God is Your Being

Anonymous Monk

"Your utter determination, firmly based as it is on true belief, must be the simple recognition and blind acceptance of your own existence, and no more than this, either intellectually or emotionally. It is as if you were saying to God, ‘What I am, Lord, I offer you. I am not thinking of you in a particular way, except that you are as you are, no more and no less.’

"Such humble and intellectual darkness must be reflected in all your thinking. I would say more: you are not to think about yourself any more than you do about God. (Not, however, at the cost of mental disintegration!) For he is your being and what you are, you are in him, not merely because of this fact, but because he is both the cause and the reason for your existence. Therefore at this stage you are to think of God in the same way that you think of yourself, and of yourself as you do of God, namely that he is as he is, and that you are as you are. In this way your thinking will not be dissipated or confused but unified in him who is all; never forgetting, of course, this difference: that he is your being, and not you, his."

Book of Privy Counsel