© 2022 Olga López
© 2022 Urantia Association of Spain
Newsletter of the Urantia Association of Spain
Light and Life — May 2022
¶ In this number
- Editorial – May 2022
- Works – our recommendations of the month
- History and teachings – Chronicle of the life of Jesus
- A Children’s Guide to The Urantia Book: The Parents of Jesus
- Other spiritual growth books
- Video – our recommendation of the month
- Navigating through life – The connection
- My favorite paragraph
- Urantia Quiz: Gema Villa
- Jubilee of Jubilees – May 15
- About the Light and Life newsletter
¶ Editorial – May 2022
M. José Sánchez Santamaría
transformation into god
Throughout history we meet multiple beings that show us how we can progress spiritually and that allow us to join forces, team up with them, have more allies in this essential task on Earth.
In 1584 a simple friar, Saint John of the Cross, wrote to a friend: “The most perfect degree of perfection that can be reached in this life is transformation into God.”
“The transformation in God” is the crucial experience in our lives, a colossal process, a being born again… dying to a way of life based on the little self (egocentrism, materialism, dehumanization, denaturing, etc.) and resurrecting in life , that is, being born to another way of living, coherent and consistent with one’s own divine nature.
Of this peculiar metamorphosis, of this new birth, Christ already spoke many centuries ago with Nicodemus, a distinguished member of the Sanhedrin. Someone who belonged to an institution concerned with preserving the fossilized truth, interested in preserving privileges and economic ties with political power, was received by Jesus of Nazareth with serenity, seriousness and dignity. In response to his questions, Jesus replied: “Truly, truly, I tell you, Nicodemus, whoever is not born from above cannot see the kingdom of God.”
To Nicodemus’s perplexity, Jesus replied:
¶ Works – our recommendations of the month
Material time, morontia time and spiritual time (Jeanmarie Chaise)
Despite what the title might indicate, this article (published in the magazine Le Lien Urantien, of the French readers association) rather than a reflection of what time itself is, reviews our upward career and the relationship that we will have in each of its stages with space and time and what it means to transcend the latter. Because, as the author says: «time and space are presented as a kind of abscissa and ordinates of a cosmic construction that can only be overcome by achieving the absolute. And all this capacity to number is inscribed inside ten number symbols.
The author says at the beginning of this work: «According to The Urantia Book (…), the first human beings (which correspond more or less in their text to that known as Homo erectus) evolved approximately 1,000,000 years ago. He also recounts that almost 38,000 years ago, Adam and Eve introduced some genetic improvements to our gene pool, which improved brain function and resistance to disease (which roughly corresponds to Homo sapiens sapiens)." Well, this work reviews the scientific findings of mutations in the human genome that go back to the arrival of the Material Sons, as the revelators affirm.
In this work, the author reviews and compares the figures of Abner and Paul of Tarsus, since they personify different attitudes towards the gospel of Jesus: one, that of Abner, who, despite being much more faithful to the initial message, quickly fell into oblivion, in the face of Paul, who made many doctrinal concessions to adapt to the previous beliefs of other peoples. In the words of the author: «this reflection can be very useful to us, since the mission of Jesus supposed the fourth revelation of the age, and we, the readers of The Urantia Book, have the responsibility to avoid that the fifth revelation is distorted with time".
About the personality (Seppo Kanerva)
We present to you here a very personal reflection of someone who has spent decades studying the book and who was president of Urantia Foundation; a reflection related to one of the newest concepts that appear in The Urantia Book. Seppo begins his presentation thus: «Personality is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universes (UB 5:6.2). So, if we were able to solve this “mystery of the universes” in a speech of twenty minutes, we would be witnessing a miracle of proportions that would not only shake the Earth, but the entire universe. Fear not! Nothing of that magnitude is going to happen. Instead, what you are going to hear is the understanding of a perplexed person who has studied the question and has implored, in the manner of a “de profundis I exclaim to you, Domine,” for superhuman wisdom to guide his mind while he tries to understand the issue and share his understanding with you.”
¶ History and teachings – Chronicle 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 revelators tell us in document 133 (The return from Rome). Inside the PDF you will see a button from where you can access the text of the document from the Urantia Foundation website.
¶ Children’s Guide to The Urantia Book: The Parents of Jesus
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 the parents of Jesus, and it begins like this:
"Before the birth of Jesus, an angel visited his mother. The angel told her that she would have a very special son and to call him Jesus. He also told him that Jesus would be great and that he would become a special spiritual teacher.
Download the entire chapter in PDF format
¶ Other spiritual growth books
The Nine Revelations (James Redfield)
This book alludes to the revelations collected in a Manuscript found in Peruvian lands. According to these revelations, the end of the millennium will mark the beginning of a change of consciousness and attitude towards the world around us.
Among the ideas contained in this book we have the following:
- There are no coincidences.
- Coincidences are normally messages that must be interpreted in relation to what we are experiencing, to our problems. The same thing happens with our dreams.
- We must trust not only what we perceive with our five senses, but also our intuition. The author affirms in this book that the New Age will arrive in all its splendor, without the need to go through traumatic changes of the “planetary disasters” type. Whether it is really so, only the Father knows.
See full review on our website
The Sacraments of Life (Leonardo Boff)
In the author’s words, the intention of this essay is “to awaken the sacramental dimension that is asleep or profaned in our lives.” Based on small real anecdotes, full of humanity, Boff reels us off the sacramental universe: the sacrament of the cigarette butt, the sacrament of the glass, the sacrament of the primary school teacher, which make us realize why the Christian sacramental universe, which has undergone a process of ritual mummification, needs to be explained, and something that needs to be explained is that it speaks little of itself, it has become sclerotized, it is not a sign.
See full review on our website
¶ Video – our recommendation of the month
Timeline from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion (Urantia Radio)
Now that Easter has passed a few days ago and we recall the events that preceded the death on the cross of our dear Jesus of Nazareth, it is worth reviewing everything that happened in light of the teachings of The Urantia Book. Our friends at Radio Urantia have created a video in a round table format where the participants recount and comment on the events that occurred in this period of time.
¶ Navigating Life – The Connection
I have a friendship that lately has been sad, off. You have recently had a series of experiences that have brought you to that state.
After much talking and making her look “inside” herself, she concluded that what she needed was to have a real “connection” with people, because she was sick of being alone.
I tried to make her see that it was not true that she was alone, but that she was simply not as she would like to be, because that voice in her head had convinced her that to be happy in her life, relationships, friendships, etc. they had to be a certain way and that their suffering arose from the fact that this was not happening.
It is one more example of the lies and tricks of the ego, which constantly tells us and tries to convince us that if we got something from this world (whatever it is) then we would be happy and at peace.
In the case of my friendship it was having a “connection”, for others it will be an amount of money, health, fame, recognition, possessions, a certain body… Objectives and goals that will also change over time.
Idols that the ego shows us to look outside to solve the infinite feeling of lack that we all have inside us and that makes it so that nothing is ever enough. And there we go like crazy in that fruitless race in the achievement of desire after desire.
It is an absolutely lost war, since nothing in this world will fully satisfy us.
The simple fact of believing that we have achieved it gives rise to the fear of losing the object, person or situation that seems to have given it and thus we will be slaves to it. And that is what the ego wants: to make us dependent on something or someone; that is, of the world and its false illusions.
I explained it to my friend as best as possible and I ended up saying: it’s okay that you want to find people similar to your beliefs, tastes and way of seeing life because, if we can choose, then we choose to our liking, but don’t think that there there is the happiness that you seek so much.
Do not become a slave to that ideal. Do not listen to that voice in your head that thinks it knows what your path to peace should be like. Eliminate from your mind all those false thoughts that give rise to your needs. The only connection you must have is with yourself to find out what happens in your mind, in your life, in your world, and thus see what judgments, what false beliefs dominate you and that result in that bad feeling in which you find yourself.
The maximum peace that we can obtain here is the consequence of freeing ourselves from the lies of that voice in our head that gives rise to the needs that we believe we have.
With a mind free of desires and therefore of all needs, what would prevent me from being happy or at peace in any situation?
¶ My favorite paragraph
Jorge Nagore
The wealth of contents of The Urantia Book provides a multitude of exciting paragraphs that have undoubtedly marked all readers. Impressed in general by the specific theme of Thought Adjusters, I have chosen a few lines, I think unique throughout the entire book, in which an Adjuster speaks for himself, referring to his mortal associate.
. . . Among other things, the Adjuster pleaded “that he more faithfully give me his sincere co-operation, more cheerfully endure the tasks of my emplacement, more faithfully carry out the program of my arrangement, more patiently go through the trials of my selection, more persistently and cheerfully tread the path of my choosing, . . . I will be true to my personality trust. And I exhort him to survival, not to disappoint me, not to deprive me of the reward of my patient and intense struggle. On the human will our achievement of personality depends.” (UB 110:7.10)
What I am going to express next is only an opinion based on my personal experience in this regard. This paragraph was a strong impulse to get to know better that wonderful being that lives in me.
The fact that a part of God, my Father, resides in me out of his own generosity is in itself amazing, and for me the greatest adventure that a human being can undertake and experience.
When two beings have the potential to come together to form one, it is undoubtedly a matter of two, and requires getting closer, getting to know each other, sharing and experiencing TOGETHER. As a potential for union, this possibility already existed, exists and will exist. Is a reality. If the interest is on both sides, it is already being carried out and it is real. Being aware of this gives me great joy and a sincere shared illusion.
And it is that this relationship with the Adjuster, contemplating and accepting his guide as well as his purposes, together with our freedom of choice, fosters the possibility of experientially creating one another, one in the other, to measure, as it would a tailor making his own suit. I have always thought that we are here to create ourselves, both physically, mentally and spiritually. To build our own soul, our authentic personality and identity in our Father, and this is a gift, a reflection of the Father’s universal cosmic will to create, which He also makes us part of through our relationship with the Adjuster.
This friendship with our Adjuster implies cultivating an intimate and sincere relationship, a collaboration, a total trust at all times, in all the details, even from the most apparently ephemeral to the most significant. It is a common living, from now on, consciously building that mutual relationship that will take us towards that desired union. But all this must be worked on consciously at all times, and as I have said, enjoying it with joy and enthusiasm.
And that relationship, as they all are, begins and continues by thinking, feeling, speaking and communicating with him, in our own way. No two formulas will be the same in the entire universe. That doesn’t matter, he knows how to adapt and will use the most appropriate channels for each one. And it is not true, as I have heard from some readers, that our Adjuster does not respond: he always does so despite his difficulty regarding our low level, because he is doing a lot with it and because he adores us. We are your goal, your illusion… your sense of being. Here the saying “does not hear who does not apply himself to listen and want to understand” should be applied here.
Humans cannot unite with each other in a total way, that possibility does not exist on Urantia, but the possible union with our Adjuster, which is the approach and progressive union with our Father, is something unique that can only occur between both of us, surpassing all kinds of union as we consider it between humans. It is something transcendent and superior.
And in this relationship with my Adjuster, I am aware that I am relating directly to my Father. On some occasions I usually address my Adjuster saying “that part of me, which is you.” But all this is only how I feel it, and possibly very different from how others experience it. But that does not matter.
¶ Urantian Quiz: Gema Villa
I am from Madrid, but I have been living in Murcia for 3 years now and the truth is that I am delighted with the change. I have gone from living in a big city to a small fishing village. This change has brought me a lot of peace and tranquility.
I am married and have 3 beautiful children, who are my life. I studied social work, although at the moment I am not exercising my profession since I dedicate myself to taking care of my children and doing some work on the radio to collaborate with the dissemination of the teachings that I have acquired by reading The Urantia Book, and both things bring me much happiness.
- How did you get to The Urantia Book and why do you think you found it?
The truth is that the first time I found a reference to The Urantia Book searching the internet, I didn’t pay attention to it. At that moment, skimming a little over what the comments I read said about it, I thought it was a very fantastic book and I didn’t stop to investigate further. Years later, when I found myself in a very difficult time in my life, I felt like I was drowning, I was not able to find a way out of the situation I was in and suddenly, one day, the book came to mind. that he had been eyeing for years. I looked it up again and automatically started reading it online
I am convinced that The Urantia Book came to me at the moment when I most needed it.
¶ Jubilee of Jubilees – May 15
Michael and the Mother, together in the government of the universe
You are invited to unite around the world on Sunday May 15, 2022 to celebrate, love, touch, make art, praise and adore. A time to honor the anniversary of our Divine Parents, a Jubilee of Jubilees throughout the universe.
(Ascension Day was May 18, AD 30, but this year we celebrate it on Sunday, May 15.)
Zoom Room: https://urantiabook-org.zoom.us/j/84879794730#success
Madrid: 19:00
Israel: 8:00 p.m.
US Pacific Time: 10:00
US East Coast Time: 1:00 PM
Argentina-Brazil: 12:00 (noon)
¶ 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-mayo-2022/