It was, she reported, like a linked chain of endless being contained in perfumed light. She knew she stood on the threshold of cosmic consciousness. But before she could cross that threshold, she was restrained by a vision of herself as a single candle dwarfed by the sun. In this terrifying moment, she was to foresee the awesome path of humility and self-surrender, of denial and repentance, of pain and solitude, that she would have to traverse on her way to crossing the threshold. "I was to come to know the poisons, and if I endured, then I would also know how to control and direct them," she concluded 1D In all cases, the objective of enhanced powers of intellectual vision of clairvoyance was, for each Reverend Mother, to uncover the "human.