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as admirable and

DO NOT MISUNDERSTAND ME. It is not the function of the artist to preach morality, to inculcate virtue. The laws of art are proper to itself. And they are the laws of beauty. But the beautiful is of the intellect, not of the senses, which merely supply the artist with his raw material. The eyes are only instruments of vision through which the soul looks. Aesthetic enjoyment is the reflection of an inner light or splendor from our reason upon material objects. The end of the intellect, let me repeat, is truth. And in words which, though not Plato's, to whom they are often attributed, are hackneyed, as the 'beautiful is the splendor of the true.' Banish the ideal from the life of men, and by the operation of the inexorable law. Corruptio optimi pessima, men will sink below the level of the lower animals, and will love the abnormal, the monstrous, the deformed, for its own sake. Such is the natural fruit of that philosophy which rejects the only rational conceptions of Right and Wrong, and degrades to the region of molecular physics, conceptions properly appertaining to the domain of the organic and the spiritual. Examples are not far to seek. And they are the sure signs of a decadent and effete civilization.-William Samuel Lilly

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ALL MY CONSCIOUS life in its totality and its details is based on my assumption that I exist. I make a still deeper assumption, namely, that there is a cohering force or principle that unifies all the forces and phenomena of the exterior world of the senses and also the inner, intangible world of thought and feeling. That is the deepest, most enduring and most important of all my assumptions. For me, everything rests on that. Neither of these assumptions can be proven by logic or by scientific method. They lie behind or are the beginning of all logic, consciousness, and perception.

As a human being, I have to make assumptions, because human minds have to start with something. Our minds cannot do without foundations and beginnings. Some assumptions are conscious, but most are unconscious, yet they can be discovered and dragged up to light. Faith is a conscious recognition and acceptance of my basic assumption. I rest my life on my absolute assumption.

The human mind has to believe in or on something greater or

Richard B. Gregg

more enduring than itself. If we give up our basic assumption or if, misled by shallow science, we forget that the nature of our minds compels us to make assumptions, as the majority of leaders of Western men have done in regard to their former belief in God, then inevitably we find ourselves putting our faith in some power that we make supreme, such as the State, science, evolution, a leader, or what-haveyou. As between various possible assumptions I choose that which gives most significance to life and the universe. So I believe in an all-embracing unity.

The name of it makes no difference. The words God and Spirit are vague, ambiguous and much abused. "The word 'God'," as Santayana once said, "is a floating literary symbol . . without fixed indicative force and admits any sense which its concept in any mind may happen to give it." Well, that does not bother me. Even mathematics, the most rigorous of all thinking, begins with some words that are undefined or undefinable except by circular definition that means

nothing. And no two human minds could think in exactly the same way of that which includes all things and yet transcends them all. Such a concept cannot be adequately or definitely described. So, with a clear conscience, I name my absolute assumption God or Spirit. In the country where I live, those names still carry more meaning than such equally valid terms as Brahma, Atman, Tao, Nirvana, or even First Principle.

that

space

The temporal essence or pattern of a person is his soul; his eternal essence is Spirit. Not his spirit, for spirit is not individual and cut up into separate pieces, it is universal and one. Spirit is, so to say, the universal soul of each and every soul. So my innermost essence is the universal Spirit, and that is eternal. My soul, my individual, intangible pattern, may outlast my body, but since it had a beginning, it is temporal and must eventually end, maybe ages hence, but sometime. I need have no fear, however, for my innermost essence is eternal and cannot be injured or slain.

This unity, because it is a cohering principle, is inherent in everything and every person. It also is greater than anything or any person or the sum of them all. It includes, yet transcends and dwells in the details and in the whole universe. Modern physics shows that the quanta of energy in matter are governed by something beyond space and time, or and time do not apply to the phenomena of the elements of matter. If so, that which includes all must likewise transcend space and time. In my thinking, that which transcends time is eternity; that which transcends space is infinity. God and the Spirit are eternal, infinite, immanent and transcendent. Spirit has no beginning, no end, and no parts. It is Eternal Now and Here, as well as always and every

where.

Just as spirit includes and yet transcends time and space, so also darkness and light, cold and heat, it includes and yet transcends north and south, motion and rest, fear and hope, victory and defeat, ugliness and beauty, evil and good, and all the other pairs of opposites that make up our world. To ask why God permits so much evil, or how can God be loving suffering, is to try to impose our and just and yet allow so much modes of thought and feeling on God and to ask the universe and our minds to be made differently. have human values and percepfrom what they are. You cannot tions and order without contrast

ing extremes. God is not adequately describable in limited hu

man words. If you assume that

God is a person, He is not good, nor bad, nor a mixture of good and bad, any more than He is black or white or a mixture of those two colors. In a sense, God includes both good and evil, but in a deeper sense He is neither, but transcends them both. Everyone will admit that there is energy in both evil and good. William Blake said that energy is divine. If so, then God is "in" evil as well as "in" good. A paradox maybe, but one has to use paradox in trying to understand the realm of spirit, for words and logic are limited, but spirit is limitless.

Our words are made for use in the world of space and time. When we try to talk of a realm that transcends space and time we are reduced to metaphors and paradoxes.

But what are we to do about all the dreadful evil in the world, that threatens to destroy all mankind? Well, even if it did, God would still exist; our very essence is indestructible. Or even if West

ern

civilization were destroyed and most of its peoples, there would still be the colored races and their civilizations. As all the founders of great religions were members of colored races. God seems to have relied pretty heavily on that branch of the human family to set things right.

Still, there remain vast moral problems for us all. All the great

religions teach that the way to overcome evil is not by fighting it on its own plane, nor even by being merely "do-gooders," as is clearly stated in I Corinthians 13. The ding-dong, see-saw struggle on that level is historically endless and hopeless. The way to conquer evil and injustice is to transcend them, to lift the struggle up to a higher level by means of doing as you would be done by, refusing to condemn ("judge not"), by forgiving the wrongdoer, by loving your enemy, by nonviolence, by humility, by equanimity, by not seeking the fruit of works, by adhering to truth, by self-transcendence, no matter what the cost. That was taught by Buddha, Krishna, Christ, and other great founders of religions. Modern psychiatry agrees. By transcending the pairs of opposites one mounts into the realm of spirit and overcomes the world, including its evil. Such ways of dealing with evil have been used by wise people in all dark days we are doubtful of the lands and all ages. If in these

effectiveness of such methods, let's be scientific and experiment with them. Gandhi called his autobiography "My Experiments with Truth." That evil now seems greater and more rampant than it used to be is due, I think, to mistaken assumptions of modern man, to lack of belief in the reality and power of spirit, to being

more interested in the outer world and its powers than in the inner world, and to prolonged attempts to fight evil on its own plane instead of trying to transcend it.

Dictators do not trouble me too

Finally, I am encouraged by my belief that because Spirit dwells in everyone, some people are capable of realizing or uniting with God. To attain that, requires rising above the pairs of opposites and giving up and transcending the individual self, but it can be done in this body, here and now. The price is considerable, but not impossible. Not many are qualified by nature and willing to pay the price. But that is also true of such people as nuclear physicists and great mathematicians, yet there are enough of those two kinds of people to influence profoundly the course of events in technology, industry, navigation, aeronautics, education, politics and other realms. The result of attaining unity with God is eternal life, realized now. "Now is the day of salvation." Eternal life is "life more abundant," peaceful and joyous. I prefer this belief to the old-fashioned concept of a heaven attainable only in the

badly. They cannot change the nervous structure of mankind. Man is the only animal in which the nerves that control the voluntary muscles do not end in the lower brain but come clear up to the fore-brain, the cortex, where we do our thinking. Though the control of action by thought is imperfect, yet that control cannot be suppressed. Man, by his nervous structure, is compelled to test his acts and the acts of others by his thoughts, and he has to observe and think. He has to test things by his ideas of truth. He may be browbeaten by a dictatorship for a few years, but because of his nervous structure he eventually has to search for truth. Literacy and the use of printing stimulates and widens thought. So dictators have a hard struggle future, though the latter may be and either go under or have to yield up power.

true for many.

"Fellowship" Magazine

UNDOUBTEDLY IT IS the hardest task we have yet seen set us
in life, to free a man of all prejudice of all crystallized thought
or feeling, of all limitations, yet developed within him the positive
will. It seems too much of a miracle; for in ordinary life positive will
is always associated with crystallized ideas. But many things which
have appeared to be too much of a miracle for accomplishment have
yet been done, even in the narrow experience of life given to our
present humanity. All the past shows us that difficulty is no excuse
for dejection, much less for despair; else the world would have
been unfinished?-Through The Gates of Gold.

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