When the Son perseveres at prayer, the Master drives away the shadows of ignorance and fills him with holy happiness.
The Son asks the Master to discover His presence, and as soon as His Divine Image appears clearly before his mind, affections and holy wishes flow from his heart.
You can compare spiritual life with a long journey to the Holy City of God. So, the disciple must go forward and learn how to travel through it patiently and constantly, without return or deviation, always on a fixed route.
You cannot start the Path of Perfection if you are not born to a new life.
The past of the disciple and everything that is left behind are an obstacle. He must forget both his good and bad actions.
Before being able to fly, a disciple must remove entirely the root of evil from his own heart.
Really, this is a painful and great death. It is not death taking your body out, but death taking evil, raising from the earth, driving miseries away, and liberating.
What his flesh demands is quite painful to the soul wishing to be liberated.
Instinctive nature is hard to overcome and a tenacious enemy against the Son’s purposes.
So, the Son attacked by his lower nature, as soon as in sorrow loses heart, implores his Master’s help like a castaway wailing for a safer and steadier port:
As the disciple glimpses the hidden power living in him and treads on his path of inner realization, he claims, moans and invokes the Mystical Presence:
“Master of mine: You are here, You are, and I am not.
The meditator should expect the hour for his deep introspective journey as joyful as a man who leaves for unknown lands, and as anxious as a person that feels attracted by the unknown, –he must expect that moment when his fullness transforms the whole day into an act of continuous meditation.
An ordinary man tries to solve his anxieties as soon perceives that distraction and entertainment are forgotten, and perhaps he does not notice that these means move away just temporarily from the mental surface the hammering of his troubles, while in his own soul, the latter remain unsolved.
All men are destined to divine contemplation.
Worldly life is opposite to contemplative life, and that is why people do not understand what contemplation is. Two opposite things cannot be real in themselves.
In essence, life of prayer usually is deep absorption. In these states of prayer, you shall find this inner point: participation.
If on any ascetic-mystical path certain time is established for prayer and spiritual exercises, not always the latter are enough for absorption when the soul reduces prayer to them.