Course XXII - Teaching 5: Affective Meditation on the “Two Ways” and the “Standard”

A man that by the assistance of the Holy Masters has abhorred his previous life and is sunk in the desolated abyss confronts the Way to the Mount peak. So, he cannot continue only abhorring his personality and feeling desolate between a world rejected and a Heaven glimpsed, because the new way in front of him is an imperative invitation to the liberating journey.
This is why he must reform his life and become a new man for the New Way.
Something dies when one reforms something. And when a being wants to reform his own life, he must die to those habits that were the structure of his old personality.
His old habits have converted him into a parasite in the Garden of God. His personal powers had aggressively turned outwards, with a permanent defensive attitude against the environment and, at the same time, like a vampire sucking all potential things to feed his personality.
So, these habits should die; therefore, the individual being has to acquire new habits. But it is relatively easy to change external habits if you replace them with other habits. The true value of new habits only rests on their capacity to promote a true death: an internal death.
But here is the point: internal habits are the most difficult to eradicate: human affections, past pleasures, successes flattering one’s vanity, old ideas and selfish prejudices. But unlike external habits, you cannot replace internal habits with other ones. Every time the individual being gets rid from one of those habits, in his soul remains a void that only can be filled up by the Divine Mother’s Love. But the individual being must become gradually purer so that the Divine Love may fill up his soul, and his personal and illusory ego must gradually die.
Here is the Great Detachment: an intimate, inner and secret Detachment. By means of it, the individual being gets rid from habits that were seemingly his own soul and that gradually and painfully he is leaving behind him like offerings to the Divine Mother.
All this detachment, all this painful and drop-by-drop human bloodshed is not in vain.
The external look of the Old Man stops being his own look. Now he sees like a New Man and glimpses the Standard where he knows that his true name is written down with luminous letters –a name that he lost sight of when veils of illusion covered his spiritual eyes.
Right now the individual being identifies himself with this Sacred Standard. He fixes his new look on it and treads on the Way. He has realized how this Way passes through the world of men. From there he looks at the world with understanding and love; he lives in the world from his new position, but does not belong to it; he is a foreigner who loves all men for the mere fact of knowing that they do exist by the Divine Mother’s Will, that is to say, she loves them for that which they essentially are, but is not attached to their appearance.
He has already made his Unique Choice: living in the world, working in the world, but being detached from the fruits of his own action.
He treads on the mystical way leading to the top perfection, where the Standard with his Spiritual Name is fluttering.
As he divinizes his own life while living and working in the world, he divinizes and transforms it with his exemplary unselfishness regarding external and material things.