How can the mind participate in worship . . . not only with the spirit of worship but with all of Mother’s adjutant mind-spirits? Here are thoughts building upon a morning mediation. First, we recall the most relevant of the adjutants: 36:5.11 (402.8) “6. The spirit of worship—the religious impulse, the first differential urge separating mind creatures into the two basic classes of mortal existence. The spirit of worship forever distinguishes the animal of its association from the soulless creatures of mind endowment. Worship is the badge of spiritual-ascension candidacy.”
For more information on the spirit of worship, I go to its source in the cosmic mind. 16:6.8 (192.4) “3. Worship—the spiritual domain of the reality of religious experience, the personal realization of divine fellowship, the recognition of spirit values, the assurance of eternal survival, the ascent from the status of servants of God to the joy and liberty of the sons of God. This is the highest insight of the cosmic mind, the reverential and worshipful form of the cosmic discrimination.”
The first thing that I would emphasize today is “the personal realization of divine fellowship.” The primary meaning is fellowship with, in the first example, the Universal Father’s distributed presence, the betrothed Thought Adjuster. “Fellowship” implies that you are not overwhelmed with the power and sovereignty of God. God is a father-friend; Jesus is a brother-friend. The indwelling spirit does not override the will of the human personality. Reinforcing this thought is the following. 27:7.1 (303.5) “Worship is the conscious and joyous act of recognizing and acknowledging the truth and fact of the intimate and personal relationships of the Creators with their creatures.“
The relevance of the adjutant mind-spirits becomes more obvious when we consider the next characteristic of the cosmic mind intuition of worship: “recognition of divine values.” Suppose I simply take truth, beauty, and goodness as being and encompassing all divine values. This is a good place to remember the definition of mind given in the Foreword. 0:5.8 (8.8) “2. Mind. The thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism of the human organism. The total conscious and unconscious experience. The intelligence associated with the emotional life reaching upward through worship and wisdom to the spirit level.”
I propose to regard truth as a school of thinking, beauty as a school of feeling, and goodness as a school of doing (to correlate divine values with the schools on Jerusem and their approximations on our evolutionary world).
How do the adjutants enable me to gain insight into truth? We have truths of science, developed in the first five adjutants, but especially in the spirit of knowledge. 36:5.9 (402.6) “4. The spirit of knowledge—the curiosity-mother of adventure and discovery, the scientific spirit; the guide and faithful associate of the spirits of courage and counsel; the urge to direct the endowments of courage into useful and progressive paths of growth.” For the sake of simplicity, I am going to consider the schools of thinking in science, philosophy, and spiritual experience with the schools of feeling in deity, nature, and the arts). For starters, notice the feeling dimension of curiosity and discovery, and how they can contribute to the worship experience.
How do the other adjutants contribute to our grasp of the truths of science? The spirit of intuition puts us in immediate intuitive-reactive contact with the surrounding universe, including the body. 36:5.6 (402.3) 1. The spirit of intuition—quick perception, the primitive physical and inherent reflex instincts, the directional and other self-preservative endowments of all mind creations; the only one of the adjutants to function so largely in the lower orders of animal life and the only one to make extensive functional contact with the nonteachable levels of mechanical mind.” Think of the combined cognitive and affective contribution to what Jesus did and recommended: worshiping in nature as a first choice.
All the adjutants are designed to contribute to the full personality. The spirit of understanding enables us to associate ideas so that we can learn from experience and grow to become less reactive to material stimuli and more intelligently responsive. 36:5.7 (402.4) “2. The spirit of understanding—the impulse of co-ordination, the spontaneous and apparently automatic association of ideas. This is the gift of the co-ordination of acquired knowledge, the phenomenon of quick reasoning, rapid judgment, and prompt decision.” Think of the cognitive and affective contribution of the spirit of understanding when we are living at our best.
The spirit of courage is described in a way that illustrates the fact that the first five adjutants are all designed to function in the whole, fully functioning personality. 36:5.8 (402.5) “3. The spirit of courage—the fidelity endowment—in personal beings, the basis of character acquirement and the intellectual root of moral stamina and spiritual bravery. When enlightened by facts and inspired by truth, this becomes the secret of the urge of evolutionary ascension by the channels of intelligent and conscientious self-direction.” Not only is there an affective component in courage; but courageous living is essential to gaining insight into higher realms of truth.
The spirit of counsel plays a role in group worship–all worship is implicitly social: I properly worship God not only as my Father but also as our Father. 36:5.10 (402.7) “5. The spirit of counsel—the social urge, the endowment of species co-operation; the ability of will creatures to harmonize with their fellows; the origin of the gregarious instinct among the more lowly creatures.” The spirit of counsel is the antechamber of what will be the brotherhood of man, even the brotherhood of beings, as we see in this next quote, about living the qualities of divinity. 106:9.12 (1175.1) “Such a Father life is one predicated on truth, sensitive to beauty, and dominated by goodness. Such a God-knowing person is inwardly illuminated by worship and outwardly devoted to the wholehearted service of the universal brotherhood of all personalities, a service ministry which is filled with mercy and motivated by love, while all these life qualities are unified in the evolving personality on ever-ascending levels of cosmic wisdom, self-realization, God-finding, and Father worship.”
Two more observations regarding worship as an insight of the cosmic mind. It includes “assurance of eternal survival”; the idea of life eternal is primarily qualitative, a level of life that is beyond our capacity to conceive. And last, worship includes the “ascent from the status of service of God to the joy and liberty of the sons of God” and daughters of God. This means that if we regard worship as “the spiritual domain of the reality of religious experience,” it includes growth, an ascent that takes place during the course of a human life, over the course of a time to worship during the day, and in the ascent from mortal childhood to Paradise.
Finally, a few words about the role in worship of spirit of wisdom. Worship is an urge which requires the spirit of wisdom to “directionize” it–to direct it, primarily, to the Universal Father. 36:5.12 (402.9) “7. The spirit of wisdom—the inherent tendency of all moral creatures towards orderly and progressive evolutionary advancement. This is the highest of the adjutants, the spirit co-ordinator and articulator of the work of all the others.” Note that evolutionary advancement includes the ascent through the functions of causation, duty, and worship that are forms of the cosmic discernment that our Local Universe Mother Spirit makes available to us in the adjutants.
Our Mother is now, in important ways, very like the Master Spirit who blesses our superuniverse of Orvonton with the cosmic mind. But before that, she was so much like the Conjoint Actor that very few beings could perceive her as an individual. When we study the papers on the Infinite Spirit, we see that the Conjoint Actor specializes in decision-action, which unites the spiritual values of the love and mercy of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son with the factual realities of the Isle of Paradise. It is wisdom that coordinates the truths of religion with the truths of science. When we learn to live in truth-coordination, we gain the beautiful wholeness of righteousness that attracts others to seek us out because of what we have gained.
At one point we are encouraged to “mandate wisdom.” This could mean two things: mandating wisdom as that area and function (cluster of functions) of the human mind, which needs to be assigned this task by the decisive will of the personality. Or it could mean mandating the spirit of wisdom, which would be very bold, but conceivable. Look at this phrase in context and consider what it might involve.
101:6.7 (1112.3) Revelation teaches mortal man that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space by means of the progression of time, he should begin by the organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate wisdom to labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming self-possessed ideas into increasingly practical but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such association in the finite mind as will constitute them the actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise truth—universal truth. The co-ordination of idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the morontia worlds.
The mind is the arena of choice. That’s where the spirit of wisdom guides our decision-action. We do so properly under the guidance of the values of goodness. These values illuminate the truths of science that clarify the factual situation about which we are deciding. This is how we intuit our cosmic duty. Duty is the insight of cosmic mind which bridges between–and unifies–causation and worship.
I leave you with this thought. The spirit of wisdom is the coordinator of all the other adjutants. They are configured differently for different types of activities–the task immediately in hand. I regard the spirit of worship as doing that configuration.
127:3.15 (1400.7) Jesus possessed the ability effectively to mobilize all his powers of mind, soul, and body on the task immediately in hand. He could concentrate his deep-thinking mind on the one problem which he wished to solve, and this, in connection with his untiring patience, enabled him serenely to endure the trials of a difficult mortal existence—to live as if he were “seeing Him who is invisible.”
Now that these April 14, 2021, revisions of this post are done, you can watch the original 13:31 video or listen to the audio file.
