Ideals, longings and motives – How can we properly examine them?
Back in ancient times, when humankind was formulating their ideas of a Creator, they realized there were two ways to think about it. One is the debt modality. It presumes that we are in debt to God and all actions follow from that first assumption. The second, is the idea that our lives are a gift from God. Debt tends to win out rather than the gift modality because sight is natural and insight is not so natural. We can see our factual limitations. Therefore, any recognition of ideals makes it look like we are in debt. Sight will always win out over insight with immature beings like us.
If we can enter the Kingdom of Heaven like a little child as Jesus ask us to do, we can go back to before sight was well developed. We can go back to that beginning stage and know that the correct choice, despite all indications to the contrary, is to know that life is a Gift. We can’t let our developing sight overwhelm that. As a child, you knew it intuitively. But then our minds develop and we feel like we are not good enough, not living up to our ideals, and without realizing it consciously, we are in debt. Subsequently, our lives take on a more hopeless scenario.
So, a word of caution, as we begin to reflect on our individual ideals, longings, and motives.
We should ask ourselves probing questions while we remember that we have a natural hard-wired tendency to slip into this debt mode of thinking about ourselves. The point of examining ourselves is not to produce an endless checklist of how we are not worthy. Unfortunately, we have a fragment of God within us that can be used only as a mere error and evil detector. Many times, we focus on the debts and shortcomings of others, or we can turn that focus on ourselves. That erroneous focus can be very unfortunate.
The point is just to recognize that we begin a never-ending universe career as a very small child. We start small. But we start out exactly as God wants us to start. We don’t start out in debt to Him, we start out designed by Him. We are supposed to be limited initially. There is no debt that we must overcome. There is nothing we need to feel guilty about.
We mustn’t think of ourselves as being in an inadequate state.
Even if we don’t consciously heap stuff on ourselves, we tend to do it unconsciously. It’s a natural thing as we start to assess our nature. We mustn’t think of ourselves as being in an inadequate state. We want to think of our current state and begin to glean a more precisely recognized beginning. And when all is said and done, we should be excited about how much there is yet to dawn in our lives as we progress.
It’s easy to think that this debt mentality comes from faulty religious beliefs that got pushed upon us when we were young. However, remember those religious beliefs come out of us naturally. When you think about what developed over the last million years of evolution, remember that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That vast evolutionary phenomenon is in summary fashion within you as you develop. They are just two sides of the same fact. If it wasn’t in us naturally it wouldn’t have ended up out there in the evolutionary world at large. That evolutionary system is of origin within our nature. It isn’t some sort of thing imposed on us from outside.
Will there be a world that is so advanced that a young child wouldn’t have to deal with this extreme debt modality?
The guilt phenomenon has very deep precursors within our foundational animal nature. It is inescapable. Remember, that very early in the development of evolutionary religion both the gift and the debt modalities were thought of. But the debt modality won out in the end. Because we have this innate animal tendency to produce guilt. But, we would like to start out with a solid foundation that can’t be taken from us; the idea that what we are, right now, is a gift from God. A phenomenon of pure grace. Then, as we can begin to examine that gift philosophically and scientifically, we discover it is the very smallest of initial gifts. Because it came from a Being who is only the initiator. By definition, it is as small as possible. When his existential Hand is behind it you don’t have some vast evolutionary phenomenon to start with at the very beginning. We just have an initial existential initiation. Like a seed that has been planted or a sperm that has fertilized an egg. As above, so below.
As we begin to reflectively examine ourselves, we are clear-eyed about where we are to begin with. We look forward to each of those facets of our lowly child-self that are maturing. The more facets of that child-self we are aware of, the more opportunities we have to observe its growth. We become aware that we are just nothing but potential everywhere we look! Some day, we will be an adult of God. But for now, we are a child of God.
With the 5th epochal revelation we have this wonderful picture where we can make a differentiation between self-esteem and self-respect. The latter is an appropriate viewpoint. The corollary is that when we assess ourselves in that debt modality, we have a tendency to go beyond self-respect because we want to amp ourselves up to make up for our supposed inadequacies. We try and make up for something we don’t need to make up for. Self-esteem can morph into self-admiration and self-love, both are totally inappropriate.
On every evolutionary sphere, in the primitive stages, there is a debt mentality that is totally natural.
When we think of evolutionary religion as it appears and evolves on every evolving world the key elements and dogma that appear are a natural and normal part of that phase. It is inescapable and part of the Supreme’s way of growing every world to the ages of Light and Life.
The Prince and his staff and the Adams and Eves on every world foster things forward but let things be in their natural state. If one of them becomes impatient with this primitive state and tries to push it unnaturally forward they are in rebellion. They must respect that primitive nature. They recognize that despite the factual limitations the truth of the whole still flows through what is. That’s why you respect something, not for the glory of its ‘partness’ but for the fact of the Truth that flows through that fact, great or small. Respect or “re-spect” is to look again and appreciate that Truth.
So, it’s not merely the fact of things, as they appear, it’s the conduit of Truth that flows through life, as well as the facts of life. Understanding there is a reality of truth that flows in others and seeing that in ourselves… that’s how we can respect and adjust our opinions. We can take another look; we can see anew. We can see our real selves and others with the light of insight, not merely sight.
Reference: Symmetry of Soul Broadcast, April 28, 2020
14-32 minutes into the show.
