Paper 5 Overview: God's Relation to the Individual

God has placed a fragment of himself within every normal-minded person on earth. This part of God, called the Thought Adjuster, lives inside each person's mind and helps them find God. Everyone has the same spiritual opportunity to connect with God, no matter their situation in life.

The Universal Father loves all his children and wants them to know him. He has made it possible for anyone who truly wants to find him to do so through their inner experience of the soul.

When humans cannot understand how such a great and majestic God could connect with individual people, they should remember that a fragment of God lives inside them. This divine fragment is part of the eternal God and allows people to find and communicate with him through their inner experience.

God has spread his infinite nature throughout the universe, but can make direct personal contact with any part of creation through his prepersonal fragments that work with the human personality to create our immortal soul. He also gives personality to divine Creators and living creatures and maintains parental contact with them.

The difficulty in approaching God comes not from God's distance but from human limitations. The spiritual difference between the highest personalities and lower intelligences is enormous. But God is not hiding from us. He constantly tries to reveal himself to his children.

While we cannot hope to stand in the actual presence of God here on earth, we can seek personal communication with God through his indwelling spirit. Our limited human nature determines when and how we can finally reach him and enjoy his personal presence.

God's presence exists in different ways in the universe. His physical presence is the reality of the material universe. His mind presence depends on individual intellectual experience and evolutionary level. His spiritual presence varies based on spiritual receptivity and dedication to doing God's will.

God lives in all his spirit-born children. The clearest way to experience God's presence is through communion with the indwelling Thought Adjuster, not by looking for God far away in the skies.

Though the Paradise Deities work as one in the universe, in their spiritual relations with humans, they are three distinct persons. We worship the Universal Father, either directly or through his Creator Sons, but it is always the Father who is worshiped.

Worship is different from prayer. Worship is for God's sake alone, with no self-interest involved. We worship God simply for who he is, not for anything we might gain. Prayer contains requests and is more appropriately directed to the Eternal Son or Creator Son.

Different religions approach God in different ways. Some motivate people through fear, while revealed religions attract people to a God of love whom they want to be like. True religion is not just a feeling but a living experience of finding God and serving humanity.

Religion provides unity, peace, and assurance in human experience. Jesus revealed a God of love that embraces truth, beauty, and goodness. His religion offers salvation from self and isolation rather than just from sin or suffering.

Morality comes from self-consciousness but does not remove life's struggles. People face physical challenges for survival, social situations requiring ethical adjustments, moral situations demanding choices, and spiritual experiences requiring them to find God and become like him.

Religion is not based on science, society, philosophy, or morality; it is a realm of human response to life. There are several different ways to see God, but the person who has faith believes in the Father in heaven, the God of love. Religious experience gives three satisfactions: intellectual unity, validation of moral values, and the joy of divine companionship.

The Universal Father gives and preserves personality in all creatures. Personality is one of the universe's unsolved mysteries. We understand many factors that make up personality but not its complete nature and meaning.

God gives personality exclusively to living systems that combine matter, mind, and spirit; he is personally conscious of every one of us. There is no personality apart from God, and human personality has the potential to survive death and achieve eternal life if it chooses to follow God's will.