© 2016 David Carrera and Santiago Flores
© 2016 Urantia Association of Spain
| The ninth planet in light of The Urantia Book | Luz y Vida — No. 43 — March 2016 — Index | Convergences and divergences: gravitational waves |
¶ David Carrera Ibáñez
[Note: Adapted by the author in February 2016 for this magazine from a message sent to the “El rincón de Urantia” list on July 21, 2013]
In this first phase of existence, we live highly conditioned by matter. And we don’t mean just the matter outside our bodies. Our own body is made of matter.
Each and every one of the problems that we can have with our body, and that includes diseases, can have three origins:
- The accidents of space and time.
- The distortions of the mind.
- The imperfect inherited biological quality.
These sources can be combined, but not mixed.
There are no more factors capable of threatening what we call “health”.
So when we don’t have “health”, we have to find out what it can be attributed to.
God gives us tools to fight against the aforementioned problems on all fronts. God does not leave us helpless. The key tool that God gives us is the intellect of the mind. We will spend many ages perfecting ourselves intellectually before perfecting ourselves spiritually. But when we die here, we will have lost all opportunity to have contributed intellectually to the solution of the problems of this world.
¶ 1. Accidents of space and time
They include physical impacts, chemical poisons, digested or by exposure, infected wounds, etc. Ergonomics, food safety, “nutritionism”, the regulation of establishments and activities, the health system, road safety, variants of medicine, geriatrics, multiple prevention services… fight against this source of evil. huge range of professions are oriented in this field. Everyone recognizes the usefulness of the improvement efforts that are made in each of the aforementioned disciplines, so we will not stop.
¶ 2. The distortions of the mind
Everything that is wrong in our mind ends up somatizing in the body, since both are permanently related and the mental level is higher than the physical one. Anxieties, stress, boredom… false beliefs, vain hopes, crystallized ideas… hatred, bad thoughts, bad feelings… all of this contaminates and disrupts the inner life that tries to organize matter and energies in the best possible way.
Psychology and psychiatry try to fight against this evil, but only spirituality manages to nullify its effects. In fact, the mind does not cease to be what mediates between spirit and matter. There are no special difficulties in recognizing that all the ideals and values of the spirit -love, solidarity, knowledge, hunger for truth, faith, honesty, concern for knowledge, humility, courage, awareness, etc.- contribute to clearing the mind so that it become an ally of the life that runs through the body, instead of its enemy.
Multitude of healings of the body depend solely and exclusively on healing the mind first.
¶ 3. The imperfect inherited biological quality
This is a source of disturbance that at first seems like a condemnation, that there is nothing to do but resign. Indeed, you cannot change the biological quality that you have inherited. Your own. Here love -other people’s or own- soothes but does not cure. Here both the precaution of accidents and the purity of ideas and feelings are powerless. To try to counteract this source of evil, you may have to take some disgusting medication for the rest of your days. You may have to do regular dialysis in the hospital. You may have to assume your life expectancy is no more than thirty. Perhaps you have to stoically endure a visible intellectual inferiority in front of society. Maybe you have to give up eating like everyone else. Perhaps you have a malformation that gives you a complex. Perhaps you have inherited a very strange dermatitis that forces you to undergo painful treatments. You may develop mobility problems. You may have to undergo chemotherapy, always on a tightrope. Perhaps a vital organ malfunctioned from the start and you need a transplant. Perhaps you start suffering from progressive cerebral palsy at a certain age, just like that relative who suffered so much. You may have to have a limb amputated, because your system has not reacted strongly enough to a certain bacterium. You may have to go to great lengths to control that damn temper the whole family seems to have. You may have to bear the thought of gradually losing your senses, such as sight or hearing. Perhaps any of these or any other imaginable thing related to inheritance will happen to you and on top of that you will have to put up with the fact that it is said that… love conquers everything.
Any imperfection in the inherited biological quality translates into loss of autonomy. And any loss of autonomy produces unhappiness. In cases of serious loss, misfortune.
If the inherited biological quality is defective, the inner life will not be able to organize the matter and energies of the body in a harmonious way, in a way better than that contemplated in the multiple codes received by the laws of heredity. Do not try to appease the restlessness you feel reading all this by uselessly imagining another reality; life “IS” -it- miraculous, BUT “DOES NOT DO” MIRACLES.
If your life is forced to abide by the laws of inheritance, that implies that you are too.
Only while you’re here.
But as long as you’re here.
Does it matter or does it not matter?
Won’t it matter what happens for a lifetime?
Is it true, as some think, that God condemns us as to the origin of problems number 3? Well no. Because the way to attack this source of discomfort exists, and it is the obvious one; cut or limit transmission. The discipline that would take on such a thankless job is called eugenics. Eugenics implies the irruption of the human intellect to supplant natural selection, which pays no attention to feelings or reason -man can be wild many times, but nature always is-.
Eugenics is defined as “Application of the biological laws of heredity to the improvement of the human species”. “Application” indicates that these laws will be taken into account to do or not to do. As inherited biology has been transmitted biology, the improvement of the human species implies, with respect to defects, cutting off its transmission.
Someone can still insist on seeing complications where there are none. For example, in relativizing the concept of tare.
The concept of tare is less relative than some would like. What is a tare? How to know if it is tara?
Well, very easy: if it is inherited, but nobody wants it, it is tara.
It has to be that nobody wants it.
Because if it’s something a lot of people are proud of, it’s not tara.
Eugenics has a bad name because the most famous eugenics is the one applied by the Nazis almost a century ago, in the least spiritual and considered way possible; by way of murder and prejudice. Other eugenic programs have been carried out in the Nordic countries or in the United States. There the life of the person was respected but their right to reproduce was not respected, a right considered inalienable and natural today; when it was seen that the person would not be responsible enough to limit his reproduction by himself, he was sterilized.
Why is it so complicated to talk about eugenics in our society? Because this society also has its diseases. This particular society is materialistic, and this materialism translates on a personal level into believing that people are a body (which is just what is material in man). If you then say that the quality of a body is defective, it seems that you are saying that the person is defective. And it seems so only because the mistake of identifying people with their bodies is made socially.
The Urantia Book will not be widely understood or accepted in any materialistic society, as the book speaks of realities other than matter. Realities that any person with their own initiative has been able to know in advance that they exist.
If the Urantia Book says that everything that improves becomes superior, and says that biology can be improved, the fool will believe that the book ensures that there are people superior to others only because of one of their attributes, the racial variety to which they belong , it could have been improved or just because the lineages that have touched them are superior.
So there will never be a lack of those who think that the book is not coherent, since there are many other sections that can be cited where it is ensured that God is no respecter of persons and the ultimate destiny of all is the same. All this will seem like a contradiction to someone who has not grasped the point.
Why is eugenics important? Because factors 1 and 2 —accidents and distortions— that threaten the integrity of the body can give you a break. With these factors as the origin of your health problems, you have been able to know years of fullness or normality. However, with hereditary problems, you can have problems for life. You don’t know normal. You are born with the problem. And that is why an intelligent and truly loving society cares AND ACTS so that no one has to regret being born with defective biological quality.
If you act, it is because you have understood the convenience of eugenics.
Be brave because this is the key point for you to get out of the dream that will continue to harm future generations. The “biologically unlucky” needs you to put yourself in their shoes. The one we call “biologically unlucky” is actually “biologically doomed” and has been doomed by people of past generations who thought… maybe like you do now.
Stop thinking that everyone has the right to reproduce at their free will. Because some you are condemning instead of setting them free.
When things are done right, not everyone will have the same right to have the same number of children. And if the idea seems terrible to us, it is because we are still culturally conditioned. If not being able to have children is so horrifying, why are there people who are happy without having had them? And why are there people who voluntarily sterilize themselves? Are we not exaggerating that alleged horror of not being able to have children? When we say that such a person has the right to be a father, are we also thinking of the rights of the series of creatures that are going to come into the world linked to him, who will inherit from him whatever is inheritable -biology- and who will have to stay with him? in the world when the father or mother has already left?
Notice; please I ask you, look:
** You may cause great frustration to a person you don’t let reproduce. But for every faulty lineage that you allow to replicate, you will be opening the doors to the possible frustration of all their descendants in the face of a limited life, potentially numbering in the thousands.**
Are you able to visualize hundreds of future people with the same problem as this person in front of your eyes and that makes you feel so sorry? Do not shield yourself, do not close your eyes, do not be a coward, because there is no hope that God will perform a miracle and convert your genes into the adamic plasma of a Material Son. God doesn’t do those things, because God doesn’t solve what we can solve. And at no time in the origin 3 have we stopped talking about defects that are transmitted by inheritance.
If you have children, you already know that what they want does not have to be the best. Well, put yourself on a higher level to realize that the desire to reproduce from a person with defective biological quality is not the best thing, and therefore it is not what they really want either.
Do the math and bravely face this reality, because there is a sector of the population that does not need your well-intentioned consolation or nice words, but rather your practical intelligence and resolute action.
Someone might think that instead of considering eugenics, natural selection should be allowed to operate. Do we ask ourselves what natural selection would be like today? Let’s think about it! There is no downside. Natural selection means “without any intervention on the part of man.” What would be the equivalent of natural selection in our current society? Well, the following: to all those families that are receiving some type of aid to treat someone dependent due to illness, defect or disability that appeared by hereditary transmission, the aid is withdrawn and “that they look for life”. So, that family has a worse time than the rest of society to survive and to procreate. So over time, those people who carry defective lineages are disappearing after much tribulation and heartbreak.
How are you? Not very spiritual, right?
Today this is not done because we are civilized. No one in the European Union dies of hunger or cold, and we do everything we can to counteract the effects of faulty biology. If we think about it, we are only talking about the faulty biology that we see in front of us, with our eyes. Which has already appeared. Not the one that will come in the future.
Apart from civilized we have to be intelligent. And here eugenics comes into play, which is as if it were “artificial selection”. Eugenics seeks to achieve the results of “natural selection” but in an intelligent and controlled way. And no really intelligent way could ever be incompatible with doing things in a civilized way.
The real problem today is that neither natural selection nor artificial selection is taking place. And that is a time bomb. When the bomb explodes and genocides take place, people raise their hands to their heads and ask God “why does he allow that?”
If it is not civilized to withdraw pensions and aid to dependent people of any kind, what is there to do? Well then, in these cases society has to say to the family in question:
- “ OK! I AM WILLING to continue helping you. You will continue to receive this pension for X Degree Disability or Major Disability and we will continue to guarantee that you will have your basic needs covered, plus what we can give you depending on the economic situation. BUT IN EXCHANGE, you must let us study the family history to confirm if this great underlying physical problem is hereditary. Because if it is, it would be wise for the entire consanguineous family to undergo a planning program. Since it is for the family, and we are going to do it together, the program will be called socio-family planning. There may be some negotiation.”
Socio-family planning programs will vary, logically, depending on the severity of the transmissible defect. It may be recommended that members up to the second degree of blood in that family have no children or be allowed to have one but only one. Of course, if there are members capable of raising children responsibly and safely, this type of family will be able to participate with certain preferences in the adoption lists. And it is that having to give up reproduction does not necessarily imply having to give up paternity, an important point to take into account.
I challenge anyone to show me that a sufficiently ethical eugenic policy of this type is not viable today. Or that it is complicated. Or that you need new professions. Or that you need judges. For it to be applied, it is not at all necessary for society to read The Urantia Book, since there have always been people who were supporters of some type of eugenics.
Who does not agree that the standards of ethics and morality are better today than they were decades ago? So, why is there fear that the eugenics that was done today would be the same as the one that was done a century ago? A century ago teeth were pulled without anesthesia, and today everyone goes to the dentist.
The name of the Ministries is constantly being changed, State Secretariats are created or they disappear. How about a Secretary of State for Eugenics, dependent on the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Health? To make it easier for society to disassociate the new eugenics from the eugenics they have seen on television or in history books, it could be called Secretary of State for Ethical Eugenics. If a percentage of society needs that said differentiation be clearly stated, then the character of the new eugenics is highlighted.
The heads of each new Eugenics Office would access the existing files marked as “dependency help” to begin to detect cases whose origin has not been an accident and that may not be related to the somatization of mental disorders; that is, those related to a defective biological quality; those related to inheritance. Doctors and/or psychologists make their appearance, carry out the pertinent consultations and tests and prepare their reports. The instructing official, in view of the reports and the law in favor of ethical eugenics that is in force, makes a socio-family planning proposal that is notified by the social worker at home and bringing together blood relatives to the second grade, and explains what there is. Said planning proposal will detail the factual foundations and will express the RECOMMENDATION that the Administration makes to them, as a legitimate representative of the common interest (in the interest of society). Family birth recommendation. More or less negative, more or less positive. The exact number will also depend on whether the rulers have become sensitive to larger-scale problems that may arise from overpopulation or underpopulation.
With such a simple eugenics program, you are not forcibly sterilizing anyone. And they are free to carry out those programs or not to carry them out. But then society will also be free to help them or not. It’s only fair, isn’t it? If the matter affects society, society will have a say. If the family does not agree with the reports or with the recommendation and even so its members want to have many children and at the same time continue receiving the aid, they can always appeal, the same as with any other act of the Administration.
I bother to detail this possible and simple program so that its feasibility is better visualized. Things that are visualized without problems are more feasible for future realization. Also so that you have a reference if someone asks you for an example of a possible application of eugenics today.
I believe that there is never any legitimate reason for not being able to carry out a eugenics program, since the human race will always be conditioned by race, as the name itself indicates.
Summarizing:
If the problem is hereditary, the key is transmission. And if the key is transmission, the solution is non-transmission.
You have no other solution for the source of problems number 3.
Scientists today tamper with DNA but what we inherit must be “something else” the revelators call it “vital plasm” and it must affect more levels of reality than what constitutes the human being apart from the physical body.
The mind, sure. The personality, debatable.
Therefore, genetic engineering will not be the true key to eugenics.
And don’t be fooled; although there are many possible eugenic programs, you will not always be able to stop the transmission without upsetting someone. The Administration is already accustomed to being insulted by making the common interest prevail over the private interest in many other cases.
Many of those affected firsthand, on the other hand, will understand the eugenics program very well.
More than you think, because they have been a long time with the problem on their backs.
A lot of time wondering why “has touched” them.
And many opportunities to not wish the same to any of their descendants.
If the best definition of love is wishing others what one would like for oneself, another version of the same definition is not allowing for the future what you already know nobody wants.
Grave defects out!
Help ALL human beings!
Hugs
¶ Santiago Flores
(Posted as a message on the list “El rincón de Urantia” on July 25, 2013)
Dear friends:
Personally I do not subscribe to the concept that the main solution for illness or disease is positive thinking or a mere mental attitude. For me, this concept falls within the “magical thinking” that psychology defines: “Magical thinking is a way of thinking based on faith, imagination, desires, emotions or traditions that generates opinions lacking a robust logical foundation or strict”. (PSICOMED-DSM IV. Glossary of technical terms-)
Although a healthy mind positively affects the health of the individual, the overwhelming majority of times it does so by giving them a capacity to accept and overcome their limitations rather than by removing those limitations.
“Psychic powers” or “mental powers” are, to me, the powers of intelligent and voluntary attunement of one’s own mind with the guidance of the indwelling spirit. They manifest themselves in a growing tendency to choose the right instead of the comfortable, the fair instead of the easy. It produces a state of inner peace and deep confidence in the future of events, including an unshakable certainty that even the most unfortunate experiences that we have to go through will end up -in time- by revealing themselves as positive.
The material being contains three levels of existence (some of its own, others generously provided by the Deity): matter, whose state of equilibrium we call ‘health’; the mind, whose balance we call ‘sanity’ and the spirit whose balance we call ‘happiness’. (UB 100:4.3 and UB 2:7.11)
A normal, healthy mind, motivated by spirit, does much to prevent or correct psychosomatic ailments, but can only provide a solid stoicism in the face of exclusively physical illnesses or ailments.
For external physical ailments (parasitic microorganisms, viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc.) there is the rational approach of biological sciences, for internal ailments -that is, inherent to congenital defects of the body itself- only the artificial genetic manipulation of genetic engineering or control of the number of offspring of carriers of these physical defects. If all carriers of genetic defects restricted the number of children to one (or zero) in a few centuries, the incidence of these diseases could drop tremendously or even disappear in some cases.
This does not imply that these people are denied the experience of parenthood, on the contrary, they should have priority when it comes to adopting children. Parents who choose not to have children of their own so as not to perpetuate their ailments in them and who in turn adopt and love children who would otherwise be deprived of growing up in a family and receiving the parental love essential for the development of the human being, two problems that solve each other.
Eugenics does not necessarily imply genetic manipulation. Well-understood eugenics trusts nature and time, it only requires that we all be aware that if we are carriers of a transmissible disease, it is best not to condemn our children, grandchildren, etc. to suffer it
Finally, I also want to bring up a paragraph from The Urantia Book:
From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the near future. At such a time the great test of the wisdom of world leadership will present itself. Will Urantia rulers have the insight and courage to foster the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the supernormal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal? The normal man should be fostered; he is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race. The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; no more should be produced than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level but making such low-grade demands as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind. (UB 68:6.11)
Hugs
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/
| The ninth planet in light of The Urantia Book | Luz y Vida — No. 43 — March 2016 — Index | Convergences and divergences: gravitational waves |