Thomas Merton

Although not explicitly divided, there are three modes of contemplation.

Three possible beginnings.

Firstly, the best of these kinds of beginnings is a sudden emptying of the soul in which images vanish.

Concepts and words are silent, and freedom and clarity suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the wonder, the depth, the obviousness, and yet the emptiness and unfathomable incomprehensibility

This touch, this clean breath of understanding comes relatively rarely.

The other two beginnings can be habitual states.

Secondly, the most usual entrance to contemplation

is through a desert of aridity in which although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety yet you were drawn and held in this darkness and dryness

because it is the only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace.

As you progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude.

and the assurance of a comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on you more and more until you gradually realize that it is God revealing itself to you in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties

Because that is infinitely above them.

And because its purity is at war with your own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.

a tranquility full of savour and rest and unction, in which, although there is nothing to feed and satisfy either the senses or the imagination or the intellect, the will rests in a deep, luminous,

and absorbing experience of love.

This love is like the shining cloud that enveloped the apostles on Tharba, so that they exclaimed, Lord, it is good for us to be here.

And from the depths of this cloud

come touches of reassurance, the voice of God speaking without words, uttering its own word.

For you recognize, at least in some obscure fashion, that this beautiful, deep,

Meaningful tranquility that floods your whole being with its truth and its substantial peace has something to do with the mission of the second person in your soul, is an accompaniment and sign of that mission.