concepts

115:3.4It is only man’s dis­tance from in­fin­ity that causes this con­cept to be ex­pressed as one word. While in­fin­ity is on the one hand UNITY, on the other it is DI­VER­SITY with­out end or limit. In­fin­ity, as it is ob­served by fi­nite in­tel­li­gences, is the max­i­mum para­dox of crea­ture phi­los­o­phy and fi­nite meta­physics. Though man’s spir­i­tual na­ture reaches up in the wor­ship ex­pe­ri­ence to the Fa­ther who is in­fi­nite, man’s in­tel­lec­tual com­pre­hen­sion ca­pac­ity is ex­hausted by the max­i­mum con­cep­tion of the Su­preme Be­ing. Be­yond the Su­preme, con­cepts are in­creas­ingly names; less and less are they true des­ig­na­tions of re­al­ity; more and more do they be­come the crea­ture’s pro­jec­tion of fi­nite un­der­stand­ing to­ward the super­fi­nite.

115:1.1Par­tial, in­com­plete, and evolv­ing in­tel­lects would be help­less in the mas­ter uni­verse, would be un­able to form the first ra­tio­nal thought pat­tern, were it not for the in­nate abil­ity of all mind, high or low, to form a uni­verse frame in which to think. If mind can­not fathom con­clu­sions, if it can­not pen­e­trate to true ori­gins, then will such mind un­fail­ingly pos­tu­late con­clu­sions and in­vent ori­gins that it may have a means of log­i­cal thought within the frame of these mind-cre­ated pos­tu­lates. And while such uni­verse frames for crea­ture thought are in­dis­pens­able to ra­tio­nal in­tel­lec­tual op­er­a­tions, they are, with­out ex­cep­tion, er­ro­neous to a greater or lesser de­gree.

115:1.2Con­cep­tual frames of the uni­verse are only rel­a­tively true; they are ser­vice­able scaf­fold­ing which must even­tu­ally give way be­fore the ex­pan­sions of en­larg­ing cos­mic com­pre­hen­sion. The un­der­stand­ings of truth, beauty, and good­ness, moral­ity, ethics, duty, love, di­vin­ity, ori­gin, ex­is­tence, pur­pose, des­tiny, time, space, even De­ity, are only rel­a­tively true. God is much, much more than a Fa­ther, but the Fa­ther is man’s high­est con­cept of God; nonethe­less, the Fa­ther-Son por­trayal of Cre­ator-crea­ture re­la­tion­ship will be aug­mented by those super­mor­tal con­cep­tions of De­ity which will be at­tained in Or­von­ton, in Ha­vona, and on Par­a­dise. Man must think in a mor­tal uni­verse frame, but that does not mean that he can­not en­vi­sion other and higher frames within which thought can take place.

130:4.15All static, dead, con­cepts are po­ten­tially evil. The fi­nite shadow of rel­a­tive and liv­ing truth is con­tin­u­ally mov­ing. Static con­cepts in­vari­ably re­tard sci­ence, pol­i­tics, so­ci­ety, and re­li­gion. Static con­cepts may rep­re­sent a cer­tain knowl­edge, but they are de­fi­cient in wis­dom and de­void of truth. But do not per­mit the con­cept of rel­a­tiv­ity so to mis­lead you that you fail to rec­og­nize the co-or­di­na­tion of the uni­verse un­der the guid­ance of the cos­mic mind, and its sta­bi­lized con­trol by the en­ergy and spirit of the Su­preme.

118:3.3Truth is in­con­cus­si­ble—for­ever ex­empt from all tran­sient vi­cis­si­tudes, al­beit never dead and for­mal, al­ways vi­brant and adapt­able—ra­di­antly alive. But when truth be­comes linked with fact, then both time and space con­di­tion its mean­ings and cor­re­late its val­ues. Such re­al­i­ties of truth wed­ded to fact be­come con­cepts and are ac­cord­ingly rel­e­gated to the do­main of rel­a­tive cos­mic re­al­i­ties.

0:12.11In for­mu­lat­ing the suc­ceed­ing pre­sen­ta­tions hav­ing to do with the por­trayal of the char­ac­ter of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and the na­ture of his Par­a­dise as­so­ciates, to­gether with an at­tempted de­scrip­tion of the per­fect cen­tral uni­verse and the en­cir­cling seven super­uni­verses, we are to be guided by the man­date of the super­uni­verse rulers which di­rects that we shall, in all our ef­forts to re­veal truth and co-or­di­nate es­sen­tial knowl­edge, give pref­er­ence to the high­est ex­ist­ing hu­man con­cepts per­tain­ing to the sub­jects to be pre­sented. We may re­sort to pure rev­e­la­tion only when the con­cept of pre­sen­ta­tion has had no ad­e­quate pre­vi­ous ex­pres­sion by the hu­man mind.

115:3.2Mind can never hope to grasp the con­cept of an Ab­so­lute with­out at­tempt­ing first to break the unity of such a re­al­ity. Mind is uni­fy­ing of all di­ver­gen­cies, but in the very ab­sence of such di­ver­gen­cies, mind finds no ba­sis upon which to at­tempt to for­mu­late un­der­stand­ing con­cepts.