Course XXII - Teaching 8: Affective Passive Meditations

Please recall this, the exercise of Affective Meditation leads ordinary feelings to transmute internally into goods of the soul by making them fit for a gradual higher identification with the Image created during the practice of Discursive Meditation.
Such as we have seen so far, the Affective Meditation is active.
Through Affective Meditation, the individual being makes efforts, voluntarily fights, and tries to project the power generated and created by an internal feeling that tries to get sensations through continuous activities, which you wish to convert into an active momentum.
You try to create this inner feeling by means of detailed Imaginative Pictures, with arguments and stories; therefore, with a lot a words producing an inner violent surge, almost like a whirlpool. Generally, the active form responds, adjusted to certain characteristic of the human being; life is manifest especially in him like a fight against his own environment and weakness, and this takes for granted a life expressed by continuous activities, impulses, and constant application of his will, because of his imperative and inherent need for making uninterrupted decisions.
But sometimes the individual being tires of the active Affective Meditation exercise.
The exercise under the passive form is recommendable if this tiredness or weariness is the result of physical or moral causes. But its practice must be ever guided.
It is here that we must remind how extraordinarily important is for the Son not to be negligent: he must report to his Superior about any difficulty in practicing the exercise of Meditation. Only a Superior, by virtue of his unselfishness and love, can distinguish these events, and what type of meditation is proper for the special time that the soul of the Son undergoes.
In the exercise of Affective passive Meditation, ideas are simple, the Imaginative Picture responds to only one image and nothing more, and Sensations are soft and calm, although steady and well defined, forming the whole with very few words, thanks to the elimination of every useless and vain term. You have to repeat slowly these few words in search of their penetration into your being, so that your receptive state, which is the fruit of your passivity, may stay eventually permeated and relaxed; then you shall maintain the necessary attention to avoid any deviation but, at the same time, certain surrender should be present.