© 2001 The Brotherhood of Man Library
“Some degree of moral affinity and spiritual harmony is essential to friendship between two persons; a loving personality can hardly reveal himself to a loveless person.” (UB 1:6.5)
Harmony and affinity for one another is also required for spiritual harmony if one of the personalities is also divine. Even to approach the knowing of a divine personality requires that all of our own personality endowment be consecrated to the effort. A half-hearted, partial commitment will invariably be a failure.
Our ability to attain any degree of God-consciousness and Adjuster communication cannot be other than proportional to our “moral affinity and spiritual harmony” with divinity. But how can finite beings such as ourselves achieve affinity and harmony with divinity when we have so little understanding of a dimension of “being” with which we have no contact or experience.
It was a major purpose of Jesus’ incarnation that he should reduce the enormous gap existing between the finite world of human experience and the infinite, transcendent world of the existential, absolute, and divine.
Through Jesus’ life experience, we received our first truly reliable and practical knowledge of what it takes for a mortal, finite, human being such as ourselves to attain real God-consciousness and Adjuster realization.
Jesus’ commitment included the revelation of those “transcendent possibilities attainable by a God-knowing human.” Thus, the degree of God-consciousness and Adjuster realization achieved by Jesus, at least to the time of his baptism, is also attainable by us. We should not sell ourselves short by aiming for less.
Besides Jesus’ revelation, what else do the Urantia papers provide that may help us in our quest for God-consciousness and God-likeness?
Obviously, the more we can know about God, the better we can love him, and the better our affinity and harmony with him can be:
“Notwithstanding that God is an eternal power, a majestic presence, a transcendent ideal, and a glorious spirit, though he is all these and infinitely more, nonetheless, he is truly and everlastingly a perfect Creator personality, a person who can “know and be known,” who can “love and be loved,” and one who can befriend us; while you can be known, as other humans have been known, as the friend of God. He is a real spirit and a spiritual reality.” (UB 1:5.8)
“Man does not achieve union with God as a drop of water might find unity with the ocean. Man attains divine union by progressive reciprocal spiritual communion, by personality intercourse with the personal God, by increasingly attaining the divine nature through wholehearted and intelligent conformity to the divine will. Such a sublime relationship can exist only between personalities.” (UB 1:7.2)
“The concept of truth might possibly be entertained apart from personality, the concept of beauty may exist without personality, but the concept of divine goodness is understandable only in relation to personality. Only a person can love and be loved. Even beauty and truth would be divorced from survival hope if they were not attributes of a personal God, a loving Father.” (UB 1:7.3)
“Ultimate universe reality cannot be grasped by mathematics, logic, or philosophy, only by personal experience in progressive conformity to the divine will of a personal God.” (UB 1:7.5)
“Only the personal experience of the faith sons of the heavenly Father can effect the actual spiritual realization of the personality of God.” (UB 1:7.5)
“The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind. Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness—contact with the divine presence.” (UB 196:3.34)
All of which means the achieving of God-consciousness as a priority aim for our mortal existence—and one of the few mortal achievements having actual spiritual value that we can carry forward into the next stage of our journey towards Paradise.
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust do corrupt and thieves break through and steal. But rather, lay up for yourself treasures in heaven—for where your treasure is there will your heart be also.” (UB 140:6.11)
If it were not so, I would have told you.
Jesus of Nazareth