The
Paul Solomon
Lecture Series

"Love One Another As I Have Loved You"
(1978 Excerpt from the lecture of the same name
By Paul Solomon)

If you want to reflect the Christ Spirit and be occupied by that consciousness, you must imitate Christ. You must imitate His vibration and His thoughts. This does not mean that if you act like Christ, you will have a mystical experience. It means that if you live like Him and think like Him, you will have cultivated the kind of ground in which a mystical experience springs forth. It will occur automatically.

You could say that a mystical experience only happens to a mystic—and further, that the mystic was already a mystic before the experience happened. It is not a mystical experience which makes a mystic—it is creating the ground in which a mystical experience can happen. If any of us wants to become a mystic, we do not need to wait for a spontaneous, lightening-bolt, experience, or an explosion from within. We simply need to become that particular vibration. Then, the mystic experience wells up naturally from within us.

One of the pitfalls to growth, and an area where the heart, the thinking, the consciousness, must be prepared, is judgment of others. We think that it is spiritual to analyze others and put them in their proper categories. We think it shows wisdom. We do it to keep ourselves safe, or to make ourselves look better by comparison. We pride ourselves on what we think is spiritual discernment. We are proud to be able to recognize another's problems, their value, their worth.

True spiritual discernment means being able to see a person's motive without being affected by it—to know a man's weakness without feeling the need to make him responsible for it.

Discernment and judgment are not the same thing. Judgment involves condemnation. Discernment involves clear thinking, clear seeing, and a lot of love. Discernment only happens with the eyes of Christ. When you look at others through His eyes, He is able to see both the darkness and the Christ. If you see the darkness in another, yet fail to see the Christ, be careful. It is appropriate to see darkness, but you need to see the Christ as well. See the Christ in others, and relate with that aspect. That is the key to discernment, to preparing the heart for its occupation by God.

This is all said best in the words of a hymn: "I made of my heart a temple..." The singer describes a temple with priests in costly robes, bells sounding, a scene of tranquility that he has prepared in his heart. But then, he says, the temple is empty—its light reveals no God.

In the second verse, he sings, "I made of my heart a stable, and the Savior came and smiled. The air was pure and pungent with the grass of the evening mild. I made of my heart a stable—and the Savior came and lived."

Copyright, The Paul Solomon Foundation 2022