"that the function of this abyss of freedom that has opened out within our own midst is to draw us utterly out of our own selfhood and into its own immensity of liberty and joy. You seem to be the same person and you are the same person that you have always been; in fact you are more yourself than you have ever been before. You have only just begun to exist. You feel as if you were at last fully born".Now you have come into your element, and yet now you have become nothing. You have sunk to the center of your own poverty, and there you have felt the doors fly open into infinite freedom, into a wealth which is perfect because none of it is yours, though it is all there for you.
And now you are free to go in and out of infinity. This darkness is not a place, not an extent, but a huge, smooth activity. These depths, they are Love. And in the midst of you they form a wide, impregnable country".And you, while you are free to come and go, yet as soon as you attempt to make words or thoughts about it you are excluded. You go back into your exterior in order to talk; yet you find that you can rest in this darkness and this unfathomable peace without trouble and without anxiety, even when the imagination and the mind remain in some way active outside its doors.
-- slightly paraphrased from Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
