"Threefold is the way to God:
The first is the way of purification, in which mind is inclined to learn true wisdom.

The second is the way of illumination, in which the mind by contemplation is kindled to the buring of love.

The third is the way of union, in which mind by understanding, reason and spirit, is led up by God alone."

- Dionysius the Areopagite

First, when the mind has achieved self conquest, the "starry haeven" of multiplicity is revealed to it.

Next, it achieves the "crystalline heaven" of lucid contemplation, where the soul is conformed to the rhythm of the divine
life, and by it's loving intuition apprehends God under veils.

Last, in ecstasy it may be lifted to that ineffeble state which is called "hidden heaven" where it enjoys a "vision of imageless reality" and enters into "possesion of all that is God".

...thus Jacopone at first uses the strongest unitive language to describe the rapturous and emotional intercourse with Divine Love which characterized his middle period, but when he at last achieves the vision of the Absolute, he confeses that he was in error in supposing that it was indeed the Truth whom he thus saw and worshiped under veils...

...thus Jacopone da Todi - exact and orthodox Catholic though he was - when he reached the "hidden" heaven" discovered and boldly declared the approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion with, God; the great extent to which subjective elements has entered into his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of Truth, when "ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light" at last shone in his heart, he says:

"I thought I knew Thee in Thy completness, I was filled with delight and immeasurable love. But now I see I was mistaken - Thou art not as I thought and firmly held."