Course XIII - Teaching 12: Imaginative Picture

In affective meditation one traces an imaginative picture, but not everybody can or must reach a picture of the same type.
Certain souls see everything through some image, and others are unable to make any image. Some souls, despite all their intelligence, even cannot understand the most elemental things if they do not see them, but once they see them, they understand quickly and definitely. In the same way they cannot awaken their emotions but through an objective picture, clear, full of life and color, which produces quick and deep effects.
Certain souls cannot trace images or get an abstraction through a symbol, but can easily grasp directly an abstraction. Even though they know properly what they want to represent, their pictures are rather subjective than objective. It is rather a feeling than a vision.
In the former, the excessive imagination richness must be cared. In the latter, one must avoid a fruitless and tiring exercise.
Certain beings seem completely insensible in front of outer objective pictures. This does not mean they are unable to have emotions, but they need stimuli of another kind. Perhaps in these cases pictures of another type may give results, according to a particular trend; memory of certain event of the day or life, an undetermined inner feeling, an inner heat, a flame in the heart, a light around them, the intuition of a presence, to be aware of being there.
Sometimes one does not respond to visual images, but responds to hearing or tact images: to be touched; to hear a voice.
Also, the imaginative picture must be clear, simple and direct. Many details and qualifications dilute the picture, transforming it into a painting; it falls away as stimulus.
The effect has to be direct; when you make it through a consideration, it loses strength.
Also you can make pictures by opposition; if it is properly made, its effect is direct.
To say that the picture has to be clear does not mean a clear vision, which sometimes impossible, but only one idea. Certain persons, with little objective imagination never shall get an image, but certainly they shall get a picture, the fittest picture for them.
Abstract undetermined images permit a more free and spiritual flight of the soul.