The pull of imaginative desire, not the push of desperate effort, serves us best.
St.Teresa well appreciated this law and applied it to her doctrine of prayer.

"If your thought," she says to her daughters, "runs after all the fooleries of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and continue in your quiet ...

if you seek by force of arms to bring it to you, you lose the strength which you have against it."[116] This same principle is implicitly recognized by those theologians who declare that man can "do nothing of himself," that mere voluntary struggle is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to grace: by yielding, that is, to the inner urge, to those sources of power which flow in, but are not dragged in.

Indications of its truth meet us everywhere in spiritual literature.

Thus Jacob Boehme says, "Because thou strivest against that out of which thou art come, thou breakest thyself off with thy own willing from God's willing."[117] So too the constant invitations to let God work and speak, to surrender, are all invitations to cease anxious strife and effort and give the Divine suggestions their chance.