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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
| "God is man's greatest and truest friend, not his dreadful judge. He is not a merciful God, for he has no mercy to give because God is never offended and has no wrath. Mercy might exist only between men on earth." |
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Father Robert Benson tells us why God created the afterlife: not for our judgment but for our particular and individual happiness
Trouble not your minds with the Church's vain and boastful threats of spiritual disaster because you fail to accept with credulity its foolish claims... [God] is man's greatest and truest friend, not his dreadful judge. He is not a merciful God, for he has no mercy to give. Mercy only exists as between men upon earth. He has no justice to give. That is only as between man and man. He has no pardon to give. For that, too, is only as between man and man. He has no great flaming, torturing hell in which to cast poor souls for small sins committed. That is a hideous invention of the Church.
He has formulated no petty rules and commandments, the breaking of which will inevitably bring down His wrath upon you. They are the inventions of Orthodoxy and its learned doctors. He has no wrath, ever. That is the invention of the same stupid churchmen. What, then, you will naturally ask, has God to give? This, my friends, has He to give: His eternal affection for you which is expressed in His divine will that you shall attain to the greatest happiness in the whole world. He would wish that you could be filled with that happiness during your earthly journey. But He knows that that is not always and in every case possible. So there exists a gigantic spirit world which possesses all the possibilities and provides all the opportunities of gaining supreme and lasting happiness.
That superb prospect is open to every single soul, without exception, who has been born upon earth. There is no man on earth who can alter that superlative, proud dispensation, either by canon law, by ecclesiastical edict, or by pontifical maledictions; nor by the invocation of a thousand creeds, by the opinions of all the doctors of the Church, past and present, nor by pulpit fulminations of whatever degree of vehemence... Remember always another sublime and eternal truth: that all the spirit realms are open to the whole race of humanity, and that faith or religious creeds can have no say in the matter... We, who have come back from these beautiful realms to tell you something of our life and our lands, are oft-times called emissaries of the devil. What the Churches would do without their great friend, the devil, it is hard to know...
- Editor's note: Father Benson is saying that, with Satan and the Church, "the Joker is wild."
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Edward C. Randall: "The justice that meets the naked soul, on the threshold of its spirit life, is terrible in its completeness." Editor’s note: This comment, made by a spirit-person on the other side, offers no threat to us, is no harbinger of punishment, but speaks only to the principle that we ourselves are responsible for changing ourselves, that there is no external savior to magically transmute sin into good character.
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Spirit Guides working as missionaries in the Dark Realms might be the greatest examples of forgiveness
'this great truth'
Missionary Spirit Guides in the Dark Realms speak of "this great truth": that, change and progression are ever possible; indeed, assured. We cannot, ultimately, defraud ourselves, try as we may, of the good things planned for us. Happiness is being stored up for us like an inheritance, safeguarded in a spendthrift trust, beyond the squandering reach of an immature beneficiary - yes, even for recalcitrant ones who presently spurn, and writhe, in the spheres of probationary suffering.
An ancient senior Guide, serving as missionary in the Dark Realms, with great beneficence of mind, addresses his younger helpers on the future of humankind:
“To what ultimate height of development we shall reach, I know not—none can know since there can be no limit to our knowledge or our progress. But I believe that, could we foresee the ultimate destiny of our own small planet, as we can, in part, judge of it from seeing the more advanced ones around us, we should learn to look upon even the longest earthly life [with its inherent suffering], and the longest saddest probation of these dark spheres, as but stepping stones on which man shall mount [so to speak] to the 'thrones of angels' at last.
the tiny seed of godhood
"What we can see - what we do know and may grasp - is the great and ever present truth that hope is truly eternal and progression is ever possible, even to the lowest and most degraded and sin-stained soul. It is this great truth we would have each of you to preach, both to mortal and immortal man, when you return [as missionary spirit-helpers] to the Earth-plane and to your work there; and, as you [yourselves] have been helped and strengthened and taught, so do you feel bound by obligations of gratitude and ties of Universal Brotherhood [and Sisterhood] to help others [receive the same].”
The missionary Guides work with the most hardened criminals of all history, those who perpetrated greatest suffering in the world. How do the Guides maintain an attitude of forgiveness toward the most evil?
The answer is, they do not see the evil but the godly potential within.
Each human being, no matter how degraded, secrets a tiny seed of godhood. Though, for some, the germination might manifest only after thousands of years of suffering, that seed will yet display all of God’s virtues.
This is a key point of understanding for us.
When someone injures us, we engender a mental position of forgiveness not by focusing on the atrocity but by visualizing their sacred potential, the tiny seed of godhood within.
READ MORE on the "forgiveness" page
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