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Goodness! A meditation for Friday's Children.

10. TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND GOODNESS

Throughout this glorious age the chief pursuit of the
ever-advancing mortals is the quest for a better understanding and
a fuller realization of the comprehensible elements of
Deity--truth, beauty, and goodness. This represents man's effort to
discern God in mind, matter, and spirit. And as the mortal pursues
this quest, he finds himself increasingly absorbed in the
experiential study of philosophy, cosmology, and divinity.

Philosophy you somewhat grasp, and divinity you comprehend in
worship, social service, and personal spiritual experience, but the
pursuit of beauty--cosmology--you all too often limit to the study
of man's crude artistic endeavors. Beauty, art, is largely a matter
of the unification of contrasts. Variety is essential to the
concept of beauty. The supreme beauty, the height of finite art, is
the drama of the unification of the vastness of the cosmic extremes
of Creator and creature. Man finding God and God finding man--the
creature becoming perfect as is the Creator--that is the supernal
achievement of the supremely beautiful, the attainment of the apex
of cosmic art.

Hence materialism, atheism, is the maximation of ugliness, the
climax of the finite antithesis of the beautiful. Highest beauty
consists in the panorama of the unification of the variations which
have been born of pre-existent harmonious reality.

The attainment of cosmologic levels of thought includes:

1. Curiosity. Hunger for harmony and thirst for beauty. Persistent
attempts to discover new levels of harmonious cosmic relationships.

2. Aesthetic appreciation. Love of the beautiful and ever-advancing
appreciation of the artistic touch of all creative manifestations
on all levels of reality.

3. Ethic sensitivity. Through the realization of truth the
appreciation of beauty leads to the sense of the eternal fitness of
those things which impinge upon the recognition of divine goodness
in Deity relations with all beings; and thus even cosmology leads
to the pursuit of divine reality values--to God-consciousness.

The worlds settled in light and life are so fully concerned with
the comprehension of truth, beauty, and goodness because these
quality values embrace the revelation of Deity to the realms of
time and space. The meanings of eternal


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truth make a combined appeal to the intellectual and spiritual
natures of mortal man. Universal beauty embraces the harmonious
relations and rhythms of the cosmic creation; this is more
distinctly the intellectual appeal and leads towards unified and
synchronous comprehension of the material universe. Divine goodness
represents the revelation of infinite values to the finite mind,
therein to be perceived and elevated to the very threshold of the
spiritual level of human comprehension.

Truth is the basis of science and philosophy, presenting the
intellectual foundation of religion. Beauty sponsors art, music,
and the meaningful rhythms of all human experience. Goodness
embraces the sense of ethics, morality, and religion--experiential
perfection-hunger.

The existence of beauty implies the presence of appreciative
creature mind just as certainly as the fact of progressive
evolution indicates the dominance of the Supreme Mind. Beauty is
the intellectual recognition of the harmonious time-space synthesis
of the far-flung diversification of phenomenal reality, all of
which stems from pre-existent and eternal oneness.

Goodness is the mental recognition of the relative values of the
diverse levels of divine perfection. The recognition of goodness
implies a mind of moral status, a personal mind with ability to
discriminate between good and evil. But the possession of goodness,
greatness, is the measure of real divinity attainment.

The recognition of true relations implies a mind competent to
discriminate between truth and error. The bestowal Spirit of Truth
which invests the human minds of Urantia is unerringly responsive
to truth--the living spirit relationship of all things and all
beings as they are co-ordinated in the eternal ascent Godward.

Every impulse of every electron, thought, or spirit is an acting
unit in the whole universe. Only sin is isolated and evil gravity
resisting on the mental and spiritual levels. The universe is a
whole; no thing or being exists or lives in isolation.
Self-realization is potentially evil if it is antisocial. It is
literally true: "No man lives by himself." Cosmic socialization
constitutes the highest form of personality unification. Said
Jesus: "He who would be greatest among you, let him become server
of all."

Even truth, beauty, and goodness--man's intellectual approach to
the universe of mind, matter, and spirit--must be combined into one
unified concept of a divine and supreme ideal. As mortal
personality unifies the human experience with matter, mind, and
spirit, so does this divine and supreme ideal become power-unified
in Supremacy and then personalized as a God of fatherly love.

All insight into the relations of the parts to any given whole
requires an understanding grasp of the relation of all parts to
that whole; and in the universe this means the relation of created
parts to the Creative Whole. Deity thus becomes the transcendental,
even the infinite, goal of universal and eternal attainment.

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