illusions

48:7.2321. The high mis­sion of any art is, by its il­lu­sions, to fore­shadow a higher uni­verse re­al­ity, to crys­tal­lize the emo­tions of time into the thought of eter­nity.

160:4.13But life will be­come a bur­den of ex­is­tence un­less you learn how to fail grace­fully. There is an art in de­feat which no­ble souls al­ways ac­quire; you must know how to lose cheer­fully; you must be fear­less of dis­ap­point­ment. Never hes­i­tate to ad­mit fail­ure. Make no at­tempt to hide fail­ure un­der de­cep­tive smiles and beam­ing op­ti­mism. It sounds well al­ways to claim suc­cess, but the end re­sults are ap­palling. Such a tech­nique leads di­rectly to the cre­ation of a world of un­re­al­ity and to the in­ev­i­ta­ble crash of ul­ti­mate dis­il­lu­sion­ment.

160:5.5The so­cial char­ac­ter­is­tics of a true re­li­gion con­sist in the fact that it in­vari­ably seeks to con­vert the in­di­vid­ual and to trans­form the world. Re­li­gion im­plies the ex­is­tence of undis­cov­ered ide­als which far tran­scend the known stan­dards of ethics and moral­ity em­bod­ied in even the high­est so­cial us­ages of the most ma­ture in­sti­tu­tions of civ­i­liza­tion. Re­li­gion reaches out for undis­cov­ered ide­als, un­ex­plored re­al­i­ties, super­hu­man val­ues, di­vine wis­dom, and true spirit at­tain­ment. True re­li­gion does all of this; all other be­liefs are not wor­thy of the name. You can­not have a gen­uine spir­i­tual re­li­gion with­out the su­preme and su­per­nal ideal of an eter­nal God. A re­li­gion with­out this God is an in­ven­tion of man, a hu­man in­sti­tu­tion of life­less in­tel­lec­tual be­liefs and mean­ing­less emo­tional cer­e­monies. A re­li­gion might claim as the ob­ject of its de­vo­tion a great ideal. But such ide­als of un­re­al­ity are not at­tain­able; such a con­cept is il­lu­sion­ary. The only ide­als sus­cep­ti­ble of hu­man at­tain­ment are the di­vine re­al­i­ties of the in­fi­nite val­ues res­i­dent in the spir­i­tual fact of the eter­nal God.

160:5.6The word God, the idea of God as con­trasted with the ideal of God, can be­come a part of any re­li­gion, no mat­ter how puerile or false that re­li­gion may chance to be. And this idea of God can be­come any­thing which those who en­ter­tain it may choose to make it. The lower re­li­gions shape their ideas of God to meet the nat­u­ral state of the hu­man heart; the higher re­li­gions de­mand that the hu­man heart shall be changed to meet the de­mands of the ide­als of true re­li­gion.

160:5.7The re­li­gion of Je­sus tran­scends all our for­mer con­cepts of the idea of wor­ship in that he not only por­trays his Fa­ther as the ideal of in­fi­nite re­al­ity but pos­i­tively de­clares that this di­vine source of val­ues and the eter­nal cen­ter of the uni­verse is truly and per­son­ally at­tain­able by ev­ery mor­tal crea­ture who chooses to en­ter the king­dom of heaven on earth, thereby ac­knowl­edg­ing the ac­cep­tance of son­ship with God and broth­er­hood with man. That, I sub­mit, is the high­est con­cept of re­li­gion the world has ever known, and I pro­nounce that there can never be a higher since this gospel em­braces the in­fin­ity of re­al­i­ties, the di­vin­ity of val­ues, and the eter­nity of uni­ver­sal at­tain­ments. Such a con­cept con­sti­tutes the achieve­ment of the ex­pe­ri­ence of the ide­al­ism of the su­preme and the ul­ti­mate.

160:5.8I am not only in­trigued by the con­sum­mate ide­als of this re­li­gion of your Mas­ter, but I am might­ily moved to pro­fess my be­lief in his an­nounce­ment that these ide­als of spirit re­al­i­ties are at­tain­able; that you and I can en­ter upon this long and eter­nal ad­ven­ture with his as­sur­ance of the cer­tainty of our ul­ti­mate ar­rival at the por­tals of Par­a­dise. My breth­ren, I am a be­liever, I have em­barked; I am on my way with you in this eter­nal ven­ture. The Mas­ter says he came from the Fa­ther, and that he will show us the way. I am fully per­suaded he speaks the truth. I am fi­nally con­vinced that there are no at­tain­able ide­als of re­al­ity or val­ues of per­fec­tion apart from the eter­nal and Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

160:5.9I come, then, to wor­ship, not merely the God of ex­is­tences, but the God of the pos­si­bil­ity of all fu­ture ex­is­tences. There­fore must your de­vo­tion to a su­preme ideal, if that ideal is real, be de­vo­tion to this God of past, pres­ent, and fu­ture uni­verses of things and be­ings. And there is no other God, for there can­not pos­si­bly be any other God. All other gods are fig­ments of the imag­i­na­tion, il­lu­sions of mor­tal mind, dis­tor­tions of false logic, and the self-de­cep­tive idols of those who cre­ate them. Yes, you can have a re­li­gion with­out this God, but it does not mean any­thing. And if you seek to sub­sti­tute the word God for the re­al­ity of this ideal of the liv­ing God, you have only de­luded your­self by putting an idea in the place of an ideal, a di­vine re­al­ity. Such be­liefs are merely re­li­gions of wish­ful fancy.

195:6.4At the time of this writ­ing the worst of the ma­te­ri­al­is­tic age is over; the day of a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing is al­ready be­gin­ning to dawn. The higher minds of the sci­en­tific world are no longer wholly ma­te­ri­al­is­tic in their phi­los­o­phy, but the rank and file of the peo­ple still lean in that di­rec­tion as a re­sult of for­mer teach­ings. But this age of phys­i­cal re­al­ism is only a pass­ing episode in man’s life on earth. Mod­ern sci­ence has left true re­li­gion—the teach­ings of Je­sus as trans­lated in the lives of his be­liev­ers—un­touched. All sci­ence has done is to de­stroy the child­like il­lu­sions of the mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of life.

160:1.7Suc­cess­ful liv­ing is noth­ing more or less than the art of the mas­tery of de­pend­able tech­niques for solv­ing com­mon prob­lems. The first step in the so­lu­tion of any prob­lem is to lo­cate the dif­fi­culty, to iso­late the prob­lem, and frankly to rec­og­nize its na­ture and grav­ity. The great mis­take is that, when life prob­lems ex­cite our pro­found fears, we refuse to rec­og­nize them. Like­wise, when the ac­knowl­edg­ment of our dif­fi­cul­ties en­tails the re­duc­tion of our long-cher­ished con­ceit, the ad­mis­sion of envy, or the aban­don­ment of deep-seated prej­u­dices, the av­er­age per­son prefers to cling to the old il­lu­sions of safety and to the long-cher­ished false feel­ings of se­cu­rity. Only a brave per­son is will­ing hon­estly to ad­mit, and fear­lessly to face, what a sin­cere and log­i­cal mind dis­cov­ers.

160:4.14Suc­cess may gen­er­ate cour­age and pro­mote con­fi­dence, but wis­dom comes only from the ex­pe­ri­ences of ad­just­ment to the re­sults of one’s fail­ures. Men who pre­fer op­ti­mistic il­lu­sions to re­al­ity can never be­come wise. Only those who face facts and ad­just them to ide­als can achieve wis­dom. Wis­dom em­braces both the fact and the ideal and there­fore saves its devo­tees from both of those bar­ren ex­tremes of phi­los­o­phy—the man whose ide­al­ism ex­cludes facts and the ma­te­ri­al­ist who is de­void of spir­i­tual out­look. Those timid souls who can only keep up the strug­gle of life by the aid of con­tin­u­ous false il­lu­sions of suc­cess are doomed to suf­fer fail­ure and ex­pe­ri­ence de­feat as they ul­ti­mately awaken from the dream world of their own imag­i­na­tions.