Course XV - Teaching 16: Final Comments

In this work we have emphasized the need of joining personal factors of the meditator to the exercise of affective meditation, that is, imaginative pictures should be personal experiences of the practitioner, on the light of the mental scene, sensations should be direct consequence of the picture, et cetera; and seemingly this limits the method, in an exclusive way, to critical possibilities, whether analytical or intellectual, of the practitioner. This is true because the use of other elements is impossible and cannot be tried until the final exploration of the practitioner in his own field. On the contrary, the effectiveness of the exercise would be reduced if the meditator first uses strange pictures and non-real sensations, which instead of certainly leading him to a fecund work on himself, move him away, transforming the exercise into something of others and strange to him.
It is known that you also can get sensations by means of imaginative pictures in contrast. So, the contemplation of a saint, of his virtues and of his beautiful disposition can awake in the soul sensations of spiritual poverty and encourage perfection; but the first years of meditation must find sufficient stimulation in direct action. Just when you reach certain affective height, you can try every indirect means to be encouraged toward perfection.
Also, bear in mind this: meditation is not inhibition of emotions, but transmutation of the emotional content given by sensations. Inhibition is not a definitive solution, but procrastination of troubles and conflicts between the personality and the emerging spiritual individuality.
You cannot say you have achieved anything or that your soul is free of something if you do not extirpate every particle of affection accumulated around that “something” and if your soul cannot remain truly serene before the to-and-fro movement of emotional surges.
You should properly understand, then, that the work of meditation is not a simple moralization or moral education –which is a task of mere inhibition of emotions– but a work of real purification in the sensible nature of the meditator.
On the other hand, since forces and not only ideas come into play in meditation, you must be cautious in the management of these forces.
To spiritualize the emotionality through meditation is not a process that may be represented by a straight line traced from the incipient spiritual state of the meditator to the summit of perfection. On the contrary, this process is made by repeated tests in which the emotionality is raised and later lowered to its natural state. As sensibility raises lower powers become more acute to recover it or to bring it to the usual state that is its state of organic and psychical balance. When you stimulate more intensely your sensibility upwards, the resistance of the lower powers becomes stronger. So, it is recommendable to be somehow skilful in the management of this sensitive polarity, and you should be wise and cautious; that is, you should meditate on an interesting subject for a while and then you should leave it for a while to approach it later again with higher chances and better effects.
Also here you must respect the dual law used by God to spiritualize His creation.