Working paper · Source Library · computational history of experience
A first attempt, what it teaches about the requirements, and why the obvious version of the idea does not work
Working draft, not for circulation. Citations marked are from background knowledge and have not been verified against the literature. Classification is by a single language model with no human-validated subset, so no inter-rater agreement statistic is available. Both are blocking issues for submission.
For four thousand years people have tried to write down what happened to them when their consciousness changed — in vision, contemplation, fever, bereavement, intoxication, terror. Those reports survive in hundreds of thousands of pages, in dozens of languages, scattered across traditions that mostly could not read one another. They have never been assembled into anything a person could look at whole. This paper asks what it would take to build such a map, and reports a first attempt.
We work over approximately 3.9 million machine-translated pages of primary sources. A blind random sample establishes the size of the field: 5.4% of corpus pages describe experience from the inside, implying 156,000–279,000 such pages in this library alone. We then build two independent sorting instruments — one derived from modern psychometric scales, one extracted from the Visuddhimagga in its own vocabulary — and run both over identical material.
The attempt yields four requirements that any such map must satisfy, each learned by violating it first: retrieval must be stratified by language or the map becomes a portrait of the largest language; genre categories must be historically appropriate or they manufacture their own findings; the instrument must be plural, because a single taxonomy can only rediscover itself; and the map must be honest about measuring descriptions rather than experiences. On that last point we report a result that constrains the whole programme: nearest-neighbour analysis shows the embedding space is organised more strongly by source text (12.4× over chance) and language (5.1×) than by phenomenological content (3.0×). We also report one substantive finding that survives those constraints — the Visuddhimagga's concentration ladder does not travel outside its tradition while its sequence of destabilisation does (χ²(1) = 14.61, p < .001, OR = 3.1) — and treat it as a demonstration that the map, built carefully, can answer questions the humanities have only been able to argue about.
The historical record of inner experience is the largest body of evidence about consciousness that exists, and it is almost entirely unused. Consciousness science works with laboratory reports from living subjects, mostly Western, mostly recent, mostly answering a questionnaire someone else wrote. The historical record is larger by orders of magnitude, spans every culture that kept writing, and covers states no ethics board would permit inducing. What it lacks is not evidence but access: the material is scattered, mostly untranslated, and unsearchable by what it describes.
Machine translation and semantic retrieval remove that specific obstacle for the first time. It is now possible to ask a library, in one query, for every passage in any language that reports the sense of a presence in an empty room — and get back the Syriac, the Tibetan, the Icelandic, and the case note. The question this paper takes up is what one should build with that capacity, and what it takes to build it without producing something that merely looks like knowledge.
A map of conscious experiences across history would do at least four things no existing resource does. It would let the perennialism–constructivism dispute — whether mystical experience has a common core or is constituted by tradition, argued since Stace and Katz — be posed as an empirical question over thousands of sources rather than a canon of exemplary figures. It would recover categories of experience that modern instruments have no items for, and that consequently go unstudied. It would let a person in a state they find frightening discover that it has been described before, by name, in five traditions. And it would give the historical testimony of ordinary people a place in a science that currently has no way to cite them.
The naive version — embed everything, project it, look at the clusters — produces a picture that is confidently wrong, for reasons we document below. Before reporting our attempt we state the criteria we think any serious version must meet. Each was learned the hard way.
A blind random sample of 788 pages, classified by the same pipeline used everywhere else, gives the first number the programme needs: 5.4% of corpus pages (95% CI 4.0–7.2, Wilson) describe an experience from the inside. Extrapolated across the corpus that is 156,000–279,000 pages of experiential material in one library. Our map plots 1,952 of them — roughly a 1% core sample.
The same sample shows what the material mostly is: 48.5% of random pages are doctrinal, 26.5% unrelated, 11.0% instructional, and only 1.3% first-person testimony. Testimony is rare enough that any map built on it must be built by search, not by browsing — which makes the quality of the search instrument the central methodological problem.
Both instruments express each category as several first-person report sentences rather than a topic label — "I felt myself dissolve and become one with everything around me" rather than "ego dissolution" — because retrieval matches passages, and the aim is experiential register rather than topical vocabulary. Probes are embedded and matched by cosine similarity against page embeddings.
Instrument A takes 36 dimensions: twenty anchored to the MEQ30, 5D-ASC and Hood M-scale so results stay comparable to the psychometric literature, plus sixteen the modern scales have no items for but the record documents heavily — felt presence, sleep paralysis, near-death, apparitions of the dead, fever delirium, mystical eros, pain and childbirth, unsourced music, animal transformation, mesmeric trance, sensory deprivation, fasting, inspired dictation, ecstatic dance, autoscopy, uncanny foreknowledge. All sixteen retrieved substantial material, which is itself an argument about what the modern instruments miss.
Instrument B is not ours. The Visuddhimagga, Buddhaghosa's fifth-century Theravāda manual, defines nine attainments of concentration and sixteen knowledges of insight, each with stated criteria for recognising it — an ordered, criterion-based state model written fifteen centuries before the MEQ. We located the pages of our own copy where each stage is defined and extracted the recognition markers and first-person report sentences in the manual's own vocabulary, forbidding substitution of modern psychological terms. This gave 93 probes across 26 stages. For ādīnava-ñāṇa, the knowledge of danger:
“Everywhere I look — at my own body, my thoughts, and the world — I see only a burning charcoal pit, or a murderer with a raised weapon.”
— a sentence assembled from the manual's own similes, by a procedure that let the tradition speak.
Every quotation was checked character-for-character against its source page and discarded if it did not match; this rejected 106 silently altered quotations, roughly 3%. Passages were deduplicated at the level of the bibliographic work, so a scripture held in many editions and languages contributes once. Quotations, not pages, were embedded for projection. Classification recorded register, whether the passage is experiential, the antecedent that brought the state on, what followed for the person, what agent the text credits, and whether the text records a dispute about the experience's source.
Our first pass used global similarity search and produced a map that was 22.3% English against English's 6.5% share of the corpus, and 2.8% Tibetan against Tibetan's 14.5%. Ethiopic, Persian, Japanese and Armenian did not appear at all. Giving every language an identical probe budget corrects this. The cost is that the resulting sample is neither proportional to the corpus nor random, and language frequencies within it must never be read as corpus frequencies — a stratified map is a deliberate instrument, and has to be labelled as one.
Instrument A judged 36.3% of what it retrieved to be experiential, against the 5.4% baseline — an enrichment of 6.7×. Without the baseline this number does not exist, and there is no way to answer the obvious sceptical question of whether the probes are selecting anything at all. Instrument B, instructed to refuse weak matches, claims only 11.0% of what it retrieves: an indigenous stage model turns out to be far stricter than a psychometric checklist, because it asks whether an experience occupies a specific position in an ordered sequence rather than whether it had a quality.
Across 5,728 classified passages, categories differ sharply in the register through which they reach us. Contemplative-emptiness material arrives 57% as instruction and 6% as testimony; body-dissolution material arrives 7% as instruction and 63% as testimony. Contemplative traditions transmit predominantly method; visionary and medical traditions transmit predominantly report. A map that flattens this would show the contemplative traditions as strangely absent from the phenomenology, when in fact they are present as instructions for producing it. It also has a consequence for the wider field: a questionnaire can only ever collect testimony, so the prescriptive half of the historical record has no modern counterpart against which to be compared.
An early pass forced every passage into a testimony/fiction binary and reported 31% testimony. Adding a vision-narrative register — for visions related as real within hagiographic, scriptural or devotional narrative, where the modern true/invented distinction does not apply — reassigned most of that material: vision-narrative became the largest single register at 924 of 1,952 passages, and testimony fell to 6.5%. The first number was an artefact of imposing a modern genre distinction on premodern texts. This is the clearest case in the study of a category manufacturing its own finding, and it is the reason we regard category pluralism as a requirement rather than a refinement.
Running the Visuddhimagga's categories over the same corpus produces a result neither instrument yields alone. Its model claimed 295 passages, 82 from inside the Buddhist tradition and 213 from outside it — and its two ladders behave differently across that boundary.
Christian mystical sources supply 104 of the outside matches, most often to bhaya-ñāṇa, appearance as terror; Sufi sources match most often to muñcitukamyatā, desire for deliverance. Ephrem the Syrian and a 1374 Armenian manuscript match to terror; the Jain Uttarādhyayana Sūtra to ādīnava:
“In this hollow human existence, which is a home for sickness and disease, and is gripped by old age and death, I cannot find even a moment's pleasure.”
What this does and does not show. The concentration ladder describes attainments produced by a technique taught in a specific institutional setting; it does not travel, and there is no reason it should. The destabilising phase describes something that happens to people — practitioners and non-practitioners, contemplatives and the bereaved — and it does. This is far weaker than perennialism: not that mystical experience has a common core, only that one particular phase of destabilisation is described in convergent terms by traditions with no contact. The constructivist can absorb it without difficulty, since terror and the wish to escape are ordinary capacities with ordinary vocabularies. What the result demonstrates is not an answer to the old dispute but that the dispute is now addressable: two independently constructed taxonomies, run over identical material, disagree in a measurable and interpretable way.
The most important result for the programme is a negative one. For every plotted passage we took its ten nearest neighbours in quotation-embedding space and asked what they share.
A passage's neighbours are 12.4 times more likely than chance to come from the same book and 5.1 times more likely to share a language, while sharing the actual phenomenological content lifts only 3.0×. The corpus is machine-translated into English and embedded by an English-centric model; proximity is therefore substantially proximity of translationese. There is also a chain of roughly a dozen lossy transformations between an experience and a point on the map — the experience, the memory of it, the decision to write, the conventions available, the copying, the survival, the digitisation, the OCR, the machine translation, the embedding, the probe that retrieved it, the model that judged it.
We take three conclusions. First, honest naming: this is a map of descriptions of experience, and calling it anything else is a claim the data does not support. Second, claim discipline: we report the ladder asymmetry because it compares rates between two populations within one instrument, which is robust to a uniform translation effect, and we decline to report cluster structure as evidence about experience. Third, a research target: the translator effect is measurable, and measuring it — via same-work-different-translator controls and probes written natively in each source language — is the single highest-value next step for the programme.
What we have is a proof that the field is large, that instruments can be built for it, that a tradition's own categories can be extracted and run as one of them, and that the results are interpretable. What remains, in the order we would do it:
Every passage below was retrieved by one of the probe sets, judged to describe an experience from the inside, and checked character-for-character against the page it was transcribed from. Each links to the scan of that page, so nothing here has to be taken on trust. These 78 are a sample; the full release of 1,952 is at the foot of the page.
For in the presence of us all, and of the said Lord Tornus, he began to whistle three or four times in succession with a very high and clear sound, and gradually allowed a very distinct and intelligible voice to be heard, although a little hoarse, and close enough to us, as if he were saying it three or four paces away.
I do not even know what it is, and I do not understand every word; but fear takes hold of me, and when I listen to his voice, it is as if it is not he speaking, but someone else, an unkind one whom nothing can soften, whom no amount of prayer can appease, and it becomes very, very heavy on my heart, it burns...
After 14 days, however, when all my flesh and strength had failed, and I was praying on my knees in my chamber in the evening, a heavenly light and comfort surrounded me, so that I felt forgiveness of my sins, peace and joy in my soul, and even a pleasant warmth in my body, and with it, strength and power.
I, in placing my hand on my chest, entered that frenzy that one suffers when one sometimes sleeps with a heavy body, and it seems that something very, very heavy sits on your heart, which does not let you speak or move.
The melancholy and magnifying imagination subsequently represents to us as if someone were lying upon us and pressing so hard that we cannot move despite all effort (compare my § 17).
I had an unusual dream. It seemed to me that I was lying in my bedroom, on my bed—and I was not sleeping, and I could not even close my eyes.
it lays runes under our tongue, we know our homeland; God speaks to us in our mother tongue in the tones of the Folk Song bird; the old memories lift themselves, the faded colors are refreshed, legends and songs offer a drink of blessing that lifts the mind and thought, so that the evening becomes a Christmas celebration.
I still seem to see how Ema's bedchamber was gloomily illuminated by the moon; I still seem to see the black shadow that a large fir tree, standing outside the window, cast into the middle of the room; I still see Ema lying in blood, I still hear her voice: Unfortunate man! You are killing your wife and your child.
To that dwelling, which one enters, but comes not forth again, To that road, whose course returns not again, To that dwelling to whose inhabitants light is denied, Where earth is their food, clay their repast; Covered are they, like birds, with feathers, 35 And the light they behold not, in darkness they dwell.
soon from the somewhat sad modulation, gradually from relaxed to dense, intense, and full of joy and triumph chromatics, they swept me away with such impetus that I was almost overwhelmed by a certain frenzied madness;
With truth, I can testify that I, awakening from my sleep about midnight, twice heard that a lute and pandora, hanging on the wall in our room, began to play by themselves, just as if human hands were busy with them.
But in such music were all the stringed instruments that could ever be thought of, and they were tuned together in such harmony that I forgot myself and sat so motionless that my neighbors wondered at me.
Now I climb into the sky, then I descend into hell; Now I am like a prince, immediately after nothing at all; Now I stand like a rock, then I lie fallen down; Now Yes, then again No; now wild, then again still: My heart is ebb and tide; I do not know what I want.
But a strange anxiety gradually took hold of my thoughts: it began to seem to me that this old woman was not just following me, but that she was directing me, that she was pushing me now to the right, now to the left, and that I was involuntarily obeying her.
This night, while I was awake in bed, I saw my mother, who thought I was sleeping, rising from the bed. Having taken off her shirt, she anointed her body with a certain ointment, which she took from a small vessel extracted from beneath the sides of the bed.
The spirits of our earth declared that they did not dare to approach them, because when they do so they are not only seized with anxiety, but also, from phantasy, they seem to themselves to be as it were bound hand and foot with serpents, from which they cannot be loosed until they retire.
I saw, in the immaculate lotus, the immaculate beautiful woman, she made the ocean bright with the glow of her presence; lightning gleaming, a sweet smile on her lips, she plays carelessly and holds the elephant, seeing the maiden, I am like one enchanted, I did not understand her essence;
And the appearance of the wheels and their work was like the vision of the Sea original: "Maris," likely referring to the gemstone beryl or chrysolite : and the four had one likeness: and their appearance and work were as if a wheel were in the midst of a wheel.
When the secret of all secrets was opened to me, I still could not believe, for the appearance of our so-small ELCTRI an alchemical term likely referring to a specific substance or prime matter took my reason captive, so that I myself laid hands on the work to experience the certainty.
I felt it only as a thin, subtle, pure, penetrating, working, and circulating (or ascending and descending) power in and through all the sensory powers and faculties of my spirit, and through all the working properties and forms of my soul.
And thus, just as in the person qnuma individual substance/hypostasis of God, his power was appearing to me, that it fills all the souls, in a beautiful and luminous joy, and all the intellect as if in light.
The Jade Maiden blows the flute and the Golden Boy mythical attendants in the Daoist heavens dances with their sleeves, sending me in a drunken stupor into the Tai Xuan Great Mystery .
Thou wilt never more endure without the flame, when thou hast known the rapture of burning; If the water of life should come to thee, it would not stir thee from the flame.
I found myself as if without the burden of an earthly body, being very lively and airy in a silent place.
Finding myself in that place, deprived of every help, and in such mortal anguish, I called for death; and although naturally it is not in any way pleasant, this time I estimated it most pleasant, which I could well desire, but it, not wanting me, was of no use to me.
The trembling of these is so great and horrible even to remember, solely through the apprehension of the judgment of God, that all the men of the world would rather die a thousand times than feel the slightest apprehension of it.
the incessant frost — the foul air of my own excrement — the boundless grief — my strength gave way, my body wasted, a thousand times I begged God with tears for death, but the measure of my punishment must not yet be filled
He penetrated me so profoundly, touched me so vitally, and took me so much out of my own possession—while he seemed himself so much in mine—that in a delicious enthusiasm, I imagined such a transfusion of heart and spirit that, coalescing and making one body and soul with him, I was him, and he was me.
When now all my spirits of life and sensation rushed impetuously to the cock-pit a vulgar term for the female genitalia , where the prize of pleasure was hotly in dispute, and clustered to a point there, I soon received the dear relief of nature from these over-violent strains and provocations.
open to me the door of your grace and the flow of your side, that I may dip therein the drink of a pure and clear blood and those same things of your mercy, whereby I may be prepared, strengthened, and fitted for a mild and flowing gratitude and for a constant receiving of compassion for his
Hence it is that it is suddenly filled with such sadness, torpor, acedia , and hardness, that we are rendered sterile in spiritual exercise, so that this dryness cannot be softened by the desire for the heavenly kingdom, nor by the punishment of hell, nor by the suffrage of prayer, nor by the consolation of conversation.
As a dark cloud covers the radiant sunlight, So my Beloved now hides his friendly face; As long as that shone in me, my heart beat with joy, Then I was strong, and sang, and leaped along the path of virtue; But now that this Divine shine hides itself, I find myself to be a worm, in dust and ashes.
and the stirrings of the mind into various parts, scattered and blindfolded from above here, knowing nothing, and the weight of good appeared foolish against falsehood, and the running of the steps by retreats, entirely blocked, and the worst from the soul in the sighing, and the book of names...
This is the most heavy, agonizing fear of something I cannot define myself, of something incomprehensible and nonexistent in the order of things, but which will inevitably—perhaps this very minute—be realized, as if mocking all the arguments of reason.
Now, such are these most wretched and pitiable hesitations, piled one upon another, which wound the existence of the heart of my senses from within with incurable pains and unimaginable arrows, in an un-utterable, constant...
My eyes are opening more and more, you did not come to release me from jail, you have come to do your own work, you have come to take my share, but Mez-da, listen—I have no share, if I do, you will not get even a penny of it.
I saw that my soul was brought to a small point, and drawn together and shrunk to nothing: and at the same time I beheld myself, as if I were surrounded with everything that the world loves and possesses, and that there was as a hand, which kept all this far from me, and cast it into the great Sea of annihilation.
and this wise one became light, and at the time that my hands came like His praise, and I turned back again like when I am seen, and it was given to me like His praise, like the speaker, and like His praise, and from His praise and I praise, and I am seen, all.
As is he who sees while dreaming, And after the dream the felt impression Remains, and the rest does not return to the mind; Such am I: for my vision almost entirely fades, And yet within my heart still trickles The sweetness that was born of it.
For You, who are the true highest sweetness, cast them out and went in Yourself for them, and are sweeter than honey and wealth, but not to the flesh and to the blood, and clearer than any light, and more inward than any secrecy, and higher than any honor, but not to those who are high in themselves.
Upon doing this, snatched away into the most secret hiding places of the world, I found the medium that I was crossing filled with countless globes, never seen by any human eye, and at last, through an immense space of ethereal air traversed, he carried me into a new Lunar globe.
Although my face has been in the face of the brightest shadows, which frightened me, they showed me, give the worthy, and the face I see of the fatherland, on the road, giving my body to the earth, which is the mother of the immortal and incorruptible.
I said; Lord, what you ask of me is altogether impossible; it cannot happen: I was told: Look at those trees in the cemetery; they look like dry wood, without leaves or fruits, nor any appearance; however, when the season comes, they will bear leaves, flowers, and fruits in abundance, without anyone touching them.
Thus it happened in the year 1673, while being in prayer at noon, that the Virgin appeared to me in the spirit from face to face, and promised me faithfulness from mouth to mouth, which my outer creature also saw and heard, and the devil could never draw into doubt, however vehemently he stormed.
Now, however, as I was enveloped in an impenetrable, cold darkness and raindrops swirled frantically before my eyes, and the wind groaned plaintively above my head, when I saw not a single living soul around me and heard not a single human sound, a vague and inexplicable fear filled my soul.
I might add that when I am taking medicine or feeling somewhat feverish, the repetition of two verses of Lucan A Roman poet rarely fails, as I have tested, to produce in me a chill—nearly identical to, though fainter than, the one that begins a bout of ague Fever or malaria .
Then it seemed to me that the table had turned into firewood; they were not burning me on the sofa, but they were burning me on the pan, and it was terribly painful, and all around the knyazya were dancing and singing songs—they chose the most vile ones.
in the middle of Lent, a fever infused into my marrow invaded my parched body, and without any rest—which is also incredible to say—the limbs of the unhappy man were so consumed that I scarcely clung to my bones.
And again I saw in a vision,¹⁴ and I looked¹⁵ at the heaven,¹⁷ and behold I saw¹⁸ many stars¹⁹ descend²⁰ and be cast down²² from heaven near to²³ that first star²⁴; and they were²⁸ among²⁵ those young²⁶ bulls²⁷ and pastured with them [among them].²⁹
I feel that if everyone would just let me go, I could walk away—into the very deep forest where no path can be found. There, at the very tip of the slender branches where the mouya a type of bird sits and sways, I could bloom as a Champa flower.
When I first came here, the great valley you see was a forest glen, and a race of men came into it, and it was destroyed, and a second forest grew in it, and this is the third forest.
We have dreamed dreams, and considering them, our mind has labored with sickness; and because the dreams are similar to each other, our souls have languished with fear; terrible are the dreams we have seen; we are tortured by anxiety, and our souls are withering because of these nocturnal dreams.
After this presentation and conviction had occurred, it was presented and shown to my spirit that the Holy of Holies was erected in the heavens of my mind; that the holy Trinity, with Its saints and angels, and with Jesus in the glory of His love, ought to dwell therein.
And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it; and out of the midst thereof came the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Standing for forty nights and days, equal to the trees, Upright from the earth in their hearts, And having God alone in their minds; another has bound His lips, and placed reins upon his tongue, bearing them.
Waters surrounded me even to the soul, the abyss has encompassed me, the sea has covered my head, I went down to the extreme foundations of the mountains, the bars of the earth had closed me in forever.
So the bride in the Song of Songs says: then I heard without sound, saw without light, smelled without movement, and tasted that which was not.
The winds were paralyzed, the fountains were mute, the birds had forgotten their song, the fish believed themselves encased in glass, and all the animals had no movement other than what was necessary for them to tremble.
For as I wondered at that which I understood, I fell from that light, and having returned to my misery, I saw that Aristotle had perceived something of this, original: "βέλτιον διὰ κείμενόν ἢ οὐ ἐτύγχανεν εἰδώς"
As one who was wearied with the heat, bathing himself and refreshed, in the enveloping light of the rayed moon, thus I have in a moment gained the partless excellent bliss, the imperishable word, the Self.
I had scarcely poured these things forth with the heat of an inflamed mind, when behold Cosmiel, having wrapped me in the rowings of his wings which emerged from his side, and with the extension of the two that seemed to emerge from his shoulders, carried [me] above all the summits of the terrestrial
Then I began to see from its inside that servant, he who is like the likeness of the servant; and he spread it in the ear of the heart, and he was spread for the body, a fiery Afisos an angelic/divine power or title , while he heard the thing that he commanded her to conduct.
How I pitied, and still pity, a youth who must lock within himself the sweet impulses, the most beautiful inheritance that nature gave us, and hide the fire that should warm and animate him and others in his bosom, so that his innermost self is consumed by monstrous pains.
I do not doubt that someone who faithfully practices this way of withdrawing their thoughts could, through the grace of God, reach such a state that even while feeling the pain, they do not reflect or think back upon themselves, considering how it is they who suffer.
But now my heart is quite overcome with grief, and the arrows of the Lord have pierced all my veins and have exhausted my brain, so that I have no limb in all my body that is not totally consumed with pain and torment; and how in the end can I be resigned?
For when I turn myself, whether stretched out long, or curled into a ball, or lying on my back, or resting supine, my body, indeed, is failing little by little, like a fodder for worms, horrid and reeking of a stench which I myself can scarcely endure.
And as we were in an upper chamber (my companions seemed to me to be handsome, well-adorned youths, and the other had only a woolen waistcoat on), the master of the house came to us, who was also young, and (as it seemed to me) he had a reasonably young wife, and knew that she was with us.
But I look, something strange presents itself: she is sitting there, she fixed her face on me, her eyes were bulging, and not a word in response, and it is strange, she looks so strangely, as if she is swaying.
It seems to me now that I am powerful, as I have come through tribulation, and I have many other things that happened in our days there, which I cannot recount.
His love, have begun to burn so in my heart that, taking leave of all creatures, I have only desired His most pure embraces, and have let out a voice that was unusual for many to hear, as if bringing forth burning coals from a fiery and burning oven.
In its depths I saw that it is internalized, Bound with love in one volume, That which through the universe is scattered; Substance, and accident, and their modes, All fused together in such a way, That what I say is a simple light.
As this is always lighter and more uncertain in the morning hours, it spreads through the limbs in such a suspended and doubtful way that, which does not happen in other sleep, you feel yourself sleeping while almost awake.
It could not get even one look of grace but was in mere anguish and also in great fear and terror.
My mind melted into an infinitesimal fraction of it, like a hailstone merging into the ocean, and it is now satisfied by that Essence of Bliss.
His own essence also vanished among the [other] essences, and everything was annihilated, dissipated, and became like scattered dust. Nothing remained except the Necessary, the Truth, the Existent, the Fixed of Existence.
When he had returned to the sensible world, that is, after he had come to the place where (we said that) he had come, he felt a loathing and aversion for the troubles of life. The highest desire for the other life arose in him.
After he had returned again to the sensory world, he felt disgusted by the hardships of life, and his longing strove for the lasting life.
The Will must be well occupied in loving, but it does not understand how it loves: if the Understanding understands, it does not understand how it understands, at least it cannot comprehend anything of what it understands.
Every plotted passage carries a resolvable link to the scanned page it was transcribed from, so any individual claim can be checked against the facsimile. Both datasets are released in full below.