© 1991 Byron Belitsos
© 1991 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
| Significant Books: Global Responsibility: In Search of a New Ethic By Hans Kung | Fall 1991 — Index | Throwing the Spiritual Baby Out With the Sexist Bathwater |
In our last Media & Values column, I advocated the rather unusual view that television and the new forms of electronic media can and should favorably affect the inner spiritual life of the individual. Let’s explore how this might occur as the media revolution of the 1990’s unfolds.
To create the right context, let’s turn first for guidance to The Urantia Book and to the general history of Christianity.
In Part III of The Urantia Book, in papers 85-98, the authors present in great detail a chronicle of the growth of the inner life of humankind, the spiritual advancement of the peoples of the earth. In my reading, this history is the thrilling story of how the average individual gets increasingly more direct access to the source of truth.
The Biblical view of Jesus’inner life is beautiful and anecdotal, but the authors of The Urantia Book present Jesus’ inner spiritual life as astoundingly rich and varied.
At first, divine truth was the exclusive province of a designated charismatic individual or privileged group: in tribal societies it was the shaman; in Egypt the Pharaoh; in India the Brahman priesthood. These auto-revelations (insights derived from association with the indwelling spirit of God) eventually became sacred texts, from which rituals and myths were derived, and later imposed on passive populations.
A new chapter was written in Israel. Here we witness an ongoing tension between the fresh voices of the prophets, whose auto-revelations sprang from new sources, and the rigid Pharisaic tradition of texts and rituals. Jesus was the first Jewish prophet to teach the Father’s love for the individual, that the Father is directly contactable in highly personal modes of thought and attitude. The Biblical view of Jesus’ inner life is beautiful and anecdotal, but the authors of The Urantia Book present Jesus’ inner spiritual life as astoundingly rich and varied. “…To him prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection…” (UB 196:0.10) plus an additional list of 12 other truth-attitudes that seem to exhaust the whole range of inner responses to possible spiritual stimulus.
Jesus was spiritually attuned to his Heavenly Father. His mind was highly refined and well attuned to receiving the most specific inner cues from his Adjuster (indwelling spirit) for handling a highly diverse set of situations in Palestine and around the Mediterranean.
Although Jesus taught a religion of the individual, the early Christians fell back into earlier forms, allowing the inner life of the believer to be mediated by an “inspired text,” and later by rites, traditions, and a clerical hierarchy. Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation removed much of these mediating factors, replacing the burdensome superstructure of the medieval church with the single text, the Bible, and replacing the tyranny of the church hierarchy with the “priesthood of all believers.”
Historians have observed that Luther’s reforms would not have been possible without the wide dissemination of printed Bibles in the language of the people.
Luther, a reformer whose teaching was launched by a new medium — the invention of printing — made possible a new inner life for the peoples of Western Europe, and especially for the pioneering Christians who settled the New World in the context of expanded religious freedom.
It is no surprise to see The Urantia Book, a 2000-page text, take root first in the land of religious freedom, but it is ironic that this is occurring at a time when traditional printing is being superseded by more flexible forms of communication. This is certainly not to say that the printed book as such will become passe. Rather, print publishing as an industry is converging with computers, and computers are converging with telecommunications. New electronic media are emerging, and with this, new possibilities for attuning the individual to inner and outer realities. A new chapter is being written in the story of the means for growth of the inner life of humankind.
New electronic media, with its access to new forms of knowledge and information, provides more than a metaphor for the inner life. These tools are extensions of our mind and senses, our psyche and even our soul, into the outer world.
New electronic media, with its access to new forms of knowledge and information, provides more than a metaphor for the inner life. These tools are extensions of our mind and senses, our psyche and even our soul, into the outer world. Communications technology mechanizes our innate abilities to communicate with self, with others, and with the universe. The more refined our media technologies become, the more they will emulate the way our minds access inner sources of imagination, memory and inspiration, and outer sources of knowledge.
Recall the versatility of Jesus’ inner life, and the resulting richness of his teaching, its adaptability to the setting in which he taught. Can electronic media provide tools that help ordinary mortals become better attuned to their inner lives, and thereby improve their ability to teach, preach, heal, and minister?
Authorship of any kind of media programming comes from the inner life of the author. In the end, media will serve some value system that arises from the inner life of its creators. Media technologies simply amplify, extend, and deliver these packaged versions of the inner life of its authors. In the final analysis, our inner attunement determines the medium, form, and the content of our media products; the quality of these products will, in turn, deeply affect the inner lives of the audiences that consume them.
If this is true, if media is an extension and amplification of our inner lives, a study of the inner life should yield new insights about our media technologies. How can the inner life be viewed in this light?
I believe that as we progress, our inner tuning evolves the following attributes: it becomes increasingly selective, specific, interactive, and creative, and is always “elusive” and synergistic.
Our worship and prayer life is selective of both its medium and object. We are endowed with creative free will in our spiritual life. The medium may be, as in the case of Jesus, a “sincere expression,” a “declaration,” an “exaltation,” a “consecration,” or a “confession,” and its object may be any single divine personality or group of personalities as revealed in Part I of The Urantia Book.
Like Jesus, our attunement is specific to a situation, either our own, or another’s. Our best prayers are for the specific needs of brothers or sisters in a concrete situation of need. The insights that result move us forward to the next step in our ministry.
The inner life is most real when it is creative. The highest products of the soul/spirit are surprises to the mind, often transcending what education, culture or mores would have predicted.
Our attunement is interactive in the sense that a questioning, petitioning self encounters the divine source, prays for insight or aid, and listens to the response. In worship, the two interact to become one.
The inner life is most real when it is creative. The highest products of the soul/spirit are surprises to the mind, often transcending what education, culture or mores would have predicted. Auto-revelation may be contrary to the current beliefs of the medium, as was the case with the person who acted as the channel for the highly creative text, The Course of Miracles. This person was an avowed agnostic.
Spiritual attunement involves a tuning in to the most elusive currents of the mind. The Thought Adjuster’s leadings are never imposed, and these impulses are easily lost in the material currents of the mind. Our first contacts may be sensational experiences, that can even “…blind the creature…”(UB 110:4.5), but these currents are always admixed with lower emotions and intellectual tendencies, much as the Adjuster content of the dream life is contaminated with “…the pressure of unexpressed emotions…” and “… unexpressed desires.” (UB 110:5.4)
Finally, the inner life is synergistic. Imagination is essential to the development of faith; faith deploys all of the faculties and all of the senses. Faith is a condition of the whole person.
Tuning in to broadcasts or interpersonal electronic communications in the outer world works much like inner turning, and shares many of its attributes. Because of new technologies, viewers will experience increasing freedom to tune into electronic sources of religious and scientific truth in the outer world that will correlate with and affirm their inner quest for higher values. In the distant future we may even find that these inner and outer activities become highly synchronized. Like inner tuning, outer tuning increases in quality as it becomes more specific. We dial a number or we tune a specific channel. We exercise choice according to needs and desires of the moment.
Of course, broadcast television and radio still get mixed reviews as far as diversity. Given the banality and commercialization of broadcast media today, we can say that the range of choices of mediocre quality programming is becoming unlimited, while the choices for quality programming are slowly growing. How many times have you sat down in front of your TV for twenty minutes and spent the whole time switching channels with your remote control unit? A whole population is searching for better programming, and VCRs, cable, fiber optics, new kinds of computers and databases, and computer networks have arrived just in time to supply it.
With new means of delivery, quality programming will expand as we begin to understand the inner life and especially the social and spiritual impact of programming on the inner life. At least, this is the idealistic source of ideas that may lead media entrepreneurs of the future to invent new approaches to programming and the delivery of programming.
The great hope for such entrepreneurs is the selectivity that the new technologies give the audience. This results from three factors. First, computer databases in their myriad forms are becoming very easy to search, and can now store virtually anything at very low cost. Second, computers are now converging with television, and the result is multimedia devices that can play back text, image, sound, and video. And third, the new media technologies let you inexpensively access multimedia sources of programming and information directly from your living room or desktop device.
The most sensational example of all this is video-on-demand (VOD) — or the ability to select and “download” movies or television programs that are stored in computer databases. VOD is expected to become available in the mid-to late 1990’s. Around this time, copper telephone wires to your home or business will have been replaced by a fiber optic cable or a satellite dish. And by this time, your viewing mechanism will not be a television or a computer, but a “telecomputer.” The telecomputer with its resident software, is the epitome of an interactive device.
Using a telecomputer, it will be possible, within the decade, to dial the Louvre Museum in Paris, and order an electronic color facsimile of the El Greco painting of the crucifixion that will appear in a split second on your six-foot high-resolution television screen mounted on the wall in your study. Or, browse the international movie database, and select that memorable scene in The Robe where the camera does a closeup on the face of Victor Mature, just as, standing near the cross, he looks up at the crucified Christ with that exquisite look of faith, sorrow, and worship. Now, store these images on your telecomputer, and create an interactive videodisk program for your congregation on the subject of “Images of the Crucifixion.” Pass out the disks to those who want to play it at home on their multimedia computers, or play it back to the accompaniment of a sermon.
As the playback and delivery mechanisms for such services as VOD (and many other less spectacular services) become ubiquitous, programmers will quickly find that all kinds of specialized tastes are now far easier to satisfy. This means that the kinds of programming that were once elusive, real works of beauty or spiritual truth, will be directly accessible to the average individual.
As this scenario becomes better understood, it is my view that the 1990’s will witness an explosion of creative activity in media programming, a media renaissance that will deepen the inner lives of both creators and viewers. Programming for the least common denominator accompanied by banal advertising will fade in importance. Broadcasting will be replaced by “narrowcasting,” and a plethora of videos, compact disks, and other multimedia products on every conceivable topic will come available.
Most encouraging is the fact that these educational, informational, and entertainment programs will be multimedia in nature, or, like the inner life, synergistic. The format can be addressed to the whole person, and, hopefully, programmers will create content that increasingly reflects the values of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Byron has been a journalist and television producer and is now a consultant in the telecommunications industry.
| Significant Books: Global Responsibility: In Search of a New Ethic By Hans Kung | Fall 1991 — Index | Throwing the Spiritual Baby Out With the Sexist Bathwater |