Course XXI - Teaching 13: Other Stimulating Affective Meditations

The “VEIL OF AHEHIA”. The veil of Ahehia is not only linen of illusions but also robe of protection, which preserves from the inclemency of life.
Sometimes, the soul enthused over an inner inspiration knows how to fly throughout unfamiliar times, where nobody has entered. This soul takes flight and, for some few moments, accedes a land of mystery and light; later, it returns and glides to the Earth, to the reality of daily illusions. The individual being cannot stand this unknown land long time. According to sages, this world is pure illusion, but the individual being, the man of this world says, all that is real, illusions, fantasies, supernatural worlds. Can we state something that we did not experience, just because some sages did say so? Many beings enter the supernatural world and say: the real world, the mental world is more real than the material world. This is a mistake: those worlds perhaps are as real as this one, but nothing more. What is real, the essence, Ahehia, is a vertical pillar in a world of any kind. Perhaps did not physicists see, in their exclusive investigation of the matter, how the matter is and how disintegrates, remaining for them the gate of the temple of the spirit open? It is not necessary to deny the matter in order to discover the spirit; also through its affirmation we may find it because through successive and accumulative affirmations we even reach that which transmutes matter into spirit. If an ordinary man states, “Matter is illusory, and just the spirit is real”, you may suspect he says so because someone else has said so, and not because he has grasped it entirely with his own being. Do his eyes, ears, glands, stomach and entire body know that matter is illusory? And as soon as he has satisfied his hunger, is his food or his satisfaction illusory? Is illusory that food that preserves him from death?
No, it is also real; Ahehia’s veil is not a veil of illusion, but a robe of protection; it is Ahehia herself. One’s bliss does not consist in drawing the veil, but in affirming and preserving it in our heart. One’s bliss comes from our understanding of what this veil represents, and also from our understanding of the need of a body.
Certain anchorites deny the matter and abandon their own body by staining and impoverishing it: men of this kind ignore the perfect correspondence between body and spirit, and that if they stain the body, distort somehow the spirit. One’s body is an instrument, a scaffold, a mechanic structure for the realization of the soul; if you destroy the matter, if you rend quite early the veil, you stay without that instrument that you are given to affirming and realizing your spiritual growth. It is as if a mason hastens to look at the building that he is erecting and removes the scaffolds before he finishes the edifice. How can he finish it later?