In the series of articles below, I attempt to outline my thinking in the development of this tool for alignment, based on the gospel of Jesus as presented in the Urantia Book. Please understand that wherever there are two Urantians there are three opinions about any one passage in that big blue book. But after some 45 years of study and devotion to its teachings –and with the world once again in turmoil–I wanted to follow through on a project I’d thought of years ago and this is it. So here I thread a needle and attempt to weave its passage through many long years of reflection to offer some remedy for the pain we’re in. We really do need each other.
God in the Urantia Book
The problem with any conception of God is that, to be accessible to human beings, it must speak to infinite possibility in a way that can be imagined. We humans understandably have a terrible time conceiving of any sort of infinite being—much less one capable of being universal and eternal, too. And because it’s so hard to fathom a being of that magnitude, we quickly declare it non-existent or impossible.
The Urantia Book asks us to step away from the tendency to minimize and dismiss the things about possibility that can’t be easily understood. It quickly brings us face to face with the challenging concept of an infinite God that has always existed and holds that place through all manifestations as the First Source and Center; poised and undifferentiated; in whom all potentials are presently actual and all actuality presently potential; primal, majestic and juxtaposed in an eternal present; and in whose presence all loving possibility is and always has been perfectly unified. And yet… who is still personally contactable.
The infinite and eternal Ruler of the universe of universes is power, form, energy, process, pattern, principle, presence, and idealized reality. But he is more; he is personal; he exercises a sovereign will, experiences self-consciousness of divinity, executes the mandates of a creative mind, pursues the satisfaction of the realization of an eternal purpose and manifests a father’s love and affection for his universal children.
The Urantia Book 3:6:6
It’s hard enough to be asked to imagine a being of that magnitude while being denied the tendency to simplify or anthropomorphize him, but to conceive of a real personality within it puts us directly at the mercy of limitation. And you do end up needing faith to forge a relationship through that.
For those who choose that path and may have initially done so from either an objective experiment or chaotic trauma, it may have begun with small, hesitant acts of faith but ends up being driven by the experience of reciprocity. We pray, meditate and worship in the realm of God and spirit because it works. It isn’t designed to be provable to anybody else. It’s only in the realm of personal experience that it becomes real.
God in Experience
The Urantia Book asks us to go deep in conceiving of God. They describe a relationship to the First Source and Center as being drawn on three levels: the most primary level is called the Absolute and has everything to do with the existential, majestic One who’s seated in dynamic yet loving totality as primal source; then the Absonite, an intervening, transcendental level that is alpha and omega, cause and consummation, co-eternal with the Absolute and chockful of patterns pertaining to every possible thing or being that could unfold through the medium of experience; and then the Finite, that aspect of creation purposefully limited by the fact of origins.
(In Urantia terminology, the word ‘finite’ doesn’t necessarily imply limitation based on inevitable endings as much as limitation by contrast to those things that have always existed and never had beginning.)
In this construct, it’s through the fracture of origins that Source has willed an escape from ‘the fetters of perfection and the bonds of infinity’ to move ceaselessly into experience. By breaking with the state of being complete, that Source being is free to tunnel through untold variations of experience, and by gifting us with free will and limited vision, becomes capable of experiencing co-creation, evolution and the element of surprise within us. Because that’s a gift that could never be given to yourself in some primal state of totality… the vicarious element of surprise.
About this Project & the Urantia Book
It’s directly because of that compelling vision of God and two other pieces of revelatory information in the book that I came to want to do this website.
The book implies that the light of revelation is something like an ocean wave in that it breaks and breaks and breaks again. It’s a process that’s standard for evolutionary worlds and depends on both the hunger and capacity of their people to receive more expansive information about God and the universe as they evolve. It’s described as happening on many different levels, some very intimate and human while others provide a larger arc of information for all the world’s people as planetary life becomes more complex. These revelations are epochal in nature, sometimes happening through incarnated teachers and, in this case, through a give and take process that resulted in a rather ungainly, odd-looking book.
The revelators felt, at this time in our history, that humans needed help in integrating science and religion. They could see the divide beginning sometime in the Middle Ages and wanted to help by pointing out that there are three pillars of wisdom: the inward trajectory of personal religion, or faith; the outward trajectory of science, or observational reason; and the third of philosophy, or the balanced integration between those two complementary polarities within each human being.
They had no interest in the resulting book being used to foster a new evolutionary religion. They teach us about the difference between the religions of authority and personal religion and their aim is simply to help all people deepen their understanding of God on personal levels no matter what their belief. So, each individual reader is encouraged and free to move with the material however he or she will and, for me, there were several pieces within this large and stunningly deep body of information that proved life altering and will inform the purpose of this website—this project around retrieving the Master’s lost gospel and fostering it through goal-setting.
The first of these was the revelation of this evolutionary and experiential aspect of God, the one breaking free of incomprehensible infinite limitations to move into equally incomprehensible finite ones. Intelligent God concepts are hard to come by. You can find many beautiful and inspirational passages in all the world’s wisdom traditions about the absolute and existential God but, so many times, the human mind goes begging in pretty dicey poetic waters when attempting to explain what He/She/It has to do with us.
But the Urantia Book’s teachings on the Supreme Being, as they call the experiential aspect of God now in process of self-actualization through all of us, do lend a new and startling lens to peek through. And even with limited vision, the mind opens and stretches toward reflected light like a flower.
The second piece that will apply to this project is found in the fourth part of the book, in the part dedicated to the life and teachings of Jesus, the incarnated Christ. It has to do with the Master’s unrealized gospel of the parenthood of God and siblinghood of humankind through worship and service and how it ended up getting buried by well-intentioned religionists in two thousand years of religious dogma. The simplicity and genius of his teaching has the potential to alter the way we live and think about God and each other if only it could come to light and be practically applied.
The third is found throughout the book in the teachings about the angels. The angels that are most intimately connected with us on a planetary level, the Seraphim, are organized for service in ways that would really benefit us in operating more effectively in our own service work, if we sought to align practically with their style of organization.
I’ll take each of these subjects in turn and hope to create a simple but compelling argument for an approach to the Master’s gospel that would involve active support for goal-setting along worship and service lines, organized closely to the way the Seraphim are for planetary service, and within an appreciative context for the evolving Supreme Being. This site will most likely appeal to Urantia readers but it is for everybody. For that reason, I’ll steer clear of any attempts to recreate the depths of philosophy our book gets into or drift loftily into Urantia speak to create a morass of muddled personal interpretations around such a gorgeously coherent body of information. If you wish to read the book, please just buy one. Hopefully, the thinking that’s arisen from it in my personal experience will speak clearly for itself and make sense to everybody, reader or not