meanings

100:3.4Mean­ing is some­thing which ex­pe­ri­ence adds to value; it is the ap­pre­cia­tive con­scious­ness of val­ues. An iso­lated and purely self­ish plea­sure may con­note a vir­tual de­val­u­a­tion of mean­ings, a mean­ing­less en­joy­ment bor­der­ing on rel­a­tive evil. Val­ues are ex­pe­ri­en­tial when re­al­i­ties are mean­ing­ful and men­tally as­so­ci­ated, when such re­la­tion­ships are rec­og­nized and ap­pre­ci­ated by mind.

115:2.2Value is a unique el­e­ment in uni­verse re­al­ity. We do not com­pre­hend how the value of any­thing in­fi­nite and di­vine could pos­si­bly be in­creased. But we dis­cover that mean­ings can be mod­i­fied if not aug­mented even in the re­la­tions of in­fi­nite De­ity. To the ex­pe­ri­en­tial uni­verses even di­vine val­ues are in­creased as ac­tu­al­i­ties by en­larged com­pre­hen­sion of re­al­ity mean­ings.

111:4.2Mean­ings are de­rived from a com­bi­na­tion of rec­og­ni­tion and un­der­stand­ing. Mean­ings are nonex­is­tent in a wholly sen­sory or ma­te­rial world. Mean­ings and val­ues are only per­ceived in the in­ner or super­ma­te­rial spheres of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence.

100:4.1Re­li­gious liv­ing is de­voted liv­ing, and de­voted liv­ing is cre­ative liv­ing, orig­i­nal and spon­ta­neous. New re­li­gious in­sights arise out of con­flicts which ini­ti­ate the choos­ing of new and bet­ter re­ac­tion habits in the place of older and in­fe­rior re­ac­tion pat­terns. New mean­ings only emerge amid con­flict; and con­flict per­sists only in the face of re­fusal to es­pouse the higher val­ues con­noted in su­pe­rior mean­ings.

101:1.4Re­li­gion lives and pros­pers, then, not by sight and feel­ing, but rather by faith and in­sight. It con­sists not in the dis­cov­ery of new facts or in the find­ing of a unique ex­pe­ri­ence, but rather in the dis­cov­ery of new and spir­i­tual mean­ings in facts al­ready well known to man­kind. The high­est re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence is not de­pen­dent on prior acts of be­lief, tra­di­tion, and au­thor­ity; nei­ther is re­li­gion the off­spring of sub­lime feel­ings and purely mys­ti­cal emo­tions. It is, rather, a pro­foundly deep and ac­tual ex­pe­ri­ence of spir­i­tual com­mu­nion with the spirit in­flu­ences res­i­dent within the hu­man mind, and as far as such an ex­pe­ri­ence is de­fin­able in terms of psy­chol­ogy, it is sim­ply the ex­pe­ri­ence of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the re­al­ity of be­liev­ing in God as the re­al­ity of such a purely per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence.

102:2.5Even the dis­cov­er­ies of sci­ence are not truly real in the con­scious­ness of hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence un­til they are un­rav­eled and cor­re­lated, un­til their rel­e­vant facts ac­tu­ally be­come mean­ing through en­cir­cuit­ment in the thought streams of mind. Mor­tal man views even his phys­i­cal en­vi­ron­ment from the mind level, from the per­spec­tive of its psy­cho­log­i­cal reg­istry. It is not, there­fore, strange that man should place a highly uni­fied in­ter­pre­ta­tion upon the uni­verse and then seek to iden­tify this en­ergy unity of his sci­ence with the spirit unity of his re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. Mind is unity; mor­tal con­scious­ness lives on the mind level and per­ceives the uni­ver­sal re­al­i­ties through the eyes of the mind en­dow­ment. The mind per­spec­tive will not yield the ex­is­ten­tial unity of the source of re­al­ity, the First Source and Cen­ter, but it can and some­time will por­tray to man the ex­pe­ri­en­tial syn­the­sis of en­ergy, mind, and spirit in and as the Su­preme Be­ing. But mind can never suc­ceed in this uni­fi­ca­tion of the di­ver­sity of re­al­ity un­less such mind is firmly aware of ma­te­rial things, in­tel­lec­tual mean­ings, and spir­i­tual val­ues; only in the har­mony of the tri­unity of func­tional re­al­ity is there unity, and only in unity is there the per­son­al­ity sat­is­fac­tion of the re­al­iza­tion of cos­mic con­stancy and con­sis­tency.