Course XV - Teaching 1: Affective Meditation and its Purpose

The spiritual work in the soul is mainly made by educating the sensibility.
The main concern is not so much to acquire knowledge or to increase mental powers during the first stages of the spiritual process, but an inner transformation.
In other words: to change the old man for the spiritual man is not only to change his conceptual world, but mainly to change his sensibility, affections and habits.
Hence the work rather influences senses and their environment than the mind and its varied range of possibilities and reactions.
So, spiritual life is synonym of continuous exercise to change the nature of an individual, his primitivism, inclinations, desires and passions, for another fit nature to the formation of an ideal, to the realization of a higher state of life, and to the achievement of plenitude.
Therefore, this exercise has to influence what generally one calls sensibility.
Knowledge given in parallel should expand the horizon and make the profile of the ideal world clearer and clearer; a horizon toward which the disciple is going.
These notes try to explain how this transformation in general terms can be achieved by the above-mentioned exercise. There are as many variations as souls, but these exercises must produce and had ever produced in general terms the above-mentioned effects.
Numerous exercises have been prescribed throughout ages to achieve the spiritualization of man. Of those that more directly influence and become proper for a natural transformation of sensibility, meditation is the most important.
Here meditation called affective shall be deal with, since it is the most suitable for the first years of spiritual work, and all powers of the world are brought into action for its realization.
The intelligence outlines pictures and brings into play the capacity of the meditator for an exercise that is technically perfect.
The will keeps the meditator in his work and encourages his efforts not to give up, be distracted or wander. The will measures the steps and invigorates the purposes.
Memory leads the meditator to get from his subconscious world and bring to the surface of his mind experiences of the past, to purify the sensibility linked to these experiences, or rather, to remove any affection related to this experience, and to transform it into a pure experience that has been summarized and learnt.
Of course, this does not discard the play of powers of the soul with meditations of other types, but its best application corresponds to the affective meditation.