To this period of vivid illumination and emotional unrest belongs the development of those ‘secondary automatisms’ familiar to all students of mysticism: the desperate efforts of the mind to work up into some intelligible shape—some pictured vision or some spoken word—the overwhelming intuitions of the Transcendent by which it is possessed; the abrupt suspension of the surface-consciousness in rapture and ecstasy, when that overwhelming intuition develops into the complete mono-ideism of the ecstatic, and cuts off all contacts with the world of sense. Of these phenomena Ruysbroeck speaks with intimacy, and also with much common sense. He distinguishes visions into those pictures or material images which are ‘seen in the imagination,’ and those so-called ‘intellectual visions,’—of which the works of Angela of Foligno and St. Teresa provide so rich a series of examples,—which are really direct and imageless messages from the Transcendent; received in those supersensuous regions where man has contact with the Incomprehensible Good and “seeing and hearing are one thing.” To this conventional classification he adds a passage which must surely be descriptive of his own experiences in this kind: “Sometimes God gives to such men swift spiritual glimpses, like to the flash of lightning in the sky. It comes like a sudden flash of strange light, streaming forth from the Simple Nudity. By this is the spirit uplifted for an instant above itself; and at once the light passes, and the man again comes to himself. This is God’s own work, and it is something most august; for often those who experience it afterwards become illuminated men. And those who live in the violence and fervour of love have now and then another manner, whereby a certain light shines _in_ them; and this God works by means. In this light, the heart and the desirous powers are uplifted toward the Light; and in this encounter the joy and satisfaction are such that the heart cannot contain itself, but breaks out in loud cries of joy. And this is called _jubilus_ or jubilation; and it is a joy that cannot be expressed in words.”[44] Here the parallel with Richard Rolle’s ‘ghostly song, with great voice outbreaking’ will strike every reader of that most musical of the mystics; and it is probable that in both cases the prominence given to this rather uncommon form of spiritual rapture points back to personal experience. “Methinketh,” says Rolle, “that contemplation is this heavenly song of the Love of God, which is called _jubilus_, taken of the sweetness of a soul by praising of God. This song is the end of perfect prayer, and of the highest devotion that may be here. This gladness of soul is had of God, and it breaketh out in a ghostly voice well-sounding.”[45]