Here we begin to participate in “the faith of Jesus” as described in Paper 196.  This is also the level of the first psychic circle.

Stage 6 Personal Values

In Stage 6 the center of value is the evolving Supreme Being.  All moral values are calculated relative to this central reality and an attempt is made to understand the will of God as a critical determiner of value choices.  The self and all others are regarded as children of God.

Stage 6 Social Values

This stage sees the emergence of universal ethical principles.  The boundaries of social consciousness are expanded to include personal identification with an evolving universe of personality relationships

Not only does Stage 6 understand its relationship to the Supreme, the Stage 6 individual’s life is dominated by motives deriving from this insight.  Stage 6 understands the nature of one’s participation in an inclusive commonwealth of being.  While Stage 5 acts out of loyalty to the present order, to its institutions, groups, and compromise procedures, Stage 6 involves becoming an activist incarnation of the imperatives of the great commandment which Jesus gave us -- that we love one another as he loved us. 

The locus of authority is centered on personal judgment informed by the experiences and truths of previous stages, purified of egoistic striving, and linked by disciplined intuition to the principle of being and to the purposes of a transcendent power.

The world is understood as a living part of a universal spiritual creation of a divinely integrated intelligence. 

Stage 6 Supportive Stories

Personal and social identity at Stage 6 is experienced as relationship to the Supreme.  It transcends forms of social identity projected from roles in social or metaphysical stories which supported faith in earlier stages.  Stories may be used to symbolize various truths but the individual is likely to draw upon a larger pool of stories instead of relying on a single story.

In earlier stages our stories provided a means for imagining and projecting identity within the social mileu.  Stage 6 identity becomes a repercussion of our fuller participation in the work of the Supreme.  It is no longer something we project and try to sustain -- consciously or unconsciously.  Someone like Mother Thresea might be a good example of a person whose social identity was a repercussion of her service to the Supreme rather than an artifact created by her psychological processes and projected into her social environment.

Stage 6 Faith Experience

Stage 6 faith is faith in God and in God’s purposes; the dedication of our will to the doing of the will of God to the best of our understanding.  

In stage 6, beliefs about God become less important than our personal experience of God as active and present in our life and in the world.

Stage 6 Faith Challenges

The tasks of this stage are:

1. Steadfast and loyal devotion to doing the will of God, as it is best understood.
2. Living a life of service -- to both friends and enemies.
3. Non-resistance to evil
4. Living out, through faith, the highest interpretation of the Golden Rule -- learning to love one another as Jesus loved us.

Stage 6 is exceedingly rare.  The persons best described by it have become incarnators and actualizers of the spirit of an inclusive and fulfilled human community.  They are powerful in the sense that they create zones of liberation from the social, political, economic and ideological shackles we place and tolerate on human life.  Through their decisions and actions they help humanity to experientially know the meaning of living in the presence of God. 

1095:6  100:2.2 "Spiritual growth is first an awakening to needs, next a discernment of meanings, and then a discovery of values. The evidence of true spiritual development consists in the exhibition of a human personality motivated by love, activated by unselfish ministry, and dominated by the wholehearted worship of the perfection ideals of divinity. And this entire experience constitutes the reality of religion as contrasted with mere theological beliefs."

Beyond paradox and polarities, persons in this stage are grounded in a oneness with the Supreme.  Their visions and commitments free them for a passionate yet detached spending of the self in love, devoted to overcoming division, oppression, and violence.

It is important to appreciate that we are not engaged in the faith adventure alone.  God is seeking to find us and to commune with us.

1733:6  155:6.18 "You are my apostles, and to you religion shall not become a theologic shelter to which you may flee in fear of facing the rugged realities of spiritual progress and idealistic adventure; but rather shall your religion become the fact of real experience which testifies that God has found you, idealized, ennobled, and spiritualized you, and that you have enlisted in the eternal adventure of finding the God who has thus found and sonshipped you."