The Highest Objective Reality
"True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception."
An individual's contact with the highest objective reality; God, is only through the purely subjective experience of knowing him, of worshiping him, of realizing sonship or daughtership with him. True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception. Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality. An individual aspires by worship to be better and thereby eventually attains the best.
The idealization and attempted service of truth, beauty, and goodness is not a substitute for genuine religious experience which is spiritual reality. Psychology and idealism are not the equivalent of religious reality. The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods, gods in mankind’s image, but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin. The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling fragment of God's spirit. Many of the religious systems of mankind come from the formulations of the human intellect, but the God-consciousness is not necessarily a part of these grotesque systems of religious slavery.
God is not the mere invention of man’s idealism; he is the very source of all such superanimal insights and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to unify the human concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality of love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived. The truth, beauty, and goodness of mankind’s world are unified by the increasing spirituality of the experience of mortals ascending toward Paradise realities. The unity of truth, beauty, and goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of the God-knowing personality.
Morality is the essential pre-existent soil of personal God-consciousness, the personal realization of the Adjuster’s inner presence, but such morality is not the source of religious experience and the resultant spiritual insight. The moral nature is super-animal but sub-spiritual. Morality is equivalent to the recognition of duty, the realization of the existence of right and wrong. The moral zone intervenes between the animal and the human types of mind as morontia functions between the material and the spiritual spheres of personality attainment.
The evolutionary mind is able to discover law, morals, and ethics; but the bestowed spirit, the fragment of God, reveals to the evolving human mind the lawgiver, the Father-source of all that is true, beautiful, and good; and such an illuminated individual has a religion and is spiritually equipped to begin the long and adventurous search for God. Morality is not necessarily spiritual; it may be wholly and purely human, although real religion, living spiritized religion, enhances all moral values, and makes them more meaningful. Morality without religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails to provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Spiritized religion provides for the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival of everything morality recognizes and approves.
Spiritized religion stands above science, art, philosophy, ethics, and morals, but not independent of them. They are all indissolubly interrelated in human experience, personal and social. Spiritized religion is an individual’s supreme experience in the mortal nature, but finite language makes it forever impossible for theology ever adequately to depict real religious experience. Spiritized religious insight possesses the power of turning defeat into higher desires and new determinations. Love is the highest motivation which an individual may utilize in his or her universe ascent. But love, without truth, beauty, and goodness, is only a sentiment, a philosophic distortion, a psychic illusion, a spiritual deception. Love must always be redefined on successive levels spirit progression.
Art results from an individual's attempt to escape from the lack of beauty in his material environment; it is a gesture toward the spiritual level. Science is mankind’s effort to solve the apparent riddles of the material universe. Philosophy is mankind’s attempt at the unification of human experience. A spiritized religion is an individual's supreme gesture, his or her magnificent reach for final reality, their determination to find God and to be like him. In the realm of the real religious experience, spiritual possibility is potential reality. Mankind’s forward spiritual urge is not a psychic illusion. All of mankind’s universe romancing may not be fact, but much, very much, is truth.
Some people’s lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful. The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious man transcends his or her environment and in this way escapes the limitations of the present material world through this insight of divine love. This concept of love generates in the soul of an individual that super-animal effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he or she does find them, they are glorified in their embrace; they are consumed with the desire to live them, to do righteousness.
An aware, awakened, intelligent observation of the condition of our world today is bleak. However, do not be discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of God to our world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail. The great challenge to modern mankind is to achieve better communication with the divine Spirit of Truth that dwells within the human mind. Mankind’s greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness; contact with the divine presence. Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness, an experience mightily confirmative of the pre-existent truth of the spiritized religious experience of knowing God. Such spirit-consciousness is the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of sonship or daughtership with God. Otherwise, the assurance of being a child of God is the experience of spiritized faith within the creative imagination.
God-consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the universe and on its highest levels of spiritual reality. Only the spirit content of any value is imperishable. Even that which is true, beautiful, and good may not perish in human experience. If an individual does not choose to survive, then does the surviving fragment of God of that individual conserve those realities born of love and nurtured in service. And all these things are a part of the Universal Father. The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his bestowed Son, Jesus, to our planet and the spirit of the Father is in his Sons’ sons and daughters all of us mortal individuals. When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God.