© 2010 David Elders
© 2010 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| God Consciousness | Volume 11, Number 1, 2010 (Summer) — Index | Understanding the Relation of Love to the Mind |
Okay. Here is what we, or at least I, know so far about the subject of human authors’ concepts used by the revelators in constructing The Urantia Book.
The Urantia Book is not just a revelation of spiritual truth to all the peoples of our world. It is also a revelation of revelation itself. What I mean is that unlike past truth revealers such as Melchizedek, Jesus, or Adam and Eve who may have mentioned other revelations in passing, our text specifically reveals to us that it is the fifth such revelation (of at least seven) of epochal significance to reach our consciousness. Not only does The Urantia Book reveal such new and challenging truths as the Father’s bestowal of our unique personalities, the Supreme (our finite God!), our responsibility for our own soul growth, our use of the Creative Mother Spirit’s mind circuits, cosmic details of our impending eternal careers, it tells us, too, that truth must be experienced before it can be perceived. More on that later.
Treating human mortals of the fifth epoch as maturing adults, the revelators who constructed The Urantia Book openly owned up to the use of human concepts, when adequate, as the linguistic building blocks onto which they grafted new and expanded truths. They did so knowing full well that such honesty risked tempting skeptical human minds to wander into confusing notions of plagiarism, a kind of shorthand for doubts about revelatory authenticity. And they weren’t disappointed. It’s not merely that the plagiarism claim pointlessly invokes a narrow legal principle intended to protect the economic fruits of creative expression. The bigger deal is that such unsubstantiated assertions call into question the very validity of The Urantia Book as revelation, including the misleading identification of human authors’ written work as “sources.”
Hopefully current reader-believers of The Urantia Book will moderate the impact of the proposition that some smart human being “plagiarized the writings of other human authors.” But how about readers yet to come? In echoes of some around Jesus who wondered how such a man could be the Son of God (“It’s not possible. He’s a carpenter. I know his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters”), the plagiarism suspicion sows seeds of doubt for later harvest by unsuspecting future readers. Besides, the very notion of such creative theft obscures the true sequence of revealed truth and its subsequent realization in human mind. So who copied whom? Fortunately we can rely on the fact that the experience of truth in the soul trumps the logic of skepticism in the intellect.
Using one of the discovered text correlations as an example, here’s a way to think about the sequence of events. Some 2,000 years ago Jesus expressed (perhaps unknown) truths about the nature of reality to Ganid in order “. . . to lay a more trustworthy foundation for the lad’s thinking . . .” [UB 130:4.1] Not only did this teaching thus enter into Ganid’s mind to inform his own understanding, it was also thereby placed into human consciousness generally just waiting to be discovered by human thinkers in subsequent generations. It was. In order to reprise this Jesus-Ganid interaction and once again register these truths in our minds some 2,000 years later, notwithstanding what Jesus may actually have said to Ganid at the time, the revelators chose the evolutionary expression last century of Ralph Tyler Flewelling, author of Creative Personality, as adequate for the job. The revelators present this transaction as fact. The skeptics, however, suggest that what The Urantia Book describes as a truth-revealing interaction between Jesus and an Indian lad named Ganid was a story using concepts plagiarized by one well-read human author from another some 2,000 years later. But that conclusion places an unjustified burden of proof on textual correlation and begs yet other questions. Did Flewelling’s words express truth? If so, from where or whom? And why not simply accept this wonderful interaction between a searching young mind and his universe Creator? Indeed, such linguistic correlation neither confirms nor denies the revelators’ explicit use of human expression to communicate truth to human minds in familiar terms. Even as the product of intellect alone without prior experiential validation, such textual correlation fits nicely with the revelators’ use of human concepts. As the simplest and surely the most appealing explanation, Occam would applaud.
Flewelling and other human authors whose thinking and expression were deemed adequate by the revelators for use in The Urantia Book are worthy examples of significant human accomplishment. Their considerable achievement was the soul experience and resulting perception in mind of previously-revealed, epochal or personal truths, perceptions which they then expressed in their writings, mostly in the early 1900s. These authors were fearless philosophic and spiritual explorers whose discovery of revealed truth was preceded by the experience of such truth in their souls. Morontia Mota 16 provides guidance: “You cannot perceive spiritual truth until you feelingly experience it. . . ” [UB 48:7.18] Since the initial manifestation of human self-consciousness in Andon and Fonta a million years ago, everything we learn, or rather discover, of spiritual truth is revealed to us by epochal revealers, higher teachers, or by personal revelation. But it is not until such truths are experienced in our souls that we may then perceive them in our minds and begin the evolutionary work of understanding and refinement. We go as far as we can until such growth potentials are exhausted by actualization and the call for new illumination is issued to those responsible for fueling our ascension to the Father.
The discovery of those human authors whose thinking and expression were used in The Urantia Book should not surprise us. Their existence was forthrightly disclosed by the revelators in conjunction with their bosses’ (superuniverse rulers) mandate requiring the use of such human expression when adequate to illuminate new truth. In fact, more than one thousand human concepts, reflective of the highest human knowledge of spiritual values and universe meanings, were selected for that purpose. Surely it was intended that we discover these authors and identify those thousand concepts. After we were tipped off by the revelators, it would have been pretty sad if we hadn’t! It’s not just that such discovery confirms what we were told. Examination of the concepts expressed also tells us about ourselves—like the level of human reality realization at the time The Urantia Book was presented to human consciousness. Or such study might enable us to distinguish between previously-revealed truth and its amplification and correction in this epoch. Even more, comparative textual analysis could help us identify new truths not previously revealed. For example, the fact that personality is a bestowal of the Father himself must be revealed. Such truth is simply not discoverable by human mind. These thousand human concepts are but the “let’s begin with what we know” intro in the latest teacher-student conversation designed to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception in our developing human minds.
So, where does this all leave us?
At the beginning of this commentary I suggested that in addition to the universal and divine truths revealed, The Urantia Book is a revelation of revelation itself. This is important because by illuminating the sequence of revealed truth and its subsequent discovery, experience, and perception in our minds, the intricatelyplanned process of continuously-aided growth toward perfection is revealed. The ordinary method of regular epochal revelation combined with personal revelation is normalized. The narrative by which we can present our revelation to others is expressed. The conceptual frame in which we think about the reality we perceive in the context of response to higher patterns becomes clearer. Just as our knowledge of our Father must trail our experience of him in our souls, so the truths of and about him and his reality must be experienced before we can perceive them. This seems to be because such truth proceeds from him to us, not us to him. In the domain of spiritual understanding, the gift of faith insight lights the way for mind perception.
This top-down sequence of revealed truth to human response persuades us to think about the human authors’ concepts in the context of the revelation of The Urantia Book and not The Urantia Book revelation in the context of the human authors’ concepts. Human thinkers learn from revealed truth. Revealed truth is simply not subject to suspicions of plagiaristic appropriation. It is a gift. The validity of The Urantia Book as a revelation of truth can no more be proven by the logic of intellect alone than can God’s reality. God doesn’t exist because we do. We exist because God does. The value of the truth perceived and expressed by human authors is derived from and dependent both upon its pre-existence and its availability to the human mind, and not the reverse. Acceptance and realization of these truths as presented in The Urantia Book do not depend on the words of the human authors used by the revelators. Nonetheless, those concept expressions can serve to signal to our higher angels and teachers that we have reached the limits of human evolutionary understanding and are in need of augmented illumination.
The skeptics’ tools are inadequate for the validation of revelation and truth. Suspicion of plagiarism, standing in for questions of revelatory authenticity, is the child of skepticism and doubt. Whether at the beginning or the end of the skeptic’s travels, the same principle governs: spiritual truth must be experienced before it can be perceived. The human authors’ perceptions of truth were considered adequate to satisfy the revelators’ mandate because these human authors had the courage to explore realms of spiritual understanding not otherwise responsive to proving. They followed the inner conviction of truth which led them to perceptions of reality existing far beyond the confines of intellect alone, in the province of faith insight. It is the very journey we, too, must make to authenticate the revelation for ourselves. Where we begin this trip matters. If our journey begins in the skeptical, doubting mind we need to bring our own light and ample provisions. If the experience of truth illuminates our way, sustenance is provided. And there is even a bonus. This well-lit path provides the only gift of true validation we can offer another—our faith certainty, our personal experience with inner conviction, the living Spirit of Truth.
David Elders has been a devoted reader of The Urantia Book since 1970. He has served in the reader community in both formal and informal roles during this time. One of his favorite transactions from the book which pertains to the commentary above is this: On the way to Caesarea Philippi Jesus asked the apostles, “Who say you that I am?” …Peter, springing to his feet exclaimed, ‘You are the Deliverer, the Son of the living God.’… Jesus said, ‘This has been revealed to you by my Father.’” [UB 157:3.5-6]
| God Consciousness | Volume 11, Number 1, 2010 (Summer) — Index | Understanding the Relation of Love to the Mind |