Course XIII - Teaching 9: Sensibility in Meditation

Spiritual life does not consist in sublimating feelings. So, those Sons who in meditation only are looking for higher sensibility do not go beyond certain limit and never can check their emotions.
Souls who emphasize particularly sensible obtained by ascetic exercises are weak and unable to understand that spiritual life is far beyond what they can feel or think. Wherever they are waiting for some event, they go on to wait for what they feel or dream, or for what they believe to see or hear. They are fond of psychical experiences, but usually have insufficient strength to face honestly Renunciation. They stumble and fall as soon as lose sensible stimulations.
It is important to transcend quickly any sensible externalization and be placed in what is true spiritual life.
The individual being should be transformed entirely, not only his sensibility. As a state, meditation achieves this purpose.
Spiritual meditation not only lays aside emotions, but even does not use the intellectual mental power; it makes of a partial intelligence, a total, spiritual intelligence. Many people are endowed with specific intelligences, but quite few are found with spiritual penetration and intelligence, which is the only one real for man, since it contacts him directly with transcendent and supernatural verities.
Meditation takes all human values and transforms them, and achieves a similar will by using a determining will.
A sensible state achieved by exercises of prayer can become high enough, but never is truly spiritual. It is a mental affective vibration brought about by word and image; it is a sensible soul movement, but not the soul itself.
Needs and high sensations exposed are all right, but one should go on ahead; everything expresses the mental personality of the individual being.
The exercise achieves an emotion that is produced by word, image and sensibility all together. An inverse movement is achieved by gradual simplification of the exercise; nothing can be produced by an outer movement.
Technique is used negatively. In exercises, the soul goes behind technique. In meditation is not so. One gets the control through the spiritual mind. If one says something in terms of the exercise it occurs. The word, which previously would help get the sensation, now does not act this way. Simply, the word guides the already extant simple state through the course wished. Then the word is unnecessary.