2018-04-01-Apprenticeship of the Golden Rule

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Topic: The Apprenticeship of the Golden Rule

Group: 11:11 Progress Group

Facilitators

Teacher: Thought Adjuster

TR: Anyas

Session

Lesson

Thought Adjuster: “You were just reading about the clarifications that Jesus gave His disciples about the Golden Rule. It is a universal rule of conduct for the Children of God. How so?

“Stop for a moment and ponder how you practice the Golden Rule in your life. This will clearly show you the current level of your spiritual development. The first level of the application of the Golden Rule is the trickiest one. It is at the ‘level of the flesh’ and this is the reason why, due to the lures of selfish agendas at this level of your being, you should refrain from interpreting the Golden Rule as a license to do whatever gratifies you physically.

“The Golden Rule gains in effectiveness at the ‘level of the feelings’, when your actions are guided by empathy and compassion. By putting yourself in the shoes of your siblings, you feel their pain and wish to alleviate it. The Golden Rule will then strongly guide your intuition in doing what is right for them.

“Its third level, as explained by Jesus, is ‘the level of mind’ that brings into play its reasoning skills as well as the intelligence of the experience. “Good judgment dictates that such a rule of living should be interpreted in consonance with the highest idealism embodied in the nobility of profound self-respect.” (UB Paper 147, Section 4.6) Indeed, ‘mind over matter’ should come into the equation and help you greatly expand the scope of the Golden Rule.

“Next comes ‘the level of brotherly love’, described by Jesus as “the unselfish devotion to the welfare of one’s fellows… a new and far more beautiful interpretation of this basic rule of life.” At that point, you already have greatly evolved in your spiritual growth. You have increasingly severed the attachments to your small self and expanded your identity to one of heartfelt oneness with the overall human condition. You take personally what befalls your siblings and do something about it, motivated by the growing love you harbor in your heart.

Eventually, you will graduate to ‘the moral level’ of the Golden Rule, having acquired “real insight into the rightness and wrongness of things… You will begin to view such problems of interpretation as you would imagine a high-minded, idealistic, wise, and impartial person would so view and interpret such an injunction as applied to your personal problems of adjustment to your life situations.”(Paper 147 Section 4.8) By doing so, you will indeed acquire more objectivity.

“Finally, you will start applying the Golden Rule from ‘the spiritual level’ by asking yourself the leading question: “What would Jesus do in my stead?” What would a Divine Son do? Indeed, this Rule of Life is foremost “the divine command to treat all men as we conceive God would treat them.” (Section 4.9)

Closing

“No matter where you find yourself in the apprenticeship of the Golden Rule, know that the mastery of each one of its levels is a necessary stepping stone toward the next one. Eventually, you will master Love in Action and no longer have the need to refer to the Golden Rule, as you will embody it and spontaneously act in abidance with it.”