SPIRITUAL COMMUNION

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 103, 4 

 

Spiritual Communion

 

 The characteristic difference between a social occasion and a

 religious gathering is that in contrast with the secular the

 religious is pervaded by the atmosphere of communion. In this

 way human association generates a feeling of fellowship with

 the divine, and this is the beginning of group worship.

 Partaking of a common meal was the earliest type of social

 communion, and so did early religions provide that some

 portion of the ceremonial sacrifice should be eaten by the

 worshipers. Even in Christianity the Lord’s Supper retains

 this mode of communion. The atmosphere of the communion

 provides a refreshing and comforting period of truce in the

 conflict of the self-seeking ego with the altruistic urge of the

 indwelling spirit Monitor. And this is the prelude to true

 worship — the practice of the presence of God which

 eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of man.

 

 When primitive man felt that his communion with God had

 been interrupted, he resorted to sacrifice of some kind in an

 effort to make atonement, to restore friendly relationship. The

 hunger and thirst for righteousness leads to the discovery of

 truth, and truth augments ideals, and this creates new

 problems for the individual religionists, for our ideals tend to

 grow by geometrical progression, while our ability to live up to

 them is enhanced only by arithmetical progression.

 

 The sense of guilt (not the consciousness of sin) comes either

 from interrupted spiritual communion or from the lowering of

 one’s moral ideals. Deliverance from such a predicament can

 only come through the realization that one’s highest moral 

ideals are not necessarily synonymous with the will of God.

 Man cannot hope to live up to his highest ideals, but he can be

 true to his purpose of finding God and becoming more and

 more like him.

 

 Jesus swept away all of the ceremonials of sacrifice and

 atonement. He destroyed the basis of all this fictitious guilt and

 sense of isolation in the universe by declaring that man is a

 child of God; the creature-Creator relationship was placed on

 a child-parent basis. God becomes a loving Father to his

 mortal sons and daughters. All ceremonials not a legitimate

 part of such an intimate family relationship are forever

 abrogated.

 

 God the Father deals with man his child on the basis, not of

 actual virtue or worthiness, but in recognition of the child’s

 motivation — the creature purpose and intent. The

 relationship is one of parent-child association and is actuated

 by divine love.
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CURIOSITY IS A DIVINE GIFT

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part I, 14, 5

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Love of adventure, curiosity, and dread of monotony — these traits inherent in evolving human nature — were not put there just to aggravate and annoy you during your short sojourn on earth, but rather to suggest to you that death is only the beginning of an endless career of adventure, an everlasting life of anticipation, an eternal voyage of discovery.

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 Curiosity — the spirit of investigation, the urge of discovery, the drive of exploration —

 is a part of the inborn and divine endowment of evolutionary space creatures. These natural impulses were not given you merely to be frustrated and repressed. True, these ambitious urges must frequently be restrained during your short life on earth, disappointment must be often experienced, but they are to be fully realized and gloriously gratified during the long ages to come.

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DIVINE FORGIVENESS

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The 35th Day of THE LENTEN SERIES is up -

http://www.maninthemaze.com/thelentenseries/divineforgiveness.html

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MUSIC - THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF MEN, ANGELS, AND SPIRITS

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part II, 44, 1

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Appreciation of music on Urantia is both physical and spiritual; and your human musicians have done much to elevate musical taste from the barbarous monotony of your early ancestors to the higher levels of sound appreciation. The majority of Urantia mortals react to music so largely with the material muscles and so slightly with the mind and spirit; but there has been a steady improvement in musical appreciation for more than thirty-five thousand years. 

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 Tuneful syncopation represents a transition from the musical monotony

 of primitive man to the expressionful harmony and meaningful melodies of your later-day musicians. These earlier types of rhythm stimulate the reaction of the music-loving sense without entailing the exertion of the higher intellectual powers of harmony appreciation and thus more generally appeal to immature or spiritually indolent individuals.

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 The best music of Urantia is just a fleeting echo of the magnificent strains

 heard by the celestial associates of your musicians, who left but snatches of these harmonies of morontia forces on record as the musical melodies of sound harmonics. Spirit-morontia music not infrequently employs all seven modes of expression and reproduction, so that the human mind is tremendously handicapped in any attempt to reduce these melodies of the higher spheres to mere notes of musical sound. Such an effort would be something like endeavoring to reproduce the strains of a great orchestra by means of a single musical instrument.

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 While you have assembled some beautiful melodies on Urantia,

you have not progressed musically nearly so far as many of your neighboring planets in Satania. If Adam and Eve had only survived, then would you have had music in reality; but the gift of harmony, so large in their natures, has been so diluted by strains of unmusical tendencies that only once in a thousand mortal lives is there any great appreciation of harmonics. But be not discouraged; some day a real musician may appear on Urantia, and whole peoples will be enthralled by the magnificent strains of his melodies. One such human being could forever change the course of a whole nation, even the entire civilized world. It is literally true,
 “melody has power a whole world to transform.”
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 Forever, music will remain the universal language of men, angels, and spirits. Harmony is the speech of Havona.

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This is from Paper 44 of THE URANTIA BOOK,
"The Celestial Artisans."  From the simple standpoint
of just "human curiousity," this is certainly one of
the more intriguing revelations in the book about
life "on the other side."
See the entire paper here:
http://www.urantia.org/en/urantia-book-standardized/paper-44-celestial-artisans
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THE ETERNAL AND DIVINE PURPOSE

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There is a great and glorious purpose in the march of the universes through space. All of your mortal struggling is not in vain. We are all part of an immense plan, a gigantic enterprise, and it is the vastness of the undertaking that renders it impossible to see very much of it at any one time and during any one life. We are all a part of an eternal project which the Gods are supervising and outworking. The whole marvelous and universal mechanism moves on majestically through space to the music of the meter of the infinite thought and the eternal purpose of the First Great Source and Center.

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The eternal purpose of the eternal God is a high spiritual ideal. The events of time and the struggles of material existence are but the transient scaffolding which bridges over to the other side, to the promised land of spiritual reality and supernal existence. Of course, you mortals find it difficult to grasp the idea of an eternal purpose; you are virtually unable to comprehend the thought of eternity, something never beginning and never ending. Everything familiar to you has an end.

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 As regards an individual life, the duration of a realm, or the chronology of any connected series of events, it would seem that we are dealing with an isolated stretch of time; everything seems to have a beginning and an end. And it would appear that a series of such experiences, lives, ages, or epochs, when successively arranged, constitutes a straightaway drive, an isolated event of time flashing momentarily across the infinite face of eternity. But when we look at all this from behind the scenes, a more comprehensive view and a more complete understanding suggest that such an explanation is inadequate, disconnected, and wholly unsuited properly to account for, and otherwise to correlate, the transactions of time with the underlying purposes and basic reactions of eternity.

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 To me it seems more fitting, for purposes of explanation to the mortal mind, to conceive of eternity as a cycle and the eternal purpose as an endless circle, a cycle of eternity in some way synchronized with the transient material cycles of time. As regards the sectors of time connected with, and forming a part of, the cycle of eternity, we are forced to recognize that such temporary epochs are born, live, and die just as the temporary beings of time are born, live, and die. Most human beings die because, having failed to achieve the spirit level of Adjuster fusion, the metamorphosis of death constitutes the only possible procedure whereby they may escape the fetters of time and the bonds of material creation, thereby being enabled to strike spiritual step with the progressive procession of eternity. Having survived the trial life of time and material existence, it becomes possible for you to continue on in touch with, even as a part of, eternity, swinging on forever with the worlds of space around the circle of the eternal ages.

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 The sectors of time are like the flashes of personality in temporal form; they appear for a season, and then they are lost to human sight, only to reappear as new actors and continuing factors in the higher life of the endless swing around the eternal circle. Eternity can hardly be conceived as a straightaway drive, in view of our belief in a delimited universe moving over a vast, elongated circle around the central dwelling place of the Universal Father.

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 Frankly, eternity is incomprehensible to the finite mind of time. You simply cannot grasp it; you cannot comprehend it. I do not completely visualize it, and even if I did, it would be impossible for me to convey my concept to the human mind. Nevertheless, I have done my best to portray something of our viewpoint, to tell you somewhat of our understanding of things eternal. I am endeavoring to aid you in the crystallization of your thoughts about these values which are of infinite nature

 and eternal import.

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 There is in the mind of God a plan which embraces every creature of all his vast domains, and this plan is an eternal purpose of boundless opportunity, unlimited progress, and endless life. And the infinite treasures of such a matchless career are yours for the striving!

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 The goal of eternity is ahead! The adventure of divinity attainment lies before you! The race for perfection is on! whosoever will may enter, and certain victory will crown the efforts of every human being who will run the race of faith and trust, depending every step of the way on the leading of the indwelling Adjuster and on the guidance of that good spirit of the Universe Son, which so freely has been poured out

 upon all flesh.

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DIVINE FORGIVENESS

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It's reassuring to find out that divine

forgiveness is inherent and inevitable.

Our inability or unwillingness to

forgive our fellows is a sure sign

of immaturity.

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Day 35 of THE LENTEN SERIES is here:

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http://www.maninthemaze.com/thelentenseries/divineforgiveness.html

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JESUS' HUMAN AND DIVINE MINDS

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Jesus was both a mortal and a divine personality, and the mystery of the workings of his minds is the subject of Day 12 of THE LENTEN SERIES. See it here: http://www.maninthemaze.com/thelentenseries/hishumandivineminds.html

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JESUS - THE MAN

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part IV, 196, 1

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Jesus’ devotion to the Father’s will and the service of man was even more than mortal decision and human determination; it was a wholehearted consecration of himself to such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the fact of the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus away from men. The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well as God; he belongs to men; men belong to him. How unfortunate that religion itself should be so misinterpreted as to take the human Jesus away from struggling mortals! Let not the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly religious man who has ever lived on Urantia.

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The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions!
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 Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to “follow after” the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father’s will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment?
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 Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living?
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 Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.

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