Course XIV - Teaching 8: Meditation
Meditation refers to sensitive aspects of the soul.
Meditation is an imaginative discourse; it is useful because brings into play all mental forces of the individual being by guiding them toward the achievement of the sensation wished.
Meditation is divided into two parts: purgative and loving. The first is fit for beginning the exercise; and the second avoids fatigue in the beginner and promotes perseverance on the path. Purgative meditation shows entirely soul wounds and their horror and stink, but you should not permit your soul to be despondent; loving Meditation liberates you from this evil.
Here are the main methods for exercises of Meditation: Meditation read, Meditation dialogued, sensitive Meditation and affective Meditation.
Purgative or loving meditation can be active or passive.
The individual being should not remove passions by killing them or trying to ban them when they emerge in his life because this way he only gets rebelliousness and apparent submission, since later passions come again more powerful and stronger into being at any moment. But you can overcome or transform them definitely by leading them and making a true transmutation of emotional values.
Meditation is not the purpose of Mystical Asceticism but just an exercise for beginners. Once certain scrupulous souls start this exercise, they refuse to leave it aside, but this danger should be avoided. Meditation is a useful and indispensable exercise in the beginning, but later a burden to discard. The exercise of Meditation occupies a site in the lake of mind and in this way displaces the spiritual waters; but some day one has to dispose of it so that these waters may entirely fill the lake of our mind.
Many mystics say that Saint Ignatius of Loyola imposed on his disciples the exercise of Meditation, but if we stated this, then we would be seriously unjust with this enlightened contemplative being. The Book on Spiritual Exercises, where the Saint describes with so many details different exercises of Meditation, are only for beginners; something that, in his view, has to be done only once in our lifetime, in the beginning of the Spiritual Path. He does not prescribe to Jesuits, by means of his rules, any method of determined Meditation, which only later would be introduced in his Society. Ignatius encouraged and urged souls to the exercise of Meditation when they would begin the Spiritual Path.
The exercise of Meditation is greatly useful and, as soon a soul manifests spiritual trends, he must be guided to its practice, though those souls that begin, particularly young people, have to be pushed more than the rest. Necessarily one must not forget that, if the soul is called to the Ascetic Path, his wish for finding it is enough in order to be partially on it. If a soul leaves the exercise of Meditation, this soul is tied to the Mystical Path, and sooner or later has to return to it.
Meditation is an exercise whose practice by every soul cannot be predicted. Certain souls start but are not sincere, or determined or faithful day by day to the exercise; of course, these souls have to practice it longer. But other souls are more determined and should not be delayed too much time on the exercise.
Meditation is ever greatly useful. Certain souls, even after they climbed great ascetic and mystical states in times of tremendous spiritual dryness, must return to the exercise to take some advantage in the hour of Mental Prayer.
The habit of Meditation, particularly among beginners, requires certain method. This method must be followed with constancy and tenacity, persevering on it all the necessary time, according to the opinion of the Spiritual Director.
If there are many didactic methods of Meditation, one should make up his mind for a clear and simple method; the affective method is very advisable.
Preparation is fundamental and basic before Meditation. It is to choose beforehand the proper subject to develop during Meditation; this subject must be prepared because otherwise all the time destined to the exercise can be wasted when one tries to find it. This is called remote preparation.
Affective Meditation is divided into five parts:
- Preparation,
- Imagination;
- Sensation;
- Purposes; and
- Consequences.
Not all souls can be given the same method as exercise of Meditation. Those people with little imagination need to stop considerably on the imaginative picture; they can divide the time of Meditation into three parts: preparation, imaginative picture and subsequent effects.
Those people with vivid imagination must reduce the duration of the picture as much as possible. Certain beings do not memorize sufficiently; in order to develop it, they should stop now and then to make a mental sketch of the object of their meditation; as it were, they are intercalating short imaginative pictures.
Your spiritual progress can be easier by making use of a spiritual book that should be read slowly and, after a pause, considered sentence by sentence. It is useful to take an object, like a flower or a pious image, observing every one of its parts with care and without haste until you find something that excites the observation. Sensitive persons, with vivid imagination and good memory, get a lot from these meditative observations: easily they weep before a sorrowful scene, enjoy a beautiful image and also feel anger or hatred before a sinful or ugly image.
Insensible people, those who are slow to feel the effects of their observations and considerations, should apply to colloquial Meditation. They should put themselves in the presence of God, of the Divine Mother or of the Holy Masters, and should to talk to them, entrusting them their secrets and imagining that they listen to their answers.
Sensitive Meditation is very necessary for some souls; the individual being takes his senses, invigorates them and guides them toward his own spiritual advantage. For instance, if you want to meditate on a rose, stare at it until your eyes are filled with beauty; smell is fragrance, try to feel its freshness in your mouth, imagine that you touch its silky petals and listen to the one-day poem that just a rose knows how to recite.
In his meditation on the hell, Saint Ignatius of Loyola says to his disciples they must try to see the frightening contortions of bodies that are burning there, to hear the screams of the damned, to feel the rotten smell of sulfur and to imagine how the fire is scorching their hands. Preparation must be short, like an aspiration, a prayer or a change between the usual life and life at that moment.
The imaginative picture is extremely important. It has to be vivid, concise, clear and ineffaceable, but short. Imagination must be controlled when it soars very easily. The imaginative picture should not last more than seven minutes when the duration of the exercise is thirty minutes. If the picture is clearly presented, the will gradually shall be attached to it, naturally giving it live and feelings. The latter shall produce effects and sensations, whether of sorrow, or love, or purgation or elevation. To use them in due way, they must not be simply objective and fleeting, but must leave behind them something effective, something like a fountain where the soul may go all day long.
But in sensitive Meditation, excessive sensibility is not preferable, for sensibility is like waters of the ocean stirred by a storm: the higher are the crests of waves, the deeper are these crests. So the higher is the sensibility of the disciple, the stronger shall be his contrary temptation all day long.
Your purposes must not be too many or impossible to achieve.
Consequences shall be watched over and self-controlled all day long.
You should meditate at a tranquil place without any eventual disturbance. You should choose the same determined hour for all days. So, the subconscious converts the exercise into a habit; preferably, the time of meditation has to be before lunch, or even better, before the beginning of morning activities.
The posture must be neither very comfortable nor too much uncomfortable. Comfortable or very uncomfortable positions are for far-reaching contemplative persons. In a seated posture, body must be straight, forehead raised, waist loose, hands united not tightening the fingertips, and arms relaxed up to the elbows.
The exercise of Meditation can be active or passive.
It is active when the soul needs a great effort to achieve sensations; then it must make use of several discursive methods whose pictures are various and colorful. Many words attend to the mind of the practitioner, and the more fecund is the discourse, the more important are the effects of the active Meditation.
Passive Meditation responds to causes that are neither physical nor moral; the practitioner feels a growing boredom before repeated pictures and many discourses and words. This Meditation is slow and, almost inadvertently, the practitioner makes a halt before every word, and fewer words give more advantage.
By means of the active exercise, a soul was meditating on vanities of the world and, suddenly, apparently he saw the world like a wider and wider gap, and thanks to this void this soul hated all useless and vain words; this was an internal warning in the sense that the soul had to pass from active Meditation to passive Meditation.
Then, in due time it is necessary to change the exercise.
Gradually, words must be less and less; instead of seeking sentences to enrich the discourse, you should try to eliminate any useless and vain word. You should try to make only one image and nothing more than one in the picture. Sometimes one word is enough to fill the whole f Meditation.
