Finding myself outside of myself, it seemed to me it was nighttime and I could see the whole universe, the whole order of nature, the starry heaven, the silence of the night.... In sum, it seemed to me that everything had a meaning. While seeing this, I seemed to see Our Lord who, beginning to speak about what I was seeing, said: “All nature invites one to rest; but what is true rest? It is the interior rest and the silence of all that is not God. Look at the stars, twinkling with tempered light, not dazzling like the sun; the sleep and the silence of all nature, of men and also of animals – they all look for a place, a den, in which to be in silence and rest from the tiredness of life. If this is necessary for the body, much more is it necessary for the soul to rest in her own center, which is God. But in order to be able to rest in God, interior silence is necessary, just as exterior silence is necessary to the body in order to peacefully fall asleep. But what is this interior silence? It is to silence one’s own passions by keeping them in their place; it is to impose silence on desires, on inclinations, on affections – in sum, on all that does not call upon God. Now, what is the means to reach this? The only means, and absolutely necessary, is for the soul to undo her own being and reduce herself to nothing, just as she was before being created; and once she has reduced her being to nothing, she must take it again in God.
“My daughter, all things have their origin from nothing. If this very machine of the universe which you are admiring with its great order had been full of other things before I created it, I could not have put My creative hand to make it with such great mastery and to render it so splendid and adorned. At the most, I could have undone everything that might have been there, to then redo it according to My liking. But we always come to this: all of My works have their origin from nothing, and when there is a mixing with other things, it is not decorous for My majesty to descend and operate in the soul. But when the soul reduces herself to nothing and rises to Me, and takes her being within Mine, then I operate as the God that I am, and the soul finds true rest. And here is how all virtues, from humility to the annihilation of oneself, begin.”