Now here it is, in these stammered tidings of an adventure ‘far outside and beyond our spirit,’ in ‘the darkness at which reason gazes with wide eyes,’[81] that we must look for the solution of that problem which all high mystic states involve for analytic thought: how can the human soul become one with God ‘without intermediary, beyond all separation,’[82] yet remain eternally distinct from Him? How can the ‘deification,’ the ‘union with God without differentiation’ on which the great mystics insist, be accepted, and pantheism be denied? First, we notice that in all descriptions of Unity given us by the mystics, there is a strong subjective element. Their first concern is always with the experience of the heart and will, not with the deductions made by the intelligence. It is at our own peril that we attach ontological meaning to their convinced and vivid psychological statements. Ruysbroeck in particular makes this quite clear to us; says again and again that he has ‘_felt_ unity without difference and distinction,’ yet that he _knows_ that ‘otherness’ has always remained, and “that this is true we can only know by feeling it, and in no other way.”[83] In certain great moments, he says, the purified and illuminated soul which has died into God does achieve an Essential Stillness; which seems to human thought a static condition, for it is that Eternal Now of the Godhead which embraces in its span the whole process of Time. Here we find nothing but God: the naked and ultimate Fact or Superessential Being ‘whence all Being has come forth,’ stripped of academic trimmings and experienced in its white-hot intensity. Here, far beyond the range of thought, unity and otherness, like hunger and fulfilment, activity and rest, _can_ co-exist in love. The ultimate union is a love-union, says Ruysbroeck. “The Love of God is a consuming Fire, which draws us out of ourselves and swallows us up in unity with God, where we are satisfied and overflowing, and with Him, beyond ourselves, eternally fulfilled.”[84]