Course XXI - Teaching 2: Discursive Meditation on a Text

Text:
“Memento Homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. Pretiosa in conspectu
Domini mors sanctorum ejus.”
Think that the suffering coming from the fight is like the death of the unbelievers. Perhaps is not life of the spiritual man like death of personality? So, why do some spiritual men suffer being alive? These men should be happy and feel that life is like death of saints.
If one centers his existence on his own periphery, that is, on his skin, then the consciousness has to stand different ups and downs of superficial life. Heat, cold and noises disturb. One is nothing more than a shell in the stormy sea of daily events. Our own existence only experiences ups and downs in the surge of sensorial life.
But if you can move your life to the fundamental center of the existence, to that central and remote point, then only deadened echoes of outer sounds will come, and you will remain ever tranquil in your self. If an individual can focus the most hidden point in his own being and lives entirely from there, how can care about events? It is as if pain had been hurting in other person, or laughter had come from other being. In the center of his vast inner space, he would be like a star gleaming high up in the night.
So, he would die as the saints do because, although the flesh could fall in pieces, only the surplus and what exactly bothers would die. So, he would internally want the gradual disappearance of faculties, senses, habits et cetera that are covering and hiding all that, and their slow and steady extinction in death. It is he who would produce the dissolution of his human personality because this way he would be more and more centered in order to be truly alone and truly forsaken. So, certainly, in the silence of a perfect night, he could truly look for God.