© 1980 Annis M. Warsh
© 1980 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
On UB 195:9.2 of The URANTIA Book it says:
“Urantia is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment.” UB 195:9.2
I believe it. And this is quite a challenge, being asked to talk about renewing and revitalizing society — even with The URANTIA Book as a point of reference.
Even as I say this, I realize that it would be an impossible challenge for me without The URANTIA Book. For twenty-five years it has been the measure against which I hold all the wonderful bits and pieces of information that come to me as I read philosophy, psychology, biology, and physics. Without this marvelous revelation, my ability to absorb new understandings would have been severely limited. With it, I read, and my heart leaps up in recognition of truths and I keep saying. “Of course! Of course!”
It has always seemed of prime importance to me to keep informed to whatever degree is possible about what is going on in the world. A lot is going on out there that would have been completely foreign to the world into which The URANTIA Book was introduced.
So l’d like to talk a little about the renewing and revitalizing of society that has taken place since then, as well as what’s going on now and what may be possible in our future.
I can only speak for myself, of course, but at that time, twenty-five years ago, there was almost no way that you could talk about The URANTIA Book to anyone except your most intimate friends and some members of your family. Even in the church, or most particularly in the church, you were looked at askance if you produced it, or tried to explain it. Actually I was a Johnny-come-lately to the fold myself, having had an ‘experience’ a couple of years earlier that had changed me from a Unitarian to a URANTIA Book Trinitarian. It was a stress-related experience of being warmly enclosed in light and deep love, with a certain and sudden knowing and understanding of all the religious puzzlements that go with intellectualism. It’s the experience that in The URANTIA Book is mentioned as one you can never explain to a person who hasn’t had it, in some form, and which you don’t need to explain to the person who has had it. I tell you about it, because I think it is the real beginning of transformation. In fact it is my thesis that the prerequisite of the renewing and revitalizing of society is the change, first, in many persons. Without it, you are trying to get a butterfly by pinning wings on a caterpiller.
Well, the only person that changed around me in those early years was my brother, David, who was then religion editor of the Chicago Daily News. He’d heard about God, of course, but that was about all. As he read the book, he had the great opportunity to meet often with Dr. Sadler, and many of his newspaper articles were based on The URANTIA Book teachings. Another light went on for me in the mid-sixties when I went with David to interview Joel Goldsmith, the founder of the Infinite Way. I read his books, delighted to find ‘out there’ some corroboration of what I felt so strongly ‘in here.’ At the same time, doing the final laps in rearing four children, alone, I felt keenly the predicament of Paul who couldn’t understand why he did the things he shouldn’t and didn’t do the things he should. I heard about a new kind of thing called Gestalt Therapy and I got my school board (I was teaching kindergarten at the time) to pay the $600 for weekly group sessions for six months so that I could develop “leadership qualities.” I found both good and bad in it. The good came as I cleared away a lot of debris in my personal life, the bad as I became aware of the damage a careless use of this technique could cause. But much more good than bad,
I’d say. The success or failure of any psychotechnology to do more than shore up weak structures depends, it seems to me, upon whether the person has, or acquires during therapy, some sense of religious identity — God-in-me — that leads to love and service, rather than just an enhancement of the ME-ME-ME that leads to self-gratification.
I think it is a mistake to down-play the importance of “self-development” — true self-development. Without it we continue to work for change in the same old ways that barely keep us afloat. Real changes come when people are different, when they become less fearful, less judgemental, more trusting of the goodness and friendliness of the universe. When we see each other in new ways we become aware of our connectedness, of our brotherhood.
Marilyn Ferguson, in “The Aquarian Conspiracy,” a book you must read, says about this kind of experience: “By increasing our awareness of inner signals, the psychotechnologies promote a sense of vocation, an inner direction awaiting discovery and release. Things begin to happen in our lives… when an individual has solved his problems, when he is ready to meet the world with imagination and energy, things fall in place — a collaboration between person and events that seems to enlist the cooperation of fate. Carl Jung called this phenomenon ”synchronicity."
“This phenomenon sounds mystical only because we do not understand it. But there are innumerable clues available given the right frame of mind — openness the availability to synthesize the clues into the whole.”
I have never forgotten the moon shot when I heard a countdown that went from 10 to 3 and then ended with the words, “guidance is internal.”
Indeed it is. A 1978 Gallup poll reported that ten million Americans were engaged in some aspect of Eastern religion and nine million in spiritual healing. Probably the main aspect that most were engaged in was some form of meditation — even as I was. With me, it was an idea I’d gleaned from The URANTIA Book, not any Eastern discipline.
“The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind. Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness — contact with the divine presence. Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness…” (UB 196:3.34)
And this: “Unselfish social consciousness must be, at bottom, a religious consciousness; that is, if it is objective; otherwise it is a purely subjective philosophic abstraction and therefore devoid of love. Only a God-knowing individual can love another person as he loves himself.” (UB 16:9.8)
I hope I’m making sense to you. I think we have begun to renew and revitalize society in a really different way and that my path has been the path many others have taken — through a time of personality integration, into meditation. Laboratory investigation shows that these methods actually integrate the brain’s activity, making it less random, provoking it into higher organization. Brains undergo a quite literal transformation. The proven plasticity of the human brain and human awareness offers the possibility that individual evolution may lead to collective evolution. When one person has unlocked a new capacity its existence is suddenly evident to others, who may then develop the same capacity.
Biologist Lyall Watson tells of the monkeys on islands south of Japan who were fed and kept under observation after World War II. Sweet potatoes were dropped from helicopters and though they were gritty and dirty, the monkeys ate them as they were until one monkey, one day, took his potato to the beach and washed it. Soon after, another monkey did the same, then another and another. Finally all were doing it. Then, suddenly, as the last monkey on the island instituted the practice, it sprang up among monkeys on a neighboring island. This is the thing we call critical mass, having its effect in a way that we don’t understand, but which is almost impossible to stop.
There is a ripening out there in the world. C.S. Lewis described what seemed to him a secret society of new men and women “dotted here and there all over the earth.” I’m in this secret society and I’m sure you are, too. Five minutes of talk is enough to let you know whether you’re with a member or non-member. But what I am aware of is that it is no longer a closed society. Body-mind discoveries; the work being done in fields of acupuncture; biofeedback, hypnosis, and paranormal research have challenged Western models of how things work. Quantum physics, of all things, is proving to us that the universe is a living organism rather than a machine.
As Watson says, “Few aspects of human behavior are so persistent as our need to believe in things unseen and as a biologist. I find it hard to accept that this is purely fortuitous. The belief, or the strange things to which this belief is so stubbornly attached, must have real survival value, and I think that we are rapidly approaching a situation in which the value will become apparent. As man uses up the resources of the world, he is going to have to rely more and more on his own. Many of these are at the moment concealed in the occult — a word that simply means ‘secret knowledge’ and is a very good description of something we have known all along but have been hiding from ourselves … of all the faculties we possess, none is more important at this time than a wide-eyed sense of wonder.”
This sense of wonder fills me as I read the Tribune articles on brain research; as I hear how a six-year-old hemopheliac can be taught self-hypnosis in order to direct blood flow away from a site of injury in order to prevent injury to his joints; and I read about biofeedback and see people beginning to take responsibility for themselves as they realize the power of self-control and self-regulation that is within them. I am excited by the use of imagery techniques in treating disease. People are beginning to realize that they are not powerless, but they are also realizing that their power is somehow tied up with goodness and proper use.
The URANTIA Book says, “Within the bounds of that which is consistent with the divine nature, it is literally true that with God all things are possible.’ The long-drawn-out evolutionary processes of peoples. planets, and universes are under the perfect control of the universe creators and administrators and unfold in accordance with the eternal purpose of the Universal Father, proceeding in harmony and order and in keeping with the all-wise plan of God. There is only one lawgiver,” (46.6) Well, I think God wants me to try very hard to understand quantum physics and to figure out just as much as I can about his laws and how things work and to try to stay in tune with the Divine Nature so that I don’t run amok.
It’s what we want for our children. We want them to exercise their divine curiosity, to keep fresh their sense of wonder, and to develop their precious and wonderful brains in a way we never have with our brains. A lovely Hebrew proverb says: “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time,” We want to teach our children in such a way that we increase their capacity for self-transcendance and evolutionary leaps. But to reach the children, you must first reach their parents and teachers so that crippling techniques of child-rearing are not practiced and the teachings of Jesus are. The URANTIA Book says: “In this work of passing on the cultural torch to the next generation, the home will ever be the basic institution. The play and social life comes next, with the school last but equally indispensable in a complex and highly organized society.” (UB 81:6.23)
Books such as those on transactional analysis and parent effectiveness training are helpful, Both books are based on the assumption that most maladaptive, antisocial behavior stems from faulty training and that the only practical solution is to greatly increase the psychological understanding of the citizenry, particularly parents and teachers. I think Jesus was an Adlerian.
The big new word in science is “paradigm,” which just means “the way things work” — and a new scientific paradigm is emerging which tells us what we already knew; that there is an inter-relatedness between all things. We are not separate; we are brothers. There is even a cosmic organizing force of some kind which you can call Mind, or Consciousness, or even God, if the Spirit moves you.
And today the Theosophical Library has two copies of The URANTIA Book and a waiting list a mile long to get it out. Not only do all of m y best friends know about it; some have even read it. And many acquaintances have seen it and heard about it.
I must stop. I think that after all this time I’ve only said two things about renewing and revitalizing society. First, that as an individual, you must never stop trying to enlarge your capacity for love and loving service by any and all means that are possible to you, and second. that it is of prime importance to keep in touch with what is going on in the world so that we will know when our time comes, so that we can sense the increasing readiness that exists, even now, for the fact and teachings of The URANTIA Book.
—Annis M. Warsh
Western Springs, Illinois