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Messages
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Thank you Mara…indeed so!
« The consciousness of the spirit domination of a human life is presently attended by an increasing exhibition of the characteristics of the Spirit in the life reactions of such a spirit-led mortal, “for the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.”
Each poison listed deserves our consideration regarding their effects on our universe reality perspective and our expectations and our own motivation and guiding priorities in life.
What poisons do I choose to ingest? How do those affect my choices and decisions? Do hopes, ideals, aspirations, faith, trust, and Divine Assurance guide me forward each day?
We simply cannot determine or control what will happen by the choices of all others and the dynamic flux of potential created by the freewill exercised by other persons individually or collectively.
But we certainly can, do, and must personally choose how to react and respond to anything and everything that happens in life. How we respond truly does determine our personal experience and outcomes and exhibits our faith and experiential wisdom ….or not!
If we would see reality clearly and make good choices, we must not poison our spirit and mind.
Religious experience and progress in the Spirit and personal happiness and contentment and confidence in future outcomes come together by way of our branch’s faith connection to the vine and the flow of truth, beauty, and goodness which delivers the fruits of the Spirit to every branch so connected to the vine of life!
Or so I understand the Papers to teach….
Bradly155:3.7 (1727.7) They learned that, when religion is wholly spiritual in motive, it makes all life more worth while, filling it with high purposes, dignifying it with transcendent values, inspiring it with superb motives, all the while comforting the human soul with a sublime and sustaining hope. True religion is designed to lessen the strain of existence; it releases faith and courage for daily living and unselfish serving. Faith promotes spiritual vitality and righteous fruitfulness.
So…keyword and key-phrase searches deliver important topical study results!!!!
Each spirit poison leads to many text resources using the keyword search engine tool.
Enjoy your studies!!
Fear
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Fear&x=8&y=14
Anxiety
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Anxiety+&x=5&y=5
Anger
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Anger&x=4&y=9
Envy
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Envy&x=2&y=9
Jealousy
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Jealousy+&x=6&y=11
Suspicion
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Suspicion+&x=6&y=17
Impatience
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Impatience+&x=12&y=16
Intolerance
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Intolerance+&x=6&y=14
Resentment
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Resentment+&x=3&y=13
Greed
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Greed&x=0&y=0
Pride
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Pride&x=5&y=17
Prejudice
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Prejudice+&x=7&y=19
Thank you Bradly for the links! I started with prejudice. What a delight to follow along so many truth-trails in the assorted references! So uplifting and fascinating, both mentally and spiritually.
A couple of favorites found in the link for « prejudice »:
100:1.2 (1094.4) Some persons are too busy to grow and are therefore in grave danger of spiritual fixation. Provision must be made for growth of meanings at differing ages, in successive cultures, and in the passing stages of advancing civilization. The chief inhibitors of growth are prejudice and ignorance.
170:2.20 (1861.2) Jesus taught that, by faith, the believer enters the kingdom now. In the various discourses he taught that two things are essential to faith-entrance into the kingdom:
170:2.21 (1861.3) 1. Faith, sincerity. To come as a little child, to receive the bestowal of sonship as a gift; to submit to the doing of the Father’s will without questioning and in the full confidence and genuine trustfulness of the Father’s wisdom; to come into the kingdom free from prejudice and preconception; to be open-minded and teachable like an unspoiled child.
170:2.22 (1861.4) 2. Truth hunger. The thirst for righteousness, a change of mind, the acquirement of the motive to be like God and to find God.
170:2.23 (1861.5) Jesus taught that sin is not the child of a defective nature but rather the offspring of a knowing mind dominated by an unsubmissive will. Regarding sin, he taught that God has forgiven; that we make such forgiveness personally available by the act of forgiving our fellows. When you forgive your brother in the flesh, you thereby create the capacity in your own soul for the reception of the reality of God’s forgiveness of your own misdeeds.
So….each poison listed deserves our consideration regarding their effects on our universe reality perspective and our expectations and our own motivation and guiding priorities in life.
What poisons do I choose to ingest? How do those affect my choices and decisions? Do hopes, ideals, aspirations, faith, trust, and Divine Assurance guide me forward each day?
We simply cannot determine or control what will happen by the choices of all others and the dynamic flux of potential created by the freewill exercised by other persons individually or collectively.
But we certainly can, do, and must personally choose how to react and respond to anything and everything that happens in life. How we respond truly does determine our personal experience and outcomes and exhibits our faith and experiential wisdom ….or not!
If we would see reality clearly and make good choices, we must not poison our spirit and mind.
Religious experience and progress in the Spirit and personal happiness and contentment and confidence in future outcomes come together by way of our branch’s faith connection to the vine and the flow of truth, beauty, and goodness which delivers the fruits of the Spirit to every branch so connected to the vine of life!
Or so I understand the Papers to teach….
Bradly155:3.7 (1727.7) They learned that, when religion is wholly spiritual in motive, it makes all life more worth while, filling it with high purposes, dignifying it with transcendent values, inspiring it with superb motives, all the while comforting the human soul with a sublime and sustaining hope. True religion is designed to lessen the strain of existence; it releases faith and courage for daily living and unselfish serving. Faith promotes spiritual vitality and righteous fruitfulness.
So….I wonder…is it obvious yet to us how difficult it is to seek truth, understanding, perspective, wisdom, and enlightenment while sipping on poisons? Or gulping them down?
Is it obvious yet to us how this sipping and gulping poisons our freewill choices and our motives and intentions and priorities???
How about our expectations for the future and perspective of universe reality? What about our opinions about God? Our opinions about others?
Is it obvious to us yet how this sipping and gulping leads to disappointment and suspicion and despair and blame and grudges and spite and a lack of mercy and forgiveness and generosity and kindness and patience? And hope and trust and assurance and joy??!!
Poisons…how do they affect us? How do we stop the sipping and gulping?? What changes and benefits might result from less poison?
What if our heart became pure enough that we no longer sipped ANY poisons??? How might we view others then? Or the future??
Can we truly see progress or its certain trajectory or the potentials before us while poisoned? Can we nurture hope and trust in God’s affection and friendly universe while so poisoned??
How can we find peace and happiness while poisoning our minds and spirit?
How indeed?
So…I wonder not only about how these poisons affect us personally but what about the effects on our relationships? How do we ‘share’ these poisons with our spouses and our children and tribe and neighbors and community? Are we transferring and projecting and perpetuating and imposing these poisons onto and towards others??
How can we not? If we are ingesting these poisons then most certainly are we ‘sharing’ them!!
The Urantia Papers teach us that the minds of children are naturally poison free. They are poisoned only by others.
Think about that.
Isn’t every single thing wrong in life and the world an effect of these poisons?
Something to think about…
I often ponder the connection of disappointment with our expectations and our impatience. So many mortals seem so blind to our world’s evolutionary progress and its obvious trajectory. Many live under a burden of great disappointment and despair, seeing only the shadows of evil/error but not the sublime fruits of the Spirit, so illuminating and inspiring and invigorating our world, propelling us forward toward an inherent destiny of future Light and Life.
Some even view evolutionary progress as some evidence of an Armageddon to come, and end of humanity by the punishment of an angry God or simply God’s indifference or even nonexistence.
Some minds are too poisoned for hope or anticipation or the expectation of progress and momentum and destiny. They despair of virtue and righteousness overwhelming error and evil and sin.
Disappointment feeds fear and diminishes hope for progress and better times to come. Disappointment feeds the false idea that there is no God or God’s plan and power and love might somehow fail us and abandon us in our suffering.
Others among us have their disappointment fuel their impatience for greater progress faster. They wish for more and sooner and often subscribe to the fallacy that the end justifies any means to achieve that end. Consider the story of Adam and Eve presented in the Papers. Even they became poisoned by disappointment and impatience.
130:5.3 (1436.4) One day when Ganid asked Jesus why he had not devoted himself to the work of a public teacher, he said: “My son, everything must await the coming of its time. You are born into the world, but no amount of anxiety and no manifestation of impatience will help you to grow up. You must, in all such matters, wait upon time. Time alone will ripen the green fruit upon the tree. Season follows season and sundown follows sunrise only with the passing of time. I am now on the way to Rome with you and your father, and that is sufficient for today. My tomorrow is wholly in the hands of my Father in heaven.” And then he told Ganid the story of Moses and the forty years of watchful waiting and continued preparation.
Me here: Our universe reality perspective determines our ability to transcend the shadows of darkness which may cloud our horizons to view the spectacular progress already achieved and the obvious and inspiring trajectory and the mass and momentum of that progress. Impatience breeds disappointment while disappointment feeds impatience. Or is it the other way around?
118:1.3 (1295.3) There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.
118:1.4 (1295.4) Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
118:1.5 (1295.5) In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.
118:1.6 (1295.6) Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.
118:1.7 (1295.7) To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.
118:1.8 (1295.8) The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
102:0.1 (1118.1) TO THE unbelieving materialist, man is simply an evolutionary accident. His hopes of survival are strung on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears, loves, longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the incidental juxtaposition of certain lifeless atoms of matter. No display of energy nor expression of trust can carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and inspirational genius of the best of men are doomed to be extinguished by death, the long and lonely night of eternal oblivion and soul extinction. Nameless despair is man’s only reward for living and toiling under the temporal sun of mortal existence. Each day of life slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless doom which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has decreed shall be the crowning insult to everything in human desire which is beautiful, noble, lofty, and good.
102:0.2 (1118.2) But such is not man’s end and eternal destiny; such a vision is but the cry of despair uttered by some wandering soul who has become lost in spiritual darkness, and who bravely struggles on in the face of the mechanistic sophistries of a material philosophy, blinded by the confusion and distortion of a complex learning. And all this doom of darkness and all this destiny of despair are forever dispelled by one brave stretch of faith on the part of the most humble and unlearned of God’s children on earth.
102:0.3 (1118.3) This saving faith has its birth in the human heart when the moral consciousness of man realizes that human values may be translated in mortal experience from the material to the spiritual, from the human to the divine, from time to eternity.
102:7.6 (1126.6) The God-knowing individual is not one who is blind to the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which stand in the way of finding God in the maze of superstition, tradition, and materialistic tendencies of modern times. He has encountered all these deterrents and triumphed over them, surmounted them by living faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual experience in spite of them. But it is true that many who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and cleverness of those who assemble objections and magnify difficulties about believing in God. It requires no great depth of intellect to pick flaws, ask questions, or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of mind to answer these questions and solve these difficulties; faith certainty is the greatest technique for dealing with all such superficial contentions.
Interestingly, there are two remedies for spirit poison. One, we .ay choose to ingest less poison. Fewer and fewer kinds of poison in lesser and lesser amounts.
The other is the antidote of hope and trust and faith and idealism and religious experience and personal spiritization.
Both strategies deliver us from the reality-blindness of spirit poisons. We can modify our reality perspective by our choices, motives, intentions, and priorities in our daily living and our philosophy of living.
195:7.19 (2080.4) Mechanists—humanists—tend to drift with the material currents. Idealists and spiritists dare to use their oars with intelligence and vigor in order to modify the apparently purely material course of the energy streams.
Those who have faith and hope and the idealism to persevere and overcome are those mortals who change themselves and their world…. and the universe and all of eternity too!
Experiential wisdom and spiritization changes everything.
Everything indeed!
81:6.26 (909.7) 9. The racial ideals. The ideals of one generation carve out the channels of destiny for immediate posterity. The quality of the social torchbearers will determine whether civilization goes forward or backward. The homes, churches, and schools of one generation predetermine the character trend of the succeeding generation. The moral and spiritual momentum of a race or a nation largely determines the cultural velocity of that civilization.
81:6.27 (909.8) Ideals elevate the source of the social stream. And no stream will rise any higher than its source no matter what technique of pressure or directional control may be employed. The driving power of even the most material aspects of a cultural civilization is resident in the least material of society’s achievements. Intelligence may control the mechanism of civilization, wisdom may direct it, but spiritual idealism is the energy which really uplifts and advances human culture from one level of attainment to another.
Faith and hope and trust overcome the conflicts and vicissitudes and doubts and uncertainties of living…and the spirit poisons too!
159:3.7 (1766.3) Forewarn all believers regarding the fringe of conflict which must be traversed by all who pass from the life as it is lived in the flesh to the higher life as it is lived in the spirit. To those who live quite wholly within either realm, there is little conflict or confusion, but all are doomed to experience more or less uncertainty during the times of transition between the two levels of living. In entering the kingdom, you cannot escape its responsibilities or avoid its obligations, but remember: The gospel yoke is easy and the burden of truth is light.
159:3.8 (1766.4) The world is filled with hungry souls who famish in the very presence of the bread of life; men die searching for the very God who lives within them. Men seek for the treasures of the kingdom with yearning hearts and weary feet when they are all within the immediate grasp of living faith. Faith is to religion what sails are to a ship; it is an addition of power, not an added burden of life. There is but one struggle for those who enter the kingdom, and that is to fight the good fight of faith. The believer has only one battle, and that is against doubt—unbelief.
102:2.3 (1119.8) It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a religious experience, but it is not difficult to observe that such religious practitioners live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers react to this temporal life as if immortality already were within their grasp. In the lives of such mortals there is a valid originality and a spontaneity of expression that forever segregate them from those of their fellows who have imbibed only the wisdom of the world. Religionists seem to live in effective emancipation from harrying haste and the painful stress of the vicissitudes inherent in the temporal currents of time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a tranquillity of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology, and sociology.
102:2.8 (1121.1) Again, there are other types of unstable and poorly disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of religion as an avenue of escape from the irritating demands of living. When certain vacillating and timid mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of evolutionary life, religion, as they conceive it, seems to present the nearest refuge, the best avenue of escape. But it is the mission of religion to prepare man for bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of life. Religion is evolutionary man’s supreme endowment, the one thing which enables him to carry on and “endure as seeing Him who is invisible.” Mysticism, however, is often something of a retreat from life which is embraced by those humans who do not relish the more robust activities of living a religious life in the open arenas of human society and commerce. True religion must act. Conduct will be the result of religion when man actually has it, or rather when religion is permitted truly to possess the man. Never will religion be content with mere thinking or unacting feeling.
Consider the power of faith-trust to liberate us from the mechanistic and fear based reality perspective which delivers the spirit poisons presented and discussed here. Doom and gloom and uncertainties and doubts cannot subdue or overwhelm the true religionists who respond to the Deity Connections we all are blessed with.
Consider:
3. Is hope—the grandeur of trust—desirable? Then human existence must constantly be confronted with insecurities and recurrent uncertainties.
101:2.13 (1107.3) True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the moral consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that “the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Religion consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual insight and the sublimity of the soul’s trust.
101:2.14 (1107.4) Your deepest nature—the divine Adjuster—creates within you a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.
101:2.15 (1107.5) The realization of religion never has been, and never will be, dependent on great learning or clever logic. It is spiritual insight, and that is just the reason why some of the world’s greatest religious teachers, even the prophets, have sometimes possessed so little of the wisdom of the world. Religious faith is available alike to the learned and the unlearned.
101:3.4 (1108.3) Through religious faith the soul of man reveals itself and demonstrates the potential divinity of its emerging nature by the characteristic manner in which it induces the mortal personality to react to certain trying intellectual and testing social situations. Genuine spiritual faith (true moral consciousness) is revealed in that it:
101:3.5 (1108.4) 1. Causes ethics and morals to progress despite inherent and adverse animalistic tendencies.
101:3.6 (1108.5) 2. Produces a sublime trust in the goodness of God even in the face of bitter disappointment and crushing defeat.
101:3.7 (1108.6) 3. Generates profound courage and confidence despite natural adversity and physical calamity.
101:3.8 (1108.7) 4. Exhibits inexplicable poise and sustaining tranquillity notwithstanding baffling diseases and even acute physical suffering.101:3.9 (1108.
5. Maintains a mysterious poise and composure of personality in the face of maltreatment and the rankest injustice.101:3.10 (1108.9) 6. Maintains a divine trust in ultimate victory in spite of the cruelties of seemingly blind fate and the apparent utter indifference of natural forces to human welfare.
101:3.11 (1108.10) 7. Persists in the unswerving belief in God despite all contrary demonstrations of logic and successfully withstands all other intellectual sophistries.101:3.12 (1108.11) 8. Continues to exhibit undaunted faith in the soul’s survival regardless of the deceptive teachings of false science and the persuasive delusions of unsound philosophy.
101:3.13 (1108.12) 9. Lives and triumphs irrespective of the crushing overload of the complex and partial civilizations of modern times.
101:3.14 (1108.13) 10. Contributes to the continued survival of altruism in spite of human selfishness, social antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political maladjustments.
101:3.15 (1108.14) 11. Steadfastly adheres to a sublime belief in universe unity and divine guidance regardless of the perplexing presence of evil and sin.
101:3.16 (1108.15) 12. Goes right on worshiping God in spite of anything and everything. Dares to declare, “Even though he slay me, yet will I serve him.”
101:10.6 (1116.7) Never can there be either scientific or logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate the values and goodnesses of religious experience. But it will always remain true: Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall comprehend the validity of spiritual values. This is the nearest approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering proofs of the reality of religious experience. Such faith affords the only escape from the mechanical clutch of the material world and from the error distortion of the incompleteness of the intellectual world; it is the only discovered solution to the impasse in mortal thinking regarding the continuing survival of the individual personality. It is the only passport to completion of reality and to eternity of life in a universal creation of love, law, unity, and progressive Deity attainment.
101:10.7 (1117.1) Religion effectually cures man’s sense of idealistic isolation or spiritual loneliness; it enfranchises the believer as a son of God, a citizen of a new and meaningful universe. Religion assures man that, in following the gleam of righteousness discernible in his soul, he is thereby identifying himself with the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the Eternal. Such a liberated soul immediately begins to feel at home in this new universe, his universe.
101:10.8 (1117.2) When you experience such a transformation of faith, you are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional son of the Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated son fighting alone against the inexorable doom of the termination of temporal existence; no longer does he combat all nature, with the odds hopelessly against him; no longer is he staggered by the paralyzing fear that, perchance, he has put his trust in a hopeless phantasm or pinned his faith to a fanciful error.
101:10.9 (1117.3) Now, rather, are the sons of God enlisted together in fighting the battle of reality’s triumph over the partial shadows of existence. At last all creatures become conscious of the fact that God and all the divine hosts of a well-nigh limitless universe are on their side in the supernal struggle to attain eternity of life and divinity of status. Such faith-liberated sons have certainly enlisted in the struggles of time on the side of the supreme forces and divine personalities of eternity; even the stars in their courses are now doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the universe from within, from God’s viewpoint, and all is transformed from the uncertainties of material isolation to the sureties of eternal spiritual progression. Even time itself becomes but the shadow of eternity cast by Paradise realities upon the moving panoply of space.
102:1.1 (1118.4) The work of the Thought Adjuster constitutes the explanation of the translation of man’s primitive and evolutionary sense of duty into that higher and more certain faith in the eternal realities of revelation. There must be perfection hunger in man’s heart to insure capacity for comprehending the faith paths to supreme attainment. If any man chooses to do the divine will, he shall know the way of truth. It is literally true, “Human things must be known in order to be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known.” But honest doubts and sincere questionings are not sin; such attitudes merely spell delay in the progressive journey toward perfection attainment. Childlike trust secures man’s entrance into the kingdom of heavenly ascent, but progress is wholly dependent on the vigorous exercise of the robust and confident faith of the full-grown man.
102:1.2 (1119.1) The reason of science is based on the observable facts of time; the faith of religion argues from the spirit program of eternity. What knowledge and reason cannot do for us, true wisdom admonishes us to allow faith to accomplish through religious insight and spiritual transformation.
More on faith and trust as antidote to spirit poisons:
103:9.5 (1141.3) Although religious experience is a purely spiritual subjective phenomenon, such an experience embraces a positive and living faith attitude toward the highest realms of universe objective reality. The ideal of religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead man unqualifiedly to depend upon the absolute love of the infinite Father of the universe of universes. Such a genuine religious experience far transcends the philosophic objectification of idealistic desire; it actually takes salvation for granted and concerns itself only with learning and doing the will of the Father in Paradise. The earmarks of such a religion are: faith in a supreme Deity, hope of eternal survival, and love, especially of one’s fellows.
103:9.8 (1141.6) Science (knowledge) is founded on the inherent (adjutant spirit) assumption that reason is valid, that the universe can be comprehended. Philosophy (co-ordinate comprehension) is founded on the inherent (spirit of wisdom) assumption that wisdom is valid, that the material universe can be co-ordinated with the spiritual. Religion (the truth of personal spiritual experience) is founded on the inherent (Thought Adjuster) assumption that faith is valid, that God can be known and attained.
103:9.9 (1141.7) The full realization of the reality of mortal life consists in a progressive willingness to believe these assumptions of reason, wisdom, and faith. Such a life is one motivated by truth and dominated by love; and these are the ideals of objective cosmic reality whose existence cannot be materially demonstrated.
103:9.10 (1142.1) When reason once recognizes right and wrong, it exhibits wisdom; when wisdom chooses between right and wrong, truth and error, it demonstrates spirit leading. And thus are the functions of mind, soul, and spirit ever closely united and functionally interassociated. Reason deals with factual knowledge; wisdom, with philosophy and revelation; faith, with living spiritual experience. Through truth man attains beauty and by spiritual love ascends to goodness.
103:9.11 (1142.2) Faith leads to knowing God, not merely to a mystical feeling of the divine presence. Faith must not be overmuch influenced by its emotional consequences. True religion is an experience of believing and knowing as well as a satisfaction of feeling.
103:9.12 (1142.3) There is a reality in religious experience that is proportional to the spiritual content, and such a reality is transcendent to reason, science, philosophy, wisdom, and all other human achievements. The convictions of such an experience are unassailable; the logic of religious living is incontrovertible; the certainty of such knowledge is superhuman; the satisfactions are superbly divine, the courage indomitable, the devotions unquestioning, the loyalties supreme, and the destinies final—eternal, ultimate, and universal.
Spirit poisons prevent and diminish, can even destroy, happiness. Such poisons reduce our ability to discern or recognize truth and beauty and goodness. We can become so blinded by poison that we cannot accept love or forgiveness because we become bitter and brittle and suspicious and pessimistic and dour.
Such a perspective damages our relationships and the social fabric in our tribe and communities and culture.
The result of spiritization and faith and love IS personal happiness and tranquillity. As spirit poisons deliver repercussions so does personal happiness!! True happiness radiates outward in time AND space into infinity and eternity.
True happiness is God’s will for all personalities everywhere always and forever!
Happiness is a function of our reality response.
True happiness is real and…is true universe reality. And the universe is friendly!
If only we will join it…and join in!
2:7.6 (42.7) Intellectual self-consciousness can discover the beauty of truth, its spiritual quality, not only by the philosophic consistency of its concepts, but more certainly and surely by the unerring response of the ever-present Spirit of Truth. Happiness ensues from the recognition of truth because it can be acted out; it can be lived. Disappointment and sorrow attend upon error because, not being a reality, it cannot be realized in experience. Divine truth is best known by its spiritual flavor.
2:7.11 (43.4) All truth—material, philosophic, or spiritual—is both beautiful and good. All real beauty—material art or spiritual symmetry—is both true and good. All genuine goodness—whether personal morality, social equity, or divine ministry—is equally true and beautiful. Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experience. Such levels of efficient living come about through the unification of energy systems, idea systems, and spirit systems.
2:7.12 (43.5) Truth is coherent, beauty attractive, goodness stabilizing. And when these values of that which is real are co-ordinated in personality experience, the result is a high order of love conditioned by wisdom and qualified by loyalty. The real purpose of all universe education is to effect the better co-ordination of the isolated child of the worlds with the larger realities of his expanding experience. Reality is finite on the human level, infinite and eternal on the higher and divine levels.
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