© 2001 Anne-Marie Ronfet
© 2001 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Brief reflection on the mind | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 | Truth and lies or Facts and falsehood |
As we read the papers, we quickly see that we are not the only ones to experience emotions, whether in the superuniverses, but also in the central universe. Although we live in a mixed and unstable mode between our animal instincts and our spiritual aspirations, other beings seem to experience purer feelings, feelings that originate only in goodness. An ardent desire seems to run through the vast universe, that of reaching God, that of resembling him and serving him.
As far as we are concerned, emotion in the very broad sense of everything that is felt at our level, whether it is of instinctive origin or aroused by the mind, places us in a situation of choice, constantly renewed.
Many religions, especially Eastern ones, have since the dawn of time encouraged us to control emotions, channel them, or even make them disappear in order to ensure the individual a plenitude that should bring him closer to God. Traditional Christianity already has a slightly different perspective; the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels is based on love. (Buddhism itself cultivates the feeling of compassion.)
What about the importance of self-control? We often let ourselves be carried away by our resentments and even among the readers of the booklets, we do not always have a tolerant attitude, the very interest in our research inciting us to too much passion. What is really the case?
Should we, like Indian ascetics, turn away from ourselves what could arouse our impulses? Is it enough to love others? Is it so simple? And above all, is emotion in itself bad? Let us be sincere. We are far from the magnificent psychological mastery of Jesus.
On the other hand, what do we really expect from reading the booklets in our religious life? Are we not a bit like those crowds who followed Jesus, waiting for miracles, small phenomena… Are we not on the lookout for additional excitement because life seems a bit dull and we also need to “feel”. Can spirituality develop in this kind of thirst? A bit, no doubt, but… At a time when booklets are spreading throughout the world, it may be necessary to review our deep motivations.
Jesus, who himself experienced “the vast range of human emotions that extend from magnificent joy to profound pain”. [UB 129:4.4], knew well that humans could not love God without experiencing fairly primary sensations: the taste for the fantastic, the desire to see miracles, the need for the marvelous expressed in a childish, immature way.
He sometimes drew on these feelings, which he understood in a more subtle way. “Jesus taught the appeal to the emotions as a technique for stopping and focusing intellectual attention.” [UB 152:6.4] He drew on the imaginative and emotional treasure of the people to move them, to tear them away from indifference. He transformed fear into a need for love, for understanding, servility into self-respect in the face of one’s destiny.
To fight against fear, human beings instituted cults that channel their impulses, but at the same time lock them in. The cult limits them to institutions that quickly lose their creative values. A few generations pass and there are the children locked in the traditions instituted by the creative imagination of their fathers.
Something else must happen in the mind. Spiritual clairvoyance must gradually prevail.
“But emotion alone is a false conversion; one must have faith as well as feeling. To the extent that such psychic mobilization is partial, and in so far as such human-loyalty motivation is incomplete, to that extent will the experience of conversion be a blended intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reality.” (UB 100:5.5)
The animal dominates in us most of the time. How can we plan our emotions, our automatic mechanisms to finally become more creative? How can we free ourselves from ancestral fear to find ourselves free and serene, without prejudices and without negative impulses, with just the right amount of fear to ensure our survival…
And what are these negative emotions? Some are active like anger, pride, others passive like laziness, inertia, greed…
Many religious techniques have developed psychological practices over the centuries to channel these emotions in order to free ourselves from them. Thus, Buddhism encourages detachment from the experiences that surround us. Sufism, on the contrary, tries to wake us up, to get us out of our deep sleep, to become aware of our actions, of our body in the present moment. Because we must live neither in the past nor in the future but build our life on the moment that passes. Only the moment that passes is alive. We can no longer act on our past. We cannot yet act on our future. We do not know what tomorrow will bring but the moment that passes, today belongs to us. Because if we are beings desiring eternity, we know somewhere that this eternity is already there, that we must sense it.
Many practices talk about identification. We identify ourselves with many things in life. We work? We concentrate, we forget ourselves in work. We are identified with our work. We are tired? To relax, we watch television or go to the movies. We forget ourselves again. Where are we during this time? Gone up in smoke in the small screens or suspended in our consciousness? An hour, two hours, three hours… It is necessary. We need to relax. But we know that our consciousness must pull itself together. We turn off the TV. It was about time. A little later something annoys us, worse, makes us angry And we are nothing more than this anger. It becomes resentment, almost hatred. We hold a grudge against someone. It floods us completely. Okay, we take a deep breath. Calm down, calm down! Anger loses its intensity. It becomes like humiliation, a ball in the stomach. We must digest this. In order to remain conscious, we must constantly create a distance between ourselves, our awakened consciousness and our action, our state. And this is exactly what we must do. Some schools call this the Observer, the one who, within us, watches us, listens to us. The most interesting spiritual practices on the planet take this path. They all agree on the need to be as aware as possible of our actions.
We have to figure it out for ourselves. The Adjuster doesn’t deal with that anyway. He works on another level. Controlling ourselves is up to us, not him. Isn’t it written:
“Your passing and ever-changing emotions of joy and sorrow are mostly purely human and material reactions to your inner psychic climate and your outer material surroundings. Do not, therefore, look to the Adjuster for selfish consolations and human comfort. His business is to prepare you for the eternal adventure, to ensure your survival. It is not the mission of the Mystery Monitor to soothe your feelings of irritation or to heal your wounded pride. It is the preparation of your soul for the long upward career which engages the attention and occupies the time of the Adjuster._” UB 108:5.6
All the reading of the booklets urges us to prepare ourselves for our long journey, to see the goal first through the call of faith, to understand that we are helped by many spiritual influences, then to take charge of ourselves, year in and year out, by mastering our impressions, our mind, our relationships with others, our actions, because “the manifestation of greatness on a world like Urantia is the demonstration of self-control”. [UB 28:6.20]. Now, in the grand universe, greatness is associated with goodness.
It is not enough to read. And if we are asked, through the study of these teachings, to make an intense intellectual effort (because we are undoubtedly behind, at this level compared to our material level…), we must try to work on ourselves to change and improve ourselves.
True religion does not feed on sensationalism. It is above all internal. It is fueled by the Spirit which seeks to manifest itself in us.
Those who have received and recognized the indwelling of God have been born of the Spirit. “You are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwells in you.” It is not enough that this spirit be poured out upon you; the divine Spirit must dominate and control every phase of human experience. (UB 34:6.7)
In every mortal there exists a dual nature: the inheritance of animal tendencies and the high urge of spirit endowment. During the short life you live on Urantia, these two diverse and opposing urges can seldom be fully reconciled; they can hardly be harmonized and unified; but throughout your lifetime the combined Spirit ever ministers to assist you in subjecting the flesh more and more to the leading of the Spirit. Even though you must live your material life through, even though you cannot escape the body and its necessities, nonetheless, in purpose and ideals you are empowered increasingly to subject the animal nature to the mastery of the Spirit. There truly exists within you a conspiracy of spiritual forces, a confederation of divine powers, whose exclusive purpose is to effect your final deliverance from material bondage and finite handicaps. (UB 34:6.9)
The mastery of our unstable psyche and our contradictory tendencies, as well as the overcoming of our human education, the victory over our egoisms and also over external prejudices is a long struggle to unify our self and rebuild it around the inspired idea that we are Sons or Daughters of God and that it is up to us to recreate ourselves from the inside so that the Spirit lives in us.
The possibility of the unification of the evolving self is inherent in the qualities of its constitutive factors: the basic energies, the master tissues, the fundamental chemical overcontrol, the supreme ideas, the supreme motives, the supreme goals, and the divine spirit of Paradise bestowal—the secret of the self-consciousness of man’s spiritual nature.
The purpose of cosmic evolution is to achieve unity of personality through increasing spirit dominance, volitional response to the teaching and leading of the Thought Adjuster. Personality, both human and superhuman, is characterized by an inherent cosmic quality which may be called “the evolution of dominance,” the expansion of the control of both itself and its environment. (UB 112:2.14-15)
On the other hand, the crossing of psychic circles seems to have a close relationship with the mastery of the individual and the impregnation in his life of increasingly morontial values. The arrival of a personal seraphic Guardian “doubles” in some way the spiritual influence. It would seem that the spiritual life of a human being can then evolve in two complementary ways. On the one hand, faith, under the influence of the Adjuster, gift of the Father. On the other hand, the exercise of mastery, the unification of the self in daily experience. “The mastery of cosmic circles is linked to the quantitative growth of the morontial soul, to the understanding of supreme meanings” UB 110:6.19.
Perhaps these psychic circles of mortal progression would be better denominated *cosmic levels—*actual meaning grasps and value realizations of progressive approach to the morontia consciousness of initial relationship of the evolutionary soul with the emerging Supreme Being. And it is this very relationship that makes it forever impossible fully to explain the significance of the cosmic circles to the material mind. These circle attainments are only relatively related to God-consciousness. A seventh or sixth circler can be almost as truly God-knowing—sonship conscious—as a second or first circler, but such lower circle beings are far less conscious of experiential relation to the Supreme Being, universe citizenship. The attainment of these cosmic circles will become a part of the ascenders’ experience on the mansion worlds if they fail of such achievement before natural death. (UB 110:6.16)
Regarding the differences in religious approaches between the West and the East, it seems to me (but this is just my opinion) that they are due to developments and revelations from various eras in the history of Urantia. The East, very much influenced by the missionaries of Machiventa Melchizedek, developed more meditative evolutionary religions, more focused on introspection, often confined to schools where teaching is transmitted from masters to students. The Christian West, by contrast, would have followed Jesus on the path he traced for the Revelation of the Father and the idea of direct filiation with God. For many Christians, faith alone counts with Service. For some evolved Orientals, faith is often assimilated to belief and is in no way sufficient to make the individual progress. They must change, know themselves, become someone else and have much more elaborate self-control than what is required in Christianity in general.
In any case, within the same religion, there have always been Orders focused on social life, helping the poor, conversions and monastic or esoteric Orders dedicated to contemplation and knowledge. Two human ways of approaching God, one based on faith and goodness, the other on the transformation of the individual and knowledge of the world which would be closer to work on the relationship with the Supreme.
Of course, these paths go to the same place and if we observed them from above, we would see that if they sometimes advance in parallel, they also cross and re-cross often.
In any case, the booklets and our personal work allow us to overcome these prejudices. We must make do with what we have, try to unify ourselves as much as possible in order to participate in this immense adventure.
The spirit struggles of time and space have to do with the evolution of spirit dominance over matter by the mediation of (personal) mind; the physical (nonpersonal) evolution of the universes has to do with bringing cosmic energy into harmony with the equilibrium concepts of mind subject to the overcontrol of spirit. The total evolution of the entire grand universe is a matter of the personality unification of the energy-controlling mind with the spirit-co-ordinated intellect and will be revealed in the full appearance of the almighty power of the Supreme. (UB 116:5.15)
Anne-Marie Ronfet
| Brief reflection on the mind | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 | Truth and lies or Facts and falsehood |