Course XVII - Teaching 10: Simple Knowledge

Simple knowledge is a state of unity and similarity between subject and object. This unity cannot be achieved through an active state of your mind, which is always dual. Knowledge or rational understanding is dual always. Passive exercises reduce a mental movement, and tend to be subjective. A subjective image or state is not dual, and usually is a living experience of another kind.
As you acquired capacity to identify objective images in a subjective way, you can start a subjective concentration on abstract images; this way you can get knowledge of another kind, and a supernatural state.
Contradiction, paradox and irrational concept are other way to achieve this subjective identification and simple knowledge. What is paradoxical or irrational immobilizes your mind as if this was a shock. It is as if you ran, just to stop suddenly. This mental stop, this systematic perplexity obstructs a logical reasoning and prepares your mental mirror for a perception of another type, more passive and subjective.
An incomprehensible expression emerges spontaneously because our limited language gives rise inevitably to contradiction when it tries to soar to divine verities.
Another way to achieve subjective knowledge is through an exercise of potential meditation; you incite a mental stimulus, but by avoiding a rational response. This generating force cannot be consumed by feeling or ordinary knowledge, and leads easily to subjective identification and simple knowledge.
Knowledge acquired this way may be subjective, but not deprived of reality. Knowledge is such when is part of your soul –when it is yourself; otherwise, it is a theory or abstraction. Of course, perhaps it is not total knowledge, but is a mean to get to this total knowledge.
When a suitable asceticism is sustained by a real state of Renunciation, your personal consciousness stops being the subject, and expands more and more in the direction of your spiritual being. Then your identification is not with an object of arbitrary knowledge, but with wider and wider states of consciousness, and finally your whole being becomes a unique state in itself, which is simple and divine.
Sometimes, the subject should fade away. Otherwise, there would be two things: soul and Divine Mother. On this point, our reflection should stop. If there is identification, how is extinction absent? If it is one, it cannot be two. It is one, but it is two, because one can be quite high, but always in the expression of God. This duality is not multiplicity, but simplicity by reversibility.
This concept, which collides with a rational mind, is incomprehensible, but you can experience it by transforming yourself, through prayer and Renunciation, into image of this simplicity by means of an inner state of similarity. So, you get a contemplative identification, and you are what you want to know. But, this still is a movement of the soul, and not the highest perfection, which is Presence. So far the soul just got its identification and transformation into a simple movement, which is life. When you get spiritual immobility, which is Presence, you are not life, but testimony of life, Simple Witness of the Eternity, perfect image, which is similar to that of the Divine Mother who “Is” because “She Is Not”.
The concept of potentiality exists just in relation to the factor time. The Eternity is not an infinite time, but non-time. When you have overcome time by the eternal Presence, you have achieved potentiality, that is to say, Hes. Hes’ Resurrection, understood rationally, is transformation of potentiality into activity, but it means spiritually a realization of the soul, a birth to a spiritual consciousness of being, which goes beyond all duality. The exercise of meditation tries to lead to this state of consciousness beyond rational differentiations and one achieves it through very deep absorption, beyond technique and rational distinctions.