Spiritual Retirement or entire detachment from the world during a year is indispensable to a proper development of ascetic exercises.
When a disciple is sufficiently advanced in concentration, he can abstract his mind whether in the most silent cavern or in the most boisterous metropolis, but as disciplinary postulate has to seek his periodical detachment from the world.
If the soul may start the ascetic path for personal purposes, as it progresses in his practices fatally has to understand that the only reality that it seeks is not the conquest of certain powers but the Divine Union.
Apparently, Man and God are two different things, but after man removes the veils of illusion, he realizes God, and then those things are like only one. This is happiness and paradise, and that is why, even being unaware of it, the individual being on earth hankers for spiritual perfection and for meeting God.
Meditation refers to sensitive aspects of the soul.
Meditation is an imaginative discourse; it is useful because brings into play all mental forces of the individual being by guiding them toward the achievement of the sensation wished.
This method will be particularly useful for beginners when they enter the way of Meditation, and will facilitate extraordinarily this exercise.
First Meditation.
Subject: The Black Lady.
Effects: Abhorrence.
The practice of this Meditation leads the soul to consider its wrongs and faults, and to abhor them; every perverse act committed by the practitioner becomes a living picture that causes him to suffer and purge his evils.
Concentration is an exclusive gift of the mind, a mechanical thought power to sustain and fix closely an idea. This gift has not anything to do with kindness of the heart or spiritual aspirations of the soul.
By Concentration your mental matter does not acquire any form, but adopts only one form.
Concentration is made in two ways: one is objective and other subjective. One, as expression of the will, acts on a sense or determined form; other, as state of abstract mental consciousness, is over all senses.
First exercise: During hours of the morning, on an isolated and calm place, the student should be seated, straight his body and his head, and the hands relaxed on his knees; slowly he shall vocalize some holy formula or a constructive words that he prefers, imagining a golden yellow color all around him.
Contemplation is the definitive step of the soul from Asceticism to Mysticism.
It is called Secret Science of God and Divine Gift because at this point of spiritual development, the soul is directly enlightened by the Masters; that is why some believe and state that it is a gift, a grace of certain privileged souls, but not of all, and even the most advanced souls cannot intend to reach it.
Contemplation can be Shadowy or Illuminative. In fact, these divisions are arbitrary because these two states cannot be accurately determined. The soul becomes rather contemplative and remains absorbed by this holy exercise for a longer and longer time.