My soul runs after truth, O Son of Truth, and to her running there is no end, nor a name for her weariness.
Better: be still, my soul, and by your stillness draw truth to yourself. What would you call him who at midnight said: I cannot do without light, I must run to the sun to bring back a few rays?
Why begin a run of a thousand years, when light is swifter than you and can fall into your lap in a few moments.
Open yourself to the light, my soul, and the light will come into you.
The walls that stand between you and truth, and seem to you monstrous mountains, which you strive with wearying running to cross, are your own making, and they are weaker than the white foam on the lake. If only you could open your eyes enough not to see them. Truly, the being of those walls depends on your seeing. If you would not see them, they would not exist.
I watched a chick on a black board, running in a circle marked out with white chalk. Long I watched it run, not daring to leap over the white line, which must have seemed to it either a living thing or a high wall.
Such too, I said in sorrow, is my soul, when she thinks that mighty giants or fearfully high walls divide her from her freedom. In truth, between her prison and her freedom there stands only one imagined line, thinner than a hair.
All the walls of your prison, my soul, are built of your fear of the world, of your desire for the world, and of your thoughts about the world. All these walls you yourself have raised, at the instruction of your senses, from the material they gave you, in truth weaker than foam.
In the beginning you had no senses, and truth was not divided from you. When you went blind, you sent the senses out to run after truth. And the greyhounds run and seize the nearest and easiest prey, and bring wolves to their blind master, and he eats them as deer.
Do not run, my soul, for it is the way of the senses to run. Servants run, and slaves, but the master is at rest.
Behold, in one corner of deep stillness and virginal purity within you, your pre-eternal eye has opened. That eye does not see the walls of your prison, and therefore does not run up mountains that do not exist. That is the Son of Truth, one of the Trinity who hold the whole heavenly kingdom, from whom you walled yourself off, desiring to be a Fourth. Truly I say to you, a fourth exists nowhere in all the breadth of what exists. His name is — the Nonexistent.
By your dancing and frolicking through the darkness, O soul, you have made me a fourth. All your people from the world of fourths will cast stones at the Son of Truth. Flee, wretched soul, from the world of fourths. Loose yourself from everything, cast everything away, hate everything, and — bow down before the Triune Truth, which gives itself to you through the Son of Truth.
O Lord of Truth and Life, help my soul to cast herself down before Thee and sob: Thou art my being, my life, and my truth, most beloved Son of the Holy Trinity. Thou art my all, and I surrender myself to Thee naked and poor. I have nothing to cast away, nothing to despise, nothing to hate, for besides Thee nothing exists. Have mercy, and receive me into Thine embrace.