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You have reached a point where your further growth in perfection demands that you do not feed your mind with meditations on the multiple aspects of your being. In the past, these pious meditations helped you to understand something of God. They fed your interior affection with a sweet and delightful attraction ... but now it is important that you seriously concentrate on the effort to abide continually in the deep center of your spirit, offering to God that naked blind awareness of your being which I call your first fruits.
I want you to clearly understand that in this work it is not necessary to inquire into minute details of God's existence any more than of your own. For there is no name, no experience, and no insight so akin to the everlastingness of God than what you can possess, perceive, and actually experience in the blind loving awareness of this word, is. ...let your faculties rest from their minute inquiry into the attributes of his being or yours. Leave all this behind...
With perseverance in this practice, you will grow increasingly refined in singleness of heart until you are ready to strip, spoil, and utterly unclothe your self-awareness of everything, even the elemental awareness of your own being, so that you might be newly clothed in the gracious stark experience of God as he is in himself.
For this is the way of all real love. The lover will utterly and completely despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves. This is the meaning of the words; "Anyone who wishes to love me let him forsake himself." ...to lose the knowledge and experience of self. This is essential...
~ The Book of Privy Counseling
edited by william johnston
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