her nuns to meditate on specific prayers. Her prayers described in The Way of Perfection involve meditation on a mystery in the life of Jesus and are based on the faith that "God is within", a truth that Teresa said she learned from St. Augustine. In her Life, she wrote that she taught herself from the instructions given in the book, The Third Spiritual Alphabet – by Francisco de Osuna – which relates to Franciscan mysticism. Her starting point was the practice of "recollection", i.e. keeping the senses and the intellect in check and not allowing them to stray. In her meditations, one generally restricts attention to a single subject, principally the love of God. In The Way of Perfection she wrote: "It is called recollection because the soul collects together all the faculties and enters within itself to be with God". She would use devices such as short readings, a scene of natural beauty or a religious statue or picture to remind her to keep her focus. She wrote that in due course, the mind naturally learns to maintain focus on God almost effortlessly. St. Theresa viewed Christian meditation as the first of four steps in achieving "union with God", and used the analogy of watering the garden. She compared basic meditation to watering a garden with a bucket, Recollection to the water wheel, Quiet (contemplation) to a spring of water and Union to drenching rain. Early studies on states of consciousness by Roland Fischer found evidence of mystical experience in the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila. In her autobiography she writes that, at the peak of a praying experience "... the soul neither hears nor sees nor feels. While it lasts, none of the senses perceives or knows what is taking place". This corresponds to the fourth stage described by Saint Teresa, "Devotion of Ecstasy", where the consciousness of being in the body disappears, as an effect of deep transcendent meditation in prayer. Saint Francis de Sales Saint Francis de Sales (1576–1622) used a four-part approach to Christian meditation based on "preparation", "consideration", "affections and resolutions" and "conclusions": In the preparation part, one places oneself in the presence of God and asks the Holy Spirit to direct the prayer, as in the Epistle to the Romans: "The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes