(17) Therefore we must know, that God, as he is all in all, so where he is not (in the Love) in the Light, there he is (in the Darkness) in the Fierceness, and Source [or Torment;] for before the Time of the Creation there was nothing but the Source, and over it the Deity, which continues in Eternity. There is no other Ground, you [can] find nothing more, therefore give over your deep Searching, for it is the End of Nature.

(3) Let be this everywhere and this ought, in comparison or this nowhere and this nought. Reck thee never if thy wits cannot reason of this nought; for surely, I love it much the better. It is so worthy a thing in itself, that they cannot reason thereupon. This nought may better be felt than seen: for it is full blind and full dark to them that have but little while looked thereupon. Nevertheless, if I shall soothlier say, a soul is more blinded in feeling of it for abundance of ghostly light, than for any darkness or wanting of bodily light. What is he that calleth it nought? Surely it is our outer man, and not our inner. Our inner man calleth it All; for of it he is well learned to know the reason of all things bodily or ghostly, without any special beholding to any one thing by itself.

(9) And ween not, for I call it a darkness or a cloud, that it be any cloud congealed of the humours that flee in the air, nor yet any darkness such as is in thine house on nights when the candle is out. For such a darkness and such a cloud mayest thou imagine with curiosity of wit, for to bear before thine eyes in the lightest day of summer: and also contrariwise in the darkest night of winter, thou mayest imagine a clear shining light. Let be such falsehood. I mean not thus. For when I say darkness, I mean a lacking of knowing: as all that thing that thou knowest not, or else that thou hast forgotten, it is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is betwixt thee and thy God.

(5) The eternal Mind is in the great unsearchable Depth, and from Eternity is the indissoluble Band, and the Spirit in the and therein in the Center of the Deep is the reconceived Will to the Light; and the Will is the Desiring, and the Desiring attracts to it, and that which is attracted makes the Darkness in the Will, so that in the first Will, the second Will generates itself again, that it might fly out of the Darkness; and the second Will is the Mind, which discovers itself in the Darkness, and the [Discovery or] Glance breaks [or dispels] the Darkness, so that it stands in the Sound and in the Crack; where then the Flash sharpens itself, and so stands eternally in the broken Darkness, so that the Darkness thus stands in the Sound of the Stars. And in the Breaking of the Darkness, the reconceived Will is free, and dwells without the Darkness, in itself; and the Flash which there is the Separation and the Sharpness, and the Noise [or Sound] is the Dwelling of the Will, or of the continually conceived Mind; and the Noise and the Sharpness of the Flash are in the Dwelling of the Will free from the Darkness. And the Flash elevates the Will, and the Will triumphs in the Sharpness of the Flash, and the Will discovers itself in the Sharpness of the Sound in the Flash of the Light, without the Darkness in the Breaking, in the Infinity. And in that Infinity of the Flash, there is in every Discovery of the Whole fin the Particular (in every Reflection) again a Center of such a Birth as is in the Whole. And those Particulars are the Senses, and the Whole is the Mind out of which the Senses proceed; and therefore the Senses are mutable [or transitory,] and not in the Substance; but the Mind is whole, and in the Substance.

(24) For there is no Light, neither of this World, nor of God, but its own fiery Kindling in itself, and that is its Light, which stands in the horrible Flash of the Grimness, which also is an Enmity to itself; yet the Source is very unlike, all according to that which the Soul has here burdened itself with. For such a Soul there is no [Remedy or] Counsel, it cannot come into the Light of God; and although St. Peter had left many thousand Keys upon Earth, yet none of them could open the Heaven for it; for it is separated from the Band of Jesus Christ, and there is between it and the Deity, a whole Birth y; and it is as with the zrich Man, where those that would come from thence to us cannot. And this must be understood of the unrepenting Souls, which thus in Hypocrisy [or Show of Holiness] depart from the Body, being unregenerated.

(106) And here is apparently seen the Glass of the Abyss of Hell, and [of the] eternal Despair; when the Anger of God rises up in the Source, that the Malice [and Wickedness] is made stirring, and there begins Trembling, Galling, and Crying, and Despair in itself as to God; there the Soul seeks Abstinence in the Kingdom of this World, and finds mnone; and then it leaves the Kingdom of this World also, and runs also into the Originality into the Root of the eternal Birth, and seeks Abstinence, and yet finds nothing; and then casts itself into the abominable Deep, supposing to reach the Original of the Abstinence, or the Gate of the Breaking in; but it mounts only above the Heaven, out (into the most outermost) into the fierce [wrathful, grim] Eternity.

(68) So also it is with the damned [Soul,] when the Body breaks, the Soul needs no flying forth, or departing far away; it remains in that which is Outermost a without the four Elements, in the Darkness, and in the anguishing Source; its Source is [that which comes] after the Light, and its Rising [or Springing-up] is Enmity against itself, and so climbs continually aloft over the Thrones of the Deity, and finds them not, to Eternity; but it rides in its Pride aloft over the Thrones, in their own Game, with the strong Might of the Grimness; of which you shall find at large, about the Description of the last Judgment.

(31) In the Originality of Darkness, there is Harshness and Austereness, this Harshness causes that it be light; for Harshness is Desirousness, an Attracting; and that is the first Ground of the Willing [or Longing] after the Light, and yet it is not possible to comprehend it; and the Attracting in the Will is the [Sting or] Prickle, which the Desiring attracts, and the first Stirring [or Moving.] Now the Prickle cannot endure the Attracting in the Will, but resists, flies up, and yet cannot get away from thence; for it is generated in the Attracting. But because it cannot remove from thence, nor can endure the Attracting, therefore there is a great Anguish, a Desiring [or Longing] after the Light, like a Furiousness, and like a breaking whirling Wheel; and the Anguish in the Bitterness rises up in the Wrath after the Light, but cannot get it, being desirous in the Anxiety to lift up itself above the Light, yet does not overcome, but is infected, [impregnated or mingled] with the Light, and attains a twinkling Flash; and as soon as the Harshness, or the Hardness (viz. the Darkness) gets the same into it, it is terrified, and instantly goes away into its Ether: And yet the Darkness continues in the Center. And in this Horror [Terror or Shriek] the Hardness or Harshness becomes mild, soft, [supple,] and thin; and the Flash is made in the Bitterness, which flies up thus in the Prickle: Thus the Prickle discovers itself in the Mother, which so terrifies the Mother with the Flash, that she yields herself to be overcome; and when the Prickle strengthens itself in the Mother, and finds her so mild, then that is much more terrified, and loses its [fierce, strong] wrathful Propriety, and in the Twinkling of an Eye becomes white, clear, and bright, and flies up very joyfully, trembling with great Delight, [Lust] and Desire; and the Mother of Harshness from the Light comes to be sweet, mild, thin, and material, even Water. For she loses not the Essence of the harsh Conditions, and therefore the Essence attracts continually to it out of the Mildness, so that out of the Nothing, Something comes to be, viz. Water.

(6) Seeing then it is fashioned out of the eternal Will, therefore it is eternal, not in Substance, but in the Will, and after the Breaking of the Substance this World stands wholly and altogether (like a Figure) in the Will for [a Glass of] God's Works of Wonder. And so we know now, that where there is a Will, it must comprehend itself so that it be a Will, and that Comprehension makes an Attraction, and that which is attracted is in the Will, and it is thicker than the Will, and is the Darkness of the Will, and a Source in the Darkness; for the Will desires to be free, and yet cannot be free, except it goes again in itself out of the Darkness, and if it does, then the Darkness continues in the first Will, and the reconceived Will remains in itself in the Light.

(15) the Constituting Intelligence, so called because it constitutes the substance of creation in pure darkness, and men have spoken of these contemplations; it is that darkness spoken of in scripture, Job xxxviii. 9, "and thick darkness a swaddling band for it."

(15) Now the objects attracting the sun-rays to themselves- illuminated by a fire of the sense-order- are necessarily of the sense-order; there is perceptibility because there has been a union of things at once external to each other and continuous, contiguous, in direct contact, two extremes in one line. But the Reason-Principle operating upon Matter is external to it only in a very different mode and sense: exteriority in this case is amply supplied by contrariety of essence and can dispense with any opposite ends ; or, rather, the difference is one that actually debars any local extremity; sheer incongruity of essence, the utter failure in relationship, inhibits admixture .

The reason, then, of the immutability of Matter is that the entrant principle neither possesses it nor is possessed by it. Consider, as an example, the mode in which an opinion or representation is present in the mind; there is no admixture; the notion that came goes in its time, still integrally itself alone, taking nothing with it, leaving nothing after it, because it has not been blended with the mind; there is no "outside" in the sense of contact broken, and the distinction between base and entrant is patent not to the senses but to the reason.

In that example, no doubt, the mental representation- though it seems to have a wide and unchecked control- is an image, while the Soul is in its nature not an image : none the less the Soul or Mind certainly stands to the concept as Matter, or in some analogous relation. The representation, however, does not cover the Mind over; on the contrary it is often expelled by some activity there; however urgently it presses in, it never effects such an obliteration as to be taken for the Soul; it is confronted there by indwelling powers, by Reason-Principles, which repel all such attack.

Matter- feebler far than the Soul for any exercise of power, and possessing no phase of the Authentic Existents, not even in possession of its own falsity- lacks the very means of manifesting itself, utter void as it is; it becomes the means by which other things appear, but it cannot announce its own presence. Penetrating thought may arrive at it, discriminating it from Authentic Existence; then, it is discerned as something abandoned by all that really is, by even the dimmest semblants of being, as a thing dragged towards every shape and property and appearing to follow- yet in fact not even following.

(2) "But the light, since he possessed great power, knew the abasement of the darkness and his disorder, namely, that the root was not straight. The crookedness of the darkness was lack of perception, namely, the illusion that there is no one above him. And as long as he was able to restrain his evil, he was covered with the water. And he stirred. And the spirit was frightened by the sound. He lifted himself up to his station, and he saw a great, dark water. And he was nauseated. The thought of the spirit stared down; he saw the infinite light. But he was overlooked by the putrid root. And by the will of the great light the dark water separated. The darkness came up wrapped in vile ignorance, and this was in order that the mind might separate from him, because he prided himself in it.

(15) As is mentioned before, the eternal Mind stands thus lin the Darkness, and vexes itself, and longs after the Light, to generate that; and the Anguish is the Source, and the Source has in it many Forms, till it reaches the Fire in its Substance, viz. [it has] Bitter, Sour, Hard, Cold, Strong, Darting forth, or Flashing; in the Root of itself sticks the Joy and Pain alike; viz. when it comes to the Root of the Fire, and can reach the Light, then out of the Wrath [or Sternness] comes the great Joy. For the Light puts the stern Form into great Meekness; on the contrary, that Form which comes only to the Root of the Fire, that continues in the Wrath.

(10) But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter?

How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case?

The secret is Indetermination.

Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows the indeterminate. Around this indefinite a definite conception will be realized, but the way lies through indefiniteness.

All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act; in this case Reason conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure: therefore the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with the alien reason.

This is Plato's meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning.

What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn?

No: the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it: so the Mind, putting aside all attributes perceptible to sense- all that corresponds to light- comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination: it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darkness, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision.

There is vision, then, in this approach of the Mind towards Matter?

Some vision, yes; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unlit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the Soul is already bestowing Form.

But is not such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever?

No: in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience: but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds for they appear as things that have accepted colour and other quality.

It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie but only a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an Ideal-Principle.

With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else: what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing.

And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-form; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being.

(40) This was the unsearchable Purpose of God in his Will; and therefore he thus created all Things; and after this Time, there will be nothing but only Light and Darkness; where the Source [or Property] remains in each of them, as it has been from Eternity, where the one shall not comprehend the other, as it has also not been done from Eternity.

(5) In accordance with (his) immobile Unity, nothing acts on him. For he is unknowable; he is a breathless place of the boundlessness.

(5) It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there.

But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two- Matter and Idea- by sheer force of our reasoning which distinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dismisses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter.

The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that in the sense-world: so therefore does the Matter- as much as the forming-Idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter, though it is the object of determination has, of its own nature, a life defined and intellectual; the Matter of this sphere while it does accept determination is not living or intellective, but a dead thing decorated: any shape it takes is an image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary the shape is a real-existent as is the Base. Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be right as long as they keep to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm: for the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher that accompanies it, is illuminated Being.

But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm, possess eternal existence?

The solution of that question is the same as for the Ideas.

Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time: they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation: they are not, like the Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible which produces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there: it is the first movement; and movement and differentiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as one: this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination , needing The First to its determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of light can be authentic; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the true.

(56) And so the Soul of Man is out of the same Balance in the Angle of the recomprehended Will, towards the Light, and also in the first Will in itself, in its own Center, where behind it the Darkness is comprehended, and before it is the End of the eternal Band, and in itself there would be nothing but an anxious Source [or Property;] and if any Thing else were to be in it, then the first Will (in the eternal Band) must conceive another Will in itself, to go out of the dark Source [or Property,] into a joyful Habitation without a Source.

(20) If you will meditate on God, take before you the eternal Darkness, which is without God; for God dwells in himself, and the Darkness cannot in its own Power comprehend him; which Darkness has a great [Desire of] longing after the Light, caused by the Light's beholding itself in the Darkness, and shining in it. And in this Longing or Desiring, you find the Source, and the Source takes hold of the Power or Virtue of the Light, and the Longing makes the Virtue material, and the material Virtue is the Inclosure to God, or the Heaven; for in the Virtue stands the Paradise, wherein the Spirit which proceeds from the Father and the Son works. All this is incomprehensible to the Creation, but not impossible to be found in the Mind; for Paradise stands open in the Mind of a holy Soul.

(1) BECAUSE there belongs a divine Light to the Knowledge and Apprehension of this, and that without the divine Light there is no Comprehensibility at all of the divine Essence, therefore I will a little represent the high hidden Secret in a creaturely Manner, that thereby the Reader may come into the Depth. For the divine Essence cannot be wholly expressed by the Tongue; the Spiraculum Vitae (that is, the Spirit of the Soul which looks into the Light) only comprehends it. For every Creature sees and understands no further nor deeper than its Mother is, out of which it is come originally.