Alchemia

“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God, for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise up above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you nothing is impossible; deem that you are too immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science; find yourself home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality: heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land and at sea, in heaven; thing that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, they you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thoughts all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God. But id you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say: “I know nothing, I can do nothing, I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I do not know what I was, nor what I shall be”, then what have you to do with God? For it is the height of Evil not to know God. But to be capable of knowing God, and to wish and hope to know It, is the road which leads straight to the Good……..” 

Bruno Giordano  1548 - 1600