Course XVII - Teaching 16: Prayer with Natural Participation

You see an image and you understand another thing, but not whatever you do, but what this image represents as a symbol.
For instance: you see a door, and you understand a possibility. You do not understand it as an interpretation, but as if you was a door –as if you was this possibility. You see a landscape by the window, and you are a new world entering your consciousness. You do not understand you as if you entered this world, but you “are” this new world.
You should not look for these states. One cannot say if this natural participation is achieved through an exercise, but it is convenient to know what it is. Particularly because it is evidence and proof of a theory: the world of archetypal symbols. It is as if on the unconscious of the race, graphic images representing Fundamental Ideas of its development were engraved.
Sometimes, these images appear on the world of dreams, but you can get them through direct experience derived from meditation.
In objective meditation, the place of action is outside you; I am subject and object. There is a flow of powers from me toward the object. In subjective meditation I am object-subject; I am action. A subjective experience is total. Meditation goes beyond a simple exercise; it is a vital state of being. Instead of being movement outwards and subjective elevation, like a request, is to be conscious in the depths of the soul, and to sink in a very deep absorption. Any movement is duality. A subjective state is simple; if there is movement, it is a movement in itself.
In fact, one needs a new language. Our ordinary language contains passive, objective states, but you cannot qualify these states –namely, passive, negative, subjective and subconscious. Thence it is impossible to get accurate definitions. Perhaps communication should go beyond verbal expression in order to become an interpretation of states leading to understanding by similarity.