© 1995 Nigel Nunn, Jeffrey Wattles, George Horton Foster, Carole Jett, Seppo Niskanen, Chris Moseley, Seppo Kanerva
© 1995 International Urantia Association (IUA)
A QUARTERLY NEWS JOURNAL AND MAGAZINE OF THE IUA
Issue No 4-1995: (1) Quarks, Gluons and Pomerons; (3) Study and Worship; (4) Interpretation of Personality; (5) Mr. And Mrs. Zebedee; (8) Are You a Happy Man?; (10) URANTIA Movement in Britain; (11) By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them.
¶ In This Issue
- Quarks, Gluons And Pomerons — Nigel Nunn, Australia
- Study And Worship — Jeffrey Wattles, U.S.A.
- Interpretation Of Personality — George Horton Foster, U.S.A.
- Mr. and Mrs. Zebedee — A Most Remarkable Couple — Carole Jett, U.S.A.
- Are You a Happy Man? — Seppo Niskanen, Finland
- “No Sects Please, We’re British” — Chris Moseley, England
- By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them — Seppo Kanerva, Finland
- Scheduled Conferences For 1996
¶ Quarks, Gluons And Pomerons
By Nigel Nunn
Canberra, Australia
Energy is close of kin to divinity when it is Paradise energy. We incline to the belief that monota is the living, nonspirit energy of Paradise- an eternity counterpart of the living, spirit energy of the Original Son…
We cannot differentiate the nature of Paradise spirit and Paradise monota; they are apparently alike. They have different names, but you can hardly be told very much about a reality whose spiritual and whose nonspiritual manifestations are distinguishable only by name. UB 42:2.19-20
By projecting energy from the absolute realm onto the constrained region we call the master universe, the chance to endlessly rearrange that energy arose. And over the last hundred years, it has been the important and increasingly profitable work of physicists to map these rearrangements.
In the same way that their precursors were able to agree to, and work in accordance with, a reality consisting of arrangements of earth, air, fire, and water, so too, had 20 th century physicists given in to the evidence, and agreed that material reality is built upon the foundation of atoms of matter: arrangements of nuclei and their orbiting electrons. This description was quickly sharpened. It was found that the whole phenomenon could be more accurately described as clever arrangements of two families of particles: leptons and quarks (the nuclear particles, protons and neutrons, being seen as triads of point-like quarks). It was thought that by including the forces responsible for animating these particles, a few equations should tie the whole thing into a testable model and a neat philosophical package.
¶ Study And Worship
By Jeffrey Wattles,
Stow, Ohio, U.S.A.
Worship is to be a natural and spontaneous reaction to the recognition of the Father’s matchless personality and because of his lovable nature and adorable attributes UB 5:3.3. These three themes are the foci of Papers 1,2 , and 3 . Let us begin to inquire how these Papers conduce to worship.
As a first approximation, Paper I is a crystalline prism, Paper 2 filled with warm colors, and Paper 3 completes the spectrum on the cool side. The cool attributes of God’s everywhereness, infinite power, universal knowledge, limitlessness, the Father’s supreme rule and primacy, however, are discovered to be extensions of the warm love and goodness of God at the center of the portrait of the divine nature. Nor are the qualities of God’s nature offered to the mortal intellect except as an unfolding of the Father personality introduced in Paper I.
How could we find the universe friendly without such a coordinated realization? How else can we put the evils of this world in perspective so that the mind can move beyond sublime thinking and consent to worship? And if we do not transcend creature concerns in worship, how shall the motivation for unselfish service prevail in us?
¶ Interpretation Of Personality
By George Horton Foster
Chino Valley, Arizona, U.S.A.
The accompanying flow chart is presented to stimulate thinking and discussion among interested students of The URANTIA Book. It represents the attempt of one such student to integrate what the book seems to be stating about personality. There appears to be some inconsistencies in the text, but one must remember, first, that different authors are likely to state things differently, and second, the writers themselves admit to lack of complete understanding of the nature of personality.
The following will help explain the content of the chart, from top to bottom and left to right:
The left half of the chart represents the content of the total “self” while on Urantia. The right half represents the same after the transition of death.
Four important characteristics of personality are described. The fourth characteristic, co-ordination, is shown related to the other three parts of the total self: spirit, mind, and body.
Important aspects of Spirit are shown, and it is defined as the Thought Adjuster. It is shown progressing through the “preliminary” Urantia soul, through the transition period of death, and into the morontia soul. This depends upon fusion which is shown as happening in the morontia world, but which can happen earlier, or not at all.
¶ Mr. and Mrs. Zebedee — A Most Remarkable Couple
By Carole Jett
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Zebedee and Salome Zebedee’s goodness, graciousness, and excellent parenting earned them a pivotal role in the bestowal of Christ Michael on Urantia. They were a moderately well-todo couple who opened their hearts, souls and family to our Creator Son. Their home in Bethsaida, a suburb of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, became the headquarters of Jesus’ revelation as the Son of Man and the Son of God.
In Jesus’ twenty-seventh year (A.D. 21) after fully preparing his earthly family to care for themselves, with James as the head of the household, Jesus departed never again to be a regular member He first traveled to Tiberias, Magdala and Bethsaida, where he stopped to pay a visit to his father’s friend Zebedee UB 129:1.2. Zebedee and Salome were the parents of seven children, three sons and four daughters. He was a boat builder; his sons were fishermen. Jesus resided with them for more than a year becoming like a son to Zebedee and Salome.
Jesus and Zebedee began to build boats of a very superior type, craft which were far more safe for sailing the lake than were the older types. For several years Zebedee had more work, turning out these new-style boats, than his small establishment could handle; in less than five years practically all the craft on the lake had been built in the shop of Zebedee at Capernaum. UB 129:1.3. He [Jesus] had long worked alone in the world, that is without a father, and greatly enjoyed this period of working with a father-partner. UB 129:1.4.
¶ Are You a Happy Man?
By Seppo Niskanen
Helsinki, Finland
Finland is currently going through the annual season of chill and darkness. People are visibly depressed and irritable. This circumstance prompted me to devote a few thoughts to happiness and to ponder what true happiness maybe is. The URANTIA Book, among innumerable other items, discusses even this subject, and does it quite frequently. Here a small number of relevant quotes and some modest observations by me.
On health and sanity man understands much, but of happiness he has truly realized very little. UB 100:4.3.
This sentence is truly very telling. Do we grasp what happiness is? Does happiness mean different things to different people? Is happiness the same as a sensation of bliss? Does love generate happiness? Does wealth come with happiness? Questions are many. Answers we have to find out on our own.
¶ “No Sects Please, We’re British” — A Concise History of the British URANTIA Movement
By Chris Moseley
London, England
Any history of the readership of The URANTIA Book in Britain is bound to be concise, as ultimately there is so little to tell. There have been no cataclysmic events or great turning points in its history, just a series of quiet and slow developments. Looked at purely from the point of view of “outreach”, it’s been quite a dispiriting story, but we continue to believe that a slow spread provides a surer foundation for the Book’s reception in future centuries.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when readers of the Book began to come together, an event more difficult to know when exactly the first book was sold here, but certainly it would have been in the mid nineteen seventies that readers became aware of each other. Until that time. the few readers who were studying the book in isolation had to refer to Chicago to be put in touch with other readers. But they were also put in touch with a man who came to have a decisive influence on our movement in Britain, Henry Begemann, The old URANTIA Brotherhood’s Field Representative in Europe. Henry came over from the Netherlands whenever a meeting of readers was being arranged in those early days, and it was he who fanned the weak flame of our curiosity and enthusiasm into a greater devotion to, and deeper understanding of, the revelation that had come into our hands. But I know that Henry suffered some disappointment at the slow growth of our readership-many times it appeared that the flame might go out altogether.
¶ By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them — Are All Fruits Fruits of the Spirit?
By Seppo Kanerva
Helsinki, Finland
AS A description of the manifestations of human spirituality The URANTIA Book employs dozens of times the figure of speech the fruits of the spirit. As concerns our concepts of what the fruits of the spirit might be, we are oftentimes as much slaves to traditionalism as were the Pharisees and the early Christian church fathers, and as are the modern-day fundamentalists. The old things have not yet passed away; all things have not yet become new. Traditionalism, the old things, suggest that the fruits of the spirit would, among many others, include these:
1. Anxiety in face of the possibility of not yielding the fruits of the spirit. The fruits of the spirit are conceived to be some well-defined and clear—cut features of conduct and behaviour—“good works”; and this kind of “fruits” are seen as a passport to eternal life, as the price one has to pay for one’s ascension to Heaven. To feel anxiety because of the possible absence of such fruits, thus, is the same as to worry about one’s eternal life, about personal salvation. The more one yields these fruits, the surer one may be of salvation.
To fret over one’s salvation is no fruit of the spirit; it is rather a symptom of selfishness. The URANTIA Book instructs that, [s]alvation should be taken for granted by those who believe in the fatherhood of God. The believer’s chief concern should not be the selfish desire for personal salvation but rather the unselfish urge to love and, therefore, serve one’s fellows even as Jesus loved and served mortal men. UB 188:4.9.
¶ Scheduled Conferences For 1996
Finland: Winter Conference, 19-21 January
Finland: Summer Conference, 7-9 June
IUA CONFERENCE: Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A., 8-12 August
Australia: Annual ANZURA Conference, October
International URANTIA Association Journal
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Any interpretations, opinions, conclusions, or artistic representations, whether stated or implied, are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the International URANTIA Association, the national or local URANTIA Associations, the Coordinating Committee, the Trustees of URANTIA Foundation, or the editors.
Quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from The URANTIA Book, © 1955 URANTIA Foundation.
The method of identifying quotations is the method used in The URANTIA Book Concordance, © 1993 URANTIA Foundation
Please feel free to submit your articles, visual aids, charts, graphs, and news items to any of the editors.
© 1995 International URANTIA Association