Course XIII - Teaching 1: Ascetic Prayer

Inner life must be centered on God, not on attributes of God, which move away from the primordial end.
A specialized progress of rational faculties in certain way has moved man away from the fundamental Idea of God.
Truly the Divine Presence is in everything, but this does not mean that the divine expression has to become divinity.
Necessarily a man should come to a real and individual contact with the Divine Mother. Nothing and none can give him the truth, with the exception of his own experience. To achieve it, he must take all his energies, centered on the worldly side, and focus them on the purely spiritual and divine aspect.
Some people believe that this is unnecessary, because the Divine Mother is also in the world and nothing is outside Her. But certainly they will not reach the Divine Mother this way. An intellectual attachment to the spiritual aspect is not enough. This attachment is not real if it does not comprise the individual as a whole. The world is a school, and body and soul are only instruments. They are interesting just as such, and when they acquire a value that is not theirs, they lack sense as instruments and means of liberation, and become factors of illusion and ignorance.
A transformation in one’s particular thinking is important, but spiritual life shall be meaningful if and when this particular thinking is confirmed by substantial facts of life, which are consistent with the fundamental idea of the soul. As spiritual life is only a partial attitude in the individual being, body and soul shall be goods in themselves, and shall constitute other opposite attitude. This means that spiritual life shall not be a total act of the individual being, but attitudes in conflict.
Renunciation to the world is not a refusal, but location of human values that acquire divine character only by means of this.
As worldly goods are the objective of man, the world shall be a world of sorrow, and as body and soul are values in themselves, they cannot become instruments of impersonal experience.
Even though union with the Divine Mother may be the soul aspiration, actually the soul prayer begins nothing more than as a monologue, a self-conversation. It is like a tentative true self-consciousness and also consciousness of what this soul actually wishes.
Ordinary thoughts of man are a continuous imaginary conversation; this conversation is entirely unreal and disconnected from him and from surrounding reality. Therefore in the beginnings, meditation tries to center the soul on its real position before itself and the world, giving a deeper and deeper consciousness of being, until its transformation into a true contact, supernatural and divine.
This essential contact with God exists in certain form in prayer and spiritual efforts of any kind, but necessarily it should become a living reality for the soul. Here is the only end of the human existence: to reach a full Union with the Divine Mother, a Substantial Union. All the rest exists in dependent relationship for this purpose.
So, inner life, as a continuous act of living in the divine presence, is the only necessary thing; because it is the living soul expression toward the Divine Mother and already lives in Her.