The Reality of Religious Experience

103:7.1Sci­ence is sus­tained by rea­son, re­li­gion by faith. Faith, though not pred­i­cated on rea­son, is rea­son­able; though in­de­pen­dent of logic, it is nonethe­less en­cour­aged by sound logic. Faith can­not be nour­ished even by an ideal phi­los­o­phy; in­deed, it is, with sci­ence, the very source of such a phi­los­o­phy. Faith, hu­man re­li­gious in­sight, can be surely in­structed only by rev­e­la­tion, can be surely el­e­vated only by per­sonal mor­tal ex­pe­ri­ence with the spir­i­tual Ad­juster pres­ence of the God who is spirit.

103:7.2True sal­va­tion is the tech­nique of the di­vine evo­lu­tion of the mor­tal mind from mat­ter iden­ti­fi­ca­tion through the realms of mor­ontia li­ai­son to the high uni­verse sta­tus of spir­i­tual cor­re­la­tion. And as ma­te­rial in­tu­itive in­stinct pre­cedes the ap­pear­ance of rea­soned knowl­edge in ter­res­trial evo­lu­tion, so does the man­i­fes­ta­tion of spir­i­tual in­tu­itive in­sight presage the later ap­pear­ance of mor­ontia and spirit rea­son and ex­pe­ri­ence in the su­per­nal pro­gram of ce­les­tial evo­lu­tion, the busi­ness of trans­mut­ing the po­ten­tials of man the tem­po­ral into the ac­tu­al­ity and di­vin­ity of man the eter­nal, a Par­a­dise fi­nal­i­ter.

103:7.3But as as­cend­ing man reaches in­ward and Par­adis­e­ward for the God ex­pe­ri­ence, he will like­wise be reach­ing out­ward and space­ward for an en­ergy un­der­stand­ing of the ma­te­rial cos­mos. The pro­gres­sion of sci­ence is not lim­ited to the ter­res­trial life of man; his uni­verse and super­uni­verse as­cen­sion ex­pe­ri­ence will to no small de­gree be the study of en­ergy trans­mu­ta­tion and ma­te­rial meta­mor­pho­sis. God is spirit, but De­ity is unity, and the unity of De­ity not only em­braces the spir­i­tual val­ues of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and the Eter­nal Son but is also cog­nizant of the en­ergy facts of the Uni­ver­sal Con­trol­ler and the Isle of Par­a­dise, while these two phases of uni­ver­sal re­al­ity are per­fectly cor­re­lated in the mind re­la­tion­ships of the Con­joint Ac­tor and uni­fied on the fi­nite level in the emerg­ing De­ity of the Su­preme Be­ing.

103:7.4The union of the sci­en­tific at­ti­tude and the re­li­gious in­sight by the me­di­a­tion of ex­pe­ri­en­tial phi­los­o­phy is part of man’s long Par­a­dise-as­cen­sion ex­pe­ri­ence. The ap­prox­i­ma­tions of math­e­mat­ics and the cer­tain­ties of in­sight will al­ways re­quire the har­mo­niz­ing func­tion of mind logic on all lev­els of ex­pe­ri­ence short of the max­i­mum at­tain­ment of the Su­preme.

103:7.5But logic can never suc­ceed in har­mo­niz­ing the find­ings of sci­ence and the in­sights of re­li­gion un­less both the sci­en­tific and the re­li­gious as­pects of a per­son­al­ity are truth dom­i­nated, sin­cerely de­sirous of fol­low­ing the truth wher­ever it may lead re­gard­less of the con­clu­sions which it may reach.

103:7.6Logic is the tech­nique of phi­los­o­phy, its method of ex­pres­sion. Within the do­main of true sci­ence, rea­son is al­ways amenable to gen­uine logic; within the do­main of true re­li­gion, faith is al­ways log­i­cal from the ba­sis of an in­ner view­point, even though such faith may ap­pear to be quite un­founded from the in­look­ing view­point of the sci­en­tific ap­proach. From out­ward, look­ing within, the uni­verse may ap­pear to be ma­te­rial; from within, look­ing out, the same uni­verse ap­pears to be wholly spir­i­tual. Rea­son grows out of ma­te­rial aware­ness, faith out of spir­i­tual aware­ness, but through the me­di­a­tion of a phi­los­o­phy strength­ened by rev­e­la­tion, logic may con­firm both the in­ward and the out­ward view, thereby ef­fect­ing the sta­bi­liza­tion of both sci­ence and re­li­gion. Thus, through com­mon con­tact with the logic of phi­los­o­phy, may both sci­ence and re­li­gion be­come in­creas­ingly tol­er­ant of each other, less and less skep­ti­cal.

103:7.7What both de­vel­op­ing sci­ence and re­li­gion need is more search­ing and fear­less self-crit­i­cism, a greater aware­ness of in­com­plete­ness in evo­lu­tion­ary sta­tus. The teach­ers of both sci­ence and re­li­gion are of­ten al­to­gether too self-con­fi­dent and dog­matic. Sci­ence and re­li­gion can only be self-crit­i­cal of their facts. The mo­ment de­par­ture is made from the stage of facts, rea­son ab­di­cates or else rapidly de­gen­er­ates into a con­sort of false logic.

103:7.8The truth—an un­der­stand­ing of cos­mic re­la­tion­ships, uni­verse facts, and spir­i­tual val­ues—can best be had through the min­istry of the Spirit of Truth and can best be crit­i­cized by rev­e­la­tion. But rev­e­la­tion orig­i­nates nei­ther a sci­ence nor a re­li­gion; its func­tion is to co-or­di­nate both sci­ence and re­li­gion with the truth of re­al­ity. Al­ways, in the ab­sence of rev­e­la­tion or in the fail­ure to ac­cept or grasp it, has mor­tal man re­sorted to his fu­tile ges­ture of meta­physics, that be­ing the only hu­man sub­sti­tute for the rev­e­la­tion of truth or for the mota of mor­ontia per­son­al­ity.

103:7.9The sci­ence of the ma­te­rial world en­ables man to con­trol, and to some ex­tent dom­i­nate, his phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment. The re­li­gion of the spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence is the source of the fra­ter­nity im­pulse which en­ables men to live to­gether in the com­plex­i­ties of the civ­i­liza­tion of a sci­en­tific age. Meta­physics, but more cer­tainly rev­e­la­tion, af­fords a com­mon meet­ing ground for the dis­cov­er­ies of both sci­ence and re­li­gion and makes pos­si­ble the hu­man at­tempt log­i­cally to cor­re­late these sep­a­rate but in­ter­de­pen­dent do­mains of thought into a well-bal­anced phi­los­o­phy of sci­en­tific sta­bil­ity and re­li­gious cer­tainty.

103:7.10In the mor­tal state, noth­ing can be ab­so­lutely proved; both sci­ence and re­li­gion are pred­i­cated on as­sump­tions. On the mor­ontia level, the pos­tu­lates of both sci­ence and re­li­gion are ca­pa­ble of par­tial proof by mota logic. On the spir­i­tual level of max­i­mum sta­tus, the need for fi­nite proof grad­u­ally van­ishes be­fore the ac­tual ex­pe­ri­ence of and with re­al­ity; but even then there is much be­yond the fi­nite that re­mains un­proved.

103:7.11All di­vi­sions of hu­man thought are pred­i­cated on cer­tain as­sump­tions which are ac­cepted, though un­proved, by the con­sti­tu­tive re­al­ity sen­si­tiv­ity of the mind en­dow­ment of man. Sci­ence starts out on its vaunted ca­reer of rea­son­ing by as­sum­ing the re­al­ity of three things: mat­ter, mo­tion, and life. Re­li­gion starts out with the as­sump­tion of the va­lid­ity of three things: mind, spirit, and the uni­verse—the Su­preme Be­ing.

103:7.12Sci­ence be­comes the thought do­main of math­e­mat­ics, of the en­ergy and ma­te­rial of time in space. Re­li­gion as­sumes to deal not only with fi­nite and tem­po­ral spirit but also with the spirit of eter­nity and su­prem­acy. Only through a long ex­pe­ri­ence in mota can these two ex­tremes of uni­verse per­cep­tion be made to yield anal­o­gous in­ter­pre­ta­tions of ori­gins, func­tions, re­la­tions, re­al­i­ties, and des­tinies. The max­i­mum har­mo­niza­tion of the en­ergy-spirit di­ver­gence is in the en­cir­cuit­ment of the Seven Mas­ter Spir­its; the first uni­fi­ca­tion thereof, in the De­ity of the Su­preme; the fi­nal­ity unity thereof, in the in­fin­ity of the First Source and Cen­ter, the I AM.

103:7.13Rea­son is the act of rec­og­niz­ing the con­clu­sions of con­scious­ness with re­gard to the ex­pe­ri­ence in and with the phys­i­cal world of en­ergy and mat­ter. Faith is the act of rec­og­niz­ing the va­lid­ity of spir­i­tual con­scious­ness—some­thing which is in­ca­pable of other mor­tal proof. Logic is the syn­thetic truth-seek­ing pro­gres­sion of the unity of faith and rea­son and is founded on the con­sti­tu­tive mind en­dow­ments of mor­tal be­ings, the in­nate rec­og­ni­tion of things, mean­ings, and val­ues.

103:7.14There is a real proof of spir­i­tual re­al­ity in the pres­ence of the Thought Ad­juster, but the va­lid­ity of this pres­ence is not demon­stra­ble to the ex­ter­nal world, only to the one who thus ex­pe­ri­ences the in­dwelling of God. The con­scious­ness of the Ad­juster is based on the in­tel­lec­tual re­cep­tion of truth, the super­mind per­cep­tion of good­ness, and the per­son­al­ity mo­ti­va­tion to love.

103:7.15Sci­ence dis­cov­ers the ma­te­rial world, re­li­gion eval­u­ates it, and phi­los­o­phy en­deav­ors to in­ter­pret its mean­ings while co-or­di­nat­ing the sci­en­tific ma­te­rial view­point with the re­li­gious spir­i­tual con­cept. But his­tory is a realm in which sci­ence and re­li­gion may never fully agree.