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Divine Music
Sandy Garrick, Katrineholm, Sweden
My main point of dissatisfaction about the origin of the Urantia papers has always been the absence of a bonafide musician on the early Forum panel that Dr Sadler put together in his Chicago home so as to bring us this superb document on the magnitude of God's cosmic reality.
But how could he? In the days of prohibition in Chicago, the local gangsters often carried their machine guns in saxophone, cello, violin and trombone cases. Thus a musician was generally looked upon as someone who might threaten your life. Which might explain why no musical mind was ever invited to sit in the Forum deliberations. Can you imagine today, everyone who carried a music-cachee being looked upon as a potential killer? Whether in Paris, Panama, Perth, Palermo, or Pittsburgh, being a musician would be as if you were a murder suspect.
Such was the culture of the times when the Sadlers' started the study group that turned into the Forum that brought us the Urantia revelation. I had the pleasure of personally knowing three of the most prominent personalities of those early days--Clyde Bedell, Clyde Goodman, and Max Laurence. One day at lunch, Clyde was lamenting about the malady that threatens us all--our preoccupation with everything that simply doesn't matter. Such was his description of those rebellious aspects so predominant in our lives. How could we have grasped the thus translated "Symphonies of Paradise" the Revelators brought to us in their rainbow of celestial music. "We must get our priorities in order" is the battle cry of such cosmic raisons d'etre. To be "CCC"--clear, cogent, and concise.
One of the revelators, the Melchizedek-in-charge, addressed the Forum saying, "If you people would only realize what a high spiritual source you're dealing with, you would stop with these puerile investigations into detecting fraud and get on with some significant questions about our magnificent universe and the reality-totality it represents." The Forum adopted the question and answer method--but without the presence of an active music-man. Even though we're taught that, "the whole marvellous universal mechanism moves on majestically through space to the music of the meter of the infinite thought and eternal purpose of the first great Source and Center." How do we understand such phenomena?
Today things are not very different on this rebellion-torn world of ours, steeped in lies, misinformation and misleadings, where we are still investigating to see if these folks really knew what they were talking about. "I know whereof I speak," the actual words of a Divine Counselor, are still questioned and our skepticism is only surmounted by those few souls who have experientially discovered the cosmic reality that such celestial beings must represent. Basic understanding is still lacking in most of us, even at the highest levels of intellectual academia. Self-seeking that equivalates to rebellion and selfishness is indeed cosmic suicide--the cosmic antithesis of the truths, beauties, and goodnesses we need to address in the actual living of the melodies of our superb revelation. "If music be the food of love, play on," said the bard in his supernal poetry.
The harmonies of God, the Father on Paradise, are exquisitely rich--filled with the masterfully orchestrated beauty of the Perfect Central Universe. As the Son's melodies and the superb Spirit depictions of goodnesses inherent in the musical rhapsodies of the ministry of Love and Mercy. Harmony is our Father-content. Melody is Son-content and the Spirit stands for the rhythmic component of the music of the eternal and divine purposes.
Dissonances are falsehoods masquerading in the habiliments of liberty. Avant garde abstractions and synthesized unmusical tendencies of a moronic dilettante are simply lies trying to wear the cloak of musical truths for further disruptive maladjustments. Distortive noise is the negative factor by which recognition of evil is thus made apparently audible even to those lacking in discriminative abilities.
Only once in a thousand lives is there any apparent capacity for the recognition of the higher, spiritually intelligent harmonies. The old Forum's ideal of being clear, cogent, and concise (CCC) is done by increasing recognition-facilities from where we might sort, choose, and achieve.
In the Melchizedek Symphony Papers (100-106), the direction is clearly, cogently, and concisely given. We are to "dare to launch out upon the limitless and never ending universe journey in the sole company of truth." (1141) Harmonious, Fatherly, thought permeated, excellence-orientated truth. After "having started out upon the way of life everlasting, having accepted the assignment and received our orders to advance, why fear the dangers of human forgetfulness and mortal inconstancy when, in every dark hour and at every crossroad in the forward struggle, the Spirit of Truth will speak, saying, 'This is the way.'" (383) Why can we not recognize the Spirit of Truth? Why can we not effectively tell it apart from the rampant sham and lies that surround us on a daily basis? By their fruits we may know them.
The qualities of divinity are truth, beauty, and goodness--in this order, as ordained by the heavenly Father. There are no shortcuts, easy paths, or royal roads to Paradise. Patronage, condescension and pity do not equivalate to mercy. Procrastination, equivocation, insincerity,
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