After the first battles that arise when one checks the flesh and passions, a person comes to a deep pool in which many go under. This is capricious reasoning, when a person is freed from crass sinfulness and is released from images to which he was attached, and freely lifts himself above time and place, which previously bound him so that he could not at all enjoy his inborn nobility. But when the eye of the intellect begins to open and a person is searching to fulfill a different and better kind of pleasure, namely, (knowledge of) the truth, enjoyment of divine blessedness, the sight of the present “now” of eternity, and the like, and when the created intellect begins to understand a bit the eternal uncreated intellect in itself and in all things, it then in some strange way happens to a person that he looks at himself–what he was before, and what he now is– And he realises that before he was miserable, godless and in need, completely blind and far from God. But now it seems to him he is filled with God and there is nothing that is not God; further, God and all things are a simple one. He grasps things too quickly, not taking enough time, then he becomes unstable…. He rushes to that which he understands or what is presented injudiciously (unwise) to him by someone who is in the same situation. He is supposed to listen to this person alone and to no one else. Then he views everything as it pleases his thinking; and things elude his grasp as they really are in themselves, be it hell, heaven, devil or angel, because such persons have only grasped God in things and have not penetrated the things with knowledge that distinguishes them in their ground, things according to their permanence or transitoriness. These people are like bees making honey. When they mature and, for the first time, storm out of the hive, they fly confused this way and that and do not know where to go. Some fly off wrong and are lost, but others return to the hive in proper fashion. This is what happens to these people. When they see God with their uninformed intellect as all in all according to their undeveloped intellect, they want to leave this or that but do not know how. It is certainly true that everything must be removed from people if they are to become perfect, but they do not yet understand how this ridding (one’s) self of everything is to take place.

–Henry Suso ‘The Exemplar’