Indeed! Courage, tenacity, confidence in uncertainty, creative problem solving, insight, and wisdom – all require obstacles and adversity. No one learns much without those I don’t think. But as pointed out, true religious living unfetters the mind and empowers the mind to seek out better and better solutions and choice-responses (eventuating into reflexive-response) by the joyful perspective delivered by such living. There is nothing passive about the believers life. Just as Jesus taught we are to be proactively responsive and wise in those responses when facing actual sin, anger, hate, injustice, or any form of act against us….it is not turn the other cheek but overwhelm evil with a love response and the patient second mile.
Learning is a progressive process. We are challenged by TA and the angels to learn. True religious living relieves the stress and anxieties of daily living but not the temporal demands and difficulties of living! If we require hunger to make us think, then hunger it is! But no temporal solution in itself delivers the yearning and craving to know more and be more today than yesterday. Life is dynamic and interactive….or it is not life for long.
On the boards over the years, I have often been accused by a few fellow students (by some who post here as well as other forums) of being lazy, indifferent, uncaring, and naïve in my contentment and confidence in my destiny and safety and that of our world, this Shrine of Nebadon. They demand anxiety, angst, blame, responsibility, change, duty, and (weirdly) the acts of others (naturally) to fix, change, save, and transform others and the world. To be fair, they are apparently concerned with suffering of others and their own and the unfairness perceived in the mortal life….it is not selfishness per se…and yet………..
Such ones display a total lack of faith in my opinion, filled with doubts and fears which require immediacy of remedy. Their interest in what others are or are not doing and should or should not be doing is quite illuminating to the believer whose faith delivers an inherent calmness and happiness, the better to face all vicissitudes along the edges of conflict. They simply have no concept of such a perspective but are all too willing to condemn those who do not share their great concerns and doubts and certainty of causes. The causes of effects are well described in the UB as is the cure.
We change the world first by our view of it in context of all time and the wholeness of the universes of time. Then and only then, we may positively change the world simply as we walk by………. Change our perspective and change the result! It’s not a matter of age.
102:2.3 (1119.8) It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a religious experience, but it is not difficult to observe that such religious practitioners live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers react to this temporal life as if immortality already were within their grasp. In the lives of such mortals there is a valid originality and a spontaneity of expression that forever segregate them from those of their fellows who have imbibed only the wisdom of the world. Religionists seem to live in effective emancipation from harrying haste and the painful stress of the vicissitudes inherent in the temporal currents of time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a tranquillity of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology, and sociology.
102:2.8 (1121.1) Again, there are other types of unstable and poorly disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of religion as an avenue of escape from the irritating demands of living. When certain vacillating and timid mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of evolutionary life, religion, as they conceive it, seems to present the nearest refuge, the best avenue of escape. But it is the mission of religion to prepare man for bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of life. Religion is evolutionary man’s supreme endowment, the one thing which enables him to carry on and “endure as seeing Him who is invisible.” Mysticism, however, is often something of a retreat from life which is embraced by those humans who do not relish the more robust activities of living a religious life in the open arenas of human society and commerce. True religion must act. Conduct will be the result of religion when man actually has it, or rather when religion is permitted truly to possess the man. Never will religion be content with mere thinking or unacting feeling.
102:2.9 (1121.2) We are not blind to the fact that religion often acts unwisely, even irreligiously, but it acts. Aberrations of religious conviction have led to bloody persecutions, but always and ever religion does something; it is dynamic!
156:5.13 (1739.8) God-knowing individuals are not discouraged by misfortune or downcast by disappointment. Believers are immune to the depression consequent upon purely material upheavals; spirit livers are not perturbed by the episodes of the material world. Candidates for eternal life are practitioners of an invigorating and constructive technique for meeting all of the vicissitudes and harassments of mortal living. Every day a true believer lives, he finds it easier to do the right thing.
"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."
