CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Meditation
Teaching 2: Discursive Meditation on a Text
Teaching 3: Texts for Discursive Meditation
Teaching 4: Affective Meditation on the “Black Lady” and the “Abyss”
Teaching 5: Affective Meditation on the “Two Ways” and the “Standard”
Teaching 6: Affective Meditation on the “Golden Temple” and the “Veil of Ahehia”
Teaching 7: Affective Meditation on “Resurrection of Hes”
Teaching 8: Other Passive Affective Meditations
Teaching 9: Other Passive Affective Meditations
Teaching 10: Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 11: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 12: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 13: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 14: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 15: Monologue as Preparation for Meditation
Teaching 16: Imaginative Monologues as Preparation for Meditation
Teaching 1: Meditation
The present times have so much collectivist power that the man is forced live thoughts and actions of social customs, in such a way that for him is quite difficult to be against massive ideas of the majority.
Exercises of meditation aim at interrupting the social chain of usual thoughts, leading the man to a new activity: an activity determined by his will, ideal or Superior.
The practical meditation exercise consists then in putting between parentheses certain hours of the day; these parentheses will be on the increase as the exercises are progressing.
So, a practical exercise of meditation consists in separating certain hours of the day; this parenthesis will be on the increase as the exercise is progressing. The ideal consists in joining parentheses of one day with parentheses of the other day, that is, by meditating or being in the mood to practice it for 24 hours a day.
In fact, the exercise of meditation discontinues our life and creates another life; it is very difficult to extend it for long time. This interruption in the social chain of actions, although disappears as soon as the exercise ends, leaves a positive remainder, whose effects can be seen several months later.
So, the important thing in the exercise is not the intensity attained on certain occasions but its average precision, regularity and persistence, in order to create, in the social chain of actions, a supernatural chain directed to certain end.
Also the practice of meditation is to live, but with sense and order; thence, the main thing in the exercise is its acquisition of sense and order. If one breaks the specific order of the exercise, its foundation is destroyed.
During fifteen minutes of exercise you live; it is a special life. The most important thing is to be totally immersed in it.
Teaching 2: Discursive Meditation on a Text
Text:
“Memento Homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Pretiosa in conspectu
Domini mors sanctorum ejus.”
Think that the suffering coming from the fight is like the death of the unbelievers. Perhaps is not life of the spiritual man like death of personality? So, why do some spiritual men suffer being alive? These men should be happy and feel that life is like death of saints.
If one centers his existence on his own periphery, that is, on his skin, then the consciousness has to stand different ups and downs of superficial life. Heat, cold and noises disturb. One is nothing more than a shell in the stormy sea of daily events. Our own existence only experiences ups and downs in the surge of sensorial life.
But if you can move your life to the fundamental center of the existence, to that central and remote point, then only deadened echoes of outer sounds will come, and you will remain ever tranquil in your self. If an individual can focus the most hidden point in his own being and lives entirely from there, how can care about events? It is as if pain had been hurting in other person, or laughter had come from other being. In the center of his vast inner space, he would be like a star gleaming high up in the night.
So, he would die as the saints do because, although the flesh could fall in pieces, only the surplus and what exactly bothers would die. So, he would internally want the gradual disappearance of faculties, senses, habits et cetera that are covering and hiding all that, and their slow and steady extinction in death. It is he who would produce the dissolution of his human personality because this way he would be more and more centered in order to be truly alone and truly forsaken. So, certainly, in the silence of a perfect night, he could truly look for God.
Teaching 3: Texts for Discursive Meditation
Text:
“Non est hic: Resurrexit!”
“Noli me tangere.”
One always requests of God to be alone, because we suffer the weight of companies that affect and impede our inner search. When one is alone, vices and virtues of the soul show up clearly in the consciousness; so, we can direct our efforts to the conquest of spiritual virtues.
In the daily struggle for life, the overwhelming shock of events catches willy-nilly the reluctant soul and makes it to feel entirely forsaken. So, one feels to be fighting alone against the whole world; a fanatic determination pushes to go on ahead in the jungle of a blind society and, finally, being covered by our robe of darkness, we look again for the divine life in our own soul.
Why does God disappear when we need him so dearly, if we are struggling for him?
He is always in us, and we would wish to have sufficient strength to carry Him ahead on the way, as a standard.
If one remains motionless, God appears; if one moves, God disappears. How to go ahead and not to move?
In spite of not seeing God, He is always with the souls. One struggles for the soul in permanent rest and God can dwell in the soul.
You should wish that this struggle for life may gradually remove from the soul all those vices that impede a more perfect life. Of course, God is behind this struggle; so we need to go on to fight wildly any opposition in order to be near God. He is on such a place that, when one is able to reach Him, we can touch Him, but however we stretch our hand, we cannot do. Now one understands that we want to live much in order to reach God; we would not wish to die not achieving it. Also one understands why the soul struggles and suffers. Also one understands that God is far away from us, and that this is His best way of loving and helping the soul.
Teaching 4: Affective Meditation on the “Black Lady” and the “Abyss”
Subjects started by this Teaching have, as a whole, an inspiring figure: Maitreya. Maitreya is the human and divine archetype. To request of Maitreya, to think of Maitreya, to wish Maitreya right now, is to create in us that image of perfection; it is to be more and more like Maitreya.
When we request of Maitreya his redemption of Humanity, in fact the human nature is being redeemed and transformed into the image of the purest ideal.
The subject of the Black Lady sees Maitreya as the winner over shadows that cover the soul. If one succeeds in making the image of Maitreya permanently objective internally, we shall affirm a constant abhorrence to the Black Lady, and will prevent the darkness of the soul from arising in our beings. The image of Maitreya is a polarity axis that will enable to direct powers of the soul and gradually expel the Black Lady.
In the “Abyss”, the second subject, Maitreya's figure affirms abhorrence achieved in the precedent meditation by means of sustained spirit of desolation, which is slowly purifying the soul.
This desolation is not that desperate momentum of him who has lost all hope; it is not that strong desolation that destroys violently worldly illusions; rather, it is a type of inner moderation and cooling of these illusions. This desolation, produced by the image of a big shadow, does not exasperate; it calms down and lowers the rhythm of the inner sea. It is like the soft dusk after a labor day; little by little, some patent negative values, which we loved till yesterday, are now extended in our being but we do not care for them; we want one thing: to rest, sleep and forget, and by this oblivion throughout the time, a slow and steady transmutation of our being is taking place.
Teaching 5: Affective Meditation on the “Two Ways” and the “Standard”
The “TWO WAYS”. This exercise, like all exercises in this series, is very clear and simple; its value rests on these qualities. It permits not only the realization of a perfect exercise, but also simplifies the soul processes.
In this example you discover, since the beginning, that there is only one way, and not two ways. Practically, during this exercise, there is just the affirmation of one way and the non-existence of any duality. Influenced by the title about the “Two Ways”, some people got used to extend the subject on the antagonism of the pair of opposites, and created a kind of fight between true and false; but if one introduces duality this way, we will never get a solution, and the conflict will tirelessly recur.
On the other hand, if from the beginning one only emphasizes one way and leaves aside any possible duality, we achieve a meditation based on the voluntary insistence on this only way. There is only one way, and not two ways. A paraphrase for the two ways can be titled as “my way”. This could clearly direct the exercise.
The “STANDARD”. This standard is a continuation of the precedent exercise –its second part– and a kind of objectified discovery of the inner way. This standard peculiarly links the inner way with all possibilities in life. It is a projection of the inner way toward the future; this standard is linked with action by bringing into practice the determination of the two ways.
This standard is an inner ideal placed outside the soul, beyond the state in which the soul is; so, being in love with the standard, this soul moves and works for being near the standard. This standard is nothing fixed and permanent residing at such and such distance of the soul; this standard moves always gradually ahead of the soul; when you feel to have reached it, this standard is useless in your hands, and now, ahead, on the new horizon, you see another standard like this that you hold in your hands –but it is new. This standard is the eternal unrest of the soul.
Teaching 6: Affective Meditation on the “Golden Temple” and the “Veil of Ahehia”
The “GOLDEN TEMPLE”. What is consolation? It is very hard to know because usually you mistake it for a soft pleasure of the soul. Many times you call consolation the fleeting oblivion of your own work.
People feel that consolation is rather a kind of proof that they are doing things properly. It is a divine breath to restore energies, and not a truce or rest; it is a surge of fresh air ventilating the soul that is a little flooded by vapors of the fight; it is a kind of spiritual amendment and re-invigoration.
A new optimism comes with consolation, but this optimism gradually disappears during the work; with consolation, you smile again to life and stop frowning. Consolation makes the soul turn again to this supreme reality: in fact, the game of life is a wonderful game for the eyes of simple souls. Sometimes one loses and sometimes wins, but the fundamental thing is in the very game, in participating and looking at the face of God now and then. God is an opponent, and not a judge.”
The "VEIL OF AHEHIA”. In this game of life, sometimes one removes the veil of Ahehia and looks directly at the Ahehia's face. Where is Ahehia?
We are wrong when we begin our inner search by investigating subtler and subtler planes and sub-planes in this quest for Ahehia; this is excessive movement. But the more you move, the lesser you see; because Ahehia is anywhere, or rather, is in wisdom and inner peace.
It is as if you were a botanist who, willing to know Nature, first would see a flower, then a seed, later a small tree, and finally another bigger tree. But you have to bury a seed and expect for years by watering and manuring the plant till the tree is fully grown. One should not move, but things have to move.
Teaching 7: Affective Meditation on “Resurrection of Hes”
Hes' resurrection is the hardest meditation subject, but fundamental for the inner life. Six precedent subjects are nothing more than instruments to achieve the mystical rapture of the spiritual resurrection.
Nothing remains apart of the meeting of the soul with the Divine; it is the final goal, the only motor during all the way; also, it is the true standard.
But the resurrection of the soul is not only a total and unique act; it is rather a continuous series of deaths and resurrections for life. Life is a grand picture of deaths and resurrections; it is the becoming itself.
You are in the resurrection right now but do not realize it because you are staring at the final rapture.
Hes is you, but not as you are now, but as you have to be; but from this right now, Hes lives pre-figured in the soul; she is a model of free Hes.
As a seed contains the full plant and even all plants that have to be born of it, so Hes exists in the soul, along with all existences that will become from her.
What is bad? What is good? They are two illusions of the imperfect consciousness. It is only Hes that exists by becoming, being again and transforming herself moment by moment.
One has to delete from the mind ideas of past, present and future; everything is , everything exists. Past, present and future are now. The soul is that eternity at this moment. Phenomena of life, the past, present and future are illusions of the consciousness. Only an eternal present there exists; not an eternity of successive and juxtaposed moments, but only one present, with no cuts or gaps. This eternal present, this great uninterrupted time Is.
Teaching 8: Other Affective Passive Meditations
The "BLACK LADY". This exercise of the Black Lady not only simplifies mental activities but even expresses quite properly the fundamental idea symbolized by the Black Lady. She is not an enemy to fight while she is pure nature but only later, when that natural energy has entered the being and has denaturalized it. Events alone as a whole are not the Black Lady but passions installed in the soul. The Black Lady never is energy but perversion that this energy can produce in the soul. Enemies of the spirit always are in the very spirit.
“The ABYSS”. The same thing occurs with the world. The world alone is neither detestable nor produces desolation of any kind. Worldly things are good and bad, and the soul can do nothing to change them. We can change only our own world, our own things. The soul cannot address yet to our dearest one because we have nothing to do with him; the affection that one may fell is only something personal. Desolation about evils of the world refers only to those worldly evils living in us; it hurts what is in us.
Receptivity about evils produces desolation; so, a total indifference is desired.
The “TWO WAYS”. Detachment clears up quite well the problem of the world evil.
All is a question of attachment; all is a question of defects of the soul. If the soul was beautiful and good, the world would seem beautiful and good. If one can be detached from good and bad of the world, then we will join again harmoniously with Humanity; for the time being, we remain attached, colliding or standing aside –attraction and repulsion.
Likewise, if one can be detached from his own bad and evil, we will be again in peace with us, and able to cope with the exact dimension objectively.
The “STANDARD”. It is this standard that makes inner goods transcend. So far the soul was concerned about itself, exclusively, in its own inner world. The standard has a virtue: to objectify suddenly the most significant thing in our fights by moving the personal ideal outside the subjectivity; so, at the same time it succeeds in cleaning of remains and leftovers produced by this activities. The standard is the great cleaner of the soul and, at the same time, gives a new vision of the way; so, it increases one's enthusiasm for perfection.
Teaching 9: Other Passive Affective Meditations
The “GOLDEN TEMPLE”. To reach the Temple of the soul, we need to undergo innumerable difficulties related to inner activities. You reach the purity of the soul as you conquer the peak of a mount; you remain there some moment, and later you come back to the valley. But that mount, with all its difficulties, still stands unalterable. How to act for a permanent conquest of this peak? You may have and keep money, and not to lose it. But if one conquers some few moments of peace, how can keep them? Suddenly they disappear, and one comes back again to troubles of the world. Our consolation last few moments and for months we strive again after the conquest of few further moments. When will we learn how to find consolation and inner peace in effort itself? When will we learn how to conquer mounts for the sake of the conquest, for the sake of the escalation, not desiring the prize of the peak?
The “VEIL OF AHEHIA”. It is this effort for conquering inner peace that is inner peace. One's limited consciousness makes us believe that the triumph is the only valid thing; seemingly the Temple, the innermost Temple is nothing more than an inevitable consequence of our efforts and struggle. When you love efforts for the sake of perfection, as the essence of the way, you are identified with its goal. You look for God and do not find Him till your soul realizes that God becomes this search.
Likewise, one does not see Ahehia because Ahehia is veiled, till we realize that She is the veil that hides Her; so, we won't see that veil, –we will see Ahehia. So, we have to transform our inner vision of life, and to remain entirely in the bliss of being on the way and being the way. We should not tear the veil of Ahehia, –we must increase the power of our vision.
The “RESURRECTION OF HES”. The Divine Mother is with the soul, although she does not realize anything. She is here, but you do not see her. As one has little faith, we need some proof of her presence in order to be sure. When one learns how to live without proofs of the Divine, then our rapture will be permanent, although this rapture nothing has to do with outer sensations. One may be very wicked and suffer much; but if our own knowledge of the Divine Mother is in us, we are powerful, and the happiness of the soul will remain unalterable.
A rapture of the soul nothing has to do with what occurs on the epidermis. The point is that the epidermis affects the being as a limited human being and distracts one's inner vision outward; but defects never affect that fidelity that the Divine Mother feels for a soul. It is you that move away from her. She is in you; but you afford to ignore her. When you believe that you think of the Divine Mother, it is only your imagination, your fantasy that is thinking; if you thought entirely of her, you would never stop doing so.
Teaching 10: Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “BLACK LADY”. Blood is the link that unites man with God, matter with spirit. Blood is always a token of sacrifice. Blood not only vivifies our being, but also is the strongest link with customs, family and past. But all blood is renewed in few days. If that blood is ever renewed, then why do habits persist?
One's renewed blood is clean, but our being stains it with actions. If we were able to break for some few days the link with the past, our blood would not be spoiled and we could truly start again a purer and cleaner life.
One's blood is stained by actions; later, our blood turns against us. We need to break mechanical chain vices of the Black Lady, to discontinue the sequence of good and evil, to cut in one go the chain of causes and effects of the past. God and blood will take charge of the constant renewal of our blood. Our being must take charge of dying, since the Divine Mother will deal with reviving it. But how to die? This is the most difficult part.
The Divine Mother gives ever life, she is life; but one's being knows only one thing: to pervert this life that we are given. When for some few moments we learn how to kill this chain of perverted habits, our life will follow by itself the Divine Mother's pure and healthy blood.
“The ABYSS”. Also it is blood that unites Humanity. Many persons consider that the highest altruism is to offer their blood for some fair cause: fatherland, social movements, ideals; but apparently the highest, most useful and long-range offering is to regenerate the individual Humanity in us, by transforming all human aspects into a higher type.
Perhaps are not evils of the world caused by the lack of a visible model to imitate? Between Jesus is two-thousand years from us. Where is on Earth the real man, not the transmitter of an idea or movement? We need on this Earth the man-man, the man whose mission emanates from him. Simone Weil, Gandhi, Schweitzer, Ramakrishna, Gurdjieff, Lenin, Roosevelt, Einstein were not men; they were a reservoir: from them the Divine has arisen with different manifestations –social, scientific or supernatural; but none of these things can solve our fundamental problem. That self-valuable man-man, the archetype for two-thousand millions of little men, still is non-existent. May be he Maitreya?
Let us think that in ourselves, in the deepest and unknown point of our beings underlies this exact human archetype; we should not wish another thing until we achieve it. If we do, this will be the best triumph over the abyss. All men have also this inner archetype.
Teaching 11: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “TWO WAYS”. All souls in the world are predestined. One day, when the soul realizes its existence, freewill and ego, already this soul is almost formed: inadvertently, education, customs, society, habits and subconscious, have formed it rigorously. For the first fourteen years of life –the most important years for its formation– the soul was pure receptivity and acceptance without any objection, since was unaware of its own strength. But when the soul grows and discovers that is free and has a motive center called ego, what can this soul do in order to stay nearer to its ideals? And were not these ideals also forged by life itself?
All souls are predestined; truly, there are not two ways; just there is one way and its negation. To be or not to be. There is a way as the personality of the being on his millenary projection, or the tragic refusal to follow it –to let the chance of self-realization in life slip by.
So, there is no choice between God and world. It is not so. Rather one should say: this life or no life; this realization or no realization; life or death.
One can do only one thing: not to choose, but to know; to know the background as a whole and the forms of being, in order to clear up and define in our consciousness which is the way, its form, texture and mode of our own course. Any man has only one way, which is determined by his past; he must know it and build a stepping-stone of improvement upon this past.
The “STANDARD”. Likewise with the standard. What standard should one choose? White, black, blue or red? It is a ridiculous question. You have only one standard established by God thousands of lives ago, and you cannot despise it because, willy-nilly you have to come back once and again to this standard; you cannot live another life, except your own life; you cannot suffer from pains of others, you cannot laugh with the laugh of others. Every person laughs with his own laugh, suffers from his own pains, loves his own loves, and believes in his own God. Every one has his own standard and is his own standard.
This standard was made in the individual being before his formal choice; this standard was waiting for him.
The Divine Mother gives the individual being life and his parents and friends, and has formed his body and his soul, made him be born in whatever age and place, made him think of infinite unexpected things, and made him fall sick in spite of him, and even so the soul sometimes wonder, where is its standard? The individual being is totally surrounded by God; God permeates him everywhere, and does he still wonder where the standard is? The standard is the life that the Divine Mother gives him; that which She forcefully and inadvertently imposes. The standard is the unexpected thing, a surprise, a disease of tomorrow, a walk next Sunday, a friend, Cafh; all this and even the meaning contained.
The standard is this truth that now has appeared in the individual being, and even efforts made to incarnate it.
Teaching 12: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “GOLDEN TEMPLE”. As one living and appreciating, with our memory, positive and negative results of our experiences, we are learning not only how to foresee results, but also to measure life with a new measure of the time.
As soon as you act, also its original causes and future consequences are present in the said act. So, instead of perceiving a very short present time, we experience a sensation of our present time that is much longer, so long that contains cause, phenomenon and consequences.
So, you learn how not to live blindly or microscopically, but with higher clairvoyance coming from the apprenticeship of experience and not from enlightenment or psychic revelation. For example, if a person went to bed and later woke up again thousands of times, when he retires at night he knows that his sleep is limited, and after some hours he will be awake and will start again his struggle for life. Although one sleeps and rests, we know absolutely that this is transient and that we have to return to the wakeful consciousness. Also, when one is tired, we know that this tiredness lasts a short while because at night when we go bed, we relax and leave aside tensions of the day.
So, one knows when it is time to rest and when it is time to work, and also we know their original causes and consequences.
A vital knowledge of this kind gives considerable consolation as much for moments of disappointment as for those of pleasure. For instance, you enjoy a movie picture in a cinema, and say, “This film lasts only ninety minutes”; later, your fantasy is over and you have to return to the street again; in your office, you say, “After two hours I will be breathing pure air again. So, the point is not to eternize the suffering or pleasure. The point is to transform subjective time into objective time, into clock time, which is unalterable and wiser; it does not distort. This consolation by the exactness of the time, by the shortness and limitation of the soul moments, and the play and balance of the different times, gives the immense consolation that things are objective: this is a pencil, this is a table and this is the soul. Just this imperfect soul distorts the vision of life and makes you believe that a pleasant afternoon is the whole life. One wants the soul to know itself with most perfect exactness. This is to obey, this is to pray and this is a defect. You do not know your soul to be wrong any more, and now, since your soul is not wrong as before, your consolation is better and does not come as a sedative, –it is understanding of the things.
Desolation, which is the opposite pole of consolation, comes because your soul expects one thing and life answers otherwise; it is your being that prefers to expect nothing more and nothing less than those things that life can provide. Your being tries to be exact and accurate. It wants to be always in the truth. There is no higher consolation than this.
Teaching 13: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “VEIL OF AHEHIA”. The veil of Ahehia is not only linen of illusions but also robe of protection, which preserves from the inclemency of life.
Sometimes, the soul enthused over an inner inspiration knows how to fly throughout unfamiliar times, where nobody has entered. This soul takes flight and, for some few moments, accedes a land of mystery and light; later, it returns and glides to the Earth, to the reality of daily illusions. The individual being cannot stand this unknown land long time. According to sages, this world is pure illusion, but the individual being, the man of this world says, all that is real, illusions, fantasies, supernatural worlds. Can we state something that we did not experience, just because some sages did say so?
Many beings enter the supernatural world and say: the real world, the mental world is more real than the material world. This is a mistake: those worlds perhaps are as real as this one, but nothing more. What is real, the essence, Ahehia, is a vertical pillar in a world of any kind. Perhaps did not physicists see, in their exclusive investigation of the matter, how the matter is and how disintegrates, remaining for them the gate of the temple of the spirit open? It is not necessary to deny the matter in order to discover the spirit; also through its affirmation we may find it because through successive and accumulative affirmations we even reach that which transmutes matter into spirit.
If an ordinary man states, “Matter is illusory, and just the spirit is real”, you may suspect he says so because someone else has said so, and not because he has grasped it entirely with his own being.
Do his eyes, ears, glands, stomach and entire body know that matter is illusory? And as soon as he has satisfied his hunger, is his food or his satisfaction illusory? Is illusory that food that preserves him from death?
No, it is also real; Ahehia's veil is not a veil of illusion, but a robe of protection; it is Ahehia herself. One's bliss does not consist in drawing the veil, but in affirming and preserving it in our heart. One's bliss comes from our understanding of what this veil represents, and also from our understanding of the need of a body.
Certain anchorites deny the matter and abandon their own body by staining and impoverishing it: men of this kind ignore the perfect correspondence between body and spirit, and that if they stain the body, distort somehow the spirit. One's body is an instrument, a scaffold, a mechanic structure for the realization of the soul; if you destroy the matter, if you rend quite early the veil, you stay without that instrument that you are given to affirming and realizing your spiritual growth. It is as if a mason hastens to look at the building that he is erecting and removes the scaffolds before he finishes the edifice. How can he finish it later?
Teaching 14: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “RESURRECTION OF HES.” Those who think of death, perhaps refuse to form an idea about it, or conceal it with the idea of a more venturous hereafter, as if it were impossible to sustain the thought about death itself.
In fact, a supernatural life may exist, but this does not impede death to have its own meaning, being heavens or hells unnecessary. Those who justify death as a transition to another world are the same beings that justify life as a proof to conquer heaven.
One should be against this ways of thinking. Perhaps do not some atheists –who do not believe in the hereafter– live or certainly live well? To talk about death is to talk about life. One should consider death in terms of life, and on the same level of birth. Sometimes one suspects that those who believe that death is a transition to the hereafter are the same beings that deny life and found all their hopes on a paradise where their wishes shall be satisfied.
To think of death as a passage to another better life is not to die; for an atheist, true death is certain death where everything finishes. Those who are tired, as after a laborious day wish to sleep, also truly wish to die so that their worn-out, completed and finished lives disappear.
There is no better rapture than the contemplation of death; not a contemplation of the paradise, since only a deep conviction about a total annihilation can produce in life the elimination of material uses. Truly to die, to disappear till the last atom, is a thought that can entirely calm down all passions in our beings. To think of a paradise is to revitalize all human potentials, because such a paradise is nothing more than justification, sublimation and increase of human desires. But a total annihilation that is gradually entering every cell of our system, is slowly putting its seal of death and transmutation on every cell.
Physical death produces automatically the transmutation of human potentials into a higher stage, but we should emphasize that a real death is not death of the spirit –which is immortal– but death of personal uses and their disappearance from the individual being.
Rapture is something different from what we imagine; it is as if we mistake the smell of an embalmed body or mummy with that of a carnation.
Generally speaking, rapture comes from increasing the potentiality of the human life, and not from our conviction about death; this is why it produces an effect opposite to our wishes. A feeling of resurrection is not pleasant at all, it is rather painful, the most painful feeling because is like a childbirth, but also is quite touching for the soul. If a soul is in search for God, and finds Him closer in the rapture, however painful this rapture is, that soul will ever be in the quest there. You cannot smile after the rapture because it rather produces intense sadness. In this sadness, we feel our soul gradually diluted on wider and wider spaces, and we feel all life in it.
Teaching 15: Monologue as Preparation for Meditation
“I AM WHAT I AM.” Experiences of every moment forcefully teach us that we are in bondage in a world of psychological chains that are strange to our own will. How many times we say, “I'll get rid from my habits”, and never we achieve it. Truly, we are something, not only something present, but also something that becomes and strives for being. This struggle in a maze of difficulties is the spiritual way of every being.
At daybreak, as soon as one wakes up and is clean and tidy, we go to job through lonely streets, and our soul vibrates with peace and inner joy more intensely and more healthy than with a good meditation. Seemingly life is so beautiful, and we ourselves do not believe to be so bad. These minutes in the morning and with fresh air seem a promise of what could be life any time and in whatever circumstance, if and when we are able to forget habits of previous actions. As the sleep retrieves and cleans, so also we wish that our daily living and our continuous yearning of the soul for the conquest of freedom could someday transform life into a perpetual morning.
Truly, every one is what is, such as things occur, with all defects, but someday one will be what one wants to be, or what God wishes us to be. Meanwhile we are what life leads us from one end to another; but we should recognize that at no other time than early morning we feel so satisfied with ourselves and with things.
You cannot be yourself if before you do not learn how to forget and to leave things aside. You discover that when you are against some force, this force increases and imposes stronger efforts; you understand that this is all right, but demands your inner efforts gradually to increase more and more. To overcome the enemy is not enough; the important thing is that you may become bigger through struggle. And how can your soul become bigger through those gradual, stronger efforts to do in order to overcome? It is Heracles' image fighting against the Hydra; as soon as he cut one head, two other heads went out of its gullet. The important thing is to become stronger and more strenuous, and not the disappearance of the enemy. Enemies are instruments of destiny for our total growth. Only through fight you can conquer the gift of your own individuality.
Teaching 16: Imaginative Monologues as Preparation for Meditation
First Monologue: Loneliness and Introspection. One is not absolute; one is not autonomous in the individual world. You cannot be autonomous even by living alone in an island lost in the ocean, because we are the logic result of a chain of lives and deaths that are beyond our will. You are determined by society –by the present and past society. We think in a circle of ideas, which is common to Humanity as a whole; we have ideals of our time. When society falls sick, we are also sick although the individual life may be perfect. We were not born now in vain and at any time. What has been the cause of this birth? We do not know, but certainly we know that we were born at certain place and time, and willy-nilly we have to accept the rough guidelines of our times.
But in this mechanic determination is the motor of your absolute individuality, which is not dependent upon a general mechanism of life, but upon it own laws. Life as a whole –actions, concerns, wishes and dreams– is on the periphery of one's personality; but gradually one burrows little pieces of human life and sets them in the gear of the inner motor. This way one expects gradually to retire, migrate from periphery to center, and to move actions and thoughts as a whole from the unconscious mechanism of social habits to the individual inner motor. When you are in a lonely and introspective state, you sense the noise of this hidden motor and gradually discover its characteristics.
Second Monologue: Fictitious death. To die is a perfect medicine for diseases of life. Death of life, ordinary death contains medicine and forgetfulness at the same time. You die, and ties disappear, because you have to go, you have to disappear; later ambitions for building beautiful things also disappear.
But the sovereign spirit of man has discovered that he can die and heal his diseases, being forgetfulness unnecessary; that is to say, we can be present and truly do all those beautiful things we wished to do, but that we were unable to do by lack of proper means. To die in life; here is the discovery of the creative spirit.
Physical death is always the great teaching: it does not teach resignation or repentance –it teaches rebelliousness against the blind impulse of our habits and instincts, and against stupidity in front of life, against wickedness and against laziness letting years pass with no valid actions.
To die in life; that is to say, to die in virtues of death; to live with perfect detachment from those who are dead. To kill the so-called goods, virtues, abilities, education, class, heritage, wishes, hope, dream and treasures of Humanity; and to be pure action, both inner and outer action, but being detached from these things, not touching the inner being because we are dead within. The soul is not terrestrial and cannot be touched because resides in the world of hereafter.
CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Meditation
Teaching 2: Discursive Meditation on a Text
Teaching 3: Texts for Discursive Meditation
Teaching 4: Affective Meditation on the “Black Lady” and the “Abyss”
Teaching 5: Affective Meditation on the “Two Ways” and the “Standard”
Teaching 6: Affective Meditation on the “Golden Temple” and the “Veil of Ahehia”
Teaching 7: Affective Meditation on “Resurrection of Hes”
Teaching 8: Other Passive Affective Meditations
Teaching 9: Other Passive Affective Meditations
Teaching 10: Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 11: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 12: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 13: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 14: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
Teaching 15: Monologue as Preparation for Meditation
Teaching 16: Imaginative Monologues as Preparation for Meditation |