Dynamic Truth and The Spirit of Truth

Dynamic Truth and The Spirit of Truth

180:5.1 (1949.3)The new helper that Jesus promised to send into the hearts of believers, promised to pour out on all flesh, is the Spirit of Truth. This divine gift is not the letter or law of truth, nor will it function as the form or expression of truth. The new teacher is the conviction of truth, the awareness and certainty of true meanings at real spirit levels. This new teacher is the spirit of living, growing truth, truth that expands and unfolds, and can adapt.

180:5.2 (1949.4)Divine truth is a living reality that is spiritually apprehended. Truth exists only at high spiritual levels of awareness of divinity and realization of communion with God. You can know truth and you can live by truth; you can experience the growth of truth in your soul and the freedom brought about by the illumination of consciousness through truth, but you cannot capture truth in formulas, codes, creeds or rational human patterns of behavior. When you try to formulate divine truth humanly, it promptly dies. Salvaging, bringing captured truth to safety after it has already died, can at best only result in the realization of a peculiar form of rationalized, glorified wisdom. Static truth is dead truth, and only dead truth can be adhered to as a theory. Living truth is dynamic and can only lead an experiential existence in human consciousness.

180:5.3 (1949.5)Intelligence develops from a material form of existence illuminated by the presence of cosmic consciousness. Wisdom includes the awareness of knowledge elevated to new levels of meaning and activated by the presence of the universe-gift of the assistant spirit of wisdom. Truth is a spiritual reality value experienced only by spirit-endowed beings who function at supra-material levels of awareness of the universe, and who, when they realize truth, also allow its spirit of activation to live and reign in their souls.

180:5.4 (1949.6)The true child of insight into the universe searches for the living Spirit of Truth in every wise utterance. The God-knowing individual constantly elevates wisdom to the living truth-levels of divine ability; the soul that makes no progress spiritually is constantly pulling down living truth to the dead levels of wisdom and to the realm of no more than exalted knowledge.

180:5.5 (1949.7)When the Golden Rule is stripped of the superhuman insight of the Spirit of Truth, it becomes nothing but a rule for high ethical behavior. When the golden rule is taken literally, it can become an instrument by which one seriously offends one's fellow men. Without a spiritual view of the Golden Rule of Wisdom, you might reason that since you yourself desire that everyone express to you openly and honestly what he thinks, you should therefore now also express all your thoughts openly and honestly to your fellow men. Such an unspiritual conception of the golden rule could result in untold misfortune and sorrow.

180:5.6 (1950.1)Some people see and interpret the Golden Rule as a purely intellectual affirmation of the brotherhood of man. Others experience this expression of the kinship of men as an emotional satisfaction of the tender feelings of the human personality. Yet another mortal recognizes this same golden rule as the standard by which all social relations should be measured, the norm for social behavior. Still others regard it as the positive command of a great teacher of ethics, who has expressed in this statement the highest conception of moral obligation in regard to all fraternal relations. In the lives of these moral people, the Golden Rule becomes the wise center and circumference of their entire philosophy.

180:5.7 (1950.2)In the kingdom of the brotherhood of truth-loving, God-knowing believers, this golden rule acquires living properties of spiritual realization at the higher levels of interpretation, through which the mortal sons of God come to understand that this command of the Master requires them to deal with their fellow men in such a way that the latter will receive the highest possible good as a result of the believer's contact with them. This is the essence of true religion: that you love your neighbor as yourself.

180:5.8 (1950.3)But the highest realization and most correct interpretation of the golden rule consists in the mind's realization of the truth of the enduring, living reality of such divine utterance. The true cosmic meaning of this rule with respect to universal relations is revealed only in its spiritual realization, in the interpretation of this code by the spirit of the Son to the spirit of the Father dwelling in the soul of mortal man. And when mortals thus guided by the spirit realize the true meaning of this golden rule, they become abundantly filled with the certainty that they are citizens in a friendly universe, and their ideals of spiritual reality are satisfied only when they love their fellow men as Jesus loved us all, and this is the reality of the realization of the love of God.

180:5.9 (1950.4)The same conception of the living flexibility and cosmic adaptability of divine truth to the individual needs and capacity of each son of God must be grasped before you can ever adequately understand the Master's teaching and practice of not resisting evil. The Master's teaching is fundamentally a spiritual statement. Even the material implications of his philosophy cannot be fruitfully considered apart from its spiritual correlations. The spirit of the Master's command consists in not resisting all selfish reactions to the universe, coupled with the bold and progressive attainment of righteous levels of true spirit-values: divine beauty, infinite goodness and eternal truth - knowing God and becoming more and more like him.

180:5.10 (1950.5)Love, selflessness, must undergo constant and living new adjustments of its interpretation of relationships, according to the directions of the Spirit of Truth. Love must thereby acquire the ever-changing and ever-widening conceptions of the highest cosmic good for the person being loved. And then love goes on and adopts the same attitude toward all other persons who could possibly be affected by the growing, living love relationship of a spirit-led mortal to other citizens of the universe. And this entire living adjustment of love must be brought about in light of both the environment of present evil, and the eternal goal of the perfection of divine destiny.

180:5.11 (1950.6)And so we must clearly recognize that neither the Golden Rule, nor the teachings of nonviolence, can ever be correctly understood if conceived as dogma or precept. They can only be understood by living them, by realizing their meaning and intent in the living interpretation of the Spirit of Truth, which guides the loving contact between one human being and another.

180:5.12 (1951.1)Now all this clearly indicates the difference between the old and the new religion. The old religion taught self-sacrifice; the new religion teaches only self-forgetfulness, increased self-actualization in the coupling of social service and understanding of the universe. The old religion was driven by the consciousness of fear; the new gospel of the kingdom is governed by truthfulness, the spirit of eternal, universal truth. And no piety or allegiance to any faith, no matter how great, can compensate for the absence in the life experience of believers in the kingdom of the spontaneous, generous and sincerely meant kindness that characterizes the spirit-born sons of the living God. Neither tradition, nor a ceremonial system of formal worship of God, can make up for the lack of genuine compassion for one's fellow man.

A Thought for Consideration from The Urantia Book