© 1985 Peter Laurence, Probal Dasgupta, Helena E. Sprague, Jeff Wattles
© 1985 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
The following article represents a new approach for the Journal, and grows out of an opportunity to expand our awareness of multi-cultural perspectives on The URANTIA Book. Probal Dasgupta is originally from Calcutta and has lived in the United States on two separate occasions. He has now returned to India and teaches linguistics at the Deccan College Post-graduate and Research Institute in Pune. Dr. Dasgupta was introduced to The URANTIA Book in the late 1970’s while attending New York University. He has read the book in its entirety and brings to it a scholarly and piercingly analytical point of view, as well as a perspective which is decidedly non-Western. The book review presented here is a prelude to a future article in which he promises to share with us his reactions to The URANTIA Book. The reasons for this anticipatory review are perhaps best expressed in an excerpt from his correspondence —
— Peter Laurence
Armonk, New York
I am thou: meditations on the truth of India. By Ramchandra Gandhi. Pune: Indian Philosophical Quarterly Publications (Department of Philosophy, University of Poona). 1984. xii s 311 pages. $15.
Let me begin by quoting from page 51: “Man does not live by bread alone, Christ reminds us, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God, i.e. by the totality of God’s revelation to mankind, i.e. at least by the truth in all the religions of the world.” This book is an attempt by Ramchandra Gandhi, an Oxford-trained philosopher who is also a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, to provide a partial exposition of the truth of the Indian spiritual tradition in a form that invites the attention of all thinking people. One of his main points is that the one God, whose self-multiplication — before eternity — is unthinkable in human thought and yet real, is accessible to us through a necessary plurality of revelations. We have to assimilate and reconcile the truths we learn from different traditions.
—Probal Dasgupta
Pune, India
Revelation is as old as man. In fact, it defines him. When the adjutants of worship and wisdom became fully active in the minds of Andon and Fonta, the Life Carrier tells us that “mind of will dignity” (UB 62:7.4) had arrived on Urantia. Aborigines had become men. And here we have the clear message that revelation is not necessarily an experience of the conscious mind.
In The URANTIA Book, we are told a great deal about revelation, its nature and function. There are two forms, epochal and auto. (UB 101:4.4) So far on Urantia, there have been five epochal revelations: the Planetary Prince, Caligastia; the Material Son and Daughter, Adam and Eve; the Emergency Son, Machiventa Melchizedek; the Creator Son, Jesus of Nazareth; and the URANTIA Papers, Epochal revelation is the function of a celestial agency, personality, or group. The second form is auto revelation; this is the conscious and unconscious communication between supermortal and mortal. Auto revelation comes from the Thought Adjuster and other spirit beings or circuits to the individual mortal mind.
— Helena Sprague
Farmington, Connecticut
Religion helps people deal with the spiritual difficulties of their times. Primitive people needed to be liberated from bondage to tradition, to recognize one supreme God of nature and the spiritual world, to be delivered from fear and to gain the assurance that faith alone is required in order to receive the gift of eternal life. That original gospel of faith and trust in the one God is always relevant, and Jesus came expanding the truth. The people of his day needed especially to experience the personal character of God’s relationship with the individual. Jesus revealed the personality of the Father, and taught that we are the faith sons and daughters of God. He demonstrated the joy and liberty of sonship with God and the spontaneous fruits of living truth in wholehearted worship of God and loving service of humankind. Today we urgently need to realize that God’s relation with the individual entails a profound spiritual consequence; the brotherhood of all humankind.
— Jeffrey Wattles
Concord, California
Our editorial timetable is such that this issue of The Journal has been in the works far too early to include any responses to the first question we submitted to our readers. Hopefully that question will have inspired some thinking which we can share with you in forthcoming issues. Meanwhile we’ll try to help keep the mental juices flowing with another question, based on the following quote from Paper 2 of The URANTIA Book:
“The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness.” (UB 2:7.10)
Question
What is your vision of this new and appealing philosophy?
As we stated in our last issue, while our intent is to stimulate the submittal of finished articles for publication, we will also welcome, edit (if necessary), and publish in summary form any responses to this question you care to send us. In fact, if this approach generates the level of interest we hope it will, we plan to use it on a regular basis to provide a way for our readers to share their thoughts, observations, and responses to questions many of us struggle with on a regular basis, alone, or in our study groups, as we seek to understand our Father better through the mechanism of The URANTIA Book. Thanks in advance for your willingness to participate with us in a more active way of using The URANTIAN Journal to cross-fertilize our thinking.
—The Editors
“A philosophy of religion evolves out of a basic growth of ideas plus experimental living as both are modified by the tendency to imitate associates. The soundness of philosophic conclusions depends on keen, honest, and discriminating thinking in connection with sensitivity to meanings and accuracy of evaluation. Moral cowards never achieve high planes of philosophic thinking; it requires courage to invade new levels of experience and to attempt the exploration of unknown realms of intellectual living.” (UB 101:7.2)