I hoped this topic would bring a wide loop of multiple topics to consider and integrate in our pursuit of understanding Paper 100. So far, so good…and thanks for your participation and considerations. Again, feel free to move forward, back, or sideways during this topic to ask questions, clarify concepts, and shed additional light on the many issues presented in text. As is usual when studying the UB, what comes next so often clarifies and specifies issues just read….it has always impressed me how the authors wrote in such a way as to both anticipate questions and lead the mind to questions like bread crumbs through the forest of discovery! After thusly seeing enough trees, the forest is revealed!
100:1.5 (1094.7) The soil essential for religious growth presupposes a progressive life of self-realization, the co-ordination of natural propensities, the exercise of curiosity and the enjoyment of reasonable adventure, the experiencing of feelings of satisfaction, the functioning of the fear stimulus of attention and awareness, the wonder-lure, and a normal consciousness of smallness, humility. Growth is also predicated on the discovery of selfhood accompanied by self-criticism — conscience, for conscience is really the criticism of oneself by one’s own value-habits, personal ideals.
100:1.6 (1095.1) Religious experience is markedly influenced by physical health, inherited temperament, and social environment. But these temporal conditions do not inhibit inner spiritual progress by a soul dedicated to the doing of the will of the Father in heaven. There are present in all normal mortals certain innate drives toward growth and self-realization which function if they are not specifically inhibited. The certain technique of fostering this constitutive endowment of the potential of spiritual growth is to maintain an attitude of wholehearted devotion to supreme values.
100:1.7 (1095.2) Religion cannot be bestowed, received, loaned, learned, or lost. It is a personal experience which grows proportionally to the growing quest for final values. Cosmic growth thus attends on the accumulation of meanings and the ever-expanding elevation of values. But nobility itself is always an unconscious growth.
I think 1.5 above teaches us that the very “discovery of selfhood”….the yearn and curiosity and wonder lure and the joys of discovery and learning and growth itself is the beginning, perhaps, of the desire for the branch to attach itself to the vine…to connect to the very source of all these feelings. And by such a connection and experience does the fruit begin to appear on the branch. Notice how humility and self criticism come into play….the very antithesis of prejudice. The branch grows increasingly loyal to the vine I think, especially when the fruits of the Spirit deliver happiness, contentment, patience, kindness, joy….to be shared in loving service….which further strengthens the branch and grows ever more fruit. The growth of wisdom by such experience only adds to the strength of the branch.
According to my understanding, it also grows and strengthens the vine…as represented by the Supreme who also grows as all the fruit on all the branches grows too.
“…innate drives…function….if not specifically inhibited….”
Indeed!
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
