Course XXI - Teaching 11: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations
The “TWO WAYS”. All souls in the world are predestined. One day, when the soul realizes its existence, freewill and ego, already this soul is almost formed: inadvertently, education, customs, society, habits and subconscious, have formed it rigorously. For the first fourteen years of life –the most important years for its formation– the soul was pure receptivity and acceptance without any objection, since was unaware of its own strength. But when the soul grows and discovers that is free and has a motive center called ego, what can this soul do in order to stay nearer to its ideals? And were not these ideals also forged by life itself?
All souls are predestined; truly, there are not two ways; just there is one way and its negation. To be or not to be. There is a way as the personality of the being on his millenary projection, or the tragic refusal to follow it –to let the chance of self-realization in life slip by.
So, there is no choice between God and world. It is not so. Rather one should say: this life or no life; this realization or no realization; life or death.
One can do only one thing: not to choose, but to know; to know the background as a whole and the forms of being, in order to clear up and define in our consciousness which is the way, its form, texture and mode of our own course. Any man has only one way, which is determined by his past; he must know it and build a stepping-stone of improvement upon this past.
The “STANDARD”. Likewise with the standard. What standard should one choose? White, black, blue or red? It is a ridiculous question. You have only one standard established by God thousands of lives ago, and you cannot despise it because, willy-nilly you have to come back once and again to this standard; you cannot live another life, except your own life; you cannot suffer from pains of others, you cannot laugh with the laugh of others. Every person laughs with his own laugh, suffers from his own pains, loves his own loves, and believes in his own God. Every one has his own standard and is his own standard.
This standard was made in the individual being before his formal choice; this standard was waiting for him.
The Divine Mother gives the individual being life and his parents and friends, and has formed his body and his soul, made him be born in whatever age and place, made him think of infinite unexpected things, and made him fall sick in spite of him, and even so the soul sometimes wonder, where is its standard? The individual being is totally surrounded by God; God permeates him everywhere, and does he still wonder where the standard is? The standard is the life that the Divine Mother gives him; that which She forcefully and inadvertently imposes. The standard is the unexpected thing, a surprise, a disease of tomorrow, a walk next Sunday, a friend, Cafh; all this and even the meaning contained.
The standard is this truth that now has appeared in the individual being, and even efforts made to incarnate it.
