Course VII- Teaching 11: Intimate Obedience

The Vow of obedience is essentially an act of mystic and spiritual love.
The Son can travel through certain stretch of the spiritual path with will effort, but he must set aside his will at certain point where routes acquire a transcendent character.
Spiritual life mainly consists in knowing how to surrender to obedience in order to live the Great Work as a whole.
The Divine Mother is the route of the Son and he must surrender to her in order to arrive.
This loving surrender to the Divine Mother becomes ideal by the vow of obedience, and effective by its daily fulfillment, whose expression is through submission to the Superior.
This intimate obedience, affirmed by renunciation, is the only source of life, happiness and salvation of the world. This obedience produces a sense of inner void, of approach to the Divine Mother and of divine prelude.
But an ideology cannot achieve this renunciation on this plane of human evolution; it can be achieved by a dynamic soul movement that is obedience.
The man gets used to a freedom with sentimental and rational values but if he wants to conquer the true freedom –the spiritual freedom– is bound to renounce to those values achieved.
Human nature tries to unite rational and supernatural aspects and to explain as much as possible the spiritual ideal, when in fact supernatural life is something that you must accept a priori, with no explanations, but certainly expecting your identification with it some day.
He who willingly obeys disposes of any mental burden and has only one point, only one idea and only one purpose.
His human living becomes divine and grants power of eternity.
Personality is annihilated as it feels the total surrender of the soul to the Divinity through intimate obedience; so, the spiritual individuality acquires a wide divine aspect.
So, the intimate obedience that is vocational is not annihilation of the individuality but conquest of the egoentia; it is to live in the Mystical Body of Cafh.
The Son’s task is relative but if you offer it to the Divine Mother through detachment and obedience, you add it to the power of the Great Current and as a result it is strength, power and creative act.
Obedience before the Superior as a man is captivity but obedience to the Superior as the Divine Mother’s image is loving submission, spiritual liberty.
Human obedience is source of bitterness, sadness and inferiority complex, which is opposite to voluntary, intimate and divine obedience that is source of joy, carefree spirit and happiness.
An intimate obedience need not think; it is sufficient to be conscious of the action.
The Son penetrates into himself through intimate, strenuous and constant obedience; so, he rejects any appearance, becomes the nothing, apparently annihilates himself and becomes a perfect ego-centered being that is totally divine.