Course XXXV - Teaching 7: The Two Ways

The decisive moment at the Spiritual Path corresponds to the Two Ways.
Its first part refers to purgative life and corresponds to worldly and terrestrial life.
Its second part refers to illuminative life and corresponds to the contemplative world.
Its third part refers to unitive life and corresponds to spiritual life.
If you analyze the life of great beings –and not only their lives, but lives of all men– you shall see them crossing these three steps before starting the decisive work of their existences.
Then the first part describes the inner analysis made by the soul, when the soul considers to abandon an old thing and to adopt a new thing.
The Grotto of Trials symbolizes the lower part of the mental world, and the Book of All times symbolizes the course of past existences, unknown to being, but that he intuits and that only can be read by IHS, the Liberated Soul.
The Four Knights watching over the gateway refer to groups of Initiates who control terrestrial souls, because the number four is symbol of material life.
By an inner and disciplined life, a disciple starts the race by which he will know his real state making him fit to conquer the future.
The second part refers to religious life.
There are souls which to make these experiences need several lives; other souls make it very quickly. Disciplined years of school and study prepare good physicians. To be a member of several Religious Orders, one or several years of harsh noviciate are necessary to be ready.
The Iron Gate symbolizes the harshness of a disciplined life.
The passage Abhayagiri, in mount Sumeru, is a place where there is an ancient Monastery.
The three wild beasts watching over the gateway are images of the three vices that have to be indispensably dominated in order to perfect life: lust, pride and greed.
To wear the Sacred Cord on the waist is symbol of chastity.
Hellenic harlots could not wear a belt and this way they were recognized.
To take one’s shoes off is symbol of a self-sacrificing soul that decided to live in everything and in everybody.
To break the Cane of Hazel indicates the breakage of a passionate and human will.
The Sanskrit word Vihara means monastery.
The third part symbolizes definitive choice and decision.
One reaches the Divine Union by two ways: by Abstraction or by Knowledge.
The first way if Vel, and it is the wonderful one; a Golden Eagle watches over it, which is symbol of the highest and loftiest thing.
The motto of the souls who travel through it is the Supreme Renunciation: to give everything, to know nothing, to go to the summit removing from illusion even its last veil.
The other path is that of Knowledge. Its name is Aphel; it is long, tortuous and difficult.
This path is studded with sharp motley little stones that denote the void of human sciences. It descends to the edge of the Abyss because those souls who travel through it must know evil but not to desire or want it. It is the Dante’s hell.
It ascends slowly in spiral because the soul has to know all philosophy, all science, all religion, all human aim, because the soul must know all the secrets of reason.
Also it reaches the summit because the multiple knowledge that is guided by right intention leads to learning and freedom.