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| Lilian Silburn |
A Letter from a Later Phase
The following passage comes from a private letter written by Lilian Silburn to a friend in 1954, several years after the powerful experiences she described in her earlier testimony.
It belongs to a noticeably later phase of her inner development.
In her first account (https://www.vira-chandra.com/2026/03/lilian-silburns-turning-point-rare.html) , the emphasis fell largely on the vivid phenomenology of mystical awakening: waves of bliss, subtle vibrations, states of absorption, and dramatic shifts of consciousness. The tone was intense and exploratory, reflecting the shock and fascination that often accompany the opening of mystical life.
In this later letter, the voice becomes more sober and reflective. Instead of focusing on experiences themselves, Silburn begins to speak about the structure of the path: emptiness and fullness, phases of inner dryness and renewal, the necessity of patience, and the subtle discipline of following the guidance of a teacher without forcing the process.
Several passages are particularly striking. She recognizes the central role of emptiness in mystical life across traditions — from Buddhist śūnyatā to Sufi fanā’ and the “dark night” described by St. John of the Cross. She also emphasizes that mystical states come and go, warning against attachment to either bliss or emptiness.
At the same time, the letter still contains attempts to interpret the inner process through patterns and cycles — an understandable effort of the mind to map a territory that ultimately resists systematic description.
For this reason the text is especially interesting. It captures a moment when the early fascination with mystical phenomena has begun to give way to a more sober understanding, yet before the need to interpret and organize the path has completely dissolved.
In the pages that follow, the letter is reproduced in full, after which a few reflections will be offered on some of its most illuminating — and occasionally debatable — insights.
Passages from a letter to a lady friend from 1954
(from "Lilian Silburn, a Mystical Life: Letters, Documents, Testimonials"):
[...] This emptiness is fundamental. It’s the framework on which all mystical states are woven; this is what, in my mind, characterizes mystic life, separating it from a pious and religious life: no emptiness for the pious man, but states of amorous and joyous exaltation, while this terrible emptiness marks the mystic.
Śūnya, ever increasing vacuity, is the essence of Buddhism and what makes it a mystique, the rest being rather morality... the same vacuity to which you refer in your letter concerning Saint John of the Cross. Patanjali in his Yoga Sūtra defines samādhi as “the absence of all mental fluctuation.” Yoga too is, therefore, built on this same emptiness. Muslims have fanā’, no baqā’ without fanā’, emptiness.
The arid desert of the spiritual Wedding.
Only the Upanishads talk about plenitude and I’ll try to show you that it’s the same thing (hoping that you will soon feel it). It’s as if something very positive was digging holes in you just to better fill them in afterwards […].
This void of all sensitive and mental operations is essential because you enter a very new domain, like a night, where nothing familiar can guide you. This is why a guide is necessary.
At the beginning it feels like emptiness, but in reality it is fullness, only the mind is not sufficiently refined to be conscious of this too subtle life. Saint John of the Cross talks about the Israelites who, used to rough food, remained insensitive to the delicious taste of celestial manna.
Little by little, this emptiness becomes softness, bliss, and takes on all forms of mystical life.
When this emptiness has become fullness, again a new phase of emptiness becomes necessary (dig deeper to better refill?). The plenitude digs ever deeper, one even falls into painful nights so much so that this emptiness is absolute nothingness: ordinary life loses all meaning and mystical life offers none.
Then, again, fullness returns, more intense than in the previous cycle: unless a wondrous love fills this void.
It seems to me there is a cycle of regular phases, but I do not know if it’s the same for everybody. Try to make sense of yours.
So, it’s all the same, calling and answering in mystical life: harmony, gentleness, love, emptiness, plenitude, etc. These phases follow on from one another automatically; the Guru probably has the power to shorten the phases.
But these are just passing states; one should not get attached to any one or the other, nor indulge in depression when the period of emptiness and annihilation comes around, because that is what permits the jump forward (one step back for two steps forward).
This darkness, that Saint John compares to a light that dazzles and blinds you, forms the essence of progression, but without a guide, as the study on the Carmelites showed, you could stay there all your life.
Personally, there is nothing to be done about these phases: just let them come and go.
As for the “influence,” as you call it, it is not necessary that you feel something. The deeper it is, the less we feel. During the first years, I was in a normal state as soon as I was in the presence of the Guru: the rest of the time I was as if drunk, immersed. So I was writing letters and pages of philosophy in his presence.
It’s better not to feel anything.
What’s important about acceptance of the influence (actually, there is no “influence”) is our meditative attitude, vigilant, forgetting oneself, without expecting anything in return: this intense fervor, without purpose, supple, is inaction in a sense.
Have I already given you this example?
You want to visit a virgin forest, wonderful and dangerous, and you fully trust your guide: so you will have to imitate your guide, watch his every gesture, hide yourself when he hides when there’s danger, become silent suddenly in order to watch a bird....
You will be totally absorbed in your guide, always available, even to halt abruptly or run.
You will develop an extraordinary instinct permitting you to divine his intentions, and little by little you will function as well as he in the jungle.
But he who only listens to himself, his desires, noisily, with panic and irritation, will see nothing of the forest and will displease the guide who won’t take him with him.
The Saint is he who always watches for the will of God in order to surrender to it fully.
This example shows very clearly what is the inactivity of the disciple, in the Taoist sense, inactivity that is compatible with a series of efforts and an often tremendous efficacy, but this is not ordinary effort.
One great secret is to find the right effort, that supple intensity.
Some have intensity without fluidity, others have fluidity without intensity.
As for emptiness, you will see that it has an infinite variety of forms […].
It is for you to discover and tell the Guru without fear about your doubts and surprises.
Try to concentrate without desiring emptiness too much either!
Relaxation rather than concentration.
Intentional desire (Vedic, kratu), that’s the danger.
Because what we want is absolutely not the mystical life which is sui generis, which comes of its own accord, so unexpected and unimaginable: the wished-for goal is so much beneath what you will get; so desire without object, and you will always find your way!
Key Insights from the Letter
Reading this letter four years after Silburn’s first testimony is striking. One can almost feel the shift in the atmosphere of her inner life. The earlier narrative was filled with vivid experiences: waves of bliss, subtle vibrations, sudden absorptions, powerful states that overwhelmed the senses and imagination. It was the voice of someone standing in the shock of a great opening.
But here something different has begun to appear.
The fascination with experience has cooled. In its place there is a new gravity, a sobriety that feels much deeper than the earlier fireworks. Instead of describing what happened to her, she begins to speak about the architecture of the path itself.
And the central discovery around which everything in the letter revolves is one word: emptiness.
Not a negative emptiness, not a psychological void, but something far more radical — the stripping away of everything familiar to the mind. Silburn sees this emptiness as the common heart of the great mystical traditions. Buddhism speaks of śūnyatā. The Sufis speak of fanā’. Saint John of the Cross speaks of the dark night. Even Patañjali’s definition of samādhi — the cessation of mental fluctuations — points toward the same silent terrain.
What fascinates her now is not bliss but the strange, austere beauty of this emptiness.
She recognizes that the mystic must pass through a kind of inner desert where nothing recognizable remains. Ordinary life loses meaning, yet mystical life offers no new certainties either. One walks in a night where the old landmarks have vanished and the new ones have not yet appeared.
There is something profoundly honest in the way she describes this stage. She does not romanticize it. She calls it “terrible emptiness.” And yet she sees that this very emptiness is the gateway through which the deeper life unfolds.
Even more beautiful is the paradox she begins to understand: that what first appears as emptiness gradually reveals itself as fullness. The mind experiences a void because it is too coarse to perceive the subtle life that begins to unfold there. What seemed like loss becomes the very space in which something infinitely more delicate can grow.
Perhaps the most luminous sentence in the entire letter is this one:
“The deeper it is, the less we feel.”
With that single line, the entire early fascination with mystical states quietly collapses.
The deeper movement of the path does not announce itself through stronger sensations or more dramatic experiences. On the contrary, it becomes quieter, subtler, almost invisible to the surface of the mind. Transformation begins to take place in a layer where experience itself is no longer the measure.
And yet Silburn does not fall into passivity. On the contrary, she articulates something extremely subtle about the nature of effort on the path. True effort, she says, is neither rigid concentration nor vague relaxation. It is something she calls “supple intensity.”
What a beautiful phrase.
Too much intensity without fluidity creates tension. Too much fluidity without intensity produces laziness. The real effort of the disciple lies in discovering that delicate middle movement — alert, responsive, and completely open.
Her metaphor of the forest guide illustrates this perfectly. The disciple moves through a mysterious and dangerous landscape by watching the guide with absolute attention. Every gesture matters. Every pause has meaning. Slowly an instinct develops, and the disciple begins to move with the same intelligence as the guide.
There is something deeply alive in this image. It shows that mystical life is neither passive surrender nor heroic struggle. It is a subtle apprenticeship in awareness.
Finally, one of the most astonishing insights appears almost casually near the end of the letter:
“The wished-for goal is so much beneath what you will get.”
This sentence carries enormous depth. It means that the seeker’s imagination of enlightenment is always too small. The mind dreams of bliss, visions, and extraordinary states, yet what the path ultimately reveals cannot be anticipated at all.
The goal the seeker desires is already beneath what reality will eventually disclose.
Reading this letter, one senses that something important has matured in Silburn. The earlier intoxication has not vanished completely, but it has been tempered by a deeper understanding of the path’s austere beauty.
And in that sobriety her voice becomes, if anything, even more luminous.
A Few Questions About the Cycles
Despite the depth and maturity that clearly appear in this letter, a few points invite further reflection.
The most notable one concerns Silburn’s suggestion that mystical life unfolds through regular cycles: emptiness followed by fullness, then deeper emptiness followed by deeper fullness, and so on. She even hints that these phases may form a kind of natural rhythm of spiritual development.
It is easy to understand why she arrived at this interpretation. Anyone who has passed through strong inner transformations often observes alternating periods of illumination and dryness. Many mystical traditions contain similar descriptions. Christian contemplatives speak of consolations and desolations; Sufi writers describe alternations between expansion and contraction.
Yet it would be risky to treat such cycles as a universal law of mystical life.
Silburn herself wisely adds a small qualification — “I do not know if it’s the same for everybody.” That brief remark is important. It reminds us that what she describes may reflect her own trajectory, not a general structure that applies to all seekers.
In fact, many spiritual biographies reveal very different patterns. Some individuals experience dramatic cycles of bliss and emptiness, while others pass through long periods of dryness without any alternating waves of mystical sweetness. Still others undergo early moments of illumination followed by decades of quiet, almost uneventful inner transformation.
The landscape of the path appears far more varied than any single model can capture.
For this reason, Silburn’s description of alternating phases is best read not as a universal map but as a phenomenological observation — an attempt to make sense of the particular movements unfolding in her own life at that time.
And perhaps this is inevitable. Whenever the mind encounters the mysterious transformations of the inner life, it naturally tries to organize them into patterns and stages. Such maps can be helpful, but they also carry a danger: the seeker may begin to expect the path to unfold according to the same sequence.
The mystical process, however, rarely follows predetermined scripts.
In this sense the most valuable insight in Silburn’s letter may actually lie elsewhere — in her reminder that all these states, whether emptiness or fullness, ultimately pass. What remains essential is not the pattern of experiences but the growing capacity to let them come and go without attachment.
And in that quiet detachment the deeper sobriety of the path gradually reveals itself.
Conclusion: When Experience Gives Way to Sobriety
Reading this 1954 letter, one has the impression of witnessing a mind that has begun to settle after the initial shock of mystical opening. The dramatic intensity that colored Silburn’s earlier testimony is still present in the background, but it is no longer the center of gravity. What now occupies her attention is something quieter and deeper: the strange terrain of emptiness, the subtle balance between effort and surrender, the necessity of patience as the path unfolds.
In this sense the letter offers something extremely valuable. It shows how the early fascination with mystical phenomena gradually gives way to a more sober understanding of the inner process. Experiences remain part of the landscape, but they are no longer treated as decisive markers of realization. They appear and disappear, while the deeper work continues beneath them.
At the same time, the text also reminds us that every seeker inevitably interprets the path through the lens of personal experience. Silburn attempts to describe cycles of emptiness and fullness, a pattern that may indeed reflect her own journey. Yet mystical lives often unfold in many different ways, and no single description can claim universal validity.
In fact, reading this letter had an unexpected effect for me personally.
For some time I carried a quiet conviction — almost an unspoken narrative — that the most authentic spiritual path must necessarily unfold through intense suffering, through stripping away, humiliation, loss, and the burning away of every support. Life itself had taken that form for me, and it was easy to assume that this was the inevitable shape of genuine transformation.
Silburn’s story disrupts that assumption in a fascinating way.
Here we see a completely different trajectory. A life of extraordinary intellectual discipline, decades of study, the rare courage to dedicate oneself entirely to the absolute — and yet the decisive turning point comes not through catastrophe but through a profound inner opening followed by the steady guidance of a living master.
The contrast is illuminating. It reminds us that the divine economy is far more varied than our personal narratives allow. Some are cut open by life itself; others are guided step by step by a teacher; still others move through long years of quiet interior maturation. The outer forms differ widely, while the inner movement remains mysterious.
Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful lessons hidden in Silburn’s story: the path cannot be reduced to a single pattern.
And yet one feature appears again and again across traditions.
Whether through the shock of experience or the slow work of time, the fascination with mystical states eventually begins to fade. Bliss, emptiness, visions, dryness — all these pass through the seeker like changing weather. Gradually something quieter begins to take root beneath them.
Not intoxication.
Not excitement.
But sobriety.
Seen in this light, Silburn’s letter becomes more than a personal testimony. It is a rare glimpse of the moment when the storm of experience begins to give way to a more stable inner clarity — the point where mystical life slowly shifts from extraordinary states toward a more ordinary, deeper transformation of being.
And that quiet shift, far more than the fireworks that often precede it, may be the true beginning of the path.
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