© 1988 Robert Crickett
© 1988 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
When I was five years old my six year old brother and I were taken to one of the churches in our small country town by our parents. Mum had been told by her careers advising father that I was to grow up to be a minister: “So expose him to the church, won’t you!” … and she did just that, rather zealously.
This particular Sunday was quite an occasion for this church. It was the day to host a visiting evangelical troupe “on a mission from God”. The troupe comprised about eight people and the speaker, who spoke to a packed audience for some time. He probably covered a great many aspects of the Christian gospel, most of it going over my head, but impressed me very deeply with a single issue the idea of the reality of God, the personal author of everything.
This ‘God’ sounded to me like the best darn thing going. Everyone ought to have some of it in their lives. This fellow up there on the platform was like someone selling water beside the river … God was free and available to everyone and was present and immediate and hey why don’t you go and grab a good bucketful?
In a very real sense this evangelist spoke as if he was introducing our town to a wholly new product, a ‘thing’ that nobody but nobody here had ever come across; like when Coke first arrived in New Zealand, it changed our whole way of life and was the herald of greater things to come. For me, looking around at the townsfolk in the congregation as they sat glued to this speaker, God was a new and fresh revelation. My reality was the complete contrary to Paul’s writing (Romans 1:19,20), “… since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (NIV version) I had not the slightest inclination that there was a cod. My self-identity had only the scope to recognize that adults rule the roost, and mum and dad in particular.
During this speech I came to the conclusion that I wanted God, in a big way. For the first time in my brief life span I felt the difference between myself in my local reality — the sky was simply blue, the trees and fields simply green — and myself and God in the same reality there was a wholeness, the creator was IN the creation, there was a sense of completion inside me and an all-pervading orderliness in the world around me.At least that’s how I thought about it at the time.
After the church service the congregation was divided into discussion groups and one each of those people from the evangelical troupe attended each group. Just before our group for the littlest kids was about to begin I went to our evangelist to ask her what felt for me to be the most important question of my life, “Excuse me Miss … what’s God?”
I needed an answer that came from her actual God-Mind, in the same way one expects the seller of a product to vouch for it based on their own experience of having used it … endorsing it because they have an intimate and inside knowledge of it from experience. But my question was met quite differently. She looked down at me like a stunned mullet and said, in a manner that was obviously sincere, “I don’t know …”.
My response was immediate and final. Here before me was a hypocrite, a living lie. She was telling us all how wonderful this God thing was and how we really ought to get it into our lives “cos it’11 fix everything and it’s just the bestest darn thing imaginable and you’d be a real fool not to get some and if you hang in with us you’ll be right all-right you betcha!” And she didn’t have a clue about it at all! And that cut me to the quick. I rejected Christianity and Christians outright.
Curiously though her hypocracy didn’t disturb my thirst for God, it just told me to be wary of that particular crowd because they didn’t know anything about it, they didn’t have any God in stock. I decided then and there, while our group was going through its somewhat empty ritual, that I would find God from someplace else … probably not from people, maybe from God himself. I figured out that if there really was such a thing as God and he was the creator of all this life around me and in me, and he did in fact know my every thought and feeling, then he’d help me find him. But I certainly wouldn’t find him through this lot.
The following Tuesday I was at school and after lunch we went out to the sports field to watch a softball match being played by our school and a visiting school. We five year old prime-grade kids were lined up along one side of the open field just at the tree line. There we sat down to watch what I found to be a rather boring event. The game didn’t involve me and I didn’t know anyone playing, they were either strangers or, being older than I was, were not my playmates. I was curious as to why we should be watching at all. The whole game had absolutely nothing to do with us at all. There was something quite incongruent about our being there. As I looked around at my classmates I noticed that they were as apparently bored and feeling out of place as was I. But then that all changed.
Overhead in the sky above the playing field and at about a hundred feet altitude came a silvery coloured sort of flying craft. It was about the size of a couple of Nash Rambler cars, wide and long, shaped a bit like two saucers placed one on the other. It seemed to pulsate with a silvery vibrancy. Boy, did it ever change the tone of the game!
Out of the craft came quite a number of flying people. They were very brightly coloured and shining and drifted. onto the playing field where they began giving out small sachets of sweets and cuddling all the kids and the two teachers as if they were long lost friends of theirs. All of the kids beside me ran onto the field, for the game had come to an abrupt stop when all of this happened out of the blue. I just stood up where I had been sitting and from the edge of the playing field by the trees I watched, not too surprised, just fascinated. I had never seen anyone like these people before.
After a short while of these greetings some of the flying people went back up to the craft hovering over the field. Then from within this craft came a big fellow. He was about three people tall and shone with a brilliant rosy colour all through him. He was sort of human-like, but not quite. He wasn’t like the flying people who in a sense seemed a bit like people, he didn’t have any limbs or face as such but was more like an oval shaped light which was alive and in some indefinable sense was a person. He, like all the flying people with wing-like things on their backs, was aglow with friendship and kindness.
He glided over from the craft to the space just above me and in front, I had to look up at him. Then he greeted me by my name and so I asked him who he was. He replied, “God Robert. You asked for me and I have come to be with you.”
Well I was thrilled. Not overwhelmed or in any way disturbed, just delighted to meet God face to face. It was a special day for all of us, what with all the sweets and seeing these flying people and so on, but it was also so very ordinary somehow, so straight forward.
This ‘God’ and I had a chat for quite a while as he stayed motionless in the space before me. I don’t recall the content of that conversation. But then he turned around and faced the craft and I noticed that all the flying people were leaving the field and gathering back inside their transport. One by one they were saying their farewells to my schoolmates and gliding back up to the craft a hundred feet above the field. They seemed to be going to leave and yet this ‘God’, this rosy coloured fellow seemed to be staying.
He said something to them all once they were in their craft, as if communicating right through its walls to them, thanking them and expressing love for them. The atmosphere was electric with affection. Then I noticed that beside the craft there was another person. He was without any form at all, he was like a powerful clear-light presence. It seemed that he had accompanied the craft and was somehow int innately related to ‘God’. After this rosy chap had said his goodbye to those in the craft, with such absolute finality to it, he turned his attention to this clear light presence, this consciousness which was motionless beside the craft. There followed the deepest stillness and love between these two that I have ever known, remaining in this silent rapport for some time. It was as if nothing of any significance could happen in all the world until this rapport had parted, such was its omnipotence. But it did part, and the one beside the craft shot straight out across the horizon in a split second. Cone.
Then the craft moved off across the horizon, in a different direction from the clear light one, at a much slower speed but still disappearing in the blink of an eye. I was alone with this rosy one, ‘God’. He had turned to face the craft in order to say his farewells, and now he came directly above me and descended slightly so that we began to merge ourselves. It was as if I had become a white egg-shaped form, a little larger than my body, and his rosy form was blending in through my head and down into my body. It was as if the stuff we were both made of was the same and he just moved on into it permeating every part of me. I distinctly knew the addition to me. There was someone else within me. And as I looked out across the playing field where now the teachers and kids were gathering up all the sports equipment I knew irrefutably that this one who had entered within me was indeed God. The world showed itself to be his, it was his product, in the same way that a mother looks upon her child and knows with her whole being that this is hers, it is from her, she is its source.
Then there was a short time, almost of experimentation, as ‘God’ and I became as one person without distinction. We fluctuated in and out of separation, God and me, just me, God and me, just me, until there was just me and no longer any ‘wobble’ of separation.
Then I felt someone tugging on my shirt at my right shoulder. I turned to look and I found myself lying on the ground, where we had originally sat down, and one of my classmates was giving me a gentle kick to wake me so I could join the rest of our class who were lining up beside the trees in order to go back to the classroom and then home. The party was over. But I was quite excited and I asked the boy who had been beside me, “Did you get any lollies?” And he said yes. This experience for me had been absolutely real, within the experience of my mind as well as within the experience of my physical reality. His reply confirmed for me that the whole event wasn’t just a dream but in fact the flying people had indeed come to us, and God was within me now whereas the Sunday before he was not.
When ‘God’ was descending into me I remember thinking, “Oh this is how God comes to people. When you’re five years old God turns up and enters inside you and lives with you from the inside. And that’s how he gets to hear your every prayer and your every thought. And that’s how come he can know you as you really are, and love you for what you are and what you try to do. And that’s how you come to know God, from the inside, not from wading through a book or practising some superstition in the hope of attracting him from outside you and far away”.
My experience showed me that God lived and breathed my life right there with me, but at five years old I had no idea why he should do that. I had no theology, no philosophy … the biggest thing in my life was trying to kick a full size football without busting my big toe! The arrival of God was so ordinary, so everyday an occurrence at the time, and I simply didn’t have the needs that emerge with growing up. The arrival of God into me was a simple affair, unquestioned, fully accepted.
But of course God then disappeared from sight and as I grew older I was among the many who kicked the stubborn lawn mower uttering oaths like, 'If there really is a God, you’ll start this mower right now!“ And I’d heartily yank on the starter cord again, to no avail. And then when it finally would start, having firmly denounced God’s reality, I’d backtrack and say to myself, ”See, there really is a God!" I’m thankful faith is not founded on such childish appraisals of the nature of things.
It would be some eighteen years later that I would find a URANTIA Book and read page 1187 to find such a correlation between it and my early experience. Whether my experience happened ‘for real’, physically, is anybody’s guess. I doubt it. The boy beside me whom I asked about the lollies may have been my own projection whilst I was ‘waking up’. Perhaps we did indeed share a common experience, all of us, in a part of our makeup which has a knowing and has responses to life seemingly independent of our conscious involvement with life. Meditative and especially stable and real spiritual mystical experience certainly confirms this. But one thing is sure. The Thought Adjuster does arrive, and does enter into the mind of the child, and does interface with the mind at a superconscious level … the same level that all authentic mystical experience occurs at, and it does occur at a definite time and on a definite day, and it is the result of a provoked interest in making the value of goodness and truth active. So it has to happen somehow. We each have to experience it somehow, with the stuff we’re made from… the same stuff that grows to thirst for mature truth and longs to be like God and as God. Spiritual hunger is real, more real than life itself. Spiritual satisfaction is real, it is not a fantasy, a myth, a desperate hope. And it has to happen somehow within us, there has to be something within us which has a direct and immediate connection with God… otherwise our body and our mind could never know it. How wonderful to gaze at the five year olds in the school playground, soon to receive their most precious secret.
Robert Crickett, Melbourne
“There is a reality in religious experience that is proportional to the spiritual content, and such a reality is transcendent to reason, science, philosophy, wisdom, and all other human achievements. The convictions of such an experience are unassailable; the logic of religious living is incontrovertible; the certainty of such knowledge is superhuman; the satisfactions are superbly divine, the courage indomitable, the devotions unquestioning, the loyalties supreme, and the destinies final — eternal, ultimate, and universal.” UB 103:9.12