prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their bodies to remain motionless, for
it seems to them that at the least movement they will lose their sweet
peace."[103] Others say that in this state we "stop the wheel of
imagination," leave all that we can think, sink into our nothingness or
our ground. In Ruysbroeck's phrase, we are "inwardly abiding in
simplicity and stillness and utter peace";[104] and this is man's state
of maximum receptivity. "The best and noblest way in which thou mayst
come into this work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "is by keeping
silence and letting God work and speak ... when we simply keep ourselves
receptive we are more perfect than when at work."[105]

But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet must at once be
qualified by the second point: _Attention_. It is based upon the right
use of the will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or nothing. It
has an ordained deliberate aim, is a behaviour-cycle directed to an end;
and this it is that marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the
contemplative from the non-directed surrender of mere quietism.
"Nothing," says St. Teresa, "is learnt without a little pains. For the
love of God, sisters, account that care well employed that ye shall
bestow on this thing."[106]

The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet without discursive thought,
the idea which it desires to realize; and this idea must interest and be
real for it, so that attention is concentrated on it spontaneously. The
more completely the idea absorbs us, the greater its transforming power:
when interest wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In spite of
her subsequent relapse into quietism Madame Guyon accurately described
true quiet when she said, "Our activity should consist in endeavouring
to acquire and maintain such a state as may be most susceptible of
divine impressions, most flexible to all the operations of the Eternal