© 2012 Santiago Rodríguez
© 2012 Urantia Association of Spain
During all these years of work in the study group, we have been breaking down its contents, trying to understand them and (why not) also to interpret them, and I personally am more than satisfied with what we have learned. I think all this joint work has paid off. It has taught us about the how and why of things. How everything is organized and what is its purpose, what can we expect in the future, both near and remote. They have even explained to us that we have a future outside of time, which is surprising, to say the least.
In an extraordinarily summarized way, we could say that we have discovered that we are beginning an incredible, wonderful and eternal adventure; we will have a whole future eternity that will be busy and entertained with some and other activities. The future is mapped out, we have understood the past and it helps us to understand why we are here and in this way. For this reason, I have found it of great interest (I would say unavoidable) that we stop and begin to focus our attention on the immediate, on what is closest to us, and this is neither more nor less than the “here and now”. , our present.
The past taught us, but obviously it is no longer with us, and the future will show us many things later and will allow us to experience ourselves, but it has not arrived yet. What we really have to experience, in this and in each of the moments, is our “now”, but it is also something that we have a certain tendency to ignore, to not consider. Our minds are more comfortable pondering the past and speculating about the future, I suppose due to the fact that “now” would demand some immediate attention from us. Later, we would need to know how to listen at that moment and not do it only when we feel like it, and finally it will lead us to a need to act, to make determinations, and we have to be realistic both to be disciplined or the need to work against laziness or against the fear of being wrong or other fears, may not be too pleasant to our ego.
With the intention set in the investigation of the “now”, of each one of us, let us reflect and raise the debate.
The universal question is almost a perogrullo, does the reading of the UB present a different “now” to each of the readers?
Obviously, the answer can have an infinite number of nuances and assumptions that will depend on the individual and their degree of understanding and internalization of the teachings contained in the book.
We are not going to go into details or partial facets; the same question from another perspective would be: what does the UB propose for the daily life of mortal man on Urantia?
These will be the questions that I would like you to join in the search for answers… I go ahead and propose my opinion on the matter.
I will introduce you to a character in broad strokes, Zoilo (which means “full of life”), whose existence we will comment on before running into the UB: I must clarify that I intend to define an absolutely normal character, with whom we can find daily, from the time we get up to the time we go to bed.
We will say about Zoilo that he is a loving father of two children (or 1.38, for the statistics), married and leading a life that I don’t know whether to call standard, normal, boring, unambitious, conformist or whatever. any other way you can think of. He has a job in a shopping center, which he tries to do as well as possible, always within the guidelines that the bosses impose on him. Bosses with whom he gets along in a cordial way, as well as with his subordinates and with his colleagues.
Try to be respectful and friendly to everyone; He understands that we live in a society with very few values, so he tries to behave in the best possible way. At home he has a normal life, if he considers it normal not to cheat on his wife and honestly try to find the best for her and their children. He tries to avoid conflicts or arguments with anyone, he has some hobbies that allow him to escape from the daily routine.
We can say that the ups and downs of his life are quite normal: some fear for the employment situation, he tries to make ends meet without serious setbacks, he tries to make his children become old-fashioned useful men (who are honest and hard-working ) and tries to encourage them with his example. He helps them as best he can in their studies and shares the housework with his wife, who also has a job outside the home. He doesn’t have much time to spend with the rest of his family, so on the few occasions when they do meet, he looks for things to go cordially and calmly.
The subject of religion has been raised on numerous occasions. A Catholic by birth, he distrusts the Church and thinks that indeed there may be something beyond death. He believes that it is possible that some God exists, although he is not clear why certain things happen. In any case, to his way of thinking, if something is to exist after death, it will be there and will be found when the time comes. If God is as good as he’s supposed to be, he’ll surely give you a chance. And, if in the end there was nothing, well nothing happens either, he doesn’t care (at least for the moment; at 45 years old, that moment still seems distant in time). In any case, it doesn’t bother him; he must remain faithful to the principles in which he really believes, such as honesty and doing things in the best possible way.
The maxims that seem to prevail in Zoilo’s life are true clichés: live and let live; don’t mess with anyone; we all have the right to be as we want; you cannot impose your criteria on anyone; life itself is hard enough, let’s not make it even harder; respect what is not yours; people are not property; If you can do me a favor, do it. And, on the physical level: exercise; watch what you eat and drink; in the middle term is virtue, etc.
One day, Zoilo ran into the UB, read it… and here we are. We are any Zoilo.
Do you think Zoilo’s life could or should change? How? Or, on the contrary, the only thing that can happen to Zoilo is that he will treasure new knowledge and continue with his life as before? In fact, he was already “good” before the UB reading. Maybe you don’t need anything else. Now you know many more things than before reading it, you have answered many of your existential questions and you could communicate what you have learned to other people and do it with enthusiasm. It is wonderful to have answers (and to be able to share them with other human beings): What is the destiny that awaits us? What meaning does our existence have? Where we come from? How can we face the setbacks that existence of one kind or another can bring us? What to expect and what not from our Creator? What to expect from our peers, from the institutions? Why is the universe so big? Is there life after dead? Do angels exist and what are they like? Does Satan exist? does Heaven and Hell exist? Are we more than what we see? What are we made of?
We have even been able to obtain an answer to the way of behaving in situations that we could consider to be of high emotional intensity, because in fact they explain to us why it is interesting and in a certain way inevitable to experience them; remember the section on inevitabilities (UB 3:5.5).
Let’s say that, faced with situations of great emotional intensity, such as the death of loved ones, personal, material, natural catastrophes, love disappointments, or even lack of credibility in one of our peers, in organizations, in institutions, etc., we have learned that we must approach these dire situations with new and higher perspectives.
UB has provided you with tools, knowledge that will allow you to approach problems from such a perspective that you can overcome successes and failures more effectively.
But Zoilo is perplexed and a bit confused. Every day he gets up and asks himself: what did he do before and what do I do now? What is the difference?
He looks at his “now” and asks himself: what should be our response to our day to day, in which 99% of the time we are subjected to situations of low emotional intensity? Does the UB say anything about it?
I will tell you my thoughts.
If I ask myself what we have to do at all times, what is expected of us at all times, the idea that comes to mind the most and not by chance, because in fact it appears verbatim 42 times throughout the book, is « do the Father’s will."
With this concept deeply ingrained in my reader’s mind, I am at first terribly perplexed. Later, the perplexity gives way to a certain frustration since, as I reflect, I find that it is neither easy nor immediate to translate that “will”, to incorporate it into everyday life. What is it like to do the will of the Father on a day-to-day basis, in the course of those days that pass and you think that there has been nothing special or different about them compared to other days?
The UB has helped us with the concepts, and a lot, to believe in God, have the will to worship him and want your will to be precisely his. But, of course, it turns out that this will must be discovered in some way. It would seem that we have a game on our hands, that is, I observe myself in a situation and try to guess what the Father’s will would be for me in those circumstances.
While it may be interesting and inspiring to try to practice this process, it is clear that your momentary inspiration may or may not coincide with the will of the Father. At the moment you will not know, the doubt persists and it is clear that we can argue (something that I also find plausible) that perhaps the will of the Father is not that you do or stop doing something specific, but that it is precisely the act of you considering it , that you question yourself and that you investigate trying to intuit his will.
But this situation does not leave me entirely satisfied. It is true that it seems that we have resolved a specific situation, but I still need to find a course of action. I believe that, although the fact of achieving one or the other objective is interesting, it must also be equally or more interesting to find, guess or intuit a line of action that serves as a guide for my daily activity. In fact, we cannot spend the day questioning ourselves at every moment as if it were a vital decision.
The UB should provide me with information about it… and indeed it expresses it to me literally at least 11 times in 9 different documents, expressly including it in the prayer that Jesus gave to his brothers in Nazareth (UB 144:3.1-12).
There is a universal plan for the ascension of creatures and, based on this plan, the Father promulgated the universal mandate: “Be perfect, just as I am perfect”. This expresses his will towards us. Given this mandate, the matter of translating this into our daily lives remains in our hands.
This mandate has mobilized an endless number of personalities and universes. We, from our position, read it and we were literally in one piece. It does not seem possible to achieve what the Father desires. We may feel overwhelmed, but there is something that will allow us to put that request towards us in its proper measure.
The path, the line of action, is traced. The translation of the will of the Father is that our path is one of evolution and growth, and our “north”, the direction that our growth must take, is towards the perfection of the individual.
It has become clear to us that we are not expected to sit idly by. We have seen that the simplistic concept that one is “good” because he does nothing bad has been far surpassed. Being good implies not only not doing evil but doing good. And the Father’s mandate takes us even further: it is no longer enough to do good, but we must do it better each time. We have an obligation to grow in that direction.
On the other hand, the Father wants us to live with joy. The obligation to grow in perfection should not distress us, we should not be violent even with ourselves. We have the obligation to perfect ourselves but we do not have to do it at an inappropriate speed, which would cause us completely unnecessary suffering.
Let us recall another passage from the UB in which we are explicitly told that, upon our arrival as pilgrims in Havona, we will only arrive with a perfection dowry, something that I personally interpret as requiring us to have achieved perfection in one of the facets, and the perfection expected of us is “perfection of purpose”:
When, through and by the ministry of all the helper hosts of the universal scheme of survival, you are finally deposited on the receiving world of Havona, you arrive with only one sort of perfection — perfection of purpose.. (UB 26:4.13)
If we take into account our racial origin, that we are little more than animals, our immediate path is clear: we must progressively “de-animalize” ourselves, and here in our world and in our current lives. If we are capable of marking the differences with the rest of the mammals, it will be part of our obligation to increase those differences both qualitatively and quantitatively.
In fact, it is easy for all of us to observe that, basically and without being questionable due to differences in beliefs, we have a body and a mind. The search for perfection in the field of our body is more limited insofar as its care and management is in our hands. Simplifying it, we will say that we have to be careful with what we eat and drink and how we expose it to the environment, in addition to trying to provide it with a healthy exercise based on the capacities of each one. The search for perfection in our physique seems more like a task for the race (medical and biological sciences) than for the individual.
However, we have our mind as a link between the physical and the spiritual, and it already lends itself to improvement work that can be as intense and extensive as we ourselves wish. And here, although any external help is welcome, it is clear that the work is individual.
We have to learn to observe ourselves, to know ourselves, to know our emotional tendencies as a result of our biology and our environment. We have to consider attitudes and behaviors, many of them genetically established, that help us to perpetuate the species (basic emotions). We have to seek our path of perfection without allowing, in any situation, our basic emotions to be the ones who direct our thoughts or our actions.
On the other hand, these emotions are perfectly legitimate and often involuntary. We have to learn about our emotions because what we can and must do is progress in the education of our mind/body so that the responses given to emotional stimuli are not always the basic ones, those of predominance of instinct that, even though it is a quick response ( instinctive), this response can be conditioned through adequate training.
One of the first things that we find in our minds and to which we can have access to modulate or modify would be feelings and emotions. The difference between the two can be a very subtle line, so to simplify it I will consider feeling as a simple state of mind, and emotion, which is something much more complex, as a term that refers to feelings, thoughts, to the biological state, to the psychological state and to the type of tendencies to action that characterizes it (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence).
Although there are still no definitive agreements among scholars on the subject, there is a tendency to think that there are actually a few basic emotions, and the rest could be considered as a mixture in different proportions of the so-called “primary” ones.
This classification dates back to the 19th century. Darwin (1872) and later Paul Ekman (1972) found that, in a fairly universal way, certain emotions generated muscular activity (especially in the face) in a very uniform way in any human group, which led to the conclusion of this universality of emotions Of course, not everything is exposed nor has the last word been said regarding the subject of emotions, but I do find it interesting to take a look at them.
Some people identify the following emotions as primary: anger, sadness, fear, joy, love, surprise, aversion, shame. Many of the other emotions are classified in one of the previously mentioned families, and the complexity increases because many emotions are difficult to classify and are produced by a variable amount, both in quantity and in the number of primary emotions that would be involved.
After experiencing emotions, we may find ourselves in a particular feeling-“mood”; we must also take into account our tendency to evoke a certain emotion or even a state of mind. It is about our “temperament”, which makes us be or have a tendency to be melancholic, jovial or shy (for example).
In short, as reactions to our environment there are two types of responses:
- Faced with what our brain perceives as an urgency, there is a type of rapid emotional response, so much so that it even seems that our feelings precede or are simultaneous with thoughts. They are involuntary reactions and we do not have the ability to decide when they will take place.
- But, simultaneously, there is a slow emotional response, which passes through reflective thinking, which we can learn to shape.
Likewise, there are emotional states that occur because, intentionally or not, we evoke emotions or moods. This is another very important chapter on which we can work. Because let’s not fool ourselves: we are always conditioned to a state of mind, even if it goes unnoticed due to the fact that its level of emotional response is not very intense.
In order to summarize, my current reflection would be:
What I think can differentiate Zoilo, before and after reading the UB, is to become aware of:
- Its origin and destination.
- Of the existence of the Universal Father, to know his relationship with us and what He expects of us: to do His Will. This statement, valid for any creature from any place and at any time of its existence, means in our case accepting the evolutionary path with an eye toward perfecting ourselves. For this we are exhorted not to look for shortcuts; we have to give time to time. In fact, in an entire universal age we are only going to be asked for “perfection of purpose.”
- We must avoid the Caligastia error (UB 136:8.5). Let us not forget that these changes must be without violence. We have to maintain an adequate speed and remember that, on the path of evolutionary perfection, there are no shortcuts.
- Knowing that this is what the Father wants, Zoilo wants it because he believes it is appropriate and because he voluntarily decides that, if it is the Father’s will, it is enough to accept it.
The way to approach it on a day-to-day basis is to be attentive to our emotions and feelings (moods), observe them to understand them, differentiate those that come from the automatic rapid response, evaluate them and try to leave in our selective memory the appropriate way of response to these stimuli, to try to adapt them to our personal program of “discouragement”. Equally and even more so in the situation of deferred response due to reflective thought.
The education of our mind (in increasingly elevated and elaborate response habits) will allow us to make an ever greater difference between ourselves and the animals. It will be the key to the beginning of our evolutionary progress towards perfection.
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/