Paper 100--a Synopsis

   "The only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual, and eternal."

   Spiritual growth depends upon:

• Recognition of one's spiritual poverty.
• Communication with the God-Spirit within.
• Utilizing the resultant spirit fruits for the benefit of our fellows.
• A personality that is motivated by love, unselfish service, and the perfection ideals of divinity.

   Our spiritual status is shown by:

• Our nearness to God.
• Our usefulness to our fellows.
• Our enhanced values for truth, beauty, and goodness.
• Our desire to know God and be like him.
• Our desire to always do God's will.

Concepts of supreme values:

• Meanings and values are non-existent in a purely material reality; they are perceived in the inner super-material sphere of human experience.
• That which experiences meanings and values is the mutual creation of mind and the associated spirit that reality-izes the experiences.
• Experience can add meaning to value--and is the consciousness thereof.
• An experience has supreme value if it enhances our interrelatedness to God and our fellows.

Problems of growth

   Spiritual growth requires:

• Dominance of love.
• Supreme love of God and unselfish love of neighbor.
• Love of neighbor requires understanding of neighbor.
• Understanding gives rise to tolerance that grows into love.
• When enough of us become the focus of God-like love, this love will spread like a virus to encompass all people.

   Conversion and Mysticism.

  In contrast with seeking mystical conversion, the better approach for attaining contact with our indwelling God-Spirit is through living faith, sincere worship, and unselfish prayer.

   Mysticism tends to gravitate consciousness towards the subconscious rather than the super-consciousness, hence can be dangerous. Jesus never resorted to such methods.

Marks of Religious Living

   True religion is living love, a life of service that adds new meanings to all life.

   The sincere religionist has an inner awareness of contact with something transcendent of the material, the God-Spirit-Within, and becomes motivated to attain high moral and spiritual goals. This intense striving is characterized by increasing patience, forbearance, fortitude, and tolerance.

   The Acme of Religious Living.

   It is altogether possible for every mortal being to develop a strong and unified personality similar to the perfected lines of Jesus' personality.

   One basic aspect of Jesus personality was his emphasis of love and mercy in place of fear and sacrifice. Another was his unfailing trust in God. Jesus' trust was both sublime and absolute, reminiscent of a child's trust in its parents. Hence he was immune to disappointment and untouched by apparent failure. His faith was thus perfect but never presumptuous and it never faltered. Of Jesus, it is said:

• He loved men and women as his brothers and sisters.
• He went about doing good.
• He loved the sinner but hated the sin.

   He never grew weary of saying:

• It is more blessed to give than to receive.
• Freely you have received, freely give.
• Everyone who seeks shall find.
• If it were not so, I would have told you.

   Jesus' personality included:

• Symmetry in its exquisite balanced unification.
• Unfailing kindness.
• True sincerity.
• Absence of hypocrisy, affectation, pretense, sham.
• He lived the truth.
• He was the truth.
• Always approachable, always reasonable.
• Free of all freakish and erratic tendencies.
• Exquisite discrimination and sense of propriety.
• Surcharged with divine enthusiasm but never fanatical.
• Imaginative but practical.
• Frankly faced the realities of life.
• Never dull or prosaic.
• Prudent but never cowardly.
• Sympathetic but not sentimental.
• Pious but not sanctimonious.
• Unbound by tradition or conventionality.
• Gentle and unassuming--yet the perfected man of the universe.
• Superbly original but respectful of truth of predecessors.
• Never in a hurry.
• Brave but never audacious.
• A pattern of reverence.
• Great because he was good.

   Jesus was the perfectly unified human personality. The traits of his personality plus his faith and sublime trust in God combined to permit him to live his life as a revelation of the nature of the heavenly Father--that aspect of the transcendent God that is comprehensible to the minds of mere mortals like us.

   Jesus' life is therefore a pattern life for all those of any religion who truly seek God, to be like God, and who seek to do God's will--to live, "De imitatione Christi," in the likeness of Jesus.

   [Jesus made no claim to be God or the Son of God. When accused of doing so he countered, "You are all sons of God." He also told his accusers he did not ask them to believe in him but rather to believe in the one who sent him.]

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