This essay is based almost entirely upon ideas found in theologian Paul Tillich's book, "Dynamics of Faith."
1. The Meaning of Symbol The authors of The Urantia Book comment at 100:6.1 (p 1100) that, "Religion is not a specific function of life; rather is it a mode of living. True religion is a wholehearted devotion to some reality which the religionist deems to be of supreme value to himself and for all mankind." In his theological writing, Paul Tillich uses the term "ultimate concern" to symbolize what The Urantia Book is referring to as "wholehearted devotion."
Tillich contends that our "ultimate concern" must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate, which we can experientially know (through worship) as being far beyond word or description. This statement demands explanation in several respects. In spite of the manifold research about the meaning and function of symbols which is going on in contemporary philosophy, every writer who uses the term “symbol” must explain his understanding of it.
Consider the comment made by the revelators at 112:2.7 (p 1228): "As mind pursues reality to its ultimate analysis, matter vanishes to the material senses but may still remain real to mind. When spiritual insight pursues that reality which remains after the disappearance of matter and pursues it to an ultimate analysis, it vanishes to mind, but the insight of spirit can still perceive cosmic realities and supreme values of a spiritual nature. Accordingly does science give way to philosophy, while philosophy must surrender to the conclusions inherent in genuine spiritual experience. Thinking surrenders to wisdom, and wisdom is lost in enlightened and reflective worship."
The symbol may be understood as that which occupies mind as it begins to make the transit from thought to worship. In various cultures these sacred symbols may take an almost endless variety of forms from ritual dancing to passages contained in a sacred text. The symbol mediates the presence of the divine to the mortal mind, but the symbol is transcended once consciousness embraces the reality to which the symbol points.
Symbols have one characteristic in common with signs in that they point beyond themselves to something else. The red light at the street corner points to the order to stop the movements of cars at certain intervals. A red light and the stopping of cars have essentially no relation to each other, but in common usage they may be united as long as such a convention is maintained by participating persons. The same is true of letters and numbers and sometimes even of words -- they point beyond themselves to sounds and meanings. They are given this special function by convention within a nation or by international conventions, such as agreement regarding mathematical signs. Sometimes such signs are called symbols; but this is unfortunate because it makes the distinction between signs and symbols more difficult. Decisive is the fact that signs do not participate in the reality of that to which they point (stop signs), while symbols do (a mandala or the cross of Christianity). Therefore, signs can be replaced for reasons of expediency or convention, while symbols cannot. The second characteristic of the symbol then, is that it participates in that to which it points by evoking a response from deeper levels of mind, as contrasted with a sign which merely asks us to recognize a socially contrived convention.
The third characteristic of a symbol is that it opens up levels of reality which otherwise are closed for us. All arts create symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other way. Music, a painting or a poem may reveal elements of reality which cannot be approached scientifically or through logical deduction. In the creative work of art we encounter reality in a dimension which is closed for us without such works.
The symbol’s fourth characteristic not only opens up dimensions and elements of reality which otherwise would remain unapproachable, but also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality. A great play gives us not only a new vision of the human scene, but opens up hidden depths of our own being. Thus we are able to receive what the play reveals to us in reality. There are within us dimensions of which we cannot become aware except through symbols, such as those which are brought into consciousness by certain melodies and rhythms in music.
The fifth characteristic of sacred symbols is that they cannot be produced intentionally. They grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being. Symbols which have an especially social function, as political and religious symbols, are created or at least accepted by the collective unconscious of the group in which they appear.
The sixth and last characteristic of the symbol is a consequence of the fact that symbols cannot be invented. Like living beings, they grow and they die. They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the “king” grew in a special period of history, and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they lose the power to produce a particular response in the group in which they originally found expression.
These are the main characteristics of every symbol. Genuine symbols are created in several spheres of man’s cultural creativity. We have mentioned already the artistic realm. We could add history, politics, religion and, in the case of Urantians, symbols given as a gift by revelation.
2. Religious Symbols and Spiritual Life We have discussed the meaning of symbols generally because, as we said, man’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically! One may ask: Why can it not be expressed directly and properly? If money, success or the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, can this not be said in a direct way without symbolic language? Is it not only in those cases in which the content of the ultimate concern is called “God” that we are in the realm of symbols? The answer is that anything which is a matter of unconditional concern becomes a god in the life of the person whose life is oriented toward that particular concern. If the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate for that person, but in an idolatrous way.
In this context it should be kept in mind that one's ultimate concern is, by definition, that central concern relative to which all other values and meanings of both the personal and social life are made subordinate. The extent to which one's ultimate concern is the preservation of a social role, a belief system, an ideology, or a even a community is the extent to which one's faith has become idolatrous -- simply because that which should be the transcendent nature of one's ultimate concern has become embodied in something finite.
These insights of Tillich's are expressed in The Urantia Book at 100:6.2 (p 1100) where the revelators comment that, "The accepted supreme value of the religionist may be base or even false, but it is nevertheless religious. A religion is genuine to just the extent that the value which is held to be supreme is truly a cosmic reality of genuine spiritual worth."
Economic, political or institutional success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of Adjuster-indwelt personalities. Rather does such an ultimate concern demonstrate mortal readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being an economic or professional success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success becomes viewed as grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern.
It is important to appreciate that the true ultimate transcends the realm of finite reality infinitely. Therefore, no finite reality can express it directly and properly. The language of faith is the language of symbols. God is the fundamental symbol for that which concerns us ultimately.
In the idea of God we must distinguish two elements: the element of ultimacy, which is a matter of immediate spiritual experience and not symbolic in itself, and the element which is taken from our ordinary experience and symbolically used to represent this experience in thought and conversation. The person whose ultimate concern is a sacred tree has both the ultimacy of concern and the concreteness of the tree which he uses to symbolize his relation to the ultimate. The person who glorifies Jahweh, the God of the Old Testament, has both an ultimate concern and a concrete image of what concerns him ultimately. For many Urantians, The Urantia Book itself has become such a symbol, representing an ultimate concern even for individuals who do not grasp very much of its content as well as mediating access to the divine for many who take the time to explore its conceptual landscape. But The Urantia Book can also become the focus of idolatry when values demanded by loyalty to deity are sacrificed to temporal objectives related to the book as a source of material, social and religious power.
God is the primary symbol of faith, but not the only one. All the qualities we attribute to him -- power, love, justice -- are taken from finite experiences and applied symbolically to that which is beyond finitude and infinity. If faith calls God "almighty," it uses the human experience of power in order to symbolize the content of its ultimate concern. So it is with all the other qualities and with all the actions, past, present and future, which we attribute to God. They are conceptual symbols taken from our daily experience, and not necessarily information about what God did once upon a time or will do sometime in the future. Faith is not the belief that such stories are literally true; rather is faith the acceptance of such stories as symbolic expressions of our ultimate concern in terms of divine actions.
Another group of symbols of faith are manifestations of the divine in things and events, in persons and communities, in words, documents and books. This whole realm of sacred objects is a treasure of symbols. Holy things are not holy in themselves, but holy in a human sense because they point beyond themselves to the source of all holiness, that which is of ultimate concern.
3. Symbols and Myths The symbols of faith do not appear in isolation. They are united in "stories of the gods," which is the meaning of the Greek word "mythos" -- myth. In Greek mythology the gods are individualized figures, analogous to human personalities, sexually differentiated, descending from each other, related to each other in love and struggle, producing world and humanity, acting in time and space. They participate in human greatness and misery, in creative and destructive works. They give to man cultural and religious traditions, and defend these sacred rites. They help and threaten the human race, especially some families, tribes or nations. They appear in epiphanies and incarnations, establish sacred places, rites and persons, and thus create a cult. But they themselves are under the command and threat of a fate which is beyond everything that is. This is mythology as developed most impressively in ancient Greece. It is the world of the myth, great and strange, always changing but fundamentally the same: Man's ultimate concern symbolized in divine figures and actions. Myths are symbols of faith combined in stories about divine-human encounters.
It is interesting to note in this regard that The Urantia Book, in its presentation of a theology of interpersonal relationships, develops its mythology around the relationships between the gods and the activities repercussing in the time/space domains as a result of those interpersonal relationships. In our mythology, these relationships between the gods become archetypal elements within the minds of those mortals actively pursuing the goal of cosmic citizenship through service relationships with their fellows.
Thus the concentric circles symbol provided by the Urantia revelation is integrated with and expressive of the core content of the revelation. It is a symbol which allows us to integrate our understanding of Michael's bestowal, his universe government, and the overcontrol of the Paradise Trinity in the processes of Supremacy -- our growing relationships with each other and with God.
4. Urantian Symbols If we accept the idea that one of the primary purposes of the fifth epochal revelation is to revitalize spiritual life and religious living on our planet, we can look at the revelation and ask, "What tools have the revelators provided in order to help us realize this purpose?" Given what we know about the mythological and symbolic content of religious expression, there are three gifts contained within the revelation which can support Urantian religion. These are:
1) The remembrance supper 2) The prayers in Paper 144 3) The concentric circles symbol
In visiting groups of readers all over North America and in a number of foreign countries, these three elements of the revelation always seem to emerge naturally in readership communities as symbolic touchstones of shared commitment to the teachings of the revelation. The remembrance supper is engaged in as a "symbolic rendezvous with Michael." The prayers in section 5 of Paper 144 are often used for liturgical purposes. The concentric circles symbol is invariably used in the form of a banner or large poster at the front of rooms in which meetings are held. It is also used in a manner similar to the fish symbol of early Christianity to guide people to places where meetings are being held -- on signposts in parking lots or along walkways.
The preservation of these religious treasures which have been given as gifts to us from the revelators are honored when we use them for the religious purposes for which they were provided. They are desecrated when used for secular purposes, such as the attempted use of the concentric circles symbol to designate commercial goods and services or a business plan.
Because of the religious nature of these symbols, the responsibility for their protection cannot lie anywhere else than with the readership -- a readership which has the choice of using these symbols to represent the realities to which they relate in the revelation, or to allow their spiritual and symbolic power to be destroyed by using them as mere commercial signs. The spiritual power of these symbolic tools with which future generations of Urantians might facilitate the appearance of a new age of religion on our world depends upon choices which each of us make in our daily lives -- choices as to how we will use and understand the sacred symbols of the fifth epochal revelation and the degree to which we are willing to tolerate their misuse.
The following is transcribed from a tape recording made in the home of Berkeley Elliott on February 18, 1962 in Oklahoma City in the U.S.A. On this occasion, William S. Sadler, Jr., one of the "contact commissioners," was talking with the study group there assembled. What follows are comments which he made on this occasion concerning the origin of The Urantia Book.
"Many years ago my parents, who were physicians, had brought to their attention a man who had some rather strange things happening to him. In one of the books my father wrote, "The Mind at Mischief", he made mention of this case in the last part of the book -- in the Appendix which was published in the 1920's. My father had spook-hunting as a hobby. He was an exposer of mediums. He had two partners in this endeavor -- the head of the psychology department at Northwestern University and Howard Thurston, a professional magician. There is a book now out of print which my father wrote called "The Truth About Spiritualism" in which he puts so-called spiritualists as falling into one of two categories. There are practicing frauds -- deliberately working for gain or for glory -- and there are people who are self-deceived. I think in that book he says "with one possible exception."
"My parents, both physicians [Dr. and Mrs. Sadler], became interested in this case. This man would go to sleep and he'd talk and what came out was intriguing and different. He was never interested in the lost watch or the stock market or in talking with your Uncle George who had passed on -- never anything practical. This was different; distinctly odd. About this time a Sunday evening meeting came to be organized at our house. It came about when Pop was giving a commencement address at a local university. I was in High School at the time and he wrote me a letter saying that we were not church people but that Sunday should be productive as well as a day of rest. He asked what I would say if they invited in some friends and they had a discussion group -- kind of a forum -- and talked about health and history and politics, etc. That group came into existence in, I think, 1922. This group became interested in spiritualism because Pop was writing on that subject at the time.
"My dad was mischievous -- there was a mind-reading vaudeville show in town. Pop attended twice. He took a pair of wire cutters and clipped the wires that hooked the guy in the audience with the gal on the stage. At which point she fainted and they asked if there was a doctor in the audience, and Pop had the gall to go back and take care of her.
"The question came up whether all such phenomena is fraudulent. My dad was an honest guy so he said there was one such case that was a puzzle. So they asked him to tell them about it. So the forum became intrigued with the shorthand notes that had been taken of things this man talked about.
"One evening when they were talking to this man, a kind of an argument came up. They were talking with someone who claimed to be a "Mighty Messenger." They asked if he could prove he was a Mighty Messenger. " No," he said, "but you can't prove I'm not either. If you knew what I know, you wouldn't ask these silly questions. You would prepare some of the most deep, searching and far-reaching questions you could possibly imagine."
"My father was half English and half Irish and he got kind of mad -- he was investigating this phenomena and now he was being challenged. Pop looked at the others in the group and said, "Lets pursue this and see what happens."
"So the next Sunday when the Forum met, the whole group came in on the deal. I was told that approximately five thousand questions were given. Some were silly -- how old is God, who created him, and so forth. What happened was this -- one day the questions were gone and where the questions had been was the first of the Urantia Papers and was entitled, "The Universal Father."
"I'll tell you how I think this paper was written. And my theory is not one-hundred percent correct. But its the best I can find. Visualize several places in space -- points A, B, C and D. I think the papers were dictated or conceived at point A and had we been there when any of these papers was written we would have seen nothing. A Divine Counselor is presenting his concepts in the language of Uversa*. A translator is there who translates it into the language of Salvington*. There is another translator there who translates from the language of Salvington* to the language of Satania* and another translator who translates from Satania* into English. You cannot translate from Uversa* into English because the languages are too far apart.
"I suspect that 99% of the original concept was lost in translation -- English is too primitive a language. Take Bantu where they have one, two and then "many" -- the end of their numbers -- and you want to translate into large number systems, you simply can't do it. See the problem?
"Point A was linked by some sort of communication circuit to point B. At point B there would be something to see, but it would be rather dull. It would be a man asleep -- doing nothing. Remember the resurrection and the way the stone was moved by the Midwayers? At point C you would see a pencil moving over paper with no visible means of motion. That's where the physical writing took place. Now point D would be where we found the papers. This individual was never seen to write one of these papers -- and don't think we weren't trying to watch him. If he wrote them he was more clever than we -- he was never observed to write them.
"We tried everything we could think of to see how this was being done, but were baffled. The text was entirely written in pencil -- all in the handwriting of this individual.
"Who was this man? I took an oath not to divulge who he was. That was required of all who know his identity and it was required by the commissioner who sponsored the last of the papers. We think we know why it was required. He would have asked us to maintain secrecy. One of the reasons this man was picked is that he has a passion for privacy -- a very stable man. He doesn't want to be known.
"These papers were read to the forum. At the end of each paper was a note suggesting the next title on which questions should be asked. This is how they led us through the first time. They were read to the forum and they generated more questions and over a period of years this book accumulated. And eventually when we had money we published it.
"In 1950 we completed the preparation of our plates. As money came in we forecast inflation, so we took the money we had and spent it in getting Donnelley (the publisher) to prepare the plates. If you went to Chicago, you'd see that the Urantia Foundation was established in 1950 by the anonymous donation of the plates of The Urantia Book. We got nickel coated plates. If you write to Donnelley, they'll tell you they negotiated with Mr. Wilfred Kellogg. The Urantia Foundation owns the copyright. There are five trustees. In about 1954 these five trustees selected thirty-six people who organized the Urantia Brotherhood. The book was published in October of 1955 and has been spreading ever since.
"I was there most of the time. I'm a management man, not the kind of man you would expect to see mixed up in something like this -- and I was very suspicious of all this. I asked myself, "Who is making money on this? I found that it was going to cost money. I realized there was no commercial end. And, as the book cleared up some personal quarrels I had with religion, I felt it was a pretty good thing. So I elected to spend my spare time telling people about it. I don't get paid, but I get a lot of satisfaction. This is a first hand story except for the years from 1924 to 1928 when I was doing military duty. And this is the first time this story has ever been recorded."
Sue Tennant Couchiching Urantia Society of Ontario's Annual Conference Sunday June 10th, 1990
The Urantia Book is a great book about religion (among other things) - but it is not and should never be misunderstood to be a religion in itself.
I think religion, at least organized religion, should be thought of as a cultural thing, even a manmade affair - something that is continually evolving as a result of what a group of people believe about a higher reality and how they try to connect with it. Religion is important because it's so much a part of our culture and values and it has inspired some of our best human thoughts and actions. But regrettably, it has also imprisoned the human mind and oppressed the human spirit. Religion is notorious for its complexity, confusion and inconsistency. Fortunately, the Urantia Book is not a product of any cultural religious tradition on this planet - it is rather a neutral and entirely objective commentary about life that inspires a sense of unity and clarity amidst such religious diversity.
The reason I mention this is, as far as the Urantia book is concerned, it makes absolutely no difference what religious culture you have been raised in or are what you now leaning towards. You will find that the Urantia Book will ultimately support your individual faith in whatever religious setting you feel most comfortable. Whether you are a Jew, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Buddhist, B'Hai, Muslim or Hindu or whatever, this book will offer you a tremendous gift quite apart from any religious tradition. I think this gift that the Urantia Book offers, is as important as anything you'll receive in your entire life.
What is this fantastic gift? It is an eternal and everlasting gift of a profound personal status not only in this world, but in the vast universe and the unlimited cosmos, science is just beginning to fathom. It is an uplifting and challenging gift that will make you feel very special, very proud and very fortunate to be born on this particular planet at this particular time in history. It is a gift that will give you a sense of personal dignity that will simply amaze you - because it has the power to transcend any serious negative hold your environment might have had on you. It is the extraordinary gift of healthy self-esteem, deep rooted self-respect, the dawning comprehension of who you really are -your one true identity. You are a son or a daughter of the Universal Father God himself and you will be humbled by the astounding realization of what tremendous value and relevance you have as a human being in this universe.
If you dare to acknowledge this wondrous relationship with the Universal Father, you will eventually recognize that what is true for you, is also true for every other human being whether they realize it or not And so all other human beings, regardless of their obvious differences from you, are entitled to transcendent respect Self-respect and respect for others is the foundation of tolerance, and tolerance coupled with unselfish service approaches love. Love is the absolute law of our universe to which we are all inextricably bound.
You have an extraordinary career ahead of you! You will soon discover that for you, there are no limits in time or space, that can separate you from the good spiritual things God has to offer you. Not only does God give his life to you by living in your mind, he teaches and guides you and blesses you with infinite patience and mercy. He desires to live in and through you to create good. And what does this really mean? It's means something so wonderful, we can barely fathom it. It means our purpose in life is nothing less than to co-create with God himself and we do this by thoughtful prayer and faith-action.
"In liaison with God, nothing, absolutely nothing, is impossible!" For you, the creative possibilities will be endless. Expect to succeed in this life, regardless of appearances. Expect to do good, regardless of appearances. Expect to change this world for the better, regardless of appearances. Have faith in yourself and the Creator, because together, you are in charge. And, eventually you will see, if not in this life than in the next, the supreme and spectacular result of your trusting faith-adventures with God! Never be afraid. God is always with you.
This to me, is the great message of the Urantia Book and I'm pleased to have had a chance to share it with you.
William S. Sadler: Psychologist, Surgeon, Medical Doctor, famous Chattaqua lecturer, author, detective, preacher, health food salesman. I wanted to get to know this man better, this man about whom so much has been said, about whom so many accusations of wrongdoing have been made. On trial, yet with little real examination. I immersed myself in his life for a while because his role is central to the rise of doubt and unbelief among some in our movement.
Born in 1875, Sadler was home-schooled by his parents until he left his home in Wabash, Indiana in 1889 at the age of 14. He moved to Battle Creek, Michigan where he worked at the well-known Battle Creek Sanitarium and met the Kellogg family who would become life-long associates, a second family to him. He also became baptized into the Kellogg's church, the Seventh Day Adventist Church (I'll refer to it as SDA from here on). A few years later (in 1893) when William Kellogg began manufacturing his soon to be very successful line of health foods, Sadler became a salesman for the new products. Then in 1897, Sadler married Lena Kellogg, William's daughter, also the niece of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the famous founder of the Battle Creek sanitarium.
Eventually, he became ordained as an SDA minister in 1901. He and Lena spent some years in San Francisco while he attended the SDA seminary here in the Bay Area, but they returned to Chicago just two years before the 1906 earthquake. Like many SDA church leaders at the time, he was disturbed by the controversy that swirled around Ellen White's plagiarisms, already discovered in her writings, and he eventually left the church in 1910. Or perhaps he was driven out. This was the end of a membership in the church that had lasted 21 years. Think about that for a minute. Meredith Sprunger tells us that Sadler, "rarely revealed this fact," of his SDA affiliation, "to his associates." There is an SDA website that has a long letter of Sadler's to Mrs. White, written in 1906, (which is also reprinted in Martin Gardner's book, Urantia) It details his objections and asks for her response, written in a tone that is still reverential but with respectful challenge. The letter also reveals a man poised at the precipice of a major decision. "I cannot afford to be wrong, whichever way it is. I must be right and I expect the Lord to help me into the light on all these matters…"
Martin Gardner has made much of the Seventh Day Adventist connection. His conjecture is that Sadler followed Mrs. White's example to create the Urantia Book: "This painful loss of a childhood faith left a huge void in the hearts of Sadler and Lena…[who] sought desperately for a replacement of Mrs. White who would not disappoint [them]…The forward-looking personality who put the papers into English was none other than Sadler himself." (Gardner's Urantia, p. 272-274)
It's hard to find instances in Sadler's behavior that support Gardner's characterizations of their "painful" and "desperate" reactions to the SDA disappointment. Both he and Lena's life stories are those of people who never succumbed to defeat, who didn't let on they'd been beaten, but found ways to keep on going, taking on new projects, finding new ways to serve humanity. These two had shed their past and were moving forward.
Everyone who met William Sadler was impressed by his gigantic intellectual abilities, his memory, his sheer command of information such as the medical history of his patients. He also dictated his books; "words just flowed before his eyes as though on a movie screen." (Sprunger) He apparently would have been quite capable of putting together a 2,096 page revelation. And he'd had a close associate, a predecessor in Mrs. White, whose successes and mistakes he was able to study up close. There is no doubt that SDA and Ellen White is an interesting coincidence, or at least, an intriguing confluence of influences and events in Sadler's life. But how do we interpret this connection?
What would motivate Sadler to put forward a revelation of his own creation? Prestige? Power? Personal fame? Being a Savior of the World? Episodes in his life repeatedly show that he didn't desire these things. As far as saving the world, yes I imagine he might have wanted that at moments (just as we do sometimes). But not to be the one getting the glory for such an achievement. The causes and the organizations that he devoted himself to demonstrate his service motivation: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Chicago Society for Personality Study, the College of Surgeons, just to mention a few. He founded a clinic that demanded no tuition fees from the students. He turned down an offer from the Guggenheim family to build a sanitarium and hotel with 51% of the stock to go to him as a reward. A wealthy fundraiser who came forward to pay for the UB's publication was rebuffed in favor of Lena's continuing fundraising efforts from within the ranks of those supporters of the book with less glittering reputations and pocketbooks . He regularly transferred his leadership duties to younger ones coming up behind him rather than holding on to his own position as founding father.
Sadler's early eagerness to follow Ellen White might be interpreted as a demonstration of his openness to the consideration of modern prophetic utterances that came from outside of traditional sources. His was the type of scientific mind that one of my heroes, Carl Sagan, admired: a person with no prejudice as to where the next insights would come from. Sadler had an adventurous mind much like a scientist's. He could look for spiritual truth beyond what was conventionally accepted and regarded by others as holy scripture.
He entered the field of psychiatry in 1911, leaving medicine temporarily to go study with Freud in Europe. He later established "a pastoral psychiatry clinic," to help clergy people understand and treat psychological problems. This open-mindedness, coupled with his investigative abilities, as shown by his detective work in Chicago, and later by the investigations into frauds and mediums that he conducted with the magician Howard Thurston, would have demonstrated to the authors of the UB that here was someone able to handle the bestowal of the new revelation already in its planning stages.
As Matthew Block's research has shown, the purported plagiarisms of the UB are nothing like Ellen White's word-for-word borrowings. Indeed, the human sources quoted and paraphrased in the UB cannot be compared to any "plagiarisms" we have ever seen before. I encourage you, if you haven't done so, to investigate Matthew's work as it continues to appear on the Square Circles website. You will better understand the difference in these "plagiarisms." Where Sister White's verbatim pillagings were easily discovered by her close followers, the Urantia Book's authors use of the "thousand human concepts" are not easily exposed in the expanded and enhanced form they've been given, often with the addition of a higher, cosmic perspective. Without Block's detective work, we might not have even recognized these passages as originating in a human source or "thought pattern."
The SDA controversy could also be interpreted as a motivating factor behind Sadler's later mindset, which was one of determination to expose deceptive psychic phenomena. He had learned from personal experience. Those of us with a background at Family Of God Foundation can understand this kind of motivation. But soon afterwards, he came across the "one exception to the general statement that all cases of psychic phenomenon" are "auto-psychism." (The Mind at Mischief, appendix)
Living inside Sadler's life as I have done recently is very much like inhabiting a new quantum universe where we deal with probabilities alone; not exact realities. Just as we cannot determine the exact location of a nuclear particle, given the quantum uncertainties, so are we unable to be accurate and precise concerning Dr. Sadler's motivations and actions. The at-the-scene witnesses are mostly dead and gone.
A man who I have known and admired over the years, Meredith Sprunger, is one of the last living individuals to have personally known Sadler well. Meredith called him, "probably the greatest man I have ever known." (at the memorial service, 1969) Yet I do not find those who have attacked Sadler, such as Gardner, and Harold Sherman, to be admirable or sincere in their motivations. Nevertheless, I still accept that William S. Sadler may have made some alterations in, or additions to the book that we call the Fifth Epochal Revelation.
The UB tells us that the ebbs and flows of spiritual presence are completely under the direction of our free will, subject to our choices and our sincere desires for more of the Deities' fellowship. Likewise is the withdrawal of deity presence subject to our will when we no longer choose to have it near. Our decisions and choices take precedence over the desires of our spiritual overseers for our welfare. "And thus does the spirit of divinity become humbly obedient to the choosing of the creatures of the realms." (p. 150; 13.4.5) The UB so consistently elevates and dignifies the preeminence of our free will, that it even goes so far as to make itself as a book secondary to our own personal religious experience. We are in a sense always limiting or qualifying the revelation of the Urantia Book, submitting it to the scrutiny of our "evaluator within, [without which] we could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings." (196: 3. p. 2094) The UB talks about how the teachings and revelations that proliferate on our planet must be "sort[ed] and censor[ed]". (p. 1007; 92.4) The fact that we have come to know more concrete details about how the UB was derived doesn't change the process of sorting and censoring which we, as thoughtful spiritual seekers, have always done before, and will continue to do in the future. Contrary to what you may have heard, I have only occasionally found, over my life-experience with the UB, students who show an unquestioning acceptance of the statements in the book.
What concerns me more is the ennui, apathy, and weariness we suffer in the Urantia movement right now. We are allowing ourselves to be tricked out of the will and desire to live passionately in the presence of God. We have watched the copyright court case, the battles over affiliation between Urantia Foundation and Fifth Epochal Fellowship, and many other legal and personal conflicts. We have grown disappointed and disillusioned by the questionable ways in which the Lord's servants have worked on his behalf. We allow the behavior of these men and women to reflect badly on the truth, even upon God. We know we should not tarnish God or the truth with the same brush used to portray the deeds of his followers, yet we so often do so.
Just at the point where it seems most important for us to be engaged, the free will choices we make seem to lead us into throwing ourselves with more determination into our jobs, our commutes, and the resolution of our money hassles, less engaged with our spiritual development. As the UB writes concerning Urantia after Pentecost, "One of the great troubles with modern life is that man thinks he is too busy to find time for spiritual meditation and religious devotion." (195: 6; 7, p. 2077)
I feel like I am watching an ancient Biblical proverb come true in our time, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Yet I open up the Urantia Book and find an antidote in many of its papers. Here is the vision we lack! I find it in the religion papers, the psychology that is depicted in the Adjuster papers, and of course the expanded life of Jesus.
I also see the current rise of fundamentalism within the religions of the world that seeks to re-impose the power trips of the ancient creeds, the sacred scriptures, and the old religious authorities-all of which trample underfoot the very personal spiritual liberties the UB wishes us to uphold and enhance.
I have fond memories of those times when we as a movement enthusiastically gathered together for projects and activities. Now, we are perhaps tempted to retreat. To feel that we can only go apart into our rooms, to close the door and pray, just as monks leave the world when the dark ages seem to descend upon them. Through meditation, contemplation and prayer we hope that we can raise the planet up spiritually from out of the darkness that descends upon it. And perhaps there is some validity to this point of view. But I think we will find in our study today that this is not the path that the Urantia Book is calling us to in our troubled times. The question we all have to answer is, do we, in our sorting and censoring process, want to throw out the visionary truths along with those other parts of the book that we find questionable. It is a decision we will make in partnership with our divine indwelling evaluator.
During a phone conversation with a new reader an inquiry was made that caught me in one of those modes where the synapses weren't firing quite up to par - I think they call it a "senior moment". The question related to those pusillanimous individuals who are afraid to move up from complacency, and perhaps even some of those who are just stuck in their ways. The question being: Why do you think there are so many people that are so undesirous of pursuing the Urantia papers? Why do they fail to grasp the significance of something so enlightening?
As a retired psychologist I'm certainly aware of the ideas regarding cultural conditioning, intellectual comfort levels, ego defense mechanisms (embracing denial, repression, etc.), and not to mention just plain complacency. Yet somehow I blurted out, off the top of my head, something possibly having to do with the lack of Thought Adjuster contact on a primitive subconscious level. Now, even though I've given much thought to the above question and we have been exposed to this question with a plausible rationale given in the Urantia book - nothing eye-opening came to mind at the time. This perplexing question has baffled many of us from time to time. After all, who in their right mind wouldn't want to read the Urantia revelation. Of course there are many who have vested interests in what they believe to be the answers to what satisfies their spiritual needs, irrespective of truth or reasoning. Many examples come to mind: the Scientologist is searching for a personal efficiency paradigm to facilitate daily living, Muslims desire an autocratic religion of dictum and rules, the phony cults just want any sort of recognition (witch cults, etc.), and there are those that play with serpents in church, and those that chant away the day praising Lord Krishna, and on and on it goes even to Christian fundamentalist who have discovered a panacea in the many false realities of scripture.
But all have one thing in common, a conscious suppression to acquire a higher expansion and understanding of truth. Jesus admonished us to "follow the truth wherever it may lead" The importance of this truth pursuit is amply discussed on in the Urantia book (pgs. 2062-2065) and relates to an acquirement apart from general intellectualization - that acquirement being the reception of the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth. And not to accept this spiritual variable bestowal has to be considered the quintessential affront to all higher spiritual entities residing in our universe, for it is actually a conscious denial of those factors that bring us closer to God, to an understanding of Deity and the acceptance of the brotherhood of mankind. Perhaps our problem towards truth rejection relates to a missing ingridient in human nature - a genetic mishap due to the Adamic default, for the revelation plainly states that: "It was the divine plan that the mortal races of Urantia should have had physical natures more naturally spirit responsive." (pg.382) Our ancestry was not "fully Adamized by the Edenic bestowal." It further states that: "... as the Urantia races were in a measure advanced by the bestowal of Adam, then is the way better prepared for the Spirit of Truth to co-operate with the indwelling Adjuster to bring forth the beautiful harvest of the character fruits of the Spirit." This then is the crux of our thesis - "If you do not reject this spirit, even though eternity may be required to fulfill the commission, 'He will guide you into all truth'." (pg.382)
The most relevant aspect to the question is that the Spirit of Truth poured out upon all humanity is a variable pour. If you're already drunk with the love of truth you actually receive a greater pour even receiving more as one pursues the truth (seemingly there's no saturation level), and concomitantly those who have little regard for the truth receive less (pg. 2063-4). "This new teacher (Spirit of Truth) was bestowed upon mankind, and every soul received him in accordance with the love of truth and the capacity to grasp and comprehend spiritual realities..."
Could it be that individuals who fail to pursue truth in life (a genuine love for truth) are not endowed with a greater capacity for truth? If this is the case it is, in part, due to their own choosing. Perhaps they have been too complacent in ferreting out truth and now either can't recognize it or have only a moderate regard for it. Decency and fair play are the cornerstones of a civilized society; it is truly disturbing to genuine truth seekers to perceive the blatant injustices manifesting throughout the world today, but it is especially problematic to discern the stagnation of spiritual advancement in this the 21st century, when so much progress has been made materially. The Book tells us that never before in the history of the world have we been so confused, caught up in such a frustrating philosophical era. The Book also informs us that the spiritual values have to catch up with material values or our very civilization is in peril. Let's rid ourselves of the philosophic confusion and seriously submerse ourselves in the soothing waters of the Urantia revelation. Let's give the Spirit of Truth (a teacher) the chance to operate; we will all feel much better in the long run for having truly advanced the spiritual status of mankind. We in the Urantia Readers International believe this (the failure to search for truth) has to be at least part of the answer as to why so many people reject what many of us believe to represent the highest truths ever presented to our world.
"Do not overlook the fact that the Spirit of Truth was bestowed upon all sincere believers; this gift of the spirit did not come only to the apostles. The one hundred and twenty men and women assembled in the upper chamber all received the new teacher as did all the honest of heart throughout the whole world."
The greatest contrast in mainstream religious orders today is perceived in the relationship of Muslims to Christians. Muslims, no matter how much they profess to advocate peace, strictly adhere to the militancy contained in Islam and all the while are working to displace Christianity - they simply refuse to accept the teachings of Jesus and his peaceful message of the beneficence of the Father and His relationship to the brotherhood of man.
"The religion of Jesus fosters the highest type of human civilization in that it creates the highest type of spiritual personality and proclaims the sacredness of that person."
The Book goes on to mention that: "The coming of the Spirit of Truth on Pentecost made possible a religion which is neither radical nor conservative; it is neither the old nor the new; it is to be dominated neither by the old nor the young. The fact of Jesus' earthly life provides a fixed point for the anchor of time, while the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth provides for the everlasting and endless growth of the religion which he lived and the gospel he proclaimed. The spirit guides into all truth; he is the teacher of an expanding and always growing religion of endless progress and divine unfolding. This new teacher will be forever unfolding to the truth seeking believer that which was so divinely folded up in the person and nature of the Son of Man."(2063-L)
"Mankind can be unified only by the spiritual approach, and the Spirit of Truth is a world influence which is universal." (2065-6)
"Many queer and strange teachings became associated with the early narratives of the day of Pentecost. In subsequent times the events of this day, on which the Spirit of Truth, the new teacher, came to dwell with mankind, have become confused with the foolish outbreaks of rampant emotionalism. The chief mission of this outpouring spirit of the Father and the Son is to teach men about the truths of the Father's love and the Son's mercy. These are the truths of divinity which men can comprehend more fully than all the other divine traits of character. The Spirit of Truth is concerned primarily with the revelation of the Father's spirit nature and the Son's moral character. The Creator Son, in the flesh revealed God to men; the Spirit of Truth, in the heart, reveals the Creator Son to men. When man yields the "fruits of the spirit" in his life, he is simply showing forth the traits which the Master manifested in his own earthly life." (2062)
All these people guilty of the intentional rejection of higher reality, cosmic truths, and the real teachings of Jesus are apparently caught up in a web of intellectual dishonesty and unrighteousness, but truth prevails throughout the universe and ultimately triumphs over the shadow of evil. Intentional rejection of the Urantia truths, merely reveals a pattern of perpetual evil - that evil persists as long as the truth is suppressed, and unfortunately some people have made that a life-long commitment. The ultimate truth suppression on our world was the condemnation of Jesus' message. Islam has tried to erase his messages by supplanting their own and discrediting Christianity whenever and wherever it can. But to their ultimate dismay, Jesus will return to straighten things out. We can count on it.
And I will end with a passage from the book (Pg. 383) that appears on the book markers of the Pensacola Bay study group established by Arnie Ondis. "Having started out on the way of life everlasting, having accepted the assignment and received your orders to advance, do not fear the dangers of human forgetfulness and mortal inconstancy, do not be troubled with doubts of failure or by perplexing confusion, do not falter and question your status and standing, for in every dark hour, at every crossroad in the forward struggle, the Spirit of Truth will always speak, saying, "This is the way."
Urantia Book Etymology and Human Languages: Similation Over Inspiration
Urantia Book Etymology and Human Languages: Similation Over Inspiration by Jon Greer - Courtesy of the Brotherhood of Man Library
Like its cosmology, the Urantia Book's etymology of proper names and terminologies is not inspired, and early accommodation of this truth may help forestall disillusionment from a linguistic inquiry of its pages. Names, and all language are metaphors -- symbolic designations of realities, couched in greater or lesser efficiencies at making the realities at which they aim more accessible. Names and languages are not the designated realities themselves, but are images thereof, mere representations, scaffolding. It's not inappropriately that names are often called handles. They are handles, not the reality they handle.
And so does the Urantia Book freely use such biblically-familiar terms as "Lucifer", "Satan", "Melchizedek", "Michael", and so on as personal names; thus obvious Latinisms and Hebraisms are used as a matter of course to apply to beings at universe levels far beyond the purview of such lingual provincialities.
"Lucifer" as a proper name was coined in the early centuries after Christ by the Roman church fathers in connection with the Jewish legend of the expulsion from heaven of evil angels and their leader. From a reference in Isaiah 14:12, "Lucifer" is so rendered in the Vulgate and is virtually all subsequent translations of the Bible. But the term is nowhere in the actual Hebrew text of the Old Testament at all, nor could it have been, being purely Latin in etymology.
The actual Hebrew reading in question is "helel", approximately "to shine", or possibly "to lament". The church fathers in Italy, taking the term as a proper name and reading into it their own tradition-perspective, rather than transliterate, inserted their own personified form for "Shine(r)", Lucifer. The doing might be tantamount to rendering "Adonai" as "Bossy", but the liberty taking has stuck through the centuries. And so no being of high constellatory station is actually named Lucifer, in the terminology of his peerage. But the archrebel that word designates has no less existed and done his indignities.
Names are no more than convenient metaphors, and "Lucifer" being a ready and common metaphor among mortals for the iniquitor with which our world is concerned, the tern found easy and thoroughly proper use in the Urantia Book. Lucifer is his name, for our purposes. If I'm known by one moniker to a friend, by another completely different family nickname to my spouse and children, and by another tag entirely to my boss, all these nonetheless refer, and very adequately for communication purposes, to me. Names are not the thing names, but pointers to it, with varying degrees of malleability and situational applicability. There is no such thing in the universe as a reality being one and the same with its nominal metaphor, of a name being an immutable and absolute designator.
Many of the Urantia Book's designations such as "Satan", "Melchizedek", "Jerusem", "Adam", et alia, are Hebrew terms or derivatives, in many cases elevated to proper noun status already within their Hebrew matrix from repeated application to specific persons, things or places now with intentional adaptation and transmutation for name purposes. "Satan", or more rightly in the actual text, "the satan", is a genericism which literally translates as "the adversary" in its Hebrew origin and definition. Being applied to one particular adversary figure repeatedly as scripture evolved, the larger generic definition fell away and the term constricted to apply to that single adversary concept, personified as Satan in full, upper-case typification. Satan is likewise not a constellatory designation, but a local.
"Melchizedek" is a composite name drawn from the Hebrew "malek", for king or chief, and "zedek", meaning rectitude or righteousness. The high being who purposely adopted this dithemic badge on coming to Abraham's generation necessarily had to appear in a physical and lingual equipage his earthly contemporaries could relate to; and so he appeared as a human with the corresponding human name of "righteous-chief". (Here, this Melchizedek's first name poses a linguistic quaintness of its own, Machiventa being clearly other than Hebrew in linguistic construct. Machiventa, it would seem, may be derived etymologically from either Pahlavic or related Sanskrit; if so, in itself it constitutes a sociologic commentary on the universality of Melchizedek's mission in appearing in Palestine within the larger cultural context of the Orient and the Levant.)
Our "Michael" itself means literally and interrogatively, "who is like god" in the Hebrew. We may be certain that with whatever name he is more directly known in his universe home circle, that term too, covers precisely the same meaning it its vastly expanded definitive spectrum.
One might reflect that "God" is an obvious Anglicism, and certainly English is not the language of currency in Paradise, no more than is Latin or Hebrew. Nevertheless, God is a very proper and accurate name for the First Center and Source, for our purposes.
Why would the Urantia Book not reveal the full verities of the names it uses? Why would it not disclose, for instance, the Orvontonian governor's name for Orvonton? Or what Midsoniters call themselves? Doubtless in part because the superfinite ideations innate within these terminologies' meanings are irreducible to any mortal conveyance. And surely also because the very words themselves are impossible of either translating or transliterating into human tongues; the very structure of higher universe and superuniverse languages as a whole would make no verbal-consonantal sense if cycled into any of this reality level's language patterns with anything attempting a syncretic equivalence.
The book in another context tells us already that the very process of trying to boil down many universe concept frames into finite mental analogs results in almost impossible distortions. Our revelators often mourn that the very (to us, especially) abstractions they are trying to communicate come out often little short of completely misrepresented in the sheer process of conversion to our mindal level; that much content is lost to the inevitable gross inefficiencies of the transition itself, like heat up an open fireplace flue. In gearing the concepts downward to human grasping, the concepts themselves must be greatly compromised in content.
Mind itself operates very differently up and down the scale of cognition, and this makes frequently for insurmountable barriers. The matter of names is one such barrier, and one which the Urantia Book negotiates well by its technique of resorting to at-hand terms and names where possible.
When the Urantia Book deals with categories and nomenclatures with which we have no prior lingual familiarity whatever in which to phrase them, its authors resort handily to artificial constructions, to well-thought but spontaneous lingual mintage. Words like "Caligastia" and "Urantia", as their linguistic and orthographic elements show, are syllabic manufactures of English-Greco-Roman tincture -- in a word, an Indo-European newspeak of especially hybrid excellence is here born. "Nebadon", "Orvonton", "morontia", and so on, show the same phonemic stamp, one and all. From considering a cardinal precept of translating from originals -- that all fixed proper names are transliterated as they are, without regard for lingual vicissitudes -- we may know that the Urantia Book's architects intend that these proper terminologies will remain intact within the book, henceforth. And it is this realization that then lets us know what precise form out planet's eventual language will have, once settled in light and life; this same Urantia Book syncretic hybrid, meant for duration.
Although obviously systematic in the phonemic construction of its made-words, the book with which we deal readily resorts to creative improvising in making these constructs transmit meaning itself. The way this is carried off is refreshingly witty in its unceremony; when a specific denotation is wanted in connection with a systematically used root or phoneme, the requisite word or sufficient part thereof is simply stuck into the phoneme: "Divinington", "Ascendington", "abandonters", "supernaphim", "Chronoldeks", "agondonters" -- how pleasant to savor a subtle humor, excellently inserted into the flow of sober consideration. In the majority of its tailor-made place names, the book's morphologic comedy is all the more superb because it is lingually engineered so well. "Seraphington" exemplifies nicely: A Hebrew angelologic morpheme combined with the, not merely English, but old Gadhelic-Teutonic place suffix, "-ington", meaning literally "people-town", etymonically. Thus Seraphington is very neatly translated, "town of seraphim people".
This light and untrammeled adaptation of language rules is again refreshingly reflected in the angel designations. Hebraisms like "seraphim" and "cherubim" rub lingual shoulders with Latin manufacts such as "omniaphim", "tertiaphim", et alia. Function, not form - but in the implementing, a singular formal beauty emerges, too. Similarly, Salvington is "town of people who save". "Nebadon" precisely means "hill of fog", or more contextually exact, "hill of nebulae", from the obvious Latin word-base, a most appropriate piece of wordmaking excellence. "Splandon" means "hill of the viscera". "Caligastia" means immediately "the stockinged one" or "he of the show", or foot, a caliga being originally a Roman legionnaire's military sandal and later, a bishop's legging. But again these are in any translative case good and right names for our particular understanding and use.
Always accentuating the practical, the Urantia Book shows forth its well-integrated advices on functionality in its lingual treatments as well as in its spiritual philosophical approaches. The finesse of its practical word smithing can serve doubly as an anticilatory disarming of those first- impression disillusionments that can come when the book's linguistic improvisation is discovered. Names and language itself, it can't be oversaid, are concept frames, not the reality conceived therewith, and are then necessarily relative. Names get their legitimacy from merest use at the lowest nominating level, and always do depict the reality they describe with greater or lesser fineness of description. Names are but names, and when artfully attuned to function, vehicles of a blissful aesthetic, too.
And we may know that however colloquial or provincial their time-space referencing, the dubbings of this experiential plane do have a universe reality, when they apply to things of cosmic status. Take the example of the rash but beloved dervish of Tarsus, Saul/Paul. Whatever his actual universe name as of post-fusion status, the celestial annals will also forever record the former style of his name during the mortal career (as we know, persons who fail of fusion and therefore survival have no universe name at all.) And thus does a homogenized Hebrew-Greco-Latinism, Saul-cum-Paul, rise to universe status (Saul is Hebraic, of course, and Paul, the Greek form of the Latin Paulus). Indeed, all names and descriptions, no matter how local when dealing with realities of cosmic or survival status, are automatically legitimized with the universal powers as to their respective reference frames.
Among the very many titles and names of Nebadon's sovereign, and duly so verbalized on its records, are such diminutives as "Jesus", "Uncle Joshua", "Peloni" (or "that man", a common derisive moniker for him among the Pharisees), "The King of the Jews", and all other rustic symbolizations for him, no matter how primitive or relatively accurate and as reflecting the attempts of a small planet's will creatures to depict their immediate Creator. And this without any regard to what our Creator's multifarious name-titles are actually within his home perimeter and beyond, or what his many designations are in other local world's language frames.
Names and descriptions are subjective usages, not objective. When an emissaryship makes overture to a native population, it is their subjective terms which are honored, insofar as communication and enlightenment's purposes allow. If the local usage for the primal Cause is "tohu-bohu", this is the term the emissaries too use, to the extent that the concepts it embodies are adequate for conveying those comprehensions they seek to pass on. "Yahweh" and its conceptual evolution illustrate this well. We may conclude that just as Saul/Paul's temporal name is set down just so in the universe accountings of his mortal career, this planet's local-reference name is verily cataloged as "Urantia" (and certainly as well, "Earth"), however else it may be known on the several levels of universe reality. Caligastia's local-reference name is likewise "Caligastia" to universe scribes, no matter what else.
The rule is that of the higher embracing the lower, but not the reverse. Nebadon's language adequately encompasses the verbalization "Urantia", but Urantia's is inherently incapable of wholly expressing the full metaphoric force of "Nebadon's" name for itself. "Urantia" is a local word couched in local language elements. We must not have that linguistic tunnel vision that would assure that the respective local names of entities all across a huge creation were bestowed in accord with our own special lingual perspective. But in those instances wherein provincial designations are recorded realities on high, could, for instance, an invented term of plainly Indo-European homogenesis have had a recognized formality on universe levels from long before this planet came about, and certainly prior to any such limited reality as Indo-European verbalization? By anticipation, surely. The time-space transcendent precognitions of the Gods acknowledge such lingual denotations long befo! re their use by incarnate will creatures. A classic example is the "mesotron", a sub-atomic nuclear entity designated and described in the Urantia Papers in 1934 as a part of a larger exposition on the nature of matter. When later discovered by physicists in 1937, this tiny nuclear proton-neutron mediator was duly dubbed by the same descriptive terminology -- a mesotron. The term has since become universally abbreviated in particle-physics circles to "meson", and not all of its outlined properties have yet been discovered. But its case is illustrative.
The matter of universe nomenclature would differ, however, in cases such as those of prior and purely local-tradition status. "Melchizedek", as example, being unmodifiedly Hebrew in every linguistic respect, composed of distinct meaning elements ("king" and "righteous") in that tongue explicitly; it is unthinkable that an entire order of universe sons would come under that old Semitic nomenclature as their formal verbalized name on their native universe and reality level. We know that the Salem teacher did assume for himself that purely local nomen for the purpose of incarnative consistency with that particular era and culture in which he appeared. And in order to explicate about the higher order from which he originated, the Urantia Book would in all convenience naturally refer to that order by the same classification, Melchizedek.
But it would be a highly inverted arrangement for an entire order of interuniverse principalities to be vested from their beginnings thousands of millennia ago with a Hebrew name classification so that when one of their number appeared among men in the far future, he could with consistency have a Hebrew name. No, the Melchizedeks are so called as a pure function that we may understand the identity of their order with the Salem missionary who wore that name. "Melchizedek" is a purely local name. Here touches again the Urantia Book's wise use of available roots and morphemes where possible to get across meaning in synthesis with its linguistic whole-cloth creations.
The "Vorondadek" and "Lanondadek" sonship orders in point: here are synthetic prefixing phonemes combined with an available morpheme, "dek". The intention here is to imply that this order is akin to the Melchizedek order, and the "dek" stem acts as the signatory device. There is no such independent root, or stem, as "dek" in the Hebrew from which this morpheme is drawn, however. "Zedek" is an intact nondivisible root itself (again, meaning justness or rectitude). But no matter. The very "dek" itself nevertheless acts very well as a metaphoric tool to transmit the desired associative connotation, so it is used, and very aptly. A word need not be a word to convey meaning. Just as a mere piece of a hologram can convey the whole picture with sufficiency, so a piece or makeshift of a phoneme or word can get its message through when embedded in the proper mnemonic setting.
And so without further information we can intuit that the terms "Melchizedek", "Lanonandek", "Vorondadek", "and "Norlatiadek" are interrelated in some fundamental way. Without knowing anything about what these terms denote, we instantly know much of what their structures connote. What about "chronoldek"?
But in language as in all else, its rules are handy tools, not meant to be situationally bound. Rules of language arise to govern situations, not vice-versa. It is the misunderstanding of this nature and purpose of all rules, period, that leads to much grief and misapplication of rules in life. Transgression is not the violation of the rules of a situation; transgression is the violation of the situation. Rules are not themselves ruled by anything. They are expediencies, which situations suggest. Rules are not bound. They too, like language, are relative.
In the main, but with major exceptions in human namesaking after the gods (i.e., Nebuchadnezzar, "Nabu protect my boundary stone"), the etymonics of proper names move from the generic to the particular, from the more literal to the more symbolic. When an old Anglo-Saxon warrior names his son, within his cultural context, "the strength of the army", he phrased it in the dithemic made-word "here-weald", literally, "army's power". Over the transmuting centuries, however, "Harold" came exclusively to be used as a personal name. No more would one think of using the term "Harold", long extinct as anything other than a proper name, to apply actually to an army's might.
So generally, people are named after things and not the other way around. The movement is from generic to specific (though we see another exemption as trade names pass into vernacular). The Hebrew generic for "man", and of course the specific for their legendary first man and racial father, is "adam", meaning literally "red" or "earthy". Was the Hebrew "Adam" a patronymic drawn from ancestral memory of Urantia's Material Son from long before there was anything like a Hebrew language or its protoform Phoenician? Was Hebraic mankind named after Adam, or was Adam named after that mankind, the Hebraic "adam"? The latter, surely. Though the old Hebrew traditionists may not have known it as a clear truth, mankind preceded our Material Son on the planet, and consequently already had a name. And though that name may not have found its way directly into the lingual tree which finally bore Phoenician and Hebrew, we can be sure that the far ancestors of the Hebrews had man named p! rior to the Material Sons's arrival, and that the Hebrew generic "adam" developed out of it.
In accordance, then with its practice of using native terms already in place, where possible, in revealing universe truth, the Urantia Papers' writers named Adam after the existing Hebrew rendering, just as the codifiers of the book of Genesis had readily named their first man after that same generic when they set down the record long after Moses. (In this reference, UB, pp. 836-38.)
Once a city's planner dub a certain throughway Peach Street it is thereafter just that until that name-reality relationship no longer applies. Whether any peaches are to be found there, although a possible additional identifier, alters in no way the propriety or functionalism of the name once established. "Peach Street" is Peach Street, and if my son knows it instead as "the street where Jerry lives", it's that too. Names are relative metaphors, not absolute realities! They may be revealed, but not necessarily inspired, and the deliverers of the Urantia Book used this verity with their typical rare grace.
We know that the post-Abrahamic Hebrew of the scriptures was in fact a later Andonic idiom itself, and that Adam himself spoke a dialect of Andonite as used by Amadon (Urantia Book page 896, eighth paragraph, and page 829, fifth paragraph). The question then is to what extent the generic "Adam" of Hebrew verbalization was a phonetically intact form of the original Andonite term for mankind; this in view of the inevitable processes of phonetic decay and transmutation of syllabic constructions over prolonged periods.
Perhaps one clue lies in the fact that late Sumerian legend's telling of the one mortal created "the model of men" to rule among them gives his name as "Adapa", clearly similar phonically to "Adam", but also a term itself previously subject to phonetic decay if in fact a remnant of the Material Son tradition from at least 30,000 years before the name was fixed in Andite-Sumerian cuneiform records.
Most significant as an indicator of the primordial meaning of "adam" itself as well as of the relatively pure phonetic antiquity of the term at least back to three millennia or so before Christ, and regardless of any alternate phonic forms, is the fact that the Sumerian Andites' word for blood or gore was "adama". (The later appearance of "red" and "earthy" as consequent meanings among the Hebrews and related Semites is plainly enfolded here). The later Chaldaic Babylonian language which supplanted the Sumerian tongue retained the same word base in its "adamatu" for gore or blood. At any rate, Adam's name, whatever its vocalization, was Andonic, and he, imported as an emissary, would have deferentially adopted for himself the local genericism for the people he came to attend.
Again under linguistic realities, because the original "Adam" means generic "man" as well as variantly and specifically "blood", or "earthy", we know it was already in full-blown use in whatever phonetic form before the Material Son's arrival. It is this denotation "of the Earth" that also reveals the primitive common knowledge that mankind had in physical essence literally sprung from the ground through upward evolution (see UB, page 837, paragraph five): thus the earliest Andonites, with or without any semblance of religious tradition, did intuit their evolutionary origins at least as to material makeup.
Illustratively, the Jordan valley town of Adam near the Jabbok River fork means literally "ground", while that not uncommon place-name element of "Adam" throughout the Levant signified the reddish clay often found in the region. Although Adam was racially nor evolutionarily neither red nor earthy (red is opposite the color scale to violet), it may have indeed been that he had red hair as common with the Adamites, and that his local-reference name tied to this designatory sense. Also very pertinent may be the fact that the Hebraic "Adam" variant "Admoni", for "ruddy", is often used of that hair or skin shade in the Old Testament. In any case, as with that of the Melchizedeks, Adam's name however verbalized was solely a local-reference piece of language, not extending to the entire universe order of Material Sons. The Adams and Eves of Jerusem do not have Andonic names, but those fitting their universe language level.
Next question -- did the original Andonites of pre-Material Son days use "adam" to denote generic man generally, or apply it generically only to Andonites? It must be remembered that the Andonites certainly did not call themselves that, and that the first Andonite's Andonic name wasn't even Andon, but Sonta-an, "loved by mother". That his wife was named Sonta-en, "loved by father", and their first child was called Sontad, "loved by us", is already the start of the later universal tradition of family names (and family names move from generic to specific to familial generic: i.e., a metalsmith properly takes the name "Smith", which is then passed on to his children generally).
The Andonic "en" denoting father has an apparent idiomatic survival even down to Sumerian times, when used in a larger transmuted patriarchal definition. The Sumerian "en" specifically had the patriarchal meaning of prelate or priest, though to what extent the term was Andonically derived is beyond available knowing.
So we can know that there was a distinct Sonta family-name tradition among the early Andonites. But again, because of the ultimacy of surname exhaustion and of phonetic decay, how long the name stayed intact or how widely it spread within the larger race grouping are unknowables. But the Andonites as a whole hadn't become entirely lost as a separately identifiable people wither idiomatically or racially as late as the advent of Adam (see UB, page 869, first paragraph). And although his name's verbal form was late Andonic, the Material Son surely would have taken a name deferentially applying to humankind in whole. Thus "adam" in its original phonetic form must have been an Andonite term for everyman generally, not just Andonites or a particular surname subgrouping of the race. This has a special relevance to the matter that "adam" in its red-earthy context could carry the connotation "swarthy", which is surely descriptive of the Andonites.
An interesting illustration of the differential contexts of names is with Adam's first sons, as compared with the later children's names. "Adamson" and Eveson" clearly were not the actual verbalization for these firstborns, "son" being Old Anglish immediately, and by way of the Sanskrit "sunu". The Urantia Book implicitly points to this in variantly listing Adamson as Adam ben Adam (and "ben" itself is a Semitic sonship designator, certainly not Jerusemic). But Cain, Abel, Seth, etc., are the actual local-reference names for the later children, except insofar as phonetic decay had injected itself into the Edenic traditions before the Hebrew scribes of 600 B.C. and later had masoretically frozen the names along with their traditions in the Pentateuch.
The etymology of Eve's name is intriguingly complicated for yet another reason beyond that of Adam's. This is because "Eve" is a mistransliteration in the first place. The actual Hebrew name for the female adam is "Chavvah", alternately "Hawwah", meaning literally "life" or "living", although virtually all scripture renderings have followed roughshod the translative abuse of the Latinized "Eve".
* * * GENERAL REFERENCE WORKS Gesenius, Friedrich H.W.,Gesenius' Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, Erdmans, Grand Rapids, 1950 M'Clintock, John, and Strong, James, Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, Arno Press, NY 1969 Pritchard, James B., ed Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, "Adapa", pp. 101-03, Princeton University Press, 1969, third edition. * * * * * * Glossary: Dithemic- Having or characterized by two themes. Etymology- The history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language. Masoresa - A body of notes on the textual traditions of the Hebrew old Testament compiled by scribes during the 1st millennium of the Christian era. Metaphor- A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. Phoneme- A member of the set of the smallest units of speech that serve to distinguish one utterance from another in a language or dialect. Syncretic- The combination of two or more orig. different inflectional forms.
Xerpi
