CAPITULO 1 (a ser traduzido)
When you come away by yourself, do not be thinking ahead of time what you are to do next; forsake good thoughts as well as evil thoughts. And do not pray with words unless you feel really inclined to do so. And then, if you feel you should say anything, do not reckon how long or how short the prayer should be. Pay no heed to what it is or what it means, whether petition, psalm, hymn, or antiphon, or any other form of prayer, with a particular or general intention, whether mental or interior, expressed merely in your mind, or vocal, by pronouncing the words. Take care that nothing remains for your mind’s activity but the simple extension of your will, reaching out to God, not dressed up in any particular thought concerning God as he is in himself, or as revealed in any of his works; simply that he is as he is. Let him be just so, I pray you; do not make anything else of him. Do not seek to penetrate any deeper into him by subtle reasoning; let faith be your foundation.
This simple extension, freely established and grounded in true faith, must be nothing else, as regards your thinking and your feeling, except a simple thought and blind feeling of your own existence; as if you were to speak to God inwardly, with this for your meaning: “What I am, Lord, I offer to you, without looking to any quality of your being, but only that you are what you are and nothing else.” This humble darkness is to be the reflection of yourself and your entire mind. Think no further on yourself than I bid you do on your God, so as to be one with him in spirit, and this without dividing or dissipating your awareness.
For he is your being and you are what you are in him, not only by cause and by being: but he is also in you both as your cause and your being. So in this exercise think on God as you do on yourself, and on yourself as you do on God: that he is as he is and you are as you are; so that your thinking might not be dissipated or divided, but kept one in him who is all things; saving this difference between you and him, that he is your being, and you are not his. For though it is true that all things are in him by cause and by being, and that he is in all things as their cause and their being, yet he alone in himself is his own cause and his own being. For as nothing can subsist without him, so he cannot subsist without himself; he is being both to himself and to all things. And in that alone he is separated from all things, because he is the being both of himself and all things; and in this he is one in all things and all are one in him, because all things have their being in him and he is the being of all. Thus your thought and your feeling shall be made one with him in grace, without any separation, while all intellectual inquiry into the subtle qualities of your unseen being or of his are banished far away. See to it that your thought is single and undefiled; that you yourself, unencumbered, just as you are, may be touched by grace and secretly fed in your feeling with him alone, be just as he is; remembering that this union shall be blind and incomplete, as it can only be here in this life, so that your longing desire may always be active.
Look up, then, with joy and say to your Lord, either aloud or in your heart: “What I am, Lord, I offer to you; for you are what I am.” And think single-mindedly, plainly, and vigorously that you are as you are, without racking your brains at all. To think in this way requires little expertise, even of the most illiterate man or woman alive, with the minimum of natural intelligence; or so it seems to me. And that is why I am quietly amused, but also ruefully amazed sometimes, when I hear some folk say-and I am not speaking of illiterate men and women but of very learned theologians-that what I write to you and to others is so difficult and so profound, so subtle and so unfamiliar, that it can scarcely be understood by the subtlest theologian or most intelligent man or woman alive: This is what they say. To such as these I must answer and say that here is great reason for sorrow and for severe though merciful scorn and condemnation on the part of God and those who love him. For nowadays not only a few people but practically everyone, except perhaps for one or two of God’s specially chosen somewhere or other, is so blinded by the subtleties of knowledge, acquired by learning or possessed by natural intelligence, that they can come no nearer in truth of spirit to the understanding of this easy exercise, through which the soul of the most ignorant man or woman alive is truly made one with God in loving meekness and perfect charity, than a little child still learning its A.B.C. can come to the knowledge of the greatest theologian in the schools; or not even as near as that, because of this blindness and curiosity. Because of it they mistakenly call such simple teaching intellectual subtlety; whereas, if we look at it properly, we find it to be a simple and easy lesson given by an illiterate. For I would consider him too illiterate and uncultured by far who could not think and be conscious of himself-that he is. Not what he is, but that he is. For clearly it is an attribute of the most ignorant cow or the most irrational animal-if it could be said, as it cannot, that one were more ignorant or more irrational than another-to be aware of its own individual being. Much more then is it an attribute of man, who alone above all the other animals is endowed with reason, to think and to be conscious of his own individual being.