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Is Advancement Mental or Emotional? Question: Does
advancement come through the heart (the emotions) or through the mind? Answer: True
advancement begins when we have learned how to quiet and control our emotions
and make them do our bidding. The Ego, being essentially Mind, uses
intellectual processes as its tools for advancement. Emotions usually
interfere with clear and rational thought and seldom really benefit us.
Although we can feel joy, happiness and love at times, we also feel
frustration, sorrow and hatred. We and all of Creation are products of God’s
love, and it is very delightful to think of His determination to provide mankind with everything possible for us to evolve
from nothingness to being His equal. But an emotional state of feeling great
love for God, even though it may be maintained constantly, will not bring an
Ego to God’s level, To become one with God an Ego must know everything there
is to know on each of the planes of existence; the means for gaining that
knowledge are intellectual, not emotional. Through observation of “cause and effect” one learns to control his environment. One must
analyze what he observes to discover true cause and effect relationships; and
this activity is mental, not emotional. Ultimate reality exists regardless of our
perceptions of the Universe. It is essential to our purpose of advancing
Egoically that we discover what true reality is—not as we would like it to
be, nor as we’ve been taught it is—but the way it
really exists in ultimate Truth. We have not arrived at that knowledge yet,
but our civilization is closer to it now than it was 1,000 years ago. For
instance, in the Dark Ages, men thought that evil spirits caused disease.
They were looking in the wrong places for ways to cure their ills. After the
microscope was invented, man discovered microbes and
found that he could control infectious disease by dealing with the microbe,
whereas the disease persisted when he continued his attempts to placate
devils. Popular fads in thinking have deterred our civilization in its
progress toward the understanding of ultimate reality. In this century a
great many Nazi youths thought it an undeniable fact of the Universe that
because they were Nordic they were supermen. People of different
nationalities were considered “untermensch”,
sub-human, and could be treated as animals. This was not truth. Like the paranoiac
who imagines everyone as his potential enemy, so the Nazi youths were dealing
in unrealities which they nevertheless had been
convinced of. Insofar as we fail to perceive ultimate reality and persist in
our beliefs in unrealities we are dealing with our
environment at some level of insanity. The Brotherhoods have worked
throughout the millennia to help preserve the knowledge man has gained in his
advances on the frontiers of ultimate reality. By preserving this body of
information, the Brotherhoods hold forth to us the
opportunity for greater understanding; but we may make use of It only by
applying our minds and intellects to the task. (05-1971) |
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