Course XV - Teaching 8: The Black Lady

What may represent the Black Lady in Cafh’s Symbols?
The spiritual path is traveled by stages; it neither begins nor ends in one life. It began by the individuation of the human being and shall end by his liberation.
The spiritual way is marked by long life spans, which is experience, subtilization, adaptation of vehicles, and a sum of inner realizations.
A stage must be relegated to the past as soon as is achieved, because it was a personal experience accumulated in the subconscious and expressed in the soul.
So, if instincts were for man his means to know, if present man is a son of whatever experience derived from instincts, this state has been surpassed and must be forgotten to choose the mental life that present mankind tries to conquer. But human senses naturally tend to taste again what some day was a cause of delight in the personal experience; and sensibility tries to preserve numberless times a pleasant sensation experienced yesterday. All lower powers of the soul conspire to grant again to man this pleasure of yesterday. But if the soul wants to try the new stage and realize it unfailingly, must give up and escape from the past, must control senses leading it to repeat what yesterday was tasted, and must educate the sensibility to move it away from this trend to taste again.
So, a spiritual man must not look behind. Behind, in his life and in the past is what he has realized and surpassed, and what he has to leave; and the Black Lady is the main symbol of this past.
Passions, vicious trends, affections of yesterday, all this belongs to the past. Yesterday they were used by the soul in is travel through the stage of senses and instincts, but in the new stage, to come back to it is to vegetate in the past, to be stagnated, and to deny the spiritual progress.
So, the Black Lady is not an evil and wicked entity; on the contrary, she is the Divine of yesterday for a spiritual man and the Divine of today for a man that still did not realize the stage in which she is the queen. The Black Lady is the voice of whatever corrupts the spiritual work, the enemy par excellence of any ideal and of any effort of the soul to excel spiritually, the deadened voice of the past, and temptation, passion, vice, belittling fear, and death.
She is a powerful enemy not only because attacks through senses, but also because invades the mind with whisperings of the latter and with the memory and all powers of the instinctive mind at her service.
There is just one way to overcome and reduce it just to an experience accumulated in the soul without any other subjugating power, and this way is meditation, since concepts and moral criteria are out of question, and we have to detach our sensibility from the desire of tasting again and to control the natural trend of our senses to sense again; and this entails, over all, to work intensively on sensibility making use of proper means.
Sermons become vain, reasoning are useless, notions of duty futile, and call to will poor; we have to act directly on the psychic substance whose diapason is sensibility, to transform, re-educate and shape it again. All this is an order that must be eminently individual or personal. Evils of the world or from other beings around us have nothing to do with this corrective exercise, and criticisms from others cannot have any influence.
The practitioner must personally take and observe his soul and its state, must understand what aspect of the Black Lady prevails in the soul, and must be ready to work, under direction and control, for his own recovery and spiritual progress. An effect must be achieved in the meditation on the Black Lady: Abhorrence.
Of all psychological reactions that can be used in this struggle, such as contempt, hatred, rejection, intolerance, repulse, et cetera, doubtless Abhorrence is really indicated for the triumph of the soul over the Black Lady.
Bear in mind that to make her power steady, the Black Lady causes the sensibility to be attached and to taste time and again those sensations experienced someday. An equivalent force must be used to liberate the sensibility from this attachment. To criticize the Black Lady, to treat her in an intolerant way or dislike her is not enough; we need to use or get in the soul a true force of attack and opposition, something able to impede the Black Lady even to appear in the soul; and this just can be achieved by continuously, intensely and constantly abhorring her and whatever she symbolizes and controls in the soul.
Years of constant abhorrence through meditation have to forge in the soul a total abhorrence of the past with all its delights tasted someday, therefore by permitting a slow and gradual formation of the new man, that is, of a man with a proper sensibility of high and lofty spiritual states: that is why abhorrence is an irreplaceable psychological effect.
Many meditators fear to abhor too much the ordinary aspects of the Black Lady and think that this is a denial of life, and that a harsh attack on the Black Lady is like an attack on life itself, and when they deem so, far from an intense abhorrence, they operate with ineffective mediocrity; this is for those who think and meditate so: life is so wisely organized that it never will attempt against itself, and there is no danger that the indispensable equilibrium may be broken by excessive abhorrence impeding to live as a human being and to achieve the purposes of life.
The Black Lady never dies, and human nature cannot be harmed in its vital aspects by meditation: these fears are the most obvious expression of how the Black Lady is fighting against the meditation on the Black Lady.
You should preferably develop the exercise bearing in mind something already lived that has been reproached or is being reproached by the conscience. This personal experience has to be coldly outlined in the imaginative picture, that is, it must not be lived again, as if it were not of the present state of the meditator.
Of course, the picture must include those conditions above-mentioned in the respective teaching, and must be careful not to be disconnected from his imaginative character.
Naturally, from this picture whether a manifested weakness before stimuli of the picture, or a sensation of vacuity and futility of the event already lived shall emerge, and this shall permit to express purposes of abhorrence and repulsion in general against the Black Lady, who from the ignorance and darkness of the soul has brought about these sensations.
You should persist for a while in the purgative work because a personal experience on the surface has to facilitate the emergence of other similar personal experiences to consciousness.
These personal experiences shall take place picture by picture in the good meditator, and shall permit a systematic purgative work. It is as if after taking from the archive of the soul something already lived, the dark pit of human primitivism would remain exposed, that is, the crude selfishness of the old man, of that being who has been faithful son of the Black Lady, permitting then a continuous evaporation and a subsequent penetration of sunbeams. The observation of vapors has to give us the uninterrupted succession of imaginative pictures, and a past that has to be really abhorred for long.