Course III - Teaching 7: Passive Meditation

The exercise of meditation is ever active; passivity depends on the attitude and disposition of the soul in regard to the exercise.
The exercise is called passive when is slower and produces simpler states.
A slower exercise prepares the soul not to stare at the purely-intelligible concept of the idea but at the power of the idea, and by avoiding numerous movements of the mind and heart, gradually leads to a simpler and simpler prayer, to a meditative state.
Passive meditation naturally introduces in meditation of simplicity and quiet, and later leads to subjective meditation and contemplation, and to certain states of subconscious participation.
Active meditation is a movement from inside to outside simultaneously attained in two ways: first as exercise, by moving the thought-feeling to concepts and images that configure and determine it; second, by bringing about mental and emotional movements that always are externalizations of the individual being and outside him.
Passive meditation is a movement from outside to inside. It takes the external representative symbol (word-idea, movement of the soul) as a support for an inner search and uses an active exercise as a mean.
Active meditation is an expression of a mental state.
Passive meditation is an effort to attain a deep state of consciousness from natural oral symbols and conventional representation of feeling and thought.
Here is the difficulty that you find in passive meditation: since externally it is an active exercise, you seek it only by means of the slowness that characterizes it. But slowness is an effect, not the motive of passive meditation. Bad interpretations occur because whatever be the type of inner movement or state that you want to express, this is ever expressed by language, which is an active mode of the mind.
The secret of passive meditation consists in the inverse movement of attention-intention, by means of concentration toward a non-determined inner side tending to the subjective experience, from a determined and objective support as the active exercise is. So the exercise becomes naturally, not forcefully slower. Words are always the reflection of other much deeper thing occurred within, which is meditation.
Active meditation is discursive thinking that canalizes the idea-emotion through a pre-determined mould. Passive meditation is non-discursive thinking, deeper and deeper introspection, but expressed by discursive thinking to the purpose of the exercise.
Non-determined images facilitate sensation and passive understanding that is almost non-rational. One tends to pictures or subjective impressions.
Passive meditation fixes only one image and keeps it strictly in its frame. You should not seek an extreme slowness but certain parsimony leading to absorption as a prelude to concentration. True concentration is deep absorption.
In meditation you cannot attain suddenly only one image, a unique state. But by means of a growing passivity, the soul is getting used to fix a lesser number of images and then needs less words and mental movement to achieve a state.
The very state, whether in every step or in meditation in general, is not so much complex; there is less to-and-fro mental movement and emotional leaps, and meditation is stabilized in a deeply-internal state.
Passive meditation is an exercise that gradually simplifies prayer and makes it flow into a unique idea, a unique feeling. In passive meditation you do not seek certain emotional state or an already-fixed consequence as a result. Even in meditation you do not try to experience sensible states but only depth, inner silence and absorption.
The deep absorption of the soul is a simple, elementary, unique state. A simplification of the steps tends to make of every step a state, and later a state of meditation as a whole. So meditation gradually becomes subjective concentration that is naturally deep and spontaneous; true prayer absorbing the whole soul.
By exercising the will you get a gradual passivity that facilitates the access to the true passive meditation. Certain moments indicate to each soul a necessary change from an active exercise to a passive exercise. It is then when prayer naturally becomes subjective, especially the imaginative picture. Even not knowing the passive exercise, usually and necessarily the souls meditate passively being unaware of that which they are doing. But even when the Divine Mother leads them by the hand during the prayer, they should be aware of and know the passive exercise by experience to be guided by Her without hesitations on the illuminative path, whose start She is marking.