On the sluggish wheels of the body my soul journeys through this world of delusions, which strives, by its sluggishness and its massiveness, to prove its own being.
O Light-bearing Lord, how fearfully my soul has clung to these decaying wheels! In her blindness she thinks that if she falls from these wheels, she can fall lower still. As though he in the tree and he beneath the tree did not stand upon the same ashes!
In her fear and ignorance my soul has surrendered herself wholly to the body, only that the body might carry her as slowly and as long as possible on the road to the fatal end.
Her lordship, her reality — the only reality in this world — the soul has ceded to the body out of fear and ignorance. She has handed the mirror to a blind man, and the blind man breaks it to pieces.
Remember your beginning, O soul, when you were like a ray of the sun, and your body like moonlight. Then you were keen and translucent as the light of the sun, and your wheels swift as moonlight.
Then you knew that being was within you, and that your wheels were only your shadow and your borrowing. And they knew no fear, for you had sight, and you saw yourself on wings of might and immortality.
The sluggish wheels on which you now ride you yourself willed, by your own will, by your own fear, by your own ignorance, and you yourself created them. Neither you as you now are, nor your body as it now is, did God wish to create. To save yourself from the thinner darkness into which your desire had cast you, you descended into ever denser and denser darkness, until you were wholly darkened, and grew thick, and cut a garment to fit yourself. And until at last you surrendered all your dignity to your thick garment, only to save yourself from fear.
You gave your being to one who cannot bear it, and so you lost it on both sides, and became an unreal and ghastly shadow like your body. For being is a holy thing, and as soon as it is carried out to the marketplace, to be sold and bought, it forsakes both buyer and seller and withdraws equally from them both.
That is why, O soul, even the great sage of India denied you being — to you no less than to your bodily garment. But if God descends into you, and is born in you, you will gladden the sorrowing sage of India, who sits upon the lotus and thinks, for you will regain your lost being. Truly, all being is in God, and outside of God there is no being, not even so much as a grain of mustard seed.
Behold, I see in you a little corner, like a cave lit by a single candle in a vast mountain weighed down by darkness. The longer I gaze at that hidden light in you, the more it seems to me like a maiden's beauty, like your original beauty, O my soul. From my gazing the small light grows, and ever more clearly there appears within it a wondrous maiden's face. Like a ray of the sun clothed in moonlight.
There is your salvation, O frightened soul. There is your life — all the rest is a grave. If only you could fan that small light into flame, and carry it like a great torch into my mind and into my heart.
Arise, O my soul, and rivet your gaze upon the little cave where the little maiden dwells. Behold, out of that cave shall your deliverance come to you. In it even now lies all your remaining might, and your unmarred beauty, and your unsold immortality.
Outside the cave, outside my soul, where the maiden gives birth to God, all is shadow and ashes, together with the sluggish wheels of the body.