On Growing in the Spirit

 Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Romans 10:4

   Your personal acknowledgement that the All-Originating Spirit of God lives within you, and that you have a personal relation to it, gives you a new basis of Affirmation. You are the starting point of a specifically-designed-for-you creative process that will lead you to your next level of personal growth and development.

   As enormous as this Thought is, you must remember that it is only a starting point. It transcends your previous range of ideas, and presents you with a new set of ideas at a higher level. But, just as when you graduated from high school as a senior, your next level of college put you back in freshman status, so also your growing beyond where you became a senior at one stage of your development, brings you back to the beginning of the next stage of development as a freshman.

   Because the Spirit is always the same, you may expect a repetition of the creative process within you, but at a higher level. That process will require you to engage in involution—actually becoming what you desire and staying in Unity with it regardless of what you are able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell. This is what Neville Goddard called living as if your wish were already fulfilled. At this point you should look for a repetition of the universal process from its new starting point in your mind. You should expect to see your Thoughts being externalized in concrete form.

   Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is set before you as the  external manifestation of the Divine Ideal. The more clearly you realize the nature of the creative process on the spiritual plane, the more your objections to and unbelief about the Gospel narrative about Jesus will fade away. If you deny the Gospel narrative about Jesus as an impossibility, then you deny the power of the Spirit in yourself.  You cannot succeed at affirming a principle and denying it at the same time. If you affirm the externalizing power of the Spirit in your own life—the countless times you have created something from nothing just by your mere Thought—then you cannot logically limit the Spirit’s action by saying that under highly specialized conditions it could not produce highly specialized effects.

   If the Spirit can create at all, then you cannot logically limit the extent or method of its action. Since the basis of your own expectation of individual expansion must be premised on the limitless creative power of the Spirit, to reject the Jesus of the Gospels as an impossibility is to cut away the ground from under your own feet. It is one thing for you to say, “I do not understand why the Spirit would work in that way”—that is merely an honest statement of your present stage of knowledge. Even if you go to the length of saying, “I am not convinced that it happened the way it is written,” that is a true statement of your intellectual difficulty.

   But certainly, those you profess to rely on the Spirit to produce external results cannot say that it does not possess that power, or possesses it only in a limited degree. That position is logically destructive. What you should do is suspend judgment and follow the light as far as you can see it. Sooner or later, it will become clearer to you. When you realize how completely the Law of Your Own Being receives its completeness—its fulfillment of culmination—in Jesus as far as you know that law, then you can conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law that you can only faintly surmise by intuition. You may have had an experience or two when just the fringe of the veil was lifted and you got a momentary glimpse of the powers and mysteries beyond your present conception. But even there, Law reigns supreme.

   Therefore, taking Jesus as your basis and starting point, you start with the Law already fulfilled, whether in those things familiar to you, or in those realms that are beyond your thought. You need have no fear of evil. Your new starting point with Jesus is the place you will quietly grow into the evolution which fulfills the Law of Your Own Being.