© 2022 Georges Michelson Dupont
© 2022 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The Wisdom of Creating Unequal Races | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 99 — September 2022 | The Human Personality |
THE EXPERIENCE OF A LIFETIME
George Michelson Dupont
God has become my life companion. Not a day goes by without me talking to him, telling him how much I want to do his will, thanking him for his presence, his unconditional love and his daily support. As I scan the night sky from my garden I realize that the colossal energy keeping the nebulae in orderly rotation is also the very source of my personality, in truth the source of all realities, whether material, intellectual, spiritual or personal.
God is a person, an absolute person. In my imagination I visualize him in paradise, the center of all things, in the form of a luminous source from which waves of love and energy emerge which propagate in galactic space and which “nourish” the universe and its creatures. In my meditations-adorations, I try to feel his gentle, relaxing and soothing presence; I then feel in harmony, at peace.
This perfect, absolute, eternal and certainly inaccessible being that I call “I AM” is also my partner in this cosmic adventure beginning on this small planet Urantia. He has a plan for eternal existence and endless adventures for me provided that I remain in association with him. To run the race of time he gave me a perfect guide, a fragment of himself to accomplish my destiny of which I do not even know the outcome, I simply trust him, I have faith in his guidance and in his love.
But how did I get here?
Before being exposed to the revelation presented in the Urantia papers, and certainly like everyone else, my first years as an adult were not “a long quiet river”. To tell the truth, “existential questions” were not jostling at the door of my conscience. Having been educated by the Oratorian Brothers of the College of Juilly, I acquired a basic Catholic education which was enough for me. The routine of “metro-work-sleep” life prevented me from considering another perspective of life that was more interesting and rewarding. I had my head down, as they say.
I think the following sentence illustrates well the situation I was in.
“Some persons are too busy to grow and are therefore in grave danger of spiritual fixation. Provision must be made for growth of meanings at differing ages, in successive cultures, and in the passing stages of advancing civilization. The chief inhibitors of growth are prejudice and ignorance.” (UB 100:1.2)
The spiritual awakening was hard and psychologically trying. Following bad decisions causing financial setbacks, I found myself bankrupt, forced to sell everything, leading my family into a spiral of difficulties.
“Provision must be made for the growth of meanings at different ages,” Melchizedek tells us.
These arrangements began with a questioning of the purpose of my life: The time for the great questioning had come: “whys” and “hows” clashed in my conscience begging for answers. I was seized with a feeling of hatred because I had dragged my family into this disaster and distressing thoughts jostled in my head, I was angry with the whole world.
In the weeks that followed, one evening, sitting on the edge of my bed, I suddenly realized and accepted that what was happening to me was in truth the consequences of my own decisions and it was at that precise moment that, humbly and with all my strength, I asked God for help. The answer to my request manifested itself in a surge of consciousness, a surge of courage to help me face the situation, in an increased willingness to take on the difficulties head on, one after the other. At the same time, I also remembered the famous poem by Rudyard Kipling “if” that my father had hung above my bed when I was a child: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si_(poth) and The Urantia Book that he had given me a few years later and that my wife was already reading.
Since that day, the course of my life has changed forever. In retrospect, I see the work of my guardian angel and the spiritual forces, you know, those who “conspire” to try to spiritualize us but who can only do so with our consent. By asking for this divine help, I placed myself in a mental disposition of acceptance and submission to Spirit. I opened my spiritual channel. The following sentence illustrates the process well:
“In the inner experience of man, mind is joined to matter. Such material-linked minds cannot survive mortal death. The technique of survival is embraced in those adjustments of the human will and those transformations in the mortal mind whereby such a God-conscious intellect gradually becomes spirit taught and eventually spirit led. This evolution of the human mind from matter association to spirit union results in the transmutation of the potentially spirit phases of the mortal mind into the morontia realities of the immortal soul. Mortal mind subservient to matter is destined to become increasingly material and consequently to suffer eventual personality extinction; mind yielded to spirit is destined to become increasingly spiritual and ultimately to achieve oneness with the surviving and guiding divine spirit and in this way to attain survival and eternity of personality existence.” (UB 1:3.7)
In reflecting on what it means to “make adjustments to the human will and transformations in the mortal mind” we must humbly recognize that we are of animal extraction with our demanding ego and our tendencies to want to satisfy our material self by succumbing to the attractions of purely material life. Becoming aware of this, honestly recognizing our ego for what it is, seeking to know it without complacency through analysis and seeking to master it constitutes the first step [Transformations in the mind]; then comes the time to lucidly reexamine our ideals of life, an exercise which must lead to voluntary decision-making to act accordingly. (Adjustments to the human will).
But in this process of conquest of the self, human will alone is not sufficient. In Tyre, Jesus responds to Nathanael:
““It is not strange that you ask such questions seeing that you are beginning to know the Father as I know him, and not as the early Hebrew prophets so dimly saw him. You well know how our forefathers were disposed to see God in almost everything that happened. They looked for the hand of God in all natural occurrences and in every unusual episode of human experience. They connected God with both good and evil. They thought he softened the heart of Moses and hardened the heart of Pharaoh. When man had a strong urge to do something, good or evil, he was in the habit of accounting for these unusual emotions by remarking: ‘The Lord spoke to me saying, do thus and so, or go here and there.’ Accordingly, since men so often and so violently ran into temptation, it became the habit of our forefathers to believe that God led them thither for testing, punishing, or strengthening. But you, indeed, now know better. You know that men are all too often led into temptation by the urge of their own selfishness and by the impulses of their animal natures. When you are in this way tempted, I admonish you that, while you recognize temptation honestly and sincerely for just what it is, you intelligently redirect the energies of spirit, mind, and body, which are seeking expression, into higher channels and toward more idealistic goals. In this way may you transform your temptations into the highest types of uplifting mortal ministry while you almost wholly avoid these wasteful and weakening conflicts between the animal and spiritual natures.”
“But let me warn you against the folly of undertaking to surmount temptation by the effort of supplanting one desire by another and supposedly superior desire through the mere force of the human will. If you would be truly triumphant over the temptations of the lesser and lower nature, you must come to that place of spiritual advantage where you have really and truly developed an actual interest in, and love for, those higher and more idealistic forms of conduct which your mind is desirous of substituting for these lower and less idealistic habits of behavior that you recognize as temptation. You will in this way be delivered through spiritual transformation rather than be increasingly overburdened with the deceptive suppression of mortal desires. The old and the inferior will be forgotten in the love for the new and the superior. Beauty is always triumphant over ugliness in the hearts of all who are illuminated by the love of truth. There is mighty power in the expulsive energy of a new and sincere spiritual affection. And again I say to you, be not overcome by evil but rather overcome evil with good.” (UB 156:5.4-5)
Prayer and worship are the keys to transformation. The conditions for the effectiveness of prayer are set out in booklet 91, section g and I invite the reader to refer to it. God always answers a sincere prayer when the motive carries spiritual content only it is rare that we can understand his response because we expect a tangible manifestation.
This transformation is very often unconscious as is our partnership with our Adjuster because “We must not consider cooperation with our Adjuster as a particularly conscious process, for it is not. It is our motives and our decisions, our faithful determinations and our supreme desires, which constitute real and effective cooperation.” (UB 110:3.6)
In my experience, I feel that God (my Thought Adjuster) responded to my sincere request by respecting my free will. He did not tell me “do this or go that way.” Everyone will recognize that it is the experience itself that is transformative and as we know, “heaven helps those who help themselves.”
Over time I have learned to view difficulties, “inevitabilities,” not as trials but as experiences necessary for the acquisition of wisdom and perfection. They are placed on my life path where I need them and I thank my guardian of destiny, my Thought Adjuster, the Spirit of Truth of Jesus and all spiritual contributors for their combined efforts. Today, I understand the usefulness of these “inevitabilities,” they truly constitute the keys that open the gates of Paradise.
“1. Is *courage—*strength of character—desirable? Then must man be reared in an environment which necessitates grappling with hardships and reacting to disappointments.” (UB 3:5.6)
I would conclude with the following quote: “There is no greater affliction than never to be afflicted.”
| The Wisdom of Creating Unequal Races | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 99 — September 2022 | The Human Personality |