If thou attend wholly to thyself and to God, what thou seest abroad will affect thee but little. Where are thou when thou art absent from thyself? And when thou hast run over all things, what hath it profited thee if thou hast neglected thyself? If thou wouldst have true peace and perfect union, thou must cast all things else aside, and keep thine eyes upon thyself alone. Thou wilt make great progress if thou keep thyself free from every temporal anxiety. Thou wilt fall back exceedingly, if thou make account of anything temporal. Let there be nothing great, nothing high, nothing pleasant, nothing acceptable to thee but only God Him self, or what comes from God. Think it all vanity, whatever consolation thou mayst meet with from any creature. The soul that loveth God despiseth all things that are less than God. God only, the eternal and infinite, who filled all things, is the solace of the soul and the true joy of the heart. (Imitation of Christ, 2, 5, 2-3)
A soul needs self-knowledge to comply with the commandments to love thy neighbor as thy self. What man can indicate and explain the principles of becoming love by wisdom? No one. You touch on a deep mystery on the Gift of Knowledge by the Sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit. The world is vain and changing. And the self that perceives it or trapped by it more so. Because all in the world is vain. Most of all we should not take ourselves seriously in the least, and the same applies to everything else less than God. Our Lady is the mirror in which we strive to see Him. O how great are the theological virtues that have their object on God, and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit that sustain us in God.
