© 1981 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
This Special Conference Issue of The URANTIAN Journal of URANTIA Brotherhood is made possible by the sincere, honest, and thoughtful efforts of many of the participants in this past summer’s General Conference in Colorado. Unfortunately, time and budget restraints precluded the inclusion of all of the highly worthy talks and presentations given at Snowmass. However, we hope that those articles which follow will fully represent the spirit of the conference theme of “The Individual’s Relationship With The Universal Father.”
The Editors
Future issues of The URANTIAN Journal will contain more of the presentations given at the Snowmass General Conference.
“Bit you who have been called out of darkness into the light are expected to believe with a whole heart; your faith shall dominate the combined attitudes of body, mind, and spirit.” (UB 155:6.17)
— Jesus
“This is my beloved Son; give heed to him.” (UB 158:3.4)
— The Universal Father
We are taught that “One is free to choose and act only within the realm of one’s consciousness.” (UB 34:3.8) The sincere study of The URANTIA Book has produced, for many of us, a genuine expansion of consciousness, introducing new possibilities for choice and action, particularly with respect to God. The concepts we have about the Universal Father must necessarily condition our experience of relationship with him. When God is small and far removed it is difficult to rely upon him to any great extent. But the Universal Father of The URANTIA Book is found to be infinitely loving, infinitely powerful, and the closest and dearest friend any of us shall ever know. We are given a philosophic foundation upon which we may exercise a level of childlike trust in God which far exceeds what was previously possible for us, But philosophy is not faith. This expanded life with the Father is not automatic; we must each choose to have it. Each of us is a freewill being, at least with respect to that which is spiritual. We are not compelled to either seek or do the Father’s will; it must be a matter of voluntary, genuine, and wholehearted personal choice. We are obliged to confront and answer the question: Do we really want to do the Father’s will?
Ships and airplanes that move across continents and oceans have highly sophisticated guidance systems to assist them in arriving at their destinations. These systems allow the pilot to make course corrections totally without reference to land objects. Most of them work off of gyroscopes; there are inertial guidance systems, doppler guidance systems, and stellar guidance systems. Whatever their design the purpose of these systems is to keep the ship on course.
The first principle of divine guidance is to make sure that we are inwardly certain that God has given each of us an on-board guidance system which is capable of leading us to where we ought to go. If human beings, within thirty years of the discovery of the transistor, have been able to devise guidance systems that will allow a cruise missile to travel 5000 miles and hit the dining room of the Kremlin, surely the Original Source of intelligence is capable of designing a suitable system to permit his children to know what his desires are.
— Harry McMullan III
Oklahoma City. Oklahoma
I see before me today a rather representative group of Andon and Fonta’s descendants. You have come from practically every state of these United States and from several foreign countries. Each one of you is indwelt by a Thought Adjuster and each one of you has the gift of Jesus’ Spirit of Truth. Each one of you is engaged in the tremendous adventure of knowing and doing the Father’s will. Each one of you has traversed part of the course or life plan prepared for you by your Adjuster and continually illuminated by him for you. With your consent and by your decisions he is gradually unraveling it before your eyes of faith. Already, by loving service, you are adjusting the ancestral tendencies of living to the demands of the spiritual urges initiated by the divine presence of the Mystery Monitor.
— Robert Schuer
New Lexington, Ohio
I want to share with you some observations concerning the spiritual aspects of mind and the states of mind that are most conducive to spirit reception. As I embark upon this topic and this endeavor, I invite each of you to join in an experiment designed to use your mind, and our collective mind, as a laboratory in which is to be tested some of the ideas to be presented. In this gathering of active and versatile minds, it should be possible to explore multi-levels of this topic concurrently; that is, in some sense to manifest and experience that which is being said in words. One way to accomplish this is to modify the usual pattern of active-speaker and passive-listeners. Now, I don’t intend to ask you to speak; rather, I want to make some suggestions as to how you listen.
In particular, I request that you relax your thought process as you listen and that you give primary attention to your inner awareness, which I will refer to as your intelligence. Thus, for this talk, I wish to make a distinction between thought and intelligence. I will regard thought as the mechanical process of our brain-mind-recording, organizing, evaluating, recalling, and so forth. In a sense, this function or activity includes everything our brains are involved with in the material realm. So thought, in this context, involves at any particular moment only information from the past, stored in memory. This leaves, in the category of intelligence, those special insights that are truly original as opposed to being simply a product of thought patterns. Intelligence, then, is personal understanding from an inner source that is spiritual. One must be highly attentive to bring mind into a state of harmony with intelligence; in fact, this must be equivalent to cooperation with one’s indwelling Thought Adjuster. And while we are informed that such cooperation is not a particularly conscious process, we are told further that there are real and effective ways to augment Adjuster harmony. Thought is a marvelous mechanical aid: but it should not interfere with the delicate contact that can be experienced as intelligence. Each person uses will to direct mind; and only that will and that mind know how best to touch the inner source and flow along with it.
— Bob Hunt
Arcata. California
The Father’s Love: The Pattern Relationship
The title of this talk is “The Human Response” and through it I’d like to explore some of the ways in which we, as individuals, respond to God. I say “some of the ways” because this is by no means intended to be a complete survey of the topic, and if, at the end of this session, I leave you either challenged, perplexed, or inspired to think more about the subject, then I will have achieved my goal for the day.
Let me first establish the stimulus for the human response — the Father’s love, the pattern relationship. It seems to me that one of our major problems is having to reconcile God’s absolute reality with the reality which we perceive in human terms, In other words, the meaning we give to the reality that we perceive is strictly our interpretation of the absolute pattern, based on our personal experience and that which others share with us. A good example is the difficulty we face in attempting to deal with God’s relationship to mortal creatures, the relationship which is symbolized by the term “love.”
— Peter Laurence
Armonk, New York
Good morning. Let’s start with a moment of quiet to thank the Father for all that he has given us, and to get in touch with his presence within us.
This quote is from UB 110:3.4: “I cannot but observe that so many of you spend so much time and thought on mere trifles of living, while you almost wholly overlook the more essential realities of everlasting import, those very accomplishments which are concerned with the development of a more harmonious working agreement between you and your Adjusters. The great goal of human existence is to attune to the divinity of the indwelling Adjuster; the great achievement of mortal life is the attainment of a true and understanding consecration to the eternal aims of the divine spirit who waits and works within your mind.”
That’s the topic for this morning: developing a “working agreement,” “attuning” to the Adjuster. The format I’d like to use is to present a series of quotes on a theme, then present my own thoughts and reactions to these quotes, and then pose some questions and ask for your thoughts and experiences.
— Marvin Gawryn
Berkeley, California
I prefer the title of this talk being the revitalization and transformation within the family instead of the revitalization and transformation of the family because it places the emphasis and responsibility of improvement on the family itself, I believe that for any transformation to take place the initiative has to come from within — not as the result of outside forces.
In order to adequately understand how we can revitalize and transform the family we need to understand first just what family is, assess its function and value. Along with this we need to take a look at the current sickness that’s plaguing the family and discuss the possible causes. Note that I refer to it as a sickness because that’s exactly what I believe it to be — not a demise. Family is in a state of transition and we need to re-define it — come to understand it in the light of a new era — and answer to the challenge and responsibility required to fulfill its function in today’s world.
— Sally Schlundt
F. Wayne, Indiana
In an uncommonly eventful century, the advent of The URANTIA Book will be recognized a thousand years from today as the most wonderful event of all. But here we are, twenty-six years into the greatest happening of the Twentieth Century and many of us are still uncertain about what the URANTIA movement is supposed to be, and further, what we, as believers in this new epochal revelation, are commissioned to do. Whether because of cultural habit or lack of spiritual courage, I think we sometimes confuse our secondary priorities with those that should be in first place.
The fellowship of URANTIA Book believers ought to be the most stringent religious group anyone could ever belong to. Not because of stiff requirements to join the Brotherhood, or because we would have to sacrifice our material treasures, but rather, because we would have to stop taking refuge behind the institutional facade. No more could any of us avoid direct personal spiritual interchange with other mortals. No longer would we simply cluster in societies and study groups, and allow these functions to be our only religious commitment.
— Carolyn Kendall
Wheeling, Illinois
The Way Jesus Taught Us To Relate To The Father
I can think of no better way of learning how to relate to the Father than through the guidelines given to us by Jesus and our own personal experience. Jesus demonstrates and teaches us to seek a first hand, personal relationship with our Heavenly Father.
Both Jesus and the authors of The URANTIA Book point out that anyone who has experienced a dynamic personal relationship with God and has dedicated himself to the demands of this relationship must do something about it. Genuine religion always motivates action and changes lives. Many of us have received just enough of an inoculation of religion to have developed an immunity to the real thing. We can comfortably intellectualize and emote about it endlessly and thereby escape the fruit-bearing demands of action. Neither high sounding words, grandiose plans, nor good intentions are substitutes for service, for actually doing the Father’s will.
— Meredith J. Sprunger
Ft. Wayne, Indiana
There may be a great difference between acting from good human motives and doing the Father’s will. Morality, and its correlated motivation, is in the first place an evolutionary phenomenon. Then it is “super-animal, but sub-spiritual.” Morality derived from this level is not spiritual activity, but an activity derived from a sense of duty. Morality as Jesus taught is more than evolutionary, it is revelationary, because its origin is in the Father-child relationship. This experienced relationship has as a consequence an enhanced morality that transcends duty. “The one characteristic of Jesus’ teaching was that the morality of his philosophy originated in the personal relation of the individual to God — this very child-father relationship.” (UB 140:10.5)
We may intellectually accept this, believe it, but this is not sufficient, not the real thing. The URANTIA Book continually and consistently places the accent on the point that such a relationship should be an actuality for us. The first phase of the kingdom is described as: “The personal and inward experience of the spiritual life of the fellowship of the individual believer with God the Father.” (UB 170:4.2) Then the second phase of the kingdom results as “The enlarging brotherhood of gospel believers, the social aspects of the enhanced morals and quickened ethics resulting from the reign of God’s spirit in the hearts of individual believers.” (UB 170:4.3)
— Henry Begemann
Wassenaar, Netherlands
Thank you all for being here. I’ve titled this talk, “Evolving a Personal Religious Experience; from Belief to Faith to Truth.” I’ve chosen this theme because I feel that the most important message of The URANTIA Book, our fifth epochal revelation, is “how to know God,” as contrasted with “how to know The URANTIA Book.”
When I began reading the book in 1970 , I was in the midst of a deep quest for truth, nearly a matter of life and death. With the social tumult and crisis of the late 1960 's, I had chosen to do things that would be of service to mankind, to seek for an end to wars and for ideals that would improve the planetary condition. Determined not to rest until I had found answers to my questions, I recognized The URANTIA Book for what it was and literally devoured it within a three month period. On page 17391 found a quote that changed my life:
— Jim McNelly
Denver, Colorado
“Be not deceived by those who come saying here is the kingdom or there is the kingdom, for my Father’s kingdom concerns not things visible and material. And this kingdom is even now among you, for where the spirit of God teaches and leads the soul of man, there in reality is the kingdom of heaven. And this kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (UB 137:8.9)
Jesus’ sermon on “The Kingdom” — Capernaum