© 2009 David Glass
© 2009 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Becoming an Effective Missionary Evangel | Volume 10, Number 1, 2009 (Summer) — Index | Urantia University - U2 |
An essay for a conference-retreat at Belton, Texas, July 25-27, 2008
Education is a broad subject, and what I would like to do is to attempt to present a brief overview/description of this topic in order to demonstrate just how broad a subject “education” actually is, and in order to familiarize us with the range of the topic.
First a short prologue: In eternity, the Infinite Deities know all things; however, at the opposite end of the creative spectrum, planetary man must acquire every bit and portion of his terrestrial and cosmic education as a progressive and continuous acquirement.
Being evolutionary creatures, we must learn virtually everything through experience. Since this is a spiritual retreat, let’s begin with our primary spiritual endowment: the Paradise Thought Adjuster, and consider how we learn from it. On a planet like ours, where there are no visible spiritual beings representing the universe and revealing its truths to us, we are dependent upon The Urantia Book for our epochal revelation and upon our Thought Adjusters for “auto-revelation.” Learning from the Thought Adjuster might be considered our primary internal means of acquiring our experiential spiritual education.
One might think that the Adjuster, being a fragment of the infinity of God, might somehow—like God—know all things. We do know that all Adjusters possess “past-eternal memory.” However, it may require the eternal future for the Adjuster to reveal to us, to educate us regarding, the eternal past. The teachings and intimations of the Thought Adjuster to the learning mind and to the growing morontia soul, are, however, gradual and evolutionary acquirements for each individual.
Our external spiritual influences—such as the circuits of the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, the adjutant mind-spirits, the cosmic mind, and all the other supermaterial influences impinging on our consciousness—are coordinated in our learning experiences and unified in our understanding by the functioning of our central spiritual nucleus—the Thought Adjuster, which is also the focal point of our unique personalities. Personality, like the Adjuster, unifies our learning experiences, our education. And the personality of the individual mortal is directly linked with the infinite, all-unifying personality of the Universal Father though the personality circuit.
Can I say that more simply? Yes. All of our physical, mindal, and spiritual influences are unified within our minds by the action of our Thought Adjuster. Our total experiential intake, material and supermaterial (corporeal, intellectual, and spiritual), is also unified for our benefit and understanding by our personalities.
Our “corporeal” educational experiences consist of all those things which we learn through our senses, nervous system, and brain—through our physical mechanisms.
We learn (1) through our senses, (2) by using our minds, and (3) by being receptive to our indwelling spirits and to our supermaterial encircuitments. Thus, all of these means of becoming educated ourselves are unified for us by the joint and coordinated activities of our nuclear Thought Adjusters—the center of our personalities—and our personalities themselves—which ever function to coordinate and unify all constituent factors: physical, mindal, and spiritual.
Thus, we begin our universe educations well endowed and equipped (physically, mentally, and spiritually) to realize cosmic citizenship relatively early in our universe careers, potentially as early as the period of our mortal youth.
The first or ascending part of “the spectrum of education” for man reaches up from the time of the arrival of his guiding Adjuster to the time of his being mustered into the Corps of the Finality on Paradise. What an educational spectrum!
Now, the intended value and purpose of this essay is to present an overview of the spectrum of education beginning at the terrestrial level, as we have already begun, and to proceed ever upward and inward to Paradise and then back outward into time and space again, tracing man’s experiential career, and demonstrating how education is a key to, if not the essence of, the entire ascension program and the entire finaliter service career. Hopefully and intentionally, this introductory essay will be a helpful way of providing a backdrop or overview of the scope and range of our retreat’s focus, “education,” against which the more specific aspects or portions of our planetary and cosmic educational experience may be studied in more detail.
So, we’ve established that man begins life as a helpless infant on a material planet, knowing primarily only his immediate and instinctual needs. Right away, the child begins to employ his personality to unify and coordinate—i.e., to make sense of—his early experiences. The child enters school or is home-taught and begins his academic education; as an adolescent, he or she may learn a trade, craft, or skill—or he or she may have a personal talent or endowment which can be cultivated through some form of training or education.
Later on, in our culture, a young adult may pursue higher education, all the while processing and coordinating all aspects of his or her planetary experiences.
At some point, most people engage in a career or learn to perform a job for self-maintenance. This experience is likewise an element in planetary education; as is the adventure of actually applying one’s knowledge by simply living life and by doing the job one has been trained to do.
Interpersonal experiences and relationships form a major part of the planetary education as well as of the eternal experiential career. Universe creatures are forever and innately social— except for a very, very few orders of beings, such as the Solitary Messengers; and even they keep in touch with each other as they travel and serve.
The overall experience of planetary life—with its various social, moral, economic, and political arenas of activity—becomes blended in the mortal’s experience, and this helps him to form a utilizable “concept of this life,” a revelator tells us, and this, in turn, affects the way in which he arrives at a concept of the next life.
Education is deemed, by the revelators, to be essential—indispensable— to civilizations as well as to individuals; education is compulsory and lifelong on the neighboring planet. And in a certain sense, education is inevitable, in that every mortal learns something from his decisions and from their consequent experiences, even from the decision for slothful inactivity.
The Urantia Book provides us with a lot of detailed information about the nature and content of our education in the ascension career, declaring that “the universe is one vast school.” This gigantic experiential educational enterprise extends the spectrum of education from the planetary kindergarten, so to speak, up through the morontia training spheres of the local system, the constellation, and the local universe capital; to the spiritual, educational career of the minor sector, major sector, and capital headquarters worlds of the superuniverse.
Next is the ascender’s long trek to the pilot world of the outer circuit of Havona worlds and the beginning of the Central Universe educational experience. Ascenders have something of unique and significant value to learn and integrate on each of the one billion unique worlds of Havona. In traversing Havona, ascenders learn about supremacy, and they achieve a satisfactory recognition of the Deities: the Infinite Spirit, the Eternal Son and his Universal Father.
Having completed the Havona educational career, the ascenders surrender consciousness for the final time on the last Havona world and are ferried over to the shores of Paradise by transport tertiary supernaphim; there, on Paradise, they are revived as new creatures of eternity. The primary supernaphim make great contributions to the Paradise arrivals’ educational orientation, preparing them for bona fide cultural, social, and spiritual life on the Everlasting Isle. The perfected mortal is subsequently embraced by the Paradise Father and takes the eternal Finaliter Oath, the act which concludes that mortal’s finite ascending education.
Now comes the educational experience of serviceful teaching— of sharing what one has learned from the evolutionary ascent and from the natives of Havona and Paradise as one returns to the worlds of time and space to serve as universe ministers of the Gods, continuing in this rich multifaceted experience until the time of the final emergence and factualized completion of the Supreme Being. This serviceful work is richly educational. There is as much or more to be learned by teaching the Paradise pilgrims from other superuniverses or from one’s own superuniverse than can be imagined by the ascending mortal learner.
The completed emergence of the Supreme is expected to be the greatest universe happening since the manifestation of the central universe, a revelator tells us.
No creature fully “finds”—experientially encounters—personally meets and “knows”—the Supreme, until this moment; and in that instant, all creatures will know him—simultaneously find him. They have always been the sons and daughters of the existential First Person of Deity, the Universal Father; and now they have become the experiential, perfected creatures of God the Supreme.
The experience of the traversing of time and space, the manifold dimensions and arenas of mind expansion; and the depth, breadth, and insight of spiritual growth of the Paradise ascension career, a revelator states, should be “the supreme study of mortal man.” [UB 40:7.4] That means that The Urantia Book becomes and remains our principal and chief educational textbook while we are here on this planet.
I would like to interject a recommendation here, made to my by Sheryl Cyr, a Urantia Book reader who lives in Miami, who admonishes her associates to read “something” from The Urantia Book every day. When the import, significance, and value of the teachings of the fifth epochal revelation are fully recognized by the mind of the learning and growing mortal and by his truthhungry soul, the motivation for daily and continuous revelation study becomes spontaneous, natural, profitable, spiritually edifying, personally sustaining, faith-enhancing, beneficial in the wisdom domain, and evocative of the most profound reactions of worship and love of and for the Universal Father to an ever-expanding extent.
Worship is itself educational and transformative, in that it makes the worshipper more and more like the personality being worshipped. Worship is a technique for learning more and more about God by increasingly becoming more like him oneself. When man worships God, his Maker, the human personality becomes increasingly receptive to and responsive to the inner and outer conspiracy of spiritual forces and presences in and around him, and his personality increasingly pursues and becomes aligned with truth, beauty, goodness, and love—the blending of which becomes the essence and acme of all planetary and early universe education, leading directly to Thought Adjuster-fusion and the certain guarantee of Paradise attainment.
It has been said that, to truly learn something, simply prepare yourself to teach it. And that is exactly what we are doing in our Paradise ascent. Not only do we impart to those just behind us what we have learned from our superiors on the way up to Paradise; but also, following our Paradise attainment, we descend (or “out-scend”) to the other superuniverses as revealers of what we have learned at the “experiential founts of wisdom,” and as helpers of the Paradise pilgrims still making their way inward to the Deities on the Central Isle of Light.
This always-progressive educational and service process continues for the remainder of the present universe age—until the Supreme Being has become fully evolved and emerged from his mysterious sources and has become unified as a single personality as the maximum deity summation of all finite experience.
I would like to close now with just a quick look at the subsequent post-finite and eternal educational and service career: It is conjectured that the Supreme Being, the Master Michaels and Master Creative Spirits, in conjunction with the planning and functioning of the Architects of the Master Universe, shall join (in the first experiential Trinity) to reveal all that was learned in the finite educational experience of the Supreme to the new citizens of outer space who will begin to come into existence on the new worlds of the four successive outer space levels of the Master Universe.
Then, briefly: Following the absonite fulfillment of actualization and perfection of all of the realities of the outer space zones, God the Ultimate will eventuate and emerge. By participating in the eventuation of the Ultimate, we shall have learned exponentially more than all we ever learned in our educational experiences in supremacy.
Finally and eternally: God the Supreme and God the Ultimate, in partnership with the (unrevealed) Consummator of Universe Destiny, will form the second experiential Trinity and will begin, possibly with us as experiential participants, the progressive actualization of the infinite potentials of the three absolutes— the Deity, Unqualified, and Universal Absolutes. This process will begin to bring into existence some new kinds of unknown absolute realities (probably personal and non-personal) on the inconceivable level(s) of the Cosmos Infinite beyond and encircling the Master Universe. The realization of the Cosmos Infinite is conjectured to be an eternal—i.e., unending—process, ever expanding the perimeter of actualized reality into the unknown and inexhaustible potentials of eternity and infinity.
What a concept! What a limitless educational spectrum! What a plan by the Universal Father!—starting planetary mortals off as beings with zero experiential background or endowment, and then, in and throughout the endlessness of eternity, to provide them with the mechanisms and the means they need for attaining an unending educational experience—a masterful and glorious destiny—the personal exploration of God the Father, the First Source and Center of Infinite Reality!
Experiential education—learning and teaching—receiving and giving—acquiring and sharing—is the plan of the Universal Father for us humble planetary mortals who are even now linked with our eternal educational careers as hosts to our divine and eternal fragments of infinity. Beginning from the moment of our first moral decisions, based on what we have educationally learned from life about good and evil, we are endowed with perfect spirit fragments of the Infinite Father as the absolute guarantee that we can graduate from the finite, supreme experiential regime; learn, love, teach and serve on the absonite level; and then begin the endless quest and exploration of the limitless Father in the boundless Cosmos Infinite of the eternal future!
And all this is offered to us as the free gift of our matchlessly Good and Perfect, Loving and Infinite Heavenly Father. Revealing his and our Father’s will and nature to us, Jesus of Nazareth, Michael of Nebadon—of direct origin in the infinite personalities of the Universal Father and his Eternal Son—said to all Urantians and to all the mortals of Nebadon: “learn and teach—freely you have received, freely give.” Sooner or later all universe personalities begin to realize that the final quest of eternity is the endless exploration of infinity, the never-ending voyage of discovery into the absoluteness of the First Source and Center. [UB 106:9.11]
A Urantia Book reader since 1972, David Glass was instrumental in organizing the Florida readers in the 1970’s. He has continued to attend study groups in Fort Worth, TX; Portland, OR; and in Dallas, TX. He has served in various officer positions in the North Texas Urantia Society, as a delegate and alternate to the TDA, as an Area Coordinator, and is currently a member of the Fellowship Publications Committee. David teaches piano privately in Dallas.
| Becoming an Effective Missionary Evangel | Volume 10, Number 1, 2009 (Summer) — Index | Urantia University - U2 |