© 2022 Olga López
© 2022 Urantia Association of Spain
Newsletter of the Urantia Association of Spain
Light and Life — January 2022
¶ In this number
- Editorial Light and Life - January 2022
- Works – our recommendations of the month
- History and teachings – Chronicles of the life of Jesus
- Children’s Guide to The Urantia Book: Eternal Life
- Books – our recommendations of the month
- Other spiritual growth books
- Video – our recommendation of the month
- Navigating through life – Always dance and heal
- My favorite paragraph
- Urantia Quiz: Gloria Andreu
- The new revision of the Spanish translation of The Urantia Book is here
- About the Light and Life newsletter
¶ Editorial Light and Life – January 2022
Maria Jose Sanchez Santamaria
There is a beautiful legend of medieval origin that tells the story of a theologian, later identified with Saint Augustine, who narrates the following anecdote:
«One day, Saint Augustine was walking along the seashore turning over in his head many of the doctrines about the reality of God, one of them, the doctrine of the Trinity. Suddenly, he looked up and saw a beautiful boy who was playing in the sand, by the sea. He took a closer look and saw the boy run into the sea, fill the bucket with sea water, and return to where he was before, emptying the water into a hole in the sand. So the boy did it over and over again.
«Until St. Augustine, immersed in great curiosity, approached the child and asked him “‘Hey, child, what are you doing?’ And the child replied: ‘I’m taking all the water out of the sea and I’m going to put it in this hole’. And Saint Augustine says: ”But that is impossible."
“And the child answers: ‘It is more impossible to try to do what you are doing: try to understand in your little mind the mystery of God.’”
This problem, trying to understand with our little mortal mind the mystery of God, was a real challenge for the revelators who had been working for years on the writing of The Urantia Book. At the very beginning of the book, the Prologue, already announces it to us:
“It is exceedingly difficult to present enlarged concepts and advanced truth, in our endeavor to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception, when we are restricted to the use of a circumscribed language of the realm. But our mandate admonishes us to make every effort to convey our meanings by using the word symbols of the English tongue.” (UB 0:0.2)
¶ Works – our recommendations of the month
The origin of the beginning (Eduardo Altuzarra)
In this PowerPoint presentation, the author of this secondary work offers a very schematic graphic vision of the most outstanding concepts of the Prologue. Highly recommended and useful for those who have special difficulty with this chapter of the book, so necessary to understand the rest of its content.
Our Creative Deities, a Supreme Relationship (Linda Buselli)
This work is a transcript of a presentation the author gave at a 2004 Urantia conference on the theme of Creative Mother Spirit. Specifically, the author deals with the relationship established by the Creator Son with his Creative Spirit and the duality of attributes and functions that exists between them and the great value of this duality in the organization of the local universe.
In this presentation, the author reviews the most important concepts that appear in the documents of the book that deal with religion in a more specific way: 100, 101, 102 and 103. Well, as she says in the introduction of her work: «Religion as described in The Urantia Book contains a new definition of religion that is made to be lived, since it tries to live our relationship with God in a personal and non-transferable way. This new concept of religion makes a big difference and challenges us to experience a new way to progress and to be better than we are."
Science cannot replace religion (Antti Roine)
This work by Antti Roine, a Finnish reader, exposes very clearly why science cannot be the source of meaning for our existence, which is one of the prerogatives of religion. As he says at the beginning of his article: «Science does not manifest itself on questions that are of fundamental importance for the human spirit, specifically, on good and evil. It is religion that finds the answers to these questions."
¶ History and teachings – Chronicles of the life of Jesus
JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE URANTIA BOOK
We present the following installment of the chronicles of the life of Jesus, which on this occasion contains what the revealers tell us in document 129. Within the PDF you will see a button from which you can access the text of the document from the Foundation’s website Urantia.
¶ Children’s Guide to The Urantia Book: Eternal Life
We continue to review the secondary work A Children’s Guide to The Urantia Book, by Mary Livingston. This is the next chapter, dedicated to eternal life, and it begins like this:
Oh, how many decisions can we make in life! A good and important decision is to try to find the Father in Paradise and be like Him. When you decide on some occasion that you want to go to the Father and be with Him, you are granted eternal life. This means that the inner spirit will grow in you forever, that you, your thoughts and feelings will live forever.»
Download the entire chapter in PDF format
¶ Books – our recommendations of the month
See you in your dreams (Olga López)
In the words of its author: “Somewhere in The Urantia Book we are told that the Thought Adjuster tries to communicate with us through dreams, although the transmission channel is too often disturbed by our own thoughts, fears and obsessions. One fine day, I wondered what that communication would be like if, due to a given circumstance, we were forced to “listen” to the Adjuster. And there my second novel was born. In this exercise of imagination, I created Ángel, a protagonist who is an expert in fleeing forward, a young professional completely dedicated to his work who, suddenly, a tragic circumstance “forces” him to listen to his divine spark, and this fact transforms complete his life and his vision of existence.”
More information about the book
For all my brothers (Gonzalo Vilar)
It is appreciated, and it is also a sign that the Urantia movement is in good health in our country, that essays and novels related to the teachings of The Urantia Book are published. In this book, it is worth noting that, before each chapter or topic covered, the author gives his point of view on the particular topic, in light of the teachings of The Urantia Book. Finally, a compilation of quotes from the book is added, true pearls of wisdom that shine by themselves.
Read the full review on our website here
¶ Other spiritual growth books
The Knight in Rusty Armor (Robert Fisher)
This novel (or rather we should say short story) tells the story of a medieval knight who, in order to always be there where he is needed, wears his armor 24 hours a day. One day he tries to take it off and finds it impossible to do so. He then begins a path in which, helped by different friends that he finds, he gradually understands what armor really is and how he can take it off.
The new psychology of love (M. Scott Peck)
This book is highly recommended, because it makes us think about how we should love others, and it makes us wonder what are those maladjustments that we carry from childhood, maladjustments that we should fix in order to fully develop spiritually. The author starts from the premise that life is difficult, and shows us how most of us look for illegitimate shortcuts to escape difficulties instead of facing and defeating them. He points out laziness as the main enemy of our spiritual development, since it pulls us towards a fictitious comfort and well-being.
¶ Video – our recommendation of the month
Is evolution real? (Urantia Writings Studies)
This month we recommend another of the videos from the channel Urantia Writing Studies, published at the end of last November, in which the exciting subject of evolution and the mechanisms that commissioned to carry it out, both from the point of view of traditional science and the enlightening information that appears in The Urantia Book. The video highlights the fact that the book indicates that there have been species that have suddenly emerged from different ones, as if there were some conditions that triggered certain mechanisms, as if there was a kind of biological clock that adjusts evolutionary changes. to the geological epochs of the Earth.
¶ Navigating through life – Always dance and heal
A young man from the tribe comes to the old man and says:
I will no longer participate in the group.
-But why? asked the old man.
The young man replied:
—I see my sister speaking ill of another; a small group that lives talking and does not support, people who during the dance seem to be trying to show off instead of looking at the tree and so many other bad things that I see.
The old man replies:
“Very good, but before you go, I want you to do me a favor: take a full glass of water and go around the circle three times without spilling a drop of water on the ground.” After that, you can leave the group.
And the young man thought: “Very easy!”, and he did the three turns as the old man asked him. When he finished, he said:
-Ready.
And the old man asked:
—When you were walking around, did you see any brother speak ill of another?
The answer was no.
“Did you see the dancers complain to each other?”
-No.
—Did you see someone who was not supporting?
-No.
-You know why? he asked, “You were concentrating on the glass so as not to throw away the water.”
The same is in our group and in life. When our focus is our steps, our prayer and our evolution, we will not have time to see the mistakes of others.
Who leaves a circle because of another never entered to dance, to heal, to pray, to pray for humanity. Those who pay attention to others never entered to honor their ancestors, they never entered for their own evolution, to find their true spirit in dance, to serve the community.
Free yourselves from prejudice, from the opinion of others, from looking at others. HEAL AND DANCE.
¶ My favorite paragraph
M. Helena Banas
“. . . Immortality is the goal of sincerity; . . . Those who are earnest die not;” (UB 131:3.7)
Like many other readers, there are numerous quotes that I could have chosen as a favorite to comment on, as The Urantia Book is full of true pearls of wisdom that often captivate and thrill us. But I chose this one about sincerity because of the importance of this value in our lives and in our ascension through the universe, and because of the lack of sincerity in the world.
Sinceridad appears as many times in the book as truth or love. It derives from the Latin sincerĭtas and the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language defines it as **“simplicity, veracity, way of expressing or behaving free of pretense”. Other synonyms of the term are honesty, authenticity, trustworthiness, good faith, transparency, rectitude, candor, naivety, integrity, seriousness, good intentions…
As we can see, sincerity is at the root of many other moral virtues and implies nobility in our relationships, both with others and with ourselves. And this is very important and a great liberation because being sincere increases our self-esteem, makes us abandon many “pretend” poses or the desire to be another person and, once we accept ourselves as we are with total honesty, we can begin to improve our defects and improve. Align with our actions. Others will see us as someone they can trust, too, and we’ll provide a solid foundation for any friendship, including a friendship with God.
Being sincere also implies a balance in our relationships, since excessive sincerity can harm the other: “…sincerity fulfills its best function in the work of the kingdom when it is united with discretion” UB 181:2.21
Discretion and sincerity must therefore go hand in hand, and we must encourage and preserve in the little ones that innate quality that they possess, but at the same time we must warn them soon that they should not say everything they think, even if it is true, and that they must be prudent and act with others as they would like them to act with them. We must not forget it either.
And most importantly: without sincerity, without that attitude of little children that Jesus praised so much, we will not be able to know God in our personal experience, experience it, feel it… we can only believe in Him through faith; that is why sincerity is the key to the kingdom of heaven within us, as the Documents tell us.
Hence also that Jesus “highly valued sincerity —a pure heart” UB 140:8.2, and that “God never forgets sincerity”. UB 131:1.6
¶ Urantia Questionnaire: Gloria Andreu
Gloria Andreu de los Santos was born in Seville and lives in Castilleja de la Cuesta (Seville). She has worked as an administrator in a private company and is currently retired. She is the mother of two children, a boy and a girl, aged 36 and 34. She has been a reader of The Urantia Book since the 1980s.
- How did you get to The Urantia Book and why do you think you found it?
I came to The Urantia Book because of ufology, from a very young age, when I was 13 or 14 years old, I remember that I was always looking at the stars and thinking that in something so immense it was impossible for there to be only life on Earth, but it was a little later , at the age of 20, when I was lucky enough to meet my friends Antonio and Patri, who along with other colleagues belonged to a ufology group of which I became a part. It was a beautiful stage in my life, because I learned a lot and we had a great time doing field work. We never saw anything. A little later we started reading philosophy and any other book that fell into our hands, and that’s when Antonio was told about a book that they said was a revelation, but it only existed in English and had been translated into French. Luckily Antonio knows French very well and through a friend he got the book in photocopies and that’s how we started reading it. Well, Antonio read and we listened. We would meet every Thursday as a group of six or seven, sometimes eight people, and that is how The Urantia Book came into my hands. I think I found it because from a very young age I was looking for answers and I am convinced that whoever searches from the heart always finds.
- What was your first impression when reading it?
My first impression was that something inside me told me that what I was hearing had to be the truth, because I felt that for the first time I had answers to so many gaps that I had in my mind and that until now nobody and nothing knew how to answer.
¶ The new revision of the Spanish translation of The Urantia Book is here
Since last December 16, the text of the new revision of the Spanish translation of The Urantia Book is already available in electronic format.
It is available and accessible from this Foundation website:
Now that a new year begins, what better than to start reading The Urantia Book with an improved text, which will allow the book to be studied in greater depth and with the certainty that it will be faithful to the English original?
¶ About the Light and Life newsletter
Light and Life is the newsletter of the Urantia Association of Spain. From 2005 to 2016 it was published in PDF format and distributed by mail and email to the association’s reader list, but it is currently distributed in newsletter format from content in HTML format.
If you want to receive the newsletter in your email, contact the association to subscribe to the mailing list.
All papers and news from readers and study groups are welcome, so if you want to share any side work, writing, outline, image, etc., you can send it to the association and we will publish it previous evaluation of its suitability. Likewise, the Communication commission of the board of directors of the Urantia Association of Spain reserves the right to edit it so that it meets minimum spelling quality.
¶ References
- Article of the Magazine Light and Life Online: https://aue.urantia-association.org/newsletter/luz-y-vida-enero-2022/