Urantia Book Commentary and Articles

By Eric Young
Christian Post Reporter
Fri, Oct. 02 2009

A team of researchers unveiled Thursday research findings on the skeleton of a hominid who is now being touted by some as the earliest known human ancestor of modern-day man.

The multinational team of 47 researchers, who have been studying the bones of "Ardi" since they were discovered in 1994, presented the oldest known skeleton of the "potential human ancestor," calling it by far the most complete among those of the earliest specimens found.

The skeleton, found in Ethiopia and thought to be 4.4-million years old, includes most of the skull and teeth, as well as the pelvis, hands, and feet - parts that the researchers say reveal an "intermediate" form of upright walking, considered a hallmark of hominids.

"This species...resolves many uncertainties about early human evolution, including the nature of the last common ancestor that we shared with the line leading to living chimpanzees and bonobos," commented team member , director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The most popular reconstructions of human evolution during the past century rested on the presumption that the behaviors of the earliest hominids were related to [or even natural amplifications of] behaviors observed in these living great apes (Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas...our closest living relatives)," added anthropologist C. O. Lovejoy of Kent State University. "Ardipithecus ramidus nullifies these presumptions, as it shows that the anatomy of living African apes is not primitive but instead has evolved specifically within extant ape lineages."

Simply put, this means the new skeleton reverses the common understanding of human evolution. Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, "Ardi" provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor - but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," White told The Associated Press.

Please click on "external source" for the complete article...and below are some Urantia Book quotes that seem to corroborate the finding of the article, although the time-line is off by a couple million years. Please click on the reference links to open the text.

61:6.1 The great event of this glacial period was the evolution of primitive man. Slightly to the west of India, on land now under water and among the offspring of Asiatic migrants of the older North American lemur types, the dawn mammals suddenly appeared. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they possessed large brains in proportion to their size and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this order of life a new and higher group of animals suddenly differentiated. These new mid-mammalsâ€”almost twice the size and height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately increased brain powerâ€”had only well established themselves when the Primates, the third vital mutation, suddenly appeared. (At this same time, a retrograde development within the mid-mammal stock gave origin to the simian ancestry; and from that day to this the human branch has gone forward by progressive evolution, while the simian tribes have remained stationary or have actually retrogressed.)

62.3.12 ...man and the ape are related only in that they sprang from the mid-mammals, a tribe in which there occurred the contemporaneous birth and subsequent segregation of two pairs of twins: the inferior pair destined to produce the modern types of monkey, baboon, chimpanzee, and gorilla; the superior pair destined to continue the line of ascent which evolved into man himself.

62.3.13 Modern man and the simians did spring from the same tribe and species but not from the same parents. Manâ€™s ancestors are descended from the superior strains of the selected remnant of this mid-mammal tribe, whereas the modern simians (excepting certain pre-existent types of lemurs, gibbons, apes, and other monkeylike creatures) are the descendants of the most inferior couple of this mid-mammal group, a couple who only survived by hiding themselves in a subterranean food-storage retreat for more than two weeks during the last fierce battle of their tribe, emerging only after the hostilities were well over.

Labels: Ardipithecus ramidus, Eric Young, evolution, hominids, The Urantia Book, Tim D. White

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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Four Myths Defy Modern Science

This is a very interesting article posted by Dr Mercola. Enjoy the movie...To view additional comments by Dr Mercola, please click on "external source" below.

Following are some Urantia Book quotes which illustrate the soundness of the ideas presented in this video, and their harmony with Urantia Book teachings:

MECHANICAL UNIVERSE MYTH

103:6.4 When man analytically inspects the universe through the material endowments of his physical senses and associated mind perception, the cosmos appears to be mechanical and energy-material. Such a technique of studying reality consists in turning the universe inside out.

42:11.1 In the evaluation and recognition of mind it should be remembered that the universe is neither mechanical nor magical; it is a creation of mind and a mechanism of law. But while in practical application the laws of nature operate in what seems to be the dual realms of the physical and the spiritual, in reality they are one.

42:11.2 Mechanisms do not absolutely dominate the total creation; the universe of universes in toto is mind planned, mind made, and mind administered. But the divine mechanism of the universe of universes is altogether too perfect for the scientific methods of the finite mind of man to discern even a trace of the dominance of the infinite mind. For this creating, controlling, and upholding mind is neither material mind nor creature mind; it is spirit-mind functioning on and from creator levels of divine reality.

LIFE IS BASED ON SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

49:1.6 The early stages of life evolution are not altogether in conformity with your present-day views. Mortal man is not an evolutionary accident. There is a precise system, a universal law, which determines the unfolding of the planetary life plan on the spheres of space. Time and the production of large numbers of a species are not the controlling influences. Mice reproduce much more rapidly than elephants, yet elephants evolve more rapidly than mice.

71:5.3 Throughout the earlier ages of any world, competition is essential to progressive civilization. As the evolution of man progresses, co-operation becomes increasingly effective. In advanced civilizations co-operation is more efficient than competition. Early man is stimulated by competition. Early evolution is characterized by the survival of the biologically fit, but later civilizations are the better promoted by intelligent co-operation, understanding fraternity, and spiritual brotherhood.

LIFE EVOLVED AS A RANDOM PROCESS

49:1.7 The process of planetary evolution is orderly and controlled. The development of higher organisms from lower groupings of life is not accidental. Sometimes evolutionary progress is temporarily delayed by the destruction of certain favorable lines of life plasm carried in a selected species. It often requires ages upon ages to recoup the damage occasioned by the loss of a single superior strain of human heredity. These selected and superior strains of living protoplasm should be jealously and intelligently guarded when once they make their appearance. And on most of the inhabited worlds these superior potentials of life are valued much more highly than on Urantia.

GENES CONTROL YOUR LIFE

116:6.1 In the evolutionary superuniverses energy-matter is dominant except in personality, where spirit through the mediation of mind is struggling for the mastery. The goal of the evolutionary universes is the subjugation of energy-matter by mind, the co-ordination of mind with spirit, and all of this by virtue of the creative and unifying presence of personality. Thus, in relation to personality, do physical systems become subordinate; mind systems, co-ordinate; and spirit systems, directive.

19:1.5 ...The human mind would ordinarily crave to approach the cosmic philosophy portrayed in these revelations by proceeding from the simple and the finite to the complex and the infinite, from human origins to divine destinies. But that path does not lead to spiritual wisdom. Such a procedure is the easiest path to a certain form of genetic knowledge, but at best it can only reveal man's origin; it reveals little or nothing about his divine destiny.

Labels: Dr Bruce Lipton, Dr Mercola, evolution, genetics, mechanical universe, spiritual growth, The Urantia Book, video

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Thursday, September 03, 2009

Hawking Radiation

A clip from a BBC documentary explaining Hawking radiation around black holes.

The Urantia Book tells us that there are several types of "dark islands" of space. Here is one that may correspond with this discovery by Stephen Hawking:

41:1.5 One Supreme Power Center of the sixth order is stationed at the exact gravity focus of each local system. In the system of Satania the assigned power center occupies a dark island of space located at the astronomic center of the system. Many of these dark islands are vast dynamos which mobilize and directionize certain space-energies, and these natural circumstances are effectively utilized by the Satania Power Center, whose living mass functions as a liaison with the higher centers, directing the streams of more materialized power to the Master Physical Controllers on the evolutionary planets of space.

Labels: astronomy, black holes, dark islands of space, space radiation, Stephen Hawking, The Urantia Book

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Saturday, August 29, 2009

The Big Bang Briefly

Truthbook did not produce this video, but only offers it for your interest...

We [not Truthbook] made this video about the Big Bang because the theory is important and amazing, but often misunderstood.

This video was produced without any funding from any outside sources. It was put together with donated creative time from a group with a desire to further public cognition of science.

Science has many amazing stories to tell, this is the first. The Big Bang Briefly.
-------------------
Story Teller: Janna Levin
Director: Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner
Producer: Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner
Animation Studio: Thornberg & Forester
Director of Animation: Justin Meredith
Editorial: Proton Studio
DP: Luke Geissbuhler
Music: Copilot
Color: James Long

In the interest of advancing revealed cosmological truth from The Urantia Book we also offer the following collection of quotes taken from our new study of Evolution. They may help in addressing some of the issues brought up in the video.

________________
In The Beginning...

"In the eternity of the past...," The Urantia Book reveals, God the Spirit - the third person of the Trinity - came into existence. He is the God of Action

The stage of universal space is set for the manifold and never-ending panorama of the creative unfolding of the purpose of the Universal Father through the personality of the Eternal Son and by the execution of the God of Action, the executive agency for the reality performances of the Father-Son creator partnership.(8:1.3)

The Perfect Worlds of Havona are Created. This is center of the universe of universes.

The God of Action functions and the dead vaults of space are astir. One billion perfect spheres flash into existence. Prior to this hypothetical eternity moment the space-energies inherent in Paradise are existent and potentially operative, but they have no actuality of being; neither can physical gravity be measured except by the reaction of material realities to its incessant pull. There is no material universe at this (assumed) eternally distant moment, but the very instant that one billion worlds materialize, there is in evidence gravity sufficient and adequate to hold them in the everlasting grasp of Paradise.(8:1.4)

Gravity, Spirit and Personality in Relation to the Perfect Creation of Havona

There now flashes through the creation of the Gods the second form of energy, and this outflowing spirit is instantly grasped by the spiritual gravity of the Eternal Son. Thus the twofold gravity-embraced universe is touched with the energy of infinity and immersed in the spirit of divinity. In this way is the soil of life prepared for the consciousness of mind made manifest in the associated intelligence circuits of the Infinite Spirit.

Upon these seeds of potential existence, diffused throughout the central creation of the Gods, the Father acts, and creature personality appears. Then does the presence of the Paradise Deities fill all organized space and begin effectively to draw all things and beings Paradiseward. (8:1.5)

This is the one and only settled, perfect, and established aggregation of worlds. This is a wholly created and perfect universe; it is not an evolutionary development. This is the eternal core of perfection, about which swirls that endless procession of universes which constitute the tremendous evolutionary experiment, the audacious adventure of the Creator Sons of God, who aspire to duplicate in time and to reproduce in space the pattern universe, the ideal of divine completeness, supreme finality, ultimate reality, and eternal perfection.(14:0.2)

Havona is the home of the pattern personality of every mortal type and the home of all superhuman personalities of mortal association who are not native to the creations of time. (14:6.34)

In brief, the Infinite Spirit testifies that, since he is eternal, so also is the central universe eternal. And this is the traditional starting point of the history of the universe of universes.(8:1.9)

From the Infinite to the Finite - The Time-Space Creations, and the "Growth Cycle"

When the perfect worlds of the Central Universe have been created, there remains the creation of the worlds of time and space - the finite creations whereon mortal beings have their existence by the freewill choice of the First Source and Center.

Finite possibility is inherent in the Infinite, but the transmutation of possibility to probability and inevitability must be attributed to the self-existent free will of the First Source and Center, activating all triunity associations. Only the infinity of the Father's will could ever have so qualified the absolute level of existence as to eventuate an ultimate or to create a finite.

With the appearance of relative and qualified reality there comes into being a new cycle of realityâ€”the growth cycleâ€”a majestic downsweep from the heights of infinity to the domain of the finite, forever swinging inward to Paradise and Deity, always seeking those high destinies commensurate with an infinity source.

These inconceivable transactions mark the beginning of universe history, mark the coming into existence of time itself. To a creature, the beginning of the finite is the genesis of reality; as viewed by creature mind, there is no actuality conceivable prior to the finite.(105:5.6)

The universe response involved an activation of the architectural plans for the superuniverse space level, and this evolution is still progressing throughout the physical organization of the seven superuniverses. (105:6.3)

Enjoy the show...

Labels: astronomy, Big Bang, cosmology, God, Janna Levin, science, the universe, The Urantia Book, video

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Newfound Planet Orbits Backward

by Jeanna Bryner And Robert Roy Britt

Planets orbit stars in the same direction that the stars rotate. They all do. Except one.

A newfound planet orbits the wrong way, backward compared to the rotation of its host star. Its discoverers think a near-collision may have created the retrograde orbit, as it is called.

The star and its planet, WASP-17, are about 1,000 light-years away. The setup was found by the UK's Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project in collaboration with Geneva Observatory. The discovery was announced today but has not yet been published in a journal.

What's going on

A star forms when a cloud of gas and dust collapses. Whatever movement the cloud had becomes intensified as it condenses, determining the rotational direction of the star. How planets form is less certain. They are, however, known to develop out of the leftover, typically disk-shaped mass of gas and dust that swirls around a newborn star, so whatever direction that material is moving, which is the direction of the star's rotation, becomes the direction of the planet's orbit.

WASP-17 likely had a close encounter with a larger planet, and the gravitational interaction acted like a slingshot to put WASP-17 on its odd course, the astronomers figure.

Cosmic collisions are not uncommon. Earth's moon was made when our planet collided with a Mars-sized object, astronomers think. And earlier this week NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope found evidence of two planets colliding around a distant, young star. Some moons in our solar system are on retrograde orbits, perhaps at least in some cases because they were flying through space alone and then captured; that's thought to be the case with Neptune's large moon Triton.

Please click on "external source" to access this entire article, including several interesting related links - one concerning the ten most intriguing extrasolar planets.

The following quote from The Urantia Book gives some corroboration to the scientific findings in this article.

From The Urantia Book:(bold is added by ed.)

57:5.14 All of the solar system material derived from the sun was originally endowed with a homogeneous direction of orbital swing, and had it not been for the intrusion of these three foreign space bodies, all solar system material would still maintain the same direction of orbital movement. As it was, the impact of the three Angona tributaries injected new and foreign directional forces into the emerging solar system with the resultant appearance of retrograde motion. Retrograde motion in any astronomic system is always accidental and always appears as a result of the collisional impact of foreign space bodies. Such collisions may not always produce retrograde motion, but no retrograde ever appears except in a system containing masses which have diverse origins.

Labels: Jeanna Bryner, planetary systems, planets, retrograde motion, Robert Roy Britt, The Urantia Book, WASP

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Did You Know?

This video is an amazing testament to the speed with which Urantian civilization is accelerating...but is it accelerating in the right direction? Is is truly sustainable?

p1086:6(99:1.3) Urantia society can never hope to settle down as in past ages. The social ship has steamed out of the sheltered bays of established tradition and has begun its cruise upon the high seas of evolutionary destiny; and the soul of man, as never before in the world's history, needs carefully to scrutinize its charts of morality and painstakingly to observe the compass of religious guidance. The paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of mankind during these dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another, from one level of culture to another.

p909:6(81:6.25) The greatest twentieth-century influences contributing to the furtherance of civilization and the advancement of culture are the marked increase in world travel and the unparalleled improvements in methods of communication. But the improvement in education has not kept pace with the expanding social structure; neither has the modern appreciation of ethics developed in correspondence with growth along more purely intellectual and scientific lines. And modern civilization is at a standstill in spiritual development and the safeguarding of the home institution.

p910:1(81:6.28) At first life was a struggle for existence; now, for a standard of living; next it will be for quality of thinking, the coming earthly goal of human existence.

p1772:4(160:1.3) The more complex civilization becomes, the more difficult will become the art of living. The more rapid the changes in social usage, the more complicated will become the task of character development. Every ten generations mankind must learn anew the art of living if progress is to continue. And if man becomes so ingenious that he more rapidly adds to the complexities of society, the art of living will need to be remastered in less time, perhaps every single generation. If the evolution of the art of living fails to keep pace with the technique of existence, humanity will quickly revert to the simple urge of livingâ€”the attainment of the satisfaction of present desires. Thus will humanity remain immature; society will fail in growing up to full maturity

Please see The Maintenance of Civilization

And enjoy this short presentation...!

Labels: civilization, communication, complexity, religion, The Urantia Book

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Sunday, May 17, 2009

German Fossil Found to Be Early Primate

This article is on the same subject as the previous one, but with a slightly different perspective. From the Urantia Book:

p703:5 62:2.1 A little more than one million years ago the Mesopotamian dawn mammals, the direct descendants of the North American lemur type of placental mammal, suddenly appeared. They were active little creatures, almost three feet tall; and while they did not habitually walk on their hind legs, they could easily stand erect. They were hairy and agile and chattered in monkeylike fashion, but unlike the simian tribes, they were flesh eaters. They had a primitive opposable thumb as well as a highly useful grasping big toe. From this point onward the prehuman species successively developed the opposable thumb while they progressively lost the grasping power of the great toe. The later ape tribes retained the grasping big toe but never developed the human type of thumb.

p706:3 62:3.12 And so it may be readily seen that man and the ape are related only in that they sprang from the mid-mammals, a tribe in which there occurred the contemporaneous birth and subsequent segregation of two pairs of twins: the inferior pair destined to produce the modern types of monkey, baboon, chimpanzee, and gorilla; the superior pair destined to continue the line of ascent which evolved into man himself.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 16, 2009

Fossil remains of a 47-million-year-old animal, found years ago in Germany, have been analyzed more thoroughly and determined to be an extremely early primate close to the emergence of the evolutionary branch leading to monkeys, apes and humans, scientists said in interviews this week.

Described as the "most complete fossil primate ever discovered," the specimen is a juvenile female the size of a small monkey. Only the left lower limb is missing, and the preservation is so remarkable that impressions of fur and the soft body outline are still clear. The animal's last meal, of fruit and leaves, remained in the stomach cavity.

In an article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS One, an online scientific journal, an international team of scientists will report that this extraordinary fossil could be a "stem group" from which higher primates evolved, 'but we are not advocating this."

This is only a few sentences from a very interesting article, and pretty exciting, as it appears to corroborate what the Urantia Book tells us about this part of the evolutionary process, and this particular branch of the tree...please click on "external source" to access the complete article.

Labels: anthropology, Germany, John Noble WIilford, paleontology, primates, science, The Urantia Book

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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

May 16, 2009

From The Urantia Book:

The great event of this glacial period was the evolution of primitive man. Slightly to the west of India, on land now under water and among the offspring of Asiatic migrants of the older North American lemur types, the dawn mammals suddenly appeared. These small animals walked mostly on their hind legs, and they possessed large brains in proportion to their size and in comparison with the brains of other animals. In the seventieth generation of this order of life a new and higher group of animals suddenly differentiated. These new mid-mammals-almost twice the size and height of their ancestors and possessing proportionately increased brain power-had only well established themselves when the Primates, the third vital mutation, suddenly appeared. (At this same time, a retrograde development within the mid-mammal stock gave origin to the simian ancestry; and from that day to this the human branch has gone forward by progressive evolution, while the simian tribes have remained stationary or have actually retrogressed.)
p700:2 (61:6.1)

MAY 15, 2009
Fossil Discovery Is Heralded

By GAUTAM NAIK

In what could prove to be a landmark discovery, a leading paleontologist said scientists have dug up the 47 million-year-old fossil of an ancient primate whose features suggest it could be the common ancestor of all later monkeys, apes and humans.

Anthropologists have long believed that humans evolved from ancient ape-like ancestors. Some 50 million years ago, two ape-like groups walked the Earth. One is known as the tarsidae, a precursor of the tarsier, a tiny, large-eyed creature that lives in Asia. Another group is known as the adapidae, a precursor of today's lemurs in Madagascar.

Based on previously limited fossil evidence, one big debate had been whether the tarsidae or adapidae group gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. The latest discovery bolsters the less common position that our ancient ape-like ancestor was an adapid, the believed precursor of lemurs.

Please click on "external source" for this most interesting article...

Labels: anthropology, evolution, Gautam Naik, lemurs, paleontology, The Urantia Book

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Friday, April 10, 2009

Astronomers: Dark Matter Guides Universe's Structure

by Bob Evans on
Apr 5, 2009

A 10-year study of 100,000 galaxies close to our own offers compelling proof that long-hypothesized "dark matter" does exist and is in fact a guiding force behind the structure of the universe, a team of Australian, British, and American astronomers revealed this week.

Saying that "the universe we see is really quite structured," one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year "census" of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter "seems to hold the galaxies together."

The dark matter's influence on galaxies "stops their constituent stars from flying off and it seems to be driving the large-scale galaxy clusters and super clusters" that are the largest objects in the universe, said Dr. Heath Jones of the Anglo Australian Observatory in an article on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Offering rich details about the direction, speed, shape, and evolving structure of 100,000 galaxies, the 10-year study offered great promise because of its exhaustive scope: it analyzed those dynamic properties for a much larger number of galaxies than any other study had ever attempted.

In reviewing the data from the study, Jones said, it became clear that directly observable visible objects could not possibly have exerted sufficient gravitational force to account for all of the movement and dynamics of the galaxies being studied.

And in hypothesing about what other, nonvisible forces could account for that additional gravitational effect, theories about dark matter completed that equation very nicely, he told the ABC:

"The galaxies just aren't uniform. They are scattered throughout the universe," he said. "What we find is that they tend to clump and cluster together. So you'll get galaxies clustering along nice delicate filamentary chains. You get some galaxies that will congregate in their clusters and you will get clusters of galaxies collecting in super clusters of galaxies, so the universe that we see is really quite structuredâ€¦.

"Astronomers know that this dark matter must exist in the universe," he said. "We can't see it with our telescopes directly, but by studying large objects like galaxies and how they move with respect to each other we can infer its existence quite accurately."

In addition to the compelling evidence the study provides for the existence of dark matter, Jones said, it also offers equally compelling proof that the universe is expanding and will continue to do so, rather than at some point collapsing back in upon itself as some astronomers have theorized.

Labels: Bob Evans, dark matter, Dr. Heath Jones, galaxies, gravity, the universe, The Urantia Book

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Sunday, April 05, 2009

Editorial/Opinion Letters to the editor

Published Friday, April 3, 2009 9:26 AM MDT

Total collapse?

Dear Editor:

Jesus prayed, "Thy will be done on Earth as it is done in Heaven." Surely all Christians want this prayer to become reality, but how can we do our part to bring this to fruition if we don't know how things are done in heaven?

Nearly one hundred years ago in Chicago divine personalities began transmitting messages through a sleeping individual. Didn't Saint Luke write, "For with God nothing is impossible." After more than 40 years of transmissions these papers known as the "Urantia Papers" were published in 1955 as the Urantia Book. This 2,000 page book self proclaims to be the most recent presentation of truth to our planet.

The first 1,300 pages teach how things are done in Heaven. The last 700 pages are the complete life and teachings of Jesus. These papers give a detailed account of 19 appearances of Jesus after his resurrection. The New Testament only tells of four appearances.

When I became a student of the book in the 1970s I was intrigued by a paper entitled, "Government on a Neighboring Planet." The authors claim that our planet is in dire need of help and they relate how the most progressive nation on this neighboring planet is advancing its civilization. The paper makes suggestions for improvement in ten areas of our society. At this point of our nation's development, I believe the areas of Home Life, Education, Dealing with Crime, and Military Preparedness are the most relative.

In the family children are not allowed to marry until the age of twenty. They must attend marriage preparation classes before given a marriage license, and they must attend weekly parenting classes until their children are grown.

The education system doesn't confine children in classrooms. In the basics they are home schooled. The public schools are farms, building skills, libraries, and technical skills. One half of each school day is devoted to competitive athletics for all students. When they graduate from the public schools they are skilled craftsmen and women. All who desire academic education can attend colleges without cost.

Crime in this advanced nation is dealt with justly and quickly. The death penalty is given to all public officials who betray the public trust and to all petty criminals who can't be rehabilitated.

Military preparedness is only for defensive purposes. To aid less advanced nations, scholarships are provided for the most able students. They are taught by example how to advance their home nations.

Will the economic programs of the Obama administration rescue our nation and keep us from total collapse? Or is this an example of "the blind leading the blind?" Maybe it's time that skeptics make a serious investigation of The Urantia Book. Copies of the book can be found in our local libraries, the book is also on the internet.

Sincerely

Lynn E. Rhoderick

Labels: Government on a Neighboring Planet, heaven, Lynn E. Rhoderick, planet earth, President Obama, The Urantia Book

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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Keck and Kepler team up to find other Earths

From the Urantia Book:

Satania itself is an unfinished system containing only 619 inhabited worlds. Such planets are numbered serially in accordance with their registration as inhabited worlds, as worlds inhabited by will creatures. Thus was Urantia given the number 606 of Satania, meaning the 606th world in this local system on which the long evolutionary life process culminated in the appearance of human beings. There are thirty-six uninhabited planets nearing the life-endowment stage, and several are now being made ready for the Life Carriers. There are nearly two hundred spheres which are evolving so as to be ready for life implantation within the next few million years.

Not all planets are suited to harbor mortal life. Small ones having a high rate of axial revolution are wholly unsuited for life habitats. In several of the physical systems of Satania the planets revolving around the central sun are too large for habitation, their great mass occasioning oppressive gravity. Many of these enormous spheres have satellites, sometimes a half dozen or more, and these moons are often in size very near that of Urantia, so that they are almost ideal for habitation.

The oldest inhabited world of Satania, world number one, is Anova, one of the forty-four satellites revolving around an enormous dark planet but exposed to the differential light of three neighboring suns. Anova is in an advanced stage of progressive civilization. p559:3 49:0.3

Keck and Kepler team up to find other Earths

This is an exciting article about the newest of science's efforts to discover inhabitable (or inhabited?) planets outside our solar system. Please click on "external source" to access the entire article, and to follow links to the Keck Observatory site - most interesting!

Kamuela, Hawaii- For nearly a decade, Cal-Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy and his colleagues have been using the W. M. Keck telescopes to discover giant planets orbiting distant stars. Now, with the successful launch of NASA's Kepler mission, they will be using Keck I's ten-meter astronomical eye to discover distant Earths. Kepler will pick out Earth-like candidates. Keck will then zero in on them and determine, with certainty, if they are at all similar to our home planet.

"Keck and NASA have a long-standing partnership to push astronomy research to its fullest potential. This Keck-Kepler collaboration gives that partnership a compelling new scientific focus," said Taft Armandroff, the Director of Keck Observatory headquartered in Kamuela, HI.

Kepler was launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center last Friday. Aboard the spacecraft is an 84-megapixel camera that will focus on a single region of the sky and snap repeated images of 100,000 stars looking for those that dim periodically. By studying the stars' episodic decreases in starlight, astronomers will be able to determine the diameter of the object that passes in front of the star, blocks its light and causes the dimming.

"Kepler does not tell astronomers with certainty if the object taking a bite out of the starlight is a planet or another star. That is where Keck plays a crucial role to the Kepler mission," said Marcy, a frequent Keck user and Kepler mission co-investigator. He, along with a large international planet-hunting team, has discovered nearly half of the 300-plus known planets outside the Solar System.

Astronomers call the objects Kepler detects transits because from the telescope's perspective the planet candidate seems to eclipse its parent star's light. The phenomenon is similar to the Moon eclipsing the Sun during a total solar eclipse. But a distant planet eclipsing its parent star will only block a small fraction, 1/10,000, of the star's light. The Moon, by contrast, blocks nearly all of the Sun's light in a total solar eclipse.

In the Kepler-Keck duo, once Kepler team members find an Earth candidate and determine as best they can that theyâ€™re not looking at two stars orbiting each other, they will hand the object off to Marcy and his colleagues. The team will use Keck I telescope and its instrument HIRES, the High Resolution Spectrometer, to monitor how the light coming from the parent star changes as the planet candidate orbits.

HIRES is an instrument that spreads light collected from the telescope mirrors into its component wavelengths or colors. This is called a spectrum. When the planet candidate orbits around the back of the star, its gravity will ever so slightly pull on the star causing the star's spectrum to shift toward redder wavelengths. When the planet comes around in its orbit to cross the face of the star, it will pull the star in the other direction, and the star's spectrum will shift toward bluer wavelengths. HIRES will detect these shifts and give astronomers the star's radial velocity, or the speed at which the star moves toward or away from Earth. Based on this speed, Marcy and his team will be able to calculate the mass of planet candidate.

Calculating the planet candidate's mass is important because it tells astronomers whether a planet or another star is eclipsing the parent star. If the object turns out to be a planet, Marcy and his team can then use the Keck-calculated mass and Kepler-calculated diameter to determine the planet's density. "In a sense it's as if we are taking the planets and dunking them in a bathtub to see if they float. A rocky planet like Earth would sink," Marcy said. Earth has a density of about five grams per cubic centimeter. Gas giants, on the other hand, have a density close to water at about one gram per cubic centimeter.

"Studying the radial velocity of the planet candidates Kepler discovers is a key endeavor in understanding our place in the cosmos. It will help answer one of humanity's biggest questions, "Are we alone?" Armandroff said.

Marcy and his colleagues plan to start studying Kepler's candidate Earths with Keck I and HIRES during the last three nights of July 2009.

Labels: Geoff Marcy, High Resolution Spectrometer, Keck Observatory, Kepler mission, NASA, planets, Satania, Taft Armandroff, The Urantia Book

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Friday, March 13, 2009

Why is TUB translated into other languages when its authors favor a one world language?

Q: Why is The Urantia Book translated into other languages when its authors favor a one world language?

A: The very first paragraph of the book states that the authors were "authorized to translate into the English language..." I think one reason that the authors chose English is that it is a very fluid language, ever adaptable and full of derivative words from many languages.

This is surely no accidental or unthinking choice. All we have to do is look around us and we see that many countries educate their children in English, and English, I have heard, is becoming the language of business as well. And we know how important commerce is to establishing global unity and cooperation.

Jesus was conversant in several languages, and this is a trend that is developing throughout the world. For example, here in America, English co-exists with Spanish in many communities. Language is an evolutionary development, and it is going to take a long time before we reach the stage of a "one tongue" world, which is a feature of the ages of Light and Life.

Some may question the decisions that have been made regarding translations into other languages, but it seems to me that if you want to reach a wide audience, you do what is necessary. Jesus said that we were to spread this message to all the world... better that people should get this message in their own language right now; later on, they may be able to master English because of it. But regardless, they will have gotten the good news.

We are given no concrete guidance in the book regarding this issue, but since the Urantia Revelation is meant to feed humanity for the next millenium or so, I think translations in other languages at this early stage is entirely appropriate. In the end, the message of The Urantia Book - in any language - must be translated by each individual into "the language of the spirit..." that Jesus spoke of.

Thanks for this interesting question!

Labels: authors, English, language, The Urantia Book, translations

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Do we have intelligent planetary neighbors?

Q: The Urantia Book authors state that there is intelligent life in close proximity to Earth. They go on to say that there are three planets in our solar system suited to harbor life. Do we have intelligent planetary neighbors?

A: The Urantia Book teaches us that there are three planets near us that are suitable to harbor life, but perhaps not intelligent life, as we know it. However, there MAY BE intelligent life on some of the moons in our solar system.

Even if a planetary moon may appear to have no familiar attributes that would support life as we know it on Earth, it may yet be able to support life-forms that are unlike us, for example, the nonbreathers. The nonbreathers are a fascinating group, and they are mortals like us, except that they are not Adjuster-fused. Their lives are very different from our own, as you will see if you follow the links.

We are told in The Urantia Book that there are nine moons in our local universe which can support the nonbreather type of life, and, intriguingly, "You would be more than interested in the planetary conduct of this type of mortal because such a race of beings inhabits a sphere in close proximity to Urantia." p564:2(49:3.6)

Earth science may be our best bet for eventually uncovering these mysteries. Some of the moons of Saturn, such as Titan, which has an atmosphere (nitrogen and methane) and Enceladus, which seems to have a "primordial soup" and "deep sea vent" components have been the subject of recent speculation concerning the possibilities of life as we know it, but I am far more intrigued by these other moons which may harbor nonbreathers, who enjoy a type of life quite unlike ours. Jupiter also has a number of moons that are of interest.

So, that makes these moons of our solar system quite interesting to me...we could indeed, have intelligent (and God-knowing) neighbors closer than we know right now! Hope I live long enough to find out for sure...

Labels: extraterrestrials, Jupiter, moons, nonbreathers, planets, Saturn, The Urantia Book

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Do the Urantia Book authors refer to the Gregorian calendar?

Q: Do the Urantia Book authors refer to the Gregorian calendar?

The simple answer is no, the word Gregorian isn't mentioned in the text of The Urantia Book, but the authors do use the Gregorian calendar for their date references.

There are 6 references to the year 1934:
(31:10.12),
(56:10.20) ,
(62:5.1) ,
(62:7.6) ,
(63:6.7),
(74:0.1),
and one for the year 1935(119:8.9).

The year 1934 is used as the base year in the precise date calculations given by the authors of the papers, 1934 being the year when the bulk of material was indited for Parts I-III; the restatement of Jesus' life and teachings came after that in 1935. The specific dates of Jesus' life begin at 7 B.C.

The dates A.D. are based on the Gregorian calendar. B.C.dates prior to Jesus are usually counted back from the year 1934.

Labels: Gregorian calendar, The Urantia Book

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Sunday, February 15, 2009

AAAS: 'One hundred billion trillion' planets where alien life could flourish

p166:8 15:2.9 7. The Grand Universe. Seven superuniverses make up the present organized grand universe, consisting of approximately seven trillion inhabitable worlds plus the architectural spheres and the one billion inhabited spheres of Havona. The superuniverses are ruled and administered indirectly and reflectively from Paradise by the Seven Master Spirits. The billion worlds of Havona are directly administered by the Eternals of Days, one such Supreme Trinity Personality presiding over each of these perfect spheres.

There could be one hundred billion trillion Earth-like planets in space, making it "inevitable" that extraterrestrial life exists, according to a leading astronomer.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent in Chicago
Last Updated: 12:05PM GMT 15 Feb 2009

Life on Earth used to be thought of as a freak accident that only happened once.

But scientists are now coming to the conclusion that the universe is teeming with living organisms.

The change in thinking has come about because of the new belief there are an abundant number of habitable planets like Earth.

Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, said there could be as many Earths as there are stars in the universe - one hundred billion trillion.

Because of this, he believes it is "inevitable" that life must have flourished elsewhere over the billions of years the universe has existed.

"If you have a habitable world and let it evolve for a few billion years then inevitably some sort of life will form on it," said Dr Boss.

"It is sort of running an experiment in your refrigerator - turn it off and something will grow in there.

He believes his views will be proved by NASA's Kepler outer space-based telescope, which takes off in the next three weeks with a mission to track down Earth-like habitable planets.

Within four years Dr Boss, who was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, believes it will have found one in our galaxy and that will prove his theories about their abundance.

He then would like researchers to build even bigger telescopes and send out an unmanned spacecraft to take photographs of the distant planet that could be up to 30 light years away. It would, however, take at least 2,000 years to report back.

Dr Boss said: "We already know enough now to say that the universe is probably loaded with terrestrial planets similar to the Earth," he says.

Labels: Alan Boss, American Association for the Advancement of Science, inhabited planets, Kepler Telescope, Richard Alleyne, The Urantia Book

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Our Inner Artist - Book Review

Reviewed by Jonah Lehrer
Sunday, January 11, 2009

This is an interesting article about art, and its necessity in the lives of mankind. The Urantia Book suggests that art is a desire for the good, true and beautiful; Dutton has an unusual take on art.

Click on "external link" at the bottom to access the complete article, and click here for a Truthbook topical study of "Art" from the pages of The Urantia Book.

THE ART INSTINCT

Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution

By Denis Dutton

Bloomsbury. 278 pp. $25

The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders.

Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct, people the world over are weirdly driven to create beautiful things. These aesthetic objects are utterly useless -- W.H. Auden pointed out that they make "nothing happen" -- and yet we enshrine them in climate-controlled museums and pay millions of dollars for a silkscreen of a soup can. What began with a few horses on the walls of a French cave has blossomed into a human obsession.

The premise of Dutton's work is that this instinct for art isn't an accident. Instead, he argues that our desire for beauty is firmly grounded in evolution, a side effect of the struggle to survive and reproduce. In this sense, a cubist painting by Picasso is no more mysterious than the allure of a Playboy centerfold: Both are works of culture that attempt to sate a biological drive.

Dutton frames his argument as a scientific response to the idea that art is a "social construction," driven by the fads of society. He begins the book by describing a series of paintings by the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in the early 1990s surveyed people in 10 countries on their preferences regarding color, subject matter and painterly style. These poll results were then distilled into a series of realist landscapes. The American painting, for instance, featured a foreground of sun-dappled grass, a lake, a few adorable children and the figure of George Washington. It's an absurd pastiche, the visual equivalent of combining all of America's favorite foods in the same dish. We might enjoy pizza and ice cream, but that doesn't mean we want pizza-flavored ice cream.

While Dutton appreciates the irony of Komar and Melamid, he's more intrigued by the striking similarity of their paintings. Although the 10 national landscapes differed in their details -- the Russians wanted a brown bear, while the Kenyans preferred a hippo -- the basic layout was identical. In each case, people craved a painting that featured a large body of blue water, some open grass, a human figure and a few animals.

Why the cross-cultural similarity? According to Dutton, the survey results reveal our hard-wired preferences, which developed when we were Pleistocene hunter-gatherers roaming the African savannah. The landscapes we find most beautiful are simply those from which we evolved. If we like paintings with a foreground of short grasses, it's because that habitat contains more protein per square mile than any other, which is a crucial perk for a meat-eating primate.

Dutton is also interested in the origins of the art instinct. Shouldn't those cave-dwellers have been busy hunting instead of drawing on the wall? Why do we squander so much time and energy on art? Dutton has two distinct theories. The first is that fictional narratives, from the Iliad to "The Sopranos," provide people with a "low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience." Because I watch HBO, I'll be prepared the next time I'm in New Jersey.

His second explanation, which leans heavily on the work of Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, involves sexual selection. Like Miller, he sees the arts as a tool of seduction, an intellectual version of the peacock's tail. Consider poetry, which for Dutton is little more than a way of showing off to potential mates. (He cites Cyrano de Bergerac as an example of poetic courtship, although he fails to note that Cyrano doesn't get the girl. His eloquent genes are never passed on.) According to Dutton, this process of mate selection -- chicks dig big vocabularies -- is responsible for the propagation of genes that lead to "the most creative and flamboyant aspects of the human personality," including artistic expression.

On the one hand, this explanation of art is just common sense. It doesn't take an evolutionary psychologist to know that a lot of poetry is written to impress the opposite sex, or that Lord Byron and Elvis Presley seldom slept alone. However, arguing that the sex lives of poets explains the origins of poetry makes about as much sense as using the bedroom exploits of Wilt Chamberlain to construct a biological explanation of basketball. Yes, poets have sex, perhaps even more sex than normal. That still doesn't explain Shakespeare.

Dutton is an elegant writer, and his book should be admired for its attempt to close the gap between art and science. It really is time that art critics learn about the visual cortex, musicologists study the inner ear and evolutionary psychologists unpack Jane Austen. Unfortunately, like so many other aesthetic theories, Dutton's ideas are ultimately undone by what they can't explain. This is the irony of evolutionary aesthetics: Although it sets out to solve the mystery of art, to explain why people write poems and smear paint on canvases, it ends up affirming the mystery. The most exquisite stuff is what we can't explain. That's why we call it art.

Labels: art, Denis Dutton, evolution, natural selection, sex, The Art Instinct, The Urantia Book

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Monday, December 08, 2008

What is the Difference Between Urantia Foundation, The Fellowship, and Jesusonian Foundation?

There are 3 primary organizations associated with The Urantia Book.

From their website www.urantia.org: "Urantia Foundation was established in 1950 to be the custodian of the inviolate text of The Urantia Book and to ensure that the book's teachings are spread, with the help of readers and fraternal organizations, to all people." The Foundation's headquarters are at 533 Diversey Ave., Chicago.

The Urantia Book Fellowship is the social branch through which the book's teachings are spread although the distinction between the functions of the Foundation and the Fellowship has become blurred. From its establishment in 1955 until the late 1980s the Fellowship was known as the Urantia Brotherhood and then the name was changed. The Fellowship's headquarters are a mail box in Grand Central Station, (PO Box 4583), New York, and in the electronic ether through telephone, internet (www.urantiabook.org) and email as well as committee meetings throughout the year.

The Beliefs and Mission statement of the Jesusonian Foundation state: "Our mission is to encourage and assist individuals in developing a personal faith relationship with our Heavenly Father by sharing the supernal teachings of Jesus in The Urantia Book with them and nurturing them as believers." The Jesusonian Foundation is a private non-profit organization established in the late 1990's which focuses on promoting the teachings of Jesus through their web site www.truthbook.com as those teachings are portrayed in The Urantia Book. The headquarters office for the Jesusonian Foundation is in Boulder, Colorado (PO Box 38).

The current version of the Truthbook.com web site was launched in 2002.

For more of the history of these and other organizations please visit the Urantia Book Historical Society's archives at www.ubhistory.org and select the subject "organizations".

Labels: Jesusonian Foundation, The Fellowship, The Urantia Book, Urantia Foundation

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Thursday, December 04, 2008

Study illuminates star explosion from 16th century

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter, Ap Science Writer â€“
Thu Dec 4, 4:11 am ET

This article explains the "double star explosion" mentioned in The Urantia Book. Please see below for the Urantia Book reference. At the bottom of this entry, you can click on "external link" to access the full news article

NEW YORK â€“ More than 400 years after Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe challenged established wisdom about the heavens by analyzing a strange new light in the sky, scientists say they've finally nailed down just what he saw.

A new study confirms that, as expected, it was the common kind that involves the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star with a nearby companion.

The story of what's commonly called Tycho's supernova began on Nov. 11, 1572, when Brahe was astonished to see what he thought was a brilliant new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. The light eventually became as bright as Venus and could be seen for two weeks in broad daylight. After 16 months, it disappeared.

Working before telescopes were invented, Brahe documented with precision that unlike the moon and the planets, the light's position didn't move in relation to the stars. That meant it lay far beyond the moon. That was a shock to the contemporary view that the distant heavens were perfect and unchanging.

The direct light from the supernova swept past Earth long ago. But some of it struck dust clouds in deep space, causing them to brighten. That "light echo" was still observable, and the new study was based on analyzing the wavelengths of light from that.
_________________
Our Starry Associates

There are upward of two thousand brilliant suns pouring forth light and energy in Satania, and your own sun is an average blazing orb. Of the thirty suns nearest yours, only three are brighter. The Universe Power Directors initiate the specialized currents of energy which play between the individual stars and their respective systems. These solar furnaces, together with the dark giants of space, serve the power centers and physical controllers as way stations for the effective concentrating and directionizing of the energy circuits of the material creations.

The suns of Nebadon are not unlike those of other universes. The material composition of all suns, dark islands, planets, and satellites, even meteors, is quite identical. These suns have an average diameter of about one million miles, that of your own solar orb being slightly less. The largest star in the universe, the stellar cloud Antares, is four hundred and fifty times the diameter of your sun and is sixty million times its volume. But there is abundant space to accommodate all of these enormous suns. They have just as much comparative elbow room in space as one dozen oranges would have if they were circulating about throughout the interior of Urantia, and were the planet a hollow globe.

When suns that are too large are thrown off a nebular mother wheel, they soon break up or form double stars. All suns are originally truly gaseous, though they may later transiently exist in a semiliquid state. When your sun attained this quasi-liquid state of supergas pressure, it was not sufficiently large to split equatorially, this being one type of double star formation.

When less than one tenth the size of your sun, these fiery spheres rapidly contract, condense, and cool. When upwards of thirty times its sizeâ€”rather thirty times the gross content of actual materialâ€”suns readily split into two separate bodies, either becoming the centers of new systems or else remaining in each other's gravity grasp and revolving about a common center as one type of double star.

The most recent of the major cosmic eruptions in Orvonton was the extraordinary double star explosion, the light of which reached Urantia in A.D.1572. This conflagration was so intense that the explosion was clearly visible in broad daylight.

Not all stars are solid, but many of the older ones are. Some of the reddish, faintly glimmering stars have acquired a density at the center of their enormous masses which would be expressed by saying that one cubic inch of such a star, if on Urantia, would weigh six thousand pounds. The enormous pressure, accompanied by loss of heat and circulating energy, has resulted in bringing the orbits of the basic material units closer and closer together until they now closely approach the status of electronic condensation. This process of cooling and contraction may continue to the limiting and critical explosion point of ultimatonic condensation.

Most of the giant suns are relatively young; most of the dwarf stars are old, but not all. The collisional dwarfs may be very young and may glow with an intense white light, never having known an initial red stage of youthful shining. Both very young and very old suns usually shine with a reddish glow. The yellow tinge indicates moderate youth or approaching old age, but the brilliant white light signifies robust and extended adult life.

While all adolescent suns do not pass through a pulsating stage, at least not visibly, when looking out into space you may observe many of these younger stars whose gigantic respiratory heaves require from two to seven days to complete a cycle. Your own sun still carries a diminishing legacy of the mighty upswellings of its younger days, but the period has lengthened from the former three and one-half day pulsations to the present eleven and one-half year sunspot cycles.

Stellar variables have numerous origins. In some double stars the tides caused by rapidly changing distances as the two bodies swing around their orbits also occasion periodic fluctuations of light. These gravity variations produce regular and recurrent flares, just as the capture of meteors by the accretion of energy-material at the surface would result in a comparatively sudden flash of light which would speedily recede to normal brightness for that sun. Sometimes a sun will capture a stream of meteors in a line of lessened gravity opposition, and occasionally collisions cause stellar flare-ups, but the majority of such phenomena are wholly due to internal fluctuations.

In one group of variable stars the period of light fluctuation is directly dependent on luminosity, and knowledge of this fact enables astronomers to utilize such suns as universe lighthouses or accurate measuring points for the further exploration of distant star clusters. By this technique it is possible to measure stellar distances most precisely up to more than one million light-years. Better methods of space measurement and improved telescopic technique will sometime more fully disclose the ten grand divisions of the superuniverse of Orvonton; you will at least recognize eight of these immense sectors as enormous and fairly symmetrical star clusters.
(41:3.1)">

Labels: 1572, astronomy, Cassiopeia, Malcolm Ritter, supernova, The Urantia Book, Tycho Brahe

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Monday, November 17, 2008

Religion and Unity: Report

Sunday, November 16, 2008
Religion and Unity: Report

Last night's interfaith panel discussion on the role of religion in promoting unity at the Boston Baha'i Center appeared to be a great success. The panel included representatives from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, The Urantia Book, the United Church of Christ, and the Baha'i Faith. The representatives from the LDS church emphasized the importance of family unity as the foundation of all other kinds of unity, sharing stories about their own families and the inspiration they derive from the scriptures of their faith. The representative of the Urantia Book, which appeared to also have some relation to biblical Christianity, emphasized how the expansion of consciousness of how great God is would contribute to greater unity among religious people. Pastor Michele Bagby Allen, a long time friend and fellow Harvard Divinity School grad, argued that the example of Jesus in the Gospels as well as statements by the Apostle Paul served as evidence that Christianity can be a basis for unity among people

Labels: Baha'i, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Interfaith, Jesus, religion, The Urantia Book, United Church of Christ, unity

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Friday, October 17, 2008

What Is The Urantia Book?

This video is the result of interviews conducted with various Urantia Book readers, who explain in their own words what The Urantia Book is. In heartfelt and inspiring fashion, "What Is The Urantia Book?" helps others understand why this Revelation is such an important source of truth, beauty and goodness, and how it has impacted some of those whose lives it has touched.

Labels: God, interviews, readers, searching, The Urantia Book, truth, video

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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Book Review: Supercontinent, Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet

This book is all about continental drift, and plate tectonics, a phenomenon that The Urantia Book presents as fact long before the common acceptance of the theory

The Upper Crust

by Ted Nield

Supercontinent, Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet
Ted Nield
Harvard Univ. Press, 2007
288 pp., $29.95

In Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet, author Ted Nield writes that the long and convoluted history of continental drift is actually three stories. The first story is about the scientific work that led to the modern geological paradigm of plate tectonics. Nield is keen to make this a story about people, including some of the most colorful scientists and explorers of the 20th century. The second thread is the story of earth history, with its changing geography, climate, and ecology.1 The third thread might be the most interesting to many readers, as Nield explores how Pangaea belongs to the company of "lost continents" that have captured imaginations, even fueled religious convictions, from Aristotle's Atlantis to the new age Mu. Nield weaves a thorough history of plate tectonics for popular audiences, drawing from historians of science (including Naomi Oreskes) and his personal relationships with contemporary workers at the cutting edge of research and discovery. As editor of Geoscientist, the magazine for Fellows of the Geological Society of London, Nield knows the material intimately and communicates it in a compelling manner.

The theory of plate tectonics is one of the major scientific achievements of the 20th century. Most geology textbooks tell the story as if it involved only two or three scientists, but Nield celebrates the wider cast of characters. Every student of geology learns about Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), the German atmospheric scientist who showed that rocks, fossils, and mountain belts match exactly where the continents can be fitted together. As a specialist on climates, Wegener was particularly interested in the distribution of glacial deposits from the Permian geologic period found on all the southern continents. He argued that if the continents at that time were in their present positions, an ice sheet would have implausibly extended from the South Pole to the equator, covering wide expanses of open ocean. The first edition of Wegener's Origin of Continents and Oceans was published in 1915, but his ideas were not adopted in his lifetime. Wegener perished in Greenland attempting to measure the movement of that particular icy landmass from Western Europe.

Nield resurrects the memory of forgotten and courageous 19th-century European geologists who mapped rocks in India, South Africa, and Australia, work that contributed to Wegener's synthesis. Preceding Pangaea, continents with names like Lemuria and Gonwanaland were proposed to explain distributions of organisms on southern continents that would seem to have required connections by land (so-called land bridges). But scientists eventually abandoned those hypothetical terrains as new evidence emerged.

While geologists were mapping the continents and comparing notes, geophysicists were learning about heat in the earth and developing models for how mountains rise and fall, leading to a comprehensive understanding of how the earth works. The synthesis of continental and marine geology with the geophysics of the inner earth came after World War II. Maps of the seafloor revealed the submarine boundaries of lithospheric plates that merged with mountain belts and fault zones on the continents. It turned out that continents are like lunch trays on a conveyor belt. Magnetic properties of the ocean crust revealed patterns of seafloor spreading away from mid-ocean ridges (where the conveyor belt begins). Mountain ranges, explosive volcanoes, and deep earthquakes mark the locations of plate convergence, even creating deep ocean trenches where ocean crust is pushed back into the earth (where the conveyor belt ends). You get Pangaea at the cafeteria when trays approaching the dishwasher collide into a mangled mess.

Nield explores sociological factors in the gradual acceptance of plate tectonics, suggesting that science is a kind of supercontinent. Just as plates are slowly shifted by a variety of forces, paradigm shifts in science can be preceded by decades of give and take between scientists. Wegener's idea was accepted earlier and more widely in Europe than in America. Frankly, American scientists were put off by Wegener's rather bombastic pronouncements (or at least the tone employed by his English translator). Nield suggests that European science was driven by inductive methods (allowing explanations to emerge from the data set), while American scientists practiced a democratic form of deduction called "multiple working hypotheses" (collection of data to deliberately test or reject numerous possible explanations). By American standards, Wegener and his cohort were jumping the gun. Also, Nield explains that scientific advances can stall or get sidetracked if scientific models become confused with reality. U.S. geographic surveyors were committed to a model of crust properties that was useful for correcting local gravity variations but carried the assumption that rocks do not flow over long periods of time. Europeans embraced a more dynamic model of the inner earth, making the idea of moving continents quite tenable. (While Nield doesn't disparage or completely neglect the role of U.S. scientists in the development of plate tectonics, I feel he ignores some important contributions from the New World to the emerging synthesis after World War II.)

The final third of the book is devoted to discoveries and theories about the earth before Pangaea. Nield uses the analogy of palimpsest texts to describe how geologists use ingenious geochemical methods to unravel the history of the earth's oldest rocks. The work has led to the "discovery" of supercontinents that preceded Pangaea: Ur some three billion years ago and Rodinia about one billion years ago. The influence of these Precambrian tectonic revolutions on the history of life is emerging from the supercontinent of science. Urâ€”with its marginal shallow seasâ€”was a template for cyanobacteria growing layer upon slimy layer on the seafloor, converting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen. Rodinia was an equatorial supercontinent, whose position and fragmentation may have promoted global cooling to the point of converting earth into a temporary snowball (or slushball, depending on the scientist). The appearance of multicellular life with three-layer bodies during the time of Rodinia's icy fragmentation about 650 million years ago implies some connection. "On the supercontinent of science, everything must fit together," the author reflects.aea

Nield considers how sometimes, in order to advance cultural or religious agendas, "scientific ideas about possible lost worlds have escaped the domain of science and taken on new life as myth." First there was the case of Lemuria,2 which was legitimized by Friedrich Engels and H. G. Wells as the missing nursery of humankind. Tamil religious scholars reasoned that Lemuria must be their mythic homeland Kumarikkanam. Spiritualist and Theosophy founder Helena Blavastsky claimed Lemuria as the paradise of pre-human ancestors who lived there with dinosaurs, before moving the whole kit and caboodle to another lost continent, Mu, in the south Pacific. Mu was promoted by a cottage industry of late 19th-century spiritualists on the basis of some wishful mistranslations of Mayan inscriptions. The account of ancient earth in the New Age Urantia Book refers to a supercontinent from which life originated one billion years ago, in embarrassing near-agreement with the scientific Rodinia.

Nield's commitment to philosophical naturalism is quite obvious throughout the book. He concludes on a blustering note, rejoicing in science's triumph over religion and mythology. Human hubrisâ€”the kind that inevitably follows from faith in an absolute creator, he contendsâ€”hinders the advance of knowledge, because "science tells us there is no absolute knowledge of any kind." Nield doesn't explain how scientific ancestors such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and (first Cambridge professor of geology) Adam Sedgwickâ€”devout Christians allâ€”managed somehow to overcome this handicap, not to mention the thousands of Christians and followers of other religious traditions in the sciences today. Nield compares the Tamil scholars' use of Lemuria to support their mythology with Christian creationists who, "By insisting on the literal truth of the creation myth told in the Old Testament and by vainly looking for evidence of the supernatural among the things of this world â€¦ espouse â€¦ both bad science and bad religion, demonstrating nothing more than ignorance on the one hand and lack of faith on the other." Ouch, he has a point there.

Given his concern over Young Earth creationism, Nield could have explored how this movement adopted plate tectonics. The founding document of modern creationism, The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, was published in 1961, when many mainstream geologists still rejected continental drift. The authors could pretty much ignore the idea. But by the 1990s, Young Earthers were ready to incorporate plate tectonics into flood geology and their abbreviated view of geologic time. They simply sped up the film. The author of a creationist book popular with Christian homeschoolers proposes the "hydroplate" version, in which drift was lubricated by the release of water from a subcrustal layer via the "fountains of the deep" at the beginning of the Genesis Flood. Considering the temperature of water that is expelled from volcanoes (let alone the depths imagined by this scenario), the only safe place for Noah would have been in orbit. A more sophisticated proposal is the "catastrophic plate tectonics" model of Los Alamos geophysicist J. R. Baumgardner, who has a well-deserved international reputation on the modeling of earth-mantle convection (the process that most geoscientists believe drives continental drift). In presentations to the International Conference on Creationism, he cites experimental data on rock physics that indicate extreme weakening of material strength at mantle temperatures (though it appears he ignores other factors, such as pressure). Plugging these variables into a supercomputer, he can make continents drift at rates of meters per second, not centimeters per year (as they are moving now and geoscientists believe they have moved in the past). Here, Nield's warning about confusing scientific models with reality in nature is appropriate. When Baumgardner offers observational support for his model, he completely ignores the geology of the ocean floor (which does not support the predictions of his model) and instead chases fossil red herrings in sedimentary rocks deposited on continental crust.

While Nield's concerns over how creationists abuse science to justify their particular understanding of Scripture are legitimate, his contempt for religion is unjustified by the history of science. Indeed, Nield and too many other contemporary scientist-authors misuse science to justify their naturalism. Let's dispose of that silly idea about religion being bad for science. History shows that good ideas eventually win over bad ideas, exemplified by Wegener's Pangaea. If science is the supercontinent, why can't religion be the ocean?

1. Why ten billion years if the age of the earth is estimated to be roughly 4.5 billion years? Because Nield considers how the geography of the planet might change if it is around for another five billion years.

2. For more on Lemuria, see Philip Jenkins, "Continental Drift," Books & Culture, May/June 2005, p. 24, a review of Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Univ. of California Press, 2004). www.ctlibrary.com/ bc/2005/mayjun/20.24.html.

Stephen O. Moshier is associate professor of geology at Wheaton College.

Labels: Alfred Wegner, continental drift, Eastern religions, Pangaea, plate tectonics, science, Stephen O. Moshier, Ted Nield, The Urantia Book

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Friday, August 15, 2008

"Words of Christ II" - listen FREE at Truthbook.com

Dear Friends,

Pato Banton, internationally known Reggae artist, and devoted Urantia Book lover, has created a new sublime and inspiring CD, called The Words of Christ II. You can listen to the entire album at Truthbook.com.

Please click on "external link" at the bottom of this article to access the CD.

You may be familiar with Pato's original effort - The Words of Christ - which has been thrilling visitors to Truthbook.com for a couple of years now. Pato's soothing and unique voice narrating Jesus' words, accompanied by the amazing music of Clyde JJ Forde, combine to give the listener an incredibly inspiring new way to grasp the teachings of the Master.

In this new CD, Pato has chosen another thrilling collection of the Master's talks, discourses and sermons. As well as the matchless music and narration, the text of each selection can also be read while listening, giving you a total sight-and-sound-and-mind experience of absorbing these soul-satisfying lessons on life.

Click here to go to The Words of Christ II page at Truthbook.

We know that you will enjoy this wonderful new CD. Each selection can be emailed, so that your Christian and truth-seeking friends and family can share them with you, and we hope that you will feel free to take this opportunity to help spread the good news.

With Love and Affectionate Regard,
The Truthbook Team

Pato dedicates this lovingly produced CD with these words:

I would like to dedicate this labor of love to all genuine Truth Seekers.

For far too long people have focused their attention on the personality and appearance of Christ, when the true focus should be on his life and teachings.

What was hidden from the wise and prudent is now revealed to the babes and suckling in these words which have been taken from The Urantia Book. ~ Pato Banton

1. First Sermon In The Synagogue
2. Discourse On The Water Of Life & The Discourse On Assurance
3. Jesus' Teaching At Tyre
4. On Counting The Cost
5. The Discourse On True Religion
6. Why Do The Heathen Rage
7. The Sermon At Gerasa
8. Teaching About Accidents
9. The Talk About Angels
10. Teachings About Wealth
11. The Enquiring Greeks
12 Evil, Sin & Iniquity
13. Enmity Of The World
14. Sermon On The Good Shepherd
Pato Banton - Words of Christ II

Labels: CD, discourses, Jesus, Pato Banton, sermons, The Urantia Book

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Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Questions about Chromosome Count

This is a question and answer recently published in the FAQ section of Truthbook.com regarding the number of chromosomes in human cells, vs the number of "trait determiners," and just what this seeming discrepancy of Urantia Book revelation with known science can mean.

At the end of this Q+A, there is a link to another site wherein author Kermit Anderson discusses these Urantia Book concepts as well.

Q: On page 397:11, The Urantia Book states that there are 48 units of pattern control in the sex cells of human reproduction. I believe this refers to chromosomes... if not, what could it mean? Our science counts 46 chromosomes. Prior to this discovery, it was thought there were 48, but that was in chimps.

I think this is fundamental to the truth of The Urantia Book, as it is stated as fact in the Origin of the Human Race, and all development is based on that assumed fact. This makes all so-called truths suspect. I wish this were not so, for I am a seeker.

A: Yes, The Urantia Book does state that there are 48 units of pattern control. The general assumption always tends to be that this is a reference to chromosomes and since it's incorrect then those looking for disputable facts will simply say, "see, The Urantia Book doesn't know what it's talking about." If the revelators had meant chromosomes they would have used that word since they did use it in one other place.

"On Urantia there are forty-eight units of pattern control--trait determiners--in the sex cells of human reproduction."(36:2.4)

This statement about "forty-eight units of pattern control"--forty-eight units of trait determiners (genes)--is in the context of the "design" of Urantia will creatures. The Life Carriers designed us with twenty-four chromosomes, twenty-two autosomes and two sex chromosomes. In the process of protein synthesis, the single-stranded messenger RNA (mRNA) is the "pattern". Each strand of the double-stranded DNA is a unit of "pattern control". The integrity of the pattern in each strand is controlled, because the DNA strands are a complementary pair. Therefore, each DNA strand serves as a control for the transcription of RNA patterns; and twenty-four chromosomes implies forty-eight units of pattern control, two for each chromosome.

The revelators point to "the sex cells of human reproduction", rather than to somatic cells, in an attempt to keep us from misinterpreting the statement. At the time of the revelation, scientists mistakenly thought that there were forty-eight chromosomes in a somatic cell; and even with the correct number of chromosomes (forty-six), the revelators are trying to help us avoid the confusion of the homologous pairs of autosomes in a somatic cell. A germ cell has twenty-three chromosomes, and "the sex cells" collectively are the two different implementation subsets of the full design set of twenty-four chromosomes.

Labels: cells, chromosomes, DNA, genetics, Kermit Anderson, pattern, RNA, The Urantia Book, trait determiners

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken

In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope took the image of a millenium, an image that shows our place in the universe. Anyone who understands what this image represents, is forever changed by it.

Urantia Book readers will not be surprised, but cheered and comforted, knowing that what our beloved Revelation reveals about God's incredible creation is more accurate than ever.

Labels: cosmos, deep field, Hubble Telescope, millenium, size, the universe, The Urantia Book

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Stars, Galaxies, Superuniverses and The Urantia Book

STARS,
GALAXIES,
SUPERUNIVERSES
and
THE URANTIA BOOK

by Frederick L. Beckner

Please click on "external source article" for the complete article, including space images.

INTRODUCTION

In the past several years, since the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), there has been an explosion of astronomical information relating to our Milky Way galaxy, our Local Group of galaxies, and myriads of galaxies unknown at the time the Urantia Book was written. The HST has even allowed us a glimpse at galaxies believed to be near the edge of the universe itself. Figure 1 shows a portion of the Deep Field South image showing galaxies at distances out to 12 billion light years.

The Urantia Book contains a description of the universe which one might describe as "Urantian cosmology." This cosmological information, written prior to 1941 by celestial beings, was derived from revelation, not human astronomical science. It is therefore of interest to examine the Urantian cosmology, some 60 years later, to see how this revelation squares with current astronomical knowledge.

Much information of cosmological interest can be obtained by analysis of selected portions of the Urantia Book text. For example, the number of suns in the Master Universe, being all of material creation, is said to be equal to the number of glasses of water in the oceans of our planet. This paper describes a procedure for calculating this number given current readily-available information, arriving at a figure of 4.5 billion trillion suns. I will show that this number is in reasonable agreement with current knowledge.

Given this number and other astronomical information now available we are able to compute the average number of stars per galaxy. Given the identification of our Milky Way galaxy as the inhabitable portion of the superuniverse of Orvonton, we can estimate the number of inhabitable planets per star. It is even possible to determine, within limits, the size of the Grand Universe, our superuniverse, and our local universe of Nebadon.

After performing these calculations and comparing the results with current astronomical knowledge where possible, one finds that the Urantian cosmology is not generally inconsistent with our present knowledge of the universe. This is in spite of the fact that the Urantia Book states that itâ€™s cosmology is not divinely inspired and may require revision in the future.

"The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. It is limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting of present-day knowledge." (UB1109:3)

Urantian Cosmology

An overview of Urantian cosmology is given on the first page of the Urantia Book.

"Your world, Urantia, is one of many similar inhabited planets which comprise the local universe of Nebadon. This universe, together with similar creations, makes up the superuniverse of Orvonton, from whose capital, Uversa, our commission hails. Orvonton is one of the seven evolutionary superuniverses of time and space which circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfectionâ€”the central universe of Havona. At the heart of this eternal and central universe is the stationary Isle of Paradise, the geographic center of infinity and the dwelling place of the eternal God.

The seven evolving superuniverses in association with the central and divine universe, we commonly refer to as the grand universe; these are the now organized and inhabited creations. They are all a part of the master universe, which also embraces the uninhabited but mobilizing universes of outer space." (UB1:5-6)

We thus live in the grand universe, which includes the presently-inhabited portion of the much larger master universe. The grand universe is subdivided into seven superuniverses, or collections of galaxies, one for each of the seven possible Master Spirits, or personality associations of the three triune manifestations of God. The seventh Master Spirit, being the association of the Universal Father, Eternal Son, and Infinite Spirit supervises our superuniverse of Orvonton. We will show that the Milky Way galaxy lies entirely within Orvonton, and is the greatest part of the inhabited portion of Orvonton. The capital of our superuniverse is called Uversa and will be shown to be located outside the Milky Way galaxy.

"Satania has a headquarters world called Jerusem, and it is system number twenty-four in the constellation of Norlatiadek. Your constellation, Norlatiadek, consists of one hundred local systems and has a headquarters world called Edentia. Norlatiadek is number seventy in the universe of Nebadon. The local universe of Nebadon consists of one hundred constellations and has a capital known as Salvington. " (UB182:5)

We also live in a star system called Satania, presumably named after Satan, a lieutenant and associate of Lucifer, a former ruler of Satania, who led a rebellion against God, which resulted in the isolation of our planet, Urantia, from the rest of the universe. Jerusem is said to be an architectural sphere, or artificial world, and thus is nonluminous and is not visible by telescopic means from Urantia. It is of special interest because it is on a subsatellite of a satellite of Jerusem that we are resurrected after death. This is the location of the mansion worlds mentioned by Jesus.

Our star system of Satania is one of approximately 10,000 such systems in our local universe of Nebadon. This local universe was created by a Creator Son of God, Michael, who incarnated on Urantia to live the life of one of His mortal creatures and to reveal the nature of God the Father to the inhabitants of His local universe. Michael is better known on Urantia as His mortal incarnation, Jesus of Nazareth. The Urantia Book specifically says that our local universe of Nebadon is not a physical star system, but that its capital, Salvington, is within such a system. We will show that our local universe is approximately 4000 light years in diameter.

With this brief overview of Urantian cosmology, we are now prepared to examine specific teachings of the Urantia Book and to compare them with current astronomical knowledge.

The Master Universe

Size of the Master Universe

The Urantia Book does not explicitly give a size for the master universe. It does imply that the master universe is finite and is expanding.

"Even if the master universe eventually expands to infinityâ€¦" (UB92:6)

Current scientific estimates of the size of the master universe are generally based on the theory of the "big bang" where the universe came into being at an instant of time about 14 billion years ago, and has expanded outwards from this point at the speed of light ever since. A good discussion of three techniques for determining this age is given at http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html. Under these assumptions, it is thus a sphere having a radius of about 14 billion light years.

The Urantia Book implicitly denies the big bang theory, for it implies that the master universe was already in existence 875 billion years ago. It was at this time the Andronover nebula was initiated which resulted in our local universe of Nebadon.

"875,000,000,000 years ago the enormous Andronover nebula number 876,926 was duly initiated." (UB652:2)

Number of Stars in the Master Universe

The Urantia Book contains the following statement about the number of stars in the master universe.

â€œBut in the master universe there are as many suns as there are glasses of water in the oceans of your world.â€� (UB173:0)

The volume of the oceans of Urantia can be found on the United States Geological Survey web site, www.usgs.gov/edu/waterdistribution.html, as 317 million cubic miles. Knowing this, and that one cubic mile is equivalent to 4.167 x 109 cubic meters, one finds that the volume of water on Urantia is 1.321 x 1018 m3 or 1.321 x 1024 cm3.

Another source states that the oceans cover 70 percent of the earthâ€™s surface and have an average depth of 2 miles. The area of the earthâ€™s surface is 4 pi times the square of the earthâ€™s radius of 6,350 km. Given this, one can calculate that the volume of this water is 1.14 x 1024 cm3, which is in substantial agreement with the volume given by the USGS.

To compute the number of stars in the master universe we need a number for the volume of a glass of water. A small juice glass in my kitchen has a volume of 200 cm3. A typical drinking glass that I use daily has a volume of 300 cm3, and the volume of the largest glass I have is 500 cm3. Thus, taking the volume to be 300 cm3 will give results accurate to within about +/- 40%, a figure sufficient for our purposes. Given that the volume of a typical glass of water is about 300 cm3, one can calculate that the number of glasses of water in the oceans of Urantia is about 4.4 x 1021. Thus, according to the Urantia Book, the number of suns in the master universe must be on the order of 4.4 x 1021. The web site, Atlas of the Universe (http://anzwers.org/free/universe/universe.html), states that there are 2.0 x 1021 stars in the visible universe.

To put this number in perspective consider that a cubic rock salt crystal 0.92 cm (0.36 inches) on an edge will contain the same number of molecules. This can be calculated given that rock salt is a cubic crystal with a lattice constant of 5.64 x 10-8 cm. We can conclude that the number of atoms in the human body is much greater than the number of stars in the universe.

The Mass of the Master Universe
Given the number of stars in the master universe it is possible to estimate its mass. Given that the sun is an average star, and the mass of the sun is 1.989 x 1033 g (grams), then the mass of all the stars in the master universe would be 4.4 x 1021 * 1.989 x 1033 = 9 x 1054 g. Currently astronomers believe that more than 90% of the mass of the universe is tied up in â€œdark matter.â€� Thus the mass of the universe would be about ten times the mass of all the visible stars, or about 9 x 1055 g.

Eddington, in his book, Fundamental Theory (1946, p 105), computes the mass of the universe from general relativistic theory as 1.98 x 1055 g which is within a factor of 4.5 of the value inferred from UB statements. Thus these estimates agree within an order of magnitude, although we have no proof that either Eddingtonâ€™s value or the UB value is correct. Eddington also computes the number of protons in the universe to be 3/2 * 2256 * 136 = 2.36 x 1079 (p283).

Number of Galaxies in the Master Universe
â€œIn the not-distant future, new telescopes will reveal to the wondering gaze of Urantian astronomers no less than 375 million new galaxies in the remote stretches of outer space.â€� (UB130:5)

The Urantia Book is probably referring here to the Hale (Mt Palomar) telescope, which went into operation in 1948. The figure 375 million thus refers to the additional new galaxies observable when the Hale telescope was put into operation, not the number of galaxies in the master universe. Recently the Hubble Space Telescope made two deep field images, in the region of the North Pole, and another in the region of the South Pole (see Figure 1), these regions being those which could be continuously observed for long periods of time without interruption by occultation by the Earth. Exposure times of 10 days were used. From the north deep field image astronomers estimate that there are 80 billion galaxies in the universe. From the southern image they estimate that there are 125 billion galaxies in the universe. For the purposes of this paper we will assume that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the master universe.

Number of Stars Per Galaxy

Given this number of galaxies and the total number of stars in the master universe, one can calculate that the average number of stars per galaxy is 4.4 x 1021 stars divided by 1.0 x 1011 galaxies or 4.4 x 1010 stars per galaxy (44 billion). The number of stars in our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to be around 200 to 400 billion. This is pretty good agreement with our average number since our galaxy is the second largest in our local cluster of about 30 galaxies, and thus may be considered to be an exceptionally large galaxy. There are many more small galaxies of the elliptical or globular types than there are of the spiral type such as our Milky Way. The information on the number of stars in the Milky Way was obtained from the University of Arizona at http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/more/mw.html.

Density of Stars in the Master Universe

If there are 4.4 x 1021 stars in the master universe and if the radius of the master universe is 14 billion light years, then the average density of stars in the master universe is 3.8 x 10-10 stars per cubic light year. If the stars were uniformly distributed throughout the master universe the minimum distance between stars would be about 1,400 light years. Actually, the stars cluster into globular clusters, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and galactic superclusters where the stellar density is significantly greater than the average density, and leaving great voids in which the stellar density is much less than average. Given knowledge of the density of stars in a given region, it is possible to estimate the volume of the sphere necessary to contain a given number of stars, and from this to determine the approximate radius of this sphere. This technique will be used later to compute radii for the grand universe, our superuniverse, and our local universe.

The Grand Universe and Orvonton

Size of the Grand Universe

The size of the grand universe can be estimated from the number of stars it contains and an estimate of the average star density on that scale. The Urantia Book says there are ten trillion stars in our superuniverse (UB172:7). If we assume that all seven superuniverses are of approximately the same size, then there would be 70 trillion stars in the grand universe.

If the grand universe contains seventy trillion stars, and if these stars are in galaxies which are approximately uniformly distributed throughout the master universe, then the volume of space occupied by the grand universe will be a fraction 70 x 1012/4.4 x 1021 = 1.59 x 10-8 of the volume of the master universe. The current estimate of the radius of the master universe is about 14 billion light years. Since the volume is proportional to the radius cubed, the radius of the grand universe would be of the order of (1.59 x 10-8)0.333 = 2.5 x 10-3 times the radius of the master universe, or about 35 million light years. This assumes that the star density in the Grand Universe is the same as in the Master Universe.

There is good reason to believe that the actual star density within our local part of the universe is considerably higher than the average density throughout the master universe. This is because the stars are grouped into galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and even larger superclusters of galaxies leaving other areas with voids containing relatively few galaxies. We may estimate the average density of stars in our local group of galaxies in the following manner.

One source, the Atlas of the Universe, http://anzwers.org/free/universe/localgr.html, states that there are about 700 x 109 stars within 5 million light years of Earth. The density of stars in this volume is thus about 1.3 x 10-9 per cubic light year, or about 3.3 times the average density of the master universe. The same source gives the density in a sphere of about 1 billion light years as 1.19 x 10-10 per cubic light year. Thus this source estimates that the star density in our local area is about 10 times greater than that in a volume much greater than the volume of any supercluster. Given this, we must reduce our estimate of the size of the grand universe by a factor of the cube root of ten (10.333 = 2.15) to allow for the higher local density of stars. Our corrected estimate of the radius of the grand universe is then 35/2.15 = 16 million light years.

Since Havona is at the center of the grand universe, the distance from Earth to Havona would be about 16 million light years. If there are seven superuniverses distributed equally in angle about Havona, then the distance to the nearest superuniverse outside Orvonton would be about 14 million light years.

Another clue to the size of the grand universe is given in the following passage:

â€œLong before the presence of life on Urantia the [Solitary] messenger now associated with me was assigned on a mission out of Uversa to the central universeâ€”was absent from the roll calls of Orvonton for almost a million years but returned in due time with the desired information.â€� (UB259:2)

The time given in this passage is most likely given in Uversa years, since the writers of the book seem to be quite explicit when they refer to Urantia years, calling such times either â€œUrantia yearsâ€� or â€œyears of Urantia timeâ€� 23 times throughout the book. Since the Solitary Messengers can travel at the rate of 4.52 million light years per Urantian year (UB267:1) and assuming the time given is in Uversa years (8.2 Urantia years, see UB174:2) the distance traveled by the Solitary Messenger would be less than 37 trillion light years. The distance to Havona would then be less than 18.5 trillion light years. This would be in good agreement with the value derived above from the number of stars in Orvonton if the Solitary Messenger had been absent only one Uversa year rather than one million years.

Number of Stars in Orvonton

The Urantia Book specifically gives the number of suns within Orvonton.

â€œThe superuniverse of Orvonton is illuminated and warmed by more than ten trillion blazing suns.â€� (UB172:7)

This number of suns is indicative that Orvonton is composed of more than one galaxy, since the Milky Way, the second largest galaxy within the Local Group, is currently thought to contain about 200 to 400 billion stars. It would take at least 25 Milky Way or about 110 average galaxies to contain ten trillion stars. It is thus clear that our superuniverse of Orvonton is significantly bigger than our local group of about 30 galaxies and is much bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.

The Size of Orvonton

The Urantia Book gives at least seven different clues as to the size of our superuniverse, Orvonton.

"Although the unaided human eye can see only two or three nebulae outside the borders of the superuniverse of Orvonton, your telescopes literally reveal millions upon millions of these physical universes in process of formation." (UB130:4)

The galaxy M81, shown in Figure 2, is visible to the unaided eye under very good viewing conditions. This 6.9 magnitude galaxy is 12 million light years distant and is probably not within Orvonton. It is a candidate for being another of the seven superuniverses.

This passage clearly delineates the spatial extension of Orvonton, since is says that the unaided human eye can see nebulae outside Orvonton. This means that the many galaxies visible by means of the telescope are not within Orvonton. This passage continues saying

â€œMost of the starry realms visually exposed to the search of your present-day telescopes are in Orvonton, but with photographic technique the larger telescopes penetrate far beyond the borders of the grand universe into the domains of outer space, where untold universes are in process of organization.â€� (UB130:4)

This sentence says that most the stars visible by eye through large telescopes are within Orvonton. This is one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of the galaxies within the Local Group; that they contain individual stars which are visible by aid of a telescope. An implication of this sentence is that some of these starry realms are outside of Orvonton. Thus some of the Local Group galaxies are outside of Orvonton. For more information on the Local Group refer to the web page of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/more/local.html.

The upper limit on the radius of the grand universe of 16 million light years also implies an upper limit on the size of our superuniverse, Orvonton. If the seven superuniverses are spherical, equal in size, do not overlap, and are evenly distributed in a circle of radius equal to 16 million light years, then the radius of each superuniverse must be smaller than about 8 million light years. This must be considered to be an extreme upper limit to the size of Orvonton.

Another estimate of the size of Orvonton can be obtained in the same manner as our estimate of the size of the grand universe. If Orvonton contains 10 trillion stars, and if there are 4.4 x 1021 stars evenly distributed in the master universe, then a volume of space with a radius of 15.5 million light years would be required to hold this number of stars. Making the same correction for the difference between the local star density and that of the average density in the universe gives a radius of Orvonton of 15.6/2.15 = 7.2 million light years.

The statement that the Divine Counselor can reach any part of the superuniverse in less than one year implies that the radius of the superuniverse must be less than 4.5 million light years. Assuming that Urantia and Jerusem are in the relative close proximity of 2000 light years, then the radius of Orvonton must be less than 3.35 times 1.35 million light years, or 4.5 million light years.

Another limit to the size of Orvonton can be derived from a passage concerning the physical-energy circuits.

â€œThe power centers and physical controllers of the superuniverses assume direction and partial control of the thirty energy systems which comprise the gravita domain. The physical-energy circuits administered by the power centers of Uversa require a little over 968 million years to complete the encirclement of the superuniverse.â€� (UB175:5)

This passage seems to indicate that the circumference of the superuniverse is 968 million light years. This would indicate that the radius of the superuniverse is 154 million light years. This value is inconsistent with our previously derived information about the size of the superuniverse. The value of 968 million years could be the sum of the travel times from the center of the superuniverse to the outer circumference, around the circumference, and back to the center, for all 30 energy systems. Assuming this, and if these circuits all travel at the velocity of light, then the radius of the superuniverse would be about 3.9 million light years. This value is consistent with our other information.

The size of Orvonton can be estimated from the passage that implies that no less than 4% of the volume of Orvonton is inhabited (UB121:5). From this, and assuming that Orvonton is roughly spherical we may infer that the ratio of the radius of Orvonton to that of the inhabited portion of Orvonton is no less than 2.92. Given that the radius of the inhabited portion of Orvonton is 250,000 light years (UB359:8), then the radius of Orvonton is not less than 730,000 light years.

Another indication of the size of Orvonton comes from the information given in the UB on the Andromeda galaxy. If Andromeda is within Orvonton as indicated by the UB, and if the distance to Andromeda is 1 million light years, then the radius of Orvonton must be at least 500 thousand light years.

Given the above considerations, one may conclude that the radius of Orvonton is greater than 730,000 and less than 4 million light years, possibly about 3 million light years. This would include the large Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies as well as a great number of other smaller galaxies necessary to give the stated number of stars.

The Milky Way Galaxy is within Orvonton

The Urantia Book indicates that our Milky Way galaxy is within the superuniverse of Orvonton.

â€œPractically all of the starry realms visible to the naked eye on Urantia belong to the seventh section of the grand universe, the superuniverse of Orvonton. The vast Milky Way starry system represents the central nucleus of Orvonton, being largely beyond the borders of your local universe. This great aggregation of suns, dark islands of space, double stars, globular clusters, star clouds, spiral and other nebulae, together with myriads of individual planets, forms a watchlike, elongated-circular grouping of about one seventh of the inhabited evolutionary universes.â€� (UB167:3)

One-seventh of the inhabited evolutionary universes (I take this to mean local universes) may very well mean that the Milky Way contains nearly the entire inhabited portion of Orvonton, which is one-seventh of the superuniverses in the grand universe.

The idea that the Milky Way galaxy is within the superuniverse of Orvonton is made even more specific in the following passage.

â€œThey [the short space rays] emanate in the largest quantities from the densest plane of the superuniverse, the Milky Way, which is also the densest plane of the outer universes.â€� (UB475:1)

This passage can also be read to imply that the other outer universes (the other six superuniverses) lie in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. It can also be read as implying that the Milky Way galaxy is the superuniverse of Orvonton, but this interpretation is inconsistent with the statement that Orvonton contains ten trillion stars, which is much larger than the 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.

We may infer that other nebulae (galaxies) outside the Milky Way belong to Orvonton from the passage

â€œsome of the nebulae which Urantian astronomers regard as extragalactic are actually on the fringe of Orvonton and are traveling along with us.â€� (UB131:0)

The Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies and the Large and Small Magellanic clouds are examples of such nebulae which are extragalactic (outside the Milky Way galaxy) but which are part of Orvonton.

The following passage indicates that there are at least seven galaxies in Orvonton.

â€œOf the ten major divisions of Orvonton, eight have been roughly identified by Urantian astronomers. The other two are difficult of separate recognition because you are obliged to view these phenomena from the inside. If you could look upon the superuniverse of Orvonton from a position far-distant in space, you would immediately recognize the ten major sectors of the seventh galaxy.â€� (UB167:8)

One can presume that they are talking about the Milky Way galaxy as the seventh galaxy in Orvonton. These ten major sectors also presumably refer to ten arms of our spiral galaxy. In one visualization of the spiral arms of the Milky Way (see http://casswww.ucsd.edu/public/tutorial/MW.html) I can count only eight arms. The Atlas of the Universe site gives the names of six arms of our galaxy: the Cygnas, Perseus, Orion, Sagittarius, Scutum-Crux, and Norma arms. At this time we cannot exclude the possibility of their being ten arms, since much of the structure of our galaxy is hidden from us by dust clouds, radio observations being the only practical way to observe behind these clouds.

The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds are within Orvonton
Two nearby extragalactic nebula which were known before the invention of the telescope are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which were noted by Magellan in 1519 during his voyages in the southern oceans. The Small Magellanic Cloud, shown in Figure 3, is at a distance of about 210,000 light years, while the Large Magellanic Cloud is only 179,000 light years away. Being at a distance of less than 250,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way puts them within the inhabited portion of Orvonton.

Uversa, the Capital of Orvonton, is not within the Milky Way
The Urantia Book gives the distance from our system capital of Jerusem to the center of the superuniverse of Orvonton. This distance corresponds to the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud. Thus it is possible, although not likely as we will show later, that Uversa is within the SMC.

â€œThe Satania system of inhabited worlds is far removed from Uversa and that great sun cluster which functions as the physical or astronomic center of the seventh superuniverse. From Jerusem, the headquarters of Satania, it is over two hundred thousand light-years to the physical center of the superuniverse of Orvonton, far, far away in the dense diameter of the Milky Way. Satania is on the periphery of the local universe, and Nebadon is now well out towards the edge of Orvonton. From the outermost system of inhabited worlds to the center of the superuniverse is a trifle less than two hundred and fifty thousand light-years. â€œ (UB359:8)

Being at a distance of 210,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud is certainly â€œover two hundred thousand light-yearsâ€� from Jerusem, and thus might be a candidate for the location of Uversa. The Small Magellanic Cloud does not, however, seem to be centrally located with respect to the three largest nearby galaxies, the Milky Way, Andromeda (M31), and Triangulum (M33). One must read â€œfar, far away in the dense diameter of the Milky Wayâ€� as indicating a direction relative to Jerusem, rather than a position. This would be consistent with accepted astronomical usage of the word â€œinâ€�, as meaning in the same direction. Thus a planet is said to be â€œinâ€� Aquarius, etc. To specifically locate the center of the superuniverse at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, one would use the words â€œat the center ofâ€� rather than â€œin.â€�

Taking the center of the superuniverse at the center of the Milky Way galaxy would be inconsistent with current knowledge in that the disk of the Milky Way is about 120,000 light years in diameter, and that Urantia (and presumably Satania) is about 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. Thus the distance from Satania to the center of the superuniverse would likely be slightly less than 26,000 light years, and not over 200,000 light years as stated. We thus conclude that the center of the superuniverse of Orvonton is not within the Milky Way galaxy.

Uversa Is Not Near the Center of the Milky Way

A Divine Counselor of Uversa states that he required 109 days to travel from Uversa to Urantia. He also says that his velocity is less than that of a Solitary Messenger. This allows one to place a lower limit on the distance from Urantia to Uversa.

â€œTrinity-origin beings possess prerogatives of transit which make them independent of transport personalities, such as seraphim. We all possess the power of moving about freely and quickly in the universe of universes. Excepting the Inspired Trinity Spirits, we cannot attain the almost unbelievable velocity of the Solitary Messengers, but we are able so to utilize the sum total of the transport facilities in space that we can reach any point in a superuniverse, from its headquarters [Uversa], in less than one year of Urantia time. It required 109 days of your time for me to journey from Uversa to Urantia.â€� (UB222:6)

This passage also allows one to compute the ratio of the distance from Uversa to the outermost point of Orvonton, basically the radius of Orvonton to the distance from Uversa to Urantia. This ratio is that of one year to 109 days or 365.25/109 = 3.35. Since we know that the radius of the inhabited portion of Orvonton is greater than 250,000 light years, then the distance from Urantia to Uversa must be greater than 74,600 light years. Since the distance from Urantia to the center of the Milky Way galaxy is about 26,000 light years, one can conclude that Uversa is not near the center of the Milky Way.

Another passage of the Urantia Book supports the notion that Uversa is not located at the center of the Milky Way.

â€œUversa is favorably situated for the work of this [astronomy] colony, not only because of its central location, but also because there are no gigantic living or dead suns near at hand to disturb the energy currents.â€� (UB338:4)

It is known that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way which should be even more effective at disturbing the energy currents than living or dead suns. Due to dust clouds, dark nebulae, and a very high density of stars, the center of the galaxy would be a most unfavorable location for an astronomy colony.

Uversa is at the Astronomic Center of Orvonton

The following passages indicate that the various components of Orvonton rotate about Uversa, and thus Uversa is the astronomic center of Orvonton.

â€œThe Sagittarius sector and all other sectors and divisions of Orvonton are in rotation around Uversa, â€¦ â€œ (UB168:3)

â€œ6. The whirl of the ten major sectors, the so-called star drifts, about the Uversa headquarters of Orvonton.â€� (UB168:3)

This rotation about Uversa is presumably not due to the gravitational attraction of Uversa since it is an architectural world and this would be of relatively insignificant mass.

â€œ10. Architectural Worlds. These are the worlds which are built according to plans and specifications for some special purpose, such as Salvington, the headquarters of your local universe, and Uversa, the seat of government of our superuniverse.â€� (UB172:1)

The statement that

â€œThe Satania system of inhabited worlds is far removed from Uversa and that great sun cluster which functions as the physical or astronomic center of the seventh superuniverse.â€� (UB359:8)

also supports the notion that Uversa is at the physical center of Orvonton, and that it is at a great distance from Urantia.

An Upper Limit on the Distance to Uversa

The velocity of a Solitary Messenger as given in the passage below can be shown to be equivalent to 4.52 million light years per year of Urantia time.

â€œTheir velocity in traversing space is variable, depending on a great variety of interfering influences, but the record shows that on the journey to fulfill this mission my associate messenger proceeded at the rate of 841,621,642,000 of your miles per second of your time.â€� (UB261:1)

Since the speed of light is 1.862809 x 105 miles/sec, the speed of the Solitary Messenger is 8.41621642 x 1011 miles per second divided by 1.862809 x 105 = 4.518 x 106 light years/ year. This is warp 4.5 million!

Given this speed, the travel time of 109 days stated above, and the location of Jerusem within 4000 light years of Urantia implies that the distance from Urantia to Uversa must be less than 1.35 million light years

Fraction of Orvonton which is Inhabited.

The UB implies that only a small fraction, between one and four percent, of Orvonton is currently inhabited.

â€œThat portion of Paradise which has been designated for the use of the existing universes is occupied only from one to four per cent, while the area assigned to these activities is at least one million times that actually required for such purposes. Paradise is large enough to accommodate the activities of an almost infinite creation.â€� (UB121:5)

This implies that the inhabited portion of each superuniverse occupies between one and four percent of the inhabitable planets of that superuniverse. Thus Orvonton contains 10 trillion stars, 40 trillion planets, 1 trillion inhabitable planets, and the inhabited portion of Orvonton contains between 10 and 40 billion inhabited planets, and must contain between 100 and 400 billion stars. The Milky Way galaxy has been estimated to contain between 200 and 500 billion stars. Thus it appears that the Milky Way galaxy contains most of the inhabited portion of Orvonton.

The ratio of the number of stars in the mostly uninhabited master universe to that of the grand universe is 4.4 x 1021/7 x 1013 = 6.3 x 107 (63 million). Could this be the reason that this portion of Paradise is over one million times greater than that actually required at present?

The Size of the Inhabited Portion of Orvonton

The Urantia Book gives a fairly precise indication of the size of the inhabited portion of Orvonton.

â€œFrom the outermost system of inhabited worlds to the center of the superuniverse is a trifle less than two hundred and fifty thousand light-years.â€� (UB359:8)

The radius of the Milky Way galaxy is about 65,000 light years. If the Milky Way contains the â€œcentral nucleusâ€�, or inhabited portion, of Orvonton, then all of the Milky Way would likely be within the inhabited portion of Orvonton as we concluded above. This also establishes that the radius of Orvonton must be significantly greater than 250,000 light years.

Andromeda not within Inhabited Portion of Orvonton

The Urantia Book explicitly denies that the Andromeda galaxy, shown in Figure 4, is within the inhabited portion of Orvonton, our superuniverse.

â€œThere are not many sun-forming nebulae active in Orvonton at the present time, though Andromeda, which is outside the inhabited superuniverse, is very active.â€� (UB170:1)

This passage implies that Andromeda is, however, within Orvonton. Notice that the UB is here making explicit the distinction between the inhabited and the uninhabited portions of the superuniverse.

The Distance to the Andromeda Galaxy

Speaking of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), the Urantia Book says

â€œThis far-distant nebula [Andromeda] is visible to the naked eye, and when you view it, pause to consider that the light you behold left those distant suns almost one million years ago.â€� (UB170:1)

This contradicts current astronomical knowledge, which gives the distance to Andromeda as 2.39 +/- 0.09 million light years based on an average of 5 different types of determinations as discussed at http://www.earth.uni.edu/astro/cosmos/part6.html. This distance to Andromeda is not inferred from its red shift (Andromeda is actually blue shifted) but is obtained from a knowledge of the absolute brightness of certain Cephid variable stars which can be seen in Andromeda. The distance obtained by these methods could be in error by a factor of 2.667 (2.39/0.9) if the light we received from Andromeda were 86% absorbed by matter in the optical path, allowing only 14% to reach our telescopes. This might be due to the postulated â€œdark matterâ€� surrounding our galaxy, but there is no evidence that this is the case. Such a severe light absorption would have to be exceedingly spatially uniform or its presence would be detectable as a patterning in the images obtained by our telescopes.

Upper Limit on the Distance to Andromeda

Given that Andromeda is within our superuniverse, there is an upper limit on the distance from Urantia to the Andromeda galaxy which would be consistent with other information given in the Urantia Book. This upper limit would be the distance from Urantia to Uversa plus the distance from Uversa to the edge of the superuniverse. In this limiting case Uversa would be directly between Urantia and Andromeda.

Knowing that the ratio of the distance from Uversa to the edge of the superuniverse to the distance from Uversa to Urantia is 3.35, then the maximum possible distance to the Andromeda galaxy is 4.35 (1 + 3.35) times the distance from Urantia to Uversa. Since Urantia is within the inhabited portion of Orvonton, then the distance from Urantia to Uversa is less than 250,000 light years, and so the maximum distance from Urantia to Andromeda is 4.35 x 250,000 = 1,087,500 light years.

This is consistent with the distance given in the Urantia Book as less than one million light years, but inconsistent with the current scientific value of this distance of about 2.4 million light years. In order to bring the Urantia Book cosmology into conformance with current science, the distance given in the UB from Uversa to the edge of the inhabited portion of the superuniverse would have to be scaled up by a factor of at least 2.4/1.0875 = 2.2.

Globular Clusters near the Edge of Orvonton

The Urantia Book states that

â€œThe globular type of star clusters predominates near the outer margins of Orvonton.â€� (UB 170:2)

The existence and location of globular star clusters in a halo around the Milky Way was well known at the time the Urantia Book was written. A discussion of this subject can be found in The Universe Around Us by Sir James Jeans (1929, pp 60-62). This book also contains a description of the distribution of these globular clusters as

â€œâ€¦ lying on both sides of the Milky Way, its greatest diameter of about 250,000 light years lying in this plane, â€¦â€�(p 62)

Given that the UB implies that the radius of the inhabited portion of Orvonton is 250,000 light years (UB359:8) and thus the radius of Orvonton itself must be significantly greater, it seems inconsistent to identify the star clusters mentioned in the UB with the globular clusters described by Jeans which have a maximum radius of 125,000 light years from the galactic center.

They may be speaking of the eleven dwarf spheroidal (or elliptical) galaxies that closely circle the Milky Way. More information on these can be found in an interesting paper by George Lake of the University of Washington. This paper can be found at the URL http://wwwhpcc.astro.washington.edu/papers/localgroup/lg.html. An image of the dwarf spheroidal galaxy Leo I, located about 830,000 light years away, can be seen at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960519.html. I suspect that these dwarf galaxies are within Orvonton.

Orvonton Rotates about the Isle of Paradise and Havona

The Urantia Book states that our superuniverse of Orvonton circles the Isle of Paradise and the central universe of Havona.

â€œOrvonton is one of the seven evolutionary superuniverses of time and space which circle the never-beginning, never-ending creation of divine perfectionâ€”the central universe of Havona. At the heart of this eternal and central universe is the stationary Isle of Paradise, the geographic center of infinity and the dwelling place of the eternal God.â€� (UB1:5)

Location of Havona

The Urantia Book states that the location of Havona is in the direction of the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Of course it is not in the Milky Way at all, but is about 16 million light years distant.

â€œWhen the angle of observation is propitious, gazing through the main body of this realm of maximum density, you are looking toward the residential universe [Havona] and the center of all things.â€� (UB167:5)

The Period of Rotation of Orvonton about Havona

The Urantia Book gives a clue to the period of rotation of Orvonton about Havona.

â€œToday, the solar system to which Urantia belongs is a few billion years past the swing around the southern curvature so that you are just now advancing beyond the southeastern bend and are moving swiftly through the long and comparatively straightaway northern path.â€� (UB165:4)

If it took a few billion years to move from the southern curvature to just past the southeastern bend, a distance of one eighth of a complete revolution, then the period of rotation of Orvonton about Havona must be 8 times a few billion years. Assuming the word â€œfewâ€� indicates the number 3 gives a value of 24 billion years for the period of rotation of Orvonton about Havona. This is twice the current estimated age of the Universe and implies that Orvonton has not yet made one revolution about Havona.

The Orbital Velocity of Orvonton around Havona

The velocity of Orvonton in its orbit is the circumference of the orbit, 2 pi times the radius of the orbit, divided by the period of the orbit (24 billion years). Given that the period is 7.57 x 1017 s, and assuming a radius of 16 million light years, one finds that the velocity of Orvonton in its orbit around Havona is 1.25 x 106 m/s or 5.6 million miles per hour.

This velocity is of the order of magnitude of the currently estimated velocity of the Local Group of 400 km/s in the direction of the Virgo galactic cluster.

The Mass of Havona and the Isle of Paradise

Knowing the period of rotation of Orvonton about Havona to be about 24 billion years, and knowing the distance from Orvonton to Havona to be about 16 million light years, we can calculate an estimate of the mass of Havona. By equating the gravitational pull of Havona necessary to balance the centrifugal force of Orvonton in its orbit about Havona, one finds the mass of Havona to be given by

M = R V2/G

Where R is the radius of Orvontonâ€™s orbit, V is the velocity of Orvonton in its orbit, and G is the universal gravitational constant (6.673 x 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2). Knowing that 1 light year is 9.46 x 1015 m, the radius of Orvontonâ€™s orbit is 1.51 x 1023 m. The velocity is 1.25 x 106 m/s as found above.

Substituting the appropriate values into the equation above gives the mass of Havona to be 3.5 x 1045 kg. Given that the mass of the sun is 1.989 x 1030 kg, this is equivalent to 1.9 x 1015 solar masses. This is also equivalent to about 900 Milky Way galaxies.

The UB says this about the mass of Havona and the Isle of Paradise:

â€œOwing to the enormous encircling masses of the dark gravity bodies about the fringe of the central universe, the mass content of this central creation is far in excess of the total known mass of all seven sectors of the grand universe.â€� (UB:129:2)

The Urantia Book states that Orvonton contains about 1013 solar masses. The seven sectors of the grand universe thus must contain about 7 x 1013 solar masses. Our calculated value of the mass of Havona and the Isle of Paradise is thus about 27 times that of the seven sectors of the grand universe, in agreement with the UB statement.

Possible Other Galaxies within the Grand Universe

Given that the radius of the grand universe is about 16 million light years, one can compile a list of the galaxies, or groups of galaxies, which could be possible locations of the other six superuniverses. If these superuniverses are in a circular orbit around Havona with radius of 16 million light years, we would expect to find two at a distance of 31 Mly, at +/- 0.86H (0.86 hours = 12.9 deg) galactic azimuth, two at 25 Mly distance at +/- 2.6H azimuth, and two at 14 Mly at +/- 4.3 H azimuth. This is because Havona is said to be in the direction of the center of the Milky Way galaxy (0 H galactic azimuth). Such candidates would also be found near the plane of our galaxy, that is, having small values of galactic elevation, Such a list will include:

After looking through lists of the many galaxies in the vicinity of Urantia, one finds that there are at least 192 galaxies within 32 Mly, and over 1000 galaxies within 100 Mly. It becomes clear that the local universe structure is more complex than the concept of seven superuniverses revolving about Havona presented in the Urantia Book. The concept of the seven superuniverses must be considered as referring to seven inhabited regions of space, and that it must be considered that there are many other uninhabited galaxies within the grand universe, besides Andromeda, not mentioned in the Urantia Book.

The lack of candidate galaxies having the characteristics stated above may be due to the fact that it is difficult to observe galaxies which lie in the plane of the Milky Way, and which are on the opposite side of the Milky Way from Urantia. Recently, some radio observations have revealed galaxies which are otherwise hidden by the obscuring matter of the Milky Way. Undoubtedly there are many unknown galaxies in this region that might be suitable candidates for the location of the other superuniverses.

Our Local Universe

Size of Our Local Universe, Nebadon

Nebadon is said to have about 10 million inhabitable planets. This implies that Nebadon contains about 100 million stars, assuming that on average one star in ten has an inhabitable planet. If the local stellar density is about one star per 240 cubic light years (there are 30 stars within a radius of 12 light years from Urantia), then the volume of space required to hold 100 million stars would be 2.4 x 1010 cubic light years. If this volume were approximately spherical, then the radius of this sphere would be about 1,800 light years. One might conclude that our local universe is about this size, or about 3000 to 4,000 light years in diameter. Thus is is clear that our local universe of Nebadon is not the same as our Local Group of galaxies, which is much bigger, on the order of several million light years in diameter.

The Location of Salvington

The UB makes the following statement concerning the location of Salvington, the capital of our local universe.

â€œSalvington, the headquarters of Nebadon, is situated at the exact energy-mass center of the local universe. But your local universe is not a single astronomic system, though a large system does exist at its physical center.â€� (UB359:1)

We can also guess that Salvington, the capital of our local universe is perhaps about 2000 light years from Urantia in the direction of the center of the Milky Way, since the book says that we are on the outer fringe of Nebadon. This would be near the location of M6, the Butterfly star cluster shown in Figure 7.

It is also likely that the majority of Nebadon is within the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

Planets, Inhabited and Inhabitable

Fraction of Planets in Orvonton which are Inhabitable
The Urantia Book gives information on the fraction of planets that are inhabitable. One reads:

â€œIn your superuniverse not one cool planet in forty is habitable by beings of your order. And, of course, the superheated suns and the frigid outlying worlds are unfit to harbor higher life. In your solar system only three planets are at present suited to harbor life.â€� (UB173:5)

Thus the upper limit on the fraction of planets which are inhabitable by human beings is 1 in 40 (0.025). This statement concerns our superuniverse of Orvonton, but since I assume the laws of nature are the same in all superuniverses I will assume this number is applicable to the other superuniverses as well.

The Number of Inhabitable Planets in Orvonton

The number of inhabitable planets in Orvonton is specifically given in the UB.

â€œSeven superuniverses make up the present organized grand universe, consisting of approximately seven trillion inhabitable worlds plus the architectural spheres and the one billion inhabited spheres of Havona.â€� (UB166:8)

Given this, one can conclude that our superuniverse of Orvonton contains about one trillion inhabitable worlds. Notice that the UB is careful to distinguish between inhabitable planets and inhabited planets. We will show later that most of these one trillion inhabitable worlds are currently uninhabited.

Fraction of Stars in Orvonton Containing an Inhabitable Planet

Given that there are one trillion inhabitable worlds in Orvonton, and 10 trillion stars in Orvonton, one must conclude that if stars had no multiple inhabitable planets, then one star in ten has an inhabitable planet. If, as is indicated in the section on the distribution of inhabited planets in Satania below, stellar systems tend to have only one inhabitable planet, then generally only one star in about ten would have any inhabitable planets.

A recent survey of 800 nearby stars using the Doppler method, has shown that about one star in twenty has at least a Jupiter-sized planet. That one star in ten has an inhabitable planet therefore seems not improbable.

Average Number of Planets per Star in Orvonton

If there are 0.1 inhabitable planets per star, and 0.025 inhabitable planets per planet then on the average there must be 0.1/0.025 = 4 planets per star in Orvonton. This would indicate that planets are a common occurrence. This is verified by current astronomical science which, although it can detect only large planets approximately the size of Jupiter, has shown such planets to be relatively common.

Number of Inhabitable Planets in our Solar System

â€œIn your solar system only three planets are at present suited to harbor life.â€� (UB173:5)

Because of the wide diversity of life forms in the Universe, many planets which we would consider uninhabitable for man, may be perfectly habitable for some of the radically-different other life forms. Our solar system having three inhabitable planets is a rare occurrence since as we show below, only 0.7% of solar systems with inhabitable planets have three.

Distribution of Inhabited Planets in Satania

The UB gives the distribution of inhabited planets in Satania among the physical systems (solar systems) containing such planets.

â€œSatania is not a uniform physical system, a single astronomic unit or organization. Its 619 inhabited worlds are located in over five hundred different physical systems. Only five have more than two inhabited worlds, and of these only one has four peopled planets, while there are forty-six having two inhabited worlds.â€� (UB359: 7)

Thus there are 511 solar systems with one, 46 with two, 4 with 3, and only 1 with 4 inhabited planets. There are thus 511 + 46 + 4 + 1 = 562 solar systems with inhabited planets in the Satania system.

Average Number of Inhabited Planets per Star in Satania

The Urantia Book gives the number of stars in our system, Satania, which allows computing the average number of inhabited planets per star.

â€œThere are upward of two thousand brilliant suns pouring forth light and energy in Satania, and your own sun is an average blazing orb.â€� (UB458:1)

Since there are 619 inhabited planets and 2000 stars in Satania, then there are on the average 0.31 inhabited planets per star, or equivalently, approximately one inhabited planet for every 3 stars. Given that there are 562 solar systems with an inhabited planet, then one star out of every 3.6 in Satania has an inhabited planet.

Given that one star in ten in Orvonton has an inhabitable planet, the fact that in Satania one star in 3.6 has an inhabited planet indicates that the Satania star system is an especially favorable environment for life. Current science accepts that only certain zones within a galaxy are favorable for supporting human life.

Fraction of Satania Presently Inhabited

According to a Table given in the Urantia Book (UB167:1), a system contains about 1000 inhabitable planets, therefore the Satania system containing 619 inhabited planets makes it about 62% inhabited. This is much higher than the fraction of Orvonton that is presently inhabited (around 1 to 4%).

The Size of Satania

Given the number of stars in Satania, one can estimate its size under the assumptions that the star density in Satania is uniform and the same as our local star density (one star per 240 cubic light years). Assuming this, one finds that a sphere of radius 48.5 light years is required to contain the 2000 stars said to comprise Satania.

Urantian Cosmology which may Require Future Revision

The Urantia Book states that its cosmology is not necessarily inspired, and that it may require revision in the future. In this article to this point we have been focusing on positive correspondences between Urantian cosmology and current knowledge. In truth, there are some aspects of this cosmology which are not validated by current science and which are likely to require revision.

For instance, the Urantia Book says

â€œThe Uversa star students observe that the grand universe is surrounded by the ancestors of a series of starry and planetary clusters which completely encircle the present inhabited creation as concentric rings of outer universes upon universes.â€� (UB131:1)

In the past decade there has become available on the Internet a number of 3-dimensional visualizations of the universe. Studying these visualizations, one is struck by the fact that there is no evidence of a structure that can be described as â€œconcentric rings of outer universes.â€� In fact, the universe appears to consist of large superclusters of galaxies, which are distributed in a more or less random manner.

In another instance the Urantia Book describes the â€œspace zonesâ€� beyond the grand universe as

â€œBetween the energy circuits of the seven superuniverses and this gigantic outer belt of force activity, there is a space zone of comparative quiet, which varies in width but averages about four hundred thousand light-years. These space zones are free from star dustâ€”cosmic fog. Our students of these phenomena are in doubt as to the exact status of the space-forces existing in this zone of relative quiet which encircles the seven superuniverses. But about one-half million light-years beyond the periphery of the present grand universe we observe the beginnings of a zone of an unbelievable energy action which increases in volume and intensity for over twenty-five million light-years.â€� (UB130:0)

Again, there is no evidence of spherical zones of empty space surrounding any structure which might be the grand universe. Given the relatively small size of these space zones compared to the size of the grand universe and the distances between galaxies, this statement cannot be reconciled with known universe structure.

The idealized picture of seven superuniverses circling Havona in approximately the plane of our galaxy ignores the fact that assuming this cosmology is true, the space containing these universes also contains numerous other galaxy clusters outside the plane of our galaxy. There is no evidence of any organization of nearby galaxies resulting in a preferential localization near the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.

In another apparent disagreement with current scientific thought, the Urantia Book specifically denies the reality of the expansion of the universe, that the apparent recession of galaxies is linked to their distance by means of the Hubble constant. The UB says:

â€œMany influences interpose to make it appear that the recessional velocity of the external universes increases at the rate of more than one hundred miles a second for every million light-years increase in distance. By this method of reckoning, subsequent to the perfection of more powerful telescopes, it will appear that these far-distant systems are in flight from this part of the universe at the unbelievable rate of more than thirty thousand miles a second. But this apparent speed of recession is not real; it results from numerous factors of error embracing angles of observation and other time-space distortions.â€� (UB134:3)

Current science regards this Hubble effect as real. In fact, all the current 3-dimensional representations of the universe largely rely on this effect to establish the distance to the galaxies, Andromeda being an exception. If the Hubble effect is not real, then all such current representations are invalid. At this time there is no scientific evidence that the Hubble effect is not real, and in fact, there is significant evidence that it is real.

The Urantia Book states that only a very small portion of the observable universe contains life.

â€œAs far as we know, no material beings on the order of humans, no angels or other spirit creatures, exist in this outer ring of nebulae, suns, and planets. This distant domain is beyond the jurisdiction and administration of the superuniverse governments.â€� (UB131:2)

Current scientific opinion is that life formed by a chance combination of chemicals and evolved into the complex life forms known today. It would be deemed as most unlikely that life was concentrated on only a few clusters of galaxies as implied by this UB statement. Of course, we have at present no way to know if this is true or not.

One of the most serious disagreements between current astronomical science and the Urantia Book cosmology concerns the size of Orvonton, The radius of Orvonton can be inferred to be about 3.35 times between 200,000 and 250,000 light years or about 770,000 light years as indicated by UB222:6 and UB359:8. This assumes that Jerusem, the capital of our star system, Satania, is relatively near (within 50 light years) to Urantia and is thus within the Milky Way. Such a small radius would exclude both the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies from the uninhabited portion of Orvonton and it seems impossible that there are 10 trillion stars (UB172:7) within such a small volume.

One possible explanation for this inconsistency and also for that involving the distance to the Andromeda galaxy is to postulate that the authors of the Urantia Book presented a cosmology that was scaled to fit the astronomic knowledge of the time when the book was written. The value of one million light years for the distance to Andromeda was the current astronomical knowledge during the period of 1923 to 1953. The Urantia papers were written within this time period. If the authors scaled the true distance to the Andromeda galaxy down by a factor of about 3 to prevent the disclosure of unearned knowledge, to be maximally self-consistent they may have also scaled down the other two distances which they directly give. These distances are the 200,000 light years from Uversa to Jerusem, and the 250,000 light years corresponding to the radius of the inhabited portion of Orvonton.

If this hypothesis is true, then the true distances can be found by multiplying the values given in the UB by a factor of about 3. This makes the distance to the Andromeda galaxy agree with current knowledge. It makes the distance from Jerusem to Uversa to be greater than 600,000 light years, and the radius of the inhabited portion of Orvonton to be less than 750,000 light years. The overall radius of Orvonton would then be greater than 3.35 times 600,000 or 2.0 million light years. It would be less than 750,000/0.34 or 2.2 million light years. This places both the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies within the uninhabited portion of Orvonton. It also makes the UB statement that Orvonton contains ten trillion stars much more plausible.

Such a scaling would not be inconsistent with the statement that the Divine Counselor can reach any part in Orvonton in one Urantia year. If the distance from Uversa to the edge of Orvonton is about 2.1 million light years, then the velocity of the Divine Counselor would be 2.1/4.51 = 0.47 times that of the Solitary Messengers, or consistent with his statement that he could not attain the speed of a Solitary Messenger. Apparently a Solitary Messenger travels at about twice the speed of a Divine Counselor. Any scaling factor greater than about 6 would be inconsistent with the stated speed of the Divine Counselor.

Could it be that the revision of the Urantian cosmology which the UB authors state may be required in the future is this scaling upwards of the stated distances by a factor of 3? This is probably one of the simplest possible revisions, which could be imagined.

Another discrepancy in UB cosmology concerns the time required for a Solitary Messenger to travel to the central universe (Havona) and back. The Urantia Book states that a Solitary Messenger can travel at a speed of

â€œ841,621,642,000 of your miles per second of your time.â€� (UB261:1)

Since the speed of light is 186,281 miles per second, the speed of the Solitary Messenger is 4,512,000 times the speed of light.

The Urantia Book also says the following about a Solitary Messenger:

â€œLong before the presence of life on Urantia the [Solitary] messenger now associated with me was assigned on a mission out of Uversa to the central universeâ€”was absent from the roll calls of Orvonton for almost a million years but returned in due time with the desired information.â€� (UB259:2)

In a million Urantia years a Solitary Messenger can travel a distance of 2,256 billion light years and back. The age of the universe is thought to be only 14 billion years, so the radius of the universe is no greater than 14 billion light years. It would take a Solitary Messenger only 6,200 years to travel to the edge of the known universe and back.

There is good reason, based on the number of stars in the grand universe, to believe that the distance from Uversa to the central universe is only about 16 million light years. A Solitary Messenger can travel this distance and back in only seven Urantia years. If this distance is correct the Solitary Messenger had 999,993 years to spend in the central Universe before he had to return.

There is also good reason to believe that the speed given for the Solitary Messenger is correct. This is based on the ability of a Divine Counselor, travelling at a lesser speed, to reach any part of Orvonton in one Urantia year, and the apparent size of Orvonton based on the number of stars in Orvonton. If this is so, it appears that he could have made the trip to the central universe and back in less than one Uversa year, or 8.2 Urantia years and still have had 1.2 Urantia years to conduct his business.

Thus it appears that the statement given in UB259:2 is grossly inconsistent with the other cosmology given in the UB. Perhaps it should have read that the Solitary Messenger was gone only one (Uversa) year?

Conclusions
These results show that the major aspects of Urantia Book cosmology are, in most part, in reasonable agreement with our present cosmological understanding. The major conflicts with current astronomical knowledge can be resolved if the three absolute distances given in the book are scaled up by a factor of about 3 to make the distance to the Andromeda galaxy conform approximately to current estimates.

The reader may question why the revelators chose to present a false value for the scale of the cosmology given in the UB. I believe that this choice actually demonstrates the wisdom of the revelators. Given that the currently-accepted value of the distance to the Andromeda galaxy was 900,000 light years at the time the book was written (Jeans, op.cit. p66), the revelators were faced with several conflicting choices. At the time, the distance to the Andromeda galaxy was the only extra-galactic distance known with any belief of certainty. I believe they chose to give this distance to provide an absolute scale to the size of our superuniverse because it was the largest distance determined by Urantian science of that time. Given this, they were faced with two choices: revealing the true distance or presenting a distance in agreement with accepted knowledge. Given the fact that the Urantian science was inaccurate at the time, any statement made would inevitably be at odds with current opinion, either before or after the truth was known. Revealing the true distance would immediately create disbelief in the revelation among the science-minded audience at which the revelation is directed, and would impart unearned scientific knowledge, prohibited by the mandate of revelation, which would shortly be acquired unaided by Urantian scientists in any event. In giving the then-accepted value, they avoided any controversy during the early stages of the acceptance of the revelation. The impact of the later inconsistency with Urantian astronomy they defused by explicitly admitting that the cosmology presented was not divinely inspired and would require revision in the future. Scaling all distances down by the same factor would create the minimum possible distortion to the presented cosmology, and would allow recovery of the true distances in the future when the true distance to the Andromeda galaxy was known.

The Urantia Book expressly condones not revealing facts when it might inhibit spiritual advancement. Speaking of the seraphic recorders it says,

â€œSome day they will teach you to seek truth as well as fact, to expand your soul as well as your mind. â€¦ But sometimes error is so great that its rectification by revelation would be fatal to those slowly emerging truths which are essential to its experiential overthrow. When children have their ideals, do not dislodge them; let them grow.â€� (UB554:6)

Did the revelators decide that correcting the factual error concerning the distance to Andromeda might inhibit the spread of the spiritual truths they were trying to implant?

The apparent inconsistency in the time taken by the Solitary Messenger in his trip to the central universe and back is not convincing evidence of the inaccuracy of UB cosmology. It may be that the Solitary Messenger spent the vast majority of the time during his trip in collecting the desired information, or it may be that the value â€œone millionâ€� was inserted by a human editor who could not believe that such a trip would take only one year.

It appears unlikely that the other disagreement with Urantian science, that of the purposeful implantation of life in the seven superuniverses, or galaxy clusters, versus the random spontaneous self-assembly of life from inert matter, will be resolved anytime within the foreseeable future. It does seem possible to verify the presence of life in the near vicinity of our solar system, which the UB states is a relatively common occurrence. This should be encouraging to those engaged in the present SETI efforts.

Labels: Frederick L. Beckner, galaxies, grand universe, Hubble Telescope, master universe, Milky Way, planets, the universe, The Urantia Book

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Wednesday, April 09, 2008

"But who say you that I am?"

An address to the 1991 Intensive Summer Seminar
Lake Forest, Illinois
L. Dan Massey, Jr.
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"Even in the study of man's biologic evolution on Urantia, there are grave objections to the exclusive historic approach to his present-day status and his current problems. The true perspective of any reality problem--human or divine, terrestrial or cosmic--can be had only by the full and unprejudiced study and correlation of three phases of universe reality: origin, history, and destiny. The proper understanding of these three experiential realities affords the basis for a wise estimate of the current status." (215:3)

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The Christian Church has long focused great attention on the events surrounding Simon Peter's epochal assertion of faith, "You are the Deliverer, the Son of the living God." In Christian mythology, as understood by a layman, it is from this occasion that the origins of the church are traced, and it is from Jesus' actions in delivering the "Keys of the Kingdom" to the apostles that the supposed authority of the church derives. The momentous events in Michael's bestowal ministry which had led up to this critical moment are chronicled in the first half of Part IV of The Urantia Book.

We know from the book that Jesus had carefully prepared the Apostles for a change in the direction of his ministry after the final, fatal rejection at Capernaum, but the new direction that emerges at the time of Peter's Confession seems at first strange, surprising, and, from the viewpoint of two thousand years of hindsight, to have led the affairs of the Kingdom in some rather queer directions.

This paper examines this critical nexus in planetary affairs, reviews some of the results of this change in direction, and reinterprets the events leading up to this occasion in the light of the many things learned from all parts of The Urantia Book about the nature and purposes of Deity and the specific mission of Michael in his bestowal. This process eventuates in a substantial deconstruction of the Christian myth and opens up a more objective and truthful perspective on the recent past and the near future of religious evolution on Urantia.

One of the major problems in examining an occasion of this kind is the sense of sacredness which has grown up around the events with the passage of time. There has been a persistent human tendency to consider all matters pertaining to Michael's bestowal as having sacred significance. In fact, Jesus repeatedly warned his Apostles of the danger in treating purely secular matters as sacred.

"But as religion becomes institutionalized, its power for good is curtailed, while the possibilities for evil are greatly multiplied. The dangers of formalized religion are: fixation of beliefs and crystallization of sentiments; accumulation of vested interests with increase of secularization; tendency to standardize and fossilize truth; diversion of religion from the service of God to the service of the church; inclination of leaders to become administrators instead of ministers; tendency to form sects and competitive divisions; establishment of oppressive ecclesiastical authority; creation of the aristocratic "chosen-people" attitude; fostering of false and exaggerated ideas of sacredness; the routinizing of religion and the petrifaction of worship; tendency to venerate the past while ignoring present demands; failure to make up-to-date interpretations of religion; entanglement with functions of secular institutions; it creates the evil discrimination of religious castes; it be comes an intolerant judge of orthodoxy; it fails to hold the interest of adventurous youth and gradually loses the saving message of the gospel of eternal salvation." (1092; 3)

One of the great lessons of this sojourn at Caesarea, where Peter's confession occurred, had to do with the origin of religious traditions, with the grave danger of allowing a sense of sacredness to become attached to non-sacred things, common ideas, or everyday events. From one conference they emerged with the teaching that true religion was man's heartfelt loyalty to his highest and truest convictions.

But the greatest error of the teaching about the Scriptures is the doctrine of there being sealed books of mystery and wisdom which only the wise minds of the nation dare to interpret. The revelations of divine truth are not sealed except by human ignorance, bigotry, and narrow-minded intolerance. The light of the Scriptures is only dimmed by prejudice and darkened by superstition. A false fear of sacredness has prevented religion from being safeguarded by common sense. The fear of the authority of the sacred writings of the past effectively prevents the honest souls of today from accepting the new light of the gospel, the light which these very God-knowing men of another generation so intensely longed to see.

Even today mankind labors under these misapprehensions of sacredness. Not all matters, even those pertaining to the actions of incarnated Deity, are sacred in the human sense, and it is only by stripping away the tradition-encrusted layers of false sacredness that mankind has attached to these events that we may penetrate to the deeper significance enclosed therein.

This paper seeks to ignore the imputed sacredness of millennia of human misunderstanding and tries to explore these events from the celestial viewpoint of the Creator Son himself. In so doing, we will be guided by certain principles, the most important of which is this -- that Michael of Nebadon is at least as intelligent as the average Urantia mortal, that he had full understanding of the social, religious, and political situation into which he would incarnate, and that he commenced his bestowal with full appreciation of the likelihood of various possible outcomes, both desirable and undesirable. In addition, once incarnate as Joshua Ben Joseph, and once in full possession of his Deity mind faculties, the mortal mind of Jesus of Nazareth suffered from no superstitious illusions about the significance of his actions for the planetary cultural economy.

I believe that the Apostles had almost no comprehension of what was really going on at this time, and that the sacred myth of the origins of the church is, in fact, a product of their own egocentric interpretation of events to which they attached a false sense of sacredness. I further claim that Jesus, as both man and God, was aware that they would do this and intended this to be the result of his actions if they persisted in their materialistic view of his teachings. This result, therefore, was also intended by Jesus as the best way of dealing with a difficult, if not actually undesirable situation. When we have fully explored these events with the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight, we will, at last, be able to perceive the broad outline of a small but astoundingly clever part of the Divine plan for Urantia.

In examining Jesus' decisions and actions from the perspective of Michael of Nebadon I will set aside the more obvious concerns of the bestowal mission, such as his commitment to doing the Father's will, his need for the physical vehicle of his incarnation to survive infancy and childhood, and the events and decisions leading up to his full achievement of personality integration at the time of his baptism. These matters are not unimportant. Rather, they are matters of such importance that a natural preoccupation with them tends to cloud our ability to perceive and to analyze the more subtle features of Jesus' life work Let me simply say this--Creator Sons do not fail to achieve the purposes of their bestowal incarnations by the methods approved for their use. Even though the actual life circumstances of the incarnate son are, from the human perspective, subject to personal, spiritual, psychic, and physical risks, the celestial purposes are always addressed and always achieved.

Instead of these major factors, we must examine those areas of Michael's bestowal in which no such force of destiny provides a teleological override of the direction of finite events. We shall examine those occasions on which the fully creative potentials of Deity are expressed through free will choice, as separated from the cases in which the mortal mind of the incarnate god exercises the relatively free human will. Only in this way will we discover the actions of creative Deity disclosed in planetary history and destiny.

In viewing the planetary situation on Urantia from the Salvington perspective, Michael wished to provide the maximum uplift to human minds and spirits to prepare them to benefit from the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth, an event which would turn psychic reality on Urantia upside-down. The better the mortals of Urantia could anticipate and work with the Spirit of Truth, the more quickly the secular institutions of life could be improved and refined and the greater would be the benefit, on all levels of reality, to the greater number of Michael's mortal children.

To accomplish this, it might have been helpful for Michael to leave behind on Urantia some token of his bestowal more substantial than the Spirit of Truth to provide a path of entry for the mortal mind to more sublime realities. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he was prohibited from leaving behind offspring, images, writings, or other things that might become an object of superstitious veneration. In addition, since his bestowal life was to benefit not only Urantia, but planetary societies throughout all Nebadon, nothing physical could ever serve the purpose.

We can imagine Michael considering whether he might simply fix things on Urantia, so everybody would be put out of their misery. But this would never really be acceptable. Simply fixing Things would be too much like a human child playing war with tin soldiers. Creation of this order is, at best, an aid to fantasy, but ultimately boring. The very hosts of heaven would sing out, "BO-RING."

There are two problems. First, and most obvious to our limited, human insight, a broken planet must want to be fixed. This was clearly not the case with Urantia, as was proven by many events of the bestowal. Second, and more subtle, a broken planet must learn to fix itself. Otherwise, it would constantly need fixing and become an eternal dependent on divine omnificence. It is clear from The Urantia Book that personally taking care of every detail of running a universe is not the job Michael signed up for when he started his creative exercise. Even worse, other planets throughout Nebadon would be thus deprived of the opportunity to observe the mortal process of planetary recreation and maintenance. It was equally important for the other planets to observe how this is done and learn to do it for themselves.

The Spirit of Truth would, of course, provide the major motive force for planetary re-creation; however, the bestowal offered a window of opportunity in which Deity could interact directly with and directly instruct humanity in the proper way. For this, though, there would need to be a clear message that could be communicated unambiguously to a critical core of humans who would be so convinced of its truth and so motivated to its dissemination that it would spread throughout the planetary culture and provide the psychic substrate on which the Spirit of Truth could more readily activate the human will to perfection. The problem for Michael was, of course, what this teaching, this revelation, would be and how he would fix it so firmly into the thought streams of humanity that the essential saving message at its core would never be lost.

I suggest that he would have most desired to give a clear teaching of truth to all humanity. Such a teaching would be embraced by a homogeneous social institution which would be well prepared to carry forward its worldwide dissemination and application. Such would have been the course of the bestowal on a normal planet, and such a bestowal would have ended in a physically as well as spiritually dignified manner, as befits the incarnation of a Paradise Son.

We know, however, that, on Urantia, the rebellion of the original Planetary Prince and the subsequent default of Adam and Eve had made the emergence of such a worldwide institution of enlightenment impossible and had resulted in the persistence of wildly fragmented races and religious and cultural sects for tens of thousands of years, right down to the times of Michael's appearance. There was no way a single human being, even one who incarnated the person of Deity, could create such an organization in the space of a single mortal lifetime without recourse to a vast amount of superhuman intervention in planetary affairs.

The only possibility that would be open to the incarnate Michael would be to work with the existing and highly fragmented human institutions. Unfortunately, there was not even consistency or coherence of purpose among these groups. Some of the Greeks had made great progress in philosophy and refining the art of clear thinking. The Romans, as a society, had learned many of the arts of government. The Hebrews had developed a profound intellectual and literal commitment to their humanly evolved idea of righteousness. Behind it all lurked some of the ideas and teachings of Melchizedek, which had helped foster and stabilize the light of truth, but nowhere was there either a literal or a psychic basis for opening a dialogue, much less making a quick move to coherence and unification.

In the city of Memphis, near Alexandria in the Nile delta, there flickered a faint light of actual truth. Here, in the precincts of the ancient temple of the Aten, a small, almost unknown, nearly secretive group kept alive the knowledge and traditions of Egypt from the times when the young Pharaoh, Ikhnaton, under the tutelage of his mother, the Great Empress Tiye, had made bold to reform the whole of his nation to the worship of The One True God. Although Ikhnaton's vision had failed his nation, and the great city of god at Akhetaten had long since crumbled to dust, this brief but spectacular effort had deflected the course of cultural history in the Levant and made possible the persistence of the teachings of Melchizedek and the Salemite missionaries down to the times of Moses and the emergence of the Hebrew peoples.

Except for a few isolated individual visionaries scattered here and there, this group of communicants of the Aten in Memphis was the only group of humans on Urantia that possessed, at least in their traditions, a reasonably accurate understanding of the broader meaning and purpose of Michael's bestowal. Had Ikhnaton's reforms succeeded, Michael would have probably incarnated in Egypt, and Urantia would be a very different place today. But the small group of believers that actually persisted in the Aten cult was too small and inward-directed ever to make a short-term useful impact on human society. An analysis of the prospects of this devoted group of followers would show that, although they possessed an understanding of the facts of the bestowal, their destiny would be to have known the truth, to have been more cosmically aware than the rest of the planet, but to have been unable to act effectively to take advantage of this fact.

As Michael surveyed Urantia from Salvington, he must have thought that, given the limitations of the Aten cult, the next-best venue for his ministry would be the Hebrews, who held the essential truths of his teachings buried deep within their complex theology and legalistic religion. They were especially well-organized and, if they could be won in large numbers to the truth, it might be possible to reform the Jerusalem-centered ecclesiastical bureaucracy into a useful tool. On the other hand, the actual practice of their religion had degenerated into sacrificial rituals that were awesome in their embrace of materialism.

Worse yet, their concept of divine truth had degenerated into a religion of the book that focused heavily on a body of supposedly sacred texts which contained a little truth admixed with vast amounts of completely fictitious racial history. Across the centuries their scribes had dutifully copied the writings of ancient prophets, and, with each transcription, had updated the teachings to harmonize with the evolving racial and political consensus regarding the final emergence of a Jewish state with supreme authority conferred by God himself. The ethnocentric silliness of this belief was clearly not apparent to the Hebrews themselves, who found solace from the hard facts of Roman rule in such quaint fantasies.

As a result, there was virtually nothing in the pseudo-sacred texts of the Hebrews that Michael could expect to use effectively to affect the formal, organized thinking of a devout "people of the book." Aside from an appeal to the spiritual nature, the best concrete, textual reference was the prophecy of the "Son of Man" from the supposed writings of Enoch. This legend, only partly accredited, would have to be his vehicle for exerting direct leverage on the Hebrew attitudes. Then, perhaps, by illuminating the genuinely prophetic writings where fragments remained in the canon, enough spiritual pressure could be brought to bear to achieve some useful results.

The problem, of course, would be that, once the Jews found out that he was the "promised Messiah," they would want him to pay off on all the promises that had been made to the race in his name by generations of pseudo-religious social parasites who knew nothing of his real nature. That was clearly impossible. It would be a disservice to everyone on the planet, and would have worse results than just fixing up the mess by divine fiat, since the Hebrews suffered under primitive tribal standards of socialization in virtually every important respect.

Clearly, anything he did with the Jews would have to work into their organized programs in some way. Since being the wholly acceptable Messiah was definitely out, he would have to consider alternative approaches. The intensely significant and sanctified feast of the Passover might offer some possibilities for religious engineering.

I imagine the Salvington corps of bestowal analysts must have worked long and hard with Michael, sifting through the details of all branches of Urantian culture and religious thought in planning the bestowal. It must have been clear that the greatest hope for improving the planet would come from having a major, organized body of mortal culture wholeheartedly embrace his teachings. The prime candidate for such a transformation would have been the Hellenized culture of Rome, which had not only managed to grow and stabilize itself for many centuries, but had generally served to unify and harmonize (by force) the wildly divergent cultures of the Mediterranean basin. The problem, of course, was that the Greeks, who exerted substantial intellectual influence, didn't care much about real religion, and the Romans, who ultimately ran things, were even less interested than the Greeks.

I think the Salvington surveys must have turned up one additional ray of hope, besides the Hebrews, and this was among the devotees of the strange and remarkable father-god of ancient Persia, Mithra. As the tides of trade, government, and commerce had swept eastward from Greece and Rome into the Levant, so had complementary currents moved out of Egypt, India, and Persia, carrying with them the news of ancient gods and legends. These supermortal beings were no less believable in their attributes and aspects than were the happy go-lucky gods of Mount Olympus, ruled over by Zeus/Jupiter, a name which itself meant "God the Father" (dyaus p'ter) in the Indo-European root tongue. The very novelty and unfamiliarity of the new Eastern deities, and the continuing pressure of growing scientific knowledge, fostered syncretism and the emergence of new, more encompassing theologies.

Tarsus, the Roman capital of the province of Cilicia, and the birthplace of the Apostle Paul, was an ancient Hittite city which had been conquered in the ninth century B.C.E. by the Assyrians under Shalmaneser III, and in the sixth century by the Persians. The passage of Alexander in 333 B.C.E. led to cultural changes through which the city became sacred to the memory of the Greek hero and demi-god Perseus. The revised worship of Mithra, the ancient father-god of the Persians, had surely reached Tarsus, through its large Persian population, soon after the sixth century conquest. The later arriving Greeks introduced their belief in Perseus as the father of the Persian race, while laying the foundation for a major school of Stoic philosophy, and this heady mythic metaphysical brew became the formative solution for a new religion. The announcement of the discovery of the precession of the equinoxes by Hipparchus, in 128 B.C.E, may have provided the seed around which an exotic and complex secret doctrine would crystallize.

Perseus was one of the sons of Zeus by a mortal, named Danae. Apparently, in the way myths evolve, the early Hellenization of the Mithra cult resulted in the transplantation of the heroic exploits of Perseus, the son of Zeus by a mortal, onto the person of Mithras, the son of Mithra born miraculously from the Earth-mother. Meanwhile, the Stoic school at Tarsus, which had long sponsored an astral religion of personal salvation (in which Perseus seems to have functioned as the keeper of the gates on the pathway of souls to and from genesis), was shaken to its roots by the discovery of Hipparchus that the "fixed stars" were anything but "fixed" in the sky.

While the immediate effect of this discovery was to trigger an unfortunate renaissance of stoic interest in astrology, it seems that the more metaphysically minded Stoics recognized, in the precession, the hand of a deity who ultimately transcended all others recognized from antiquity, but especially the sun, moon, and planetary gods. Perhaps because of local bias and astrological considerations, this splinter group of Stoics fixed on Perseus/Mithras as this transcendent deity and began an elaborate and esoteric reification of the "old religion" along the lines of their own apocalyptic and eschatological beliefs. Because of this deep connection into the intelligensia of Cilicia, variants of these beliefs became established throughout all social strata, particularly during the reign of Mithridates VI Eupator, the king of Pontus who conquered most of Asia Minor around 88 B.C.E. By the time Mithridates was overcome by Pompey in 66 B.C.E., Mithraic rites were firmly established as the normative religion among the Cilician pirates (Mithridates' navy), and probably in his other armed forces as well.

By the time of Michael's final review of the Urantian situation, just before embarking on the bestowal, the Mithras cult had developed its own, unique character and was spreading rapidly throughout the Roman Empire. It had, in fact, become the dominant, though unofficial, religion of the Empire. The soldiers of the Roman army had adopted Mithraism from their former enemies, who entered imperial service after Pompey's victory. Their conquests became the fertile stream which carried the cult to the far corners of the empire. This situation can have hardly escaped the attention of the Salvington planners of the bestowal. Let us consider for a moment some of the beliefs of Mithraism, to the extent they may be inferred from archaeological evidence.

The origins of much of Mithraic ritual lay in conventional fertility-astrology myths. Mithras is the son of god. He is a heroic solar deity, and is associated with the Sun. According to the solar version of the heroic myth, the son (of the Sun), in his mission from heaven to earth, performs his great deed which re-fertilizes the soil for the next season of growth. Subsequently, he dies and, on the third day, arises from the dead and ascends to heaven. Therefore, the day most sacred to solar heroes is December 25th, for this is three days after the Winter Solstice, when the resurrection of the Sun from the slow death of Autumn is first apparent to the careful observer. Because Mithraism incorporates additional mythic features of deity transcendence, probably added by the Stoics, the god of the Sun is also the Son of God. Even so, he and his father are one, for his father is also the Sun.

The Salvington analysts of Urantian religions must have known of the bizarre twistings of parts of the Melchizedek teachings which had somehow migrated into this new religion of Rome. Although Mithraism had been strongly influenced by Zoroastrian teachings of a dualistic spiritual universe, the fact that, in Mithraic myth, Mithras triumphs redemptively over the universal forces of decay and death showed that good would eventually come out on top. If the supposed mythic facts concerning the sojourn of god on earth counted for anything, the Mithraic version was closer to the truth than the Hebrew concept of the Messiah, which was grounded in the primitive tribal idea that Yahweh, the volcano demon, was literally the absolute god of the universe. Although the Mithraic liturgy was somewhat unsavory in its reliance on astrological iconography, sacrificial blood, and purifying holy water, it was no more offensive than the temple services in Jerusalem.

Given this somewhat more detailed (and speculative) view of the circumstances of the bestowal than is presented in The Urantia Book, how did Michael decide to deal with his need to create for Urantia some vehicle for improving human welfare and responsiveness to the upheaval induced by the bestowal of the Spirit of Truth?

The story is familiar to us. He is born in Bethlehem as Joshua Ben Joseph. He is recognized by a few people who really have some idea of his divine purpose. Old Simeon and Anna in the temple at Jerusalem are the ones we know best for giving voice to the heartfelt longing of the Jewish people for a deliverer, although their recognition was prompted by Zacharias, the priest. The priests of Ur sought out the infant, again in response to knowledge acquired by direct revelation to one of their associates.

As we know, circumstances conspired so that the infant Jesus was taken to Alexandria. And here occurred the only direct recognition of his divinity from traditional human sources that would mark his entire life on Urantia. For here those priests of the Aten, privy to the sacred heritage of Egypt's brief golden age of the spirit, journeyed from Memphis to see Jesus and "...to some extent understood certain phases of his divine mission to Urantia." Although this visit fulfilled an ancient obligation, and allowed the communicants of the Aten to know the supreme joy of being right about otherwise unknowable matters of spiritual destiny, even when ignored by the world, there was no way Michael's purpose could be fulfilled within this community.

Most importantly, it could not be fulfilled here because it did not depend on direct access to the wealth of human commerce or the organization of human government. Rather, as a result of the well-understood religious patterns on Urantia, it depended on a successful takeover or redirection of one or more extensive, well-organized religions through affecting the hearts of its communicants. No direct assault through the powers of mind or money could achieve this in the way the Spirit of Truth could, as it activated the memory, the story of the bestowal life, the bread of life.

Jesus left Alexandria and returned with his family to Galilee, for this course had already been selected by the Salvington planners. There he grew to young manhood as Jesus of Nazareth, the child of as yet unfulfilled promise. During this time he mastered the intellectual content of the Hebrew religion and found the critical writing in the Book of Enoch which he had planned to make the starting point of his attempt to minister to the Jewish people. The liberal religious atmosphere of Galilee did not overwhelm or crush the human side of his spiritual development, so that his human mind was able to find the great truths within the scriptures and recognize the Enoch fragment when it came to him. Perhaps from an unrestrained position in Galilee he would actually be able to work his spiritual lever on the establishment at Jerusalem and shift the establishment onto a more productive path.

Eventually, he was able to travel from home, to see the civilized world, and even go to Rome. And here he made the second great connection of the mortal mind with the deity inevitability as he became fully acquainted with all the religions of the world, but most especially with the religion of destiny, Mithraism. Already Jesus had met with a Mithraic priest of Persian extraction at Carthage, and had delivered his memorable discourse on time and space. A central element of this discourse is an exposition of the difference between the human concepts of time and space and the perceptions of these realities held by lower (animal) and higher forms of consciousness. The focus of the discourse is on the nature and mechanism of conscious immortality, and the level of discussion is the most cosmologically advanced of any of Jesus' discourses reported in The Urantia Book. The ideas presented deal with Ultimacy as a reality apart both from the Absolute and the Finite, and mark this as an extraordinary revelation, considering the time and place. But more remarkable discussions were yet to occur.

With Nabon, the Greek Jew who served as a high priest of Mithras in Rome, Jesus held many meetings, of which the most significant was the discussion of truth and faith, presented on pages 1459 - 60 of The Urantia Book. Jesus' discourse went far beyond contemporary human understanding of these realities and permanently influenced Nabon's way of thinking about these things and their relationship to the attainment of personal immortality. Since the attainment of salvation was a major concern of the mystery cult, these discussions did much to uplift Nabon's concept of the truth embodied in the myths of Mithras. We are told, "These truths continued to burn within his heart, and he was of great assistance to the later arriving preachers of Jesus' gospel." And indeed he was.

In each of his encounters on the trip to Rome and the return to Nazareth, Jesus was selecting and preparing individual human truth seekers in many different schools of philosophy and theology to understand and to appreciate aspects of his revelation that would be particularly relevant and inspiring to the unique view point of their faith. Once this work was completed, once the fuel was laid for the religious conflagration that would sweep the Roman Empire, Jesus returned home to strike the match and ignite the kindling to start the process of religious transformation. After a period of personal preparation, he visited John and was baptized, completed the perfect and permanent alignment of his will with the will of the Father, and retired to Mount Hermon for forty days to complete the "cross-check" for his mission. It was during this time that the mortal and divine minds could fully intercommunicate and final decisions concerning the plans laid long ago on Salvington could be affirmed by the mortal mind based on the mortal life experience and acquired knowledge of life on Urantia.

Once he had fully affirmed and fine-tuned his plans, he returned from the mountain and began to select and to train the Apostles. He taught them, and the later evangelists, all the truth that they could bear, and then made them practice telling this truth to others. Appearing now among men as the Son of Man, Michael gradually extended his sphere of influence to bring his revelation of truth to hungry souls throughout Judea, Samaria, and the Decapolis, never competing with, but always complementing the work of John and his disciples. Finally, on January 13, 28 AD., three days after the death of John, Jesus arrived at Capernaum, in Galilee, to begin the next major phase of his public ministry. Up to this time he had taught the Apostles of truth and spiritual realities, but they had comprehended little. As always, they could not bring themselves fully to discard the racial delusions of the Jewish concept of the Messiah as a temporal ruler.

This obsession with the Messianic myth was so powerful that it kept Jesus from imparting a fuller understanding of his mission and purpose to the disciples and prevented them from properly understanding and acting on what he told them. Without the healing, helping ministry of the Spirit of Truth, the Apostles were unable to discriminate between their long, dearly held Messianic delusions and the cosmic truth which was exhibited daily before their eyes. At best, Jesus could hope that the teachings and the experiences would fill their minds with information consistent with cosmic truth, and inconsistent with their fondly held delusions, so that the eventual activation of these memories by the Spirit of Truth would enable them to begin to function on higher levels of faith. One senses, in reading this part of the book, the repeated disappointment which Jesus felt at the continuing incapacity of the Apostles to grasp and work with higher spiritual truths. In spite of this, the teaching work did make progress, and when, after the death of John, Jesus began not merely to teach but also to heal the sick and infirm, the news of his actions spread rapidly and attracted much attention.

It is clear that Jesus had made a conscious choice for the Son of Man to enter into a more demonstrative relationship towards the multitudes after John's death. He surely had planned to capitalize on the work done by John in preparing the way for his supposed Messianic role, and to accept that role to the extent it could be made to fit reality and to the extent the Jews would accept him in that role. It was unimportant that he could never really fulfill the total Jewish vision of Messiah. He would be what he was and show those who were willing to understand how his life and ministry transcended their highest ideals of Messiah. In addition, helping and healing people was both gratifying to his own deepest merciful impulses and evocative of increasing levels of popular attention and support for his ministry.

Unfortunately, his increasingly miraculous and attention-grabbing ministry worked against some of the more subtle aspects of his mission. The Messiah obsession of the multitudes made it even harder for them to focus usefully on his teachings than it had the Apostles, who benefited from close everyday contact with him. But this was expected too. Surely, he had foreseen the statistics of his popular appeal, even if he could not accurately predict the outcome of individual free will choice. As much as his mercy impulse prompted him to help and heal all his unfortunate children on Urantia, he would not do so, for it was essential that humankind master these problems itself, within the scope of its evolved planetary knowledge. A necessarily temporary removal of this burden would be worse than no help at all, especially since the people were so unwilling or unable to embrace the higher motivations to truth-seeking that he taught.

For fifteen months of his public ministry, Jesus appeared as both a teacher and a healer, but the work of healing increasingly consumed his energies and gradually stirred up more and more opposition from the religious authorities in Jerusalem. As the point of diminishing returns on this phase of his ministry was reached, Jesus performed his most massively visible creative miracle, the feeding of the five thousand, and then, at the peak of his popularity as a miraculous Messianic personage, refused to be made a king, disheartening many of his followers who left that day, never to return.

The necessity for shedding any remaining semblance of the Messiah role became even more apparent when, a few days later, he confronted the religious authorities from Jerusalem at the Capernaum temple. In the epochal sermon, presented on pages 1709-11 of The Urantia Book, we see for the first time that Jesus is actually claiming his own deity, notwithstanding that the Apostles' recognition of that change in approach will be delayed another four months. Surely he did not decide to take this new and extreme position without recognizing that, at this point in his ministry, the reaction of the religious authorities would be severe and negative. And so it was. From this time forward, although the door to forgiveness and reconciliation by Jesus would remain open to the religious authorities, Jesus' ministry would focus on the individual. Any idea of his life as a fulfillment of the Jewish racial destiny would not be seriously entertained, notwithstanding that the Apostles and many of his closest followers would continue to believe in it.

The great collapse in popular support, combined with the increasingly active opposition by the religious authorities, reduced Jesus' following to a minute fraction of its former size. Yet these remaining disciples were more numerous than those he had at the beginning of his work, and they had survived the disappointment of his first major break with the Jewish Messianic delusion. The result was the accomplishment of what had been Michael's purpose from the beginning of his public work as Jesus. He had managed to assemble a following of liberal-minded Jews who, by virtue of their experience of living and working with him for over two years, were totally loyal to his vision and trusting of his life purpose, even though they did not at all grasp its import. In short, their loyalty was increasingly fixed on Jesus as a person and less and less dependent on their confusions about his presumed Messianic role.

Yet even after this, there were many among his followers who remained because their Messianic delusion was so strong as to override the clear evidence of error which Jesus had provided. During the ensuing four months, he tried his remaining followers sorely, forcing them to face the near total rejection of his apparent mission by the general populace, and affording them few opportunities to experience acceptance of their teaching. Through out all this time he continued to teach, placing ever greater emphasis on the new revelation "of the spirit of the living God who dwells in the minds of men." And in conjunction with the emergence of this new and expanded view he increasingly disclosed his deity both to the religious authorities and to the Apostles.

He had carefully prepared the Apostles to achieve closure on the new revelation of his person and had laid the plans to achieve this closure which would bring about, at last, the ignition of planetary religious redevelopment, the irrevocable launch of the final eight month phase of his mortal life. It is appropriate to close this paper with an examination of this pivotal moment when the plans of Salvington, matured and refined through the mortal life, were set into final motion, since the outcome of this moment will move Michael's bestowal mission forward to its accepted, if not planned, conclusion.

What exactly had happened as a result of the final rejection of Jesus by the Jewish religious authorities which caused him to take this new direction? Two previous approaches to a coherent life mission appeared to have failed. The Son of Man, as a teacher, achieved only limited success. The Son of Man, as a teacher-healer, while apparently successful in attracting attention, created a confusing image by reinforcing the Messianic longings of the Jews, which he could never fulfill. Now, however, a new objective appears on the scene. For the final phase of his bestowal, Michael will structure the external, visible, material part of his life in such a way as to mesh with the salvation myth of Mithraism, which is, in material if not in spiritual content, much closer to the facts than the myth of the Jewish Messiah. And this is the final stage which must have been planned from the beginning on Salvington. No wonder the mortal mind of Jesus seemed to have its doubts.

In adopting this approach, or, rather, in accepting this final plan as a model for his earth life, the human Jesus was required to accept certain extraordinary corollary requirements. He would not try to be, nor would he want to be, a prophet or savior to the Mithraic cult. His experience with the Jews showed the problems in that approach. Rather, the story of his life, especially these last eight months, would become a vehicle by which his later apostles and followers would, without even meaning to, successfully take over the structure of the widespread Mithraic cult and infuse it with their Galilean ideals of liberalized Judaism, from which could then flower, under the influence of the Spirit of Truth, a religion of adequate power to preserve the ideals, if not the realities, of Jesus' religion to the time of a new, more tolerant, and spiritually conscious world order.

In order for this to happen, Jesus would have to become known as the Son of God, and would have to be fully accepted as such by a critical mass of Galilean Jews. This acceptance would have to be a matter of total personal faith, and not simply a matter of instruction. They would have to know the truth to the very core of their beings. It would be desirable for Jesus to enact, for their edification, a true parallel to the mythic adventure of Mithras. The Apostles would have to know and understand the reality of Jesus' victory over the Lucifer rebels. They would have to witness, in part, his acceptance and confirmation as the supreme power of the universe. Most of all, they would have to experience the phenomenon of a visible resurrection, with lots of appearances in the morontia form to convince large number of believers, who had not been close to him during his life, of the veracity of the Apostles' stories.

There was definitely a down side to this plan, especially for the human Jesus. As much as the Jewish authorities had hated and despised him and his teachings when he appeared as the Son of Man, they would become positively apoplectic when he claimed deity sonship as the Son of God. It took no great insight to know that they would pursue him personally to the limits of their ability, and destroy him when they could. That would be distressing, to say the least. On the other hand, there was much advantage to continuing a Hebrew-oriented ministry, even though it would hasten the end. In particular, the rite of the Passover could be readily adapted to form the foundation of a real communion experience.

He knew that, once he had attained full co-supremacy over the local universe, he would be able to literalize his presence anywhere and anywhen, so that, if he committed to appear wherever and whenever his followers celebrated the sacrament of remembrance, all practitioners of this form of communion throughout the time and space of Urantia would at last be able to worship in the genuine deity presence and be subject to the divine influence on their minds and souls. Since the Mithraic cult had already made a communion ceremony central to the weekly celebration of their belief system, the transformation of this ritual into a literal spiritual communion would expose the Mithraic communicants to regular, high-quality spiritual contact, whether they planned it or not. The rite would lay the foundation for the spirit to accomplish the motivation of the laggard human will.

Of course, the adapted Mithraic rite would have vastly more effect on its communicants than would occur with his own Apostles (who had been taught the truth and only awaited the activation of the spirit) or on the ceremonial Jews (who would experience relatively less exposure to the deity presence, since the communion was not a formal feature of their worship). The rapid acceleration of spiritual uplift among the Mithraists, once connected to this reality, would rapidly change the Roman Empire, since Mithraism was the major religion of personal experience within the Roman Army. Because of the extreme organization of the army, as well as the organization of the Mithraic cult, the infusion of spiritual power would create a social force able to begin the reformation of planetary culture.

Although I have described this plan quite plainly, this was not a cynical exploitation of human foolishness. Rather, it was a divinely loving acceptance of the necessity forced upon the bestowal Son by mankind's unwillingness to recognize the possibility of deity as anything other than a totem god. Although Moses and the Hebrew prophets had repeatedly tried to center the developing cult of Judaism on a spiritual concept of deity, judged in terms of statistics and outcome, they had failed miserably. Yet within ceremonial Judaism there lurked a concept of the truth, and within the lay followers of Judaism there were a few who retained this concept of the truth and were able to respond to Jesus when he appeared. The opposition of the majority was necessary to fully dramatize the occasion, and this could never have occurred in a liberal, cosmopolitan community like Alexandria. Without this persecution, Michael could not have created the image of the mythic Jesus that would enable the reform of Mithraism and lay the foundations of the future.

The central problem of making this work, not just for the Mithraic cult, but for all other religionists who might someday hear the Apostles' stories, was to totally lock in their commitment to his deity. The Apostles knew Jesus on many levels. They had known him as an expert carpenter. They had experienced him as a knowledge able fisherman. They had heard him teach individuals and multitudes. And they saw him heal the sick and infirm. They saw him multiply the loaves and fishes. And, when he had at last triumphed over the emotions of the crowd and was ready to be crowned King, they saw him refuse. Now it was necessary to force these Apostles to think, to analyze and to understand the meaning of all these things. He must challenge their ideas of the Messiah forcefully, yet build on them to achieve an understanding of his true nature and to lay the foundation of the new world order.

To do this, he put the Apostles through the most trying experiences of their lives up to this time. He took them to places where nobody was interested in their message. He forced them to reconsider what they were doing and why they were doing it. And he told them repeatedly that he was the Son of God and was one in both deity and divinity with his father.

Then, at what must have been the psychological low point in their hopes up to this time, he deliberately issued the challenge to their faith and belief, knowing the intended and hoped-for result. First he asked them, "Who do men say that I am?" Then, after the Apostles had expressed a number of viewpoints, he invited them to disavow these lesser concepts of his nature with the clincher question (and note the phrasing of the idea) "But who say you that I am?" I wonder if the mortal Jesus held his breath while he waited for the answer to this one. He had focused heavily for the past four months on building the Apostles up for this moment. Would it work? What would be the result? Would it be close enough to the ideal that he would have what he needed?

In the event, Simon Peter obliged with his spontaneous outburst, "You are the Deliverer, the Son of the living God." Jesus' reply is even more remarkable, for he said, "This has been revealed to you by my Father. The hour has come when you should know the truth about me."

Obviously, he found the response satisfactory, but what did he mean by saying that it had been revealed to the Apostles by the Father? He had certainly spoken words that appear to have more or less that same message on many occasions during the past four months. What had the Father revealed? I believe that Jesus recognized in Peter's assertion a depth of acceptance of this truth that went far beyond mere intellectual assent. And it was in this that he recognized the revelatory hand of the Father, confirming the extraordinary path his divine self had planned and his human self had accepted for the remaining eight months of his bestowal life.

It was necessary for Jesus to make sure that the Apostles genuinely believed that they had discovered this truth completely independently and of their own, guided free will. He had to give them the opportunity to change their minds, so that they would be fully committed to this truth during the trying times ahead. So the following day he said to them, "Now that a full day has passed since you assented to Simon Peter's declaration regarding the identity of the Son of Man, I would ask if you still hold to your decision?" To which Simon replied, for them all, 'yes, Master, we do. We believe that you are the Son of the living God." And then Jesus took the first step on his now-certain path, when he said:

"You are my chosen ambassadors, but I know that, in the circumstances, you could not entertain the belief as a result of mere human knowledge. This is a revelation of the spirit of my Father to your inmost souls. And when, therefore, you make this confession by the insight of the spirit of my Father which dwells within you, I am led to declare that upon this foundation will I build the brotherhood of the kingdom of heaven. Upon this rock of spiritual reality will I build the living temple of spiritual fellowship in the eternal realities of my Father's kingdom. All the forces of evil and the hosts of sin shall not prevail against this human fraternity of the divine spirit. And while my Father's spirit shall ever be the divine guide and mentor of all who enter the bonds of the spirit fellowship, to you and your successors I now deliver the keys of the outward kingdom--the authority over things temporal--the social and economic features of this association of men and women as fellows of the kingdom."

So the Apostles also felt Jesus had finally decided to entrust them with a role in his Kingdom. It is doubtful that they understood what they had received, but they felt they had been given something, and that reinforced their commitment to stand by Peter's confession.

From here on in Jesus' life, he will increasingly live the life of a mythic hero. And he does this deliberately, to reinforce the myth, which is the most substantial literal thing the bestowal limitations allow him to leave to a generation of totem worshipers. He has already fully expounded his message of truth to the Apostles and to the people of Palestine. Knowing that that revelation is doomed as a social force, he now works to provide the mythic trappings, the sugar-coating which will make the awful social medicine of truth palatable.

The price the divine Michael will pay for this decision is, in its way, as great as the price the Christ myth says that Jesus paid on the cross to redeem the souls of a sinful world. The spiritual price to the human race is horrendous in the near term. And every spiritual horror which flows from this decision, and their number is beyond human calculation, is a double agony to the Creator Son because he experiences it personally through his mortal children and he knows that it is an inevitable consequence of his plan for the rapid, radical uplift of Urantia. Growth is accompanied by discomfort. Extreme growth is accompanied by extreme pain.

Let us examine some of the small change that makes up the price of Peter's confession and Jesus' acquiescence. Religious truth will be submerged on Urantia for fifty generations in the cocoon of a gross pagan myth that the incarnate deity decided to literalize in order to capture the attention of a totem-minded culture. The factualization of this myth will make it terribly difficult to uncover the truth, except through the passage of time. Those far-seeing souls who dare to penetrate the myth to secure the truth will be persecuted by Jesus' appointed managers of human affairs even more outrageously than the Master himself was persecuted by the Jewish authorities.

In time the practice of the religion of the myth will diverge so much from the inner truth that men will see the truth standing apart, an obviously divine reality unto itself. Perhaps a new revelation will be possible to sharpen the difference and accelerate the change, while making the divergence abundantly clear. But the price of further acceleration will beget more conflict for a time. In a sense, the belief system of the human race was tricked by God for two thousand years in a way which displays respect for the human mind only as a vehicle of free will choice. Man chose to require his savior and teacher to function as an object of idolatry in order to be believed. And the savior accepted this role because it was the best he could do with the resources at hand. And all the best religious engineers of Salvington had examined the problem beforehand and agreed with the diagnosis and treatment.

In the end, this was the best way to maximize the penetration into human culture of the knowledge and attitudes of heart that would be necessary to work effectively with the Spirit of Truth. The price was that the Creator Son would have to endure a lot in the short term, until the human spirit on Urantia could begin to find and harmonize with itself and with his own.

I think Michael must have carefully weighed the alternatives, not only before but after the event. What if he had not done this? What would have happened? He could have lived as King of Urantia, but that would have been bo-ring. Realistically, he might have stuck with the Son of Man image to the bitter finish. The Jews would have destroyed him one way or another, but he would have made only a very small mythic splash. The Apostles might not have kept the point so well and, since they would not have a good story for marketing purposes, they would have probably become a small school of religious philosophy, holding meetings in secret to avoid persecution. Ultimately, without the link into the Roman power structure, they would have gone the way of the Atenites, a fate superior to that of the Cynics and Stoics, but not much better than the followers of Abner achieved. We see that Jesus was the truly brilliant marketer, because he created the concepts that convinced Saul of Tarsus to accept the new religion, and Tarsus was the Mithraic cultural center.

If Jesus had not done these things, the Spirit of Truth would have been limited in its effectiveness in working with mortal minds that had no basis for understanding or appreciating its existence. Cultural progress would have been slow, hard, brutal, and barbaric. The truth-induced collapse of culture in preparation for the rebirth of civilization would have been deeper, because there would have been no literal, material institution to catch and preserve the useful pieces until they could be reassembled into a more appropriate structure. The recovery of civilization would have been slower, yet some aspects would have been improved. In the end, the time governor of progress was pressed to its limit by this plan and a universe learned the final lesson of the Lucifer rebellion.

There is a faster way towards perfection, if guided by the hand of God. But that faster way requires the mortal race to accept the transition from barbarism to light and life more rapidly, and does not bypass any of the steps along the way. The shocks come more frequently, the joy and pain more often, and only the eye of faith can sustain the mortal mind from the fear of this headlong rush into the unknown.

Urantia has been on this course for over 1,961 years, and today we are privileged to be recipients of the new revelation which will, at last, free the religion of Jesus from the myth of Jesus and launch our planet on the next stage of its flight toward future perfection.

(C) Copyright 1997, L. Dan Massey, Jr. 10818 Fawn Drive, Great Falls, VA 22066

Author's Note: Information in this paper about the historic antecedents and context of Mithraism is derived from the book, "The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries--Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World" by David Ulansey (Oxford, 1989). The historical data and conjectures presented by Ulansey have been reinterpreted in light of statements in The Urantia Book about Mithraism.

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A service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship

Labels: Apostles, Christianity, Jesus, Jesus' ministry, Jr., L. Dan Massey, messiah, Mithras, Nabon, Peter's confession, Stoics, The Urantia Book

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Friday, March 28, 2008

Human ancestor fossil found in Europe

(63:5.1) The early Andon races did not penetrate very far into Asia, and they did not at first enter Africa. The geography of those times pointed them north, and farther and farther north these people journeyed until they were hindered by the slowly advancing ice of the third glacier.

(63:5.2) Before this extensive ice sheet reached France and the British Isles, the descendants of Andon and Fonta had pushed on westward over Europe and had established more than one thousand separate settlements along the great rivers leading to the then warm waters of the North Sea.

This article reflects recent scientific discovery that corroborates Urantia Book revelation. It should give us all hope that the world is catching up, ever so slowly...

Human ancestor fossil found in Europe
By DANIEL WOOLLS, Associated Press Writer
Wed Mar 26

MADRID, Spain - A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say.

A team co-led by Eudald Carbonell, director of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution, reported their find in Thursday's issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The timing of the earliest occupation of Europe by humans that emerged from Africa has been controversial for many years.

Until now the oldest hominin fossils found in Europe were the Homo antecessor ones, also found at Atapuerca, but at a separate digging site, and a skull from Ceprano in Italy.

Carbonell's team has tentatively classified the new fossil as representing an earlier example of Homo antecessor. And, critically, the team says the new one also bears similarities to much-older fossils dug up since 1983 in the Caucasus at a place called Dmanisi, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. These were dated as being up to 1.8 million years old.

"This leads us to a very important, very interesting conclusion," Carbonell said. It is this: that hominins which emerged from Africa and settled in the Caucasus eventually evolved into Homo antecessor, and that the latter populated Europe not 800,000 years ago, but at least 1.3 million years ago.

Chris Stringer, a leading researcher in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London and not involved in the project, said Carbonell's team had done solid dating work to estimate the antiquity of the new Atapuerca fossil by employing three separate techniques â€” some researchers only use one or two â€” including a relatively new one that measures radioactive decay of sediments.

"This is a well-dated site, as much as any site that age can be," Stringer said.

But he also expressed some caution about Carbonell's conclusions.

First of all, the newly found jawbone fragment, which measures about two inches long and has teeth attached to it, preserves a section not seen in the equivalent pieces found at Atapuerca in 1997. So assigning both to the same species must be provisional, Stringer said.

And on the broader issue of tracing the new fossil back to the species unearthed at Dmanisi â€” Carbonell's big leap arguing continuity â€” Stringer said this too must be tentative because it is based on just a piece of a front of a jawbone and the time lapse is half a million years.

"That is a long period of time to talk about continuity," Stringer said.

Still, there are similarities between the two and this along with other archaeological evidence, suggests southern Europe did in fact begin to be colonized from western Asia not long after humans emerged from Africa â€” "something which many of us would have doubted even five years ago," Stringer said.

Carbonell says that with the finding of human fossils 1.3 million years old in Europe, researchers can now expect to find older ones, even up to 1.8 million years old, in other parts of the continent.

"This has to be the next discovery," he said. "This is the scientific hypothesis."

Labels: archeology, Chris Stringer, Daniel Woolls, Eudald Carbonell, evolution, migration, The Urantia Book

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Thursday, March 20, 2008

My stroke of insight

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

(The following Urantia Book section is a discussion of our two-brain types, and aligns well with this article. ed.)

Brain Type

p566:1 49:5.6 2. Brain-type series. The one physical uniformity of mortals is the brain and nervous system; nevertheless, there are three basic organizations of the brain mechanism: the one-, the two-, and the three-brained types. Urantians are of the two-brained type, somewhat more imaginative, adventurous, and philosophical than the one-brained mortals but somewhat less spiritual, ethical, and worshipful than the three-brained orders. These brain differences characterize even the prehuman animal existences.
p566:2 49:5.7 From the two-hemisphere type of the Urantian cerebral cortex you can, by analogy, grasp something of the one-brained type. The third brain of the three-brained orders is best conceived as an evolvement of your lower or rudimentary form of brain, which is developed to the point where it functions chiefly in control of physical activities, leaving the two superior brains free for higher engagements: one for intellectual functions and the other for the spiritual-counterparting activities of the Thought Adjuster.

Labels: Jill Bolte Taylor, left brain, right brain, stroke, The Urantia Book, Thought Adjuster, two-brained, video

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Faith and Reason

Faith and Reason

My friends made a big fuss when their Mom predicted her death. Well, itâ€™s not everyday Mom says she is going to die. Their Mom did succumb to lung cancer later that day. We sat and they talked about what a great person she was and reminisced on old times long gone. But they kept coming back to Momâ€™s recent prediction. They found great meaning in this event. Much of it seems to have come from their faith in Momâ€™s organizational abilities. Planning her end was consistent with the way she lived her life. Thus in their minds the prediction was an extension of who she was and not some random expressed thought that just happened to come true.

The faith of many in God is also connected to this process of finding meaning in the seemingly random events of life. The current emotional explosion in Muslim dominated countries reflects this search for meaning through the connection of theology and random events. The Danish consulate in Lebanon was burned to the ground by a mob because of a cartoon in a Danish newspaper. There doesnâ€™t seem to be a way of rationalizing this event. There is no obvious connection between the newspaper and the government of Denmark. There is no obvious connection between a worldwide religious movement and some guy doodling on a piece of paper. And yet the protestors define the meaning of the event as being an â€œinsult to our faithâ€�. Despite the difficulty in rationalizing violence as a religious faith response, the protestors put all of the pieces together and went on the attack. The problem is that many faith responses â€“ and this one in particular â€“ appear to be functioning outside of the bounds of reason.

The Urantia Book says that religion is â€œwholly rational insight which originates in manâ€™s mind-experienceâ€� (1105.2). When the book speaks of insight it is talking about that learning which comes from the spiritual forces which are influencing us to be more Godlike. When the book speaks of rationality it is talking about the reasoning abilities inherent within the human mind. In other words â€“ true religious experience involves both spiritual guidance and human reasoning. The book says that religion is reasonable, rational and logical. It also says that even though spiritual truth is beyond reason, reason is an important part of our growing experience of Godâ€™s presence. And so, religious concepts should always be able to withstand the scrutiny of human reason. God wants us to use our minds as well as our hearts when developing the highest human concepts of our Father in Heaven.

The continuing world-wide violence in the name of religion shows that our world needs to reject religious ideas which do not stand up to reasonable examination. The search for meaning cannot be held hostage by the mixing of random events with age old traditions. Too many people are locked into belief systems which make no logical sense in our quickly advancing world culture. The ideas of The Urantia Book, which I believe are the most reasonable and logical of any and all religious concepts to date, need to be promoted to the fullest extent. It isnâ€™t enough to urge someone to read the book. The concepts within the book need to be promoted as much as the book itself. Unquestioned belief systems need to be replaced by the reasonable concepts that were given to us through revealed truth. It is these truth concepts stimulating the inherent logic of our minds in concert with the always present spiritual forces that will move the search for meaning ever higher.

God bless you,

William Whitehead

Â© 2006 All Rights Reserved

Labels: faith, God, meaning, Muslims, reason, religion, The Urantia Book, violence, William Whitehead

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Friday, March 14, 2008

The Missing Years of Jesus

Materials and quotes for a detailed study

Compiled & Presented by Dave Holt
Jan - Mar 1997
Unity Center of Walnut Creek (8 week course)

Part 1: Jesus Within the Jewish Tradition

Part 2: Jesus Visiting Other Cultures

Part 3: Further Travels with Ganid and Gonod

Note: In the materials below, "OE" denotes the "Original Edition" of
The Urantia Book and "NE" denotes the "New Edition."
The texts are identical with the exception of the page formatting and
minor changes in spelling and punctuation.

"You learn about God from Jesus by observing the divinity of his life, not by depending on his teachings. From the life of the Master you may each assimilate that concept of God which represents the measure of your capacity to perceive realities spiritual and divine, truths real and eternal." (The Urantia Book, Pg. 1856 OE)

This is how we plan to proceed--merely to observe his life, the unfolding of its story much as we might listen to the parables he himself loved to tell. At the same time I will highlight the issues that I have perceived emerging out of the text for group discussions. I will also try to relate what we "see" to some well-known idea (or controversy) of his later life, or one that Jesus himself worked with in his public ministry. These concepts will also be cited from the Bible.

"You can adequately comprehend the destiny of the mortals ofâ€¦a local creation only by a perusal of the narratives of the life and teachings of your Creator Son as he once lived the life of man, in the likeness of mortal flesh, on your own evolutionary world." (P. 360)

Part 1: Jesus Within the Jewish Tradition

The world in Jesus's time:

p. 1332, "Nothing like the civilization of the times of Jesus has been seen-since," also p. 1333, "Greece provided a language culture (I par.)

p. 1338, "three languages prevailed (1. par)

p. 1358, "There were few homes that could give better religious training (up to three languages.)

"The Galileans were not regarded with full favor by the Jerusalem religious leaders and rabbinical teachers. Galilee was more gentile than Jewish when Jesus was born." (p. 1334)

The Alexandrian connection:

p. 1355, "their sojourn at Alexandriaâ€¦the Greek translation of the Hebrew scripturesâ€¦"

Jesus growing up:

p. 1360, "his prayers-departure from more solemn & reverent modes" (sec 3, 5th last par.) and a par. about, "family co-operation" (2nd last par.)

p. 1362, formal schooling and "contact with the gentiles" because of which, p. 1363, "Nazareth was... more liberal," (up to "view of all Galilee")

p. 1396, "As time went on..." Jesus denied his destiny as "the deliverer of the Jewish people." (I par.)

The angel Gabriel described Jesus as, "the soul-healer of your people and the spirit liberator of all mankind (p. 1345)," in his visitation to Elizabeth (John the Baptist's mother).

The insularity of Jewish culture/ the distrust of "foreigners":

p. 1412, racial mingling... "Mary was much upset..." (1 par.)

More on the Messiah (the deliverer), p. 1334, "The Jewish people ... (1 par.) and p. 1339, 2 pars. under Jews and Gentiles.

Possible Question for discussion: Why, in spite of all the aforementioned biases and prejudices of the Jewish people, were they chosen above other groups to receive the bestowal son in their midst? Consider the idea quoted from A.N. Wilson for example:
"They [the Pharisees] taught that the Teaching (Torah) which came from Almighty God--while itself being holy and unchangeable --was of universal application. It was addressed to all mankind, to Gentiles as well as Jews..." (fr. Paul, The Mind of the Apostle, by A.N. Wilson)

Our first theme is emerging: How does Jesus coordinate obedience to his native tradition with the desire for freedom of expression?:

p. 1366-1367, the drawing episode, p. 1372, "Jesus remonstrated with his father about the Jewish custom" (to end of paper.)

p. 1370, "About the middle of May trip to Scythopolis" (to end of paper.)

Theme of Parenting/ Family Life:

The Death of Joseph Paper 126 #2 (p. 1388 OE/1215 NE.) How this "apparently cruel" event changed the course of Jesus's life. read all Sec 2.

A philosophy of non-violence:

p. 1401 OE (p. 1227 NE/Paper 127 #4), The Nineteenth Year (A.D. 13), the children learn Jesus's technique of non-violence.

Was Jesus a revolutionary? Let us consider that important question here. Some people try to fit Jesus into the role of a radical revolutionary. Was he a Zealot? Or a philosopher of "evolutionary" vs. "revolutionary" change?:

The Jewish Revolt of 70 B.C. was fomented by the Zealots and other Jewish revolutionaries many years after Jesus's death. It led to the nearly complete destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple (as he foretold.) The Jews were banned from living in or even visiting Jerusalem. "The city "was rebuilt as a Roman city named Aelia Capitolina." (Biblical Archaeology Review, Jan/Feb 1997)

Jesus refuses to be the leader of the Zealots at age 17 (Ref. p. 1396 OE/1223 NE, Paper 127 #2) and later on, just before his baptism (Ref. p. 1522 OE/1336 NE, Paper 136, #9).

p. 1404, (Paper 127, sec 6, par. 3-7) The first passover without the Paschal lamb up to "the law of Moses."

The episode with his brother Jude, p. 1415 OE/1239 NE (Paper 128, #6 3rd Par.) Read fr., "The family finances..." to end of section 6.

Jesus's philosophy of non-violence continues to be heard, for example, in the teachings of Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Here is part of a speech Martin Luther King gave to a crowd who assembled outside his home after a stick of dynamite had been thrown onto his porch (Jan. 31, 1956):

"We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them."

Part 11: Jesus Visiting Other Cultures

P. 1422 OE (Paper 129, Sec 2, par. 9-10) "...by apparent chance, Jesus met a wealthy traveller and his son .... Jesus agreed to make the trip."

Teaching the character of God:

At Joppa--Discourse on Jonah, (p. 1428 OE, p. 1251 NE/ Paper 130, #1)
a spirit liberator: "will deliver them from captivity," generous and forgiving: "fresh opportunities for wiser living," God is love, "his goodness is so great and real that it cannot contain... evil."

Teaching partnership with God:

At Caesarea, (same paper, #2) Anaxand and the cruel foreman, Jesus's first comments on "the indwelling and divine spirit."

What is the "will of God?" (other refs: p. 1221 OE, Paper 111 #5, p. 1068 NE)

Jesus discusses the indwelling spirit quite naturally with Gonod and Ganid as if they are already well familiar with the concept- -perhaps because of such teachings in the Indian tradition as:

"He who, dwelling in all things,/ Yet is other than all things,/ Whom all things do not know,/ Whose body all things are/ Who controls all things from within--/He is your Soul, the Inner Controller,/ the Immortal." (from Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad.)

"The Lord Supreme ... is the inmost soul of all, which like a little flame the size of a thumb is hidden in the hearts of men." (from Svetasvalara Upanishad.)

The Urantia Book expands on this idea of Jesus preserved in Luke 17:21, "The kingdom of God is within you," and his remembered saying on partnership: "with God, all things are possible." (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27)

p. 1438 OE (p. 1258 NE/same Paper 130 #6), The Young Man who was Afraid. Jesus's most successful case history in his role as a psychological healer. Relate this episode to Paul's description of the effect of Jesus's gospel:

"He is a new creature; his old life is over, a new life has already begun." (2 Cor 5:17, The New English Bible)

Jesus as a philosopher and a man of knowledge: Not only did "the common people hear him gladly," but also the philosophers and theologians of the ancient world.

Throughout the Urantia Book's descriptions, Jesus is less of the rabbi familiar to us from the Bible. We see him become reintegrated back into the whole matrix of the ancient world's philosophic, scientific and religious thought in the unique way that his ideas blend science, philosophy and religion to further serve human progress. Jesus was a practical idealist.

"At their inn there also lodged a merchant from Mongolia ... Jesus had several long visits with him. ...This merchant was a Taoist, and he had thereby become a strong believer in the doctrine of a universal Deity ... One God--the Supreme Ruler of Heaven." (p. 1429 OE, p. 1251 NE/ Paper 130, #2)

Every being in the universe is an expression of the Tao. It springs into existence, unconscious, perfect, free, takes on a physical body, lets circumstances complete it. That is why every being spontaneously honors the Tao.

The Tao gives birth to all beings, nourishes them, maintains them, cares for them, comforts them, protects them, takes them back to itself... (From The Tao Te Ching, #51, translated by Stephen Mitchell)

"Tao covers and supports all things. How overflowingly great!... To love people and benefit all things means humanity (jen). To identify with all without losing his own identity means greatness. To behave without purposely showing any superiority means broadness. To possess an infinite variety means richness. Therefore to adhere to virtue is called discipline. To realize virtue means strength. To be in accord with Tao means completeness." (attributed to Confucius by the Taoist philosopher, Chuang Tzu, or one of his pupils. 399-295 B.C.)

P. 1432 OE, At Alexandria, (Paper 130, #3 and #4, p. 1254 NE) Jesus's discussion of the relation between the visible and the invisible with a Platonist. -Jesus teaches on subjects such as: what is truth? What is evil (error)?

**Optional** On The Island of Crete, short section (#5) (At this point, the class needs to make a decision whether to cover the world religions teachings that Ganid and Jesus assembled while in Alexandria or move on to other events in their journey.)

The Sojourn at Rome (Paper 132, p. 1455 OE, p. 1275 NE)

Read all of Introductory section, and Section 1, science, philosophy & religion. A discussion of a balanced approach to progress on all three levels and liberating oneself from dogma/static truth in all three areas. The progressive human development emphasized in Jesus's talks conflicts dramatically with the ideas of last days, judging the people of the earth, the rapture, the end of an age, and Armageddon current in many contemporary Christian circles. These eschatological concepts originate partly from Jewish concerns with re-establishing their rule and smiting their Roman enemies. When Jesus predicted the demise of the Temple, the Jews could not imagine life continuing afterwards. Jesus could foresee the continuing evolution of human societies.

Other references to follow up for further study, par. 4 of The Cosmic Mind, "responds on three levels of universe reality" (paper 16, #6, p. 191 OE, p. 166 NE);
The Seven Psychic Circles, par. 4 on, "When the development of the intellectual nature proceeds faster Likewise, overspiritual development" (paper 110, #6, p.1209 OE, p. 1059 NE); Control and Overcontrol, par. 6, "when culture advances overfast, when material achievement outruns the evolution of worship-wisdom" (Paper 118, p. 1301, OE p. 1139 NE)

Section 3, Truth and Faith, talking with the priest of Mithraism. (paper 98, p. 1082 OE, p. 948 NE, for more on Mithraism if you need to know more.)

Section 5, Counseling the Rich Man, Section 6, and Section 7 beginning at par 3, "It was on the visit to Switzerland..." for a discussion of unbalanced approaches to God, philosophy without religion and visa-versa.

Part III: Further Travels with Ganid and Gonod

The Return From Rome (Paper 133, p. 1468 OE, p. 1287 NE) Read all of Introductory section and section 1, Mercy and Justice.

Key ideas:
justice, even in the universe, is vested in groups
having "absolute confidence in [the] heavenly Father's overcare." Recall from pg. 1326 (OE, p. 1159 just before par. 4), "the full meaning and the rich significance of that faith-trust which you so unvaryingly require all your creatures to master in the bestowal commission given to Michael (Jesus) before his incarnation.

Section 2, Embarking at Tarentum, up to end of par. 3, "...returned to India."

Section 3, At Corinth, up to end of par. 10, "...first Christian church in Corinth."

Section 4, Personal Work in Corinth, Read only par. 10, and 12.

Section 5, At Athens--Discourse on Science. Notice again the triads at the root of Urantia Book cosmology- -science, philosophy, religion; fact, meaning, value; matter (energy-mass), mind, spirit; a liberation from the trap of dualities such as we found in Plato with shadows of reality, original reality but no intervening middle ground of reality coming into being.

Section 6, At Ephesus--Discourse on the Soul, Notice this graph of stages in its evolution:

1. Self-consciousness ... is not the soul.

2. Moral self-consciousness= true human self-realization.

3. Spiritualization of the self-realization of the moral selfconsciousness ... leads to eternal survival of the soul.

Section 7. The Sojourn at Cyprus--Discourse on Mind, Read par. 5 to the end.

Section 9. In Mesopotomia. the Farewell between Joshua, Gonod and his pupil.

"Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it." (p. 2090, Paper 196, sec 1, par 3.)

A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship

Labels: Dave Holt, Ganid. Gonod, Jesus, Jewish, missing years, The Urantia Book

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The Real Gospel

What is the gospel?

If you asked several people, you would probably get several different answers. Some would say the word gospel means "good news", and it does, but that's just a definition. You want to know, "What is the good news, and where does it come from?"

Some will say that the gospel is the story about Jesus, as written by the New Testament writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. After all, these stories are often called the "Four Gospels". Others will tell you the good news is that God sent His son to earth as a sacrifice, to die, and to rise again, in order to atone for the sins of mankind. Still others say that Jesus' death on the cross was a ransom paid by God to redeem mankind from the Devil, and so on.

The New Testament says that Jesus and the apostles went from city to city, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God to the multitude.

"And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people." (Matthew 9:35)

"And it came to pass...that Jesus went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him..." (Luke 8:1) (Also see Matthew 4:23, Mark 1:14, and Luke 4:43.)

>From these verses we can tell that the gospel was something that Jesus actually preached and taught. Thus, the question of where the gospel comes from is answered. It comes from Jesus.

The word gospel means "good news" and "glad tidings", but what exactly was Jesus telling the people? What was his message? And has the essence of it, the actual gospel, the teachings of Jesus, been partly lost to us today and replaced by another message, the teachings about Jesus?

On these preaching tours, Jesus gave the people very important information (the good news!), and it was a positive, powerful message, focused on a few specific ideas. The gospel that Jesus taught was that information which would satisfy our deepest spiritual hopes, needs and desires: to better know our Father in heaven and our relationship with mankind, to be of the Spirit and to show the fruits of the Spirit, and to have eternal life with God.

We can tell from his teachings that the gospel of Jesus, even what we may call the "religion of Jesus", was and still is, this: God is our loving spiritual Father and we are all His children, sons and daughters in His family. If we love God and love one another, we will have eternal life in heaven.

Have you heard the expression, "I got it straight from the horse's mouth"? When people say this, they mean they got some information right from the source, and therefore it is true. It is like a gold miner who finds the mother lode. The actual teachings of Jesus are from the true source, the mother lode, from God Himself, as personified by His son.

Here then are the high spiritual teachings of Jesus, the information that he was giving to the crowds, - the real gospel. It's all you need to know.

* * * * * * *

Jesus teaches us about doing the Father's will and entering the kingdom of heaven.

"Not every one who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 7:21)

Doing the Father's will is the key to entering the kingdom of heaven. And what is the Father's will? It is simply loving God, and loving and serving our brothers and sisters on earth, our brothers and sisters in God's family.

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us how we can have eternal life.

"And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tested him, saying, 'Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?' Jesus said to him, 'What is written in the law? how do you read it?' And he answered saying, 'Thou shall love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.' And Jesus said to him, 'Thou has answered right: this do, and thou shall live.'" (Luke 10:25-28)

Do this and you will have eternal life! Love God, and love your neighbor. Could it be any clearer or simpler? Jesus knows that loving all of our fellow humans may not be easy for us, but he expects trend and effort.

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us why he came to earth.

"And he said unto them, 'I must preach the kingdom of God to other cities also: for therefore was I sent.'" (Luke 4:43)

Many have differing views as to the purpose of Jesus' incarnation on earth. Here, Jesus himself tells us that he came to earth to preach the gospel, the good news of the kingdom of God.

* * * * * * *

Jesus teaches a new and very personal idea about the kingdom of God.

"And when he was asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them and said, 'The kingdom of God will come not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.'" (Luke 17:21)

Imagine! The kingdom of God is within you. This is a stunning but misunderstood teaching of Jesus. There are several aspects of the kingdom of God. One is spiritual, - the kingdom is not a material realm. Another is the outward kingdom, - the Father and His angels off in heaven somewhere. And then there is the kingdom within. Jesus is talking about this inner kingdom when he says that the kingdom of God is within you, actually a part of the Father himself, sharing your life, going through your ups and downs with you, and if you desire it, guiding you like a compass back to Him. This is not a nebulous spirituality wafting through you, as might be imagined for a spirit being, and as might be the case in some situations, but rather a definite focalization of the Father, in you.

* * * * * * *

If we have become separated from God, Jesus tells us what the Father requires in order for us to come home to Him, to rejoin His family, our spiritual family.

"The Parable of the Prodigal Son." (Luke 15:11-32)

Many people do not give much thought to the parables that Jesus taught. They are often quoted but seldom explained. Parables are simple stories with a single, clear message. You don't have to be a theologian or a rocket scientist to understand them. In this parable, Jesus says that our spiritual Father will welcome us home just as soon as we sincerely want to return to Him. Even though the repentant son was still a long way off, the moment his father saw him coming down the road he ran to him to greet him in love and welcome him back into the family. This is how our Father in heaven responds to us, His children, always with an attitude of love and forgiveness. No matter how far down the road away from the Father you think you are, if you want to return home, the door is open.

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us how we can have our sins forgiven.

"For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." (Matthew 6:14)

Forgiving others is a difficult thing for us to do. In reality, the Father's forgiveness is always available to us. By forgiving others, we tap into that forgiveness, we open the door to it.

* * * * * * *

In a conversation with a man named Nicodemus, Jesus teaches us about being "born again".

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water [physical birth], and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." (John 3:5)

God is spirit. When we love God and desire to do His will, we are born again, born of the Spirit. It's that simple.

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us to be perfect.

"Be you therefore perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:48)

Nobody's perfect, as the saying goes. Perfection is not our condition, but it is our goal. The Father knows that we have been created with a "human nature", after all, He created us. It will take effort on our part to become more perfect, more spiritual, more like God. There's no time like the present to start. In the words of Lao-tzu, "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step."

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us about God's family.

Jesus says, "Our Father..." (Matthew 6:9, Luke 11:2)

When Jesus uses the term Father, he is talking about his Father and our Father. Above all else God is a loving Father and we are his children. If we know that we are sons and daughters of God, we will naturally want to act like one.

* * * * * * *

Jesus tells us that God knows what we need.

"...for your Father knows what things you have need of, before you ask him." (Matthew 6:8)

God knows our real needs. His kingdom is a spiritual one and our real needs are mostly spiritual in nature. When we pray, we should not pray overmuch for material things, but should pray for spiritual insight, pray for others, and pray for help to know and do the Father's will. When Jesus says, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you..." (Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9), he is talking about spiritual gifts, spiritual truths, and spiritual doors.

* * * * * * *

Jesus teaches us about tolerance, one of the fruits of the Spirit, and beyond mere tolerance, even love for other people and groups which may be different from our own.

"For if you only love those who love you, what reward have you? do not even the publicans do the same? And if you salute your brethren only, what do you do more than others? do not even the publicans do so?" (Matthew 5:46-47, Luke 6:32-33)

* * * * * * *

Jesus talks about sharing the good news, - his teachings.

"...freely you have received, freely give." (Matthew 10:8)

The good news is not something to be hidden under a rock. It should be shared with everyone in God's family.

* * * * * * *

Many religions are complex, but the real gospel of Jesus is simple: Love God your Father, and love your fellow man. If you do this you will be doing the Father's will, and you will have an eternal life of love and service with God. This real gospel of Jesus will also be acceptable to all of God's children on earth who love Him, whether they be Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, or Hindu.

* * * * * * *

And finally, as would be expected from the Son of a loving God, comforting words from Jesus to all of us.

"Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." (Luke 12:32)

* * * * * * *

All Bible quotations excerpted or adapted from the King James Version.

Prepared by: Norm Du Val
PO Box 335
Wadena, MN 56482

Copyright c 1994 Please copy as needed. Rev. 11-96

Labels: born of the spirit, eternal life, forgiveness, Gospel of Jesus, Jesus, Kingdom of God, New Testament, Norm Du Val, The Urantia Book

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Thursday, March 06, 2008

Quest for Spiritual Culture: An Exploration of the Urantian Paradigm of Spirituality

Quest for Spiritual Culture:
An Exploration of the Urantian Paradigm of Spirituality

David Kantor's IC99 Plenary Address
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Contents:
Exploring the Urantian Paradigm of Spirituality
Recovering from the Lucifer Rebellion
Mortal Support of Seraphic Ministry
(For additional background, see also, "Exactly How do Seraphim Work?")

When we gather together like this, it seems appropriate that we consider the state of our planet and ask what we, as bearers of an epochal revelation, are doing about it. The Urantia Book describes a paradigm of spirituality which is fundamental to the social development of normal worlds. We're going to explore that paradigm this morning. We'll look at how the Lucifer rebellion has retarded its implementation on our world; and we'll look at how the seraphic planetary government is mobilized in support of it. The result should be a very practical understanding of how we each can support this paradigm, and thus participate cooperatively in the transformative tasks of the fifth epoch.

Religionists often view entanglement in the institutional affairs of government, economics, industry and civil culture as detracting from more important personal spiritual pursuits.

Medieval Christianity taught that the authority of the state and all the institutions of this world were an ordained punishment for the sin of Adam. Radical Calvinism took the position that true believers had been mandated by God to control sin by means of civil institutions. Conservative Islam seeks to place social and governing institutions under the control of the clergy.

And while good men and women of faith struggle valiantly throughout the world, trying to serve humanity as best they can, the fact remains that the world is desperately short of compelling visions by which a spiritual transformation of its institutions might even be contemplated.

We live today in a world where we are struggling to keep the basic human institutions of marriage and family intact. It is not surprising then, that we would find great confusion and difficulty in attempting to achieve meaningful personality integration at higher levels of social complexity.

It is helpful to think of "institutions" as co-ordinating mechanisms. In a world of active, creative personalities there need to be means for coordinating their activities so they may be mutually sustaining where possible and, hopefully, not mutually destructive. In today's world, the ways in which we affect each other's activities are changing rapidly. When the rate of change exceeds the rate at which coordinating institutions can adapt and remain effective, a threshold is crossed where social breakdown begins to appear.

As the world continues to flirt with this threshold, the magnitude of the potential difficulties seems overwhelming. Global ecological problems whose solutions will require an unprecedented level of international cooperation loom on the horizon. Fledgling institutions of world government, developed to prevent catastrophic wars between superpowers are finding themselves unable to prevent regional civil wars rooted in ethnic conflict. And throughout the developed world, the breakdown of that most basic and fundamental of all human institutions, the family, continues to accelerate.

There has been great success in building military, economic, and industrial systems, but a failure to advance systems which are inherently social and moral. We have utterly failed to match the astonishing accomplishments of our heads and hands with a comparable development of our hearts.

In Paper 92 we are told that, "Modern man is confronted with the task of making more readjustments of human values in one generation than have been made in two thousand years."

In Paper 99 the revelators describe our time as "psychologically unsettled", characterized by "the economic upheavals, moral crosscurrents, and sociologic rip tides of the cyclonic transitions of a scientific era."

The popular mentality is again filled with apocalyptic fears and expectations.

Historian Oswald Spengler, in his book "The Decline of the West" comments on our tendency to equate cultural crisis with apocalypse; to become so overwhelmed by the magnitude of change taking place that we lose the ability to rationally process it and end up projecting metaphysical meanings onto events we observe in the world around us. Spengler goes on to point out that "crisis" is the normal state of Western Civilization.

You may recall the story about Mahatma Ghandi's return to India after his first visit to England. He was asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization and he replied that -- he thought it would be a good idea.

Over the next half century, human society will undergo yet more profound changes. It will experience a radical demographic transformation, be challenged by unforseen effects of ecological neglect, experience fundamental shifts in the global balance of economic and political power, and cope with nearly continuous technological change. These transformations are inevitable -- the forces which compel them are already in place -- but what the outcome will be, no one knows.

It is such a complex system of inter-related factors that no one can reasonably predict its likely state at any point in the future. It is impossible to know whether the twenty-first century will usher in an era of human advancement and global integration, or a period of conflict, environmental degradation and human tragedy on a scale that overshadows anything which has previously occurred -- The planet is literally "quivering on the brink."

Broad social trends, such as rising levels of education, attempts to stabilize an emerging international economy, rapid increases in literacy world-wide, and the growing economic and social liberation of women, are examples of powerful forces with unknown potentials for transformative change. The information revolution with its ability to profoundly affect public opinion, is spreading globally far more quickly than did the industrial revolution. And it is clear that the majority of the social, economic and political effects of this revolution have yet to appear.

The underlying forces which determine all these trends however, are human processes driven by human decisions being made on a daily basis. We may not be able to predict the future, but we certainly are shaping it through the choices we make on a moment by moment basis.

The general consensus of opinion held by individuals who attempt to study these trends and their implications, is that the long-term social and ecological health of our planet will be determined by decisions made in the next 25 years or so -- during the lifetime of virtually every person in this room; each of us will participate in determining the outcome.

Czech President Vaclav Havel has commented that "Nothing short of a new spiritual vision of global dimensions will save human civilization."

Exploring the Urantian Paradigm of Spirituality

Most of us would be in agreement that The Urantia Book provides such a vision. But how do we go about applying the ideas in this book to the problems of our world? How do we get from ink and paper to an advancing civilization ruled by spiritual wisdom? While the revelators have generously provided us with a comprehensive overview of the cosmic context within which the present planetary struggle is taking place, the challenge of effectively applying this information lies before us today.

The Urantia Book describes religion as "the mighty lever which lifts civilization from chaos."

But we are also told that institutional religion "cannot afford inspiration and provide leadership in this impending world-wide social reconstruction." We are told that "Only the real religion of personal spiritual experience can function helpfully and creatively in the present crisis of civilization."

And it is this "real religion of personal spiritual experience" along with The Urantia Book's portrayal of the ideals of cosmic citizenship, which holds such great hope for transforming human institutions. With these concepts, The Urantia Book profiles a paradigm of spirituality unlike that of any existing religion or philosophy in the world today. It links personal spiritual development to meaningful personality integration resulting in the brotherhood of man.

The grand panorama of a personal cosmos is first laid out in the Foreword of The Urantia Book. The revelators make it clear to us that the future of the cosmos involves a discovery and exploration of the new realities which actualize when personalities interact with each other in creative ways.

As the revelation unfolds we are told something about the cosmic purpose of all this personality experience -- preparation for creative participation in the communities of personalities which comprise the mortal corps of the finality, communities of personalities who have experientially, over the long journey to Paradise, discovered, explored, and developed their potentials for working together creatively for the Father's purposes.

We are told about our ascent through the "psychic circles" which involves cosmic socialization and the realization of universe citizenship.

Social integration and spiritual growth are inseperable in the Urantia Book's paradigm of spirituality. In this paradigm, the locus of spirituality is in the relationships between personalities.

This revelation describes relationships between persons, from the Paradise Trinity down to those which we sustain with our family members, as the living realities within which the continuous discovery and exploration of an infinite cosmos takes place.

In Paper 103 a Melchizedek admonishes us to "Remember that in the religion of all ages the experience which is paramount is the feeling regarding moral values and social meanings, not the thinking regarding theologic dogmas or philosophic theories."

Just as information about the material world makes impressions on the conscious mind through the eyes and the ears during the process of looking and listening, so do spiritual values make their impressions on the superconscious mind during the process of reflective personality interaction.

In a loving, caring, "authentic" exchange with another personality the superconscious functions of mind are mobilized in a state of dynamic receptivity, open to the discovery of divine values which the immediate moment holds as potentials.

Imagine for a moment that you are engaged with another person in an effort to solve a problem. You're sincerely seeking the best possible outcome. As you engage in this discussion, you try to do your best thinking; you simultaneously attempt to be conscious of the moral and ethical values in the situation.

You try to phrase your communication in a caring and loving manner. The interaction is free from any effort to psychologically or emotionally manipulate the other. As you communicate you are trying to remain "conscious of consciousness" -- you've mobilized your best resources and while applying them you are still actively evaluating -- seeking to discern even higher values.

You may even attain a level of involvement where you actively seek to bring an understanding of the Father's will into the interaction -- you're sharing the inner life with God as you participate in this relationship.

This experience in which the personality engages in a choice-making dance with the meanings and values of the cosmos, is the living process by which we open ourselves up to spiritual guidance.

The Midwayers comment that, "Every time man makes a reflective moral choice he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his soul."

This living process of relationship is where the fruits of the spirit appear. It is where we apply the higher levels of the golden rule. It is where we implement Jesus' great commandment. It is where Jesus' brotherhood of the kingdom is experientially discovered.

This is the paradigm of spirituality which the apostles failed to grasp!

And I ask today, "Do we get it?" Have we really gained any more understanding than the Apostles had regarding the profound implications of Jesus' teachings about the kingdom of heaven?

In Paper 170 the Midwayers comment that "...to his apostles Jesus always taught the kingdom as embracing man's personal experience in relation to his fellows on earth and to the Father in heaven." "The kingdom of heaven," said Jesus, "is a spiritual relationship between God and man."

Given this paradigm of spirituality, and the Apostle's difficulty in grasping it, appreciate the remembrance supper.

This sacrament which Jesus initiated has the potential for invoking a social context in which it is possible to experientially discover that which he was unsuccessful in communicating to his followers.

The remembrance supper is an intimate social activity. Through the employment of this sacrament we are encouraged to attempt to become conscious of our personal relationship with the Father as well as our relationships with our fellows, and to merge these into an experiential wholeness catalyzed by a shared appreciation of the Master's life.

Said the Master on the occassion of that first remembrance, "Every soul who attains the realization of this united nature of God and man shall live forever. And this bread of life which I give to all who will receive is my own living and combined nature. The Father in the Son and the Son one with the Father--that is my life-giving revelation to the world and my saving gift to all nations."

In the context of the remembrance supper our souls can experientially feel the spiritual state of personality integration which The Urantia Book indicates needs to be actualized as a cultural reality on a broad scale.

A Melchizedek refers to the remembrance supper as "... the practice of the presence of God which eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of man."

The Midwayers comment that by establishing this sacrament, "the Master sought to set man's reborn soul free upon the joyous wings of a new and living spiritual liberty."

This "religion of personal spiritual experience," the Urantian paradigm of spirituality, is creative participation in a progressive culture of integrated mortal-divine personality association. It contains an ideal of daily living in which every single encounter with another person is an opportunity to participate directly in the spiritual transformation of the world.

Recovering from the Lucifer Rebellion

Once we begin to appreciate the critical importance of the relationship between mortal personality and the personality of the universal Father, we can more fully appreciate how the Lucifer rebellion has affected human institutions.

Item number one in the Lucifer manifesto was a denial of the reality of the universal Father. And even today, tens of thousands of years later, there is still confusion in the world regarding whether or not this essential relationship with the Father is real, or merely a conceptual illusion.

The long-term repercussions of failing to establish a spiritual basis for social evolution may be seen when we compare the state of our institutions with those described for a normal world in a post-Adamic epoch. Failure to establish a relationship with the Father significantly reduces an individual's chances of perceiving and implementing values which transcend self-interests. And it is from such an impoverished set of values that many of our world's institutions derive their character.

Recovery from the Lucifer rebellion requires elevation of the values by which the people of our world conduct their affairs. On the level of planetary institutions and culture, the realization of full recovery is limited only by individual free-will decision making processes which choose and actualize values within the cultural milieu on a moment-by-moment basis. It's the ultimate democracy and we cast a vote each time we make a choice of values which affect a human interaction.

The trial of Timothy McVey for the Oklahoma City bombing may have settled his legal status, but the task of repairing the damage he did - emotionally, psychologically, socially, spiritually - will continue to challenge the affected individuals and community for many years to come. And so it is likely to be with the recovery from the Lucifer rebellion.

We can get an idea of how the universe authorities are dealing with this situation by observing the focus of the last three epochal revelations. Each of them has represented an attempt to re-establish a spiritual foundation on the planet from which cosmic citizenship might develop.

Machiventa Melchizedek dealt with the very basic dynamics of the relationship with God - its faith-grasp by the mortal mind.

Jesus continued the process with a revelation of the nature of the Father's personality and his love for each individual. Each of these revelations aimed at restoring the integrity of this underlying relationship between the individual and God. Jesus, with his teachings about the kingdom, also laid the groundwork for a fuller appreciation of the interpersonal nature of reality.

The Urantia Book furthers this process with its revelation that this emerging network of spiritualizing personality relationships is a vital part of the living cosmos.

The primary task of the fifth epoch seems clearly laid out before us -- fostering the development in our world of a cosmic foundation of spiritualized personality relationships. This is the essential infrastructure which must be in place before a meaningful spiritual culture can evolve.

Upon such a foundation, men and women will more easily discover those higher values of universe socialization and cosmic citizenship by which our institutions might truly be transformed.

Mortal Support of Seraphic Ministry

There are indications in the book that the number of seraphim devoted to this task is enormous. I suspect that almost everyone in this room, at one time or another, has felt a deep desire to assist our unseen friends in some small way in their task of planetary enlightenment, to support the plans they no doubt have implemented relative to this revelation.

In attempting to get a useful idea of what cooperation with the revelators and their seraphic associates involves, we can study the way in which seraphic involvement in human affairs is described in The Urantia Book. With that knowledge it should be relatively easy for us to recognize what we need to do to support and reinforce their efforts. If we could accomplish this and foster the growth of a readership in which each individual is actively seeking cooperative engagement with the program being implemented by the planetary government, we might be able to do a great deal in terms of helping "apply spiritual pressure from above" to the problems of our day.

So how do the seraphim work?

They are "mind stimulators," continually seeking to promote circle-making decisions in the mortal mind. They "operate from the outside inward, working through the social, ethical and moral environment of human beings." This network of spiritualizing interpersonal relationships is real. It forms a morontia environment in which the seraphim are able to minister to participating minds and souls.

In Paper 196 we're reminded that, "The human mind does not create real values; human experience does not yield universe insight. Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose."

It is the Seraphim who make spiritual values "visible" to the superconscious, as it functions in the social, ethical and moral environment of interpersonal communion.

In The Urantia Book we are encouraged to pray for values; we are told such praying indicates that religion "has evolved to that level where the human mind recognizes the reality of beneficent powers or beings who are able to enhance social values and to augment moral ideals..."

From the ministry of the Mighty Primary Supernaphim who facilitate the relationships between the diverse residents of Paradise, to the Primary Seconaphim who facilitate relationships between the Ancients of Days, the Trinity and the Creator Sons, on down to the Home Seraphim who function within the relationships between your family members, the ministry of the Infinite Spirit is continuously fostering the value-potentials inherent in personality associations.

These relationships -- our first living connections with the infinite cosmos -- are fragile, tenuous affairs which flicker back and forth from reality to unreality in accordance with the quality of values being implemented in any given interaction. This is the arena in which the seraphim labor to reinforce the faintest flickers of faith, to strengthen newly emerging souls and immediately begin integrating them with the culture of the spiritual cosmos.

At a conference like this we can actually feel this process taking place -- we feel spiritually invigorated and challenged to be our best in our friendships. New meanings and values appear in our relationships with each other on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

Consider for a moment some of the angelic orders which serve in this personal universe:

The Interpreters of Cosmic Citizenship

The Union of Souls

The Spirits of Brotherhood

The Ethical Sensitizers

The Social Architects

The Heart of Counsel

The Satisfaction of Service

The Quickeners of Morality

-- the list goes on and on. Just contemplating these names gives us a glimpse into the personal nature of the spiritual cosmos. This entire ministry of the angelic orders is focused on the spiritual enhancement of relationships between personalities.

The Master Seraphim of Planetary Supervision foster the development of human institutions by making higher values available to the mortals who participate in the work of those institutions. These seraphim minister within social groups -- the angels of the churches, the angels of the races, the angels of progress, the home seraphim. The angels of enlightenment are occupied, not only with the mental and moral training of individuals, but of small groups -- families, groups, schools, communities -- virtually any association of mortals persisting over some period of time seems to provide a context for seraphic ministry.

How do we support their work? Six quick action-points:

1. First and foremost is our personal relationship with the Father. The secret of Jesus' unparalleled religious life was his consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship--unbroken communion with God. God needs to become an integral part of all our processes.

2. We support seraphic efforts by cultivating a sensitivity to the divine values they attempt to bring to our attention.

3. We support their work by courageously choosing those values to shape our relationships with others -- "by decisions, by more decisions, and by more decisions."

4. We support seraphic services when we reinforce the higher value-choices we recognize being made by our fellows -- stabilizing and affirming existing values where appropriate; recognizing and reinforcing religious living in others.

5. We lay the groundwork for enhanced seraphic action when we provide spiritually useful information. Get The Urantia Book spread around the planet. Remember the parable of the sower. Jesus said that this parable was a hint as to what messengers of the kingdom might expect in their ministry from generation to generation as time passed. Don't assume that we'll always have the remarkable global transportation and communication infrastructure which we enjoy today. Maximize all available opportunities and resources for the spread of the revelation. Don't wait for things to happen -- make them happen.

6. Be involved; participate creatively in human associations. Rededicate yourself to service in your marriage and your family, your work community and your study group. The cultural icon of the monastic saint living in contemplative bliss aloof from the cares of less enlightened folk is no longer useful. Mother Theresa, Dag Hammersjold, Vaclav Havel, countless men and women with high ideals, working in the inner city, in classrooms, in churches, struggling to revitalize our institutions -- these are the new icons of the applied spirituality of the fifth epoch. The benign virus of love is not going to invade the sentimental emotion stream of humanity unless we're out there helping to make the personality connections necessary for its transmission.

By dedicating ourselves to such a program, by choosing the highest values we can recognize in any given situation, we can serve as conduits through which the higher values of the spiritual world may be passed to the mortal world and incorporated into planetary institutions.

"True religion," a Melchizedek tells us, "is the devotion of the self to the service of meaningful and supreme values."

This vision is ennobling. Your family, the local school board on which you serve, your kid's soccer team, the youth group at your church, the working group at your office -- When you realize that these are all arenas in which the seraphim are laboring to achieve a spiritual transformation, the most commonplace tasks of daily life take on cosmic significance and become worthy of our best efforts. This is how the religion of personal spiritual experience can become "the mighty lever which lifts civilization from chaos."

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to ask you to take a deep breath, and take a moment to look around you. Impress upon your mind the image of this beautiful room and the hundreds of readers sitting around you. Recall the moments of worship, insight and love which you have experienced here -- impress these realities into your memory.

And as you serve in the years to come, when you run into difficulty or feel overwhelmed by circumstances, reflect back on this moment, a time in which you sat in assembly with a gathering of universe conscious citizens of Urantia. In your times of challenge, rest assured that many of these individuals are valiantly serving the Father's purposes in their own corners of the world, in their own sets of challenging circumstances.

Look ahead as well, to a reunion on the mansion worlds, where we can reminisce about the Urantia adventure, deepen our friendships, and perhaps be launched on the universe career in the company of cherished friends from the mortal adventure.

And as you leave here today, and see your fellows streaming out of the doors of this auditorium, appreciate the fact that they are on their way to Africa, Asia, the Pacific; to Europe, to North and South America, carrying a heightened understanding of the kingdom of heaven to be planted in the families and human associations of our world.

May God richly bless each and every one of you with unlimited opportunities to participate uin the spiritual transformation of our world.

Labels: David Kantor, Lucifer Rebellion, religion, Seraphic ministry, spirituality, The Urantia Book, Urantian

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The Dynamics of Inner Spiritual Guidance

The Dynamics of Inner Spiritual Guidance

Meredith J. Sprunger
October 1984

Contents
Basic conditions which facilitate the reception of spiritual guidance
How do we test the validity of spiritual guidance?
Questions for thought and study

I. Basic conditions which facilitate the reception of spiritual guidance.

Seeking to recognize and follow spiritual guidance is the most important aspect of human life. It is central to the teachings of Jesus and the great religious prophets of history.

A. Wanting to do the Father's will more than anything else.

1. A categorical will decision to dedicate one's life to God.
2. The source of an all-pervasive motivation for our lives.
3. Learning to discipline and master our minds--we need to control, guide, and direct our thinking as it is the key of all personality development and growth.

a. Develop a habitual spiritual frame of reference.
b. Eliminate the garbage and emotional poisons from our thinking.

B. Take short retreats for relaxation, thought clarification, and recharging the spiritual resources of our soul.

C. Engage in prayer and worship. It is important to understand the essential principles of creative prayer and worship.

1. Prayer and worship are complementary. Prayer has an element of self or creature interest and concern. Worship in the contemplation of God and is an and in itself. Prayer may lead to worship and be an aid to worship.
2. Prayer is communion with God which expands insight. It is both a sound psychological practice which augments self-realization and an effective spiritual technique to expand the soul.
3. Prayer is not a technique to escape life's difficulties but a way in which we can learn to face conflict and suffering meaningfully and courageously. Prayer does not change God's mind but it may change the person praying.
4. Primitive and immature prayer attempts to plead or bargain with God for health, wealth, power, or preference. Prayer, however, cannot be used to circumvent universe laws and the limits of time and space. The spiritual level of people is revealed by the nature of their prayers; however, the more mature should not criticize or ridi cule the naive and the immature.
5. Words are not important in prayer; God responds only to the true and sincere attitudes of the mind and soul. We should pray for divine guidance to solve human problems, not for some cosmic, miraculous solution.
6. To pray effectively we must face reality honestly and intelligently, attempt to solve problems creatively through spiritual guidance with the resources which we have, be dedicated to doing the will of God, and have living faith. Efficacious prayer should be: unselfish--not alone for oneself, believing--according to faith, sincere--honest of heart, intelligent--according to our insight and knowledge, and trustful--in submission to the Father's all-wise will.
7. Only prayers which are rooted in spiritual reality and sustained by faith are answered in the frames of reference of the petitioner. Prayers are answered in terms of true spiritual needs. We should not attempt to use prayer as a substitute for human ingenuity, and action; it cannot be used to escape reality. Some prayers because of their visionary aspirations and all-encompassing nature can only be fully answered in eternity.
8. Prayer is a vital and indispensable factor In spiritual growth, Even immature and presumptuous prayers expand the soul's potential. Prayer is a major resource for the achievement of human self-realization, effectiveness, and inner peace, Prayer also has great social repercussions and is an antidote to personality isolation.
9. Worship is spiritual communion with God; it is the part identifying with the Whole. It should not be confused with psychic or mystical experiences. God-consciousness is humanity's greatest opportunity and challenge.
10. Worship is the most creative activity of personal growth. It renews the mind, stimulates soul growth, eliminates insecurity and personality isolation, and greatly increases the total resources of the individual. Worship should alter with service; it is ancestor to the highest joys of humankind.

D. Making decisions and taking action--grappling with specific life opportunities and problems.

1. The clearest spiritual guidance comes through experience, not theoretical contemplation.
2. Spiritual guidance is especially communicated through the process of service to our fellow human beings.
3. The spirit of God can most effectively adjust, guide, and direct when we are engaged in the concrete activities of human life--when there is something tangible to guide and direct.
4. The feed-back of human experience is the most substantial and reliable channel of receiving spiritual wisdom, direction, and vision.
5. The spirit of God indwelling each of us has a plan for our lives. Our greatest adventure in life is discovering and actualizing that plan.

II. How do we test the validity of spiritual guidance?

A. First we must realize that our minds are quite capable of deceiving us. If we do not critically examine our inner leadings, it is easy to mistake our own subconscious will for the will of God (superconscious direction). Even genuine spiritual guidance can be distorted--often leading to half-truths and fanaticism.

1. Spiritual guidance is often on the unconscious level. God's leading is so benign, subtle, and unimposing, so admixed with the ordinary things of life that we often cannot be certain whether our inclinations have their source in our subconscious motivational needs or our superconscious value direction.

a. We hear naive, fundamentalistic Christians glibly declaring "God spoke to me..." or "God told me to do this or that." Even as a small boy when my parents attended one of these emotional groups I had some doubts about the 20/20 spiritual vision of some of the statements I heard.
b. The phenomena of voices heard by the mind's ear and visions seen by the mind's eye have been relatively frequent in religious experience. Such unusual events are impressive to the person experiencing them; however, we should not over-react but apply to them the same tests for validity that we give to the "inner leadings" of our every day life.

2. Who can say for certain that the coincidental circumstances which seem to focus meaning or value in our lives are of divine direction or are merely the chance happenings of experience?

a. Usually our first response to an inclination, leading, or idea is intuitive. We "feel" it is right, wrong, good, or questionable. Many of our decisions are made at this intuitive level.
b. Over the years as one observes these "meaningful coincidences" and ponders their precise timing one begins to suspect and then often believe that some kind of spiritual planning and guidance must have been involved in the production of such meaningful juxtapositions of events.
c. Since so much of our spiritual guidance seems to be associated with the common experiences of every day life, one suspects that the presence of God is a matter of using circumstantial manipulation as a communication technique.

3. Following our intuitive reaction to inner leadings, we need to use our common sense and logical thinking to evaluate our inclinations. We ought to be particularly wary of those leadings which logically could have origins in our conscious or subconscious fears and anxieties or those which reinforce our egocentric psychological needs--pride, selfishness, security, justification, importance, prestige, etc. It is dangerous to uncritically accept our own human desires and needs for divinely inspired direction. Conversely, if we have a tendency toward guilt and self-punishment, we ought not reject leading simply because they contribute to our fulfillment as sons-and daughters of God.

B. All of this subjective difficulty in evaluating and testing spiritual guidance points to the need for some objective standards by which we can assess our inner orientation.

1. We should apply objective criteria to complement our subjective evaluation.

a. Is it harmonious with the highest teachings of The Urantia Book? Is it something Jesus would approve?
b. Is it harmonious with the highest values and thinking of human religious culture?
c. Is it contrary to scientifically verified facts and the best scientific orientation?
d. What do the people whose judgment I most respect think about it? The approval of others is not of paramount importance but listening to the wisdom of others may be helpful to our discernment.
e. How does time and experience affect this leading or sense of mission? We need to "sleep on it," to allow days, weeks, and months to see how inner convictions look over a period of time.
f. After we are confident in our thinking that the idea or action contemplated is good and consistent with the highest and best that we know it is time to get experiential validation--we need to act.

2. After taking the leap of faith-in action, service, and living what does this experience reveal? How does it measure up to the following seven-fold pragmatic experiential test?

a. Does it improve one's physical health?
b. Does it improve one's mental functioning?
c. What social effects does it have -- does it promote love and unity or fear, anger, and disharmony?
d. Does it contribute to the spiritualization of one's every day life?
e. Does it enhance one's appreciation of truth, beauty, and goodness?
f. Does it conserve one's most basic and highest values?
g. Does it increase one's God-consciousness?
h. Does it help bring God to humankind and lead humankind to God?

3. The feedback of experience will give us information and wisdom which thinking and theory cannot reveal. In this testing of our "inner leadings" through thought and action, and altering our behavior on the basis of the feedback of experience we have exhausted our human evaluative capacities. We then must live in faith and inner conviction that we are following the will of God for our lives because we are living and acting on the highest and best that we know. Our lives are then enhanced by the power of the Spirit.

Questions For Thought and Study

1. Why do all people--unbelievers, evildoers, and psychotics-- seem to have "inner guidance?"
2. Is our "conscience" a reliable guide to spiritual reality or synonymous with the will of God in our lives?
3. Are strong feelings and emotions a reliable guide to the will of God?
4. In our prayers should we ask God for things which would alter universe laws for our benefit?
5. Does God have to be pleaded with or persuaded to do good things for us?
6. Do our prayers ever change God's mind or purposes?
7. Why do sincere and dedicated people come to such different views regarding the will of God on such issues as abortion, genetic engineering,euthanasia--or even about smoking, drinking, and wearing jewelry?
8. Should we give more weight to guidance if it comes through "hearing voices" or "seeing visions?"
9. Is it common or rare that we human beings mistake our will for the will of God? What are the results of such confusion?
10. Does the state of our health, wealth, or happiness have any relationship to God's love for us? Is health or wealth a sign of God's special blessing?
11. Why are we human beings often victimized by naive, simplistic views of God and his ways in our lives?
12. How important is intelligence or formal education in determining our capacity to receive spiritual guidance, develop spiritual insight and wisdom, and achieve spiritual growth?

Labels: experience, God, Inner guidance, intuition, Jesus, Meredith J. Sprunger, prayer, questions, spirituality, The Urantia Book, validity

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Friday, February 15, 2008

The Urantia Book in India: The 2008 World Book Fair

in Delhi, India - February 2-10, 2008

A Report by Paula Thompson, Director, The Urantia Book Fellowship

AFTER YEARS of dreaming and months of planning, a team of experienced and dedicated Urantia Book evangelists exhibited The Urantia Book at the World Book Fair in Delhi, India, February 2-10, 2008. I was blessed and honored to be a part of that team ably led by Buck Weimer and including Arlene Weimer, Charlene Morrow, Agustin Arellano and Mario Trevino. When I left for home on Friday, February 8, an Indian reader, Mr. Garfield Jansen, arrived several hundred miles by train to fill my place. It was a fantastic team and the joy, camaraderie and love at our booth attracted other exhibitors and attendees to us. Many came back and visited with us daily for the ten days we were there. We made many friends among the Muslims, Hindus and Christians who were there.

Months of preparation culminated and, at least for me, the adventure began at about 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday January 30, when Buck and Arlene arrived at my house. Our first mission was to fit 48 hardback Urantia Books, hundreds of brochures, thousands of spiritual vitamins, dozens of Urdu Sampler and Jesus books, UB Audio DVDs and numerous other booth outreach materials into our luggage along with our clothes. We were allowed to check only two bags, each weighing 50 pounds or less, and entitled to one carry-on bag which (as Buck reminded me) had a size limit but not a weight limit. For a little over an hour we worked in my garage wrapping each Urantia Book in bubble wrap and meticulously fitting them all into our bags. Buck is a maestro at this so Arlene and I wrapped and he loaded and re-loaded. We used an old bathroom scale to determine if we were in the ballpark but we knew we would have to do some shuffling of materials at the airport to maximize each bagâ€™s weight and avoid additional weight charges. Each Urantia Book weighs nearly 4 pounds so letâ€™s just say we got very creative. Buck reminded us all to leave out any non-essential personal objects and over the course of our time there me and my room buddy Charlene had occasion to miss and laugh about the â€œnon-essentialsâ€� several times.

Our next step can only be called the long, long schlep. We met Charlene at Denver International Airport and spent some time weighing and shuffling the content of bags. When the shuffling was done, 7 of our eight checked bags were stuffed to the hilt with books and effects and maxed out at 50 lbs. There was only one bag that contained 15 books and since the other bags were maxed out and there was nowhere else to put even one more book, we paid the $50.00 charge and counted our blessings. After all, we got 64 Urantia Books (256 lbs.) and numerous other books and literature to India for just $50.00. Having shipped these books around the world for two decades now, I can assure you, even I was amazed.

Buck personally carried on a bag that contained 11 books and weighed over 40 pounds. We all had at least three books in our carry-on bags. We had a good laugh at the airport when we saw people giving Buck a wide berth and realized that his bag, which was found in my garage and used, displayed the words, â€œBlack Belt Karate School,â€� prominently on the side. The Angels were indeed with us. After the long schlep of 8,843 miles, with one stop in Frankfurt, we arrived at the New Delhi International Airport, India at 2:30 AM on Friday the 1st of February. Buck had previously secured for us decent and reasonable accommodations at The La Sagrita Tourist Home, which he found in the book Lonely Planet â€“ India. Their driver was waiting at the airport to take us there.

We were exhausted but grateful to be in India in one piece with all of our various pieces in tact. We unpacked and got a few hours of sleep and then headed to the Pragati Maidan (a huge exhibition complex in Delhi) to set up our booth. We were not there long before all kinds of people swooped in wanting to sell us everything from personal guide service to poster hanging service to booth sweeping service to bottled water for the booth service and even Dominoâ€™s Pizza came by. Buck joked that word must have spread that, â€œthereâ€™s fresh meat at booth 11.â€� We passed on the pizza but Arlene did negotiate for a guide for us which proved invaluably helpful. Lotus and Bhawna Verma, a married couple, drove us everywhere we wanted or needed to go during the entire time we were there and took fantastic care of us for just 500 Rupees a day, which is less than $20.00.

* * *

It took the better part of the day to set up the booth, but we got it done and were ready to roll the next morning. Buck was our fearless leader, and we soon became Buck and the Buckaroos. Well, Arlene actually took on the affectionate Indian designation of â€œMrs. Buckâ€� but the rest of us gladly became the Buckaroos.

Saturday the 2nd of February was the first full day of the fair. Charlene and I decided it took us less than a day to fall totally in love with the Indian people. Their big sparkling dark eyes and beautiful smiles were only eclipsed by their sincere interest in us and our book. In a word, they melted our hearts. They have a unique head gesture, in which they swivel their heads from side to side. Itâ€™s graceful and beautiful, but it looks a lot like someone shaking their head in the negative. Since they would read the Spiritual Vitamins and then do this gesture, we weren't sure if they liked us or thought we were crazy. Agustin, being the student of world cultures that he is, learned for us that it is actually an affirmation, a sort of Indian thumbs up. So, for the rest of our time there we basked in the sweetness of their positive and lovely energy.

As sweet as the people are, the environment is deplorable and desperately polluted. The air is heavy with smog, smoke and a dust that daily coats everything. Coming from Colorado and the crisp mountain air, the air conditions there were shocking. Being a mom, and seeing barefoot 4-year-old children in the middle of crowded busy intersections begging, even at night, with no parent in sight really had an impact on me. Riding in a car in Delhi is a life altering experience. Even so, all things considered, itâ€™s nothing short of miraculous that Indiaâ€™s one billion people work and live together as well and happily as they do. Delhi, India is certainly a tribute to the indelible human spirit as well as the human ability to adapt, survive and even thrive.

Over the course of the next 10 days in Delhi, we made lifelong friends. There are so many, but a few stand out for me. Yuyutsu Sharma, a poet and bookseller from Nepal, had a booth right across from us. I can only describe him as a beautiful Asian Red Man. He came over on the first day and greeted us with warmth and friendship, glad to be our neighbor; in the course of a week we got to know him well. We learned of his family at home in Nepal and that his 12-year-old daughter is strongly drawn to Jesus. Yuyutsu encourages her to follow her heart and learn all she can about Jesus but he explained with a gleam in his eye that his wife thinks heâ€™s crazy to tell her that. Of course, we traded our magnificent story of Jesus for one of his books of poems and he sent it to his child the next day, via express mail. Imagine being 12-years-old, inexplicably drawn to Jesus and being able to read Part IV of The Urantia Book! Well, let's just say, it delights my imagination.

Yuyutsu is a very successful poet and heâ€™s coming to Boulder soon to read his poetry and promote his book. Of course, I offered him a place to stay. He hopes we Urantians will come to Nepal and be his guests. At dinner one night, he said, â€œI will take you all over the mountain trails, to all of the villages, and you can hand out your spiritual vitamins -- translated into Nepalese, of course.â€� We all smiled and replied, â€œOf course!â€�

I had an encounter with two young Muslim brothers, Fraz and Kashif Hasan Khan. Fraz was the older of the two and clearly the boss, doing most of the talking. They came in and took issue with us as they were clearly fundamentalists. However, they were much more polite than some other fundamentalists I've encountered. We had a wonderful and lively exchange and after at least an hour of intense conversation on subjects like Hell (which they did believe in) and Jesus being born of a virgin (which they do not believe in) we came to a place of mutual respect. I learned that Fraz is majoring in comparative religions at the university there and he very much wanted a copy of the UB. So I promised him that if he will read the entire UB I would read the entire Koran. He assured me that both he and his brother will read it. They took my email so that they might ask me questions and share insights and I have theirs. Such encounters are like the pinnacle of outreach for me.

Incidentally, the Muslims we talked to there all reiterated to us that they accept and recognize Jesus as a true prophet and believe that he is the one prophet that is coming back. As I spoke to these two young men, I would often preface my words with, â€œWell, as I said, Jesus is my prophet, and he teaches thatâ€¦.â€� I found it to be an effective way to engage them but it is important to note that, just as with Christians, the New Testament is their only source for his teachings.

I had an encounter with a pharmacist, Noor Ul Hussain, from Kashmir. Noor (which Agustin said means â€œriverâ€�) told me he was drawn to our booth and very much interested in Jesus, although raised a Muslim. Noor said he felt that he was led to us there and that God was guiding him and answering his prayers. He of course has the book now. He took off of work to come back to our booth and came back every day. After a few days, he was working with us and it was great to have him there to explain things to people who speak mainly Hindi. He works in Delhi and commutes home periodically to visit his family in Kashmir. He was headed there for an eight day visit at the end of the week. Noor spoke very good English, and said many times over the course of the week in his wonderful Indian accent, â€œYes, def-in-nately, it is a revelation, I am conveenced.â€�

While we were there, people who have had the book since 2000 (the last time the book was exhibited there by Urantia Foundation representatives) came into our booth. Some expressed difficulty in understanding the manner in which it is written and its concepts and we assured them that this is difficult for everyone even those for which English is their first language. Several of the publishers we spoke to said they felt it would do better in Indian markets as a trilogy of books. They felt that the size and cost could make it prohibitive for most Indians.

We originally decided to sell the book there for 300 Rupees, which is less than $12. But we soon learned that this amount is equivalent to an average dayâ€™s wage. Charleneâ€™s comment was, â€œThatâ€™s like paying $80.00 for it by US standards.â€� So we asked several people what they felt would be a fair price for such a book. The comment that stood out for me is, â€œLower the price to 150 Rupees and you start to see the books move out.â€� This we did and the books began to move.

When I called Buck on Saturday to tell him that I made it home safely, he said they had nine books left and were all but out of everything including Spiritual Vitamins (which people absolutely loved) and brochures (having had to print 1000 there for 1500total) and the busiest day, the last day, was still ahead.

Buck, Arlene and Charlene were headed to Jabalpur on Monday to visit with Dr. Chauhan, who has read the book in India for more than 25 years. He may be the first real Indian Urantia Book reader. He translated 2,000 quotes into Hindi (the Hindi Sampler) and we got it just in time to take there with us. We had just one printed copy, which Buck bound in a notebook as a booth copy. This was picked up and read so many times we couldnâ€™t begin to count. One fellow exhibitor came back every day to read it a little more. Each time he read it, his eyes would tear up. Agustin quickly started keeping a list of people who want a copy with a promise to each that one will be sent as soon as itâ€™s available.

In conclusion, I feel deeply satisfied that 64 more whole seeds of revelation have been planted in India, along with hundreds of lesser seeds in numerous other forms, including audio DVDs, Urdu Samplers, Jesus books, Life After Death Magazines, Inhabited Worlds brochures, select excerpt brochures and introductory brochures and soon the Hindi Samplers will be sent. In a word, we conducted splendid and effective outreach there. This is our work, the work of the revelation and the work of the Fellowship. I hope our efforts will only grow in this way and that such will be supported gladly and I pray that we not let another eight years go by before we go back to India and Asia in general.

I give my personal heartfelt thanks to Buck Weimer, who worked tirelessly to arrange this trip. Thanks Buck for your stalwart dedication! I also thank all of you who have supported the Fellowship and our work over the years. Without your support, efforts like these would not be possible. O

Paula Thompson is Director of The Urantia Book Fellowship

Labels: Delhi, India, Jesus, Muslims, outreach, Paula Thompson, The Urantia Book, World Book Fair

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

Safeguarding the Symbols of Urantian Faith

David Kantor
February 2001

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 â€œsymbolâ€� 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 symbolâ€™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 â€œkingâ€� 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 manâ€™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, manâ€™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 someoneâ€™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 â€œGodâ€� 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 someoneâ€™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.

Labels: concentric circles, David Kantor, God, myths, Paul Tillich, religious symbols, remembrance supper, spiritual life, The Urantia Book

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How The Urantia Book Came into Existence

by William S. Sadler, Jr.,
February 18, 1962

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."

Labels: Forum, Jr., sleeping subject, The Urantia Book, William S. Sadler

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The Urantia Book has a Message for You...

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.

Labels: God, message, religion, Sue Tennant, The Urantia Book

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A Study of Sadler "The Editor"

by Dave Holt

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 mattersâ€¦"

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 Lenaâ€¦[who] sought desperately for a replacement of Mrs. White who would not disappoint [them]â€¦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.

Labels: biography, Dr Willam Sadler, Ellen White, Martin Gardner, The Urantia Book

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Bestowal of The Spirit of Truth

by Dick Ziglar

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."

Labels: Dick Ziglar, Spirit of Truth, The Urantia Book, Thought Adjuster, truth

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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.

Labels: concept, Etymology, Jon Greer, language, reality, terminology, The Urantia Book

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Friday, January 18, 2008

Is it possible to be a bestowal son and not be fully aware of it yet?

Q: Is it possible to be a bestowal son and not be fully aware of it yet?

A: The Urantia Book speaks of Christ Michael as being a Bestowal Son , and also uses the term "bestowal" in other contexts, such as bestowal of personality and bestowal of the Thought Adjuster. As you likely know, a bestowal is a gift, or an honor given to another. There have been other divine bestowals on earth: Melchizedek was a Bestowal Son also, but he arrived as a fully grown, fully aware individual, so there was not a time when there was any question in him about what he was doing here. Adam and Eve were bestowals, but again, they arrived a adults. The only other divine Bestowal - Caligastia, who is our defaulted and deposed Planetary Prince - was also a fully formed individual upon his arrival.

There surely was a time in Jesus earth life when he was not fully aware of his divine nature, and the fact that he himself was a Bestowal Son - a true gift to the planet. He was after all, born as a helpless infant, as we all are, and had to reach a certain maturity of mind before he could grasp the truth. But it was at age thirteen years that he began to become fully aware of all these things, and by the time he was fourteen, he was already busy formulating his mission and how he would accomplish it. So, to answer your question, I guess you could say that it is possible to be a bestowal son and not be fully aware of it. Jesus' life proves that point. But only because of the nature of the bestowal, involving the maturation of a child into an adult.

Bestowals of divine personages upon the earth are rare, and wonderful. We have been richly blessed by the bestowals given us by God, even though some of them were failures, in part or in whole. Without them, we might be worse off than we are. Surely the greatest of these bestowals was that of Christ Michael as Jesus of Nazareth. And although there may come a time when God sees fit to bestow yet another divine son upon the earth, it seems hightly unlikely that there will ever again be a bestowal like that of Jesus - born as a baby to human parents.

Labels: awareness, bestowal, Jesus, The Urantia Book

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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Letter to a Friend: The Atonement Doctrine

Preston Thomas
From the Fall 1996 Spiritual Fellowship Journal

Dear B. J.:

At Thanksgiving our original discussion centered around the "blood of Jesus." As you know, my son and the girl he planned to marry broke up over this issue. She felt that as long as he did not believe that Jesus died for our sins they had no future. She believed this even though they shared a belief in God, Jesus, and basic Christian values. So this is an important issue and one I would like to discuss with you and make a clear presentation of my beliefs.

Historic Background

Let me begin with a short discussion of the historical beliefs and attitudes that led to the atonement doctrine. The early Hebrews believed that "without the shedding of blood there could be no remission of sin." (Heb. 9:22) They accepted the primitive idea that God could not be appeased except through blood sacrifice. Moses made a distinct advance in that he forbade human sacrifice and substituted instead the ceremonial sacrifice of animals.

This concept of ceremonial sacrifice was preserved, in principle, by the apostle Paul as the doctrine of atonement for sin through the sacrificial death of Jesus. Paul, however, went beyond Moses and the Jewish teachers in that he expounded theories of original sin, hereditary guilt, and innate evil. Paul was a great man; he more than anyone else was responsible for bringing Jesus' teachings to the world. But he also injected a number of his own ideas which were not taught by Jesus, and indeed, were at variance with the teachings of his Master.

I emphasize that human teachers such as Paul were not only fallible but made a serious blunder in promoting the atonement doctrine. I believe we need to make a fundamental distinction between the teachings of Jesus and those of the human followers of Jesus. Jesus is the Son of God as well as the Son of Man and his life and teachings are a divine revelation. Therefore, I believe that we should look to Jesus first, and judge all other teachings by their harmony with his life and teachings.

A Loving Heavenly Father

Accordingly, the first reason I would cite in defense of my belief that the atonement doctrine is in error is that it is not harmonious with Jesus' revelation of God as our loving heavenly Father. While the ancient Jews taught the necessity of sacrifice, Jesus, in his life and teachings, revealed a God of love, mercy, and forgiveness. The Old Testament prophets and the New Testament teachers recognized God but not with the insight, clarity, and perfection of Jesus. Although Jesus' God is just and righteous, it is love -- the heavenly Father's perfect love for his human children -- that is the defining characteristic of his teachings. This concept of God as our loving heavenly Father was the only concept, besides acknowledging God as a spiritual being, that Jesus ever taught. He said, "God is love," and in his teachings God's love is supreme over justice and all other divine attributes.

The ancient Jews had conceived of God as a harsh king-judge. They believed that the only approach to God was through fasting and sacrifice. They felt that racial guilt had separated them from God and that sacrifice was necessary to appease his divine wrath. Paul's atonement doctrine grew out of these beliefs.

But such a God sounds little like the God of Jesus. He taught that God's attitude toward us is that of a Fatherly affection -- he loves us as his sons and daughters. This fatherly affection is the dominant characteristic of the God revealed by Jesus. God's loving forgiveness is always open to us; we must only seek it and be forgiving of others. Jesus revealed this in the prayer he taught his apostles: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors." God's love is not held hostage to an inflexible justice that cannot forgive until a totally innocent Son is sacrificed in remission of sin.

This brings me to the second problem I find in the atonement doctrine. It assumes a lower conception of God than is presented by Jesus' life and teachings. Indeed, the conception of a father who will not forgive his erring children until an entirely innocent elder brother dies as a human sacrifice sounds barbaric. We would expect more even from a human father. This conception is a relic of ancient times and primitive beliefs, ideas, and practices which Jesus came to free us from. He brought a new and higher revelation of God; and in his life he sought to free believers from the Jewish system of ceremony and sacrifice.

The last argument I would advance in opposition to the atonement doctrine is that it was not taught by Jesus. Isn't it reasonable to assume that if Jesus' purpose in living his bestowal life on our world was to die on the cross for our sins, he would have emphasized this doctrine? But Jesus did not teach the necessity of sacrificing himself for man's sins; instead he consistently focused on the Kingdom of God.

There are other problems with the atonement doctrine. In particular, it tends to mask Jesus' true teachings of the kingdom of heaven. In his message, the gospel of the kingdom, Jesus taught that God is our loving heavenly Father and we are his sons and daughters. We are called to live a life of faith in our Father's love and over-care, to trust in God as Jesus trusted God, to trust Him as a little child trusts his earthly father.

Jesus' emphasis was always on the kingdom of heaven -- the rule of God in the hearts of his sons and daughters. The prayer he taught his apostles reveals this central teaching: "Your kingdom come; your will be done." He identified the kingdom of God with the will of God and taught that we enter the kingdom by the inner submission of our will to God's will. It is this teaching that Jesus held supreme; he did not teach the atonement doctrine.

The Meaning of the Cross

Paul taught the atonement doctrine to help make Jesus more acceptable to the Jews, and to try to explain the seemingly inexplicable fact that the Creator (John 1:3, Col. 1:16, Heb. 1:2) of our universe was killed by his own creatures.

Jesus' death was significant; it was the final act of a life of love and service bestowed upon mortal man. The great thing about Jesus' death was the way he died, the magnificent spirit in which he met that death. His final prayer, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do," is Jesus' final demonstration of the love and forgiveness of our heavenly Father.

In Gethsemane Jesus sought to avoid his death if this choice would be consistent with the Father's will. He prayed, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me." But his purpose was to live the full human life of his earth creatures. And in a human life we cannot usually have our death avoided or taken away. So Jesus submitted himself to death on the cross, a death brought about by men -- not by God. It was God's will that Jesus finish his human bestowal, even though it included "drinking the cup" of death at the hands of his enemies.

Jesus' courage and selfless devotion to the service of man and God in his crucifixion inspires us onward. It was the final act of a life of service. "Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends." Jesus lived a life of service, revealing truth to humankind, and he courageously and selflessly submitted to the death that truth teachers must often face.

After Jesus had asked if the cup might be removed, he finished the prayer with the words, "Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done." This prayer -- not the atonement of Jesus -- is the key to our salvation. We are saved not by Jesus' death on the cross but by our faith submission to God's will. This is evident from the fact that believing in "the blood of Christ" will not save someone who does not faithfully choose to live in accordance with the Father's will. And such a choice of God's will over our own personal will can be made independently of the death of Jesus.

Although I believe it is incorrect to refer to Jesus as our redeemer, he is truly our savior. For even though the way to salvation was open before Jesus lived, he, in his bestowal life, did truly make the way of salvation more clear to humanity. His life and teachings are our lighthouse, our certain and infallible guide to salvation. Certainly we may gain much from the teaching of his well-meaning followers, but we must also recognize that they were human and fallible. Jesus is divine and his teachings are perfect; they are the touchstone by which all other teachings should be judged.

B. J., in this letter I have attempted to restate and organize what I said to you at Thanksgiving. I do sincerely appreciate your good hearted and sincere effort to help me better understand the apostolic teachings concerning the "blood of Christ." I am also delighted to have the opportunity to express my beliefs to you. I hope they have found some reception in your mind and heart.

Sincerely,

Preston Thomas

Labels: atonement, God, Heavenly Father, Hebrews, Jesus, Paul, Preston Thomas, sacrifice, the cross, The Urantia Book

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Presentation On Spiritual Healing (Summary)

Summary Of The Presentation On Spiritual Healing
Mr. Henry Begemann
March 4, 1977

Spiritual Healing could be viewed as one factor of the vast process of supremacy, spirit dominance over mind and mind over matter, pattern caused to appear.

(See p. 1274, 6,4-7 and 1275, 7,5-9 - titles to be counted as paragraphs)

The ordination -- mandate, p. 1570, 4.1;

A. proclaim liberty to the spiritual captives
B. proclaim joy to those in the bondage of fear
C. heal the sick, in accordance with the will of my Father in heaven

p. 1590, 9.1-2 Jesus taught the twelve how to heal. What he taught is not communicated, only some clues:

p 1590, 9.2-4 "... the whole man..." p. 1591, 2 & 3: Diseases of the flesh, Troubled minds. (Giving clues for really interested students is an often practiced method of the authors of the Urantia Book).

The whole man:
1. the material energy system
2. the mindal energy system
3. the spirit energy system (different from the indwelling spirit)
4. personality
a. true personality, changeless
b. identity, (personality identifying itself with a living organism to get self-knowledge through experience).
On our level, and throughout the local universe-career the I, or ego, or self, is not yet centered in the spirit-energy system, but in the mind-energy-system.
5. The Thought Adjuster, the indwelling spirit, not yet really a part of man.
6. Soul, born of two parents, mind and Adjuster, the embryonic morontia-mind including a potential/actual new self, reborn man. (the Biblical concept of "the old man" and "the new man")

Relationship between "the whole man" and disease:
P484, 1.1 "The spirit is the architect, the mind is the builder, the body is the building."

A. The architect can be inactive or "captive;" The mind can be without director and in error; The body can exemplify and manifest the error of mind.
B. Purely physical disease. 57, 6 (...the mis-thinking) the collective mind influences nature and creature.

The healing-process indicated by ordination-mandate.

A. Liberty for the Spiritual Captives... The spiritual energy-system is non-active through the overpowering tendencies, convictions, and fears of the ego, that is centered in mind. Reversion of truth: matter dominates mind, (material) mind dominates spirit.

Living, experienced, TRUTH causes the mind-center, the self, to strive for spirit -- (real value) domination. Then the creative nature of spirit manifests itself. This is liberty -- sonship. Intellectual "truth" is insufficient for spiritual healing.

When the captain of the mind-ship listens to the advice of the pilot, he steers his ship free from the shoals, into the open sea of spirit. page 1217, 5.1

The liberated spiritual energy-system regenerates the mindal and material energy systems.

B. Joy for those in bondage of fear.... Fear is an attitude of the mind. Mind, lacking the creativity of the spiritual energy-system, is in bondage of its concepts of material reality. page 140, 2.2-4.

Mind, innately creative, thus creates fear images, which can become obsessions. Fear is a strong factor in the collective mind also. According to Jesus, the remedy for fear is joy. The BEAUTY of life is the basis and reason for joy. Life, as the Universal Father meant it for his children, is beautiful. When we experience the love of our Father, this love casts out fear, through the liberated creativity of the spiritual energy-system.

Experienced values create their channels of expression. Fear is a concomitant of illness. Jesus often began his treatment with "Be not afraid." Fear often expresses itself in the material body as some form of disease accordant with the special form of the fear. (Mind dominating matter).

Every Thought Adjuster brings with him an individual plan of life for his subject.

42, 8.4-7 "Happiness ensues from the recognition of truth because it can be acted out; it can be lived...."

C. "I send you forth ... to heal the sick in accordance with the will of my Father in Heaven."

Two meanings:
1. healing is in accordance with his will;
2. our healing work should be done in accordance with his will.

Both interpretations seem valid. What is the will of God? On the personal, spiritual level the Thought Adjuster is called the will of God. On the physical level, pattern is called the will of God. Mind (with the self-center) is confronted with mystery above and below. p. 1223, 6.2:

"Why do you not allow the Adjuster to strengthen you with Cosmic Power while you wrestle with the temporal difficulties of creature existence?"

On p. 3, 4.3 power is mentioned as a disclosure of divinity on impersonal levels. Conclusion: personality has not power. Power is not personal.

p. 10, 4.4: "That quality of ... personality by virtue of which pattern is caused to appear may be attributed to God - Deity ..., to the co-existence of personality and power."

Though personality has not power, there exists a relationship between personality and power. This relationship The Urantia Book mostly calls "Sonship with God."

page 2097, whole second par., is very enlightening for the "Sonship with - God" - consciousness. It is more than God-knowingness, more than embryonic soul-consciousness, more than the faith-experience of Sonship, it is the actual experience of the divine presence, "equivalent to the integration of the self with the universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality." It is actually participating in the process of Supremacy.

But physical healing not only implies dedication to doing the Father's will as expressed by the indwelling presence, it also requires recognition of the Father's will as pattern. We need an enlightened and unshakable faith and pattern is the basis for that.

Pattern, like personality, is an unfathomable mystery because the Universal Father is the source of both.

But there are some essential aspects of pattern which our book has revealed and which we should remember:

1. Pattern is perfect, absolutely or relatively, depending on the level on which it has been projected. Its gravity-debt has already been paid p.3, 3.4.

2. Pattern does not control energy, like gravity does. In this respect it more resembles love. Pattern is the GOODNESS of the Universal Father, who "fills all things." Pattern should be accepted in living faith. Pattern constitutes the validity-basis for the divine command: "Be ye perfect as I am perfect." In final analysis the Universal Father himself has paid the gravity-debt. More directly the Creator Sons and their subordinates have paid the gravity-debt for us by projecting pattern. The perfection of pattern is already here.

God's GOODNESS is not the same as God's mercy. God is good because he shares his perfection with us as the ever-present, perfect pattern, waiting to be activated. He is merciful because he knows that the realization of perfection is a process in time. Even the realization of relative perfection as manifested in healing is, in most cases, a process. Jesus' healings were instantaneous, because his faith was so much stronger and more enlightened than ours. As a Creator Son he was above time, but it is not clear if, or in how far he acted as Creator Son, when healing. Anyway, he taught his apostles how to heal.

Our healing mostly is the result of a faith struggle between the spiritual mind and the material mind. And this struggle can only be won through the help of the indwelling spirit, our Father-friend within.

A Divine Counselor summarizes it on p. 43, 5.4 as follows: "Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty and goodness as they are blended in human experience. Such levels of efficient living come about through the unification of energy systems, idea systems, and spirit systems."

And on page 42, 8.4: "Happiness ensues from the recognition of truth because it can be acted out..."

Spiritual healing is a privilege, not a "must." It belongs in the category mentioned on page 1866.

Medical science has its place in evolution.

Labels: disease, fear, God, Gospel of Jesus, healing, Henry Begemann, Mind, pattern, spiritual healing, The Urantia Book, Thought Adjuster

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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Fundamental Patterns of Reality

by
Chris M. Halvorson

http://urantiabook.org/archive/readers/halvorson_patterns.pdf

Labels: Chris M. Halvorson, God, I AM, personality, reality, The Urantia Book, unity

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Saturday, September 29, 2007

Ultimatons, Electrons and Atoms: A Discussion Of Paper 42

by Georgia Gecht

Contents:

Ultimatons
Electrons
The Atom
Atomic Cohesion
The Atomic Nucleus
The Phenomenon of the Mesotron
The Phenomenon of the Number Seven in Atomic Physics
Paper 42

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ULTIMATONS

Ultimatons are the energy particles which make up the electrons, the PRIME physical units of material existence (472:1); Ultimatons aggregate into electrons. (475:1)

Ultimatons do not whirl about in circuits within electrons, but they CLUSTER, - or spread, in accordance with their AXIAL REVOLUTIONARY VELOCITIES, which determines:

a. The differential electronic dimensions
b. The NEGATIVE or POSITIVE reactions of the several types of electronic units
The entire SEGREGATION AND GROUPING of electronic matter, RESULT from these various functions of the COMPONENT ULTIMATONIC INTERASSOCIATION. (476:#6:LP)

ELECTRONS

Mutual attraction holds 100 ultimatons together in the constitution of the electron. There are never more nor less than 100 ultimatons in a "typical" electron. The loss of one or more ultimatons destroys typical electronic identity, bringing into existence one of TEN MODIFIED FORMS of the electron. (476:#6:5)

The ultimaton is derived from, and is dependent on, PARADISE. It has Paradise as it's NUCLEUS. (476:#1:2)

Ultimatons function by mutual attraction, responding ONLY to the Paradise gravity pull. Without LINEAR gravity resonse, (the electrical stage, 125:#8:3), they are thus held in the universal space drift. They are capable of accelerating revolutionary velocity, but cannot, of themselves, deindividuate, - return to the puissant-energy stage. (476:#6:3)

Many phases of physical activity slow the ultimatons down before they attain the revolutionary-energy prerequisites to electronic organization, (organizing into electrons according to certain velocities. (476:LP)

Ultimatons have three varieties of motion:

a. Mutual resistance to cosmic force.
b. Individual revolutions of anti-gravity potential.
c. The intraelectric POSITIONS of the 100 mutually interassociated ultimatons.
Some of the unpredictability of the electron is due to differential ultimatonic axial revolutionary velocities, and to the unexplained "HUDDLING" proclivity of ultimatons. Other influences, - physical, electrical, magnetic, and gravitational also operate to produce VARIABLE electronic behavior. The ultimaton is the first measurable form of energy, and has Paradise as its nucleus. It is measurable by the force organizers who initiate those changes of space-force, which eventuate in energy. (468:3)

There is no measurable linear gravity pull on uncharged electronic energy particles, or on unassociated ultimatons. (476:#6:2, 3)

THE ATOM

Atoms may contain from one to one hundred orbital electrons. ONLY THE OUTER TEN electrons of the LARGER atoms revolve about the central nucleus as DISTINCT and DISCRETE bodies, -intactly and compactly swinging around on precise and definite orbits. These outer ten electrons, (present in only the TEN HEAVIEST elements), are possessed of the dignity of independence, and are therefore able to escape more or less freely from the control of the mother nucleus. With a minimum variation in temperature and pressure, the members of this fourth and outer-most group of electrons will escape from the grasp of the central nucleus, - as illustrated by the spontaneous disruption of uranium and kindred elements. (Ref.:478:2,3,4)

MESOTRON: "Energy carrier" particle at center of nucleus.

NUCLEUS: Charged protons and uncharged neutrons. (479:2)

FIRST ENERGY ZONE Thirty electrons nearest the center are difficult of observation or detection as separate and organized bodies.

SECOND ENERGY ZONE The next thirty electrons are of advancing individuality, - bodies of matter exerting a more complete control over their attendant energy systems.

THIRD ENERGY ZONE The next thirty electrons are still more individualized and circulate in more distinct and definite orbits.

OUTER TEN Electronic orbits Electron in orbit This same comparative ratio of electronic behavior (in relation to nuclear proximity) obtains in all atoms, regardless of the number of electrons embraced. THE NEARER THE NUCLEUS, THE LESS THERE IS OF ELECTRONIC INDIVIDUALITY.

The WAVE-LIKE ENERGY EXTENSION of an electron may so spread out, as to occuply the whole of the lesser atomic orbits, especially those nearest the nucleus. These thirty innermost electrons DO HAVE individuality, but their energy systems tend to intermingle, extending from electron to electron, and well nigh from orbit to orbit.

The formation of all matter is on the order of the solar system. There is at the center of every minute universe of energy, a RELATIVELY stable, COMPARATIVELY stationary, nuclear portion of material existence." (477:#7:1) "Relatively" and "comparatively" - meaning compared with the unbelievable velocities of the electrons and ultimatons. This does NOT mean "absolutely" stationary, as Paradise Isle. (See "relatively stationary": matter example. (472:#10)

Illustrations in science books, aforementioned, show the atom to be round, like a golf ball. The Urantia Book describes it as having the solar system pattern, i.e., horizontal. If an atom could be photographed, it's revolutionary velocity would make it appear round.)

ATOMIC COHESION

Gravity is one of SEVERAL factors concerned in holding together a tiny atomic energy system. There is also present IN and AMONG these basic physical units, a powerful and UNKNOWN energy...the SECRET of their basic constitution and ultimate BEHAVIOR, an energy not yet discovered on Urantia. This universal influence permeates ALL the space embraced within this tiny energy organization. The space between the electrons of an atom IS NOT EMPTY. It is activated by wave-like manifestations which are perfectly synchronized with electronic velocity and ultimatonic revolutions.

This force is NOT DOMINATED by our laws of positive and negative attraction; its behavior is, therefore, sometimes UNPREDICTABLE. This "unnamed" influence seems to be a SPACE FORCE reaction of the UNQUALIFIED ABSOLUTE. (478:#8:1,2)

NOTE: The Paper #42 on Energy, Mind and Matter was requested by Gabriel of Salvington, the Chief Executive of the universe of Nebadon, and was presented by a Mighty Messenger, ... a perfected mortal who was either rebellion tested, or in some way passed throuogh some definite test of universe allegiance. (245:#2) And, so it behooves us to do our best to understand the energies, so that we understand God and his universes, and attain worship through comprehension of his greatness; and proceed intelligently with our PRIME PURPOSE from here to Paradise; of inter-relating energy and spirit. (See 1,275:#6:2,3; also 638:4,5)

THE ATOMIC NUCLEUS

When atoms perform radioactively, the excess of radiation is derived from the "breaking up" of the mesotron "energy carrier", which thereby becomes a MERE ELECTRON. This disintegration is accompanied by the emission of small uncharged particles. (479:4)

Electronic orbits Charged protons and uncharged neutrons of the nucleus MESOTRON at center (The "glue" of the atom) weighs 180 times the weight of an electron. Mysterious wave-like manifestations expanding outward in ever increasing circles of 360 degrees. Our Mighty Messenger brother thinks that this mysterious manifestation seems to be a reaction of the Unqualified Absolute.

From these brief explainings of the atom, which are given, could we not conclude that the mesotron is secretly composed of 100 potential ultimatons at the beginning; performing at high speed revolutions, (possibly at the puissant stage), and made stable by the many uncharged particles; but not yet slowed down to the revolutionary prereequisites to electronic energy; which maintains order throughout the system...whether the atom consists of one or one hundred electrons,...the "powerful cohesive integrity" of the atom.

When a physical change occurs in the atom, as in radioactivity, the powerful mesotron undergoes a sudden metamorphosis. Through previous intelligent action of the ultimate and a flash reaction of the delicately space-concealed bit of the Unqualified Absolute, the "certain uncharged particles" of the mesotron are released, reducing its weight 180 times itself, -the revolutionary velocity of the ultimatons is slowed down to tthe requisite electronic stage,...thus proceeding within the laws of the "sevenfold electronic organization of prematter". (469:#2)

The 100 mature ultimatons, huddled together, become an electron. It then goes forth to perform another service. In its wanderings in space, it may be absorbed by another atom in another universe, but after countless ages of swinging ever true to the circle of eternity, it returns to its source, Nether Paradise, where, we assume, it is reduced, or melted back into space potency (Unqualified Absolute), only to be sent back into space...where it takes another turn in the evolution of space-force...in "the circularity of endless existence". One thing is certain - nothing is destroyed. It merely changes its course and proceeds through intelligent law. (A reference to "mature ultimaton" may be found on p.519:#1:2)

THE PHENOMENA OF THE MESOTRON

a. Causes protons and neutrons constantly to change places. The mesotron causes the electric charge of the nuclear particles to be incessantly tossed back and forth between protons and neutrons. At one infinitesimal part of a second, a given nuclear particle is a charged proton, and the next, an uncharged neutron.

b. The integrity of the nucleus is maintained by the reciprocal function of the mesotron. It HOLDS charged and uncharged particles together.

c. It has superior force-mass power, being 180 times as heavy as the ELECTRON.

d. Without the mesotron, the electric charge carried by the protons would be disruptive of the atomic nucleus. Neither electric nor gravitational forces could hold the nucleus together.

e. The mesotron functions as an "energy carrier" through the above described process. The resulting phenomena: It mightily contributes to the nuclear stability of the atom. But, it does not account for the cohesion of proton to proton, nor neutron to neutron.

Mesotrons explain CERTAIN cohesive properties, but the PARADOXICAL and POWERFUL FORCE of ATOMIC COHESIVE INTEGRITY is a form of energy, as yet UNDISCOVERED ON Urantia. (Other Ref. on "unknown energy": 47:1; 328:2; 467:LP; 472:#4:2; 667:1)

THE PHENOMENON OF THE NUMBER SEVEN IN ATOMIC PHYSICS

The decimal system is inherent in energy, matter, and the material creation. The number seven is basic to the central universe (Paradise through Havona), and the spiritual system of transmissions of character (1,242:2-4), but the number seven also plays a phenomenal part in the physical energies of our world. The atomic world displays a certain periodic characterization which RECURS in GROUPS OF SEVEN, a brithmark, carried by this material world, indivative of its far-distant spiritual origin.

There are seven cycles whereby certain SIMILAR physical and chemical properties are recurrent in our atomic energy system. If we arrange the basic elements in a row in the order of their atomic weight, then, "...starting from ANY ONE ELEMENT, and nothing some ONE property, such a quality or property will change -- for the following SIX CONSECUTIVE ELEMENTS, but on reaching the eighth it tends to reappear, that is, the EIGHTH chemical active element resembles the FIRST, the NINTH the SECOND, and so on." (425:1)

This PERIODIC change recurs diminishingly, and with variations, down through the entire chemical weight table, being most observable in the LIGHTER atomic groupings. This sevenfold persistence of creative constitution is difficult of comprehension, but this fact of the physical world points to the "seven-fold constitution of ancestral energy". (489:#2) Urantians are saddled with a great problem in trying to compute fixed laws for posterity, because of the inconstancy of the elements; together with "man's ignorance of the philosophy of the universe; which CANNOT be predicated on the observations of so-called science". (480:2) Further complications are analyzed in the last three paragraphs on page 482 of The Urantia Book.

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The Urantia Book Fellowship

Labels: atom, electron, mesotron, physics, The Urantia Book, ultimaton