Exercise yourself unceasingly in mystical contemplation. Abandon feelings. Renounce intellectual activities. Reject all that belongs to the perceptible and the intelligible. Strip yourself totally of non-being and being and lift yourself as far as you are able to the point of being united in unknowing with Him who is beyond all being and all knowledge. For it is by passing beyond everything, yourself included, irresistibly and completely, that you will be exalted in pure ecstasy right up to the dark splendour of the divine Superessence, after having abandoned all, and stripped yourself of everything.

Dionysius the Areopagite (circa 1st century A.D.)