Course XXI - Teaching 8: Other Affective Passive Meditations

The “BLACK LADY”. This exercise of the Black Lady not only simplifies mental activities but even expresses quite properly the fundamental idea symbolized by the Black Lady. She is not an enemy to fight while she is pure nature but only later, when that natural energy has entered the being and has denaturalized it. Events alone as a whole are not the Black Lady but passions installed in the soul. The Black Lady never is energy but perversion that this energy can produce in the soul. Enemies of the spirit always are in the very spirit.
“The ABYSS”. The same thing occurs with the world. The world alone is neither detestable nor produces desolation of any kind. Worldly things are good and bad, and the soul can do nothing to change them. We can change only our own world, our own things. The soul cannot address yet to our dearest one because we have nothing to do with him; the affection that one may fell is only something personal. Desolation about evils of the world refers only to those worldly evils living in us; it hurts what is in us. Receptivity about evils produces desolation; so, a total indifference is desired.
The “TWO WAYS”. Detachment clears up quite well the problem of the world evil.
All is a question of attachment; all is a question of defects of the soul. If the soul was beautiful and good, the world would seem beautiful and good. If one can be detached from good and bad of the world, then we will join again harmoniously with Humanity; for the time being, we remain attached, colliding or standing aside –attraction and repulsion.
Likewise, if one can be detached from his own bad and evil, we will be again in peace with us, and able to cope with the exact dimension objectively.
The “STANDARD”. It is this standard that makes inner goods transcend. So far the soul was concerned about itself, exclusively, in its own inner world. The standard has a virtue: to objectify suddenly the most significant thing in our fights by moving the personal ideal outside the subjectivity; so, at the same time it succeeds in cleaning of remains and leftovers produced by this activities. The standard is the great cleaner of the soul and, at the same time, gives a new vision of the way; so, it increases one’s enthusiasm for perfection.