I came to you with a fearful and anxious heart. The fear never leaves me—I keep thinking I have lost you, and the thought of losing you still more fills me with terrible unease. You revealed yourself to me as life-force, as life itself, as soul, as witness, as listener, as thinker, as knower, as rememberer, as the manifold world itself, and in that revelation I did not lose you. Appearing in solitude, in silence, in darkness, as beloved, as lover, as the innermost and most intimate presence, you assured me that losing you is impossible. Those beloved persons whom once I embraced with passionate love—they have gone far away. My intimacy with them was never the deepest. That intimacy bears no comparison to my intimacy with you. What I saw of them, heard from them, touched in them, felt through them—all that was relatively external. It was external and it was fleeting. It could not fulfill the heart's longing. If I could love you, my heart would be completely filled. That love is not coming to me. That is my fear; that is my unease. What union I have with you carries too much the impress of thought, too much the influence of intellect. If love is present, it is only the merest trace—it dries up like a dewdrop at dawn. However deep my thought, however profound my understanding, I will not possess you permanently through them; you have told me this again and again. It is the absence of love that keeps me from possessing you permanently. Without love, even the weight of thought becomes unstable. Through even a single drop of love's influence, knowledge that seemed lost returns. I can attempt to examine your thoughts. You surely inspire that effort and grant it success; yet even through thinking, I cannot bring forth love. By what law do you awaken love and let it wither away? I cannot fathom it. When you kindle love's fire in my heart and bring my seeking to fruition, it seems to me I will never lose that understanding again. Yet it never holds—that state always passes away. When I possess you vividly, in sweet feeling, if I could sit with you and not release you, not forget you—would you then become entirely and permanently mine? That is what seems true to me. If I do not release you, do not forget you, why would you abandon me without cause? Yet you do not give me the strength or the means to hold you firm and permanent in this way. I find myself dependent on your grace, wondering if I can possibly sit with you for as long as I am able. It does not seem that my heart lacks the seed of love. That hunger for love from my earliest days remains unfulfilled—you can see it. Disappointed in human beings, I took refuge in you. The love I sought no human could ever give me—of that I am certain. Except through you, there is no fulfillment of love; of that I am sure. Now if I cannot receive that love from you, if loving you does not bring me peace, joy, and strength, then life has been in vain, and life's labor has borne no fruit.
That you would undo my life like this—I cannot bring myself to believe it. Within this struggle, this prayer, I glimpse the seed of fulfillment. Every effort, every prayer succeeds in part, and carries the promise of complete success... Is this not what I hear in your word?