The spiritual work in the soul is mainly made by educating the sensibility.
The main concern is not so much to acquire knowledge or to increase mental powers during the first stages of the spiritual process, but an inner transformation.
Meditating is not thinking. Thinking is just one of the elements of the exercise. Discoursing, reasoning and reflecting do not involve a real and deep movement in the soul substance. The purpose of thinking in meditation is to outline the aim of the exercise and to produce necessary stimuli for its realization.
In affective meditation there are five steps, namely, Invocation, imaginative picture, sensitive picture, purposes and consequences.
Seemingly it is a contradiction that one must invoke superior forces for an exercise like meditation, where personal effort of the person that prays is mainly important; but this first step is indispensable and must be taken for a true meditation.
This step consists in exposing a picture that the soul has to observe and consider: it may be the development of an event already lived, scenes usually observed in the abyss, or images that express the divine.
The sensitive picture is one of the most important steps in the exercise of meditation, for it is the stage in which the soul controls its feelings and gives its intended form, tonality and vibration.
Emotionality is led to a high point of vibration during the Sensitive Picture. If the practitioner stops the exercise, emotionality returns immediately to its early state, and nothing occurs in the soul.
As the last step of the exercise, Consequences have a double purpose in the technical formation of the exercise.
As we said, along with the spiritual process developed in depths of the soul, the student should become self-conscious of the process, that is, he should acquire knowledge of his inner development and of the result achieved through exercise of prayer and application of the teaching to his own life.
What may represent the Black Lady in Cafh’s Symbols?
The spiritual path is traveled by stages; it neither begins nor ends in one life. It began by the individuation of the human being and shall end by his liberation.
What may the abyss symbolize as subject of meditation?
First, we must emphasize the analogy between the graphic picture suggested by this word and the environment in which mankind in general lives, struggles, enjoys and suffers to die.
Certainly, just the beginning of the purgative task of the soul, first step in the spiritual life of the meditator, is also the beginning of honoring the divine promise, the beginning of the Divine Union.