Course III - Teaching 1: Inner Life
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.
