© 2003 Saskia Praamsma Raevouri
© 2003 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Picture an orchestra. God is the conductor. God has composed a beautiful symphony, but unless there are instruments there will be no music. So, he gets a piano. Now he hears a strain, but it sounds rather monotonous. He adds a violin, bass, and drums; they learn to get in tune with each other and produce a sound that is pleasant but limited. He adds more and more instruments — cellos, harps, guitars, oboes, flutes, trumpets, trombones, saxophones, horns, clarinets, cymbals, and xylophones. At first they all hit wrong notes, but as each finds his key and learns to harmonize with the others together they produce a much richer, deeper and more beautiful sound than the four basic instruments alone. Now God really has something to conduct!
Each instrument alone falls short compared with how it sounds in concert with all the others. Each instrument is unique; an oboe can never sound like a flute, a trumpet will never be an xylophone. And how dull to have an orchestra composed entirely of pianos, all playing the same note at the same time!
And so it is with race on our planet. We have all the components of the orchestra but we have not yet learned how to play together, let alone to allow God in as the conductor. The violin complains that he is not a piano; the oboe believes he is inferior to the harp. Yet, if each individual in each race took the time to find his unique form of expression, to discover where he fits into the whole, the world would soon be making beautiful music.
When The Urantia Book talks about race, many are offended that it casually mentions superior versus inferior races. A person falling into the latter category may feel he has gotten a bad deal. “I just don’t understand why God wouldn’t create everyone equal,” he grumbles. Or, “Why do I have to be green, or orange, or indigo, and go through life in a secondary Sangik body?”
When one reads that on some worlds there are only primary Sangiks, one might say, “Then why would God purposely create — or permit the creation of — inferior people, and why do I have to be one of them?”
“The evolution of six — or of three — colored races, while seeming to deteriorate the original endowment of the red man, provides certain very desirable variations in mortal types and affords an otherwise unattainable expression of diverse human potentials. These modifications are beneficial to the progress of mankind as a whole provided they are subsequently upstepped by the imported Adamic or violet race.” [UB 51:4.4]
“Of the six colored Sangik races, three were primary and three were secondary. Though the primary races — blue, red, and yellow — were in many respects superior to the three secondary peoples, it should be remembered that these secondary races had many desirable traits which would have considerably enhanced the primary peoples if their better strains could have been absorbed.” [UB 82:6.2]
Here is one example of how this might work: The book tells us that the outstanding characteristic of the orange race was “their peculiar urge to build, to build anything and everything, even to the piling up of vast mounds of stone just to see which tribe could build the largest mound.” It also says that “a blend of the blue man with the Andon stock produced an artistically gifted type.” So, let’s pair up an orange woman with a blue/Andonite man — their descendants might produce vast, artistic mounds of stone. Now if we inject these people with a dose of violet blood, which would accelerate their creative imaginations, they could very well build the pyramids of Giza, or cities such as the Inca Macchu Picchu in Peru.
In tracing the racial migrations I have concluded that it was exactly this racial blend that produced these great stone-structure-based civilizations. The violets, on their own, could not have achieved it, neither could the blues nor the oranges — they needed their particular inherent traits and essences to be brought together. It’s like the ingredients in a recipe: depending on what you combine you will wind up with either a fruitcake or a meatloaf.
The plan was for the different qualities of each race to be mingled for more versatility, well in advance of Adam and Eve’s mission as biologic uplifters. By then the races would have reached “the apex of biologic evolution,” and would have been ready for upstepping. Due to the failure of the Planetary Prince to execute his mission, thereby causing widespread chaos among the evolutionary races, the plans for blending the races went awry, leaving some individuals with comparatively high doses of “superior” genes and others with little or none, stranded in a secondary Sangik body. And the subsequent default of Adam and Eve left some pockets of humanity abundantly upstepped, while pockets of hers not at all.
“Having failed to achieve race harmonization by the Adamic technique, you must now work out your planetary problem of race improvement by other and largely human methods of adaptation and control.” [UB 51:5.7]
The above statement is a fact. While for some, race is a touchy subject that they would rather the book had not gone into, these “politically incorrect” Papers are extremely informative as they clearly show us how we got into today’s global mess. We are not advised to weed out the ”inferior“ races but the ”defectives and degenerates" — those who can never know God — that are to be found in all the races. We can’t bury our heads in the sand to hide the problem — it is with us whether we like it or not, and eventually it must be dealt with.
Our bodies are all different, but the spirit within is the same — our bodies are merely vehicles to give that spirit a way to express itself. If God wanted us all alike he would have created us so. Part of our mission in life is to discover who we are and how we can contribute to the whole. The colors of our skins have nothing to do with it. One day the world will awaken to the fact that we are not our bodies — we are what is inside our bodies. When that day comes, we will finally begin to take our first baby steps out of the darkness and start edging our way into light and life.
One might say, "What does all this have to do with my search for God, with my spiritual growth?” We can look for God and find him anyway. However, as the universe is not only spiritual but also physical and morontial, the more diverse qualities we can assimilate and incorporate into our beings the more interesting we will be to the Father when we finally stand before him billions of years from now, as well as to the fellow travelers we meet along the way.
And while we are still on this planet, learning to deal with those who are different teaches us spiritual realities — tolerance, patience, acceptance, love, kindness, compassion, altruism. If we can’t learn those things here, just imagine what awaits us on the mansion worlds and beyond when we are confronted with beings from other planets and universes! I say, let’s at least become brothers and sisters under the skin while we are on Urantia so we can face those really strange critters from other planets as one united family. What would they think of us if we were divided against each other?
“Though human beings differ in many ways, the one from another, before God and in the spiritual world all mortals stand on an equal footing. There are only two groups of mortals in the eyes of God: those who desire to do his will and those who do not. As the universe looks upon an inhabited world, it likewise discerns two great classes: those who know God and those who do not.” [UB 133:0.3]
So, let’s all tune up our instruments and learn to play in God’s symphony orchestra!
Saskia Praamsma Raevouri was born in Holland, grew up in Australia, worked and traveled in Europe and Asia, and now lives in Southern California. One of her biggest questions in life was, “Why do people look and behave differently everywhere I go?” This and many other mysteries were cleared up when she found The Urantia Book in 1977. After a lifelong career working as a final checker on animated feature films at Walt Disney Studios, Saskia is now semi-retired. Together with her partner, Matthew Block, she operates Square Circles Publishing, which is devoted to Urantia Book-related works.
Visit Saskia’s website at: https://www.squarecircles.com