God’s Relation to the Individual

5:5.1Moral­ity has its ori­gin in the rea­son of self-con­scious­ness; it is super­an­i­mal but wholly evo­lu­tion­ary. Hu­man evo­lu­tion em­braces in its un­fold­ing all en­dow­ments an­te­ced­ent to the be­stowal of the Ad­justers and to the pour­ing out of the Spirit of Truth. But the at­tain­ment of lev­els of moral­ity does not de­liver man from the real strug­gles of mor­tal liv­ing. Man’s phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment en­tails the bat­tle for ex­is­tence; the so­cial sur­round­ings ne­ces­si­tate eth­i­cal ad­just­ments; the moral sit­u­a­tions re­quire the mak­ing of choices in the high­est realms of rea­son; the spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence (hav­ing re­al­ized God) de­mands that man find him and sin­cerely strive to be like him.

5:5.2Re­li­gion is not grounded in the facts of sci­ence, the obli­ga­tions of so­ci­ety, the as­sump­tions of phi­los­o­phy, or the im­plied du­ties of moral­ity. Re­li­gion is an in­de­pen­dent realm of hu­man re­sponse to life sit­u­a­tions and is un­fail­ingly ex­hib­ited at all stages of hu­man de­vel­op­ment which are post­moral. Re­li­gion may per­me­ate all four lev­els of the re­al­iza­tion of val­ues and the en­joy­ment of uni­verse fel­low­ship: the phys­i­cal or ma­te­rial level of self-preser­va­tion; the so­cial or emo­tional level of fel­low­ship; the moral or duty level of rea­son; the spir­i­tual level of the con­scious­ness of uni­verse fel­low­ship through di­vine wor­ship.

5:5.3The fact-seek­ing sci­en­tist con­ceives of God as the First Cause, a God of force. The emo­tional artist sees God as the ideal of beauty, a God of aes­thet­ics. The rea­son­ing philoso­pher is some­times in­clined to posit a God of uni­ver­sal unity, even a pan­the­is­tic De­ity. The re­li­gion­ist of faith be­lieves in a God who fos­ters sur­vival, the Fa­ther in heaven, the God of love.

5:5.4Moral con­duct is al­ways an an­te­ced­ent of evolved re­li­gion and a part of even re­vealed re­li­gion, but never the whole of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. So­cial ser­vice is the re­sult of moral think­ing and re­li­gious liv­ing. Moral­ity does not bi­o­log­i­cally lead to the higher spir­i­tual lev­els of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. The ado­ra­tion of the ab­stract beau­ti­ful is not the wor­ship of God; nei­ther is ex­al­ta­tion of na­ture nor the rev­er­ence of unity the wor­ship of God.

5:5.5Evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion is the mother of the sci­ence, art, and phi­los­o­phy which el­e­vated man to the level of re­cep­tiv­ity to re­vealed re­li­gion, in­clud­ing the be­stowal of Ad­justers and the com­ing of the Spirit of Truth. The evo­lu­tion­ary pic­ture of hu­man ex­is­tence be­gins and ends with re­li­gion, al­beit very dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties of re­li­gion, one evo­lu­tional and bi­o­log­i­cal, the other rev­e­la­tional and pe­ri­od­i­cal. And so, while re­li­gion is nor­mal and nat­u­ral to man, it is also op­tional. Man does not have to be re­li­gious against his will.

5:5.6Re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence, be­ing es­sen­tially spir­i­tual, can never be fully un­der­stood by the ma­te­rial mind; hence the func­tion of the­ol­ogy, the psy­chol­ogy of re­li­gion. The es­sen­tial doc­trine of the hu­man re­al­iza­tion of God cre­ates a para­dox in fi­nite com­pre­hen­sion. It is well-nigh im­pos­si­ble for hu­man logic and fi­nite rea­son to har­mo­nize the con­cept of di­vine im­ma­nence, God within and a part of ev­ery in­di­vid­ual, with the idea of God’s tran­scen­dence, the di­vine dom­i­na­tion of the uni­verse of uni­verses. These two es­sen­tial con­cepts of De­ity must be uni­fied in the faith-grasp of the con­cept of the tran­scen­dence of a per­sonal God and in the re­al­iza­tion of the in­dwelling pres­ence of a frag­ment of that God in or­der to jus­tify in­tel­li­gent wor­ship and val­i­date the hope of per­son­al­ity sur­vival. The dif­fi­cul­ties and para­doxes of re­li­gion are in­her­ent in the fact that the re­al­i­ties of re­li­gion are ut­terly be­yond the mor­tal ca­pac­ity for in­tel­lec­tual com­pre­hen­sion.

5:5.7Mor­tal man se­cures three great sat­is­fac­tions from re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence, even in the days of his tem­po­ral so­journ on earth:

5:5.81. In­tel­lec­tu­ally he ac­quires the sat­is­fac­tions of a more uni­fied hu­man con­scious­ness.

5:5.92. Phil­o­soph­i­cally he en­joys the sub­stan­ti­a­tion of his ide­als of moral val­ues.

5:5.103. Spir­i­tu­ally he thrives in the ex­pe­ri­ence of di­vine com­pan­ion­ship, in the spir­i­tual sat­is­fac­tions of true wor­ship.

5:5.11God-con­scious­ness, as it is ex­pe­ri­enced by an evolv­ing mor­tal of the realms, must con­sist of three vary­ing fac­tors, three dif­fer­en­tial lev­els of re­al­ity re­al­iza­tion. There is first the mind con­scious­ness—the com­pre­hen­sion of the idea of God. Then fol­lows the soul con­scious­ness—the re­al­iza­tion of the ideal of God. Last, dawns the spirit con­scious­ness—the re­al­iza­tion of the spirit re­al­ity of God. By the uni­fi­ca­tion of these fac­tors of the di­vine re­al­iza­tion, no mat­ter how in­com­plete, the mor­tal per­son­al­ity at all times over­spreads all con­scious lev­els with a re­al­iza­tion of the per­son­al­ity of God. In those mor­tals who have at­tained the Corps of the Fi­nal­ity all this will in time lead to the re­al­iza­tion of the su­prem­acy of God and may sub­se­quently even­tu­ate in the re­al­iza­tion of the ul­ti­macy of God, some phase of the ab­so­nite super­con­scious­ness of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther.

5:5.12The ex­pe­ri­ence of God-con­scious­ness re­mains the same from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, but with each ad­vanc­ing epoch in hu­man knowl­edge the philo­sophic con­cept and the the­o­logic def­i­ni­tions of God must change. God-know­ing­ness, re­li­gious con­scious­ness, is a uni­verse re­al­ity, but no mat­ter how valid (real) re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence is, it must be will­ing to sub­ject it­self to in­tel­li­gent crit­i­cism and rea­son­able philo­sophic in­ter­pre­ta­tion; it must not seek to be a thing apart in the to­tal­ity of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence.

5:5.13Eter­nal sur­vival of per­son­al­ity is wholly de­pen­dent on the choos­ing of the mor­tal mind, whose de­ci­sions de­ter­mine the sur­vival po­ten­tial of the im­mor­tal soul. When the mind be­lieves God and the soul knows God, and when, with the fos­ter­ing Ad­juster, they all de­sire God, then is sur­vival as­sured. Lim­i­ta­tions of in­tel­lect, cur­tail­ment of ed­u­ca­tion, de­pri­va­tion of cul­ture, im­pov­er­ish­ment of so­cial sta­tus, even in­fe­ri­or­ity of the hu­man stan­dards of moral­ity re­sult­ing from the un­for­tu­nate lack of ed­u­ca­tional, cul­tural, and so­cial ad­van­tages, can­not in­val­i­date the pres­ence of the di­vine spirit in such un­for­tu­nate and hu­manly hand­i­capped but be­liev­ing in­di­vid­u­als. The in­dwelling of the Mys­tery Mon­i­tor con­sti­tutes the in­cep­tion and in­sures the pos­si­bil­ity of the po­ten­tial of growth and sur­vival of the im­mor­tal soul.

5:5.14The abil­ity of mor­tal par­ents to pro­cre­ate is not pred­i­cated on their ed­u­ca­tional, cul­tural, so­cial, or eco­nomic sta­tus. The union of the pa­ren­tal fac­tors un­der nat­u­ral con­di­tions is quite suf­fi­cient to ini­ti­ate off­spring. A hu­man mind dis­cern­ing right and wrong and pos­sess­ing the ca­pac­ity to wor­ship God, in union with a di­vine Ad­juster, is all that is re­quired in that mor­tal to ini­ti­ate and fos­ter the pro­duc­tion of his im­mor­tal soul of sur­vival qual­i­ties if such a spirit-en­dowed in­di­vid­ual seeks God and sin­cerely de­sires to be­come like him, hon­estly elects to do the will of the Fa­ther in heaven.