Course XIII - Teaching 10: Meditation and Technique of the Exercise

How can meditation on level of ordinary thoughts be differentiated from a beautiful speech that is able to arouse vivid emotions and uttered with order, method and established subject?
Technique is valuable for this: one achieves meditation by means of technique. There are two ways to practice the exercise: as technique and as meditation technique.
As technique, you need an impersonal consciousness ruling over the exercise in order to transform it into living science and dynamic empiricism.
As technique of meditation, the exercise technique becomes indispensable means to acquire gradually contemplative and more and more spiritual lofty states, eventually to make of exercise technique a contemplation technique.
On should master the meditation exercise, but not only as to its inner technique, but also as technique. To achieve it one must reach gradually such inner objective position that, more than an unfolding becomes a super-conscious state. Then one stops working with personal faculties or powers and do so simply with forces. This is the only way to know them and lead them.
Attachment is always a grade of ignorance, and while personal identification survives, true self-knowledge is impossible. This does not mean that your own soul does not matter to you; it means that you reach a transcendent position regarding yourself. Only in this way ascetic exercises become the true liberation technique. So, meditation becomes science, from the moment when you are able to know that you are he who thinks and feels.
So, the individual being can experience with his living forces and acquire an ascetic-mystical technique that perfectly empirical and objective. Of course, this science does not follow a dimensional and contingent empiricism, but a supernatural and whole empiricism.
The individual being has disappeared actually, and certain spiritual power remains only to keep the cohesion in the soul compound. This compound can be experienced perfectly by the vision of the spirit, with its own precise laws. It is the true instrument of the spirit.
From this to intellectual meditation exercises there is an enormous distance. The mistake is if one wants to make of meditation a science through the intellect, when the spiritual science is possible only through Renunciation. Intellectual meditations are mainly unreal. The intellect creates a fictitious reality and never can touch the bottom of things. Dimension should be changed; one can say that the inner dimension, the depth of the spirit, which the intellect cannot reach, should be attained.
It is only Renunciation, as extreme simplicity, that can establish a substantial contact with the simple and unique essence of knowing.