Course III - Teaching 9: Sensible Spiritual States

We call sensible spiritual states those states of meditation or contemplation characterized by an intense emotional experience although of lofty and spiritual kind.
Ordinary emotional states in meditation are active, with intense sensible movements. In sensible spiritual states, emotionality is more and more passive and tends to affective immobility.
We may say sensible spiritual states start with prayer of quietness. When the soul tends to become more passive, gets more depth in emotional experience, but is a static depth that hardly moves the waters of ordinary emotionality.
That is why in this prayer your only desire is to stay there, apparently inactive. It is an undefined peace that is almost insensible.
Ordinary emotionality gets not used to the intense vibration of spiritual states, and it is as if it were not feeling anything.
Sensible states are beautiful as experience, but only affect an aspect of the individual; they are not total. They are consequence of states of prayer, but are not full prayer.
A true prayer absorbs the entire being, fusing his body, mind and heart in a whole spiritual and supernatural unity.
The soul desires many times contemplation because of sensible states attained by it, not as a result of renunciation prayer and an entirely divine aspiration.
Generally the purgative stage is longer than that that one feels, and lasts as long emotionality has not been purified by means of the sensible renunciation.
Purification of sensibility is not only transmutation of the grossest emotionality but also its spiritual sublimation by means of renunciation to the sensible aspect. It is more that to renounce to consolation and satisfaction; it is to go out of the world of affective substitutions and transpositions.
This is bread fit to all, because when we speak of renouncing to affective transpositions, we easily destroy the momentum, and the weak souls are paralyzed and fall.
Really it is “a house without support”.
Certain people believe that, since they are not affective, do not need or have reached the sensible renunciation simply because they do not find stimulus in anything. But this lack of sensible stimuli often leads them to painful, depressive states. I they had really renounced, they would not notice that they lack stimuli or that nothing attracts them in particular.
Transposition of affections is not only necessary but indispensable. Sensible renunciation is not to forsake the asceticism, but not to convert it into a succession of goods to attain but states to experience. Asceticism, like prayer, must become impersonal.
The point is that sensible states are a usual state of consciousness of the individual, and he cannot easily dispose of them; it is like to live suspended on the void. Life was a succession of feelings, and without them one stops being.
The only support in the existence is the hope to reach what one desires. This hope never must be destroyed, but we must gradually and very carefully eliminate the sensible hope.
What one expects is not always what one expects. Sensible states are beautiful but must pass.
Sensible superficial states cannot last long because are a considerable expenditure of energy and alternate with period of insensibility that usually cause great suffering to the beginners who believe that have lost their inner good. But later usually there are times of great dryness that can last long time. It is the moment for the great purification.
Only a mightier power than strong affective movements can lead the soul to the inner stability.
Just dryness overcomes sensibility.
Dryness is the hand of the Divine Mother upon the soul that was called to perfection.