Course III - Teaching 10: Dryness

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.