Course XV - Teaching 10: The Two Ways

Certainly, just the beginning of the purgative task of the soul, first step in the spiritual life of the meditator, is also the beginning of honoring the divine promise, the beginning of the Divine Union.
But throughout the path there are culminating points, crossroads or bifurcations marking the beginning of new stages.
The two ways symbolize a culminating point in Cafh’s hermeneutics. They symbolize a decision that the soul has to make someday to follow certain direction by means of clear-cut methods and yearnings, through the way of knowledge, or way of wanting nothing and knowing nothing, that is, the way of Renunciation. Is there any relationship in this symbolical name with the subject of meditation? Obviously, there is a concrete relationship between the subject and the step that the soul must take. You might state that so far the two classical stages in Hindu mystique occurred: Yama and Niyama, external and internal detachment from worldliness, change of external habits and of internal dispositions. But, did the purgative task finish? Is it enough what we made to leave the soul exposed to the Divine influence? No; certainly, evils of the soul are removed and an aversion to worldliness is introduced, but the deep incision to remove along with the evils the productive source of them still is not made.
And the meditator must decide then between a morality more or less acquired and the bleeding elimination of sources of evil existing in him. He has to decide for death of his nature and of his old man, formed by links, affections and ties of his personality, or simply, for those things that he achieved so far, which is a more or less emphasized morality. The attentive meditator then has noticed that it is not enough to remove those superficial layers thrown to his soul by the past that the Black Lady symbolizes. And to fight against his inclinations to the world of the abyss is not enough, but he has to remove affections, ties and chains of his soul and to achieve the internal detachment.
This meditation leads to it and certainly produces a very different spiritual freedom, as to its projections, from that freedom commonly understood in the world.
You are truly free just when you removed from the soul your attachment in every human and emotional aspect –material, psychological and mental chains forged to stay on earth, which you must tear to pieces in order to take flight to heaven–. Before your meditation on the Two Ways, you should make a self-analysis to see more or less clearly those inner bonds that are tying your soul with the world and its shadows.
So, abundant material shall come to the surface configuring imaginative pictures, blood ties, disordered affections, imaginary possessions, concepts of happiness, illusory certainties and excessive desires of life, which all together shall show to the meditator the dimension of his ties through pictures of intense colors and subtle design.
These last pictures shall determine at the same time a sensation of bondage, heaviness, prison, attachment or impossibility to take a spiritual flight or to get undressed and enter, light and pure, the kingdom of heaven.
This sensation must be intense and quite descriptive; the meditator must really feel the burden of chains and how short steps he can take if he does not cut these ties that now are heavier and heavier by virtue of a continuous meditation.
So, he shall pose general purposes to lighten the burden, and later other purposes of immediate realization, of immediate dissolution of the affective nucleus sealed off in the heart and of immediate disintegration of the heavy mass established there, whose chains form the whole prison of the individual.
Also consequences have to be clear, determining in the soul understanding or clear vision of its own tie, and conviction of having incorporated within, through exercise, a liberating force and enthusiasm for a freedom already achieved.
Certain meditators refuse to leave to purposes the result of meditation and as early as in the picture of sensations they want to feel detachment, but notice that this sensation is non-existent as a lasting state of the soul. Of course, you feel relief by discarding your burden, but this is not a sensation of detachment. Technically you need introduce, by means of purposes, a liberating force whose results some day shall be detachment.