world is constantly emerging a little farther above nothingness.
Blessed, above all, be death and the horror of falling back into the cosmic forces. At the moment of its coming a power as strong as the universe pounces upon our bodies to grind them to dust and dissolve them, and an attraction more tremendous than any material tension draws our unresisting souls towards their proper centre. Death causes us to lose our footing completely in ourselves so as to deliver us over to the powers of heaven and earth. This is its final terror—but it is also, for the mystic, the climax of his bliss: it is our final entry, there to remain for ever, into the milieu that dominates, that carries us off, that consumes.
Created beings must work if they would be yet further created.
The mystical milieu is not a completed zone in which beings, once they have succeeded in entering it, remain immobilized. It is a complex element, made up of divinized created being, in which, as time goes on, the immortal distillation of the universe is gradually assembled.
What force can be expected to keep in one common orbit, untiringly and without any disorder, the countless numbers of individuals who pass through life without making a success of it and without understanding what it means? What, then, is the driving force that insistently urges into the struggle so many wretched, unconscious living beings who seem to be attached to the earth by no appetite, no interest, and no useful purpose?
Man finds himself inexorably forced, by his passion for union with God, to give things their highest possible degree of reality, whether it be in his knowledge of them and his love for them, or in their proper being.
In your excessive self-love you are like a molecule closed in upon itself and incapable of entering easily into any new combination.
Together with all the beings around me I felt that I was caught up in a higher movement that was stirring together all the elements of the universe and grouping them in a new order.
No one, I think, will understand the great mystics—St. Francis, and Blessed Angela, and the others—unless he understands the full depth of the truth that Jesus must be loved as a world.
It is God who has to give us the impulse of wanting him. And when the soul feels itself on fire for heaven, it still cannot, by itself, see what it lacks. It will see God only if God turns his face towards it: and a man cannot even force another man to do that. And when, finally, the soul has distinguished the burning centre which has been seeking for it, it is powerless to follow up the ray of light that has fallen on it, and cast itself into the source. For it is written: ‘No one can come to me unless I take him and draw him into myself’.