Course XIII - Teaching 7: Meditation Exercise

The meditation exercise should undergo a gradual simplification not only as to discourse and pictures, but also as to the mode or relationship of the discourse and picture in relation to the soul.
In the beginning it is indispensable to achieve the meditation technique; otherwise efforts made during the exercise are in vain. But when one possesses the technique, we must be careful not reducing the exercise to a technique.
The exercise is a technique, but this technique must be dynamic and alive; otherwise it is a continuous repetition, not a continuous prayer.
At certain point you know perfectly what inner resources to touch in order to get the necessary stimulus for certain emotion, and as soon as one gets some higher feeling, any next effort can consist in repeating again the experience, being unaware that this experience is already ours. This is to transform asceticism into an end. It is unnecessary to live again a thing already known, when one has transformed knowledge into exhaustive experience.
The soul must try to go higher and higher; the meditation exercise has to be a free play of the soul looking for the divine realization, and the technique known by the soul must remain as a barely traced but necessary check outline.
The Son should not go to meditation as a routine, but must turn his contact with the Divine Mother more and more alive and real, being very honest with himself.
Now as one has properly established what is good to look for and what is bad to dispose of, what one has to ask and how to do so, usually these pre-concepts lay aside three needs and problems of the soul, particularly vocational states, which must arise from meditation. On the other hand, as there is an idealized ego, meditation cannot be related to the living reality of that moment of the soul, and cannot have a total effect.
Seldom real problems appear directly, such as they are. Trends, desires and feelings appear in a confused way. It is indispensable to fight and overcome imperfections, but it is good to know the bottom that usually is common to many of those trends that constitute the center of the ascetic work.
This does not mean that always there are subconscious states, which should arise by means of a deep self-analysis; the point is to get a clear vision of our own trends, not to mistake their active expressions and confuse them with the root of evil or the fundamental conflict.
Seldom souls have a number of inner problems. Each soul has its fundamental center, and when this centre stops being a conflict, every aspect apparently pressing fall away. So, in meditating, and always, in contemplating within our own soul, we must be quite clear and see properly the source of desires, particularly the source of those desires seemingly very justified, and have actually a human sense.
In human life, everything is imperfection, and Renunciation, that in men’s view is like ice and lack of love, is the only true perfection of love.
If life and the world are a school, we must pass through them in an entirely objective way, and nothing should stick to it. This attitude appears as insensibility and even incomprehensible cruelty in men’s view. So, the mind transforms the fundamental soul problem into innumerable considerations, insolvable questions, diverse worries and meaningless desires.
Meditation is an exercise leading the soul to get through confused inner states toward a meeting with itself, that is, to meet its Renunciation vocation.
If this is bound to occur as soon as possible in the Son’s lifetime, this occurrence is also good in many souls which, if they are on the road long ago, still are not actually born for a true spiritual life that is for them but that they lay aside not daring to face their Renunciation vocation.