The First Source and Center
First Person of Deity and primal nondeity pattern, God, the Universal Father, creator, controller, and upholder; universal love, eternal spirit, and infinite energy, potential of all potentials and source of all actuals; stability of all statics and dynamism of all change; source of pattern and father of persons. Collectively, all seven Absolutes equivalate to infinity, but the Universal Father himself actually is infinite.
The Urantia Book 105:3:2
Imagine you’re holding a thin golden disc between your fingers. On one side it’s opaque and perfect but, if you flip it over and hold it up to the light, exquisite patterns of light and dark begin to emerge and move out from it. Relationships within it that were perfectly, invisibly homogenized on one side begin to toggle into polarities and diversify, coming into view on the other.
The Urantia Book, in describing God in relationship to the godhead, presents an expansion of the original revelation of the one God and the Paradise Trinity that the incarnated master teacher Melchizadek gave to Abraham about 4,000 years ago. It describes God as being in an originating relationship to six other co-absolute, co-eternal persons, sources and potentials in a seven-fold relationship within the godhead. The Universal Father, the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit are more fully revealed as the Paradise Trinity while Paradise itself is described as ‘the material fulcrum of infinity’; and the three Absolutes of Potentiality as the divine and infinite repositories for endless possibility pertaining to spirit and matter. As mentioned before, all of these Absolutes perfectly cohere within the God of eternity but break into diversified source-relationships to spirit, matter, actuality, potentiality and the ‘ministry of mind’ when it comes to what is realized and currently actualizing in the finite.
But what does all this heady stuff mean when it comes to us? How do these absolute relationships break into the light of our own experience?
There are clues in the creature context we find ourselves in. We can peer into a crowd and see thousands of sets of eyes yet only ever observe anything as a singular witness, however many eyes we see. We can also observe that however many future plans are constructed or past events remembered, our lives continually and cohesively unfold in the context of a present moment. And we can lay witness to the fact that creature life seems everywhere relatable. Groups of individuals move easily in and out of relationships, as do pairs, and personalities are perfectly capable of operating in the aggregate. Wherever we walk, there is ground beneath our feet.
As persons, we have the experience of having a definable personality that’s capable of unifying its experience through time. We also know what it is to have parents, siblings and children—relationships that are both peer-based and familial as well as precursors and consequences in all our life experience. We have the continual use of our minds as instruments to affect changes in the personal and material environments around us and to also experience potentials arising from things we’ve done while those past potential things become stable and established actualities. We have free will.
You actually don’t have to look far to find evidence of the purposes and relationships that the Urantia Book describes as originating in the godhead as being elemental to human experience, too. It really is true: “In him we live and move and have our being.” What’s sourced so intentionally from will on absolute levels creates the ordinary light and soil of everyday experience.
But from a God point of view there’s another elemental thing that may be less inherently felt. In describing how God as a father moved to creatively source and people his creation, the revelators describe him like this:
He has given away, actually bestowed, with the dignity and sanctity of personality possession, all of himself and all of his attributes, everything he possibly could divest himself of, in every way, in every age, in every place, and to every person, and in every universe except that of his central indwelling…. Divine personality is not self-centered: self-distribution and sharing of personality characterize divine freewill selfhood.
The Urantia Book 10:1.3
In fact, they say further that the only two things that the Creator kept for himself in the projection of temporal creation were his own free will and primal creatorship—and they honestly think it was because he couldn’t manage to give them away.
There’s a real generosity of spirit when you look at that description. But is it human, too? Perhaps, sometimes. When you run into one of those people so unselfconsciously giving they almost make you cry. They can be anywhere–in a store, on the street or even in your family–but there’s a quality to how they love that almost makes you worry about them, and yet they seem fine, tethered to a deeper cord and perfectly sustained in how they are.
But God gave human beings free will so our relationship to that type of love is voluntary. In the temporal, the book says creatures may be projected, eventuated, attenuated, co-created or born but, whatever their point of origin, it’ll be their relationship to that quality of love that ends up determining how real they become and how much they help the not-yet-actualized experiential God gain reality because, in the end, that Source being can cohere only to its true nature.
Because of the Creator’s desire to share whatever creator prerogatives it was possible to give away, the God of experience, called the Supreme Being, is revealed as being seeded through thousands of co-creator and creative beings engaged in the work of universe building, which turns our familiar concepts of God on their head. But co-creatorship is a very big deal and we find ourselves, in a much smaller way, within the matrix of that dynamic, too. There isn’t a hierarchy in heaven based on power hungry demi-gods. The Creator’s originating characteristic of generosity and service permeates the whole ‘ascension scheme’, as it’s called. No pissy gods playing with people’s lives out of boredom, wrath or envy. There’s love in the works and it’s the only motive allowed to finally factor into the further actualization of the Supreme Being.
‘The action is ours and the consequence is God’s.’ He alone gets to choose what remains in collective memory as valuable life experience in the finite–and those possessions are destined to become all of ours eventually. When the Supreme Being does finally actualize, that quality of generous self-sharing will result in a truly knowable aspect of the unfathomable, infinite God. The download will be unimaginable. Every person’s long experience will become accessible to everyone else. There’ll suddenly be many pairs of eyes to peer through, and yet, even as a collective, we’ll remain a single witness.