© 2022 Mamadou Doudou Diagne
© 2022 Francophone Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
By
Mamadou Doudou
April 2022
Virtual conference given by Mamadou Diagne as part of the conferences organized by the Urantia association of Quebec.
Mamadou Doudou comes from Senegal and currently lives in Marseille where his wife works. He is also the father of 2 daughters. Doudou has been retired since 2012 from his position as a literature and philosophy teacher at the Dakar high school. Quite young, he became interested in spirituality and his meeting with Moussa N’Diaye was beneficial for him.
He received spiritual training from Moussa based on The Urantia Book. Currently, with his friends in Dakar, he is part of the small group of teachers who provide what is called the teaching of progressive divine wisdom, which essentially occupies all of his time. Today, his presentation is entitled “A spiritual quest: God in question”. I greet you very much Linne, I thank you for your spiritual friendship, your leadership in inviting me to give a presentation. I thank the Urantia Association of Quebec for its tireless work in promoting the ideas and ideals stemming from the Urantia revelation. I greet and thank from the bottom of my heart my brother Gaétan for our links and our collaboration concerning the defense and manifestation of spiritual truth. I greet each of you and thank you very much for your presence as well as for the questions and contributions that you will not fail to bring in order to enrich the presentation.
In fact, I am not presenting a conference in the classic sense of the term, I would rather like to share a reflection/conviction that I will briefly introduce so that the exchanges of discussions and the experiences of each other constitute the real substance. I have entitled my theme “Spiritual quest, God in question”. By spiritual quest I mean that we must seek God and find him in order to seek him better to find him even more. And this God who presents himself to us as a Spirit which in fact justifies our spiritual quest. Thus all of us who are here and many others, we find ourselves in this quest which unites us and brings us together by drawing largely on the teachings of the Urantia Book, the 5th revelation made book, which constitute in our eyes a treasure of inestimable riches.
Our quest means that we consider that the human being as a creature, as an ascending mortal, has an essential objective: God who is an absolute, eternal, infinite, and perfect being. And this being, as far as man is concerned, is represented by the Thought Adjuster. But, man realizes that God is not obvious to him, as the world is to him. Indeed, neither the human sense, nor the material mind, nor the human personality seem to be sufficiently endowed with the power allowing the transparency of the spiritual reality of God. This is why man in his spiritual quest must recognize that God is a question for his conscience, a problem to be resolved, a fundamental issue.
It is therefore appropriate for the human being to engage in a sincere and intimate relationship in an experience of creature to creator, which supposes that God also wants to make himself known. In reality, these are two symmetrical beings who position themselves in an ontological experience which made the Master Son Creator Jesus say, addressing Nicodemus, this very old rabbi of the Sanhedrin, “I declare to you that unless a man is born of the spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (UB 142:6.5).
It is this very moving central question of Nicodemus which secretes other very important ones of which I will mention 6 which seem essential to me but on which I await your enriching contributions.
¶ The first question is faith.
Faith is a method, a technique, a living spiritual process which offers me the possibility of sharing my mortal material human nature with the divine spirit which resides in me and which, for its part, strongly wishes to share its spiritual nature with me. The conceptual content of this existential sharing is indicated in the program of faith with its 7 levels as it is set out in booklet 101 on page 1112.
¶ The second question is experience.
Living faith cannot be reduced to an affirmation of principle or even a sum of intellectual knowledge or admiration or astonishment in the face of extraordinary facts or events. Faith, in truth, sets in motion a path of personal and progressive spiritual experience. In other words, it is the total being, as a mental body and personality, which is mobilized to go in search of and conquer the Thought Adjuster. But for this experience to be effective and transformative, it would be wise for it to be based on a few prerequisites.
The first prerequisite is the adequate and living understanding of fundamentals such as goodness, love, mercy, truth, beauty and evolution.
The second prerequisite is the acceptance of 3 existential postures which must become spiritual habits: worship, prayer and service.
The third prerequisite is soul consciousness. It is appropriate to be partially conscious of course of the morontia soul which constitutes an intermediate middle part between the human self and the divine Adjuster.
¶ The third question is that of personality.
During our spiritual quest we discover God experientially, spiritually and always progressively and we can then become so convinced that God is the first and last principle of reality that we then proceed to a reorientation of our personality and our will on the objective which is God. We truly make him a decisive priority in our planetary existence.
¶ The fourth question
it is love and brotherhood.
Love is the means of expression of the good, the true and the beautiful, the first tension of spiritual love consists in loving God first. I also refer to the level of faith in order to let ourselves be transformed by the spirit and by participating in the growth of our soul.
This is the first commandment of Jesus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”
His 2nd commandment which constitutes the 2nd tension of love is directed towards men, therefore towards our mortal companions, our earthly brothers, with a view to enlightening them, to offering them spiritual truth and to supporting them in their personal quest for the inner spirit. We clearly hear Jesus “you will love your neighbor as for myself”, this is the basis of fraternity.
¶ The fifth question is brotherhood.
After the love of men it is appropriate to broaden ourselves to the spirit of brotherhood with all the creatures of the universe and the cosmos. Indeed, all the beings of the cosmos are more or less involved in the plan of evolution of the father. This is why they can be the object of our love within the framework of this vast family of the Universal Father.
¶ The sixth question is the Supreme.
He is the God of time and space. Through the Thought Adjuster we share in the work of perfecting the grand universe after the Universal Father at the dawn of time declared his purpose to create man in his image and to raise him in his likeness. Thus with the growth of our souls we contribute to the realization of the will of God by becoming more and more conscious of Supremacy, first in our inner life under the guidance of the Thought Adjuster, then in relation to the greater Whole with God the Supreme who will lead us to the emergence of the Supreme Being at the end of time; that is to say, each of us is a part of the whole, has a part to play, a place to occupy on the planet Urantia and on the subsequent and successive levels of existence by expressing and revealing the personality values bestowed by our father. Progressively, our soul perceives the plan of the supreme and intuitively perceives the parts of the Supreme progressing in the perfection of Urantia.
I will conclude. God creates us and gives us the gift of life, a mind and a personality of a material order, then he makes himself immanent in our being as a Thought Adjuster. And this Divine Spirit wants to humanize himself and that is why we are here on the planet. Our cooperation with the Divine Adjuster results in the progressive ascending morontia soul which satisfies both man and God. This is why it seems that it is very important to question God. The question of God inaugurates multiple questions about God and finally we arrive at a questioning, an almost infinite questioning which opposes the dimension of the infinite God that we carry on our dear planet, certainly darkened but how much compensated by the 5th revelation of the Urantia Book.
Thank you for your attention.