This new consciousness, this new worship, this new love is for the Godhead. Christ is gone up into the Godhead, and I worship Him in, and as One with, the Godhead. For three months this continues uninterruptedly. Then Jesus Christ presents Himself to my consciousness. Jesus, Who led me to this happiness, now calls and calls to my soul. Immediately I commence to respond to Him. He is drawing me away; He is teaching me something--at first I do not know what, but soon I know that He is leading me out of this Eden, this paradise of my childhood: I know it, because I begin to feel pain again, and to recognise evil. O my Jesus, my Jesus, must I really follow Thee out of Paradise back into pain? Yes, in less than two weeks I am fully back in the world again--but not the same world, _because I know how to escape from it._ The Door that I knocked at, and that all in one moment was opened to me, is _never closed._ I can go in and out. God never closes to me the right of way; never severs those secret wires of Divine Communication.
But my soul is not nursed, as it were, in His Hands day and night--she must learn to grow up. Woeful education, deadly days of learning, stony paths that hurt, that hurt all the more because of the felicity that only so recently was mine.
For three months I am walking further and further out of Eden and back into the horrors of the world--following Jesus.
One night I compose myself as usual for sleep, but I do not sleep, neither can I say that I am quite awake. It is neither sleep, nor is my wakefulness the usual wakefulness. I do not dream, I cannot move. My consciousness is alight with a new fiery energy of life; it feels to extend to an infinite distance beyond my body, and yet remains connected with my body. I live in a manner totally new and totally incomprehensible, a life in which none of my senses are used and which is yet a thousand, and more than a thousand, times as vivid. It is living at white heat--without forms, without sound, without sight, without anything which I have ever been aware of in this world, and at a terrible speed. What is the meaning of all this? I do not know: my body is quite helpless and is distressed, but I am not afraid. God is teaching me something in His own way. For six weeks every night I enter this condition, and the duration and power or intensity of it increase by degrees. It feels that my soul is projected or travels for incalculable distances beyond my body--(long afterwards I understand through experience that this is not the mode of it, but that the soul _remaining in the body_ is by some de-insulation exposed to the knowledge of spirit-life as and when free of the flesh)--and I learn to comprehend and to know a new manner of living, as a swimmer learns a new mode of progression by means of his swimming, which is not his natural way.