© 2014 Chris Ragetly
© 2014 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
| Buddhist philosophy Mindfulness | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 67 — Summer 2014 | Small philosophical survival kit (Alexandra Ahouandjinou) |
The consecration of a mortal’s or any other creature’s choice is nothing more or less than showing one’s willingness to share one’s inner life with God. See: (UB 111:5.1).
To share is to be like divine God. (UB 111:5.1) And to share one’s inner life with the Universal Father is to be in contact with Him as often as possible, that is to say with our Mystery Monitor. It is an invitation to reach the 7 psychic circles.
The imitation of God is the key to perfection; the doing of his will is the secret of survival and of perfection in survival. (UB 111:5.2)
The consecration of choice is therefore to share our interior life with our Father, which at the same time ensures our survival in perfection by doing His will.
Mortals live in God, and so God has willed to live in mortals. As men trust themselves to him, so has he—and first—trusted a part of himself to be with men; has consented to live in men and to indwell men subject to the human will. (UB 111:5.3)
Mortals literally live in God; this we may conceive of by considering the vast universe which surrounds us. For this is a gigantic living organism. See: P 1276 — §2 The grand universe is not only a physically splendid, spiritually sublime, and intellectually grandiose material creation, but also a magnificent and sentient living organism. A real life sends its pulsations through the whole mechanism of the vast creation of the vibrant cosmos. The physical reality of the universes symbolizes the perceptible reality of the Almighty Supreme. This material and living organism is permeated by circuits of intelligence, just as the human body is traversed by a network of sensitive nerve conduits. Therefore we may say that we live in God in a very prosaic way with the Almighty Supreme, that experiential Deity who for the moment represents in the Grand Universe the Supreme Evolutionary Being; but we also live in God in a completely spiritual way, because by giving us a fragment of himself, the Father makes us discover his presence which completely envelops us with his divine love. And he dwells in us through this same Monitor of Mystery.
Such a creature choice is not a surrender of will. It is a consecration of will, an expansion of will, a glorification of will, a perfecting of will; and such choosing raises the creature will from the level of temporal significance to that higher estate wherein the personality of the creature son communes with the personality of the spirit Father. (UB 111:5.5)
The choice to do the will of God is therefore a consecration of the will, that is to say that this choice is a triumphant validation of this will which has known, in full knowledge of the facts, to distinguish between the different choices which present themselves to it.
It is also an expansion of the will, for in making this choice the human will places itself under the care of the Father and by this the Father gives to the will of this mortal increased power and effectiveness.
It is also a glorification of the will, for it represents the Father’s glowing approval of the mortal will.
It is also a perfecting of the will, for it raises the creature will to that higher state where the personality of this mortal son can commune with the Father through the personality gravity circuit. This increased sensitivity to the personality gravity circuit of the Father is qualitative and not quantitative.
The personality of the mortal creature may eternalize by self-identification with the indwelling spirit through the technique of choosing to do the will of the Father. Such a consecration of will is tantamount to the realization of eternity-reality of purpose. This means that the purpose of the creature has become fixed with regard to the succession of moments; stated otherwise, that the succession of moments will witness no change in creature purpose. A million or a billion moments makes no difference. Number has ceased to have meaning with regard to the creature’s purpose. Thus does creature choice plus God’s choice eventuate in the eternal realities of the never-ending union of the spirit of God and the nature of man in the everlasting service of the children of God and of their Paradise Father. (UB 118:1.2)
The consecration to do the will of the Father is solidly anchored in the faith of the creature, and once this anchoring is factual it becomes eternal. This design of eternal reality is invariant and definitive in relation to all the events that can occur throughout eternity. It is one of the great mysteries that seems impossible to us, but when the creature binds itself to God the Father, nothing is impossible; as we have just seen, this glorious event represented by the choice of the creature to do the will of the Father has a repercussion and a scope much wider and more important than it seems at first glance.
Therefore is there increased safety in narrowing the limits of personality choice throughout the lower levels of existence. Choice becomes increasingly liberated as the universes are ascended; choice eventually approximates divine freedom when the ascending personality achieves divinity of status, supremacy of consecration to the purposes of the universe, completion of cosmic-wisdom attainment, and finality of creature identification with the will and the way of God. (UB 118:7.8)
By dedicating oneself to doing the will of the Father, the creature gets rid of potentially useless choices, and the choice becomes more and more clear as one rises in the universes, in this way, there remain only divine choices. This is the supremacy of dedication to universal purposes.
Moral evaluation with a religious meaning—spiritual insight—connotes the individual’s choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity. Human survival is in great measure dependent on consecrating the human will to the choosing of those values selected by this spirit-value sorter—the indwelling interpreter and unifier. Personal religious experience consists in two phases: discovery in the human mind and revelation by the indwelling divine spirit. Through oversophistication or as a result of the irreligious conduct of professed religionists, a man, or even a generation of men, may elect to suspend their efforts to discover the God who indwells them; they may fail to progress in and attain the divine revelation. But such attitudes of spiritual nonprogression cannot long persist because of the presence and influence of the indwelling Thought Adjusters. (UB 196:3.17)
In the final analysis, the individual choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity, is the work of spiritual clairvoyance.
Chris Ragelty
| Buddhist philosophy Mindfulness | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 67 — Summer 2014 | Small philosophical survival kit (Alexandra Ahouandjinou) |