Course XXI - Teaching 12: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations

The “GOLDEN TEMPLE”. As one living and appreciating, with our memory, positive and negative results of our experiences, we are learning not only how to foresee results, but also to measure life with a new measure of the time.
As soon as you act, also its original causes and future consequences are present in the said act. So, instead of perceiving a very short present time, we experience a sensation of our present time that is much longer, so long that contains cause, phenomenon and consequences.
So, you learn how not to live blindly or microscopically, but with higher clairvoyance coming from the apprenticeship of experience and not from enlightenment or psychic revelation. For example, if a person went to bed and later woke up again thousands of times, when he retires at night he knows that his sleep is limited, and after some hours he will be awake and will start again his struggle for life. Although one sleeps and rests, we know absolutely that this is transient and that we have to return to the wakeful consciousness. Also, when one is tired, we know that this tiredness lasts a short while because at night when we go bed, we relax and leave aside tensions of the day.
So, one knows when it is time to rest and when it is time to work, and also we know their original causes and consequences.
A vital knowledge of this kind gives considerable consolation as much for moments of disappointment as for those of pleasure. For instance, you enjoy a movie picture in a cinema, and say, “This film lasts only ninety minutes”; later, your fantasy is over and you have to return to the street again; in your office, you say, “After two hours I will be breathing pure air again. So, the point is not to eternize the suffering or pleasure. The point is to transform subjective time into objective time, into clock time, which is unalterable and wiser; it does not distort. This consolation by the exactness of the time, by the shortness and limitation of the soul moments, and the play and balance of the different times, gives the immense consolation that things are objective: this is a pencil, this is a table and this is the soul. Just this imperfect soul distorts the vision of life and makes you believe that a pleasant afternoon is the whole life. One wants the soul to know itself with most perfect exactness. This is to obey, this is to pray and this is a defect. You do not know your soul to be wrong any more, and now, since your soul is not wrong as before, your consolation is better and does not come as a sedative, –it is understanding of the things.
Desolation, which is the opposite pole of consolation, comes because your soul expects one thing and life answers otherwise; it is your being that prefers to expect nothing more and nothing less than those things that life can provide. Your being tries to be exact and accurate. It wants to be always in the truth. There is no higher consolation than this.