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The task of a spiritualist is to lay hold of the Divine Spirit, by means of meditation, prayer and contemplation, and to keep it captive in the soul.
The presence of the captive Spirit within manifests itself in the form of illumination, rapture and ecstasy. Unfortunately, this state does not usually last very long: people usually drop back into the misery of everyday life and have to begin their efforts all over again.
The Divine Spirit can never be held captive by someone who does not possess a suitable recepacle within himself, the receptacle that tradition calls the Holy Grail.
Alchemists used a different language to express the same reality: they spoke of ‘fixing the volatile’, that is to say, of capturing that which, by definition, cannot be captured: the volatile spirit.
But in order to fix the volatile, the Cosmic Spirit, it has to be condensed and made material and this is possible only if the reverse process of ‘volatilizing the fixed’, that is to say, of making subtle that which is solid, is carried on at the same time.
As long as the physical body is gross, dense and impure, it cannot vibrate in unison with the spirit nor hold it captive. This is why there is always need for a great deal of purification and decantation. Once this is done, the physical body becomes capable of receiving the Divine Spirit. To volatilize what is fixed, therefore, is to spriritualize the physical body.
OMA
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