© 2015 David Kantor
© 2015 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| The Urantia Book and Its Mission | Volume 15, Number 1, 2015 (Summer) — Index | Sixty-Four Original Urantia Book Concepts |
Author’s note: This essay provides a synopsis of concepts presented in the books listed in the accompanying bibliography, attempting to relate them to the evolving context within which The Urantia Book is read, interpreted, and used as a social object.
Deep in a pre-historic forest, night is falling. A circle of sacred stones contains a small fire. Nearby, a wrinkled old shaman softly chants as he taps a small skin drum. From time to time he sprinkles an offering of tobacco leaves over the flames. At the moment the full moon is first seen between the trees he removes the shoulder blade of a beaver from the fire.
Divining a pattern of cracks in the bone made by the fire he finds a revelation of the cosmos in which his band of hunters lives, a map pointing the way to tomorrow’s hunting— a herd of caribou that will provide sustenance for the tribe, specific dangers to be avoided, actions that must be taken to assure success. The most essential information for the life of the tribe is read by the shaman in the cracks of this bone.
I sit by a small lamp in my study. In my hands I hold a copy of The Urantia Book, a collection of inscribed patterns of markings made by a complex formulation of solvents and dyes. Divining them, I find a revelation of the cosmos in which I live, guidance pointing the way to sustenance for the day, specific dangers to be avoided, actions to be taken to assure a more successful life. The most essential information for understanding my life may be read in the markings on sheets of paper.
Between the shaman and me much is the same; we each seek guidance from that which is beyond our limited human perceptions, accepting collections of abstract symbols as revelation.
Are these sacred texts the shaman and I are reading? We employ collections of symbols to connect ourselves with a larger cosmos. We engage in the same activity as countless other human beings who daily read the Bible, the Torah, the Rig-Veda, the Koran, the Mahabharata, the Avesta, or any one of countless other collections of writings. Does The Urantia Book belong in this category of texts? Or does it transcend this category? Does classifying it as a “sacred text” cheapen it?
On our isolated world missing both its Planetary Prince and Adamic centers of education and culture, literacy has become a primary mediator of revelation. It is not the material symbols themselves which constitute revelation (as some religious fundamentalists would maintain), but rather the process of reading them which facilitates the catalyzing influence of spiritual benefactors operating within a seeking mortal mind.
The revelators note that, “The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. . . .Such religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind of man by the combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth as they function amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving sons of God.” [UB 101:1.3] You and I, living in a twenty-first century world, spend most of our waking hours processing symbols and extracting meaning from our experience in our environment. We are navigators in a sea of information from which meaning is mediated to us through various texts, images, icons, hand-held displays of light patterns, and devices linked to satellites indicating our exact location on the surface of the planet.
For countless generations our ancestors ordered their lives around what they read in the rocks, the trees, footprints on streambeds, the movement of clouds, and mysteries concealed in nighttime skies and burnt shoulder blades. Information of a cultural or historical nature was passed from generation to generation by story tellers. But over the past three thousand years humanity has been going through the most significant transition it has so far experienced in its long history—the transition from oral traditions to mass literacy.
You who today enjoy the advantages of the art of printing little understand how difficult it was to perpetuate truth during these earlier times; how easy it was to lose sight of a new doctrine from one generation to another. [UB 93:7.4]
Masses of people reading and manipulating symbols that they themselves create has not only transformed society, but has greatly accelerated the evolution of all aspects of human civilization—including the rate at which symbols carrying meaning are propagated across linguistic and cultural groups.
Is there a relationship between this transition and the appearance of three epochal revelations in rapid succession? What is the potential activity of spirit within a mind engaged in processing the material symbols of written language?
In 2000 BC Melchizedek revitalized the fundamental spiritual content of the oral tradition (abstract symbols assimilated through the ears rather than the eyes). His training center and the missionaries he sent forth worked entirely within the oral tradition.
Jesus came during a time when the transition from oral to literate was well underway in both the Hebraic and the Greco-Roman worlds. The wisdom of the older Hebrew tradition had just been translated into Greek at Alexandria, liberating it from centuries of accumulated social ritual and reinvigorating its spiritual potentials.
The Hebrews had become known as “the people of the book.” But within that culture, the traditions of the earlier oral period still dominated. Written texts were used as mnemonic devices to aid the recall of memorized passages. The rabbis taught by word of mouth and the unique articulation and linguistic nuances of their sentences were handed down from generation to generation. Literacy, in this culture, meant the ability to enunciate or chant the written words in the ordained manner.
Even today, the oral tradition is strong. The word “Talmud” literally means “learnt by heart.” The word “Koran” implies a recitation of scripture. The word “Bible” implies a collection of books and letters. If you visited an Islamic school you would likely find students sitting and repeating together, in high, rhythmic voices, verse after verse of the Koran. It is the same in the traditional Talmudic schools. Elementary Christian education still emphasizes the memorizing of passages of scripture.
Jesus’ parables are great examples of conceptual constructs from which spiritual values may be derived by people in literate as well as oral cultures. The original rendering of the Sermon on the Mount is written in a rhythmic structure which facilitates memorization.
The Urantia Book came at a time of increasing global literacy. According to the World Bank Development Fund, in the world today more than 70% of adult men and women have a basic level of functional literacy. Programs for increasing literacy and levels of educational attainment are being aggressively pursued by governments and international agencies around the world.
Alan Purves[1] comments that for some it means the ability to sign one’s name on legal documents. For others it is the ability to read a particular text such as the Koran and answer a teacher’s questions. To a group of women in Bombay it may mean knowing whether a vendor in the marketplace is asking a fair price for a kilo of lentils.
There is one thing these definitions have in common: They assume shared meanings for the symbols used. We assume the meanings of the words we speak are the same meanings the mind of our hearers will attach to them. Literacy does not exist apart from a social context of interpretation.
Reading and writing are not merely skills related to figuring out print or writing a sentence; they involve a number of social activities as well. Each of us enjoys membership in a variety of literate communities; communities which have their own specialized vocabularies and modes of relating linguistically.
Literacy is at heart a social process and does not exist outside of a social context. In the case of religious or sacred texts the social interaction around the texts may become very complex or ritualized. And these social activities have a great deal to do with the way in which particular manuscripts come to be considered “sacred texts.” (There are important implications of this fact which lie beyond the scope of this present essay; they relate to an understanding of specific social contexts within which dissemination of The Urantia Book might most effectively take place.)
Any understanding of reading must begin with an acknowledgement of the role which the oral tradition has played throughout human history. Mass literacy is a very new phenomenon, present for less than one tenth of one percent of human history.
The earliest texts made no pretension to be actual representations of reality—they existed to help the storyteller remember. True knowledge was understood to exist only in memory; writing was mnemonic, a reminder. Not until the late Middle Ages did texts begin to be used as archival representations of the facts of the world.
The classic sacred texts of our world today, the texts which provide the conceptual foundations for Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism—all of these texts are collections of the most highly valued insights, revelations, and stories from the earlier oral tradition. They have been carried over into this radically new medium of symbolic representation— writing—so that the words of the ancient prophets and seers might continue to provide humanity with spiritual guidance in a bold new age of literacy.
We can appreciate that the transition from an oral to a literate culture—from hearing words to translating written symbols—would have a profound effect on human consciousness. Completely different parts of the brain are involved in these two activities. Some scholars believe that one of the repercussions of this transition was the discovery, by the Greeks, of the human mind itself.
To the early Greeks, feelings and emotions were understood to be bodily functions. Complex perceptions of reality were thought to come from outside of the organism itself— from some other-than-human source. In Homer’s works, no one decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything within his own psyche. Making a decision was understood as following instructions received from the gods.
Only in the later Classical period is the psyche recognized as a part of the body—a mental organ residing in the head. These Greeks discovered thought as something originating within the human organism and therefore a phenomenon which could be developed and managed by the will of a responsible self.
Seeing actions as the expression of one’s own thoughts allows them to be seen as subject to moral and ethical control, thereby providing a foundation for personal spiritual life.
Surprisingly, the critical element in this process turns out to have been the act of writing. Writing makes us conscious of speech and subjects the expression of our ideas to a degree of scrutiny and refinement not possible in a purely oral context.
The early storytellers did not accept personal responsibility for their own expression of thoughts. In the oral tradition the storyteller or the prophet was only the spokesperson for the muse or the deity—the words were the muse’s, the voice was the storyteller’s.
“God forbid that we should take a dream of the imagination for a pattern of the world” Francis Bacon
The intellectual landscape of the past century is littered with the debris of theories attempting to describe how meaning is transmitted through texts. In some respects the history of reading could be studied as the history of interpretation.
The early Christian scholar, Origen, argued that all biblical texts could have more than one meaning. Some texts, he concluded, since their straight-forward meaning did not agree with standard theology or ethics, had no literal meaning and the reader was admonished to seek only the secondary spiritual or symbolic meaning of the passage.
The purpose of reading during this period was not to get information; it was to see beyond the physical written text and grasp its hidden wisdom. The graphical images in illuminated texts were intended to facilitate this process of perceiving the spirit believed to be accessed through the medium of the text. The text was seen as only a starting point for pious meditations—an entry point to the spiritual cosmos.
During the Middle Ages there were substantial changes in the way people read texts. Every monastery had its own interpretation of its texts, its own oral tradition running parallel to the written word—and this oral tradition carried far more authority than the words in the books.
Disputes about the meaning of a text arose in the course of writing commentaries on them. The Jewish tradition allowed some latitude for interpretation. Here the correct oral reproduction of the verbal form of the word was of critical importance—the correct rhythm and melodic intonation of the words and phrases.
At the end of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas attempted to provide a solution to the interpretive problem by saying that the “literal meaning” of a text is that meaning intended by the writer. The influence of Aquinas was such that his view became somewhat prevalent; the understanding of reading changed from that of seeking “epiphanies” or revelations to the attempt to determine the author’s intentions.
But Aquinas did not abandon the notion that there may be a spiritual interpretation of the Biblical text in addition to a literal one. He continued to insist that the deeper meanings and higher truths were available only as a gift from God.
“You attribute to letters a fortune that they cannot possess.” Plato in Phaedrus
It is important to remember that within early Rabbinic Judaism as well as pre-reformation Christianity, authority in determining meaning still resided with the spoken word rather than in the text. The church taught that only trained clergy were able to interpret accurately the meaning of scripture and the common people were discouraged from reading the Bible lest they become confused.
No small part of the Protestant Reformation was the shift to the belief that the meaning contained in the biblical text was austerely anchored in the literal construction of its sentences themselves a reaction to self-serving interpretations by priestly authorities. The Christians of the new Protestant sects were dogmatic, requiring that “correct” interpretations be distinguished from “incorrect” ones.
As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, voyages of discovery were being made across the great oceans of the planet and a profoundly new world view was coming into existence. Until the second half of the fifteenth century, maps of the habitable world showed a circular disc surrounded by the ocean, with Jerusalem at the center, Paradise at the top, and the boundaries of human knowledge around the periphery noted as the domain of dragons.
One of the most important intellectual developments of this period was the refinement of map making and the ability to create maps which could be useful for navigation—symbolic representations that bore a one-to-one correspondence to reality. Navigation had been relatively easy as long as land was in sight. More daring voyages relied on celestial navigation. But once the south-bound voyager saw the North Star sink below the horizon, all means of orientation were lost.
Magellan, his predecessors, and his contemporaries of the sixteenth century, are considered to have made “voyages of discovery” they brought back the information necessary to construct increasingly accurate maps. In contrast, the eighteenth century voyages of Captain Cook two hundred years later are considered to have been “voyages of exploration”. Captain Cook was able to study maps created over the previous two centuries which served as a theoretical model for his thinking.
Magellan’s discoveries were made on the basis of his careful observations of the world. Captain Cook’s explorations were made on the basis of careful study of abstract representations of the world which existed on paper. We live much of our lives relative to abstract representations of reality. We read instruction manuals, diagrams, cook books, travel guides, maps, and financial reports, documents which we believe to be direct representations of reality. All of this reading activity causes us to develop particular attitudes toward the process of extracting meaning from what we read.
Many people unconsciously come to assume that scripture is a direct representation of reality in the same way that the owner’s manual for their car describes its construction, use, and maintenance procedures.
Do the passages we read in The Urantia Book really bear a one-to-one correspondence to reality? Or are they metaphorical constructs utilized by a vastly superior intelligence for purposes of facilitating the grasp of spiritual values by the mortal mind? Are the concepts in the book simply conceptual models that bear only a distant correspondence to some actual reality? The revelators imply such a construct of the text in several places.
One of these is in the discussion of universe frames in Paper 115 where we find the comment that “universe frames” are indispensable to rational intellectual operations but that they are, “without exception,” erroneous to a greater or lesser degree. The revelators go on to note that, “Conceptual frames of the universe are only relatively true; they are serviceable scaffolding which must eventually give way before the expansions of enlarging cosmic comprehension.” [UB 115:1.2]
The revelators appear to have broken reality up into categories with relationships easily accessible to mortal thought processes “In order to facilitate mortal comprehension . . . the diverse levels of cosmic reality have been designated as . . .” [UB 115:1.3] Here the revelators confess that they are creatively constructing a model of reality intended to compensate for our limitations. In one place they refer to the concept being articulated as “a philosophic concession which we make to the time-bound, space-fettered, finite mind of man…” [UB 0:3.23]
At some points they indicate frustration with the limitations of the process. In Paper 44 an Archangel laments “the necessity of constantly perverting thought and distorting language in an effort to unfold to the mortal mind…” [UB 44:0.20]
The danger to be avoided in relying on any scripture as a guide to living is that of falling into the fallacy of fundamentalism— falling into the trap of living our lives relative to abstract representations of reality rather than relative to reality itself; relative to self-constructed facts and meanings rather than relative to spiritual values. This danger is particularly acute in the developed world where a great deal of our daily lives are lived relative to symbolic abstractions represented in various forms of media—radio, television, film, YouTube videos, email, tweets, magazines, books, and Facebook postings, to name just a few.
Although The Urantia Book encourages us to grow intellectually and philosophically, its highest priority is the directing of the reader to the personality activities of worship and service—activities which force personality to become engaged with the world-as-it-is rather than in abstract representations of that world. If our primary engagement in life is with man-made abstractions, we are guilty of nothing less than idolatry—devoting our lives to conceptual representations of reality rather than to personality integration with a personal cosmos. The Urantia Book exhorts us to serve our fellows, not abstractions about the nature of reality. A printed text can be a religious fetish just as easily as can an image carved from a piece of wood or stone. Always must the symbol be differentiated from that which it is intended to symbolize.
The development of changeable type and the printing press changed the way texts were produced and made them identical to one another across thousands of copies, reinforcing ideas of the authority of the text being greater than the authority of a person.
But by the seventeenth century writers and scholars had become painfully aware of the unmanageably diverse ways in which a given text could be interpreted. The problem is that the meaning of a text, especially texts created in one culture and read in another, is never clearly evident. (And the shortcomings of the most insightful literary theory become painfully obvious in the light of Urantia Book ontology and its discussion of the differences and relationships between things, meanings, and values).
We can get a better understanding of seventeenth century consciousness by appreciating the evolution of symbolic representation which had been evolving in other domains: representational paintings of the Dutch masters, the representation of the world in maps, representation of physical motion in mathematical notations, the representation of botanical species in herbals, and the representation of imaginative events in fiction. Again, the type of logic represented in this mass media of the time had an effect on the way people read scripture.
The early Protestant teachers seemed to distrust the mind, the memory, and to some extent even the scriptural ceremony. They placed their trust in the external text, which they saw as a map intended to lead the soul of the reader to God.
The assumption here is that anyone can read scripture and understand its true meaning without any outside assistance. To hold such a belief is to view the text as an exact picture, not a metaphor; that the text is to God and God’s plan as the periodic table is to chemical elements.
During this period scientific writing began to take on precision, and with the work of various anatomists, a map of the human body could be used as a guide to those who would trace various bodily functions. Cookbooks began to appear which included precise measurements and sequences of directions. Timetables for trains and carriages were consulted regularly by an increasingly literate urban population.
Reading became the primary means by which knowledge was accrued. Metaphorical or symbolic meanings were looked upon with disdain. And today, it should not surprise us to find that a large number of people who hold to a strict literal interpretation of their sacred texts are technicians and people from other professions whose daily lives are spent following instructions in books and manuals.
By the middle of the nineteenth century mass literacy was becoming a fact of life in much of the world and associated with it were growing repercussions of mass media—shared culture through the shared reading of texts.
And it did not take the planetary supervisors long to exploit this development with the compilation of the fifth epochal revelation presented in the form of a book.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concomitant with the growing interest in psychology, literary critics began focusing on the reader as the source of meaning in any act of reading. This view says that it is the existing ideas, feelings, and psychological trends within the mind of the reader which create meanings when the text is read.
In language, an alphabet represents the mechanism of materialism, while the words expressive of the meaning of a thousand thoughts, grand ideas, and noble ideals—of love and hate, of cowardice and courage—represent the performances of mind within the scope defined by both material and spiritual law, directed by the assertion of the will of personality, and limited by the inherent situational endowment. [UB 195:7.21]
A related disclaimer may be found in Paper 92 where the revelators seem to acknowledge this post-modern insight that all our understandings of reality—and revelation—are subjectively constructed within the mortal mind. And they do this “. . .at the risk of weakening the future influence and authority of this, the most recent of the revelations of truth to the mortal races of Urantia.” [UB 92:4.9]
The recognition that all human concepts of reality are subjectively synthesized within the individual mind has been the source of a great deal of philosophic confusion in recent decades—especially in the areas of literary and communications theory. And while the revelators acknowledge this as a valid concern, The Urantia Book affirms the objective reality of truth and our ability to recognize it; it affirms our ability to enjoy integration with cosmic reality through the objective presence of the Adjusters, the Spirit of Truth, and the Holy Spirit all operating within the subjective interpretive processes of the mortal mind. The Urantia Book brilliantly illuminates the dark abyss of nihilistic despair.
That which is of greatest importance are the spiritual values our constructs of reality enable us to recognize, along with our choosing to incorporate those values into our interactions with other personalities. These are spiritual elements which become part of the soul which will survive mortal death. The facts and meanings from which those spiritual values are derived are nothing more than scaffolding and have very little cosmic value beyond that of facilitating the formation and growth of the soul.
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.” John 1:1
Obviously we relate to a text such as The Urantia Book in a very different manner than the block of text on a milk carton or the content of someone’s Facebook post. But the way we relate to the book is also very different from the way in which we relate to most other books.
It’s not that we read it front to back, then start over and read it again. We have favorite sections that we read more than others; sections which are still too difficult to really understand, places we go when we are seeking inspiration, clarification, or the illumination of a new idea.
Some of us put notes in the margins of our books creating cross references between various paragraphs and sections. Some of us color-code specific passages with highlighters. Sometimes we engage in topical studies, using some of the supplemental tools created over the years such as Clyde Bedell’s Concordance, Harry McMullan’s Topical Index, Duane Faw’s Paramony, or electronic search utilities such as those created by Kristen Maaherra, Barry Clark and Troy Bishop.
Interestingly, the way in which many of us use The Urantia Book closely resembles the way in which we use the Internet. On the Internet we seldom read an entire text or even a full page. We read fragments and jump from one page to another, from one text to another, using hyperlinks.
In light of the source work which has been done by Matthew Block we can view The Urantia Book itself as a hypertext document. When we read it we are actually surfing through the gems of our world’s theological ideation as these have been collected and arranged by a transcendent intelligence we don’t fully understand, done in such a manner that enhanced access to universe meanings and a subsequent recognition of spiritual values is made possible.
But this hypertext usage is not unique to The Urantia Book. It is a defining feature of how virtually all of the world’s books which have come to be regarded as “sacred texts” are used.
Texts such as the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, and the Torah are all used in this way; and their use is enhanced by secondary texts such as the Catholic Breviary, the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, the Ahadith of the Messenger, the Talmud, or the notations in a Schofield Reference Bible. The seminal texts themselves are not read in the straight-through fashion in which we read novels. They are compendia, collections which can be read in a variety of configurations depending on the reader and the situation.
The Christian testaments are studied as if the New Testament referred to the Old Testament. The text is often set up in a three-column format with the middle column containing references from the present text space to others before or after. The actual verses and images refer outward to other verses and images so that the New Testament presents a reworking and a re-contextualizing of earlier books, songs and prophecies. The final book in the Bible, the book of Revelation, is a kaleidoscope of images that are understood to reference various parts of the entire preceding collection of books.
There are a number of contemporary theologians who have come to view the authority for interpretation of a “sacred text” as residing neither in the text nor in the individual, but rather in the community within which the text is read and discussed.
We can imagine that early preachers were often asked to explain what they meant with their talk about God, salvation, and revelation, and when they were hard pressed, when all their parables or references to the unknown God and to the Logos had succeeded only in confusing their hearers, they turned at last to the story of their life, saying, “What we mean is this event which happened among us and to us.” H.R. Niebuhr[2]
It should be obvious that the meanings people derive from the Torah today are not identical to those which Hillel or Paul derived from reading it. Meanings derived from reading the Gospels today are not the same as those derived by Augustine or Aquinas. In one sense the texts persist through time and across translations into the marks and symbols of different languages. But the meanings derived from them change as the community reading them changes. The persistence of “sacred texts” over long periods of time lies in the fact that people continue to derive spiritual values from the stories and expressions of thought transmitted by those texts.
But at what point do we begin to consider a collection of writings to be “scripture?” The hypertext nature of its usage by an interpretive community has already been mentioned. But there is more.
One step involves the members of a social group believing that the text is a transcription of the actual word of God or of a divinely inspired person. Another step is the incorporation of the text into the worship life of a community. Sometimes the words of the text are believed to be the actual words of God.
In our community of Urantia Book readers there seems at times to have been an obsession with avoiding the establishment of anything which resembled a religion—almost to the point of making this avoidance into the central ritual of a new religion! But in spite of this reluctance, The Urantia Book may be well on its way to being what is classically considered a “sacred text.”
The primary factor in this transition is the continuing development of social activities centered around the text. Reading aloud in a study group, reading a passage before a General Council meeting, participating in discussions about the meaning of a passage, taking a moment of silence before and after a study group, recalling stories about Jesus during a remembrance supper (to say nothing of associating the ritual of the remembrance supper itself with the text)—each of these is a social activity centered on the text. In our study groups and conferences, the printed text is only a part of the total experience.
And as these social activities are repeated over time, they become the core rituals and ceremonies of the community. We engage in the ceremony of social reading. We use the text as an entry point to seek understanding of the divine, as a means of engaging ourselves and each other in questions about meaning and spirituality.
In this context, religious community may be the family sitting around the dinner table, it may be a study group, a phone conversation, a conference workshop, or one of many other social settings characterized by intimacy, communication between individuals, and the quest for truth.
Emerging Urantian educational institutions play roles in this process as well—Urantia Foundation’s Internet School, the Fellowship’s summer study sessions, Urantia University, the Perfecting Horizons Institute—these are emerging foundational institutions of a new text-based virtual religious movement.
The Urantia movement is the first significant religious movement whose beginnings are tied to the propagation of its precepts by means of the Internet. The translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek made their wisdom accessible in a new environment, liberated from accumulated ritual and tradition. The launching of an epochal revelation over the Internet allows it to spread free of authoritarian dogmatism, to take root in the subjectivity of countless individuals living in every country of the world.
As we read The Urantia Book within our various reader communities and re-construct the sequence of paragraphs to make the text relevant to specific needs and interests, as we read the text as the central activity of a social gathering that has a religious purpose, we are slowly but surely transforming The Urantia Book into much more than a mere book; as its reading becomes associated with acts of worship, it increasingly takes on qualities of scripture.
Does The Urantia Book fit into the category of “sacred texts?” Personally I consider anything that mediates the presence of the divine within my mortal mind to be a sacred text. My personal collection of mediating objects, while containing The Urantia Book, also contains other books, pieces of music, paintings, icons, pieces of poetry. My most highly valued sacred text is life itself where I find evidence of transcendent mind in snowflakes, cloud formations, flower structures, leaf patterns, revelations about the history of the earth in rock formations, evidence of transcendent personality in relationships with other personalities.
My appreciation of The Urantia Book stems from the fact that I perceive the pattern of its conceptual description of reality as belonging to the author of DNA, the originator of spiral galaxies, and the source of love.
I suppose that makes it a sacred text of sorts, something I read in a manner not too far removed from that of my distant brother, the shaman, reading cracks in bones by his fire, making a small offering to the gods with a sprinkling of tobacco leaves over the flames.
David Kantor has been a reader of The Urantia Book for almost fifty years. He is vice president of the Rocky Mountain Spiritual Fellowship. He has recently written, directed, and produced a feature length film, “Re-Imagining Jesus”, based on The Urantia Book.
| The Urantia Book and Its Mission | Volume 15, Number 1, 2015 (Summer) — Index | Sixty-Four Original Urantia Book Concepts |