5.
The Sabian Philosophy
Summary
Man must make allowances for his presuppositions in every thought and action, but it is within his power to select whatever assumption best sustains him in his expression of himself. Philosophy is the means by which he orders life to his liking, through the functions of mind.
Man creates the actual reality in which he finds himself through the fundamental truth he accepts for the centering of his aspiration, and he reaches his spiritual fulfillment through a realization of the basic rightness of his motives and impulses. Religion is the means by which he rehearses his spiritual insights and thereby effects his ultimate reconciliation with his highest desire for himself.
Man exists most fundamentally in his works, or in his acts or reactions of being, and his arrival at any worthy stature is entirely a question of his creative accomplishment or of his service to his fellows and his world at large. Science is the means whereby he harnesses his skills in order to employ them in genuine creative fashion, and thereby achieve his ultimate potentiality.
The basis for any self-unfoldment under the Solar Mysteries is (1) an acceptance of the complete integrity of experience, (2) the culture of a genuine respect for all personality and (3) the development of an individual gift for utilizing the creative powers of consciousness.
All things are related to all other things, and the realization of any relationship in any or all of its pertinent details is through philosophy, religion and science, that is, by means of thought, feeling and expended effort. Thinking provides experience with a center of reference, emotion gives experience a complementary periphery of reference and skill maintains the frame of reference for any particular detail of experience.
Knowledge is valid only through its continual verification in experience, and the verification is accomplished through an awareness of consequences and a recognition of analogy and probability. Knowledge has a reliable expansion only as single minds project it through the thinking of many minds. Precise definition of terms and accurate statement of fact and reaction constitute the underlying basis of dependable knowledge. Knowledge is defeated or limited only in (1) the acceptance of delimitations for the self as irrevocable and (2) the pursuit of infinite regressions of relationship away from the immediateness of actual experience.
Man manipulates the factors of experience in degrees of remove from himself by a use of ideas, and as these are brought into leash by the mind they are known as concepts. The Sabian project in consequence is sometimes identified as the philosophy of concepts.
Man comes to know God through the fulfillment of himself in religious experience, and when this becomes personal he is able to serve his fellows as the avatar-to-be or as a healing presence in everyday affairs.
In his creative initiative, and its immortal centering within his own potentials, the aspirant becomes the initiate and the glory of his kind.
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