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A key principle Logopraxis offers so far as our relationship to the claims found in the Word is that they are true, even if we don’t yet know how they are true. This is what the Word calls affirmative doubt, as opposed to negative doubt which is a position of denial until proven otherwise through sensory evidence.
To practise the Word is to take what it has to say and to test it in our life with a view to gaining insights and illustrations of how the portion of Text we are working with is true. In Logopraxis we hold that the Text is Divine Revelation and that its truth claims stand independent of human reasoning. In other words, if we can’t see how something claimed in the Word is true then our inability to see how it is true says nothing about the Truth of the Text. What it does say is something about the natural mind’s inability to grasp spiritual and celestial realities.
Logopraxis doesn’t offer explanations or interpretations of things, it simply asks us to find a way of testing the truth claims of the Text in life using a task to provide a focus for spiritual work. Maybe we will see something maybe we won’t but whatever our practise provides us with, as material for our work, the Word remains true. To remain affirmative towards the Text when engaging with it keeps the doors of our mind open to receiving something for us to work with. That something might be an increased awareness of our resistance to the Text’s claims, or of the thought processes that tend to dismiss its claims because they don’t fit in with how we see things. If we can put all this on hold when the Text is before us then something new has the opportunity to present itself.
Here we are beginning a new set of cycles in our Logopraxis journey with the Text looking to experience it in a fresh way each time we come to it. If we commit to applying the principles found in the Text to our internal life i.e. our mental states, then we will find that our previous ways of understanding it will fall away allowing for a new understanding to arise. This change in our relationship to the Text involves the falling and rising of churches which internally has to do with the fall and rise of ways of understanding spiritual and celestial realities. In Logopraxis when we talk about applying the truths of the Word to life our focus should be on the life and activity of our mind and not so much on our outer life separate from the internal activity that tends to go unnoticed until we bring attention to it.
Thank you for this. I (Harald) have always loved the principle of affirmative doubt. I also love the idea of testing the (truth of) the Text, the Word as the Lord, by trying to practice what I think it teaches. What gives me pause, however, is the possible interpretation that what I discover in that process, or affirm to the extent my practice is successful, is truth, however helpful the process is in seeing the proprium at work in my mind. My testing of the Text in practice (praxis) will hopefully lead to greater clarity FOR ME of the meaning… Read more »
Hi Harald, thanks for your comment. The testing of truths in life isn’t to test if they are true but to discover how they are true as illustrated form our direct experience of them operating in our mental life. Affirmative doubt holds that whether I can see how the Word is true or not it remains true because it is the Divine Truth in Textual form, the Word. So our putting a truth into practice isn’t what makes it a truth; if it’s from the Word then its truth is a given before its implementation. So in Logopraxis, we hold… Read more »
Thank you, David. Very helpful. Testing HOW they (the truths of the Word) are true in our mental life versus IF they are true makes total sense.