happens gradually; we vibrate between life and death, being
sustain life, as a drowning man will support himself in the water by clinging to the blade of a razor, without complaining about the pain it causes him, if nothing else is within reach.
CHAPTER 5. THE FIFTH STAGE: MYSTICAL DEATH. 35. Attacked thus on all sides by so many enemies, without life and without support, we can do nothing but die in the arms of Love. When death is complete, the most terrible states cause no further trouble. We do not recognize death from the fact of having passed through all these states, but by a lack of ability to feel pain, to think of or care for self, and by our indifference to remaining there forever without manifesting the slightest sign of life. Life is evidenced by a will for or repulsion from something; but here, in this death of the soul, all things are alike. It remains dead and unaware of everything that concerns itself, and, let God reduce it to what extremity He will, feels no opposition. It has no choice between being Angel or Demon, because it has no longer any eyes for self. It is then that God has placed all its enemies beneath his footstool, and, reigning supreme, takes and possesses it more fully, as it has more completely deserted itself. But this takes place by degrees. 36. There remains for a long time, even after death, a trace of the living heat, which only gradually disappears. All states cleanse the soul, but here the process is completed. 37. We do not die spiritually once for all, as we do naturally; it happens gradually; we vibrate between life and death, being sometimes in one and sometimes in the other, until death has finally conquered life. And so it is in the resurrection; an alternate state of life and death, until life has finally overcome death. 38. Not that the new life does not come suddenly. He who was dead, finds himself living, and can never afterward doubt that he was dead and is alive again; but it is not then established; it is rather a disposition toward living than a settled state of life. 39. The first life of grace began what could be sensed, and sank continually inward toward the centre, until, having reduced the soul to unity, it caused it to die in the arms of love; for all experience this death, but each by means peculiar to himself. But the life that is now given arises from within; it is, as it were, a living seed which has always existed there, though unobserved, and which shows that the life of grace has never been wholly absent, however it may have been hidden. There it remained even in the midst of death; nor was