Ruysbroeck discerns three moments in this achievement. First, a negative movement, the introversive sinking-down of our created life into God’s absolute life, which is the consummation of self-naughting and surrender and the essence of dark contemplation. Next, the positive ecstatic stretching forth above reason into our ‘highest life,’ where we undergo complete transmutation in God and feel ourselves wholly enfolded in Him. Thirdly, from these ‘completing opposites’ of surrender and love springs the perfect fruition of Unity, so far as we may know it here; when “we feel ourselves to be one with God, and find ourselves transformed of God, and immersed in the fathomless Abyss of our Eternal Blessedness, where we can find no further separation between ourselves and God. So long as we are lifted up and stretched forth into this height of feeling, all our powers remain idle, in an essential fruition; for where our powers are utterly naughted, there we lose our activity. And so long as we remain idle, without observation, with outstretched spirit and open eyes, so long can we see and have fruition. But in that same moment in which we would test and comprehend _What_ that may be which we feel, we fall back upon reason; and there we find distinction and otherness between God and ourselves, and find God as an Incomprehensible One exterior to us.”[78] It is clear from this passage that such ‘utterness’ of fruition is a fleeting experience; though it is one to which the unitive mystic can return again and again, since it exists as a permanent state in his essential ground, ever discoverable by him when attention is focussed upon it. Further, it appears that the ‘absence of difference’ between God and the soul, which the mystic in these moments of ecstasy feels and enjoys, is a psychological experience, not an absolute truth. It is the only way in which his surface-mind is able to realise on the one side the overwhelming apprehension of God’s Love, that ‘Yes’ in which all other syllables are merged; on the other the completeness of his being’s self-abandonment to the Divine embrace—“that Superessential Love with which we are one, and which we possess more deeply and widely than any other thing.”[79] It was for this experience that Thomas à Kempis prayed in one of his most Ruysbroeckian passages: “When shall I at full gather myself in Thee, that for Thy love I feel not myself, but Thee only, above all feeling and all manner, in a _manner not known to all_?”[80] It is to this same paradoxical victory-in-surrender—this apparent losing which is the only real finding—that Francis Thompson invites the soul: “To feel thyself and be His dear nonentity— Caught Beyond human thought In the thunder-spout of Him, Until thy being dim, And be Dead deathlessly.”