8/115 SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS By FRANK H. SPRAGUE
Every belief is destined at some time to be outgrown and cast aside. He who pins his faith to beliefs, ancient or modern, builds on an unstable foundation. The free man is absolved even from the desire for a permanent system of thought. Just now we need to be exceedingly careful lest, in our enthusiasm for a newly discovered ideal, we establish a dogma of healing.
The final word in this matter has not yet been spoken, in fact it never can be spoken in any matter with which the intellect has to deal. Every man believes what he believes because of his particular view-point. The free man recognizes the utter dependence of belief upon viewpoint. Instead of asserting that what appears to him in the form of intellectual conceptions is the Truth, he treats his views rather as working hypotheses.
To attempt to put truth into rigid forms, implies a misconception of its very nature. For convenience we may try to formulate it, but always with the realization that each result is merely tentative and a steppingstone to a higher one, in endless progression, as our experience enlarges. Creeds are but “milestones on the road to truth.”
The man whose inner world is based on definite beliefs is in much the same quandary as the ancients who fancied that the earth rested on the back of a huge elephant, which in turn stood on a tortoise. But what supported the tortoise? That seems to have rested on the credulity of the believer. An absolute first cause can never be arrived at by reasoning back from specific effects to their antecedent causes.
In order to obtain a truer inward view of the world, we must relinquish the view-point we have hitherto held. We shall then see that absolute truth is independent of all fixed beliefs and authority. Spirit is self-constituted, self-sufficient, self-sustaining, not mind-created or subject to the dominion of thought.
It is necessary repeatedly to tear away formulas and dogmas deposits of thought filtered through the intellect and crystallized around the spiritual nucleus of life. Open-mindedness is the key that unlocks the door of the intellect, and gives one access to the spiritual realm. He who bars this door with dogmas and creeds cannot know the essence of truth.