© 2022 Aprilhelen Lovesyou
© 2022 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| An Amazing Event is Coming for Urantia Book Readers | Volume 22, Number 1, 2022 (summer) — Index | Walls, Doors, and Windows: The Psychology of Disseminating the Teachings of the Urantia Book |
by Aprilhelen Lovesyou
The Urantia Book Fellowship’s (the Fellowship’s) Youth and Young Adult Committee and the Stepping Stones Program invites you to participate in exploring the art of universal language.
The desire for a meaningful community is innate in our human bias. We all wish to be safe, heard, and loved. Whether within our Urantia Book community or elsewhere, we feel most accepted as we increase our truth, beauty, and goodness in relationships. To help one another improve our communication skills, we’ve developed a platform for virtual discussions that explore the Art of Universal Language.
Learning about the direction Urantia is headed toward the inevitable era of light and life, I fantasized at a young age about all the corrections humankind must traverse in generations to come. The “one-language proposition” (see UB 55:3.1) is highranking on that list. This Urantia Book quote speaks to the promotion of using a single dialect:
Language differences have ever been the great barrier to the extension of peace. . . . A universal language promotes peace, insures culture, and augments happiness (UB 81:6.18).
Although one may deduce that in UB 81:6.15 “Effectiveness of Language” may be remarking on the different languages of nations, the paradigm I am referring to is the universal spiritual language. Regardless of one’s vernacular, our celestial family advises us to seek similarity to find unity. From my short forty-five year experience on Urantia, I have found it is best to share higher consciousness concepts through terminology that is understood by all ears involved. Perhaps you also have been in situations that, when reflected upon, could have led to greater receptivity if the tone and choice of words were of significant commonality.
Until we, as one human race, achieve the same vernacular language, there is great potential in engaging in universal language. I define universal language as that which is spoken in such a way that the greatest good is compassionately understood and unreservedly received by the greatest number of people in the conversation, with the intention to reveal the greatest love to them for the greatest length of time.
Being raised with the information in The Urantia Book, one of my favorite revelatory truths to grasp was the uniqueness of each of us and to be aware, through listening to body language and words, of who is in the audience, then choosing the appropriate concepts when speaking to those individuals. By kindergarten, it became apparent that if I wanted to be accepted, I certainly would not use any words unique to the Urantia Revelation, unless I was in the presence of other Urantia Book students.
Through my school years, I held greater conviction that the Urantia message was filled with awe-inspiring truth. This evolved into a wonderfully exciting challenge for me to express this higher knowledge without ever mentioning where it came from. When I was introduced to the path of yoga, I immediately saw the opportunity as an idyllic platform to teach the ascension concepts of what we students love about the teachings of the fifth celestial mission to our planet. Now with twenty-six years of sharing techniques in the art of living, on and off the yoga mat, revealing truth to all sorts of demographics, universal language is a pillar upon which my life stands.
“To UB or not to UB?” Is that really the question? To speak or to not speak terms unique to The Urantia Book is a buzzing question amongst the circles that surround me within the Urantia Book community. This debate is as old as the original contact commission deciding whether or not to mass market the book or allow for grassroots dissemination. Today you can find many secondary works projects which choose the patient route and heed the celestials’ call to restate the teachings to each particular audience present.
The spirit of religion is eternal, but the form of its expression must be restated every time the dictionary of human language is revised (UB 99:1.6).
One of those restatements of the teachings is the Truthseekers, who were the first group of Urantia Book students with whom I truly resonated. This group is the brainchild of longtime Urantia Book readers, Tom Choquette and Fred Harris. Although our brothers heartily carry the faith of the Urantia Revelation, they are well aware of the necessity of universal language. Their priority is to give lessons on cultivating values and expanding life’s meanings to younger people, rather than evangelizing The Urantia Book. One of their reasons is because of this revelatory truth:
And now that he has personally left the world, he sends in his place his Spirit of Truth, who is designed to live in man and, for each new generation, to restate the Jesus message so that every new group of mortals to appear upon the face of the earth shall have a new and up-to-date version of the gospel, just such personal enlightenment and group guidance as will prove to be an effective solvent for man’s ever-new and varied spiritual difficulties (UB 194:2.1).
The Truthseekers worked alongside the Fellowship’s Youth and Young Adult Committee (the YaYAs), with several of its members serving in both groups concurrently.
Since the inactivity of both groups due to the global changes of 2020 , I transitioned to the playground of the Fellowship’s Family Life and Web Content Committees.
The Web Content team recently, with the leading of our siblings, Jena and Albert Einstein Lassiter, who so generously serve on several other Fellowship committees, became interested in the analytics of visitors to the Fellowship’s website within the past few years. They found that although we had a lot of web traffic, many left the website quickly; it was rare for someone to become interested enough to look further into the site, much less The Urantia Book. Hence the birth of the Stepping Stones Program, in which I have found another tribe who desires to expand the practice of universal language.
Being an active member of the Stepping Stones Program since its inception in the summer of 2020 , I am honored to collaborate with other seasoned Urantia Book students, Kaye and William Cooper, Marie and Tom Vasile, Thomas Orjala, Pamela Keller, and Darla Hughes. These team players are the contributors populating somewhat-hidden web pages within the Fellowship’s website. The pages are akin to a create-your-own-adventure story, providing ample inquiry for the curious seekers to dive deeper into their self-directed spiritual growth. This section of UrantiaBook.org bears no obvious reference to The Urantia Book—no logos, no unique Urantia-related terms, and no navigation paths to the rest of our regular website.
We offer the curious audience information about and practices for themes such as:
- What is Spiritual Growth?
- Can We Feel the Flow of Love?
- Can Friends Help Us Grow Spiritually?
We also have created the opportunity to engage the inquisitive seekers coming to these web pages. We found a virtual lounge for further discussion on a platform called Kazm (see https://juntochat.web.app/home). Within the Kazm website we noticed a like-minded meeting space called Living Room
Conversations, where anyone can participate in or host discussions, choosing from over 160 topics. Kazm also hosts many other public groups for open dialogue.
As such, the Stepping Stones Program is proud to announce this timely new Kazm venue called “Spiritual Growth Conversations” (at https://juntochat.web.app/space/spiritualgrowth-conversations). Darla Hughes and I host small groups exploring an expanding list of topics related to the Stepping Stones web pages. Currently these conversations are:
- Creative Spiritual Adventures with Friends!
- Spiritual, but Not Religious?
- How Do We Survive This Crazy World?
- Art of Universal Language
Through this recent work, we are also excited to declare the reimagining of the Youth and Young Adult (YaYA) committee of the Fellowship! The YaYAs are now emerging with a mutual admiration for teaching and practicing universal language, with the intention to grow a conscious youth corps to serve the planet at large. One of our priorities is to create another Kazm venue specifically for the younger people. As we prepare for next summer’s International Urantia Conference 2023 (IC23), we are creating a handy guide book for the art of living. At IC23 we will explore and practice together so that the youth are ready to return to their daily lives with more tools to face challenges and potentially provide strength for other teens and college-age students adapting to a quickly changing, and challenging world.
The celestials have given us the foundation of effective and efficient communication to win souls to truth. The Stepping Stones Program and the YaYAs are committed to providing a home to foster and develop within each of us the ways of our master teacher, Jesus. As we know well, he was the acme of religious living. From his life on Urantia, we can glean practical methods of communicating that generate curiosity within the listener. Far from the strategy of converting people, we can integrate the Morontia Mota number fourteen by whetting the appetites of our associates for truth and only giving information when it is asked for (cf. UB 48:7.16). We are also urged to speak to our planetary family with these qualities:
In influencing the expanding evolutionary mind, the power of an idea lies not in its reality or reasonableness but rather in its vividness and the universality of its ready and simple application (UB 87:4.3).
My interpretation arrives from our brother Marvin Gawryn, as I paraphrase here: vividness for attention grabbing, universality of understanding, readiness for integration, and simplicity of application. The last one our other brother Albert Einstein says simply, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Furthermore, alongside these techniques for sharing your perspective successfully, it is becoming widely understood that listening skills are often more valuable for learning to love our fellow mortals. Spiritual Growth Conversations are fashioned to highlight an elevated form of communication by asking thought-provoking questions to reveal similarity, therefore unity.
Darla Hughes and I have begun to hold online explorations introducing the Art of Universal Language, and I held a workshop at the Fellowship’s Summer Study Session 2022 recently. Our description is currently:
A collaborative adventure for Urantia Book students in the art of communicating higher spiritual realities. We will discover effective conversation methods that will leave participants able to impart and embody revelatory truths for the purpose of dynamically interacting with the widest possible audience.
I would add that it is a course in expressing spiritual values with the intention of global social transformation!
We have determined that Art of Universal Language is easy P.E.A.C.I.E.
- P = Preparing through Centering
- E = Existence in full Presence
- A = Awareness of Audience
- C = Consciousness of Expression of Spiritual Values
- I = Inquiry at the Fore
- E = Exchange of Language
As you can see, we explore much more beyond exchanging Urantia -Book-unique words and concepts. It is likened to authentic networking. We must know the receptivity and capacity of the other before bombarding them with a 2,097 page book. Shine your light “just so" and be patient for them to ask you what you have!
I am honored to say that this passion project of mine is now thoroughly accepted in and out of the Urantia Book community. A Urantia Book Fellowship Second Miler Grant has been approved to create a short video, a training manual, and the beginnings of a children’s book, to be completed by the time of our International Conference 2023 (IC23) in Chicago next summer. A proposal for a presentation at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions will also be submitted. The Art of Universal Language course will soon be offered through the Urantia University Institutes virtual campus.
We welcome you to join us in practicing the art of universal language!
Are you interested in serving the Fellowship’s Stepping Stones Program by writing topic profiles or being trained to host conversations on this new platform? Contact us at SteppingStones@UrantiaBook.org.
If you want to know more about, or become involved with, the Fellowship’s Youth and Young Adult Committee, email:
If you would like to contact me, reach out to aprilhelen@urantiabook.org
¶ References
- Article obtained from The Fellowship site
| An Amazing Event is Coming for Urantia Book Readers | Volume 22, Number 1, 2022 (summer) — Index | Walls, Doors, and Windows: The Psychology of Disseminating the Teachings of the Urantia Book |