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"As you ascend the universe scale of creature development, you will find increasing goodness and diminishing evil in perfect accordance with your capacity for goodness-experience and truth-discernment.
"Goodness is living, relative, always progressing, invariably a personal experience, and everlastingly correlated with the discernment of truth and beauty. Goodness is found in the recognition of the positive truth-values of the spiritual level, which must, in human experience, be contrasted with the negative counterpart--the shadows of potential evil….
"The possibility of evil is necessary to moral choosing, but not the actuality thereof."
To Nabon, the third member of this triad, Jesus said, "Truth cannot be defined with words, only by living. Truth is always more than knowledge. Knowledge pertains to things observed, but truth transcends such purely material levels in that it consorts with wisdom and embraces such imponderables as human experience, even spiritual and living realities. Knowledge originates in science; wisdom, in true philosophy; truth, in the religious experience of spiritual living. Knowledge deals with facts; wisdom, with relationships; truth, with reality values….
"Revealed truth, personally discovered truth, is the supreme delight of the human soul; it is the joint creation of the material mind and the indwelling spirit. The eternal salvation of this truth-discerning and beauty-loving soul is assured by that hunger and thirst for goodness which leads this mortal to develop a singleness of purpose to do the Father's will, to find God and to become like him. There is never conflict between true knowledge and truth."
[The beauty of these words automatically generates the thought, "Did any man ever write or speak thus." To which a reply might be, "Perhaps occasionally but never consistently." The revelatory truth in the Papers is self-validating.]
There follows a quite remarkable comment defining faith as our "sublime hope." What we hope to become sets the scale for our values: "Truth can never become man's possession without the exercise of faith. This is true because man's thoughts, wisdom, ethics, and ideals will never rise higher than his faith, his sublime hope. And all such true faith is predicated on profound reflection, sincere self-criticism, and uncompromising moral consciousness. Faith is the inspiration of the spiritized creative imagination.
"Faith acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark, the immortal germ, that lives within the mind of man, and which is the potential of eternal survival"
Our faith and our hopes are important both for adding purpose to our existence and for their spiritualization.
A little further on in this discourse we find a definition for spiritual evolution. "Spiritual evolution is an experience of the increasing and voluntary choice of goodness attended by an equal and progressive diminution of the possibility of evil. With the attainment of finality of choice for goodness and of completed capacity for truth appreciation, there comes into existence a perfection of beauty and holiness whose righteousness eternally inhibits the possibility of the emergence of even the concept of potential evil. Such a God-knowing soul casts no shadow of doubting evil when functioning on such a high spirit level of divine goodness…."
There is positive feedback from our choices and our decision making, fortifying and upgrading their spiritual value depending upon the content of goodness and unselfishness but doing the opposite if through selfishness we slip waywardly backwards toward the pole tainted by evil. Positive feedback actually feeds upon itself. It has the characteristic of the more you do it, the more there is of it and the faster you get there. But it cuts both ways.
And at the conclusion of the discourses there is a concise statement of the revelation promise given in these Papers, "The presence of the Paradise spirit in the mind of man constitutes the revelation promise and the faith pledge of an eternal existence of divine progression for every soul seeking to achieve identity with this immortal and indwelling spirit fragment of the Universal Father."
The fulfillment of the revelatory promise is dependent on both our conscious and our unconscious seeking for identity with the one who is simply "good."
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