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CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Inner Life
Teaching 2: Prayer
Teaching 3:
Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual Life
Teaching 4: Meditation
Teaching 5: Simple Prayer
Teaching 6:
Discursive Meditation
Teaching 7: Passive Meditation
Teaching 8: Ascetic Deviations
Teaching 9: Sensible Spiritual States
Teaching 10: Dryness
Teaching 11: Idealization during Meditation
Teaching 12: To Love in Silence
Teaching 13: Creative Imagination
Teaching 14: Asceticism in Life
Teaching 15:
Renunciation in the World
Teaching 16: The Idea of Renunciation
Many times you hear you have to return to inner life. But, what is actually inner life?
Also you are told evil in man consists in a continuous outward switch; and if you looked for within, you would find solution to all your problems. Which is that search, and how to start it?
Many souls are eager for inner life; but they do not know what to do to reach it, and then when they look within, are disappointed and in the dark.
All can reach a full inner life, but there are souls and souls, states and states.
Some people believe inner life is to think much, to investigate problems, to return continuously to themselves. Others look for inner life by sustained efforts of will to achieve their purposes. It is good to meditate on needs of the soul, but this is not inner life. If inner life does not mean to think or self-analyze, you could believe inner life is a continuous practice of exercises of meditation or prayer. These are actions of the individual being that become helpful, but are not inner life.
Inner life is a vital, total attitude of the individual.
Mainly, inner life is to invert the usual movement of the soul; not an action led inwards, but an elevation of spiritual values over human values. When we speak here of valuation of the spiritual aspect, we do not mean a mental attitude, but a new sense given to the existence to place it in the frame of its transcendental terms.
By this, natural centers of concerns are naturally displaced toward a unique, divine object, and forces of the soul stop being dispersed with useless gestures and start focusing on a unique spiritual action.
So inner life is not only an active movement of the soul, but also an usual spiritual disposition transforming disconnected and disordered actions of man into true life, into spiritual life.
When you are told, you need to “return” to the inner life, your impression is that inner life is a good that you possessed some day and that now is not yours any more. If you are told that you must return, it is because your soul always was darkly and vaguely aware of possessing that good that you seek so painfully and that will give happiness. It is like a deep consciousness of being and like knowledge that any conquest will be only a rediscovery. Knowing this one is infusedly and unbreakably sure that will attain the goal and that the destiny will be achieved.
Neither faith in spiritual life nor acceptance of the idea that human values are vain and fleeting is enough to make spiritual life possible.
Doubtless a vast faith increases human chances; but one thing is a thought accepted by people and another thing altogether is the living reality of the soul. Life may be ruled by trends entirely opposite to those ideas that an individual feels that he has. The human tragedy is that he is something very different from what he believes that he is, and his thoughts are continuously weakened by his deeds and trends. So the main effort in spiritual life should be made to achieve unity between mind and mind, and between mind and heart.
So perfection in inner life is not active concentration, but soul expansion, simple act of the spirit.
Inner life is progressive and expansive self-consciousness. It is the new world that man has to discover and conquer. To it he needs to know his own means to achieve it.
First he must know what is good; later he has to live according to it when the end is eventually transformed into “the” good.
To live centered in oneself, not out of oneself or inside oneself. A thought personally turned upon the individual being moves him away from his divine center. Just Renunciation fixes the soul to an inner life that is pure and simple.
When the important thing is spirituality, the human aspect takes its corresponding place, and illusory life becomes life, inner life.
Only inner life gives experience of the Teaching and of the divine mysteries. All problems lose importance and only fundamental problems remain alive.
From a mystical viewpoint, the grade of inner life is given by the depth of abstraction acquired or also by the usual clarity of control and self-consciousness.
Prayer as a mystical-ascetic mean is excellent in spiritual life, but at the same time is full inner life and becomes divine life by permanent contact with the Divine Mother.
Prayer is life; so it is not easily understood. Every human understanding is mere understanding and cannot comprise vast inner states or living forces brought into play in the mystical asceticism of spiritual life.
But it is necessary clearly to know both technique and prayer states of the souls, and to understand the need of prayer as an ascetic mean to divine realization.
Prayer is supernatural life of the soul, and in this sense it cannot be said it is necessary. It is, but humanly it is necessary as a mean to attain that supernatural life.
The eternal presence in the soul of its divine vocation is a latent state of inner prayer. But for practical purposes, prayer is taken as conscious attempts of the individual being to update in him that divine presence. These exercises of prayers produce a direct effect on the soul and are like little consecutive shocks that are continuously transforming the soul. At the same time they bring about reactions and inner states forming sediment of spiritual power within the individual being.
Regardless exercises of prayer, there is a particular mode of the soul that can be called state of prayer. It is a simple act, regardless time and action, which fixes statically the individual being on a singular inner point as fixed center of his existence. This state is achieved by the permanent offering of the soul by means of Renunciation.
Even though exercises in themselves can achieve noticeable conquests in the field of mental and supernatural possibilities, they are insufficient to introduce the soul into the mystery of divine states. Inner spiritual life is achieved not only by ascetic prayer but also by ascetic Renunciation. Only Renunciation transforms acts of prayer into a permanent state.
Prayer produces in the soul contingent effects and permanent effects.
Prayer gradually leads to a physical, mental, astral and psychical adjustment, to successive higher and higher states; purifies affections and mental mechanism; situates intellectual, rational and emotional values; gradually simplifies the soul complex; brings to consciousness obscure subconscious states; gives wealth of ancestral experience gathered by the unconscious of the race; produces capacity to live super conscious states; tunes the sensibility of the soul and gradually raises to a divine state, to the union with the Divine Mother.
Prayer synchronizes intrinsic and extrinsic values and supernatural and natural values transforming being into a harmonious, integral whole.
Prayer leaves in the soul a permanent feeling of peace and certainty, a consciousness of being, staying on the road, and knowing that one arrives to its end.
Prayer gives life to the soul, makes man be conscious of his true vocation and divine destiny, and creates potentials of human and supernatural forces which he needs.
Prayer gives a direct knowledge of divine verities, presenting them to the soul with no other intellectual mechanism at all.
Prayer grants the gift of knowing and the gift of teaching: the gift of penetrating into the divine mystery and into unfathomable depths of the human heart.
Prayer gives infinite patience and supernatural comprehension of human problems, and there you find the secret to be able to live a divine life in a world that is darker and darker by sorrow, ignorant passion and separateness.
Teaching 3: Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual Life
Several exercises of meditation taught in ascetic spiritual life acquire or lose importance according to the situation of the Son before this spiritual life.
The Son meditates regularly and methodically.
This continuity in a life devoted to realize the Renunciation necessarily produces the mystical union of the soul with the Divine Mother, wherever the Son is and whatever is the work that he has to fulfill.
This union takes place by means of successive simpler and simpler. So the soul naturally simplifies little by little its methods of prayer until they are reduced to similar contemplative states, although with different particular hues.
Doubtless prayer alone does not give realization, and even the most active way or any other way cannot lead to the Substantial Union when contemplative mystic states are absent
Rational mind dissociates activity from inner contemplation because it only operates in one sense, but a realized soul does not lose its contact with God even amid the most hectic activity.
You cannot differentiate life in the world from life detached from the world, and even there are not two types of prayer, one for every state of life. Simply there are several ways to feel the Renunciation and the need of inner offering. The pitfall is not in major or minor difficulties that the one and the other offer to the system of life, but in the spiritual poverty of the souls.
Wherever you are and whatever you do, you need will to Renounce and to do it.
In a contemporary author’s view, a normal man is a God-Realized man. Those who did not achieve it suffer of some unbalance preventing them from an integral experience of the reality, so their vision of things and life is distorted.
Then we can say there is not a major or minor inclination to mystic life, but a major or minor intensity of real life, of total experience of the truth, and of its need.
Behind extreme human inclinations there is always an internal factor of unbalance producing them, and we can state that almost any individual tends to certain extreme end in his life and actions.
The Divine Realization is not the fruit of an extreme inclination to asceticism; if so, it would be false mysticism.
Substantial Union is perfect balance, contingent and transcendent situation; integral situation and integral action.
There are few expert souls on the paths of inner prayer and meditation because few souls deeply feel their vocation of Renunciation and achieve it, but these souls are those marking the way and teaching how to realize it.
This apprenticeship is difficult because demands more than inner adhesion and practice. Also a free mental attitude is necessary.
When you feel that you already know something, you close any possibility to new experiences. Only when you know and admit that your experience is not total or definitive, your field is free to get successive infinite experiences. But this must be something more than an understanding; it is integration to the experience in its character of non-totality.
First we should explain the meaning of meditation, exercises of meditation, prayer, orison and entreaty.
The exercise of meditation is not an entreaty or request for oneself and for another person; it is an exercise of the mind. One thing is to entreat and another thing altogether is to meditate.
Meditation is a state or disposition of the soul.
Meditation is stability in a state of consciousness, in contrast to the usual variability.
The exercise of meditation is the mean tending to achieve this state, to make it more and more permanent, and to attain the simple state by gradual simplification.
Prayers are a particular mode of the meditation exercise.
Man is a compound if emotions, thoughts, ideas and sensations.
You need varied exercises to effectively act on every aspect and achieve a unique, precise and integral end.
Prayers, entreaties, vocalized prayers, and both discursive and affective meditation act on the emotional plane.
Affective meditation also acts on the comprehensive and ideational plane by the force of feeling. It does not create or discover; it works.
Exercise inside exercise cannot solve a vital problem. Life is solved in life; a mental or emotional problem is only the reflection of a problem. Exercise only leads to the point that unleashes a vital definition. A mental schema is not a solution, is a schema.
He who did not solve his fundamental problem has problems; he who has solved his life has tasks.
Confusion between what is an exercise and what is a mystic state produces disorientation as to the practice of the exercise of meditation.
The exercise unleashes sensible forces that turned on the chosen ideal cause a sensation of a greater union with God. The very act of internally setting oneself in the presence of the Divine Mother is already a partial state of union. But since the exercise of meditation is also a mystic exercise, difficulties of the exercise are mistaken for inner problems disconnected from the exercise of meditation.
Of course, sensible states produced during the exercise never are true mystique, but in most cases they are paramount moments in the life of the souls that take them as guides who indicate their progress and spiritual level.
True meditation never discontinues, like life, what should be spiritual life. But meditation is mistaken for the exercise, and exercise certainly is discontinued forcefully. So you have two different and opposite states of consciousness: the first, in the circle of exercise of meditation, could be called consciousness of the soul; the second, when the exercise ends and ordinary daily life begins.
These circles collide and fight one other.
The power of the Great Current keeps this inner fight alive. The Son fights not against external factors but against himself. Here is the virtue of Cafh: to unleash the internal conflict, which the Son calls spiritual life, struggle, efforts and realization; it is force transmutation. Change gives a sensation of achievement.
Exercises that are taught, particularly the exercise of meditation, keeps this struggle alive and fruitful.
The Son’s technique consists in knowing and creating by himself those conscious and unconscious stimuli that sustain and accelerate the rhythm of his spiritual life.
Despite good intentions, despite apparent efforts, certain souls complain because they cannot realize the spiritual life. Everywhere one finds difficulties and obstacles. Everything becomes justifications to explain the stagnation. So we are often told that in the world there are many stumbling blocks to achieve a pure spiritual life and that although all Sons can attain the Renunciation, people who must live on the vale only find difficulties.
Really this is meaningless because the soul that lives an inner life and prays, cannot have difficulties wherever is is, or whatever does, or whoever is, but certainly, many times the Son, by virtue of numberless causes, permits to be trapped by needs of life and by excessive preoccupation for his material troubles, and this moves away from contemplation and divine things; then a lot of difficulties emerge.
It is impossible to be in peace with oneself if first we do not define our inner values. You can never find what you procrastinate or relegate, and spiritual vocation never must be displaced by other concerns or intentions.
Everything will be difficult as you make your vocation play on the pair of opposites of one thing or the other, of one desire or the other, of one need or the other. This should reveal a great inner instability that is true source of all the rest of conflicts or obstacles.
The spiritual vocation is the only real value of the individual being, and therefore can be neither impossible nor exclusive for very few people. But its achievement is only reserved to those who know how to live it as their only real value.
Only a clear and final definition of what the Son is seeking allows him traveling through the path toward the inner liberation without inner obstacles.
As a practice, the simple prayer is the best way to remain centered on the Unique Idea and transcend inner and outer difficulties.
It is to do everything with an intention previously established by a life of surrender; it is faith on the success and good result of the spiritual mission, although if apparently this is not so; and it is a state of deep and usual humility in face of every action to fulfill in life.
Teaching 6: Discursive Meditation
Discursive meditation should be based on faith in order to become effective.
You may ask if all other –affective and sensitive meditations– likewise should not be based on faith. If you take strictly the latter as a mental-affective mechanism in action, they require no particular faith of the individual. On the other hand, discursive meditation is a free talk of the soul with the Divine Mother, and only faith can give it a divine sense.
Doubtless any exercise of meditation is a mystic exercise, as effort of the soul to attain the union with God; but at the same time it has a psychological mechanism perfectly fit to the end pursued.
During the invocation the soul appeals to the best feelings and tries to move deep layers so far ignored. Although the soul calls to the Divinity imagined out of him, actually is seeking the divine essence that dwells on the vastness of his consciousness that still is unknown.
The invocation is like higher and higher tension soul powers until their natural limit and to stay motionless there on the threshold of the mystery.
Silence is not only to stay with a receptive attitude expecting the answer. It is an exercise that usually consists on staying longer and longer time on a different vibration that is superior to the state of usual consciousness with no need of certain volitive movements to achieve it, as it occurs with the invocation.
The invocation is like an arrow thrown toward the unknown, innermost depths of the soul, and there is an inevitable answer. The immediate answer, although it is important, is not tantamount to the inner movement that the invocation brings about by repeated stimuli.
Silence has a very great mystic value: sets the soul before the Divine Mother by means of a pure act of faith and love entirely free of images and pre-concepts that are an obstacle when one seeks to contact Her on an entirely spiritual way. Since the intellect does not act at the same time, one acquires a negative attitude that is extraordinarily favorable to attain rapidly a supernatural state.
When there is a particular predisposition to prayer, the time of silence can become an exercise like that above-explained in reference to meditation about the Resurrection of Hes. But in this case you should not seek a determined sensation because then you go out of the discursive exercise, but you must remain there, motionless, suspended on the divine void and feeling more and more closely the presence of the Divine Mother.
There is a different hue: in Hes’ resurrection, this feeling is somehow oriented to get a determined state: rapture; in this case, to reduce you to the purposes of the exercise, you should lead it in no sense and you are bound to stay motionless and in the dark in front of the unknown.
The time of silence can lead to this, but the exercise strictly considered consists in staying there, trying not to think, imagine and move, but only to stay.
When in meditation we get a true elevation of the soul, the response is not coming from the ordinary mind. However little elevated may be the state achieved, it is another state of more spiritual consciousness, and responds to the best part of individual being.
Although we are ever told the same things or the same suggestions are repeated, this does not spoil the exercise but makes it more valuable.
A different purpose every day never can produce a true inner conquest, but a persistent, ever-identical intention charges with power the will although with the magnetic suggestive power of the repeated word.
This exercise is not the true response. Meditation cannot be only the answer to a question; one state responds to other state.
Discursive meditation as an exercise first is reduced to a series of successive considerations. You learn how to analyze and how to analyze yourself; to reflect and to make of reflection an objective knowledge instead of reacting personally.
Then you project an image of the world or of yourself to know, situate and charge this image with that energy to strengthen or sublimate it.
A usual consideration of personal and human problems closely acquaints you with the most fundamental problems: the becoming, death and illusion.
But you need not to distort the reality to know and know yourself. Only then discursive meditation may become inner meditation.
• First, discursive thinking.
• Later, knowing.
• Then, seeking
Until becoming a deep absorption in which the period of silence is an interlude between objective state and subjective state, between active state and passive state.
Teaching 7: Passive Meditation
The exercise of meditation is ever active; passivity depends on the attitude and disposition of the soul in regard to the exercise.
The exercise is called passive when is slower and produces simpler states.
A slower exercise prepares the soul not to stare at the purely-intelligible concept of the idea but at the power of the idea, and by avoiding numerous movements of the mind and heart, gradually leads to a simpler and simpler prayer, to a meditative state.
Passive meditation naturally introduces in meditation of simplicity and quiet, and later leads to subjective meditation and contemplation, and to certain states of subconscious participation.
Active meditation is a movement from inside to outside simultaneously attained in two ways: first as exercise, by moving the thought-feeling to concepts and images that configure and determine it; second, by bringing about mental and emotional movements that always are externalizations of the individual being and outside him.
Passive meditation is a movement from outside to inside. It takes the external representative symbol (word-idea, movement of the soul) as a support for an inner search and uses an active exercise as a mean.
Active meditation is an expression of a mental state.
Passive meditation is an effort to attain a deep state of consciousness from natural oral symbols and conventional representation of feeling and thought.
Here is the difficulty that you find in passive meditation: since externally it is an active exercise, you seek it only by means of the slowness that characterizes it. But slowness is an effect, not the motive of passive meditation. Bad interpretations occur because whatever be the type of inner movement or state that you want to express, this is ever expressed by language, which is an active mode of the mind.
The secret of passive meditation consists in the inverse movement of attention-intention, by means of concentration toward a non-determined inner side tending to the subjective experience, from a determined and objective support as the active exercise is. So the exercise becomes naturally, not forcefully slower. Words are always the reflection of other much deeper thing occurred within, which is meditation.
Active meditation is discursive thinking that canalizes the idea-emotion through a pre-determined mould. Passive meditation is non-discursive thinking, deeper and deeper introspection, but expressed by discursive thinking to the purpose of the exercise.
Non-determined images facilitate sensation and passive understanding that is almost non-rational. One tends to pictures or subjective impressions.
Passive meditation fixes only one image and keeps it strictly in its frame. You should not seek an extreme slowness but certain parsimony leading to absorption as a prelude to concentration. True concentration is deep absorption.
In meditation you cannot attain suddenly only one image, a unique state. But by means of a growing passivity, the soul is getting used to fix a lesser number of images and then needs less words and mental movement to achieve a state.
The very state, whether in every step or in meditation in general, is not so much complex; there is less to-and-fro mental movement and emotional leaps, and meditation is stabilized in a deeply-internal state.
Passive meditation is an exercise that gradually simplifies prayer and makes it flow into a unique idea, a unique feeling. In passive meditation you do not seek certain emotional state or an already-fixed consequence as a result. Even in meditation you do not try to experience sensible states but only depth, inner silence and absorption.
The deep absorption of the soul is a simple, elementary, unique state. A simplification of the steps tends to make of every step a state, and later a state of meditation as a whole. So meditation gradually becomes subjective concentration that is naturally deep and spontaneous; true prayer absorbing the whole soul.
By exercising the will you get a gradual passivity that facilitates the access to the true passive meditation. Certain moments indicate to each soul a necessary change from an active exercise to a passive exercise. It is then when prayer naturally becomes subjective, especially the imaginative picture. Even not knowing the passive exercise, usually and necessarily the souls meditate passively being unaware of that which they are doing. But even when the Divine Mother leads them by the hand during the prayer, they should be aware of and know the passive exercise by experience to be guided by Her without hesitations on the illuminative path, whose start She is marking.
Teaching 8: Ascetic Deviations
The most common deviation from asceticism is when it stops being a mean and becomes an end.
Doubtless none takes asceticism as an end in itself, but it is very easy to mistake contingent results of asceticism for mystique.
Every act of the individual being brings about a result whose entire repercussion is on him. You cannot separate physical effects from astral, psychological, mental and spiritual effects. So, although the object of asceticism is a gradual predisposition of the soul for the Union with God, at the same time the asceticism produces secondary contingent effects in the soul.
You should not mistake natural or supernatural states for divine states, and contingent conquests for permanent realization of the soul.
Asceticism is a psychical state, a supernatural, metapsychical, experimental state of the mind. In one word: it is the order of the brain to the cerebral-spinal mechanism in regard to will; these orders are imparted by the brain to acquire a method, a system adjusting the soul in the frame of an inner life that the soul wants to attain.
Mystique is an indescribable, transcendent, obscure, unknown state, but at the same time is source of any realization.
This does not deny the reality of secondary effects of asceticism, but one has to find them. Since Renunciation is an absolutely spiritual good, souls remain very easily trapped by the shine of immediate ascetic conquests, which to be more accessible are much more attractive. When divine states are higher they are vaguer and obscurer, and it is necessary to achieve a very great Renunciation to transcend those immediate goods obtained by mystical asceticism.
When the result of ascetic practices is a supernatural state of the mind, intellect or emotion, there is a natural desire to repeat the experience. This repetition is good controlling the technique of the process, but if you insist on it, a state that was a mystic consequence becomes a relative sequence and therefore loses its divine value.
The union with God is not a positive act of the individual being, it is dynamics in itself, a simple, inexpressible state, infinite as to its divine magnitude, which manifests in the soul as a state that more than a full experience is expansive, radiating, simple and quite deep full being. It is an abyssal and total undifferentiated consciousness, with no limits or impediments, infinitely deep and obscure, in which all disappears and gets lost just to remain the obscure and indecipherable aspect in itself.
Teaching 9: Sensible Spiritual States
We call sensible spiritual states those states of meditation or contemplation characterized by an intense emotional experience although of lofty and spiritual kind.
Ordinary emotional states in meditation are active, with intense sensible movements. In sensible spiritual states, emotionality is more and more passive and tends to affective immobility.
We may say sensible spiritual states start with prayer of quietness. When the soul tends to become more passive, gets more depth in emotional experience, but is a static depth that hardly moves the waters of ordinary emotionality.
That is why in this prayer your only desire is to stay there, apparently inactive. It is an undefined peace that is almost insensible.
Ordinary emotionality gets not used to the intense vibration of spiritual states, and it is as if it were not feeling anything.
Sensible states are beautiful as experience, but only affect an aspect of the individual; they are not total. They are consequence of states of prayer, but are not full prayer.
A true prayer absorbs the entire being, fusing his body, mind and heart in a whole spiritual and supernatural unity.
The soul desires many times contemplation because of sensible states attained by it, not as a result of renunciation prayer and an entirely divine aspiration.
Generally the purgative stage is longer than that that one feels, and lasts as long emotionality has not been purified by means of the sensible renunciation.
Purification of sensibility is not only transmutation of the grossest emotionality but also its spiritual sublimation by means of renunciation to the sensible aspect. It is more that to renounce to consolation and satisfaction; it is to go out of the world of affective substitutions and transpositions.
This is bread fit to all, because when we speak of renouncing to affective transpositions, we easily destroy the momentum, and the weak souls are paralyzed and fall.
Really it is “a house without support”.
Certain people believe that, since they are not affective, do not need or have reached the sensible renunciation simply because they do not find stimulus in anything. But this lack of sensible stimuli often leads them to painful, depressive states. I they had really renounced, they would not notice that they lack stimuli or that nothing attracts them in particular.
Transposition of affections is not only necessary but indispensable. Sensible renunciation is not to forsake the asceticism, but not to convert it into a succession of goods to attain but states to experience. Asceticism, like prayer, must become impersonal.
The point is that sensible states are a usual state of consciousness of the individual, and he cannot easily dispose of them; it is like to live suspended on the void. Life was a succession of feelings, and without them one stops being.
The only support in the existence is the hope to reach what one desires. This hope never must be destroyed, but we must gradually and very carefully eliminate the sensible hope.
What one expects is not always what one expects. Sensible states are beautiful but must pass.
Sensible superficial states cannot last long because are a considerable expenditure of energy and alternate with period of insensibility that usually cause great suffering to the beginners who believe that have lost their inner good. But later usually there are times of great dryness that can last long time. It is the moment for the great purification.
Only a mightier power than strong affective movements can lead the soul to the inner stability.
Just dryness overcomes sensibility.
Dryness is the hand of the Divine Mother upon the soul that was called to perfection.
Dryness takes place when the exercise of meditation does not give sensible responses.
The Son, identified with the thought-desire projected by the mind, gets lost in the void of a sensibility that was consumed by emotional collisions of an uncontrolled mind.
In the beginning he would bring about a force opposite to another force, and this struggle gave him the impression of his actions. But time consumes the capacity of sensible response and only leaves a force lost in an abyss without echoes. It is the moment of anguish, loneliness and dryness in prayer.
Renunciation expressed by the habit of mental and emotional control places the individual being over his sensible movements and establishes prayer on a deeper level inaccessible to emotional waters and usual, instinctive rational thought.
There the soul is not only free of the vortex of an instinctive-volitive life, but by the same reason is also free of knowing and being.
Usually dryness and difficulties in meditation may have strange causes to the spiritual soul development. It may occur that since the mind does not respond to the work of usual activity in the time chosen for the exercise then the feelings do not come to the surface and all is suffering. Simply it may be physical or mental tiredness. Likely on another moment one would have an excellent disposition for meditation.
The important thing is the ascetic exercise, not the immediate consequences of it. In this case, the most perfect meditation is constant effort to overcome physical states, to keep the mind above mind itself.
There are two types of dryness:
1) Dryness of beginners. It is harmful, produced by struggle of worldly, carnal sensibility against spiritual sensibility. In this state the Sons have to be accompanied with sweetness.
2) Dryness of souls that is already steady in their vocation. It is fruitful dryness.
Spiritual consolation and bliss consume themselves on a personal experience that is valid only for oneself.
Dryness is experience that yields fruit in the direction of the souls: very indispensable, valuable experience to reach spiritual maturity.
It is impossible an eventual transformation of the Divinity into something like our image, or into a God of consolation, bliss and heavenly favor; one cannot limit the Divinity. So after the Divinity descends into the soul, escapes and waits that the soul may seek the Divinity and transmute the prayer. Then many people say, “Perchance I am not wasting my time?”; “I am absent-minded, I am upon thorns when I pray, I am not moved by any devotion”. If in this state the soul anxiously and painfully seeks, then has perfect prayer.
One has to seek in the Temple of the Heart by transforming prayer into Divine Wisdom.
Dryness is a painful state that one undergoes and expects to transcend while there is attachment to sensible states.
During meditation you create an image and this image becomes objective and something outside yourself. You sense energies spent to give life to that image. Once you could sublimate your affections, you should not spend energies on an objective image. You should be able to feel not feeling, to retain and to become potential.
Dryness begins when an objective image does not produce an uncontrolled expenditure of energies. It indicates the beginning of self-control. You should not mistake this dryness for that violence that many souls must inflict themselves because during long time they abandoned the exercise of meditation.
There is a sign by which you ever observe the spiritual dryness: it is ever periodically illuminated by contemplation moments.
Teaching 11: Idealization during Meditation
The idealization of the ego produces a kind of inner splitting and is sometimes expressed by the exercises of the Sons.
The real need of the soul is not something that you choose arbitrarily, but what irresistibly arises within.
You may observe in exercises of meditation how easily one creates a fictitious spiritual personality. In the beginning all is eagerness to die in the surrender, to confess imperfection, and to aim at virtue and Renunciation. But when the time deemed sufficient to attain a spiritual standing is over, there is a subconscious defense against an apparent stagnation revealed by a false standing.
Now while looking at your own soul you do not see it such as it is, and you go on with a fictitious image of yourself. The true inner gist is again taken to deeper layers, so that later you need another spiritual birth to take a step forward.
When the exercise of meditation expresses the true need of the soul, usually it is very rich in sensible states and produces great emotional swifts. But this is impossible with the routine of the exercise, since once the inner critical points are exposed, not only it is not recommendable but also it is impossible to fall again sensibly and continuously on them. Then one has to practice a true technique of meditation.
While the souls remain in purgative stages they cannot achieve an impersonal technique in their meditation. Even though they attain the perfect technique in developing the exercise, they do not master the very exercise as technique because still they do not attain impersonality in the exercise.
In purgative stages, spiritual life is a movement between pairs of opposites; transposition of affections, sublimation of passions and especially an eagerness to measure the progress according to sensible evidences.
Bad trends become some sort of personal enemies, and virtues also become personal goods to attain.
The soul is too much embedded in his own development and its concern it too much its own concern so as to have a sufficiently objective vision of itself and its states. Its efforts, more than a technique, are sensible swifts around itself and every sensible swift around oneself creates an ideal personal image that is a true obstacle to the inner liberation. Usually this ideal image becomes so strong that forms the personality through which an individual being is known and expressed. This ideal image must quickly disintegrate, and you achieve this by great inner sincerity and deep humility, which is the only mean to attain deep self-knowledge.
Teaching 12: To Love in Silence
In these times of confusion and uncertainty it is difficult to maintain an inner balance to allow a clear, impartial and passionless vision of things, life and oneself. So every effort should lead to be centered on oneself, to have a clear self-vision and to become conscious within. One has to explore the soul within and to be continuously and steadily controlled to acquire a deep consciousness and to feel the Renunciation message.
Man calls love to a fleeting feeling that quickly falls away because of time and changes; by the same word he names at the same time his eagerness for freedom and his inner, spiritual plenitude. All becomes the same thing, all is mistaken, illusion ever contains contradictory feelings and at the end of love one never finds that which one imagined to attain.
The individual should be aware of his own inner strength, to concentrate it on himself, converting it into a pure and simple act of love, offering, surrender and Renunciation to the Divine Mother.
The soul must die of a continuous surrender of love so that the human love is totally consumed and transformed into the most pure flame of Eternal and Divine Love.
Only Renunciation transforms natural love into supernatural love. You do not find peace by seeking your own satisfaction and happiness but on that love that gives and nothing expects or desires, where the little heart of man becomes the Heavenly Heart of the Divine Mother.
If we could make distinctions in regard to love, we would say there are two loves: the first, with all its variations, about which we can speak and give explanations; the second that one lives in silence, in the inner mystery of the soul.
The first is not only human love but also human love tending to become divine: all that fervent aspiration of the intellect and heart that seeks its own elevation, purification and sublimation, and that sometimes one feels like almost irresistible impulses full of plenitude, eagerness for surrender, and offering.
They are ever characterized by the intense experience that they arouse; they are great emotional and sensible movements. Sometimes this may occur during the exercise of meditation or at any moment, when one talks to a soul, before a beautiful painting or before a sentence in a book.
But there is another love without so many sensible signs; it is a state of love whose nature is inexpressible but leads constantly inwards to the silence of the heart.
It is something that you would not want to touch, but to leave it there, in the secret tabernacle of the soul; it does not drags like a burning sudden blaze, but does not go out either: it is always there like an infuse certainty like that of a child who, safe in the bosom of his mother, does not think or feel; he only knows that he is there and does not want to go from there.
By this touch in the heart, the Divine Mother leads the soul to the true inner life, to that life that does not waste words or sensations, but establishes being in his divine center and becomes a constantly full and total spiritual consciousness.
So during prayer and especially during meditation you should not seek certain sensible state but you have to go inwards with very simple words and thoughts, constantly inwards and more deeply, to the unfathomable silence of the heart to listen there to the voice of the Divine Mother that speaks in silence.
Teaching 13: Creative Imagination
Man continuously dreams and does not get almost anything. The Son casts his divine dreams.
Exercises of prayer are human techniques to get a divine result.
It is quite suitable to rationalize methods of meditation, but one has to be careful not to rationalize the very prayer.
You must know experience and control the mean. But a methodology of the very prayer cannot be established.
For the Son who lives in the world, the exercise of meditation is greatly important; it is the transcendent act of the day, which gradually transforms his entire life.
Life is not a series of successive acts for a devoted soul. An ever-identical routine makes any succession lack sense, and a permanent ever-equal rhythm gradually transforms life into permanence.
Exercise of meditation, that is just an act, starts losing its apparent value before the vital act of presence, and then prayer cannot be put in the frame of an exercise and expands until becoming vital in the soul and encompasses the whole being. It stops being an act, an expansive act. It escapes its situation in time to stay out of time, being a vital, integral prayer.
Therefore, prayer in itself cannot be rationalized; it is the way of being in the realized soul.
Divine dreams took form through exercises. They became life through routine. They became permanent reality through Renunciation. They became universal through expansion.
None can stop the expansive force of the Spiritual Idea fed by the living renunciation of devoted souls, and here is the force-life that feeds and sustains dreams and hopes of the afflicted Humanity.
Mean ideas and projects of men ever end with their misery, but continuous sacrifice and ideal aspirations of devoted souls ever yield fruits of peace and liberation in the world.
Teaching 14: Asceticism in Life
Certain souls particularly strive for practicing their spiritual exercises but do not get obvious results of this effort. The point is that they know how to meditate, but they know this alone. They reduce their spiritual life to a practice of certain exercises but do not do anything more.
Certainly a correct, methodical exercise gives obvious results, but you need more than an exercise to get spiritual results; over all you should use your entire being on a continuous, uninterrupted ascetic Renunciation. Otherwise, although you get surprising mystical experiences, it never shall be a pure mystical Renunciation, mystical Substantial Union, but false mystique with materialistic results.
You need a vital, clear and simple situation for efficient results not only in ascetic-mystical exercises but also in any activity of the soul.
In life it is important clearly to know what you seek and what the fundamental aspiration is. This is the most important thing. Later, you should subordinate efforts and objects to attain this end. By doing so, quickly you attain the goal.
Few are sufficiently honest and brave to confess what they really want, and even lesser is the number of those who act according to this feeling and risk their lives to do it.
The Son can get anything he intends, but not all his conquests shall give him what he expects from them.
First you should know how to discriminate among your wishes and which is the genuine vocation that shall give the plenitude at which you aim.
Among all roads, among all achievements, only one is for the Son, only one is his vocation.
Every soul has his way to reach the Union with the Divine Mother: here is his vocation; and he shall have no peace until he discovers and achieves it.
The Son must quickly reach this fundamental situation, which is his individual way to achieve Renunciation because Renunciation is the only fundamental way toward the inner soul liberation.
The exercise of meditation, made with absolute soul honesty to seek the vocation, quickly defines this vocation and not only produces efficient results but also its fruits are of spiritual liberation. But the exercise made only as a compulsory routine, without sincere intention of giving anything of oneself but with selfish eagerness for wrapping oneself with the silk of sentimental consolation and the sweet weeping of one’s pains becomes a burden that is difficult to carry, does not give spiritual results and stops being true ascetic mystique.
The obvious results of asceticism depend directly upon the situation of the soul in regard to its spiritual vocation.
Teaching 15: Renunciation in the World
Although the Son makes of Renunciation a utopian perfection state, he never can attain a full realized life.
Also this false position leads to reject Renunciation as an unrealizable state for those souls that in the world dedicate most of their time and energy to the mere fact of being able to earn a living.
This is a wrong position. Renunciation is the law of all, otherwise that which one understands as Renunciation is not such.
Renunciation is sway and realization not only of certain souls but also of all men, all mankind, as society and as individuals in all.
Son’s vocation is a define state of life; the circumstance by which he lives in the world does not mean a license that exempts him of the asceticism of his spiritual life, but on the contrary, a fact that obliges him to maintain an especial vigilance and a continuous control of himself and of forces around him.
The Son cannot reach plenitude if he does not achieve totally the Renunciation according to his way of living. Nothing impedes him the inner consecration of his soul and the integral fulfillment of his vocation through concrete and consequent attitudes.
The Son misplaced in the world, his feeling of insecurity in many cases, and even of certain failure, comes from the resistance to his vocation of Renunciation and his consequent realization.
The unity of the family cell is fundamental for Renunciation to the world.
Renunciation is not only an inner state of the soul but also a concrete attitude in front of needs and diverse situations of daily living. Then the family cell is a point of concentration and expansion. It must become a steadily consolidated unity to get it. A vocational affinity of husband and wife is foundation of realization in the Sons and point of expansion in their message of Renunciation.
The Son can not only attain the full Renunciation, but also his duty is to achieve it by simple, human and ordinary means given by life and his spontaneous standing in society. He must take this duty as his true mission, since he must become proof and evidence of his spiritual message.
Each Son must feel totally responsible for the fulfillment of his vocation of Renunciation as mission before the world, and his life must be a mirror of his doctrine, since the ascetic Renunciation is the only possible asceticism in any state of life and the only mean of accessible realization to all human beings: true universal way. This universality must be demonstrated by a consequent realization of the Sons, who live it in every social area through different individual vocations and by transcending every type of particular problems.
This diversity of particular hues in the individual realization of the Sons becomes the true Renunciation that Cafh transmits to the world.
So the Son must understand the magnitude of his individual responsibility and the seriousness of his spiritual duty of achieving effectively that Renunciation through his efficient work, consecrated family, understanding, sacrifice and consequent life.
The Son that lives in the world must feel that he and their dear ones are the living teaching of Cafh, and he must not be deceived by only living intellectually these concepts. A word that is not life becomes destructive and source of discouragement and ruin to the world. But only one concept integrally achieved is light and liberation to the souls.
The continuous concern of the Son must be that all his life reflects, even in its tiniest and insignificant details, his own vocation of Renunciation. His home, and especially the way to satisfy his needs, must be clear and definitive expression of the Teaching that he transmit to the world as the living message.
Teaching 16: The Idea of Renunciation
The highest mission is to maintain the Idea of Renunciation intact and pure, and to live and achieve it in life by realizing it totally.
All that Cafh has, makes or preaches has no other sense than that of confirming and achieving Renunciation in Mankind.
All movements, even the most spiritual, have their existence fixed in time; they are born and must die. Only one thing is not born, the only eternal thing is the Idea transmitted through contingent movements.
So one must be the Idea, not the contingent movement. One never must think about Cafh in terms of duality, but in terms of life.
This is as if you were seeing how souls that are only ready to certain renunciations resist the Idea of Renunciation, not because they are able to intuit it, but because its acceptance would entail its need.
Lack of comprehension of Renunciation never is lack of understanding, but lack of Renunciation.
Only you can be the Idea of Renunciation when Renunciation is total in the Work. When what you do, say and think in the Work does not mean other thing than that which means to be. When what you do as Work is as spontaneous as being, only then there is detachment from the Work.
When nothing constitutes a specific activity, when all flows as life does, when all is simple, when there are not two any more and when one does not think about what you do but about what you act, then you are the Idea of Renunciation.
When one does not stop Being what you Are, although one continues to be and act personally; when objectives are not such but natural states of life like childhood, growth and death, then one is the Idea of Renunciation.
When in the knowledge of things and life does not intervene other thing than the capacity of objective contemplation, and when Spiritual Life of Cafh, its external works, the present and future state of mankind and the individual mission inside it exist the same way that one exists, then one is the Idea of Renunciation.
When even so one considers the contingent, knows how to use it and is aware of its laws, then the Idea of Renunciation is achieved on a living reality of Renunciation, love and surrender of the soul to the Idea of Renunciation.
As the potential experience always forges future happiness, so the practical experience becomes a stumbling block on the road of progress.
There are souls who practiced every rule of Meditation, Concentration and Contemplation, received immense benefits and drank in abundance the Ecstasy of Divine Love. But the regulated predisposition that led them to the Union became a habit that sometimes is cause of delay and of an impenetrable rampart that impedes them to accede to a total knowledge of mystique and to be established on a definitive point of permanent Union.
A truly wise soul is ever free; it gives and takes, and uses and throws away, and does this even with the greatest rules of inner life.
That which is difficult to determine is the proper moment when the means used can be replaced for one’s effort of will-consciousness.
Naked you should enter the ocean of life; none shall be able to penetrate in the Sancta Sanctorum not disposing previously of that which one used for the experience, even the holiest and solemnest experiences.
All, positively all, even the most perfect Master is only a companion of journey on the Mystical path, and he must be abandoned when the illuminating light becomes an impediment that hinders the other Light that emerged behind Him: The Eternal Light.
CONTENTS:
Teaching 1: Inner Life
Teaching 2: Prayer
Teaching 3:
Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual Life
Teaching 4: Meditation
Teaching 5: Simple Prayer
Teaching 6:
Discursive Meditation
Teaching 7: Passive Meditation
Teaching 8: Ascetic Deviations
Teaching 9: Sensible Spiritual States
Teaching 10: Dryness
Teaching 11: Idealization during Meditation
Teaching 12: To Love in Silence
Teaching 13: Creative Imagination
Teaching 14: Asceticism in Life
Teaching 15:
Renunciation in the World
Teaching 16: The Idea of Renunciation
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