Course III - Teaching 3: Exercise of Meditation in Spiritual Life

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.
This continuity in a life devoted to realize the Renunciation necessarily produces the mystical union of the soul with the Divine Mother, wherever the Son is and whatever is the work that he has to fulfill.
This union takes place by means of successive simpler and simpler. So the soul naturally simplifies little by little its methods of prayer until they are reduced to similar contemplative states, although with different particular hues.
Doubtless prayer alone does not give realization, and even the most active way or any other way cannot lead to the Substantial Union when contemplative mystic states are absent.
Rational mind dissociates activity from inner contemplation because it only operates in one sense, but a realized soul does not lose its contact with God even amid the most hectic activity.
You cannot differentiate life in the world from life detached from the world, and even there are not two types of prayer, one for every state of life. Simply there are several ways to feel the Renunciation and the need of inner offering. The pitfall is not in major or minor difficulties that the one and the other offer to the system of life, but in the spiritual poverty of the souls.
Wherever you are and whatever you do, you need will to Renounce and to do it.
In a contemporary author’s view, a normal man is a God-Realized man. Those who did not achieve it suffer of some unbalance preventing them from an integral experience of the reality, so their vision of things and life is distorted.
Then we can say there is not a major or minor inclination to mystic life, but a major or minor intensity of real life, of total experience of the truth, and of its need.
Behind extreme human inclinations there is always an internal factor of unbalance producing them, and we can state that almost any individual tends to certain extreme end in his life and actions.
The Divine Realization is not the fruit of an extreme inclination to asceticism; if so, it would be false mysticism.
Substantial Union is perfect balance, contingent and transcendent situation; integral situation and integral action.
There are few expert souls on the paths of inner prayer and meditation because few souls deeply feel their vocation of Renunciation and achieve it, but these souls are those marking the way and teaching how to realize it.
This apprenticeship is difficult because demands more than inner adhesion and practice. Also a free mental attitude is necessary.
When you feel that you already know something, you close any possibility to new experiences. Only when you know and admit that your experience is not total or definitive, your field is free to get successive infinite experiences. But this must be something more than an understanding; it is integration to the experience in its character of non-totality.