Course XXII - Teaching 6: Affective Meditation on the “Golden Temple” and the “Veil of Ahehia”

Usually the present man projects his own being outward, as if he recalled certain fights which, in the beginning of the race, took place against hostile forces of Nature, but also looks for consolation outside himself; he looks for human consolation.
His accumulated privations, afflictions and anguishes press and smother him. He has no internal altar to offer those privations, afflictions and anguishes to Something higher, except to his own personality; so, he offers and externalizes them in order to get compassion, flattery and, through this, consolation.
As joy is described as the prize of God, so pain must be the justice of God. Any internal pain comes from the human refusal to be illuminated by His Divine Light. So, man wastes this teaching by exposing it to the compassion of another man instead of being intimately identified with that teaching in order to discover the message of the Divine.
And as he requests consolation from relative things, his consolation will be relative, or rather, a fleeting palliative. So, he deludes himself more and more, since he does not find absolute, unique and lasting consolation, and then mistakenly replaces it with many consolations which are born and die like any other thing created by man.
Like in other things, he sacrifices divine and absolute quality to human and relative quantity.
The Old Man says, “Pain shared, pain diminished”.
But the Son knows that at the very moment of his first Vow, the Divine Mother made germinate the seed of the truth in him, and it is its germination and enlargement that is pressing against those attachments that harden the soul and produce pain.
If this comes from the Divine Mother, where is the man to soften this pain?
Only in the Silence of his inner seclusion, the Divine Mother can teach him how every inner void leaving an eradicated attachment will be occupied by a new sprout of that divine seed; so, this eradication pain will become a loving and expectant foretaste, a Divine Consolation.
May the Son live his Silence; he has an altar in his own heart to offer to the Divine Mother his pains and sorrows of spiritual growth.
May he make strenuous efforts not to externalize them; may he make strenuous efforts to remain in Silence; may he stop seeking many human consolations as the Old Man did, and he will find in himself a Unique, Pure and Eternal Divine Consolation.
The Old Man lives a continuous yearning for pleasures and for getting them by using material means. As these material means give him pleasure, so he strives for possessing them and converts them into very ends, and this way he is tied to the object of pleasure through an anguishing attachment. Eventually, his fear of losing it, or the real loss, because these things are perishable, tortures him constantly; so, he tries to delude himself and he is chasing the eternity in his endless quest for pleasure and enjoyment.
In addition to it, as the man internally carries the spark of his immortal essence –which tries to be one with the Unique Fire– inadvertently and unconsciously is in quest for the Absolute, but the Old Man degrades this perfection tendency and tries to calm down those desires of the soul by means of changing and perishable things.
Bitterness and weariness, experienced by man after he tastes a human pleasure, are born of this antagonism between his essential part looking for the Essence, and his human part looking the Essence in what is contingent.
One pleasure is perdurable: when you can feel and glimpse the Divine Presence.
When you feel internally the Divine Presence, you feel it totally around. You feel the Divine Presence in your neighbor, in clouds, stars and flowers, in short, in everything, because the Divine Presence colours internally your look with Divine Love, and this look permeates the surface of every form in quest for the essence, that is, the Divine Presence hidden in forms.
The Son must avoid the delusion of human pleasures, and be faithful to this Love that illuminates him internally.
By means of this loving Fidelity, the Son can renew his efforts, expect patiently, and offer his fleeting attachments and pleasures, one by one, for the sake of this Divine Presence, which he recognizes as the only source of internal Bliss –insensible Bliss, Unique and Divine Bliss.