Course XXII - Teaching 1: Schemes for Meditation

In Cafh, the first vow marks the birth of a new life.
It implies a need for reviewing old concepts structuring a way of feeling thinking and acting.
This special structure of feelings and thoughts, and of its correlated action, would compose the old man, and had been built from premises that gave as the only reality a reality constituted by the physical body and its needs. After the vow, you go on to be a man, but now united with the Divine Mother. Another scale of values starts appearing, and another qualifying adjective shyly is outlined: new. New Man. After the Vow, the soul surrenders the will and uses it in order to address to the Divine. It is then when one is willing to be a soul; so, we need to apply the will by using every human resource in order to address to the Divine and respond to the call of the Divine Love. This loving answer can be updated by the act of meditation. The same means given in order to be men, and that previously were helpful to affirm falsely the preeminence of the physical aspect, of the bodily aspect, converting them many times into ends in themselves, now can be used in their pure condition of means to respond to the divine call. This takes for granted an exercise, the exercise of meditation. You should not forget they are the same means for different ends. Previously all of them were helpful to excite mental and personal values; through the exercise of meditation, and with a new habit, we are leading them to act exclusively upon the soul.
If we use a radio set as a simile, we could say the Divine Mother’s love to be equivalent to Hertzian waves, and mental and sentimental values to a radio set. Efforts made for tuning are equivalent to the exercise of meditation. The state of meditation is equivalent to achieve the exact tuning point. The wonderful symphony of the Divine Love is present everywhere, but in order to tune into it we have just one radio set formed by thoughts and feelings. We should use these thoughts and feelings and, in order to get our long-wished tuning, we move and try continuously the dial. This attitude of quest can be like the exercise of meditation. As soon as you reached the tuning point, the divine symphony gets manifested without any interference; so, why to go on to move the dial? By moving the dial we were playing the radio set in tune and making it fit for getting the Divine.
It is the Superior he who regulates and manages how to develop exercises of meditation of different type. It is recommendable for the Son to inform his Superior, when he talks to him, even the littlest details about every formal or thorough experience occurred during his practice.
Discursive Meditation: Creation of image. Dialogue with this image. Two goals: natural and supernatural. Natural: by discriminating things of daily life for their influence on a worthy method of the New Man, a method of external life adapted to his intimate idiosyncrasy; but all this for the supernatural goal: being gradually fitter for getting the Divine Mother’s Love, so that daily acts may gradually reflect a nearer communion with Her.
Affective Meditation: Divinization of feeling. A whole range of ordinary feelings raised to a higher and transcendent plane by love for the image created.
Invocation: Preparatory step to calm down outer and inner vortices, by focusing the intimate aspiration on the entreaty.
Imaginative Picture: First, in order to facilitate, and taken from pictures of personal life. which perhaps have produced certain sensations.
Sensations: As one describes this picture, so to speak we are releasing emotional undercurrents in the subconscious, eventually leading them to the level of consciousness, which now is alert by virtue of a loving will. You appreciate these sensations, and speculate about them. Later you raise them to the spiritual plane, by achieving a true transmutation of human values into divine values.
Purposes: These purposes should be simple, substantial and, mainly, humble. It is easier for man to die for his own principles than to live according to them. Example: if a feeling of hatred appears because we our irritable, then generalizations like these should be left aside: “I promise not to upset any more”. Instead one should say; “I promise for this whole day to control my mood, by raising my thought to the Divine Mother at the exact moment when something upsets me”; and if I fall, then I should calm down and request serenely from the Divine Mother her forgiveness.
Consequences: Clarification step, and conclusions. Now one does not speculate about certain feeling produced, like in Sensations, but about effects that have taken place. We have understood.
Mystical resume: A true synopsis for engraving essential parts of the meditation fulfilled.
Sensitive Meditation: One should internally re-create, through imaginative efforts of the mind, those sensations that can be perceived by using every one of our physical senses. You leave them aside and this way you develop astral senses. So you widen the range of action and give the consciousness a chance to use and control another vehicle for its experimentation. But remember that this is important but not the higher goal. This higher goal consists of a conscious and loving transmutation of the said sensations, imaginatively created and colored by a predetermined feeling, into certain good for the soul, a spiritual good.
It consists of:
Invocation: Same characteristics as in the step for affective meditations.
Sensations: To avoid any interruption of our attention, it is recommendable previously to establish certain direction from to top downward, according to the place of the different organs of our senses, starting by: eyes, ears, nose, mouth and fingertips.
Entreaty: Now, in this step, you request from the Divine Mother her help so that all these spiritualized sensations remain as a powerful experience in the soul.