Thomas Merton

You know that this presence is God, but for the rest, that is hidden in a cloud

Although that is so near as to be inside you and outside you and all around you.

When this contact with God deepens and becomes more pure, the cloud thins.

In proportion as the cloud gets less opaque, the experience of God opens out inside you as a terrific emptiness.

What you experience is the emptiness and purity of your own faculties produced in you by a created effect of God's love.

Nevertheless, since it is God itself who directly produces this effect and makes itself known by it without any other intermediary, the experience is more than purely subjective and does tell you something about God

that you cannot know in any other way.

These effects are intensified by the light of understanding, infused into your soul by the Spirit of God and raising it suddenly into an atmosphere of dark, breathless clarity in which God, though completely defeating and baffling all your natural understanding,

becomes somehow obvious.

However, in all these things, you remain very far from God, much farther than you realize.

And there are always two of you.

There is yourself, and there is God, making itself known to you by these effects.

So long as there is this sense of separation,

this awareness of distance and difference between ourselves and God.

We have not yet entered into the fullness of contemplation.

As long as there is an I that is the definite subject of a contemplative experience,

An eye that is aware of itself and of its contemplation.

An eye that can possess a certain degree of spirituality.

Then we have not yet passed over the Red Sea.

We have not yet gone out of Egypt.