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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.