Once you have acquired some of the skills for investigation of the outer realms, you are equipped for entrance into the Third Room of our temple. It is here that most of us are content to remain, once we have learned to enter it.
Everyone who obeys the admonition, "Permit nothing you dismay - which is an old world way of saying that you can not be harmed, so be courageous - may enter into this chamber. Such courage is truly strengthened by our intellect and the intellect is strengthened by study. Now we will turn the focus of our intellect inward. We do this through prayer.
Do not be caught up in the thought that might be shaped as follows: "Oh, all this fuss, all this focus and study. What good is it for prayer? I don't think any of this writing can improve upon it."
If that, dear reader, becomes the dominant thought in your mind at this stage, then it is true, this writing will not improve upon your already acquired ability to pray. No one should tell you that you should not pray as you feel.
However, we are dealing with a very advanced topic here. We are dealing with "Contemplative Prayer" and that is a subject in itself. There are certain skills that we need. We do not need to be nuclear physicists but we need to be able to stick to the subject of our contemplations and we are helped by giving attention to outer details.
This Third Room of prayer may be as far as you wish to go because it does furnish us with all we need for prayer.
The outer world reaches us through our five senses, those senses that we have been sharpening. The inner world reaches us through Feeling, Intuition and Imagination. These different senses are needed here.
FEELING:
When we think of Feeling, it seems familiar to us because we are accustomed to feeling things in the outer world. How smooth the cat's fur seems to be to our touch, how rough we may find a newly sawed piece of wood. These are Feelings and we find them to be valuable in our investigations of the outer world.
Yet, here in the within, the Feelings we need to deal with are emotions. I can only hope that you have experienced some of the "chills" that may happen during prayer, some of the joy that may be felt when you enter into the spiritual presence of the Christos within - some of the tears that such joy may elicit. These emotions are very real, as real as the sparrow's song we took the trouble to listen to earlier. The usual Feelings are wonder, joy calm, assurance, hope and perhaps fear.
INTUITION:
Intuition is another of the inner senses we use to investigate this inner Third Room. You may not sense that you know what Intuition is or what it has to do with prayer, but it is a valuable aide when you turn your attention inward. Some may call Intuition simply a "hunch", but those hunches will teach you a great deal, if you follow them. Intuition or hunches will eventually present themselves to you when you are faced with situations dealing with the outer world. The great geniuses of the world have followed hunches and discovered amazing things. We must learn to use that inner sense because it furnishes our lives with vital information concerning our own spiritual journey.
The great teacher Yogi Ramacharaka, early in the 20th century, taught that the Intuition is developed through our ability to increase our attention span! Thus, those previously described exercises for concentration may now pay the interest promised. In fact, it was Ramacaraka who first wrote about the pencil exercise in 1904, and if you have tried it, you may sense, intuitively, its value.
IMAGINATION:
The last of the inner senses we can use is Imagination. This is the most difficult sense to use because it can so easily be misused. We can imagine all sorts of things that are erroneous and even dangerous. We may imagine that we hear voices telling us to do this or that. We can imagine that we see the face of Christ and in all cases of such imaginings, we need to use our well developed sense of Intuition! We need to learn through this sense whether or not our imagination is playing tricks on us.
We rarely need to use the imagination to further our prayers, but there is a time when without this sense, we will miss some of the great joys of our inner life.
Elsewhere I have written that in the Third room, or at this third stage, you may feel warmth, you may see light or hear a tone. I do not mean that you may imagine that you feel warn, that you see light or that you hear a tone. The tone is real, but it is not one that anyone else can hear. It comes through the imaginative sense, but it is an audible tone. Do not confuse the Imagination with fantasy. There is no fantasy about the tone. If you pretend that you are hearing a tone, that is fantasy, and that can be erroneous and even harmful.
Unlike the outer senses, these three inner senses do not operate separately. The ear hears and the eye sees. In the inner, the senses work closely together and in certain ways depend upon each other's development for their own strength.
If you give yourself a few moments of quiet in which you gather to yourself as much clam as you are able to achieve, and after a period of time, depending upon your ability to sustain that calm, you begin to review your life as an observer, then you will quickly develop a new sense organ. This sense organ is the Imaginative sense.
If you begin by passing in front of yourself the experiences of the day and reviewing how those experiences effected your moods and your journey for that time, then you are practicing this exercise. It is important that you do not react emotionally to these things, just witness them in your mind's eye as if you were only and observer.
Think about how you react emotionally or fail to react emotionally when you observe someone spilling his tea in a restaurant. Most of us would hope that he is not scalded and that the damage he may have done to his trousers is not permanent! We know that his embarrassment is unnecessary since we all spill our tea on occasion. We are, for the most part, "on his side." Most of us would not condemn him. Most of us would not laugh and think him stupid. Most of us would see the situation and understand the humanness that confronts us as we observe the scene.
Now that fellow, as he reviews the day's occurrences, may be ashamed and embarrassed on recalling it. Imagine how he will condemn himself for such clumsiness in public! We can see that this feeling is uncalled for.
Our task then is to review the events in our lives as if we were the observer across the room; the one who is "on our side." for that one is our Higher Spiritual Self. I believe God does not condemn us for our clumsy mistakes. He hopes we are not harmed. He knows that any damage done can be mended and He hopes we will understand the uselessness of embarrassment.
It is not easy to do this review, this reflection, when the embarrassment is new or fresh in our experiences. It is better to look at that event a few days after it has taken place and this is true with many of the more powerful experiences of our lives. It does little good for us to review our reaction to the death of a loved one immediately following that death. It may take months or years before we are able to look at that occurrence as an observer across the room. When we are able to do that, however, we will lean many important things about the death of our friend. When we can, even at such times, put our ego - our self - "on our side", we will enter a different room within the interior castle.
When the tempests of our lives have been calmed, and we have reviewed the events of our day and of our past experiences, withholding all negative condemnations of our selves, then we are able to "listen." In this quiet, this calm, we wait patiently for our conversation with God to begin. During these moments we may experience those sounds or those lights I have written previously. All are within this Third Room, this room of prayer, but now we are much better equipped to play our part in this inner dialogue that will take place.