The Foundations of Religious Faith

102:4.1Be­cause of the pres­ence in your minds of the Thought Ad­juster, it is no more of a mys­tery for you to know the mind of God than for you to be sure of the con­scious­ness of know­ing any other mind, hu­man or super­hu­man. Re­li­gion and so­cial con­scious­ness have this in com­mon: They are pred­i­cated on the con­scious­ness of other-mind­ness. The tech­nique whereby you can ac­cept an­other’s idea as yours is the same whereby you may “let the mind which was in Christ be also in you.”

102:4.2What is hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence? It is sim­ply any in­ter­play be­tween an ac­tive and ques­tion­ing self and any other ac­tive and ex­ter­nal re­al­ity. The mass of ex­pe­ri­ence is de­ter­mined by depth of con­cept plus to­tal­ity of rec­og­ni­tion of the re­al­ity of the ex­ter­nal. The mo­tion of ex­pe­ri­ence equals the force of ex­pec­tant imag­i­na­tion plus the keen­ness of the sen­sory dis­cov­ery of the ex­ter­nal qual­i­ties of con­tacted re­al­ity. The fact of ex­pe­ri­ence is found in self-con­scious­ness plus other-ex­is­tences—other-thing­ness, other-mind­ness, and other-spir­it­ness.

102:4.3Man very early be­comes con­scious that he is not alone in the world or the uni­verse. There de­vel­ops a nat­u­ral spon­ta­neous self-con­scious­ness of other-mind­ness in the en­vi­ron­ment of self­hood. Faith trans­lates this nat­u­ral ex­pe­ri­ence into re­li­gion, the rec­og­ni­tion of God as the re­al­ity—source, na­ture, and des­tiny—of other-mind­ness. But such a knowl­edge of God is ever and al­ways a re­al­ity of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence. If God were not a per­son­al­ity, he could not be­come a liv­ing part of the real re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of a hu­man per­son­al­ity.

102:4.4The el­e­ment of er­ror pres­ent in hu­man re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence is di­rectly pro­por­tional to the con­tent of ma­te­ri­al­ism which con­tam­i­nates the spir­i­tual con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther. Man’s pre­spirit pro­gres­sion in the uni­verse con­sists in the ex­pe­ri­ence of di­vest­ing him­self of these er­ro­neous ideas of the na­ture of God and of the re­al­ity of pure and true spirit. De­ity is more than spirit, but the spir­i­tual ap­proach is the only one pos­si­ble to as­cend­ing man.

102:4.5Prayer is in­deed a part of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence, but it has been wrongly em­pha­sized by mod­ern re­li­gions, much to the ne­glect of the more es­sen­tial com­mu­nion of wor­ship. The re­flec­tive pow­ers of the mind are deep­ened and broad­ened by wor­ship. Prayer may en­rich the life, but wor­ship il­lu­mi­nates des­tiny.

102:4.6Re­vealed re­li­gion is the uni­fy­ing el­e­ment of hu­man ex­is­tence. Rev­e­la­tion uni­fies his­tory, co-or­di­nates ge­ol­ogy, as­tron­omy, physics, chem­istry, bi­ol­ogy, so­ci­ol­ogy, and psy­chol­ogy. Spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence is the real soul of man’s cos­mos.