The most important truth of spiritual experience is that YOU CAN! You have been created to know God, to receive his love, and to love him in return. Your mind receives the ministry of the Adjutant Mind Spirits and the Holy Spirit; you are blessed by the Spirit of Truth; you have the Thought Adjuster. Dare to believe and receive! Your experience of love and worship will grow beautifully, on the divine schedule, every day you turn again in the direction where faith points.
Looking at the night sky on a clear night, we see some stars as more bright than others. The brightest ones are first-magnitude stars, as astronomers classify them. The next brightest are second-magnitude, and so on. The unaided human eye can see stars as faint as fifth magnitude.
There are levels of brightness, so to speak, in our spiritual experience, too. We go around, day by day, in an ordinary level of awareness, thinking of God from time to time, thinking a divine thought from time to time, but with no great focus or sincerity or insight or receptivity. Our ordinary stream of conscious life is fifth-magnitude experience of God. We believe in God, but there is no consciousness of any interaction between the divine indweller and our own mind.
As we turn to God in a deeper focus, in deep need, in great sincerity, we feel his presence more strongly. As we wait after making our prayer to let his answer (or some phase of it) come to consciousness, we may sense some enhancement of awareness of truth, beauty, and goodness. Our spontaneous sense is that such awareness is a gift of God. This is a fourth magnitude experience (to make rough estimates with this metaphor).
We realize that it is possible for inputs to consciousness to come in from outside, not only from the superconscious, but also from the subconscious. There is nothing wrong with the latter source; we need its energies, and we can enjoy its symbols. Since our ability to discern between sources is limited, we are encouraged not to speculate. Rather we responsibly discern the meanings and values in whatever presents itself. As a grateful and joyous child of God, given the adventure of progressing philosophically and religiously, we go forward.
There are higher magnitude experiences of great spiritual clarity. Some experiences come with great power. Regarding some experiences we cannot honestly doubt that they are divine gifts. Theoretically, it is possible for us to be wrong. We still need responsible discernment about the quality of the experience and about its implications for our decisions. What adjustments or transformations of our life shall we make? How discrete should we be in communicating our experience? For all the wisdom questions that arise, however, we should never doubt our growth in God-consciousness. Even an error in interpretation does not block us from receiving the Father’s love and loving him in return.
The experience of divine love can bless us at any moment. It need not need to be a high magnitude experience to be heartening, touching, encouraging. At the same time, divine love is an experience that culminates a process of growth. In several passages in The Urantia Book, we see love come at the end of a process.
The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness. Such a new and righteous vision of morality will attract all that is good in the mind of man and challenge that which is best in the human soul. Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love. (43.3)
In other words, devote yourself to truth, beauty, and goodness, and the realization of divine love will gradually dawn.
Here’s a remarkable passage about how you “can consciously augment Adjuster harmony by:
1. Choosing to respond to divine leading; sincerely basing the human life on the highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness, and then co-ordinating these qualities of divinity through wisdom, worship, faith, and love.
2. Loving God and desiring to be like him--genuine recognition of the divine fatherhood and loving worship of the heavenly Parent.
3. Loving man and sincerely desiring to serve him--wholehearted recognition of the brotherhood of man coupled with an intelligent and wise affection for each of your fellow mortals.
4. Joyful acceptance of cosmic citizenship--honest recognition of your progressive obligations to the Supreme Being, awareness of the interdependence of evolutionary man and evolving Deity. This is the birth of cosmic morality and the dawning realization of universal duty. (1206:4-8)
What I want to draw attention to here is not mainly the beautiful expressions of the “commands” of the love of God and the neighbor, but primarily the preparation for such love in point 1. Love culminates what is potentially a long and complex process.
Here’s another touching statement of love as a culmination:
Religion eventually achieves the profoundly simple realization of an all-powerful love, the love which sweeps irresistibly through the human soul when awakened to the conception of the limitless affection of the Universal Father for the sons of the universe. (986.3)
We don’t start out at the summit. To give that conception of the Father’s love a chance to awaken, the Divine Counselor—the counsel of God!—instructs us to stop and ponder:
How unreasonable that you should not worship God because the limitations of human nature and the handicaps of your material creation make it impossible for you to see him. Between you and God there is a tremendous distance (physical space) to be traversed. There likewise exists a great gulf of spiritual differential which must be bridged; but notwithstanding all that physically and spiritually separates you from the Paradise personal presence of God, stop and ponder the solemn fact that God lives within you; he has in his own way already bridged the gulf. He has sent of himself, his spirit, to live in you and to toil with you as you pursue your eternal universe career. (39.5)
To stop and ponder the gift of God’s indwelling presence gives us a chance to realize, each day, a bit more.
If we with faith accept this journey, however gradual it may be, our experience of divine love comes sooner.