11/11/2005

TENETS AND DEFINITIONS

BASIC TENETS


My pursuit of spiritual truth is not about religion as much as it is about relationship.  It is not about intellectualizing God's commands, but about internalizing his truth within my heart as well as my head, an understanding so deep and intimate that it affects not only my thinking, but my behavior as well.  Susan Cosio, This I Believe, 2006


The building blocks of our thinking are shaped definition by definition into precept complementing precept resulting in walls of tenet after tenet. These walls tend to become malformed and weak through crooked attachments, fuzzy thinking, without occasional re-measurement and re-evaluation. This is my attempt at elucidating my building blocks of belief. Remember as you read; these are my tenets. You don’t have the same ones since you are you and I am me. However, something you read of my thinking might just help you in building your walls. For this reason, I am starting this study with a personal inventory of my basic tenets.



God is!—personal, eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent. Everything else is based on this one truth, God is!

God created! everything—natural laws, the universe, life, body, thinking, spirit—everything. Once a person really believes this, it changes everything.

The Bible is the Word of God. The Bible is not the words of God. However, the Word, Message, is offered through the words—translations and interpretations—by divine inspiration. We "learn" the Word from these words spiritually through inquestioning.

The Word of God cannot be and is not meant to be completely understood. God intended this ambiguity to help keep us studying, inquestioning. An individual’s insights are “learned” through the facilitation of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is God’s way of working through individual selves into humanity.

God works through progressive revelation generation after generation. Progressive revelation is God’s will revealed through an individual’s will in a way that changes the collective will of mankind. It is up to the collective generation how much revelation is bestowed. These revelations are given through the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual elements of our collective selves.

Each self is made up of four integrated elements in one entity. We recognize these entities as the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

God presents Himself throughout His creation in three ways: (1) through the physical laws He has set up to occur by design; (2) through an individual’s spirit; and (3) through performing miracles.




God as the Holy Spirit is the universal Soul and is made a part of an individual’s spirit through our belief and subsequent worship. In the Christian community we use the term that a person becomes a “child of God” through the work of the Holy Spirit.

All persons can become one through the Soul. A person is complete when he/she becomes a part of the Soul, and the overlapping part is then the Holy Spirit working in that self.

We are one with each other through our spirits, which are one with the Spirit.
Every person is personally related to God through his/her spiritual self. It is not necessary to acknowledge this relationship and most don’t, but it is so satisfying to do so.

God occasionally works miracles through any part of His creation. Miracles are rarely recognized as such.

God in love disciplines a person if he/she continuously scorns and mocks the Word. If we continuously study to show ourselves approved, discipline is lessened.

Love, the "shine" of God's Spirit, is a part of all facets of our lives—the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and Soul. We see this differently in each element, but they are all related to the Spirit.

DEFINITIONS

The following are my personal definitions of various key words used in these exercises. Please understand that they are presented in this form to help in understanding them, not to present them as in concrete. They are my definitions; perhaps yours have different shades. I will try to use them in the exercises as they are presented here.

body: The makeup of an individual entity--the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual self.

christian: A person who has accepted God’s plan of salvation through Jesus Christ. We might say that all persons in God's creation who have recognized the interaction of God working through the self's spirit by the Holy Spirit are in the same category. The word Christian is a manmade notion. I doubt if God recognizes the word as we do.

emotional self: That part of a self represented by the hormonal/neural effects on the body. It does not exist outside the body.

Holy Spirit (Spirit): What we call the interaction of God with His creation.

inquestion: (a coined word pronounced in-quest-ion): A private, personal query "given" to us by God for our study, contemplation, prayer, enjoyment, and worship and can only be "learned" through the Spirit/spirit.

love/Love: There are four types of love: 1. physical—sexual, erotic actions; 2. emotional—hormonal effects on our body and the natural effects of those hormones; 3. mental—philio love, love for another person; 4. spiritual—Agape Love, the Love that is God as the Spirit.

mental self: That part of a self that is recognized through the process of thinking. The mental (mind) is a part of the body and exists only in a physical body.

Message: God's presentation of the Word, God's will, to individuals.

Miracle: God created individual selves through natural law, and these selves are God's entities on the natural law universe. Any time He does something outside these natural laws, He is working a miracle. Such are probably rare, and we seldom know of their occurrence. It could be that God changes everything including our thinking with each miracle; therefore, we don’t know it happened.

physical self: The part of our self represented by our body parts—toes, heart, skin, brain, etc.

religion: The service, inquestion, study, and worship of God. There are many kinds of religions, all as one, over the world.

Revelation: The actual reception of a fragment of perceived Word.  Revelations are often revealed as a-has while inquestioning.

reveling: The process of willingly inquestioning revelation. 

Soul: A conglomeration of all God's “children” within the Spirit of all time as one.

Spirit: The part of God that is involved in His creation.

spirit: That part of a self which can be imbued by the Spirit. It exists outside the physical body, but is a part of the body in this world. God as Spirit works through a human spirit on a constant basis, but this interaction is not always recognized.

Word: "In the beginning was the Word." We usually perceive the Word through some kind of physical form (message)—Bible, preaching, praying, reveling, inquestioning, etc., but we sometimes "see" the Word through the spirit/Spirit. These latter may be called miracles as God does this personally and individually; however, I would rather think of them as an aspect of God’s created will for mankind.