I descend deep into my mind, and I find in it Jews, who bar the entrance to Thee, O my Light-bearing King, and who have filled the whole world with tales of their flight from Pharaoh's kingdom, which did not flee from them.
And I surveyed all that dwelt in my mind, and cried out in despair: all this is neither I, nor my God, nor the kingdom of my God.
All these are echoes and images of the earth, which my all-too-diligent senses carried in from outside and heaped up in my mind.
Where then am I? Where is my King and my Lord? Where is the kingdom of my King? Did you drag the whole kingdom of Egypt into the promised land? And into the city of my King did you carry all the mire of the Nile?
Wretched is the food of my mind, so long as it feeds only on what my senses set before it. Outward imprints and impressions, shadows of shadows, magnified to dreadful proportions, just as shadows always grow fearfully large where there is little light — is this my mind? All the thinking of my mind, I found, is nothing but the building of powerless structures out of powerless shadows.
And once more I surveyed the measureless field of my mind, where with the swiftness of many spiders whole cities of shadows were being built and torn down, more powerless than cobwebs — and I grieved, and took counsel with myself:
On what can shadows dance if not on light? Is not that light my mind? Would not the shadows shrink little by little as the light of the mind increased? But is not my mind itself only a powerless shadow of the mind of God?
Woe is me, if my mind, when it is parted from the body, through which this inheritance is given it, should remain alone in Eternity with this dreadful weaving!
And in solitude I repeated to my mind: now, when I see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing, touch nothing — what fills you now, if not only shadowy images and memories of what you have heard, seen, smelled, tasted, touched, all of which has passed away into the past, has changed, been disfigured, decayed, died? Why do you not once and for all bury the dead and leave them to the dead, and flee — but stand like a graveyard, over which the shades of the dead dance, a graveyard that waits for new corpses?
How the Jerusalem on high, the city of my King, has been turned into a kingdom of the dead and a rubbish heap of the world!
O my King, I hear Thy mysterious whisper, and I understand; I see Thy light, and I comprehend.
And when I understand and comprehend, joy drives tears to my eyes, and I cry out: my salvation is in my Lord!
He is the light of my mind, over which I was a drowsy watchman, so that strangers crept in and darkened the royal light.
My Lord will help me — when I confess that there is no other helper in all the worlds — to drive out the darkness and the dark strangers from my mind.
Let there be darkness, let it circle about my mind, but let it not enter the city of the King of Light.