Thank you profoundly for your participation and wonderful questions.
Not knowing whether some participants would like to be quoted by their chat name in the September 9, 2019 Forum, I will leave all these contributions anonymous. If you would like to identify yourself as the author in the blogpost comments, please go ahead.
Quick answer. For more on personalism: Jan Olaf Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism–and LTBG 56-59.
Some of your questions—like the next one—call for reflective judgment, a sense of proportion, and fine discernment. Philosophy by its nature is unsuited to answer this kind of question, although it may discover some ideas to help frame the inquiry. The goal often is to help you with your prayer process with the conditions of effective prayer, putting the inquiry back into your hands for that blessed interaction with the One who answers prayer.
Chat question #1: For example, this chat question: How do you decide when
person takes precedence over project.
Jesus would characteristically interrupt a conversation with his apostles to fraternize with a passer-by. But his was a revelation of the Universal Father’s will of love in one-to-one relationships. But the Eternal Mother Son is a spiritual administrator . . . and somehow there is a path from the awesome love of the Father to the Third Source family, some of whose members minister mercy by applying “the hammer of suffering on the anvil of justice.” Consider:
12:7.8 (138.3) The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man present the paradox of the part and the whole on the level of personality. God loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. Yet God thus loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons, and the universality of his love brings into being a relationship of the whole, the universal brotherhood.
Fifth epochal maturity spends enough time with these creative tensions to become peaceful about the tension between the tremendous emphasis on the fact that each person is a divinely created, infinitely loved child of God and the kind of discourse that we often see in Part III, which strikes us as callous because of some generalizations that are made about some groups of persons. The more we are able to narrate a coherent path between these poles of truth, the more we can respond to those who simply reject the book, or struggle with it, because of the tensions that the authors frankly revealed.
In other words, we don’t always allow opportunities to bless individuals to postpone our responsible functioning in social systems of three or more persons.
Undoubtedly, philosophy could come up with more ideas to help guide a person in answering this question, but nothing more occurs to me at the moment. And sooner or later, philosophy will have to simply fall silent as reflective proportional judgment and discernment regarding truth, beauty, and goodness; and the requirements of love, mercy, and ministry, against the backdrop of justice, power, and sovereignty.
Enough on that question—and to some extent on that kind of question.
Chat question #2: How do I engage young people in fostering values in their young children when they are so young and I am in my 70’s? The differences are large to me.
This question carries a lot of pathos because it speaks of a genuine struggle, of efforts that have not seemed successful. In addition the questioner is a person with several notable virtues for the task.
My approach is two-fold. First, recall some of the things that I believe the questioner knows even better than I do—say about how Jesus related to young people; and each generation arrives on the planet with its own package of advantages and handicaps. And second, I would say that no matter what our virtues, we all also have our not-yets (our unbeautifulnesses, our qualities that need more growth to attain symmetry with our gifts and achievements). Our goal is a strong and well-balanced personality along the perfected lines of the Jesus personality. Most of us can’t get there in the lifetime, but every mortal can attain his balance. So then I might simply recall that our front-burner growth issue might be found in paging through the description of the mansion worlds in Paper 47. Experiential education for mortals in Satania is organized according to a definite sequence of priority-clusters. Mansonia #1 is less uniform, because we arrive with such diverse “defects of character and deficiencies of experience.” But the main issues are biological in the broad sense, matters of family life.
Year by year, my skill with, and reliance on, Jesus’ lesson on self-mastery, encourages me with whatever growth need I experience. Believe and rejoice. Trust to the Spirit of Truth, with its constant spiritual renewing of your mind. You are being endowed with the power of the certain and joyous power of the gracious, acceptable, and perfect will of God! Have faith in such exceedingly great and precious promises of God. And the power of your spirit-born faith enables you to cleanse yourselves of all evils of mind and body as you seek for perfection in the love of God. And then I often remind myself that we do not normally totally erase the mark of the beast until the 7th mansion world (we normally fuse on the 6th)!
One question came in different shape from a number of persons. How can we distinguish the divine guidance from the leadings of our own mind?
When we persistently mobilize all our personality powers of mind, soul, and body by faith to seek the will of God . . . the message is seek and you shall find. But this does not mean that we always get it right. The Creator has designed a learning process for us. In this learning process there is no litmus test that tells us the difference between subconscious and superconscious inputs into the mind.
The conditions of effective prayer (91:9/1002) are tremendously helpful. The section on mysticism, ecstasy and inspiration is one place where we are told some factors that make it more likely to suspect subconscious inputs and other factors that promote superconscious harmony. But in our blessed adventure of growth, there is no fail-safe criterion that the human intellect can apply.
It takes great humility to play leap-frog, so to speak with growth in wisdom and growth in spiritual experience: kneeling down with one’s spiritual confidence as wisdom leaps over that confidence—which may be premature.
91:7.4 (1000.5) The human mind may perform in response to so-called inspiration when it is sensitive either to the uprisings of the subconscious or to the stimulus of the superconscious. In either case it appears to the individual that such augmentations of the content of consciousness are more or less foreign.
110:4.2 (1207.2) You are quite incapable of distinguishing the product of your own material intellect from that of the conjoint activities of your soul and the Adjuster.
110:4.3 (1207.3) Certain abrupt presentations of thoughts, conclusions, and other pictures of mind are sometimes the direct or indirect work of the Adjuster; but far more often they are the sudden emergence into consciousness of ideas which have been grouping themselves together in the submerged mental levels, natural and everyday occurrences of normal and ordinary psychic function inherent in the circuits of the evolving animal mind. (In contrast with these subconscious emanations, the revelations of the Adjuster appear through the realms of the superconscious.)
110:5.5 (1208.4) It is hazardous to attempt the differentiation of the Adjusters’ concept registry from the more or less continuous and conscious reception of the dictations of mortal conscience. These are problems which will have to be solved through individual discrimination and personal decision. But a human being would do better to err in rejecting an Adjuster’s expression through believing it to be a purely human experience than to blunder into exalting a reaction of the mortal mind to the sphere of divine dignity. Remember, the influence of a Thought Adjuster is for the most part, though not wholly, a superconscious experience.
110:5.6 (1208.5) In varying degrees and increasingly as you ascend the psychic circles, sometimes directly, but more often indirectly, you do communicate with your Adjusters. But it is dangerous to entertain the idea that every new concept originating in the human mind is the dictation of the Adjuster. More often, in beings of your order, that which you accept as the Adjuster’s voice is in reality the emanation of your own intellect. This is dangerous ground, and every human being must settle these problems for himself in accordance with his natural human wisdom and superhuman insight.
The solution to this problem is to grow progressively in our understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness and exercise our own responsibility to scientifically consider, philosophically interpret, and spiritually evaluate our experiences.
