© 1983 Jeff Wattles
© 1983 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Prayer is the most important way to discover the will of God; but finding the Father’s will is not only a matter of listening, of inner openness. What else is involved? seeking the will of God falls under the “laws of prevailing petitions” set forth in The URANTIA Book. The second of these conditions asserts, “You must have honestly exhausted the human capacity for human adjustment. You must have been industrious.” (UB 91:9.3)
What does it mean to be industrious in making human adjustments? If I am engaged in seeking the Father’s will, I must do my best with all relevant human channels of enlightenment before I can expect revelation from within to augment my efforts. Reason helps us discern what we ought to do; one of the three realities to which our mind intrinsically responds is: “Duty-the reality domain of morals in the philosophic realm, the arena of reason, the recognition of relative right and wrong. This is the judicial form of the cosmic discrimination.” (UB 16:6.7)
So one essential phase of a responsible prayer process is the use of reason, which includes drawing practical deductions from facts, gaining group wisdom, and critically examining the thoughts that come from our times of prayer.
When Michael of Nebadon went forth to live in Joshua ben Joseph, he received this advice from Immanuel: “In all other details of your oncoming bestowal we would commit you to the leading of the indwelling Adjuster, the teaching of the ever-present divine spirit of human guidance, and the reason-judgment of your expanding human mind of hereditary endowment.” (UB 120:3.9) How did Jesus use reason-judgment?
The next activity of reason I want to mention is the critical examination of the thoughts that come into the mind during prayer. It is no fun to raise questions about our ability to discern Adjuster guidance, but many of us have had the experience of doing what we inwardly felt was right and then finding out later that we were wrong. The Adjuster, perhaps, had been trying to help us be true to the best we knew, but we simply hadn’t done our homework. We didn’t know what was truly best.
Imagine a young child whose mother has warned him not to swim in a dangerous river. Suppose the child ignores the warnings, keenly wants to swim in the river, and then consults inwardly about the best thing to do. What “guidance” is the child likely to perceive? Excellent prayer requires us to “… surrender every wish of mind and every craving of soul to the transforming embrace of spiritual growth.” (UB 91:9.4) Disobedience and needless ignorance can block reason and frustrate the prayer process. For adults who know what they are doing this is serious business: “If man will not listen to the Gods as they speak to their creation of the laws of spirit, mind, and matter, the very act of such deliberate and conscious disdain by the creature turns the ears of spirit personalities away from hearing the personal petitions of such lawless and disobedient mortals.” (UB 146:2.3)
So we must challenge ourselves. Suppose in the quiet time following prayer a beautiful thought arises in consciousness. We need to remember that this may be an Adjuster-sponsored answer or it may not. Perhaps it is simply a creative product of the human mind, fusing conscious and unconscious material into a new and satisfying synthesis. Because we do not know the origin of our new idea, we must simply evaluate it for its intrinsic worth. The warning is clear: ““… it is hazardous to attempt the differentiation of the Adjusters’ concept registry from the more or less continuous and conscious reception of the dictations of mortal conscience. These are problems which will have to be solved through individual discrimination and personal decision. But a human being would do better to err in rejecting an Adjuster’s expression through believing it to be a purely human experience than to blunder into exalting a reaction of the mortal mind to the sphere of divine dignity… More often, in beings of your order, that which you accept as the Adjuster’s voice is in reality the emanation of your own intellect. This is dangerous ground, and every human being must settle these problems for himself in accordance with his natural human wisdom and superhuman insight.”” (UB 110:5.5-6)
“The technique whereby you can accept another’s idea as yours is the same whereby you may ‘let the mind which was in Christ be also in you.’” (UB 102:4.1) What do we do when accepting a friend’s idea? We consider it, think about it, put it in the context of other things that we know, find reasons to support it, and draw conclusions from it and test them with foresight we look before we leap. While at times something a friend will say rings true immediately, we do not simply open ourselves up to an authority, put ourselves in a heightened state of passivity, and follow whatever seems to be the most emotionally satisfying advice. We turn over the ideas in our minds, both because there might be some doubt that the idea is good and because we want to understand what would be involved in accepting the idea. We do not need to doubt the guidance of God, but we do need to test our mind’s deliverance sour perceptions of divine guidance.
For students of The URANTIA Book, using our reason implies careful study of the revelation. We can trust that inner guidance will not contradict epochal revelation. And as we study the book we become more aware of the “vocabulary” of concepts that the Adjuster is trying to use in communicating with the human mind.
Jesus had high standards for study: he himself was a good student at school; during one period of his life, while boat-building in Capernaum, “… he spent at least five evenings a week at intense study.” (UB 129:1.9) During the first four months they were together, Jesus led the six original apostles in more than a hundred training sessions (UB 137:7.1); they went two evenings a week to study the existing scriptures of the day (UB 137:8.1). Two years later during the training of the evangelists, Jesus would challenge Thomas to be more penetrating in his study of the story of Adam and Eve: “Why do you refuse to comprehend the meaning of the record…? And why do you refuse to interpret the meaning of the record…” (UB 148:4.7) He told Nathaniel that “… there is much in the Scriptures which would have instructed you if you had only read with discernment.” (UB 148:5.5) And he addressed the same message to John: “My son, you do not comprehend the meaning of adversity or the mission of suffering. Have you not read that masterpiece of Semitic literature — the Scripture story of the afflictions of Job?” (UB 148:6.2) Eventually he would stun the religious leaders by telling them that their questions were the result of their not knowing either the Scriptures or the living power of god.
Jesus expected the intellectually capable to remember what he said, “And do you not remember that I said to you once before that, if you had your spiritual eyes anointed, you would then see the heavens opened and behold the angels of God ascending and descending?” (UB 167:7.4) One saying should be enough. And now we have the Spirit of Truth to help us recall and understand Jesus’ words,
Before telling a parable, Jesus once said, “‘I would test you to know how you would receive this.’” (UB 151:3.15) The same high expectations that he had for his listeners then pertain today to us as readers.
Our ascendant career, “… the supreme study of mortal man” (UB 40:7.4), is illuminated tremendously by the religious life of Jesus, that knowledge “… of greatest value…” (UB 196:1.3) Is all this study an end in itself? Of course not. Spiritual realities and personal relationships alone are ends in themselves. The coordination of knowledge and striving is beautifully presented to us: “One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose.” (UB 196:1.3)
Mysticism is that distortion of religion which results when we have too small a proportion of reasoning and socialization in our efforts Godward. Fanaticism occurs when commonplace obligations are neglected, or when linear, single-minded devotion to a project, however noble, departs from the elliptical direction of divine guidance. The maturity of the vision of religion presented in The URANTIA Book is destined to make mysticism and fanaticism obsolete. While skeptics look at the irrational episodes of planetary religious history and propose to supplant faith by reason, the book says, “Faith is a traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity …” (UB 101:8.3)
Let us all enjoy the full and harmonious exercise of our faculties as we coordinate the thorough study of The URANTIA Book, a keen knowledge of the world around us, rigorous deductions from facts with moral implications, and the surprising benefits of group wisdom. Then we can be all the more prepared for the enlarged revelations of God’s will that the indwelling spirit has for each one of us.
— Jeffrey Wattles
Concord, California