Course III - Teaching 6: Discursive Meditation

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. On the other hand, discursive meditation is a free talk of the soul with the Divine Mother, and only faith can give it a divine sense.
Doubtless any exercise of meditation is a mystic exercise, as effort of the soul to attain the union with God; but at the same time it has a psychological mechanism perfectly fit to the end pursued.
During the invocation the soul appeals to the best feelings and tries to move deep layers so far ignored. Although the soul calls to the Divinity imagined out of him, actually is seeking the divine essence that dwells on the vastness of his consciousness that still is unknown.
The invocation is like higher and higher tension soul powers until their natural limit and to stay motionless there on the threshold of the mystery.
Silence is not only to stay with a receptive attitude expecting the answer. It is an exercise that usually consists on staying longer and longer time on a different vibration that is superior to the state of usual consciousness with no need of certain volitive movements to achieve it, as it occurs with the invocation.
The invocation is like an arrow thrown toward the unknown, innermost depths of the soul, and there is an inevitable answer. The immediate answer, although it is important, is not tantamount to the inner movement that the invocation brings about by repeated stimuli.
Silence has a very great mystic value: sets the soul before the Divine Mother by means of a pure act of faith and love entirely free of images and pre-concepts that are an obstacle when one seeks to contact Her on an entirely spiritual way. Since the intellect does not act at the same time, one acquires a negative attitude that is extraordinarily favorable to attain rapidly a supernatural state.
When there is a particular predisposition to prayer, the time of silence can become an exercise like that above-explained in reference to meditation about the Resurrection of Hes. But in this case you should not seek a determined sensation because then you go out of the discursive exercise, but you must remain there, motionless, suspended on the divine void and feeling more and more closely the presence of the Divine Mother.
There is a different hue: in Hes’ resurrection, this feeling is somehow oriented to get a determined state: rapture; in this case, to reduce you to the purposes of the exercise, you should lead it in no sense and you are bound to stay motionless and in the dark in front of the unknown.
The time of silence can lead to this, but the exercise strictly considered consists in staying there, trying not to think, imagine and move, but only to stay.
When in meditation we get a true elevation of the soul, the response is not coming from the ordinary mind. However little elevated may be the state achieved, it is another state of more spiritual consciousness, and responds to the best part of individual being.
Although we are ever told the same things or the same suggestions are repeated, this does not spoil the exercise but makes it more valuable.
A different purpose every day never can produce a true inner conquest, but a persistent, ever-identical intention charges with power the will although with the magnetic suggestive power of the repeated word.
This exercise is not the true response. Meditation cannot be only the answer to a question; one state responds to other state.
Discursive meditation as an exercise first is reduced to a series of successive considerations. You learn how to analyze and how to analyze yourself; to reflect and to make of reflection an objective knowledge instead of reacting personally.
Then you project an image of the world or of yourself to know, situate and charge this image with that energy to strengthen or sublimate it.
A usual consideration of personal and human problems closely acquaints you with the most fundamental problems: the becoming, death and illusion.
But you need not to distort the reality to know and know yourself. Only then discursive meditation may become inner meditation.
• First, discursive thinking.
• Later, knowing.
• Then, seeking
Until becoming a deep absorption in which the period of silence is an interlude between objective state and subjective state, between active state and passive state.