The Language of Body, Mind, Spirit and Soul – The Eighth Contactual Sub-Tone
What is the eighth contactual sub-tone? It is written, as follows:
Paper 48: The Morontia Life – 7: Morontia Mota
48:7.10 8. Effort does not always produce joy, but there is no happiness without intelligent effort.
A child, upon birth, progresses from a purely physical, instinctual, and intuitive level of relating to material reality, through the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.
If he or she is to grow a soul, however, the individual must progress into the mind development level of understanding.
And if you have been reading and studying these posts, the sub-tone which stimulates the human ascension toward the birth and continued growth of the mortal and morontial soul, (the midpoint level of reality halfway between the human and the divine), involves highly personal and discreet choices. What does this mean?
Two Paths, Two Choices – Only One of Which is the Great Choice, Which Leads to Joy and Happiness
It means that the mortal soul is the achievement of the human will-decision to become unified with the indwelling paradise spirit-fragment of the Paradise Father. And you cannot short-circuit the time required to experience those difficult situations in your life, wherein we are ever faced with two distinct choices.
The First Path
One of those choices is to follow the human-animal path of least resistance, which avoids the making of moral decisions. On this path, the indolent human-animal brain-spirit-mind matrix, rarely if ever, asks any questions of life, let alone, working at life. He or she is content to follow the beliefs and ways of reacting to any life challenge, as they have been taught, and without question.
The individual very early learns that to ask questions is to go against the tide and the rule of both written and unwritten, as well as verbal and traditional laws. And it is not only uncomfortable and unpleasant to disagree, such an attempt at self-assertion and individual expression, is often dangerous, especially when we are still children, and are told what we ‘must believe.’
As a boy, I grew up with an often tyrannical father, who was both iron-willed and iron-fisted, literally, as well as figuratively. The infamous false face my dad projected to his children, his spouses, and to the world was “Do as I say–not as I do. And don’t even think to question what I tell you, or you will end up in jail before you are twenty years of age.” And it was confronting this false face, wherein I was deciding to agree or disagree.
The more I agreed with this false face, the more I felt myself becoming just like him. Privately, I was in agony, leading to deep conflict, and eventually to a broken self, upon reaching my mid-twenties. I would not succeed in throwing off my own shackles of mental laziness, which I learned from my dad until I reached thirty years of age.
Giving myself a ‘get out of prison’ card would conceptually seem like the easiest thing in the world to do. Here! Here is your ‘get out of jail card. Take it! Go! You’re free! Even when the cell door is open, we more often than not, refuse to put one step forward beyond the entryway. It is easier to again close the cell door, and throw away the key.
And doesn’t it feel far better to agree than disagree? The mindless and autonomic agreement is a warm and secure sensation. It often heaps praise upon us, from others, even if it is false praise when we respond with what we are told to believe, and with which we parrot back to anyone, who has what we believe, is authority and control over us.
For many, indolence is an iron yoke chained to the neck with no key to open the lock. This is the work a day, couch potato nights, go to church on Sunday, and impotently vote for the political candidate on the right or the left. It is blind allegiance to the governmental and private corporate power structure, never questioning the economic enslavement that is forced upon us.
For a few others, this path of mental laziness is ‘riding upon the wings of agreement, wherein lies upon lies, self-deceit, and deceiving others, in order to rise to the highest level of the false sense of freedom, as the fanning of the flames of greed, lust for power, and the godless state of the power to economically, mentally and spiritual enslave the whole of the human races,’ is acquired.
The first path of human-animal indolence requires little effort if any at all. The ready-made belief systems, the fossilized records of the religious men and women of past ages, the materialistic and mathematical theories of an empirical and hierarchical science, politics, including every other conceivable construct of the mind, provides a ready-made scaffolding to build a wall of resistance to change, and behind which the human-animal brain-mind matrix and personality can perpetually hide behind.
And the path of human-animal indolence never requires the individual to ask penetrating questions, which would lead to moral decision-making and the greater experience of embracing deeper and higher levels of truth-experience (living values), regardless of the two extreme manifestations, and any life-path, in-between.
The Second Path
The second is that of entering the universe family of the Paradise Father (the kingdom of heaven), as would a child, who is without deceit, sincere, truthful, happy, and joyful.
From Paper 196: The Faith of Jesus
196:0.11 In the earthly life of Jesus, religion was a living experience, a direct and personal movement from spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The faith of Jesus bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith was not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways, it did resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child’s mind. Jesus trusted God much as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe—just such a trust as the child has in its parental environment. Jesus’ wholehearted faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembled the child’s trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He depended on the heavenly Father as a child leans upon its earthly parent, and his fervent faith never for one moment doubted the certainty of the heavenly Father’s overcare. He was not disturbed seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism. Unbelief did not inhibit the free and original expression of his life. He combined the stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew to such heights of trust that it was devoid of fear.
196:0.12 The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child’s trust. His faith was so absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in his religious experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the faith of the child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness. It is not strange that he once said, “Except you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom.” Notwithstanding that Jesus’ faith was childlike, it was in no sense childish.
196:0.13 Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. The Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme requirement, “Follow me.”
196:0.14 Jesus’ earthly life was devoted to one great purpose—doing the Father’s will, living the human life religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments, resolutely surmounted extraordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.
By choosing the more spiritual path, reactions and actions toward our fellow kind, the individual, unconsciously and later on, consciously rejects the path of least resistance, valiantly and courageously engaging life’s struggles, wherein often difficult and momentous moral struggles result in the choice to be a better person, first toward oneself, and subsequently, toward all others with whom he or she comes into contact with and interacts, regardless of how many times we initially fail to live up to the highest concepts of our higher ideals and more spiritual personality manifestation.
Much effort is required on this second path of moral decision-making, often greater than anything we can imagine at the moment. The second path requires courage, often greater courage than that required of a mountain climber to reach the peak. It often requires expending mental energy in asking question after question, such as “Who am I, really? Who is the true me? Why am I here? What are my purpose for coming into this material and mortal experience? Is there a God? Where is He to be found?”, even to the point of exhaustion, refusing to accept anything less than clear answers to each and every question.
In the decades past, I have often been accused of being a “devil’s advocate,” because I asked so many questions, whenever someone would tell me what they believe to be true or the truth. I learned early on that humankind wears a mask of self-deception. And it is often a mask that is so tightly stitched onto the true self, just underneath, with seemingly endless layers, in-between. You can ask question after question, peeling off layer after layer, never reaching that hole, where the real self is poking its head out and in, and is scared to death to step out into the spiritual light of day.
When taking this approach with others, it may often have come across as ‘aggressive.’ I could not reveal to the other person, or group, that I was not doing this, only as a mirror for the individual to reflect back to himself or herself. I was first doing this for me, out of a true and sincere desire to get at the truth, which more often than not, lies below the surface appearances.
Only one of these two paths will ever lead to joy and happiness, at a level we may ever-presently experience, moment by moment, and day by day, real joy and real happiness that is lasting and enduring. It is the road of initial great uncertainty, which increasingly leads to the profound certainty of living, as in the presence of the will of God.
It is this superconscious state–soul consciousness, wherein we live, move, and in which we have our being, commune with the heavenly Father twenty-four-seven, and foretaste the higher realities of spiritual dimensions, just beyond the material and physical.
The possibility of the attainment of this high estate of soul consciousness begins with the decision to make the effort, intelligent effort, in the grasp of intuitive faith in the Will of God, and in the deepening understanding that the quickest path to spiritual joy and happiness, progressing into the spiritual dimension of “sublime peace that passes all understanding,” is to live loyally as a tadpole.