Course III - Teaching 8: Ascetic Deviations

The most common deviation from asceticism is when it stops being a mean and becomes an end.
Doubtless none takes asceticism as an end in itself, but it is very easy to mistake contingent results of asceticism for mystique.
Every act of the individual being brings about a result whose entire repercussion is on him. You cannot separate physical effects from astral, psychological, mental and spiritual effects. So, although the object of asceticism is a gradual predisposition of the soul for the Union with God, at the same time the asceticism produces secondary contingent effects in the soul.
You should not mistake natural or supernatural states for divine states, and contingent conquests for permanent realization of the soul.
Asceticism is a psychical state, a supernatural, metapsychical, experimental state of the mind. In one word: it is the order of the brain to the cerebral-spinal mechanism in regard to will; these orders are imparted by the brain to acquire a method, a system adjusting the soul in the frame of an inner life that the soul wants to attain.
Mystique is an indescribable, transcendent, obscure, unknown state, but at the same time is source of any realization.
This does not deny the reality of secondary effects of asceticism, but one has to find them. Since Renunciation is an absolutely spiritual good, souls remain very easily trapped by the shine of immediate ascetic conquests, which to be more accessible are much more attractive. When divine states are higher they are vaguer and obscurer, and it is necessary to achieve a very great Renunciation to transcend those immediate goods obtained by mystical asceticism.
When the result of ascetic practices is a supernatural state of the mind, intellect or emotion, there is a natural desire to repeat the experience. This repetition is good controlling the technique of the process, but if you insist on it, a state that was a mystic consequence becomes a relative sequence and therefore loses its divine value.
The union with God is not a positive act of the individual being, it is dynamics in itself, a simple, inexpressible state, infinite as to its divine magnitude, which manifests in the soul as a state that more than a full experience is expansive, radiating, simple and quite deep full being. It is an abyssal and total undifferentiated consciousness, with no limits or impediments, infinitely deep and obscure, in which all disappears and gets lost just to remain the obscure and indecipherable aspect in itself.