THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Nine

THE GOD I KNOW

Chapter Nine

Knowing Good and Evil
(The Battle of Armageddon)

Before mortality, when we were living as beings of spirit, when our spiritual self was our only reality, our relationships with one another, and even with God, were comparatively sterile. All our experience was good, but our ability to appreciate its goodness was limited by our lack of real comprehension of anything else. Our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and whatever other teachers were part of our circumstance, taught us principles of truth. They told us about good and evil, about light and darkness, about progress and degeneration. Our environment might be likened to that of the innocent young who are going to school where they are exposed to a broad curriculum. Each of us learned according to his unique intelligence. The things we are drawn to here in mortality – the areas of our special talents and particular interests – are probably the same areas we gravitated toward in our spiritual becoming.

There were some differences between our schooling there and our schooling here. There we learned about opposition and evil. Here we experience them. There we accepted on faith that evil exists. Here we accept on faith that God exists. There we lived under a law where we were part of only goodness, truth and beauty. We did not have to struggle with opposition. Our only struggle was to comprehend what we were experiencing; and that was the struggle which finally caused us to choose to progress into the dimension of mortality and live under a law where we could learn from our own experience to comprehend the difference between good and evil.

As mortals we don’t remember those details. But God’s gift of free agency does allow
us to make choices which help us truly comprehend what we learned of goodness in the spirit world. The fragile delicacy of a flower may be comprehended with new awe and joy, because we are aware that it can be destroyed. The poignant beauty of a song may reach our ears with new aliveness and new gratitude, because we have known the silence of pain and death. We may run into the fragrant wind, drinking it into our being with desperately glad abandon, because our own body has felt the sickness of immobility and our lungs have hurt for the breath of life. We learn to take nothing for granted. Fully comprehending the opposite of God’s light, we can choose to be alive in the holiness of God’s truth, finally comprehending who we are in relationship to God.

All influences which are part of our awareness may take on greater meaning for us; but the most important reason it is necessary for us to learn the difference between good and evil is so that we can understand each other and live together in peace and harmony. It is our perfection in human relations that counts the most in becoming like the Gods.

In the spirit world we were neither selfish nor unselfish. The absence of selfishness prevented us from hurting one another, but the absence of unselfishness prevented us from knowing one another deeply enough to comprehend a fullness of love. The most valuable result of our being good in mortality is that we know how someone else feels when he feels good. Likewise our experiences with pain and sorrow make it possible for us to empathize with another’s afflictions. Our experiences with sin acquaint us with the deep needs for forgiveness that other sinners feel. Our need to be understood finds a kinetic relationship with all people’s need to be understood.

As we learn to know ourselves better as a result of our successes and our mistakes, we also learn to know everybody better and to recognize ourself in others. Consequently there begins to be a foreseeable possibility of becoming of one heart and one mind with them.

As we love others in mortality, faced always with the opposition of lust, and continually hurt by it, we come to know what love really is. We have enough brief moments of soul-communion – in reality, in fantasy, or in vicarious observation – that our hearts are kindled with the yearning awareness of the possibilities in loving and being loved. Always the dream is shattered by someone’s carnality before it reaches fruition, and we reconcile ourselves to less and less of the envisioned perfect love. But our experience convinces us what love is not. And our spirit remembers what love IS.

The actual working plan of mortality is that our divine nature, our godliness, is hidden and suppressed by the costume of our carnal nature. Deep inside our heart is an urgent burning which insists ever more convincingly, as we respond to good and evil, that there is more to us than we can see. As we struggle to discover what it is – WHO we really are – the truths we learn free us to remember all of the goodness and beauty of our spirit, but in the new dimension of a physical body which has experienced both good and evil and has chosen between them. As the divine in us emerges,, it has the added power of godliness which has felt selfishness and unselfishness, which has distinguished between love and lust, which knows good and evil.

As we choose good unselfishness love, our feelings about others are softened with the remembrance of our own pain, and mellowed with the tenderness of our own longing. Then God can quicken us to love unconditionally, purely. We, freed from lust, are no longer instruments of opposition, but instruments of God’s peace. We have won the battle.