© 2023 Duane Johnson
© 2023 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| 2022 Annual Pipeline of Light Report | Summer 2023 Issue — Index | The Future of the Urantia Movement—Young People in Sight! |
By Duane Johnson
“Art is mortal morontia, the intervening field between man, the material and man, the spiritual. Poetry is an effort to escape from material realities to spiritual values.” (UB 195:7.15)
The realization Of the recognition of spiritual values is an experience which is superideational. There is no word in any human language which can be employed to designate this “sense,” “feeling,” “intuition,” or “experience” which we have elected to call God- consciousness. (UB 103:1.6)
The revelators of The Urantia Book never seem to tire of stating how difficult it is for us to grasp the true nature of spiritual reality. The limits of our senses as well as the limits of the human mind, we are given to understand, make it impossible for us to comprehend much of the larger reality of which we are a part.
True, we have all benefited by discussing and analyzing, in our most eloquent prose, every Urantia Book paper, passage by passage, in study groups. We come to understand more by reading articles and commentary in Urantia related publications and on social media. We learn much, but we also come away with a keener understanding that, as songwriter Stephen Stills might say, “There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
Because of this, we look to the arts to foreshadow these higher universe realities. (see UB 48:7.23)
The poet in each of us seems to intuitively know that words cannot adequately convey spiritual ideas, ideals, and meanings. This is why I have come to think of poetry as an attempt to articulate the ineffable. Poets use symbolic and metaphorical language in an effort to lift our human type of mind up to the level of cosmic mind so as to better comprehend “the enhanced realities Of time and the more enduring realities of eternity.” (UB 101:9.8)
Toward this end, Byron Belitsos in 1982 published Ardent Ascent, a collection of poetry by poets whose lives have been touched and inspired by The Urantia Book.
Now, forty years later, we are publishing another volume of poetry entitled Sailing to Salvington: Poetry Inspired by the Fifth Epochal Revelation. Poets included in this collection are Jean Ascher, Byron Belitsos, Peri Best, James Cleveland, David Glass, Dave Holt, Bruce Jackson, Gard Jameson, Duane Johnson, K. Brendi Poppel, and Errol Strider.
This anthology also Will include twenty photographs and paintings, mostly from the collection Of Jesus paintings Of MO and Jennifer Siegel, who have been so kind as to allow us to include them. The inclusion of these full-color paintings increases the book’s value, but also markedly increases printing costs; fortunately, the Urantia Book Fellowship’s Second Miler Grant Committee has seen fit to help finance this project.
Of course, we are keenly aware that poetry has a limited market. To get a sense of how many copies to print, we are offering pre-ordered copies of this twenty-dollar value volume for only ten dollars.
If you would like to preorder a copy of Sailing to Salvington, send your order to Duane Johnson (duanej747@gmail.com). We Will mail you your copy in early July, or if you are attending The Urantia Book Fellowship’s International Conference 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, USA, you can pick it up then- For more information on the conference go to urantiabook.oWic2.3.
Poets use Symbolic and Metaphorical Language in an Effort to Lift our human Type of Mind up to the Level of Cosmic Mind.
¶ External Links
| 2022 Annual Pipeline of Light Report | Summer 2023 Issue — Index | The Future of the Urantia Movement—Young People in Sight! |