10/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE

The doctrine of the “new birth” is founded on a universal principle. Beneath the distorted conception of conversion taught in the “old theology,” is a fact of experience that finds new emphasis in each successive epoch of the world’s unfoldment.

Before any human being can appreciate his right relation to the universe, it is necessary for him to utterly forsake the viewpoint he accepted on entering this sphere of finite thought, the earthly life, to cease relying on intellectual impressions as the basis of absolute knowledge.

Through the spiritual re-birth, one emerges from the darkness of that realm into the light of an absolute or axiomatic consciousness. Thus the Truth makes one free. “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God,” i. e., the realm of Spirit.

3.
REALIZATION OF IDEALS THROUGH RIGHT-THINKING.

Our subject contains three elementary ideas, Ideals, Right-Thinking, and Realization. Let us consider Ideals first. What is an ideal? The word Idea, from which the adjective and the noun Ideal are formed, is derived from the Greek ειδω, to see. An ideal is primarily, then, something that is seen.

We may define it as The Absolute seen through relative conditions. Those conditions are due to limitations in our thought. Ideas are like pictures on a screen. When we look through them at the light of the Absolute Principle, it transforms them into ideals. Ideals would be impossible without its illuminating power. Both the absolute and relative elements are necessary to their existence. Thought paints on the screen of time and space an outer world, through which this light shines.

“Forever at the loom of time I ply, And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by.”
We cannot know the Absolute fully or perfectly from relative planes of consciousness; and so, as we journey through the realm of transient, finite experiences, since our thought is perpetually changing, our ideals change correspondingly;

but they go ever before us like the “pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night,” indicating the direction of the absolute realm where thought is consummated by perfect realization.