Psychology and the Urantia Book: A Simple Approach

Spiritually Integrated Mental Perspectives on Living Everyday

Presented by Royce Russell

Initially, a mingling of two elements such as psychology and The URANTIA Book should produce the same result as mixing oil and water. What does the current science of mind and behavior have to do with the spiritual foundations of man, God, and the universe? On the surface it's science versus religion, but a more careful examination reveals worlds within worlds whose boundaries touch and spill over into one another. It is these curious correlations that I would like to explore, from a layman's perspective of course, and how these overlappings affect us on a daily basis. My approach will stem from these three areas of consideration:

1) Where did psychology come from?

2) Who is Carl Jung?

3) How does the work of Carl Jung parallel the precepts of the Urantia Book?

Where did psychology come from?

The word psychology is derived from the ancient Greek "psyche" meaning soul (not brains or ego) and "logos” meaning story of or knowledge about. Psychology is thus the logic of the soul. The first Greek thinkers, who are conveniently called "philosophers," were more interested in cosmogony and cosmology than in the study of man. For them, "Logos is an object of intellectual apprehension which a soul in the right condition can grasp. There are two fundamental ideas involved here: first, the soul is now treated as the recipient of sense-impressions. Second, it is able, by interpreting these, to grasp a principle which is not strictly empirical. In this sense, the soul possesses depths which cannot always be grasped, and along with being immortal, excellence of character went along with intellectual understanding. In light of these conceptions is it any wonder that Socrates (470-399 B.C.) would say, "The life which is unexamined is not worth living.

As early as the sixth century B.C., the ancient Greeks showed the necessity for a rational explanation of man and of the world. Moreover, the "sophists" were the first to unveil what is today called "human subjectivity," by bringing to light a problem inherent in every human being. They asserted that any person with feelings and desires who is capable of asking himself questions about himself and about the world, that the very nature of that individual's existence will necessarily condition and at the same time influence those questions and answers. Their great opponent, Socrates, was to provide moral significance for this interrogation of man by himself. Socrates' dialectical irony inspired by the inscription on the Delphic temple -- "know thyself" -- brought to introspective analysis a method that lent itself to generalization. This method actually laid the foundation for introspective psychology which was to undergo, in future centuries, countless variations, all of them inscribed on the royal road opened up by the Athenian philosopher.

The term psychology, invented only in the sixteenth century by an obscure Marburg professor, Goclenius, was rarely used until the eighteenth century. It was in 1879 that William Wundt established, in Leipzig, the world's first psychology laboratory. Scientific psychologists, however, became uncomfortable among their fellow scientists with the thought that they were involved in "studying the soul." The word "soul" was generally rejected because of the metaphysical and religious overtones it aroused, so many of them began to refer to their field as the "study of the mind." Neurology and biochemistry, however, continue to question whether man has any such thing as a "mind" separate from the material brain, so to maintain its standing in the scientific community, psychology is beginning to question whether it should even employ the term "mind" in its theorizing. Thus it might accurately be summarized that psychology... first lost its soul… and now stands in danger of losing its mind, all of which is only indicative of the attempt to scrutinize human behavior from the most scientifically pure and mathematical viewpoint. If that isn't humorous enough, Dr. Karl Menninger defined the neurotic as the person who builds castles in the air and the psychotic as the person who moves into them and takes up residence, while the psychiatrist collects the rent for both.

But I digress. Allow me to get back to the original Greek story of Psyche and how that well served as a bridge to Carl Jung.

The myth of Psyche tells of a beautiful princess, greatly admired from afar, but whom no suitor would embrace or marry. The king, her father, consulted Apollo who told him that Psyche must set herself alone, dressed in mourning, on the summit of a high mountain, from whence a winged serpent would carry her off as his bride. The sorrowing family obeyed and Psyche waited all night in cold and terror, but found herself by morning wafted to a beautiful palace. She was its queen and every night an unseen husband came to make gentle love to her. He asked only that, as a sign of trust, she was never to look at him. But her sisters persuaded her that her husband must be the serpent monster and one night when her husband fell asleep she shone her lamp upon him. There she saw Eros (or Cupid), a man of surpassing beauty, but the lamp awakened him and he fled. In desperation she appealed to his mother, Aphrodite (or Venus), but she was jealous of the girl's beauty and demanded that she first perform several tasks so arduous and dangerous as to make her survival nigh impossible. But Psyche prevailed. Aphrodite then told her that her efforts had left her so ugly that only by using the beauty-charm she offered could she retain the affections of Eros. In fact, the charm contained a potion that put Psyche into a perpetual sleep. But Eros flew through the bars of her castle keep and awoke her with the prick of his arrow. He then went to Zeus and begged him to make Psyche and their marriage immortal, and to this day Love and Soul have never been separated.

What might this myth mean? Half a dozen interpretations occur to one almost at once. That loving involves making oneself vulnerable, that unity grows out of prior separation, that anxieties about serpents and arrows will assail young virgins (what might Freud have made of this myth!), that the soul must make a journey into night and prays for some presence in the dark, that the skeptical light of objectivity can kill the relationship between the knower and the known, that feeling and touch are senses equal to sight, that Cupid and Psyche remain child-like till joined, that soul or psyche is a form of apprehending that can turn monsters into lovers, and so on.

The Greeks would not, I think, have appreciated our insistence that this story has one meaning or message. It has all the above meanings and many more besides. It means one thing to a bride, another to a young initiate to adulthood, another to someone recently bereaved, and yet another to a person approaching death. It is less an answer than a question. It is there to educe, literally "to lead out," from us meaning after meaning till the end of time. Thus the strength of myth lies not in doctrine but in its perceptual re-creation. Myth is "that haunting awareness of transcendental forces peering through the cracks of the visible universe." As stated by Clement of Alexandria (150-220): "I will give ye understanding of the mysteries of the logos by means of images with which you are familiar."

This concept of psyche gave the Greeks their infinite love and delight in nature and an extraordinary courage in exploring it. Into every nook and cranny of the world the spirits of gods or heroes had already ventured. Men crossed the seas in the path of Odysseus, entered labyrinths of mind or nature wherein Theseus had already slain the Minotaur. Hercules had cleared the earth of monsters as Greek civilization eclipsed the monster gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia with their supremacy of the inhuman. Miguel de Unamuno might have been commending Greek humanism when he wrote: "In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. The union of Psyche and Eros is an epistemology of the heart. Additionally, the concept of soul was for Greeks an unbreakable relationship between men, gods and nature which even encompassed death. The Greek word "chaos" means literally "gap," a breaching of the imagined perspective that joins up all things to human scale.

In closing, for the Greeks the one was derived from the many, be it the judgment of Athena, or the one personality of a human being. Polytheism and the polycentric human crowded with god-derived endowments are parts of the same pattern. If there are so many gods, or many potential personalities within the human capacity, then multiple images have the effect of broadening, qualifying, liberating, and redeeming our complexes and compulsions by offering them fuller personalities. This is a psychology that acknowledges diversity, a polycentric universe of mind that is always seeking the patterns which connect. And who looking back over twenty-three centuries could deny Psyche her immortality? Has she not penetrated dark ages to find her lover beyond? What can you say of the imaginative power of the world that reaches across centuries, continents, languages and religions to revitalize the human experience and its various expressions.

Who is Jung and why is he saying all those wonderful things?

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist who lived from 1875 to 1961 and has often been described as a mere disciple of Freud. In fact, he had pioneered word association tests, received an honorary degree from Clark University and earned himself an international reputation before he met Freud in 1907. Their intellectual relationship was intense, although short-lived. In 1912 Jung published his major dissent from Freud's position, just five years after their first meeting. Nonetheless, Jung borrowed from Freud the conception of conscious and unconscious spheres, of a mind mediated by a defended ego, a source of psychic energy called the libido, and a mission to reclaim territory from the unconscious. However, while Freud's model tended to be mechanistic, analytic and reductive to basic causes, Jung's was more organic, expansive, and unfolding to purposeful ends. The son of a clergyman, Jung never subscribed to the theory of his time, that science and religion were incompatible.

Another major area of distinction between the two men lay in their fundamental views of religion. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), whose pioneering work in psychology and psychoanalysis has had such profound influence on modern thought, sought to explain the origin of religion or its primordial form in terms of deep-seated psychological impulses, particularly in the human male. To him religion was essentially “an infantile obsessional neurosis” centered mainly on the primal father-figure. In his Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud propounded his thesis that "the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex. He imagined a primordial state of human society composed of a "primitive horde," dominated by a father who kept all females for himself and repelled his growing sons. The latter banded together to slay their father, whom they both hated and admired. They ate their victim, to identify themselves with him and absorb his strength. After their patricide, remorse set in and a sense of guilt formed. Rituals of expiation were devised, centered on the totem as the "father substitute." Hence, according to Freud, the institutions of primitive society, namely, totemism, incest, taboos, exogamy, the ritual totem meal, originated from the Oedipus complex. Although Freud took his ethnological examples from Australian aboriginal society, his reconstruction of this primeval drama had the sanction of no archaeological or anthropological evidence; however, its novel interpretation of the sex-instinct as the source of religion caused much excitement and gave it a publicity which it did not deserve on scientific grounds.

Jung was, however, more concerned with the forms in which religion has expressed itself than with its origin. For him those forms expressed "the living process of the unconscious in the form of the drama of repentance, sacrifice, and redemption." He concentrated on the interpretation of myths as expressions of the collective unconscious, discerning therein certain "archetypes" or primordial images that exercise a formative influence upon human thought and behavior. For him, "The religious myth is one of man's greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe." (Symbols of Transformation (1956), p. 231). These psychological interpretations of the origin of religion, and its fundamental nature, placed the source of religion below the level of the conscious self and reasoning.

Jung's thinking has colored the world of modern psychology more than many of those with casual knowledge realize. Such familiar terms, for instance, as "extrovert," introvert," and "archetype" are all Jungian concepts - borrowed and sometimes misused by others. But his overwhelming contribution to psychological understanding is his concept of the unconscious --not (like the "subconscious" of Freud) merely a sort of glory-hole of repressed desires, but a world that is just as much a vital and real part of the life of an individual as the conscious thinking world of the ego, and infinitely wider and richer. By collective unconscious Jung meant "the inherited possibility of psychical functioning – namely - the brain structure." This shared human heritage was quite unlike the dark chaos of impulse which Freud had assumed. Jung's unconscious has a primordial structure and coherence, like an Egyptian burial chamber of priceless antiquities which are lustrously revealed by the light of consciousness probing the darkness of this tomb. Page 566:#4 of The URANTIA Book states: "The majority of impoverished souls are truly rich, but they refuse to believe it." Each of us must then become our own archaeologist by exploring and discovering not only our shared treasures, but those that are unique to our own particular chamber of self.

For Jung, this technique is accomplished through the process of individuation: a process by which the conscious and the unconscious within an individual learn to know, respect, and accommodate one another. This, in a nutshell, is the essence of Jung's philosophy of life: man becomes whole, integrated, calm, fertile, and happy when (and only when) the process of individuation is complete, when the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and to complement one another. Strictly speaking, however, this process of individuation is real only if the individual is aware of it and consciously makes a living connection with it. Page 557:#27 of The URANTIA Book states: "Progress demands development of individuality..."

Along with this process, Jung felt that a world dominated by science and materialism could only find salvation by returning to the wisdom of this inner world. Religion can foster this return and serve as a bridge to intra-psychic life only if, according to Jung, historically fixed thought-forms are translated into experientially understood forms or patterns. Jung demonstrated that the religious function resides in the psyche and is an integral part of human psychology. That means that the ego, in order to be healthy, needs to have a living connection to a transpersonal center. There are two etymologies to the word "religion." One emphasizes the meaning of "linking back" the idea that the religious function links the ego to its origin, to its background, to the larger entity from which it came. The other etymology, which Jung preferred, is the meaning of giving careful consideration to the background of one's life. It is the opposite of the root of the word "neglect."

The point is that the human psyche has a religious function in both senses: There is a need to link back and a need to give careful consideration to the source of one's being. The religious process, then, is one in which the ego experiences a living, organic connection to a larger whole.

Nonetheless, as traditional religion declined in influence, depth psychology developed -- as if humankind could not suffer the loss of a living connection to the inner world. Related to and underlying all of it, was the idea of the "death of God" and the metaphysical void it created. Dr. Jung came to realize that this strange and mysterious phenomenon of the death of God is a psychic fact of our time. In 1937 he wrote:

"I know and here I am expressing what countless other people know -- that the present time is the time of God's disappearance and death."

For years he had observed the Christian God-image fading in his patients' dreams -- that is, in the unconscious of modern men. The loss of that image is the loss of the supreme factor that gives life a meaning. Jung's healing message to those who have lost their sense of purpose and forgotten is that…

… life's meaning comes only through self-transcendence -- that is, when a person's life is sacrificially offered up to an idea greater than themselves.

This idea is illustrated on page 1229 of The URANTIA Book: "The material self, the ego-entity of human identity, is dependent during the physical life on the continuing function of the material life vehicle, on the continued existence of unbalanced equilibrium of energies and intellect which, on Urantia, has been given the name life. But selfhood of survival value, selfhood that can transcend the experience of death, is only evolved by establishing a potential transfer of the seat of the identity of the evolving personality from the transient life vehicle -- the material body - to the more enduring and immortal nature of the morontia soul and on beyond to those levels whereon the soul becomes infused with, and eventually attains the status of, spirit reality. This actual transfer from material association to morontia identification is affected by the sincerity, persistence, and steadfastness of the God-seeking decisions of the human creature." From Jung's point of view, God seeks to become embodied in our own experiences. When we know our own depths, then we know God. For this reason modern individuals should take to their own process of individuation with the utmost moral seriousness, for when they are alienated from themselves, they are alienated from God. For Jung, the human spiritual birthright is imprinted in the depths of each human soul -- the human race finds its unity in the depths of the psyche -- in the soul's encounter with the human face of the god within. Our response to this experience can help us to acquire the strength to swim against the stream of collective prejudice by taking our own soul seriously into account.

Another key aspect of Jung's thinking is the concept of shadow. But to understand shadow we must first understand SELF. The self can be defined as an inner guiding factor that is different from the conscious personality. Jung described it as the totality of the whole psyche, in order to distinguish it from the "ego," which constitutes only a small part of the total psyche. Jung advises that we should give in to this almost imperceptible, yet powerfully dominating impulse -- an impulse that comes from the urge toward unique, creative self-realization. And this is a process in which one must repeatedly seek out and find something that is not yet known to anyone. Thus it seems as if the initial encounter with the self casts a dark shadow ahead of time, or as if the "inner friend" comes at first like a trapper to catch the helplessly struggling ego in his net. As the ego has its persona in front (the face it shows the world), it has its shadow behind (the face it does not yet know).

This shadow is the split-off part of the ego, which the ego has repressed or rejected, the dark brother. Their examples abound in literature: Cain and Abel, Dante and Virgil, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Their characteristics become counterpoints, the monster being as full of pathos and savagery as Dr. Frankenstein is cerebral and civilized. To confront your shadow is to encounter your own unrealized potential, the missing arcs of the circle, the functions never developed, which grow dark by their exclusion. The shadow, therefore, personifies both the evil of isolation and the hope of reconciliation, while the psyche (self) should represent their cognitive embrace and harmonious unification. Just how far these inborn possibilities develop depends upon whether or not the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the self. If, for example, I have an artistic talent of which my ego is not conscious, nothing will happen to it. The gift may as well be nonexistent. Only if my ego notices it can I bring it into reality. The inborn but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same thing as a wholeness that is fully realized and lived.

Thus, for Jung, the only adventure that is still worthwhile for modern man lies in the inner realm of the unconscious psyche. The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own. In the midst of ordinary outer life, one is suddenly caught up in an exciting inner adventure; and because it is unique for each individual, it cannot be copied or stolen. The realization of this uniqueness in the individual person is the goal of the process of individuation. Only the individuated person can relate effectively to another. In the fullness of maturation there can rise the SELF, which is both a nuclear element integrating the psyche and the totality of that psyche. It reconciles all the various faces of the mind and represents the self-realization that the kingdom of God is within you.

How does all of this relate to The URANTIA Book?

The Urantia Book itself, as well as the individuals assembled here tonight for this study group, are prime examples of the very principles I have been outlining. We are here in the way that all spiritually attuned and similarly oriented people find their way to one another, to create a group that cuts across all the usual social and organizational affiliations of people. Such a group is not in conflict with others; it is merely different and independent. This consciously realized process of individuation thus changes a person's relationships. "After such spiritual attainment, whether secured by gradual growth or specific crisis, there occurs a new orientation of personality as well as the development of a new standard of values" (p. 1096). The familiar bonds such as kinship or common interests are replaced by a different type of unity -- a bond through the Self. Those activities and obligations that belong exclusively to the outer world can unduly harm the inner activities of the unconscious. Through these unconscious ties those who belong together come together. That is one reason why attempts to influence people by advertisements and political propaganda are destructive, even when inspired by idealistic motives. If a single individual devotes himself to individuation, he frequently has a positive contagious effect on the people around him. It is as if a spark leaps from one to another. And this usually occurs when one has no intention of influencing others and when one uses no words.

On page 141 of The URANTIA Book, it states that: "Spirit is the basic personal reality in the universe, and personality is basic to all progressing experience with spiritual reality.... Consciousness of divinity is a progressive spiritual experience. The brighter the shining of the spiritualized personality (the Father in the universe, the fragment of potential spirit personality in the individual creature), the greater the shadow cast by the intervening mind upon its material investment - and so your Greek figure of speech -- the material as the shadow of the more real spirit substance -- does have a philosophic significance." (What would Jung have thought of this use of shadow?) On page 1096 we find: "Spirituality becomes at once the indicator of one's nearness to God and the measure of one's usefulness to fellow beings. Spirituality enhances the ability to discover beauty in things, recognize truth in meanings, and discover goodness in values… the achievement of finality of spirituality is equivalent to the attainment of the maximum of reality, the maximum of godlikeness. The goal of human self-realization should be spiritual, not material. The only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual, and eternal. The supreme value of human life consists in growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic interrelatedness of both of these experiences. And such an experience is the equivalent of God-consciousness" (p. 1097).

Without benefit of the Urantia Book, Jung was working toward and achieving these same realizations and goals. To Jung, Christ is "our cultural hero, who, regardless of his historical existence, embodies the myth of the divine primordial man, the mystic "Adam." As such, his life provides a pattern for the process by which a human being comes to wholeness through fidelity to the truth that is heard within. This inner truth is synonymous with the voice of God echoing in the depths of the soul.

Jung's point is that the image of the incarnation of deity in a human being, which was symbolically manifested in Christ, is now to be empirically realized in those individuals who are able to go through the process of individuation. He considered the individuation process to be equivalent to the symbolic imagery of the incarnation of God in the human being. What that means psychologically is that the ego, in the process of establishing a conscious, living relationship with the Self, become the ground, so to speak, for the incarnation of deity. As Jung phrased it, the ego is the stable in which the Christ child is born.

This symbolism has now become available for empirical, psychological understanding and integration. It no longer has to be reified and worshipped as a religious image. In such projected form, it is not recognized and acknowledged as a psychic reality, as an aspect of psychological experience. This is what Jung achieved in his own time: the incarnation of deity. The way he modestly puts it, there is now the opportunity for many to do likewise: to realize their role in the evolution of the God-image. (What would Jung have thought of how we actually play an active role in shaping God the supreme?)

Jung also knew that the process of individuation excludes any parrot-like imitation of others. Time and again in all countries people have tried to copy in "outer" or ritualistic behavior the original religious experience of their great religious teachers -- Christ or Buddha or some other master --and have therefore become "petrified." To follow in the steps of a great spiritual leader does not mean that one should copy and act out the pattern of the individuation process made by his life. It means that we should try with a sincerity and devotion equal to his to live our own lives. An authentic imitation of Christ means "picking up one's own cross and living one's own life in this world, taking seriously the world's values and struggling to reconcile them with the inner values." The spirit that animated Christ also resides in each of us. Like the collective Israel and the individual Christ, we too are the beloved of God, divinely chosen and made heirs to His kingdom. As the eternal word took flesh in Christ, divinity must now be embodied by each person. God is now to be carried experientially by the individual. (Does thought-adjuster mean anything here?) This is what is meant by the continuing incarnation.

The concept of "continuing incarnation" means that we, like Christ, are called to participate in God's enfleshment by undergoing our own individuation process with as much consciousness as possible. They will learn the meaning of what they are experiencing; the suffering will become bearable because they will realize that there is a purpose in it. That purpose is the transformation of God, the emergence of a new god-image, and the possibility of a genuine unification of both the individual and the world.

Jesus addresses this principle on page 1438 when he states:

"...Your potential of real achievement is the spirit which lives within you...and when you become so readjusted to life within yourself, you become likewise readjusted to the universe; you have been born again -- born of the spirit -- and henceforth will your whole life become one of victorious accomplishment."

On page 1766 Jesus goes on to say:

"The world is filled with hungry souls who famish in the very presence of the bread of life; men die searching for the very God who lives within them. Men seek for the treasures of the kingdom with yearning hearts and weary feet when they are all within the immediate grasp.”

While on page 2093 we read:

"True religion unifies the personality for effective adjustment to all mortal requirements."

We also read on page 1135 that: "The study of another's religion is psychology." In this sense, Jung becomes the psychologist of our time. The great service that he performed by his discovery of the collective unconscious, the archetypes, and the SELF is that he has empirically discovered and made known to us the psychological source that underlies all the world's religions. He thereby verified and redeemed for modern man the reality and validity of religious processes as they are expressed in all religions.

If the glory of creation is in its diversity, then I wish all of you much success in your efforts to combine your unique differences -- to create new meanings of truth, beauty, and goodness with enthusiasm (from the Greek, “en” and "theos" meaning God within).

References Search: Psychology

Taken from The URANTIA Book

Page-69 Line-3 Para-l

Religious experience, being essentially spiritual, can never be fully understood by the material mind; hence the function of theology, the psychology of religion. The essential doctrine of the human realization of God creates a paradox in finite comprehension. It is well-nigh impossible for human logic and finite reason to harmonize the concept of divine immanence, God within and a part of every individual, with the idea of God's transcendence, the divine domination of the universe of universes. These two essential concepts of Deity must be unified in the faith-grasp of the concept of the transcendence of a personal God and in the realization of the indwelling presence of a fragment of that God in order to justify intelligent worship and validate the hope of personality survival. The difficulties and paradoxes of religion are inherent in the fact that the realities of religion are utterly beyond the mortal capacity for intellectual comprehension.

Page-1090 Line-21 Para-4

Man's greatest spiritual jeopardy consists in partial progress, the predicament of unfinished growth: forsaking the evolutionary religions of fear without immediately grasping the revelatory religion of love. Modern science, particularly psychology, has weakened only those religions which are so largely dependent upon fear, superstition, and emotion.

Page-1105 Line-9 Para-l

Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.

Page-1107 Line-37 Para-7

Psychology may indeed attempt to study the phenomena of religious reactions to the social environment, but never can it hope to penetrate to the real and inner motives and workings of religion. Only theology, the province of faith and the technique of revelation, can afford any sort of intelligent account of the nature and content of religious experience.

Page-1119 Line-46 Para-9

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.

Page-1123 Line-37 Para-6

Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychology. Spiritual experience is the real soul of man's cosmos.

Page-1125 Line-22 Para-3

To science God is a possibility, to psychology a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an actuality of religious experience. Reason demands that a philosophy which cannot find the God of probability should be very respectful of that religious faith which can and does find the God of certitude. Neither should science discount religious experience on grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the assumption that man's intellectual and philosophic endowments emerged from increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, finally taking origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of all thinking and feeling.

Page-1131 Line-22 Para-4

The psychology of a child is naturally positive, not negative. So many mortals are negative because they were so trained. When it is said that the child is positive, reference is made to his moral impulses, those powers of mind whose emergence signals the arrival of the Thought Adjuster.

Page-1135 Line-21 Para-4

Theology is the study of the actions and reactions of the human spirit; it can never become a science since it must always be combined more or less with psychology in its personal expression and with philosophy in its systematic portrayal. Theology is always the study of your religion; the study of another’s religion is psychology

Page-1140 Line-12 Para-3

A good and noble man may be consummately in love with his wife but utterly unable to pass a satisfactory written examination on the psychology of marital love. Another man, having little or no love for his spouse, might pass such an examination most acceptably. The imperfection of the lover's insight into the true nature of the beloved does not in the least invalidate either the reality or sincerity of his love.

Page-2095 Line-39 Para-7

The idealization and attempted service of truth, beauty, and goodness is not a substitute for genuine religious experience - spiritual reality. Psychology and idealism are not the equivalent of religious reality. The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods - gods in man's image - but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin. The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling spirit. Many of the religious systems of man come from the formulations of the human intellect, but the God-consciousness is not necessarily a part of these grotesque systems of religious slavery.