Since the light of spiritual knowledge is the intellect's life, and since this light is engendered by love for God, it is rightly said that nothing is greater than divine love.When in the intensity of its love for God the intellect goes out of itself, then it has no sense of itself or of any created thing. For when it is illumined by the infinite light of God, it becomes insensible to everything made by Him, just as the eye becomes insensible to the stars when the sun rises. (Maximos the Confessor)

Many of us have experienced when our "intellect goes out of itself."

When it happens we are usually engaged in a task of such intensity or importance that everything else -- even our sense of time and space -- is compressed.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described this as the experience of flow. He writes, "By creating a temporary world where one can act with total commitment, flow provides an escape from the chaos of the quotidian. But this escape does not represent a descent into entropy, as when one dulls one's senses with drugs, or simple pleasure; it is an escape forward into higher complexity, where one hones one's potential by confronting new challenges." (The Evolving Self)

In describing this state-of-flow, Csikszentmihalyi also uses a term that Maximos would find familiar: autotelic, auto (self) plus telos (purpose).

For Maximos the fundamental purpose of the self is to love God.