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CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Contemplative Vocation
Teaching 2: Absorption
Teaching 3: State of Absorption
Teaching 4: Contemplative Life
Teaching 5:
Contemplation and Exercises of Prayer
Teaching 6: Contemplation
Teaching 7: Eventual Trials during Mystical Death
Teaching 8: Vow of Holocaust
Teaching 9: Prayer and Vows
Teaching 10: Simple Knowledge
Teaching 11:
Dificultéis in Prayer
Teaching 12: Simple Witness
Teaching 13: Life of Prayer
Teaching 14: Full Prayer
Teaching 15: Subjective Concentration
Teaching 16: Prayer with Natural Participation
Teaching 1: Contemplative Vocation
All men are destined to divine contemplation.
Worldly life is opposite to contemplative life, and that is why people do not understand what contemplation is. Two opposite things cannot be real in themselves.
Contemplation is necessary because is the last possibility of man. This does not mean all men are contemplative by nature, but the meaning of “contemplation” should be wider and universal.
Contemplation is not a characteristic path to certain souls, or adapted just to certain temperaments. A man finds in contemplation the only means to experience directly and totally the Divine Truth –the Divine Mother.
Contemplation is not a possibility, but a truth. Only a living experience of the soul is real knowledge. You doe not know because you understand, but because you “are”.
The contemplative path is not one-sided, but integral.
Contemplation as life is not a continuous exercise of certain prayers, but a permanent state incorporated to the total reality of life –both active and passive. This identification leads rapidly to a supernatural knowledge of divine things, which people often understand as contemplation.
If contemplation was disconnected from active life, its comprehensive fruit would not be a universal truth.
Contemplation is a spontaneous consequence of renunciation, and evidence of the very Truth.
Contemplation is a connection that keeps the integral life united, because contemplation is a simple underlying state of living experiences.
Contemplation is not to reach a final understanding point, but a condition of dynamic life in the soul, which remains a substantial contact with the Divine Mother.
To turn spiritual life into a truth is to experience directly and personally the Divine Truth. Otherwise, in the Buddha’s words, “It is as a peasant counting the cattle of his neighbor”.
Contemplation is an immediate possibility for all those who are strong enough within and can be continuously faithful to their vocation of divine freedom.
So, one cannot speak of living in the world and of contemplative life. The world is not against contemplation; but appetites, desires and attachments counteract contemplation. Contemplative life is not a type of particular life; it is the life of a soul that is dead to things of the world.
To differentiate action from contemplation does not mean that souls may exclude, by temperament, their inner contact with the Divine Mother. On the contrary, contemplation grants higher capacity of action, because it multiplies the power of the soul by renouncing to a personal action.
There are rules of inner and external discipline; these rules are commonly seen as contemplative life, but they are more suitable means leading to a real and methodical practice of Renunciation; only this practice guides the soul to spiritual contemplation.
Realization has to produce the extinction of the soul –a soul is a compound– and we should overcome ascetically our continuous and natural resistance, that is to say, our fight against our own extinction.
Extinction of the soul does not mean annihilation; it acts as an instrument of the spirit. The world is the kingdom of the soul, and life is a continuous projection outward.
External attraction is great ignorance, and our reason cannot destroy this attraction, but concrete facts do. To set ourselves free of our possessions is not enough: we have to break possessiveness. Attraction cannot exist without an illusory possession.
The world attracts by means of material, affective and intellectual possessions. But its attraction is not only direct, but also through worldly internal states, which move us away from contemplation.
Many souls live ascetically amid mortification and prayer, and do not understand how, after so many efforts, they keep the same type of attitude before the world, and remain in the dark before the Divine Mother: these souls are worldly within.
We are worldly within when we live centered on the world, not on Renunciation. Saint John of the Cross says: who cares how thin is the thread that ties a bird if this thread always shall prevent this bird from flying.
This does not mean that our spiritual contemplation shall occur just in the end of the path. We may be imperfect, but not worldly. A central idea must move the soul, and this idea may differ from our words. Very often we talk of our attachment to something because we fear this tie is not broken.
Many fervent souls usually experience great outbursts of divine love while they pray, but are unable to contemplate because they still possess many emotions, which should be purified and calmed. Great soul movements never become a quite high prayer. When prayer is higher, inner movements are much simpler and more essential; then it is just a state of presence as a simple movement in itself.
Contemplation is the only good of the spirit, because contemplation is a direct contact with the Divine Mother. We are told contemplation is blissful, but not in a sensorial sense. Here senses are inactive and practically non existent. The soul sense is deep and simple, but never emotional. To reach a real contemplation we should be deprived of emotions, because emotions do not respond to our will. Virtuous deeds stop being acts, and become super-understanding and human tolerance through direct contact with the reality and truth of life. At the same time, this is an absolute spiritual solitude, within our reach after a great sensorial solitude.
This solitude is like that of a snowy peak, –inaccessible to the majority of mortals.
We have to descend to our inner solitude, –to our absolute solitude in the heart. But we have to descend alone. There is an inaccessible place to all in our soul, with the exception of the Son and the Divine Mother. There is the Son’s treasure.
First you experience a sensorial solitude; you feel alone –nobody can be with you or near you. Later there is a wonderful spiritual solitude; “She is Alone with Him Alone”.
This is not a permanent active awareness of divine company, but a total taste of being and eternity, and also a taste of becoming inaccessible to contingencies of life and beings. You can descend to them, but they cannot come to you.
In essence, life of prayer usually is deep absorption. In these states of prayer, you shall find this inner point: participation.
If on any ascetic-mystical path certain time is established for prayer and spiritual exercises, not always the latter are enough for absorption when the soul reduces prayer to them.
Moreover, in many cases, Sons that really achieve absorption are severely tried out and feel dry and absent-minded while they meditate. Even though their trials are unimportant, this experience is significant in those people who are insufficiently devoted to prayer, particularly because their life style demands much movement, continuous talk and very little propitious environment to inner life.
When you are more in need of an inner switch, you need more detachment and absorption. You can pray continuously, but if your prayer is not subconscious, then you are finally involved in an activity that in the beginning attracts your attention. Moreover, continuous talks and socialization with persons of ideas and purposes that are opposite to those of the Son, give rise to contrary power centers in which you consume rapidly this power. You do not counteract always this attraction by means of simple jaculatories or fixed prayers. You need an inverse soul movement: inner fixation is absorption.
You have to unveil the secret of this movement, and to have the key to this chamber of your heart.
If you do not pay attention to this, you stop rapidly being devoted to Renunciation, and only a deep absorption can sustain your Renunciation.
When your life is not internally devoted to Renunciation, you stop being in contact with the living Cafh’s Teaching, and the Substantial Union with the Divine Mother is more and more far away, and finally becomes one more dream.
Nothing changes outside, everything goes on the same in the ordinary routine of daily actions; but here life is absent –a life that a simple external performance cannot sustain, but needs inner stability and determination of your soul: it needs mystique of Renunciation made life and union. You need this irresistible inner magnet: the Divine Mother.
Teaching 3: State of Absorption
To speak about absorption does not mean a sensible state that a soul enjoys in certain type of prayer without distractions.
Even absorption is not a natural self-concentration produced by activities that require of attention, or of more or less intense concentration on daily duties. Absorption nothing has to do with that of states of prayer, though the latter prepare us to it. Absorption cannot be characteristic of a state; absorption is the state itself. The so called states of absorption are only more or less lasting manifestations, produced by certain persistent type of prayer and life. Absorption as a state is a visible expression of Renunciation, which is produced by an inverse soul movement. It is an inverse movement not only in regard to an attraction toward worldly things, but also inverse movement to any determined sense.
An inverse movement is not a movement in opposite sense, but a movement without an apparent sense: negativity as spiritual state. So, absorption is permanence, because of its non-determined characteristic.
What is determined is always within pairs of opposites and within a cyclic rhythm. What is non-determined is a real state that is independent from time, dimension and orientation. This might be more properly expressed as “depth”.
All usual states of absorption develop in another dimension, that is to say, in a dimension. They have orientation, so they also have a beginning and end; so, they are not absorption.
Absorption is an inner soul movement, which is Renunciation.
Seemingly, all this is disconnected from the reality, which needs states, actions and stimuli leading to absorption, but this is not so.
Absorption as a state does not negate different states of absorption, since by being a state, it cannot have a position. All is valid and necessary, but one must know what the spirit of Renunciation is, not to lose insensibly the essence of the Son’s life. Absorption is a token of the Divine Mother’s love for all Her Sons, because it is a token of the Son’s Renunciation.
The level of absorption is the first signal you have to look for in order to know on what plane a soul lives and develops.
Even the most wonderful tasks and actions do not acquire a transcendental level of existence; only one thing grants divine character to a work: the spiritual level of inner life in those souls that achieve such work.
While the souls develop, think and live in dual thoughts, aims, sufferings and problems, their circle becomes potentially worldly-spiritual.
Movement in this circle does not make any sense in Cafh.
Cafh would have no real value without the divine sense, which is given by the transcendental trait of Renunciation.
Transcendence as a mere mental attitude does not make any sense because it causes our soul to adopt a false position, but a transcendental inner position is certainly useful because it makes each thing to occupy its own place, and likewise does with the soul, that is to say, in the Divine Mother’s heart. The spiritual Son’s gaze must aim upwards always, and even more: it must remain absorbed and fixed there.
Teaching 4: Contemplative Life
Contemplation does not detach you from contingencies of life.
Material things are not evil, but your type of relation with them may be evil. Evil is eagerness and desire, which settle life on a material level.
Eagerness levels and likewise this occurs with desire.
When you achieve a quite deep inner life, then your attitude may be indifferent toward external things.
Indifference is a deviation from the mystical path, and impedes a true realization, which is expansion through participation.
But, this participation, which is static, also appears as indifference when in reality it is not so; and it makes the world be unable to understand a true contemplative being or his apparently indifferent attitude toward human things.
Contemplative life is not permanent contemplation of divine mysteries, but ascetic routine of renunciation, which transforms the most trivial actions into true spiritual pillars; the latter are a source of experience, understanding and illuminative prayer.
Moreover, routine produces automatic ordinary actions. We do not mean they work just in an automatic way; really the Son takes part in these actions. But, by acquiring necessary control and capacity, one follows automatically his rules and duties, without any further intervention of a determining volitive element, which identifies a being with his own actions. Then this being is not reduced to an action; so, he is free.
Routine is liberating automatism; the Son remains fixed and immobile in his divine center, while his body or his soul works efficiently.
Exercises of prayer are unusually colorful thorough routine. First, their relevant value is missing; second, they can become habitually dry, particularly after a purgatory period of time, through a gradual removal of extreme emotions. By virtue of this help, these exercises are less rational and simpler. On the other hand, as the soul has less and less varied desires, at certain time all subjects of prayer become almost variations of only one idea and aspiration. Because of this, often you find boring and difficult to subdue your mind to thoughts that apparently are unnecessary now, because as usually you do not fix your soul at a point, then distractions enter easily, and along with them, tiredness, divagation, and even drowsiness and sleep. Then you should come back to a complete technical exercise, by trying to achieve gradually greater passivity.
The same occurs with the habit of continuous prayer, vocalized or silent. You start considering the meaning of your sayings, and later gradually, thorough their spiritual meaning, you immobilize the soul as to a unique aspiration represented by this prayer.
When only one idea, when only one fundamental thought about renunciation rules, every human action becomes super-conscious and objective through your non-identification with action and through your impersonal concern about them. Necessarily, this state of prayer leads to spiritual enlightenment –in the beginning, a sporadic state, and later, a permanent state.
Usually, one looks for a power of concentration through certain exercises. Doubtless, these exercises give capacity of concentration and certain mental powers, but just a mystique of routine grants the gift of concentration made life.
The routine removes ups and downs of our mental surge through the rhythm of what is established.
Because our mind is free of thinking about things already established, and because we do not need anything after our renunciation to any desire, except for indispensable things, our mind is spontaneously set on a unique center and unique idea; so, we acquire the gift of a multiple concentration, which potentializes greater performance and possibilities.
Moreover, routine becomes over-demanding when is integral.
Human routine is not such, because he rejects it and does not subdue his mind to a rhythm. He is thirsty and eager for change. This is escape.
An integral routine of the soul demands supreme efforts and inner determination, and potentializes possibilities of mystical expansion to the utmost, because as the soul cannot be enclosed in a material circle of activities and has no human escape, it transcends immediately and is set in the divine center.
Contemplation technique is absolutely different from meditation technique. In the latter, you manage forces and positive actions of being, and volitive efforts act on the ordinary plane of consciousness.
During contemplation, will is pure spiritual power, which leads the soul in the divine inner kingdom. There is a loss of ordinary perceptive powers, but also a noticeable development of intuitive and supernatural powers.
An intuitive contemplation knowledge is instantaneous; or rather, knowledge through instantaneous identification. You should not understand it as ordinary knowledge, but as total and essential knowledge, which is impossible to translate into mental aspects that always are under it.
Teaching 5: Contemplation and Exercises of Prayer
The exercise of meditation is an organized mental movement to produce certain effects in the soul.
In questions related to love and enlightenment, this exercise leads to lofty feelings and considerable experiences so far unknown.
As your capacity to feel is filled to the brim, this exercise leads to suspense, or rather, to a considerable ecstasy.
On the other hand, though in the beginning during passive meditation one rather achieves a permanent emotional suspense, the former can lead to a sensible state, deeper and darker. Reason does not intervene so much in the formation of the discourse; so there is more freedom to acquire purer states.
Contemplation gives direct knowledge of divine verities.
Personal eagerness for knowing drives contemplative knowledge away. Only renunciation to knowledge is knowledge, because it places mental knowledge in the relative frame of contingent truths.
As you try to know, you do it through enquires of your mind and of your rational mechanism. But there is another way, which is totally spiritual and direct. It is a positive concentration on the object, which sets free our spirit for contemplation and knowledge. It is so deep and dark knowledge that remains almost unknown to our own mind, and the latter hardly may translate this knowledge into rational definitions.
It is as if you moved in a dark world because of the intense spiritual light of the very soul, and would come in contact not only with the very truth, but also with the truth of particular and defined things. Perhaps Plato mentioned it in relation to the world of ideas.
You should study, but by transforming your study into prayer.
When you have an object of knowledge, this object is one thing and you are other thing. This knowledge that you can acquire is limited and within the reach of your mental perception. But if you achieve a contemplative state of identification with the object, you “are” what you want to know, and you never shall be able to express all that you know.
When you reach a substantial union with the unique and simple truth of the Divine Mother, you do not wish to express it any more, if you could do in terms of desires.
When for the first time you come into contact with divine verities through a supernatural mental state, you desire with lofty intensity to transmit a partial truth that you have discovered. But when “you are” the truth, then you keep it in silence. This is the Vow of Silence. You should not break the secret of what should not express.
The Teaching should be studied not only on books, but also on the Divine Teaching that arrives continuously in a heart in Silence. This Teaching is uninterruptedly conveyed by participating in the immobile Presence of the Soul in the Divine Mother’s Heart.
In active meditation there are exalted emotions, and in passive meditation, this exaltation grows deeper. In the contemplative phase there is an identification of subject and object. In the unitive phase, first there is an active expansion of the soul, as participation in the divine and participating state itself, and one achieves a simple knowledge by similarity.
When you transcend sensible states, Union becomes unusually deep, and in certain way you are disconnected from the reality. This does not mean an absence of a transcendental state of consciousness while you are actively disconnected. We may say this is more possible, but this does not exclude your active capacity, which develops as another kind of action, which is dark and your mind cannot decipher
Renunciation leads naturally to contemplation. One cannot define Renunciation itself. There is void between perfect state and ascetic state, and a continuous Renunciation of the soul should fill this void.
Renunciation actions mean privation, mortification and discipline. But external and internal actions break any real tie. Ambition, possessiveness, blood and affection ties, and attachment to life demand whole asceticism for their sublimation as divine love.
Innwe asceticism needs external action, not only as confirmation, but also as method. “I cannot know if I love myself until I decide never to talk about me, or about my sorrows, problems, desires and difficulties, and even about my virtues. I cannot keep my soul silent if I am unable to keep my lips silent. I cannot say I am detached from the world if I am unable to stop my eyes seeing the world ceaselessly. I cannot feel I have broken blood ties, until wellbeing and happiness of any person is as important as wellbeing and happiness of my kindred, and until my dear ones do not occupy in my heart more room than any soul. I cannot say I have renounced to my own life when my person, my future, my needs and my achievements are more important to me than those of my Sons or those of the world.” This attitude always transcends outside through gestures, glances, postures, words, talks and events of living.
Asceticism must take place conjointly; inner renunciation gives rise to outer mobility, and outer control gives rise to a new soul attitude.
Renunciation transforms each Cafh’s Son into ideal, perfect and impersonal Son. This integral asceticism, particularly by acting on your whole being, always must result in mystical contemplation. Your whole being experiences a transformation.
Seemingly so simple actions (a posture, a glance, a silence or a continuous work), which form this internal and external control, demand will and efforts totally devoted to achieve perfect Renunciation. Really they are death to the external man and, if you analyze them properly, you shall see how, without any further quest, successive stages and achievements derive from them one after the other; the soul must experience all this until the Divine Mother’s realization and its expansive consequences of participation and presence.
The secret of spiritual contemplation is not a secret: simple actions give divine results. But the simplest actions are the hardest actions to do, when they must persist on time, as a dry routine, without immediate possessions within our reach, and being ourselves sustained just by an extraordinary love to Renunciation, which is the Divine Mother.
In fact, an accurate definition of contemplation might be impossible, but certainly there are ascetic-mystical rules leading to contemplation. As a whole, these rules organized as a method of living, are named “state of perfection”, adopted by all religious and spiritual systems that aim at the union of man with God. But, all men can achieve this asceticism-mystique by whatever means and in whatever place.
Asceticism-mystique of Renunciation can be summed up as follows: Silence, Patience and Routine.
Teaching 7: Eventual Trials during Mystical Death
In the beginning of his path, the soul is too much busy with his troubles and sorrows, and that is why worldly evils are to him just a mere consideration to which he sticks by attachment or sympathy. But the Divine Mother teaches through sorrow.
In relation to understanding and faith, trials seldom appear alone; usually they derive from sentimental trials and inner conflicts, and the latter often derive from seemingly trivial events.
External events do not give rise to conflicts; the latter just open the way, and then conflicts rush in.
While Renunciation was just a mental attitude, sorrows and trials were not so deep. But life tries by itself, and always it is high time to painful and deep wounds.
It is then when the soul feels as if the Divine Mother had forsaken him. She does not forsake him, but he cannot perceive Her Presence at all when is totally absorbed in his internal struggle.
All becomes darkness, and just a cruel sorrow remains, as if it was the only reality of his living.
If a soul really loves Renunciation, then his sorrow becomes expansive.
In selfish beings, the more intensive suffering, the more closed in themselves. But the Son’s heart grows through sorrow. In spite of seeing nothing and being deprived of sustenance, and in spite of all his illusory ties and attachments, he witnesses an alive, frightful and enormous reality, that is to say, sorrow of life upon earth. He becomes conscious rapidly through his own sorrows, –a sorrow ignored by thousands, a sorrow that not only is of those who are living in the world now, but also that of those who were and of those who shall come.
Life appears as a vast darkness, where the dark red of passion and despair covers all. And all is meaningless in the unfathomable depth of his heart. Not only his whole flesh and his whole blood ask, “Why?”.
This is a hard question to answer, which deepens even more the wound of his heart.
His boundless compassion makes him feel he is separate from the God of light, and sunk in the dark of human misery. He refuses to have eyes; he rather prefers to be blind and sunk in an apparently meaningless despair in regard to life, than to join to the highest bliss and good, which he knows is within his reach.
To the disciple, the world is a boundless pit of blood, flesh and despair, where souls are immolated continuously, and also a world without light, explanation, excuse or destination
This is beyond the ordinary capacity of common emotions; it is a cruel and deadly anguish, an outburst. Even death seems consolation, but he refuses it. A human heart is unable to feel it.
The soul feels more human through his own sorrow by escaping from God and joining to man, but, on the contrary, he becomes divine. He believes he is detached from God, but joins to the Divine Mother. His boundless sorrow and his renunciation to understanding, light and peace, and his awareness of pain and darkness life, lead him to stand the burden of the world; so, his expanded soul can go beyond sorrow and through absence of sorrow, light and darkness.
The last questions of your mind cannot be responded; you cannot account for life by means of an answer. Life makes sense through Renunciation.
Certain Spiritual Director said to a disciple who was experiencing these states: “Look up to Christ on the Cross, there you shall find answers to all your dialectical questions”.
This trial is totally spiritual, and your whole being takes part in it. Peace comes after this, and your soul experiences a transformation; your soul is Christ on the Cross. Your understanding, your love, your consciousness, everything is participation. Now your life is that of all beings and, at the same time, a life in the Divine Mother’s heart.
You do not take part only in sorrows of human beings, or in the love of God; all is unity. In this unity, which is living and permanent holocaust, you shall find the great mystery settled –the sublime Divine Mother’s mystery in the souls.
“My soul is tied to all souls forever. Just as God is a prisoner in the Creation, so my soul is a prisoner of its love to all souls. These souls are my life; and I am these souls.”
This is perfect love, perfect Renunciation. When this expansion comprises the universe, then it is perfect and fades away in the eternity and infinitude of God –it fades away in the souls.
Extinction is not self-annihilation, but to be in expansion.
Why is this expansion a Holocaust?
Men feel union is sensible and exquisite bliss, but then also there would be a sensible exquisite sorrow.
Perfect Unity is extinction that is holocaust; it is Spirit’s immolation on a life of separateness and sorrow.
I am what I am, but I am in the souls: in this duality you find a divine redeeming sorrow, which only ends in the Eternity.
But you fade away absolutely as a separate life through your Eternal Vow of Union, and you exist as a simple, eternal and universal participation.
Your life becomes eternal divine presence through your union with those who were and with those who shall come.
A union with the Knight Great Master is union with the Divine Mother’s Presence through Substantial Union.
A Vow of Union is Holocaust because is the last sacrifice; it is non-existence from a personal viewpoint, and tear of the last differentiating veil
A Vow of Union is holocaust because is union with human sorrow in the universal aspect of limitation and darkness, as a restraint of relative possibilities; but at the same time in the aspect of acquiring boundless expansive possibilities through reversibility and motionless presence in the essence of sorrow and limitation.
An eternal union with the Knight Great Master transforms the Son into permanent expression of Divine Will and Word, and into perfect Divine Mother’s image.
The Son becomes image of the God-man and divine mediator, and his human life is an eternal and continuous act as sacrifice in flesh and blood.
Man cannot know redeeming sorrow, pure pain.
This sorrow, this pain is not a feeling: it is being, feeling and interpretation of powers. It is not living experience, but the very life of the soul. It is an act of supreme renunciation; you do not renounce to limitation, but to the Eternity, to an absolute peace. This must be so. Perfection is an expansive impersonal state.
Through Divine Union you get to a perfect ecstasy, your return to life and do not miss this ecstasy, and you expand it upon men and upon the world. And you do not intend to form a duality, but because duality does not exist in God.
Divine Union is extinction; one simple witness remains to give evidence of God upon earth.
Suddenly, this holocaust takes part there, before the disciple, as his own life, his own destiny and his own being. But the great mystery remains –mystery about acceptance, mystery about freedom of the soul.
Holocaust to be such has to become spontaneous action of a free soul. Not strictly as offering, but as expression of the last offering, that is to say, that of his individuality and of his divine and supreme freedom.
There is no freedom but through participation of the soul in life, in the complete existence of Hes and Ahehia: He Is; He Is not; He is One; He is Many. This is Holocaust before the very eyes of separateness; it is life to the Spirit.
Vow: A Vow is seal and divine mark on a transformed soul. It is eternal confirmation; a contingent action in time becomes simple and eternal. It is a connection between the Divine Mother and the soul –divine alliance.
Eternal: Through his renunciation, the Son becomes immortal: He is, he was and he shall be: in the Son, in souls, in worlds and in Eternity.
About Union: Participation by presence. He is simple witness of God in each soul and, at the same time, living holocaust of love and sorrow in all of them, by becoming one with them Eternally.
The 43 Table’s Sons establish the magnetic divine-human circle, which is Divine through Substantial Union with the Divine Mother. Human because is shaping the Simple Idea in flesh, blood and sorrow of the human world –blood holocaust.
And as to all those who were and all those who shall come: Human participation becomes expansive: it goes over separateness, comprises all worlds and all states of life and consciousness, and finally becomes a simple and eternal unity, as Ired, as divine life.
Cafh’s Sons, take my blessing. The Ired is closed: the Divine Union is perfect ecstasy poured continuously on the souls and the world.
An Eternal Vow is Vow of Holocaust because is Vow of Substantial Participation.
The Union with the Knight Great Master is union with the Divine through eternal immolation on the souls; it is divine blood united with human blood, liberating the latter through its redeeming pain.
Redeeming pain is not human pain, but divine pain that becomes human. It is the Divine Mother becoming flesh and blood in Her Sons.
By being undetermined, the expansion of the soul transforms it into mystical presence in all souls. So, all souls live in the Son’s soul, and he transforms his life into life of all souls. So he becomes a perfect image of the Divine Mother, not only through his Substantial Union with Her, but also as Her perfect expression, in the sense of a life made universal existence.
By becoming one with the Knight Great Master, the Son becomes one with the eternity.
The Knight Great Master is one and unique; he is expression of the Divine Spirit, Who is Cafh’s life. So, the Son becomes prototype, ideal Son, divine and perfect image of “The Son”, divine Initiate, Redeemer.
The Vow of blood union with those who were and shall be is the indissoluble loving tie that transforms him into a co-redeemer through substantial participation with the Divine Initiate.
By his Vow of Union with the 43 Table’s Sons he is spiritually tied to divine beings that form the mystical circle of help and salvation of humanity. This Vow ties him indissolubly to divine destiny and human suffering as if it was an eternal chain whose links would be love and sorrow, blood and spirit.
When a disciple takes his Vows, he finds in them a total culmination of efforts and spiritual conquest. The Vow of Holocaust cannot be considered like that. A Holocaust cannot be a conquest –it is something pre-existent in the soul.
This Vow is not more than a confirmation of what already is in the soul. To the Son, this Vow is the Divine Seal on his human and spiritual immolation. It is something irrevocable, absolute and Eternal.
The Path of Renunciation is that of objective and concrete achievements. Otherwise, Renunciation would be just another abstraction. You renounce to possessions, but you have to possess spiritual goods in order to be able to give them.
You talk, you think and you feel always in dualistic terms, and life is unity. You should not understand this unity as only one thing, but as an organic totality, indivisible and simple in itself, and composed as attribute.
A soul is not simple; so, prayer is just an act to the soul; but prayer is its strength, its power and its divine chance –its extinction as a soul.
In the same way, Vows are something outside being, until their achievement as spontaneous expression of a supernatural being.
So, you conquer your Vows by your spiritual efforts and personal death –death in the sense of a mystical extinction in the Divine.
Prayer leads a soul to an ideally divine state, and Vows are a real and permanent expression of this realization.
Certainly, from a human viewpoint, a Vow is a contingent expression, but at the same time an eternal act of identification with your own spiritual truth.
Ascetic prayer leads necessarily to achieve gradually your offering through Vows, but these Vows not only are a unique expression of a true spiritual being. Otherwise, Vows might not be a simple and divine act; they would be just an attitude.
Here we refer to Vow in its divine and supernatural sense.
If Vows were not a necessary expression of the spirit, they would not liberate your being, and would be bondage. So, through a limitation imposed by a Vow, the soul has a field of divine possibilities.
In fact, in a supernatural sense, we can speak just of “The Vow” –of the supernatural alliance between man and God. But a gradual approximation of man to the Divine Mother is humanly necessary.
Just one thing exists as Vow: the divine seal on the soul –a simple and eternal connection between God and man.
A Vow, as achievement of a spiritual vocation, is a free act of the soul; in fact, it is not an act of choice, but an act of acceptance.
The Divine Mother calls Her souls; they can say just one thing: yes or not.
When the Son takes his first Vow, he cannot know it entirely as to its mystical depth, but he knows that “he is” through this Vow. It is an intuitive perception of the truth about his vocation by offering his Renunciation.
Vows “are”. They are his unique reality by being a divine possibility of the soul.
So, prayer is a path of self-recognition through Vows. Recognition through Vows is spiritual identification with the transcendental value of these Vows.
In this way, what a Vow means loses its human limitations and acquires immeasurable vastness. Vows include entirely doctrine and path, teachings and mystique of extinction (silence), identification (fidelity), responsibility (obedience), participation (renunciation) and presence (holocaust).
Vows must be object of prayer, because they condense all spiritual treasures of the Son.
Simple knowledge is a state of unity and similarity between subject and object. This unity cannot be achieved through an active state of your mind, which is always dual. Knowledge or rational understanding is dual always. Passive exercises reduce a mental movement, and tend to be subjective. A subjective image or state is not dual, and usually is a living experience of another kind.
As you acquired capacity to identify objective images in a subjective way, you can start a subjective concentration on abstract images; this way you can get knowledge of another kind, and a supernatural state.
Contradiction, paradox and irrational concept are other way to achieve this subjective identification and simple knowledge. What is paradoxical or irrational immobilizes your mind as if this was a shock. It is as if you ran, just to stop suddenly. This mental stop, this systematic perplexity obstructs a logical reasoning and prepares your mental mirror for a perception of another type, more passive and subjective.
An incomprehensible expression emerges spontaneously because our limited language gives rise inevitably to contradiction when it tries to soar to divine verities.
Another way to achieve subjective knowledge is through an exercise of potential meditation; you incite a mental stimulus, but by avoiding a rational response. This generating force cannot be consumed by feeling or ordinary knowledge, and leads easily to subjective identification and simple knowledge.
Knowledge acquired this way may be subjective, but not deprived of reality. Knowledge is such when is part of your soul –when it is yourself; otherwise, it is a theory or abstraction. Of course, perhaps it is not total knowledge, but is a mean to get to this total knowledge.
When a suitable asceticism is sustained by a real state of Renunciation, your personal consciousness stops being the subject, and expands more and more in the direction of your spiritual being. Then your identification is not with an object of arbitrary knowledge, but with wider and wider states of consciousness, and finally your whole being becomes a unique state in itself, which is simple and divine.
Sometimes, the subject should fade away. Otherwise, there would be two things: soul and Divine Mother. On this point, our reflection should stop. If there is identification, how is extinction absent? If it is one, it cannot be two. It is one, but it is two, because one can be quite high, but always in the expression of God. This duality is not multiplicity, but simplicity by reversibility.
This concept, which collides with a rational mind, is incomprehensible, but you can experience it by transforming yourself, through prayer and Renunciation, into image of this simplicity by means of an inner state of similarity. So, you get a contemplative identification, and you are what you want to know. But, this still is a movement of the soul, and not the highest perfection, which is Presence.
So far the soul just got its identification and transformation into a simple movement, which is life. When you get spiritual immobility, which is Presence, you are not life, but testimony of life, Simple Witness of the Eternity, perfect image, which is similar to that of the Divine Mother who “Is” because “She Is Not”.
The concept of potentiality exists just in relation to the factor time. The Eternity is not an infinite time, but non-time. When you have overcome time by the eternal Presence, you have achieved potentiality, that is to say, Hes. Hes’ Resurrection, understood rationally, is transformation of potentiality into activity, but it means spiritually a realization of the soul, a birth to a spiritual consciousness of being, which goes beyond all duality. The exercise of meditation tries to lead to this state of consciousness beyond rational differentiations and one achieves it through very deep absorption, beyond technique and rational distinctions.
Teaching 11: Difficulties in Prayer
Certain souls complain sometimes and say they cannot meditate because their exercise is heavy and they get bored, and ask of their Superior a lighter routine of spiritual discipline. Superiors also observe how methods of meditation do not result according to their expectation in all cases; they do not see an evident advance in prayer and there is an apparent stagnation. After a moment of enthusiasm there is unconcern, weariness and boredom; very few people persevere and many are inconstant. But though you do not pursue an immediate end, an exercise of meditation, practiced methodically, always leads to a result necessarily; and at certain moment of your life, spontaneously you get consequences of your spiritual asceticism.
In spite of this, asceticism is not as it should be, that is to say, a total transformation of the souls. In the ascetic-mystical path, difficulties of different kinds can show up, but fundamentally there are two types of difficulties; the first type is related to all inherent troubles and setbacks of the very asceticism. The latter are logical and convenient, since they are a part of this asceticism. The second, nothing has to do with asceticism, and derives from a fundamental position of the Son in regard to his vocation and his position.
It is indispensable to differentiate with clarity these two types of problems. If you do not differentiate them, this produces rapidly a significant inner disorientation, and feelings of stagnation and failure.
It is fundamental to discern clearly and exactly the motivation and source of difficulties and attitudes of the soul in order to guide them definitely toward the achievement of their spiritual vocation.
The Son must be one Unity so that his orientation is complete by resulting in transformation –one complete unity in regard to his own feelings, efforts, yearnings, life and vocation. Otherwise, his asceticism shall be discontinuous, his efforts shall be opposite, and he shall find very difficult to take part in the Spiritual Cafh’s life.
If the Son turns Cafh into one of his own things, then his life cannot be centered on himself because Cafh shall be something to him, but not himself. If the Son is one Unity, then creative word, example, peace and radiating presence flow from this Unity. Otherwise, the Son is discontinuous efforts and sporadic idea, that is to say, by advancing, stopping and going back. In this way, one cannot take part substantially in the Great Current, for while one takes part in it, later collides with it. So, sometimes souls feel dissatisfied.They believe sincerely to take part in meditation, method or whatever external thing, but really they are dissatisfied with themselves. Commonly, they dispose of a responsibility they are not ready to assume.
Also, sometimes, though certain souls devote themselves to Cafh with enthusiasm, also have troubles in their spiritual development. Enthusiasm is a quite personal feeling, which emerges from satisfactions that are personal too. This is certain euphoria experienced when one takes Cafh’s Gifts. If behind this there is not a true vocation of Renunciation, this enthusiasm lasts for a short while, and you start wasting your time in quest of the source of your conflicts in how you are practicing your spiritual exercises, in your external problems, and so on. That is to say, you enquire about an immediate cause, when in fact the true root lies in your lack of vocational awareness.
While the Son is driven by a power that is not totally impersonal and unselfish, he shall find with difficulty certain fullness in his mystical asceticism. To live Renunciation is to live detached, without personal illusions and expectations. It is to live with the Divine Mother alone. But sometimes, the Divine Mother’s presence is even further solitude, because it may be dark presence, non-presence and ignorance of the Divine Essence, and finally is only knowledge about duties, routine and daily task.
Few souls are ready to give all; few souls are ready to give themselves completely. Few souls are ready to jump over their tiny troubles and sorrows in order to live the Substantial Union with the Divine Mother trough a prayer of Renunciation.
A prayer cannot be complete and total if our whole being is not devoted to it. When we say “whole being”, this does not mean an intense sensible flight, but a being as a whole.
Since souls are not a unity, there are opposite desires in them. These opposite desires make these souls not sustain totally certain idea, and they are opposite and scattered powers.
Our whole purpose devoted to prayer is not enough; this purpose must be incited to act permanently in order to guide all powers toward the unique Idea.
After a while in the spiritual path, the Son must be an exponent of the Doctrine. Otherwise, he is an obstacle.
The Son must be a living testimony of Renunciation, and he would not achieve it without his testimony of faith.
To believe is not enough; you have “to be” what you believe.
Besides a supernatural mystical action of consecrated souls, the world needs a living example of men and women practically devoted to their Doctrine.
You cannot shape the fundamental idea of Renunciation in the world if this idea is not previously incarnate in those who must preach it.
A Son must be living a testimony of his idea, a simple example that should be present in the world as a constant and permanent image of perfection.
Sons must see Renunciation made flesh, made blood and made life. This time is demanding, they are very few, and the work is colossal.
They have the work in their hands; their objectives are universal and extraordinary. They cannot waste a drop of energy, or an instant or thought, whatever.
All must be centered on the Unique idea of Renunciation.
Sons are few. Those who are not ready to a total and absolute surrender cannot last. The Divine Mother wants all or nothing. Who cares if they are quite kind; She does not wish them. Then they must be quite steadily united and become a powerful and invincible force through their offering. And they must be total in order to achieve this.
You should burn on this absolute faith, which is Renunciation and death, in order to give evidence of your faith. You are a simple witness of the Divine Idea just through spiritual extinction.
To talk about such divine mystery is useless if you are not ready to surrender your life through a death that is continuous and inalterable Renunciation. To be Simple Witness is extinction through Substantial Union with the Divine Mother.
The Son is motionless in his divine center, and remains therein as a testimony of Presence. Simply, “He is”.
You do not need to listen to the Buddha’s sermon –to look at him is enough.
So, the Son, as a motionless presence in the divine centre, in his Unique Idea, in his Renunciation, becomes preaching and action, union and redemption, act and power, love and sorrows, life and death –“He is”.
Prayer is “the” means to God-realization, but it must be full, total and whole.
Prayer cannot be whole prayer if it does not comprise our entire being. Even our mind and our heart, an also our body, our life and our chances; our past and our future –our whole existence must be present there in order to be burnt totally by the divine fire of Renunciation.
This is Substantial Union: when our whole being, body, mind and spirit, is permanently established on the simple and eternal point, which is the Divine Mother.
Prayer shall be full when a man has to transform himself into testimony of faith, and to discern continuously obvious truths and possible truths in the teaching. A soul remains always on a state of perfect prayer when the divine truth is centered on it.
For a full spiritual effect of the exercises, discursive meditation must be based on faith.
Sensitive meditation has to be based on constant renunciation as to emotions and cognitive satisfactions, in order to remain in a divine mental-sentimental state that is unknown (something non-visualized).
Perfect prayer is on ignorance of the Divine Essence.
The Son’s life, to be such, has to be life of prayer.
A full prayer is something different from what one commonly imagines. When sometimes you feel plenitude during your prayer, your prayer is not full, but you are doing a sensibly full prayer. A really full prayer is effort, emotion and feeling.
Full prayer is not feeling, but state of life. Life involves your feeling, but feeling is not life. Prayer must be out of the plane of feelings, and located at your own life.
Prayer is not discontinuous just when prayer is one’s life; one’s being is centered only when prayer is our life. Because then prayer is not a thing produced by our lips, or vocalized by our mind, or visualized by our imagination: prayer is continuous self-control and self-centered always in our whole center, not in our ideal center or in our imaginative center. Prayer is to be located continuously as man, as soul, as dynamic power, as static determination, as affective work, as volitive work and as physical work –prayer is to be located at the whole life.
Then, fullness is not an act of prayer: the “being” is fullness. And only through this fullness, you get your necessary power to convey the idea of Renunciation and to perform your mission during your lifetime.
It is not easy to be located at Cafh, because its location is dynamic.
In Cafh, you cannot say, “I am located”, because as soon as you say “I am located”, you are “out of place”. Location is dynamic and demands continuous renunciation, which is your own freedom. So, the Son is free and located at the Cafh’s dynamics, and his location goes beyond.
On the other hand, when the Son understands his limited human work, in the magnetic field where he acts, he goes beyond, his location becomes universal by limiting his purposes and restricting himself to a concrete idea, and he does not expect from his work anything more than what his work is.
Your prayer cannot be full when contains remnants of self-interest. However spiritual this egotism be, it cannot be an expansive universal feeling.
A man can go beyond his little miseries only through renunciation to his own miseries. So, when he is ready to focus a universal aspect, a transcendental law, or a spiritual state, he fails. He fails because he has a purpose or tries to get something, that is to say, understanding or personal expansion. This concern, this eagerness, makes his contact impossible with a wider sphere of consciousness because reduces his inner elevation to his own field, perception and state of consciousness. So, even though he tries many renunciations, they are not enough to get knowledge or self-transcendence.
All depends upon motivation and from the ruling idea of these efforts. This unique idea must be real Renunciation, not ideal Renunciation.
You only know when you do not wish knowledge; you possess when you have nothing.
Possession is only possible through reversibility.
Detachment, offering, sacrifice and opposite act –opposite to human nature, opposite to his state of consciousness, opposite to instinctive and animal selfishness, and opposite to personal movement of life– destroys the husk, that is to say, the narrow circle of a limited state to open the soul to its new world, and to the universe and life.
Renunciation is possession through participation; it is fullness; it is life. But you reach Renunciation through sacrifice, sorrow and absolute control of your animal nature.
If life is not unity and you do not live what you say, a full prayer cannot exist.
Renunciation does not make any by means of explanations or oratory brilliance, but through authority derived from possessing Renunciation. Words are hollow and rhetorical without a charge of powerful and living faith of the soul, and you can get it only with continuous sacrifice, prayer, offering and holocaust.
Prayer cannot be full if you do not express it in the external life.
You can be like all men of the world, but you cannot be equal to them.
Renunciation puts a seal on the soul, which you see, you feel and you touch; so real it is.
If your renunciation is to all, this attitude necessarily has to be expressed in your relationship with life, beings and things.
Realization is not a word; it is a living, substantial, obvious fact, which is reflected on living, substantial obvious facts.
Teaching 15: Subjective Concentration
In sensitive meditation you perceive the image through your five senses. It aims at refining your sensibility and sharpening your perception. But this exercise prevents from going beyond sensible evidences.
There is a type of prayer that, even though assumes a form of ordinary meditation, is a true exercise of subjective concentration.
In an ordinary concentration, you fix actively your attention on the object, and finally you make your mind not move from there. Concentration becomes subjective when identification between subject and object begins. This experience can begin during your meditation.
Its characteristic difference is in the imaginative picture.
You start fixing your attention on the image, and gradually you transfer your consciousness toward this image. For instance: you see a bird on the sky, floating on the air. You fix so much this floating movement on the air that you start feeling yourself floating on the air, as if you represented a bird. In the beginning, this is a simple exercise, but finally you are deeply identified with things, and even with inanimate things, which only can be achieved through a subconscious state.
This identification is impossible in an ordinary conscious state. With a subjective concentration, your experience is like in dreams. You see whatever image, perhaps preposterous, but you know it is this or that person.
In fact this is just a subjective exercise, but facilitates to achieve subjectivity while you meditate.
Teaching 16: Prayer with Natural Participation
You see an image and you understand another thing, but not whatever you do, but what this image represents as a symbol.
For instance: you see a door, and you understand a possibility. You do not understand it as an interpretation, but as if you was a door –as if you was this possibility. You see a landscape by the window, and you are a new world entering your consciousness. You do not understand you as if you entered this world, but you “are” this new world.
You should not look for these states. One cannot say if this natural participation is achieved through an exercise, but it is convenient to know what it is. Particularly because it is evidence and proof of a theory: the world of archetypal symbols. It is as if on the unconscious of the race, graphic images representing Fundamental Ideas of its development were engraved.
Sometimes, these images appear on the world of dreams, but you can get them through direct experience derived from meditation.
In objective meditation, the place of action is outside you; I am subject and object. There is a flow of powers from me toward the object. In subjective meditation I am object-subject; I am action. A subjective experience is total. Meditation goes beyond a simple exercise; it is a vital state of being.
Instead of being movement outwards and subjective elevation, like a request, is to be conscious in the depths of the soul, and to sink in a very deep absorption. Any movement is duality. A subjective state is simple; if there is movement, it is a movement in itself.
In fact, one needs a new language. Our ordinary language contains passive, objective states, but you cannot qualify these states –namely, passive, negative, subjective and subconscious. Thence it is impossible to get accurate definitions. Perhaps communication should go beyond verbal expression in order to become an interpretation of states leading to understanding by similarity.
CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Contemplative Vocation
Teaching 2: Absorption
Teaching 3: State of Absorption
Teaching 4: Contemplative Life
Teaching 5:
Contemplation and Exercises of Prayer
Teaching 6: Contemplation
Teaching 7: Eventual Trials during Mystical Death
Teaching 8: Vow of Holocaust
Teaching 9: Prayer and Vows
Teaching 10: Simple Knowledge
Teaching 11:
Dificultéis in Prayer
Teaching 12: Simple Witness
Teaching 13: Life of Prayer
Teaching 14: Full Prayer
Teaching 15: Subjective Concentration
Teaching 16: Prayer with Natural Participation
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