Course I - Teaching 2: The Secret Tabernacle

When a man decides to start something new, the laws of logic establish implicitly that is indispensable to begin from the starting point commonly set to achieve the object.
So it is understood that when the candidate starts his way to perfection, he must reform his precedent life, like other people who already climbed on the summits of the soul.
It is understood that the aspirant should adopt certain rule, or code, and should observe it scrupulously, on pain of suffering serious punishments.
Ultimately, it is understood that he should place himself within one current or another of ideas, previously established.
This labor is good, excellent; but as it were, it is to start the work from outside inwards, while the “Labor of the Great Work” starts in the innermost and most hidden depths of the inner consciousness of being.
The aspirant should leave, once for all, the bread bag of the poor fellow; nothing and none should fix him laws or trace limits, and it is he who should transform himself into living bread for his own food. “I am bread of life”, Christ said. “If you did not eat this bread, you won’t eternal life”.
This means that a being should free himself by his own means, when experience made him fit to enter the path of the chosen.
Every man is a little world, or rather, a Universe in miniature, with its entire particular rules and exceptions. What is very good for the one can be self-defeating for the other. Also, mankind establishes, wisely and beyond any argument, as a basic axiom of spiritual perfection, the conquest of good and annihilation of evil. But beyond the region of beings, on the pure atmosphere of the Spirit, neither the one nor the other exists.
We cannot despise as impure the blood that runs through veins of our system and just value the blood that runs through our arteries, not considering that the existence of the one is inexorably ruled by the existence of the other.
A true spiritual development is neither started nor acquired; it is rather a wonderful backward knowledge which, removing one by one veils of illusion –that the need of experience has placed upon the souls– leads a being to return to the Fountain of Life within himself, and to know himself in the absolute silence of the undifferentiated Essence.
“Let us enter the cell of knowledge of ourselves”, the mystic Catalina Benincasa of Sienna ceaselessly repeats.
May the Sun of the Flame enter his own heart. This is the mysterious sepulcher of the Divine Mother, and she ever waits there for the kiss of the true lover who awakens and obliges her to reveal to him eternal secrets. There he will learn the Great Alchemy that transmutes hard metal into pure gold of peace and happiness.
This concept should not be given a simple symbolical form, but a real form. Even physiologically, a human heart is the measure of the Universe; its formation, its life, its beats, different substances circulating through its crevices, a multitude of living and ulterior atoms compounding it are a microcosmic measure of the Macrocosm.
A human heart is the Arcane of existence; there the seed of the Highest Power is hidden, and this Power, duly applied and developed, could know, form, maintain and destroy everything. The substratum of all perfection, of all possibility, the inborn flower of every pleasure and satisfaction, is latent there; and even the seed of every evil and misery.
If affections of a limited heart are wishes of life, then manifestations of a free and conscious heart are achievements of the Supreme Love.