© 2007 Jacob Dix
© 2007 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Year 2006 Update on The Coming Scientific Validation of The Urantia Book | Volume 8, Number 1, 2007 (Summer) — Index | Personality and Man |
When the Gods in unity projected eternal Havona, “the eternal pattern of co-ordinate participation in creation—sharing,” was forever revealed. And the Sons and Daughters of God have ever since attempted “to duplicate in time the central universe of eternal perfection.” To achieve this, the Father “actually goes into partnership with us by means of his own spirit.” [UB 54:2.1]
The progressive understanding of what it means to really share, and more importantly the experiential attainment of this living reality of participation—by you and I—is supremely vital to the success or failure of the revelation. It is indispensable to the healthy growth of the various teachings about The Urantia Book (its translation, spread, and study) and will prove I have no doubt, essential to the living mastery of the teachings of the revelation.
But sharing becomes far more complex when various degrees of insight, ignorance, and possibly sin are admixed with free and sovereign will, determining whether the exchange between personalities is an evolutionary process of reciprocal growth, or an arbitrary time-bypassing revolution.
Recall that “neither angels nor any other order of universe personality” (including ourselves) “have power or authority to curtail or abridge the prerogatives of human choosing.” [UB 113:5.1] However, it is possible to attempt to do so. And there are consequences to such attempts.
Lucifer’s folly was unachievable, “to short-circuit time in an experiential universe,” his resulting crime the “attempted creative disenfranchisement of every personality.” [UB 54:2.3] Lucifer, in attempting to circumvent time, seized liberties he already had, and “others he was to receive in the future.” [UB 54:4.4] By doing so, he attempted to abridge everyone’s “personal participation—freewill participation—in the long evolutionary struggle to attain the status of light and life both individually and collectively.” [UB 54:2.3] Stated otherwise, he attempted to steal away our potential experience of earning destiny while prematurely forcing it, artificially, upon us.
Now, throughout The Urantia Book there is a common theme to “give advice only when it is asked for,” [UB 48:7.16] and its negative to “never proffer counsel unless it is asked for.” [UB 55:4.13] Observed in this light, giving unsought advice, similar to Lucifer’s theft of liberty, is a theft of experiential discovery. Arbitrarily solving a problem for someone overthrows the experiential growth process, short-circuiting time by replacing real growth with premature knowledge.
Letting “our light so shine,” [UB 140:4.5] to “whet the appetites of [our] associates” [UB 48:7.16] means spreading the truth at the pace of the one in need, not at the speed of our own zeal.
A Divine Counselor sets the revelation’s pace, stating immediately the Father’s supreme mandate to “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” [UB 1:0.3] This is our “first duty” and should be our “highest ambition.” [UB 1:0.4] To achieve such a compelling injunction we must understand the Father’s nature, character, methods, and behavior, as these are discernable in the epochal revelations of his divine children.
(I) The Caligastia one hundred arrived on the planet “and began the proclamation of the new gospel of individual initiative within the social groups of that day.” [UB 66:6.2] It was the “Come to me all you who labor” [UB 163:6.7] invitation to participate. Because the cultural acquirements of Jerusem were virtually useless to mankind, “the sudden transformation, or the en masse uplifting, of the primitive races,” [UB 66:6.3] was wisely avoided. “Foreign emissaries were never sent to a race except upon the specific request of that people.” [UB 66:6.5] And “none of the Prince’s staff would present revelation to complicate evolution; they presented revelation only as the climax of their exhaustion of the forces of evolution.” [UB 66:5.14]
Bur rebellion came to Urantia. Caligastia attempted “the complete and radical reorganization of the whole world,” and “revolution displaced evolution as the policy of cultural advancement and racial improvement.” [UB 67:5.1] He attempted to produce a premature and unearned “liberty without the associated and ever-increasing conquest of self.” [UB 54:1.5] Caligastia’s iniquity was the revolutionary “destruction of restraining barriers, barriers which the mortal minds of those times had not experientially overridden.” [UB 118:8.7] which caused “indescribable confusion and racial pandemonium.” [UB 67:5.1] How have our own actions impinged upon others, behavioral barriers, barriers which prevent breakdown between transitions, and which only experience (climaxed by revelation) can override?
(II) There is but one essential to the Adamic epoch: “had [Adam and Eve] been more patient, they would have eventually met with success.” [UB 75:8.4] But “the situation seemed so desperate as to demand something for relief not embraced in the original plans.” UB 75:0.1 Even though they were “adequately equipped and fully instructed concerning every duty and danger” [UB 74:1.6] they would encounter, Adam and Eve experienced a revolutionary shock to their systems that no classroom could have prepared them for. They responded with revolution, something that “could be done in the meantime immediately to advance the needy waiting tribes.” [UB 75:3.5] The default was an impatient individual’s bypassing of what would have become a group attainment, a revolutionary circumvention of the divine law and opportunity to share.
(III) Machiventa’s revelation contains much insight into how “skillfully to put the leaven of new truth in the midst of the old beliefs.” [UB 178:1.16] “Melchizedek taught his followers all they had capacity to receive and assimilate” [UB 93:3.6] but he “well knew how difficult it is to suddenly uproot long-established customs.” [UB 93:4.14] “Sometimes error is so great that its rectification by revelation would be fatal to those slowly emerging truths which are essential to its experiential overthrow.” [UB 48:6.32]
. . . It has often been the error of the teachers of new truth to attempt too much, to attempt to supplant slow evolution by sudden revolution. The Melchizedek missionaries in Mesopotamia raised a moral standard too high for the people; they attempted too much, and their noble cause went down in defeat. . . . [UB 95:1.8]
Ikhnaton was a typical example of this unfortunate combination of religious sincerity and unwise methodology. Since Melchizedek’s disappearance, “no human being up to that time had possessed such an amazingly clear concept of the revealed religion of Salem as Ikhnaton.” [UB 95:5.2] Yet this remarkable Egyptian prophet also mistakenly “went too fast; he built too much, more than could stand when he had gone.” [UB 95:5.4] His changes were revolutionary. “The teaching of immortality for all men was too advanced for the Egyptians.” [UB 95:5.13]
(IV) But how to skillfully advance truth in the lives of our brethren? Jesus answers: “Be reminded that a wise tailor does not sew a piece of new and unshrunk cloth upon an old garment, lest, when it is wet, it shrink and produce a worse rent. Neither do men put new wine into old wine skins, lest the new wine burst the skins so that both the wine and the skins perish. The wise man puts the new wine into fresh wine skins.” [UB 147:7.2]
In a universe of time, experience is sovereign. “Even revelation must submit to the graduated control of evolution.” [UB 89:9.3] There is a time-process in the acquirement of experience to attain any given sphere of status. To give advice not asked for is like “unshrunk cloth,” hardly “adapted to local conditions in time and space.” [UB 92:4.9] and which produces a worse rent. To follow Jesus’ injunction above is to share, to draw very near to people, to literally invest in their experience.
Jesus does not force himself into our lives. He asks us to participate with him but only enters into such a partnership by our own willing decision to open the door. Even his Spirit of Truth is not an invasion, being “almost wholly limited in function and power by man’s personal reception of that which constitutes the sum and substance of the mission of the bestowal Son.” [UB 34:5.5] “The Spirit never drives, only leads.” [UB 34:6.11] “The Master’s yoke is, indeed, easy, but even so, he never imposes it; every individual must take this yoke of his own free will.” [UB 141:3.7]
Immanuel’s commission to Jesus says it all: as the Son of Man, “as a mortal creature of the realm, in weakness made powerful by faith-submission to the will of your Father, I suggest that you graciously achieve all you have repeatedly declined arbitrarily to accomplish by power and might when you were so endowed at the time of the inception of this sinful and unjustified rebellion.” [UB 120:2.2] And this he did. “He would not compromise with the revolutionary techniques of Caligastia.” [UB 136:9.2] But do we yet realize the significance of God, as a man, experientially wresting the sovereignty of a disloyal system from his fallen sons, which, as God, he refused to arbitrarily seize from its apostate ruler?
It is “the goodness of God,” not his power or force, “which leads to repentance.” [UB 48:6.8] And it was LOVE which caused Jesus to say, “inasmuch as you minister to one of the least of my brethren, you have done this service to me.” [UB 176:3.5] That is sovereignty—sovereign enough to share the kingdom with publicans and sinners! In fact the kingdom of heaven is “built upon such a mediocre human foundation!” [UB 139:10.9]
(V) “The Master Physical Controllers and the Morontia Power Supervisors are able so to modify the revolutions of the primary units of matter and at the same time so to transform these associations of energy as to create this new [mota] substance.” [UB 48:1.3] The Urantia revelation, likewise, had its origins in an analogous man ner of “primary units.” “More than one thousand human concepts representing the highest and most advanced planetary knowledge of spiritual values and universe meanings” were “so modified:” and “at the same time so transformed” as to render their spiritual content consistent with the revelatory mandate. [UB 0:12.12]
Epochal revelation unfailingly portrays that which is necessary for the growth of mankind, “the essentials of truth for an entire age on earth.” [UB 141:7.7] The Urantia Book contains enough “stimulus to creative speculation” [UB 30:0.2] We are to grow beyond the rote repetition of quotes, “and instead aspire to become living prophets of the Most High and spiritual heroes of the coming kingdom.” [UB 155:6.7] “God and men need each other.” [UB 195:10.3] We have been offered the opportunity to participate, to become “the temporal personality fulcrums on which the levers of revealed truth depend.” [UB 92:5.4]
A further truth garnered from the garden and its fall: “The civilization of the second Eden was an artificial structure—it had not been evolved—and was therefore doomed to deteriorate until it reached a natural evolutionary level.” [UB 78:2.3] “While divine or spiritual insight is a gift, human wisdom must evolve.” [UB 101:4.2]
ALL revolution (whether giving unasked-for advice, affectation, assuming unearned leadership, making arbitrary demands, forced adoption of advanced ideas of culture, or even the revolutionary overthrow of personally bad habits) may produce immediate results, but quickly and often tragically regresses, gravitating the subject concerned to and fro like a pendulum toward “a state of reciprocal balance” [78.2.4] to stabilize at that natural point of previous evolutionary attainment, and much to the sorrow of everyone involved.
This ethic for living applies not just to individual relations but to all other spheres of human interaction, and extends from the sovereignty of the individual up through the family, peer groups, tribe, institutions, race, industrial units, and nation, even to the sovereignty of all humankind—global federal union. [UB 134:6.9] It extends from worlds to systems to the Paradise Father of your sovereign will. This reality of sharing is founded on the divine origin of personality, and the way from here to Paradise treads this straight and narrow path.
“The one characteristic of Jesus’ teaching was that the morality of his philosophy originated in the personal relation of the individual to God—this very child-father relationship.” [UB 140:10.5] “He taught morality, not from the nature of man, but from the relation of man to God.” [UB 140:10.8] To the extent that the Father becomes sovereign in our lives, to that extent are the various other spheres of sovereignty in our existence, from family to global union, slowly and progressively aligned.
“The religious challenge of this age,” [UB 2:7.10] our challenge, is a commission to construct something new and appealing out of the revelation’s teachings, in our own words and in our own ways, and adapted to our local conditions. This challenge is a “universe ideal of human relationships,” [UB 147:4.9] —sharing—which God desires that we “duplicate in time.” and is bound up in the new commandment of Christ to “love one another even as I have loved you.” [UB 180:1.1]
Jacob Dix lives and works in northern Sweden while studying at the University of Umea. He has participated in the annual young adult tours and has also been a host to those tour participants passing through when not able to join them. Jacob is 30 years old, and has recently been host to a Urantia Book discussion group in Umea founded on the laws of Urmia.
| Year 2006 Update on The Coming Scientific Validation of The Urantia Book | Volume 8, Number 1, 2007 (Summer) — Index | Personality and Man |