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Patience--a Millennium is 1000 Years.
Ken Glasziou
"Mechanical inventions and the dissemination of knowledge are modifying civilization; certain economic adjustments and social changes are imperative if cultural disaster is to be avoided. This new and oncoming social order will not settle down complacently for a millennium. The human race must become reconciled to a procession of changes, adjustments, and readjustments. Mankind is on the march toward a new and unrevealed planetary destiny." (Paper 99, Section 1)
Human evolution proceeds at a snail's pace. In fact further genetic improvement of the human race has probably ceased, and is not likely to resume until acceptable selection criteria are agreed upon. Even then, it may take thousands of years before significant improvement is achieved. Hence, in referring to a millennium of change, the revelators must be speaking dominantly about changes to the mores of human society--which are dependent on changes to the individuals that constitute a society.
Perhaps it is the Eastern rather than the Western world that is destined to bring us the necessary changes--for there is a very deeply embedded "thinking pattern" indigenous to the western world which is highly resistant to change. The revelators refer to such patterns as "universe" or "concept" frames.
Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the master universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree. (1260)
Perhaps mainly due to the influence of the ancient Greeks, Westerners mainly think in a "yes or no," "on or off," "this or that," "either/or" mode of thinking that chooses between incompatible alternatives. But in the Eastern world, "both this and that" is the more usual way of considering reality.
The "universe frame" that is apparent in the Urantia Papers is far closer to Eastern "both/and" thinking than it is to the either/or thinking of the West that seeks to exclude any middle ground.
The vast majority of research workers in the Western world, whose interests are in the field of mind and neurophysiology, give credence only to the single postulate that every aspect of human behavioral characteristics has its roots in our animal origins.
In contrast, the Urantia Papers provide us with information on the structure of our mind and our personality that differentiates between an animal-origin and a spirit-origin component of our make up.
Mind, the revelators tell us, is derived from the Infinite Spirit, the source of Cosmic Mind. Mind is tailored to the needs of the creature and, for the human type of mind, comes already endowed with specific attributes such as self-consciousness and the ability to differentiate between relative right and wrong.
Our minds also interact with other components that go to make up our selfhood. Our personality is a gift from the Universal Father. With "personality" come the dual characteristics of relative free will and the capacity, through will, to utilize qualities inherent in Cosmic Mind.
Our first free will moral decision signals the coming of our Thought Adjuster to indwell our minds. On our request, we are also graced with the presence of the Spirit of Truth from our Creator Son. These two spirits then act as one in guiding and fostering those spiritual attributes of our being that are capable of fostering our soul growth--and thereby differentiates our soul from that animal-origin component of our make-up that responds only to the cause-effect sensory signals emanating from our material environment.
It appears to be factual that Western civilization promotes the almost exclusive development of those animal-origin components of our being by which attention is focussed upon our interactions with the material components of the environment.
There is a positive feedback in this situation. The more we focus attention on the material environment, the more important it becomes to us, hence the more we develop its potentials which thereby demands more and more of our attention. Hence there is positive feedback--and an inherently explosive progression.
Automatically that means we Westerners give little thought and even less time to our spiritual progress and the fostering of our souls.
And so it is not surprising that the vast majority of western people are not at all spiritually orientated but are dominated by materialism and the animal-origin aspects of their being.
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