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The Indwelling Father-Spirit--what are its functions? (1203)
The devotion of the indwelling Spirit to the individual is touchingly sublime, divinely Father-like. Indirectly and unrecognized it is constantly communicating with its human subject.
The Paradise Father has apparently reserved this form of personal contact with his individual creatures as an exclusive Creator prerogative.
While passive regarding purely temporal welfare, the Father-Spirit is divinely active concerning all the affairs of our eternal future.
When indwelling human minds, the Spirit-within brings with it a model career, the ideal life, as determined and foreordained by that Spirit itself.
But our indwelling spirit forces never try to control our thinking, but rather to spiritualize it, to eternalize it.
As personal creatures, we have mind and will. The Spirit-within is prepersonal and has premind and prewill. If we so fully conform to the mind of the Spirit that we see eye to eye, then our minds become as one, and we receive the reinforcement of the divine mind.
The great goal of our human existence is to attune to the divinity of the indwelling Spirit. The great achievement of our mortal life is the attainment of a true and understanding consecration to the eternal aims of the divine spirit who waits and works within our mind. And our ideal life is one of loving service to our fellow travelers.
Co-operation with our Father-Spirit is not a particularly conscious process; but our motives and our decisions, our faithful determinations and our supreme desires, do constitute real and effective co-operation. We can consciously augment harmony by:
Choosing to respond to divine leading; sincerely basing the human life on the highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness, and then coordinating these qualities of divinity through wisdom, worship, faith, and love.
Loving God and desiring to be like him--genuine recognition of the divine fatherhood and loving worship of the heavenly Parent.
Loving our fellows and sincerely desiring to serve them--wholehearted recognition of the unity of mankind coupled with an intelligent and wise affection for each of our fellow mortals.
Joyful acceptance of cosmic citizenship--honest recognition of our progressive obligations to God and to all our fellow citizens. This is the birth of cosmic morality and the dawning realization of universal duty.
We should not confuse and confound the mission and influence of our indwelling God-Spirit with what is commonly called conscience. Conscience is a human and purely psychic reaction. While it is not to be despised, it is hardly the voice of God to the soul. Conscience rightly admonishes us to do right; but the Spirit-within endeavors to tell us what truly is right.
The motivation of faith makes experiential the full realization of our personal relationship with God, but action, completion of decisions, is essential. Faith transmutes potentials to actuals in the spiritual world, but potentials become actuals in the finite realms only by and through the realization of our choice-experience. Our choosing to do the will of God joins spiritual faith to material decisions, thus supplying a divine and spiritual fulcrum for the more effective functioning of our God-hunger. (1211)
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