© 1981 Sara Blackstock
© 1981 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
One of our missions as students of The URANTIA Book is to integrate its spiritual truths with the secular realities we constantly encounter, thereby uplifting the ideologies and practicalities upon which our everyday lives are based.
We all do this in our own realms as our life styles, environments, talents, and interests indicate, and as our Father’s will guides. For many of us a particular interest is education, both in our homes and in the schools. We have shared our ideas for years — along with our experiences, dreams, and problems — and we have come to be aware of the strong spiritual strains being woven through our daily contact with children. We’ve also begun to see how intimately the principles and purposes of education, as expressed in The URANTIA Book, have influenced us. Many are feeling a very strong commitment to consciously UPLIFT EDUCATION in our homes and communities so that the minds of children may seek values and meanings which will allow them to think more clearly and problem-solve with expanded awareness; so that their bodies may be trained and allowed to experience peak usefulness; so that their souls may be enriched through incorporating the harmonies of the universe with the patterns of daily living; so that we — as parents-to-be, parents, educators, and friends of children — do all we can to help them maximize their God-given abilities.
In order to progress with these desires it would seem useful to look toward truth, beauty, and goodness to provide a philosophical framework for further thinking and action. If we base educational philosophy on these three concepts we will be integrating the principles of education with divine reality. “Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love.” (UB 2:7.10) We, as parents and educators, cannot provide the actual unification of truth, beauty, and goodness — “The unity of truth, beauty, and goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of the God-knowing personality.” (UB 196:3.24) but we can be clear in our minds as to the purpose of all universe education so that we can arrange and incorporate methods, techniques, attitudes, and curriculum into environments which are conducive to this unification. Particularly helpful are the following statements.
“All truth — material, philosophic, or spiritual — is both beautiful and good. All real beauty — material art or spiritual symmetry — is both true and good. All genuine goodness — whether personal morality, social equity, or divine ministry — is equally true and beautiful. Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experience. Such levels of efficient living come about through the unification of energy systems, idea systems, and spirit systems.”
“Truth is coherent, beauty attractive, goodness stabilizing. And when these values of that which is real are co-ordinated in personality experience, the result is a high order of love conditioned by wisdom and qualified by loyalty. The real purpose of all universe education is to effect the better co-ordination of the isolated child of the worlds with the larger realities of his expanding experience. Reality is finite on the human level, infinite and eternal in the higher and divine levels.” (UB 2:7.11-12)
Balance is an essential aspect of a philosophy based on truth, beauty, and goodness, as they provide the loom upon which are woven the daily individual experiences and insights which produce the strong fabric of wisdom and understanding. “Truth is the basis of science and philosophy, presenting the intellectual foundation of religion. Beauty sponsors art, music, and the meaningful rhythms of all human experience. Goodness embraces the sense of ethics, morality, and religion — experiential perfection-hunger.” (UB 56:10.10)
Living truth must embrace wholeness and a living spiritual reality. Likewise does this ideal throw light on patterns in education: with the whole child, the child’s whole environment, the child’s unique personality, special abilities, genetic make-up, and the home and family life, We must allow the child to integrate and unify through his own explorations and experiences with Truth.
“Beauty, rhythm, and harmony are intellectually associated and spiritually akin, Truth, fact, and relationship are intellectually inseparable and associated with the philosophic concepts of beauty.” (UB 44:7.2) Beauty, art, music, rhythms, and harmonies must be integrated into educational systems. They are a part of the basics of universe education. Within this framework an archangel admonishes us as to how to better prepare ourselves for the morontia worlds, saying “Even now you should learn to water the garden of your heart as well as to seek for the dry sands of knowledge.” (UB 48:6.32) And a Mighty Messenger discloses that “Universal beauty embraces the harmonious relations and rhythms of the cosmic creation: this is more distinctly the intellectual appeal and leads towards unified and synchronous comprehension of the material universe.” (UB 56:10.9)
The finishing prong of the loom upon which to weave an educational philosophy and structure is goodness. We, as educators and parents, must be good, we must realize that the children are good by basic nature, and we must develop an environment within which children may do good — to know and understand that “the good effort of each man benefits all men.” Perhaps we can measure our educational attitudes in the home and community by asking ourselves if we are providing our children and their children’s children with “good experiences,” for which Jesus gives us some exhalted criteria. “An experience is good when it heightens the appreciation of beauty, augments the moral will, enhances the discernment of truth, enlarges the capacity to love and serve one’s fellows, exalts the spiritual ideals, and unifies the supreme human motives of time with the eternal plans of the indwelling Adjuster, all of which lead directly to an increased desire to do the Father’s will, thereby fostering the divine passion to find God and to be more like him.” (UB 132:2.5)
— Sara L. Blackstock
Albany, California