© 2009 Chris Ragetly
© 2009 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
(following)
17. Ambition is dangerous until it is made fully social. You have not truly acquired a virtue until your actions have made you worthy of it.
Having ambition is a quality, as long as it does not bother others and becomes a service to others, that it is social. Virtue, in other words morality, is the reality of a progressive experience to reach ascending levels of cosmic fulfillment, it is to regularly choose good rather than evil, but, the supreme virtue therefore consists in choosing with all our heart to do the will of the Father who is in heaven, and it is at that moment that we are worthy of being called virtuous.
18. Impatience is a poison of the mind. Anger is like a stone thrown into a hornet’s nest.
Impatience: This is one of my greatest faults. I have a hard time getting rid of it, and I often find that I suffer failure after failure. It is in these moments that we see that the greatest victories are those that we win over ourselves, because they are the most difficult to win, they require constant work and unfailing supervision.
Anger: It stands as a barrier to our mental and spiritual evolution. Our Mystery Monitor must undoubtedly be considerably delayed in his efforts to spiritualize our mind.
19. We must abandon anxiety. The most difficult disappointments to bear are those that never happen.
Anxiety is like Don Quixote’s windmills, which he considered giant and evil enemies. They are present only in our minds. We tend to suspect events or people as formidable obstacles, or at least as part of events or people to be wary of. In the vast majority of cases, these anxieties are unfounded. We create future disappointments that exist only in our minds. All this does is delay our mental and spiritual progress, and causes a considerable loss of time during which we could have been engaged in much more profitable work.
20. Only a poet can discern poetry in the banal prose of everyday life.
Whether on the material, intellectual or spiritual level, we can indeed discern in all things a beauty, a goodness which are the very nature of these things and these meanings which surround us and of which we are a part. We tend to marvel only in exceptional circumstances, whereas the prose of everyday life is full of poetry, charm and grace for those who are willing to take the trouble to discern and appreciate.
21. The high mission of an art is to prefigure through its illusions a superior reality of the universe, to crystallize the emotions of time into a thought of eternity.
The arts as we conceive them, that is to say music, literature, painting, sculpture, dance, etc. awaken our emotions to varying degrees, depending on whether we are more sensitive to one art than to another. But this higher reality of the universe (which can be the morontia reality through music) that we sometimes reach through an art lets us foresee a universal language. Beauty is the godmother of art, music and the significant rhythms of all human experience. (UB 56:10.10) Art in its broadest sense can only be beauty, it is what awaits us across all the universes of time and eternity.
22. An evolving soul is not made divine by what it does, but by what it strives to do.
It is at the level of the will to realize the potentials as the Mystery Monitor perceived them when he agreed to come and inhabit the mind of a mortal, that a soul becomes more and more divine, that is to say that when it has made the choice to conform to the will of the Father, it comes a little closer to the goal of the ages, that of meeting the Universal Father.
23. Death added nothing to intellectual possessions or spiritual endowment, but it added to experiential status the awareness of survival.
We awaken on Mansion World No. 1 with exactly the same intellectual and spiritual possessions that we had at the time of our physical death, only the experience of survival is a new addition. Our new life work will be accomplished with a new morontia body, which will undergo transformations throughout our career in our local universe, (exactly 570 progressive transformations). After which, a new status awaits us, spiritual status. At that time, our intellectual possessions and our spiritual endowment will be greatly increased by our gradual evolutions in our local universe of Nebadon.
24. The destiny of eternity is determined from moment to moment by the accomplishments of daily life. Today’s actions form tomorrow’s destiny.
This is a warning given to us here that the actions of our present life shape the destiny of our future life, on morontia as well as spiritual levels. Let us try to remember this and act accordingly.
25. Greatness consists not so much in possessing strength as in using it wisely and divinely.
Force here represents both physical force as we know it on Urantia, but also mental and spiritual forces. The latter two will appear to us with more lucidity on the morontia and spiritual levels, and will undoubtedly be the only ones to have importance.
26. Knowledge is only possessed by sharing it; it is safeguarded by wisdom and made social by love.
Indeed, what would be the use of knowledge if it were preserved and hidden. It can only be useful when it is shared with as many people as possible. Wisdom makes us safeguard knowledge, because it is this wisdom that teaches us to value the knowledge that we acquire little by little, and we share this knowledge through social service, through love towards others.
27. Progress requires the development of individuality. Mediocrity seeks to perpetuate itself in uniformity.
Constantly seeking to improve oneself is developing one’s individuality. If we ever stop in this search, it is certain to lead to decline, mediocrity and failure.
28. The argumentation necessary to defend a thesis is inversely proportional to the truth contained in this thesis.
We would do well to take a leaf out of their book! Too often we tend to embark on endless explanations and digressions to develop a thesis. The result is too often a more or less confused mixture where the truth is difficult to discern. Let us take as an example the parables that Jesus teaches us.
These 28 examples of human philosophy that are taught to us on world #1 of the mansion worlds are paralleled with the elementary concepts of mota meaning, they are reserved for new morontia ascenders. This teaching is used to help late ascenders. If the author of this booklet (an archangel) shares it with us, it is because he has a good reason to do so, isn’t it? But on the following worlds we will have to master the higher levels of cosmic clairvoyance and morontia mota. Note that the teaching of cosmic clairvoyance is done at the same time as that of morontia mota and that cosmic clairvoyance is acquired by mastering the psychic circles.
On the SQUARECIRCLES.COM website, you can find an essay by Matthew Block entitled: “Morontia Mota: A New Perspective”. This essay discusses the human sources that the author of Paper 48, an Archangel of Nebadon, used to illustrate the technique used by the mansion world instructors.
CMR