My Guardian Angel explained to me the difference between the separation of the soul from the body at death and the momentary separation of the spirit from the body and soul in ecstasy or rapture. He told me that, whereas the soul’s separation from the body provokes death, ecstatic contemplation - that is, the temporary prayer of the spirit outside of the barriers of the senses and matter - does not provoke death. And this is because the soul is not separated, but with its better part becomes immersed in the fires of contemplation.
To get me to understand this better, he had me consider that all men, as long as they are in life, have their soul in themselves (be it dead or alive because of sin or justice), but only the great lovers of God reach true contemplation. This serves to demonstrate that the soul preserving existence as long as it is united to the body - and in this respect it is the same in all men - has a select part in itself - the soul of the soul, shall we say - which, with a lack of love for God and his Law or even with lukewarmness and venial sins, loses the grace to be able to contemplate and know God and the eternal truths, insofar as a creature can, according to the perfection attained.
I received this angelic explanation because, while saying the Holy Rosary, I was meditating on the Fourth Glorious Mystery and thus on the words of Mary Most Holy on April 12 and of the Holy Spirit on February 2.370
370 We omit about six-and-a-half handwritten pages, dated May 16, 1948, containing the twenty-first of the Lessons on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans.