© 1989 Ann Bendall
© 1989 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
| Greetings From The Sydney Study Group | Vol 10 No 4 July 1989 — Index | You Can Never Watch Yourself Grow |
“Stabilize mind by subordination to spirit.” — I am convinced, for most of us, this is the essential prerequisite to the development of our relationship with our Paradise Father, one which allows His rule to truly rule every moment of our lives.
The religious experience is a personal experience, one which defies our mortal mind to describe. But the mortal mind is the arena through which our Adjuster must work, and in traversing the realms of our subconscious, protoplasmic memory banks, emotional background, morals, conscience, ideals, expectations and learning, the Adjuster can have a dreadfully hard task, compounded by the fact that we are often somewhat confused in the role of father, child, the emotion love, and the place Heaven.
The last mentioned The URANTIA Book explains perfectly, and since most of us have a pretty strange fairy tale image of ourselves, dressed in chiffon, being handed wings, a halo and a harp and just rolling around heaven all day, for evermore and a day, which, with the only alternative to this ever after lifestyle, being, no clothes or associated paraphernalia being chucked in a big burning pit which burns us forever more and a day, we naturally opted for heaven.
And then we were blessed with a beautiful blue book and the revealing of God’s creation, His plan and His purpose and it all seems so right to us, so understandable and acceptable, both as to who we are, who God is and what He plans to achieve through ourselves. Our minds accept this as logical.
The book supplies a wealth of information on our Father and ourselves as His children. We appreciate that many of the emotions we have felt in the past are natural, that we have a very basic material mind which can make communication by our Adjuster difficult. We also understand how our minds, conscious, subconscious are full of a lot of erroneous guff but know that in handing over all matters of mind to our Thought Adjuster, it will work to clear away all of this so that our ideals can be truly spiritualized.
And we are further advised that “Religious living is devoted living, and devoted living is creative living, original and spontaneous. New religious insights arise out of conflicts which initiate the choosing of new and better reaction habits in the place of older and inferior reaction patterns. New meanings only emerge amid conflict; and conflict persists only in the face of refusal to espouse the higher values connoted in superior meanings.”" (UB 100:4.1)
“Religious perplexities are inevitable; there can be no growth without psychic conflict and spiritual agitation. The organization of a philosophic standard of living entails considerable commotion in the philosophic realms of the mind. Loyalties are not exercised on behalf of the great, the good, the true and the noble without a struggle. Effort is attendant upon clarification of spiritual vision and enhancement of cosmic insight. And the human intellect protests against being weaned from subsisting upon the nonspiritual energies of temporal existence. The slothful animal mind rebels at the effort required to wrestle with cosmic problem solving.”
“But the great problem of religious living consists in the task of unifying the soul powers of the personality by the dominance of love.” (UB 100:4.2-3)
“Man cannot cause growth, but he can supply favourable conditions. Growth is always unconscious, be it physical, intellectual, or spiritual. Love thus grows; it cannot be created, manufactured or purchased; it must grow.”" (UB 100:3.7)
Don’t they write and express themselves so beautifully! I sit down and try to put something to paper, it takes me ten foolscap pages, and I open the blue book and there is one sentence that says the lot.
The book does not describe the psychic, but I suspect that in trying to communicate with us at a conscious level, the psychic can either be a curse or a blessing to the Thought Adjuster — as sone of our zany dreams will reveal. I personally, suspect that the psychic arena is embraced within what the revelators call “the protoplasmic memory” and if this is so would explain how people can get stuck on a reincarnation theory.
The ego will have its finishing touch to dream imagery and depending upon whether our ego be inflated — in which instance we will colour the Adjuster’s image with a tinge of Messiahship about our role — or the converse, an ego which relegates self worth to zilch, which will convert the dream into one of guilt and self recrimination — one can appreciate how certain people who have had, to them, a very real religious experience, will foul up the message totally.
And so, in the education of ourselves as to our Father and ourselves as His children, and in the enlightenment of His will for us on a day to day basis, I verily believe we must each arrive at our own formula for growth — for our relationship with God is a personal one — we are each individuals, the mode of development, the growth in intensity of same will be unique. The book points in the direction of various pitfalls to watch for, in regard to emanations from within, as being at very best coming from our alter ego rather than our Adjuster. So where do we go when we are advised to question our minds, which is the arena for interaction between our Adjusters and ourselves? My conclusion — love and faith and more and more love and faith and prayer and worship.
Introspection is a good technique. But this means examination of one’s thoughts and not in a self-judgmental manner.
For a good number of us love had a price. — “Do that and I will love youl” and we have had a lot of right/wrongs locked within us good/bad etc. and before our Adjuster can truly spiritualise our thinking we must clear our systems of all these erroneous beliefs.
A rather sobering thought helps me in my personal endeavours — ay Adjuster has to go through every base erroneous thought that 1ullow to flit through my mind. My Adjuster has worked so hard during my lifetime, it is about time I started to pull m weight — weed the garden of my mind so beauty, truth and goodness can be sown, nurtured by love and a spiritual viewpoint.
Ann Bendall, Nambour, QLD
| Greetings From The Sydney Study Group | Vol 10 No 4 July 1989 — Index | You Can Never Watch Yourself Grow |