© 2003 Nancy Johnson
© 2003 The Urantia Book Fellowship
I’ve been pondering the attributes and attitudes of God these many years and marvel more and more at how he can always be objective about everything that happens. He understands everything so perfectly that when they nailed his son to the cross, he loved “them” as much as he did Christ and forgave them even before they asked. He must have seen the situation in an entirely different light than we do.
Remember how we reacted to 9/11? The world was shocked—outraged!—and we wasted no time declaring a war on terrorism. We saw the destruction of the World Trade Center and the taking of nearly 3,000 lives as a godless act. Strangely enough, the terrorists see us as godless, and they praised Allah for making their attack successful beyond their expectations. Stranger yet, God is there, knowing exactly what happened, yet loving the terrorists just the same as their victims of that fateful day. God is objective. Sin isn’t real to him. He’s no respecter of persons. He loves all his children equally.
Webster defines objective as: emphasizing or expressing the nature of reality AS IT IS, apart from personal reflections or feelings; also, expressing or involving the use of facts without distortion by personal feelings or prejudices (emphasis mine).
I thought about this long and hard and figured this is probably our biggest problem. Human beings are usually just the opposite—no matter what’s really going on, it’s how we think and feel about it that we get all fired up about Webster says that’s subjective.
Being objective is an important aspect of God’s perfection. He extended us an invitation to become perfect, even as he is perfect, so I figured it would behoove me to take a close look at this aspect of his perfection.
I put myself under a microscope to look at my own reactions to everyday situations, especially if I was feeling tested, trying to recognize what I reacted to and why I reacted that way. Then I’d ask God what was really going on and how did it appear to him. Then I studied others— whoever was handy—trying to find out what they reacted to. Many people like to explain themselves, and it was no surprise that they were quite willing to talk about the things they react to. Oftentimes I explained why I was curious about peoples’ reactions, and there were a few who got into the spirit of it with me.
The trickiest problem we ran into was facing that we’re actually being subjective when we think we’re being objective. In time it became a mind game, and we finally reached the point where we could laugh at ourselves as we were caught in the act of being subjective. It’s even better when we catch ourselves.
The Urantia Book says on [UB 100:1.2] that ignorance and prejudice are the greatest inhibitors of growth. It’s hard to separate the two or to figure out which comes first. Are we ignorant because we’re so wrapped up in our feelings and emotions and preconceived ideas that we can’t see the forest for the trees? Or, do we misinterpret and distort reality because we’re ignorant? We can’t see reality as God sees it; that’s for sure. In fact, we can hardly get ourselves out of a situation far enough to see it as the angels see it.
In a sense, we each view reality as if we were the center of the universe. We certainly start out that way – aware only of our own needs and wants and feelings. Everything else is outside of our “center” and we eventually grow to have a lot of thoughts and opinions and more and more feelings about what goes on “out there.” It is said that by the time we’re six years old our attitudes are rather firmly established. Children rarely question what’s really happening “out there” or why—their primary concern is how it affects them. They busy themselves learning ways to make things go the way they want them to. And how they want them to go depends on how they’ve learned to feel about themselves and their environment.
Once set, those attitudes and opinions and feelings are a part of us—unconscious for the most part—and all new situations are weighed from that point of reference. “Normal” is what’s normal to us. We assume it’s normal for everyone. It can, and often does, come as quite a shock to learn that people we’ve become very close to don’t think or feel the way we do about some things that arc pretty important to us. Once we realize this, we’re usually inclined to “set them straight.” For most of us, it’s many a heartache later before we start to question our own points of view. Some go to their graves having questioned themselves very little—the way they see it is the way it is, and there is no other way. Period. And that’s subjective.
Reality is whatever it is—nothing can change that. That’s objective. It appears different to each of us because we see it from our own center-of-the-universe, and that makes our viewpoint subjective.
Thank heaven for the vicissitudes of existence and certain inevitabilities we must encounter. [UB 3:5.5-13] Essentially, vicissitude means change. It implies a change great enough to constitute a reversal of what has been and by means that are beyond our control. In the plan of creature evolution, we’re supposed to switch from subjective (and self-centered) to objective (God-like). We’re assured it produces joy. We’re assured that this joy is ours for the striving.
The pain or negative reactions we experience can only come from resisting the necessary changes. Oftentimes we experience discomfort in a situation and honestly don’t know it’s because we’re resisting some needed change. Most religions teach something about the virtues of long suffering, and if we accept that and are brave about it, it may not occur to us to investigate what we might be doing ourselves that’s causing the discomfort. We just accept it and find that we’re better persons for having bravely endured. That certainly may be true, but that does not mean it was necessary. We have full control over how much discomfort we experience in our Paradise ascent, and it is in exact proportion to how much we resist the change from subjective to objective. So even though our resistance may be unintentional, it nonetheless produces discomfort.
Most of our discomfort is intentional but unconscious. We hold tenaciously to our ideas of what we consider to be right or wrong. Parties on both sides of a disagreement consider themselves right, or at least hold the other side to be wrong; otherwise, there would be no disagreement. Both sides are probably right, and both are probably wrong. We can see how others often make that mistake, but we have great difficulty being objective where our own value systems are concerned. We’re told quite plainly on [UB 48:6.33] that we “can be technically right as to fact and everlastingly wrong in the truth.” Subjective creatures that we are, we probably interpreted that as an assurance that those who are in disagreement with us are wrong. Our own views are “right,” of course, or we wouldn’t believe in them. We can correct this imbalance by trading viewpoints and trying to defend theirs against our own. We can see our views more clearly then.
One of our favorite ways to resist change is also intentional but unconscious. We blame others for whatever misery comes our way. We know we wouldn’t intentionally make ourselves miserable, so it’s obvious someone else is doing this to us, and we can always come up with someone to blame. Psychology has made enormous strides forward in recent years. If we’ve kept abreast with the latest findings, we can readily see that it doesn’t matter what anyone else “does to us,” we’re in strict control of how much we suffer as a result. And if the choice is ours, so is the responsibility for that choice.
If what we read is true about these people who can walk barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals without any sign of burning or pain, we can infer that all of us also have control over physical pain. We just haven’t learned the trick yet. We know there are conditions called low and high pain tolerance. People with low pain tolerance often think people with high pain tolerance are just lucky. It could be that people with high pain tolerance make their own “luck” by their attitude. Most will allow that they just don’t give their pain any more attention than it takes to make it go away, and they busy themselves with some kind of work they consider more important than the pain. It’s a technique of dwelling less on the self and more on what the self is doing, and that is a step toward becoming objective.
On [UB 48:6.26] we find support for this technique. It says the work we are doing is important. The self is not. It’s a handy way to get rid of physical pain, but we find it more noticeably effective in ridding ourselves of a psychological burden brought on by ego. Who of us has not had our feathers ruffled more often than we care to admit? And how often has the real joy of some of our better efforts been marred because we didn’t get as much reward or appreciation as we were expecting? It goes on to say we lose a lot of energy to the wear and tear of ego dignity and how much more we can accomplish when we correct that problem. It’s easier said than done, but just think of all the trouble and energy we’d save if we didn’t resist the change!
[UB 48:6-7] is full of ideas we can help ourselves with. We make a lot of plans in our lives that include other people—marriage, family, work, friends, groups, etc. The more subjective we are about what we expect from these relationships, the more certain we can be of disappointments. An unconscious subjective attitude is expressed here in slightly exaggerated form by: “I can’t control myself, so I must control others in order to insure my happiness (or peace of mind).” Objectively, the opposite is more apt to succeed: “I can’t control others, but I can control myself, and I’ll be responsible for my own happiness (or peace of mind).”
Every day in many ways we’re subjective. Every time we feel the slightest discomfort, physically or emotionally, we can probably trace the cause back to some subjective attitude or opinion we’re not willing to yield up. Some of these we wouldn’t even admit to ourselves, much less to anyone else, so we busy ourselves at “growing spiritually.” That’s something like trying to build a house without a foundation—the first ill wind that comes along will blow it over. Notice how often the book refers to our physical (emotional), mindal, and spiritual growth, and notice, too, that its always presented in that order. I presume that was intentional.
Sometimes we know we’re being subjective and find it doesn’t produce any discomfort. A closer look at “subjective” revealed that it comes in two forms-positive and negative. Humans are subjective creatures-there’s no escaping that reality. I accept three things then: (1) It must he a part of God’s plan; (2) God’s plan is perfect and loving; and (3) It must be to our advantage to be subjective.
It seems we would have to be subjective just to get started living and keep on living until our minds grow enough to respond to the spiritual gravity circuit. Babies might choose to cancel out and call the whole thing off after that rude slap on the rear they get as they arrive, but mother’s loving arms may help them decide to stick around and see what this is all about.
We’d have to be subjective to go inside ourselves and search for potentials to develop. Whatever motivates us to do this in the beginning doesn’t matter. Eventually we’ll learn that this is God’s way of experiencing himself. If we went on realizing our potentials with that as the sole purpose—so God can experience himself- that would be pretty darned objective. We’re probably more motivated by the eternal reward we’ve been promised, but that’s okay. Our Father delights in rewarding us.
Most of the time we’re playing a subjective/negative game called “my will be done.” When we exhaust our energies and realize it isn’t worth the hassle, we can always transform and reenergize by taking a subjective/positive stand: “It is my will that Your will be done,” which is what the game of life is all about. How much and how long we play around in the negative is strictly up to us.
I question that anyone but God can ever be totally objective because he’s the only one who will ever know all that is. We’ll probably become objective only within whatever sphere we attain perfection. For us in the flesh, objectivity—reality comprehension—is an ideal. We will become increasingly objective as we discern more and more eternal truths, and the revelators have already advised us that most of the truth we discern here is more relative and evolutionary than it is eternal. It’s a long road to objectivity.
So maybe we would be wise to content ourselves with the awareness that we’re almost totally subjective and spend more time converting negatives to positives. That’s probably the key to discerning truths and becoming objective, anyway.
Nancy Johnson is a puzzle person who has worked extensively with the text of The Urantia Book for 27 years. She typed the text of the book into an electronic format in 1981, and she indexed it electronically in 1990. Nancy has typeset both Uversa Press editions of The Urantia Book. As a member of the Fellowship’s Publications Committee, she also typesets the Mighty Messenger.
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