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.
The soul wishing for the transformation by God and also the perfect life of the Divine Master must dive in the blood of the sorrowful passion, and suffer intensely so that the human nature is redeemed, and the personality destroyed and dead, with a super-individuality shining in the soul.
God, great universal worker, teaches daily to man His lesson on work through Nature, but man achieves it with sweat, blood and strenuous sacrifices; it is hard to him to overcome obstacles on the line of duty.
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:
A Son that desires peace and quietness finds a source of continuous sorrow in the atmosphere of a city. Then he looks at the sky in quest of the Divine Master, and finally confesses sorrowfully:
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.
Meditating is not thinking. Thinking is just one of the elements of the exercise. Discoursing, reasoning and reflecting do not involve a real and deep movement in the soul substance. The purpose of thinking in meditation is to outline the aim of the exercise and to produce necessary stimuli for its realization.
This step consists in exposing a picture that the soul has to observe and consider: it may be the development of an event already lived, scenes usually observed in the abyss, or images that express the divine.
The sensitive picture is one of the most important steps in the exercise of meditation, for it is the stage in which the soul controls its feelings and gives its intended form, tonality and vibration.