Course XIV - Teaching 15: The Union

The soul becomes God in the Union. The soul remains as if deified; very subtle veils around the Superior Mind, which are the loftiest part of a being, disappear temporarily during the act of Supreme Realization, as if the Spirit absorbed and transformed entirely the soul.
Of course, this Union, this direct Contact with the Cosmic Spirit is instantaneous; if the individual being persisted in this Divine state, the body and supra-physical forms around him would be discarded in myriads of atoms that would return to the great universal deposit.
When the ocean of Eternal Light suddenly enters the soul, it penetrates into the most hidden corners of the latter; the lamp disappears and just the flame remains. Everything is illuminated, even the most unknown parts where experiences of a being are kept along with its reserves of possibilities; everything, absolutely everything remains exposed and everything disappears in the Divine Light.
But the Divine Union has also several particular traits. Even if it is arbitrary to divide the Union into parts, because it has no parts, the student can understand it if we divide it. The Union can be divided into four parts:

1. Passive Union of isolation;
2. Active Union of isolation;
3. Essential passive Union; and
4. Essential passive Union in activity.
   Union of isolation is as if the soul gradually had got used to the Divine contact. The Spirit of the Beloved One visits his fiancée and marries her in a lofty engagement.
   The disciple has admirable experiences before or a little before this great Realization comes to be true. He is like the one who neither enjoys, feels, or knows, and is detached, despite his will, from every worldly thing. His soul is like a fixed star, like an endless age, like a prisoner at large. His heart has sudden movements, he quivers from head to foot and it is as if he stopped living at any moment, but suddenly the powers leave any activity, the soul has not any knowledge, except its certainty of being united with God, and remains a prisoner of the Divine Love. This Union of isolation, which is an absolutely passive state, does not last long; sometimes, one or two hours at most.
   Back the disciple in his ordinary state, he passes to the second state of Union: the active Union of isolation. He cannot remove the sweet memory from his mind; his soul certainly believes to have achieved the Union with God and this sweet certainty is continuously with him day and night, and never disappears from his sight.
   The third state of Essential passive Union is the Spiritual Wedding of the soul with God. In this union, the Divine Flame burns in such a way all external things that the individual being remains as if it were dead to the world; only the Root of the existence remains. In this Divine Union, many disciples remain several days as if they were dead; they have crossed over the great shore of life and are united with the Eternity. The body is like an uninhabited house suspended on the air and without support; the disciples is tied to the Spirit only by the golden thread of the seed of the existence. In this Union there is neither a form nor a seed tying to the cause-and-effect law; all the oil is on the surface of the water.
   There the Universe is extinguished; the space does not exist either. Ideas are nothing but floating shadows over the deep and dark profile of the absorbing Spirit. What is there the weak consciousness of the Ego? It is only the thread of the existence, which has been broken by the Eternity.
   The soul enters the Essential passive Union in activity after being conscious again. Now it is not the soul that lives, but God lives in the soul. For a while he was free of the bonds of flesh and it cannot be again what it was. Even its physical cover is transformed into God: it is as if deified. The soul has seen for a moment the Arcane of God, the Impersonal Light and now understands that all existing things are vain and illusory.
   For the soul there is not duality, and infinite space and finite space are nothing more than only one thing. Only the Eternal One exists over the word, over the mind and beyond everything.
   The soul opens again the doors to life, but just to expect the day when it shall be definitively liberated, but shall stand the exile to help those who still did not reach that point.