Course XV - Teaching 11: The Standard

Generally, in observing the spiritual process of the souls, at a moment the enthusiasm for purification decreases and the meditator stops by repeating inconsistent imaginative pictures that, because of their repetition, neither arouse enthusiasm, nor make the soul progress in the purgative aspect or in the spiritual process in general.
Then the spiritual directors usually remove from the meditator that depression caused by a long purgative exercise and again kindle in him a flame or something like that that may move it within with new determination to seek the grace of the Mother.
Meditation on the Standard is for this purpose and other purpose too.
Seemingly for the novice, his entire spiritual life is to abhor his sins, visibly multiplied when he meditates more and more, and to escape from an almost uninhabitable world, whose evils are greater and greater in his mind.
And what about the Divine Promise? And about love so many times dreamt? And about the revelation of mysteries so many times promised? Seemingly everything is farther and farther from the soul like a frustrated ideal.
Then the practitioner must recover his early determination, by kindling again the holy fire within.
Also he must control the world of values and choose among them, becoming somebody who decides and solves his own destiny. This meditation and its effect –the choice– lead to it.
For a person devoted to continuous purgation and internal isolation to escape from the abyss, the Standard implies to look at the light and means to flee from a darkened world in quest for the radiant light of the spirit, majestically and lovingly conveyed by the Standard.
This meditation is a revival and must be started with this disposition. It is the first contact of the embittered practitioner with the divine sweetness and the substitution of the dark screen of the Black lady for the red color of the sweetly tender Anhunit.
Invocation has to be the first dialogue with no complaints between meditator and the divine. It has to be the first projection of forces of the soul upwards, in a youthful, vibrating tone; it has to be like the green grass that in springtime emerges from the black earth toward the light and heat of the soft sun. During the invocation a perfect choice has to be requested because the soul, after its distresses, finds new choices and then has to decide the way to follow for its culmination. When the soul started its purgative activity, just one world would exist: the Abyss ruled by the Black Lady. But after a long battle against this world, a new state emerged in the soul, expressed by its longing for something else, for something different, and by its yearning for the first love.
The choice shall determine the form of vocation to achieve entirely this state.
As purgative death prevailed in the soul, there was neither vocation nor force to do so. The meditator was dozing and dreaming of his imperfection. But when vocation breaches the walls of darkness, whose foundations shake by the purgative hammering, and the soul strives for going out, then this is not a clear-cut purpose, but a first desire to breath divine air; he makes it but does not know why. The meditation on the Standard has to take this vocative force that is beginning, and has to drive it toward the Divine by means of the choice.
Usually many spiritual aims call the attention of the meditator to apply his vocation on them, but a long exercise of meditation on the Standard shall give him the knowledge of his own vocation and the subsequent guide to re-float this vocation. Therefore, choices must have vast aims, in such a way that the practitioner is not obliged to make use of his sensibility to choose properly among many aims that are indiscernible to him. First choices must imply the vocative force of the Mother, her love, her banner, her heart, her harmony, et cetera, and as soon as the practitioner progressed and established his vocation in this aspect, then less wider and but fitter aims to the vocational nature of the soul can be sought.
Practitioners very often complain for their numberless choices and therefore find this meditation improper; but the genuine vocation of the soul lasts a lot to purify its merely enthusiastic nature and to become a clear, unique, true and transcendental expression; one thing is the spiritual vocation in general and another thing altogether is the peculiar vocation of every one, and this process of self-quest, that is, the quest for vocation, is long and laborious. So, meditators should not be sorry if, year after year, are obliged to change choice, to choose again and to change their aim, since this shall occur nearer and nearer to the unstoppable nature of their own vocation.
So far all of our sayings are sufficient provision of elements for the invocation and imaginative pictures of an exercise of this kind. In sensation, the meditator has to describe his deeds and the effects produced on him by the picture; has to determine the stimulus that he sensed to get from it force for his purposes; and has to achieve a vigorous and clear choice, sufficient effect, to produce in the souls what we said it is the aim of meditation on the Standard.