Course XVII - Teaching 4: Contemplative Life

Contemplation does not detach you from contingencies of life.
Material things are not evil, but your type of relation with them may be evil. Evil is eagerness and desire, which settle life on a material level.
Eagerness levels and likewise this occurs with desire.
When you achieve a quite deep inner life, then your attitude may be indifferent toward external things. Indifference is a deviation from the mystical path, and impedes a true realization, which is expansion through participation.
But, this participation, which is static, also appears as indifference when in reality it is not so; and it makes the world be unable to understand a true contemplative being or his apparently indifferent attitude toward human things.
Contemplative life is not permanent contemplation of divine mysteries, but ascetic routine of renunciation, which transforms the most trivial actions into true spiritual pillars; the latter are a source of experience, understanding and illuminative prayer.
Moreover, routine produces automatic ordinary actions. We do not mean they work just in an automatic way; really the Son takes part in these actions. But, by acquiring necessary control and capacity, one follows automatically his rules and duties, without any further intervention of a determining volitive element, which identifies a being with his own actions. Then this being is not reduced to an action; so, he is free.
Routine is liberating automatism; the Son remains fixed and immobile in his divine center, while his body or his soul works efficiently.
Exercises of prayer are unusually colorful thorough routine. First, their relevant value is missing; second, they can become habitually dry, particularly after a purgatory period of time, through a gradual removal of extreme emotions. By virtue of this help, these exercises are less rational and simpler. On the other hand, as the soul has less and less varied desires, at certain time all subjects of prayer become almost variations of only one idea and aspiration. Because of this, often you find boring and difficult to subdue your mind to thoughts that apparently are unnecessary now, because as usually you do not fix your soul at a point, then distractions enter easily, and along with them, tiredness, divagation, and even drowsiness and sleep. Then you should come back to a complete technical exercise, by trying to achieve gradually greater passivity.
The same occurs with the habit of continuous prayer, vocalized or silent. You start considering the meaning of your sayings, and later gradually, thorough their spiritual meaning, you immobilize the soul as to a unique aspiration represented by this prayer.
When only one idea, when only one fundamental thought about renunciation rules, every human action becomes super-conscious and objective through your non-identification with action and through your impersonal concern about them. Necessarily, this state of prayer leads to spiritual enlightenment –in the beginning, a sporadic state, and later, a permanent state.
Usually, one looks for a power of concentration through certain exercises. Doubtless, these exercises give capacity of concentration and certain mental powers, but just a mystique of routine grants the gift of concentration made life.
The routine removes ups and downs of our mental surge through the rhythm of what is established.
Because our mind is free of thinking about things already established, and because we do not need anything after our renunciation to any desire, except for indispensable things, our mind is spontaneously set on a unique center and unique idea; so, we acquire the gift of a multiple concentration, which potentializes greater performance and possibilities.
Moreover, routine becomes over-demanding when is integral.
Human routine is not such, because he rejects it and does not subdue his mind to a rhythm. He is thirsty and eager for change. This is escape.
An integral routine of the soul demands supreme efforts and inner determination, and potentializes possibilities of mystical expansion to the utmost, because as the soul cannot be enclosed in a material circle of activities and has no human escape, it transcends immediately and is set in the divine center. Contemplation technique is absolutely different from meditation technique. In the latter, you manage forces and positive actions of being, and volitive efforts act on the ordinary plane of consciousness. During contemplation, will is pure spiritual power, which leads the soul in the divine inner kingdom. There is a loss of ordinary perceptive powers, but also a noticeable development of intuitive and supernatural powers.
An intuitive contemplation knowledge is instantaneous; or rather, knowledge through instantaneous identification. You should not understand it as ordinary knowledge, but as total and essential knowledge, which is impossible to translate into mental aspects that always are under it.