"In the Sufi system of lights, the black light is considered one of the holiest of all. It is only revealed to the most accomplished masters, those who have vanished themselves in the process known as 'fana', annihilation of the ego. For millennia, shamans of every indigenous culture have described the horror of this process, one which is incomprehensible to those who have not been through it. This mystic death is nothing less than being torn apart in the night by God. There is ecstasy in being torn apart by God, but also pain that must be consented to. The agony of dismemberment, the darkness of Gethsemane, has to be accepted. As one Persian mystic said, "Without the Friday of the crucifixion, there would be no Sunday of the Resurrection." Those are the terms. The mystic has to pass through the halls of death while in a body. Meister Eckhart said that "If you do not die before you die, you die when you die ... (and) by aligning itself with God's will, the soul takes on the taste of God: grief and joy, bitterness and sweetness, darkness and light, all become divine." Bursevi, the Sufi mystic, wrote of this state: This death must come about by resolution and he in whom this state of death appears will see the complete annihilation of everything but God, Nothing is left but the beauty of God."

from _Dialogues with a Modern Mystic_ by Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek