Course XVII - Teaching 5: Contemplation and Exercises of Prayer

The exercise of meditation is an organized mental movement to produce certain effects in the soul.
In questions related to love and enlightenment, this exercise leads to lofty feelings and considerable experiences so far unknown.
As your capacity to feel is filled to the brim, this exercise leads to suspense, or rather, to a considerable ecstasy.
On the other hand, though in the beginning during passive meditation one rather achieves a permanent emotional suspense, the former can lead to a sensible state, deeper and darker. Reason does not intervene so much in the formation of the discourse; so there is more freedom to acquire purer states. Contemplation gives direct knowledge of divine verities.
Personal eagerness for knowing drives contemplative knowledge away. Only renunciation to knowledge is knowledge, because it places mental knowledge in the relative frame of contingent truths.
As you try to know, you do it through enquires of your mind and of your rational mechanism. But there is another way, which is totally spiritual and direct. It is a positive concentration on the object, which sets free our spirit for contemplation and knowledge. It is so deep and dark knowledge that remains almost unknown to our own mind, and the latter hardly may translate this knowledge into rational definitions.
It is as if you moved in a dark world because of the intense spiritual light of the very soul, and would come in contact not only with the very truth, but also with the truth of particular and defined things. Perhaps Plato mentioned it in relation to the world of ideas.
You should study, but by transforming your study into prayer.
When you have an object of knowledge, this object is one thing and you are other thing. This knowledge that you can acquire is limited and within the reach of your mental perception. But if you achieve a contemplative state of identification with the object, you “are” what you want to know, and you never shall be able to express all that you know.
When you reach a substantial union with the unique and simple truth of the Divine Mother, you do not wish to express it any more, if you could do in terms of desires.
When for the first time you come into contact with divine verities through a supernatural mental state, you desire with lofty intensity to transmit a partial truth that you have discovered. But when “you are” the truth, then you keep it in silence. This is the Vow of Silence. You should not break the secret of what should not express.
The Teaching should be studied not only on books, but also on the Divine Teaching that arrives continuously in a heart in Silence. This Teaching is uninterruptedly conveyed by participating in the immobile Presence of the Soul in the Divine Mother’s Heart.
In active meditation there are exalted emotions, and in passive meditation, this exaltation grows deeper. In the contemplative phase there is an identification of subject and object. In the unitive phase, first there is an active expansion of the soul, as participation in the divine and participating state itself, and one achieves a simple knowledge by similarity.
When you transcend sensible states, Union becomes unusually deep, and in certain way you are disconnected from the reality. This does not mean an absence of a transcendental state of consciousness while you are actively disconnected. We may say this is more possible, but this does not exclude your active capacity, which develops as another kind of action, which is dark and your mind cannot decipher.