ideas

70:6.1Ef­fec­tive state rule only came with the ar­rival of a chief with full ex­ec­u­tive au­thor­ity. Man found that ef­fec­tive gov­ern­ment could be had only by con­fer­ring power on a per­son­al­ity, not by en­dow­ing an idea.

156:5.16Are your ide­als suf­fi­ciently high to in­sure your eter­nal sal­va­tion while your ideas are so prac­ti­cal as to ren­der you a use­ful cit­i­zen to func­tion on earth in as­so­ci­a­tion with your mor­tal fel­lows? In the spirit, your cit­i­zen­ship is in heaven; in the flesh, you are still cit­i­zens of the earth king­doms. Ren­der to the Cae­sars the things which are ma­te­rial and to God those which are spir­i­tual.

9:6.2Much as the Fa­ther draws all per­son­al­ity to him­self, and as the Son at­tracts all spir­i­tual re­al­ity, so does the Con­joint Ac­tor ex­er­cise a draw­ing power on all minds; he un­qual­i­fiedly dom­i­nates and con­trols the uni­ver­sal mind cir­cuit. All true and gen­uine in­tel­lec­tual val­ues, all di­vine thoughts and per­fect ideas, are unerringly drawn into this ab­so­lute cir­cuit of mind.

87:4.3The no­tion of two kinds of spirit ghosts made slow but sure prog­ress through­out the world. This new dual spiritism did not have to spread from tribe to tribe; it sprang up in­de­pen­dently all over the world. In in­flu­enc­ing the ex­pand­ing evo­lu­tion­ary mind, the power of an idea lies not in its re­al­ity or rea­son­able­ness but rather in its vivid­ness and the uni­ver­sal­ity of its ready and sim­ple ap­pli­ca­tion.

92:3.3Prim­i­tive re­li­gion is noth­ing more nor less than the strug­gle for ma­te­rial ex­is­tence ex­tended to em­brace ex­is­tence be­yond the grave. The ob­ser­vances of such a creed rep­re­sented the ex­ten­sion of the self-main­te­nance strug­gle into the do­main of an imag­ined ghost-spirit world. But when tempted to crit­i­cize evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion, be care­ful. Re­mem­ber, that is what hap­pened; it is a his­tor­i­cal fact. And fur­ther re­call that the power of any idea lies, not in its cer­tainty or truth, but rather in the vivid­ness of its hu­man ap­peal.

133:7.7Ideas are not sim­ply a rec­ord of sen­sa­tions; ideas are sen­sa­tions plus the re­flec­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the per­sonal self; and the self is more than the sum of one’s sen­sa­tions. There be­gins to be some­thing of an ap­proach to unity in an evolv­ing self­hood, and that unity is de­rived from the in­dwelling pres­ence of a part of ab­so­lute unity which spir­i­tu­ally ac­ti­vates such a self-con­scious an­i­mal-ori­gin mind.

101:7.1An idea is only a the­o­ret­i­cal plan for ac­tion, while a pos­i­tive de­ci­sion is a val­i­dated plan of ac­tion. A stereo­type is a plan of ac­tion ac­cepted with­out val­i­da­tion. The ma­te­ri­als out of which to build a per­sonal phi­los­o­phy of re­li­gion are de­rived from both the in­ner and the en­vi­ron­men­tal ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­di­vid­ual. The so­cial sta­tus, eco­nomic con­di­tions, ed­u­ca­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties, moral trends, in­sti­tu­tional in­flu­ences, po­lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ments, racial ten­den­cies, and the re­li­gious teach­ings of one’s time and place all be­come fac­tors in the for­mu­la­tion of a per­sonal phi­los­o­phy of re­li­gion. Even the in­her­ent tem­per­a­ment and in­tel­lec­tual bent markedly de­ter­mine the pat­tern of re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy. Vo­ca­tion, mar­riage, and kin­dred all in­flu­ence the evo­lu­tion of one’s per­sonal stan­dards of life.