Course XLV - Teaching 3: Contact with the Community

Preparation for Ordination life is a constant effort of the soul for many months to get used to higher nervous tensions than to ordinary tensions.
The soul accustomed to this psychical run experiences a violent shock as soon as it arrives at the House of Community.
Doves blinded by sunbeams collide with the white walls of the houses. This occurs with the soul that illuminated by the divine sun of its vocation comes from the world and does not know how to stop on time before this change of vibration, which it experiences when it enters the Seminary. It is precise to put signals of warning and the best signal of warning in this case is a backward survey of the past life.
While the thought runs backward looking at the traveled road, the mind will loose its decisive tension, the heart will slow down its beats of immense desire and, little by little, in that immobility of the soul, the eyes will begin to see the new world where the aspirant entered.
The soul must enter the Silence of the Holy House, slowly, without efforts.
When the aspirant enters the Seminary, his rules of life must be imparted slowly and warnings given little by little. Old men said to those who came back hot and thirsty: “Wait for a while, do not drink water yet”.
After this violent shock, the soul comes in true contact with its vocation and comprises entirely its sense, because vocation and soul look one another square in the eye, not through the veil of the unknown ideal, but in contact with the simple reality.
At once, through an internal state that is entirely new, the soul senses how all its natural powers decrease and become weaker.
Wounds of the soul, even the most old and distant, become patent; all that was hidden appears as if a large screen were open before it.
The oldest desires and bad instincts emerge and everything that seemingly was abandoned forever gains new life.
The Great Current operates during these first days like a huge compressor that removes any humor, even the oldest and most hidden. The soul feels its misery, and the more this misery becomes manifested, the more gigantic appears the greatness and purity of the spiritual vocation.
Through a permanent silence in the Seminary, through the absence of any stranger and through an impossible communication or information about anything or anyone, the aspirant feels that he lacks any support, that he may fall any time and that nobody will run to help him.
People are all day excited by their curiosity, distraction and continuous escape of what they must do and consider. But the almost superhuman silence of the Seminary removes any intoxicating variety and becomes overwhelming and painful. Very few privileged souls are able to enter this silence and to remain immersed in it at once.
The eyes looking down and the absence of images and figures are as if something were rent or broken; it is as if the images of the world had taken an ideal form and were not any more what they are.
The habit of never saying what one wants or would wish, and prayers and Hymns chanted and repeated almost uninterruptedly are for the soul as if it had not any force or capacity for anything.
The apparent monotony of the regulation rhythm, hours repeated always the same through successive exercises during all day, and the new way of walking, of saying, of speaking and of being, produce a painful shock in the soul. But this pain becomes indispensable, because it is as the passage to a new birth.
The soul, put into the vibration of Community, is subject to a constant pressure and finally gets used to dispose of exciting and disconnected movements from the world. But this painful contraction, which in the beginning harries the brain and leaves it tired, rent and empty, is followed by a subsequent period of indifference, relaxation and inner silence. And it is there that the vision and sense of conformity and peace suddenly emerge.
And this wonderful vision of peace places the soul definitively in the perfect and serene rhythm of life in Community.