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The Universe is Friendly?
"Ganid, I have absolute confidence in my heavenly Father's overcare; I am consecrated to doing the will of my Father in heaven. I do not believe that real harm can befall me; I do not believe that my lifework can really be jeopardized by anything my enemies might wish to visit upon me, and surely we have no violence to fear from our friends. I am absolutely assured that the entire universe is friendly to me--this all-powerful truth I insist on believing with a wholehearted trust in spite of all appearances to the contrary."
"The universe is friendly"--what a strange concept! Is it not the experience of virtually all of us that the universe is universally hostile? Ask a farmer and he will recount stories of flood, fire, famine, and drought. Ask all those emergency services people who deal with the aftermath of earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, twisters, and other quirks of an apparently hostile nature. Of course there is another side--those freak events were always there and we humans just happened to build our homes in their territory.
However, for most of us, the statement we read in the Urantia Paper that relates Jesus' experiences duting his tutorship period with the Indian boy, Ganid, and which attributes to Jesus his stated insistence on believing the universe is friendly despite all appearances to the contrary--this surely is out of this world, contrary to all experience, and bordering upon the ridiculous.
But is it? We have minds. Their origin is the cosmic mind of the Eternal Spirit so not likely to be unfriendly. We experience the ministry of the Universe Mother Spirit via the Mind Spirits--again not likely to be unfriendly. We each have a unique personality, the gift of the Universal Father, we have the indwelling Father-spirit to council and guide us, we have the Spirit of Truth from Jesus, always ready to council us. So what is the source of the unfriendliness, the hostility, that we feel is the natural experience of all creatures that dwell on this planet?
First we can discount the "natural disasters" of nature. After all they are entirely impersonal. If they catch us out, it really was our own fault in having exposed ourselves unnecessarily or else it was just "one of those things"--a natural hazard but hardly unfriendly.
The unfriendliness we experience in life is dominantly generated within our own minds, some of it in response to real or imagined "unfriendliness" from others of our kind, but much of it due to acquired attitudes.
Our minds are dualistic in nature. They have those components that are of the divine nature but they also bear the stamp of our evolutionary origins. We have inherited behavior patterns that we hold in common with other herd animals--dominance behavior, territorialism, the flight or fight response to threat, self-preservation, and other instinctual activities.
Jesus, of course, knew all this. Until we digest the text of the Urantia Papers we are only guessing. There is no way for science to know that our minds have their origin in cosmic mind and that it comes to us with inherent properties. Nor is there any way that science could ever discover that we each have a unique personality pattern derived from the Universal Father that also has the capacity to activate inherent properties of cosmic mind. Likewise scientists may infer that we do or do not have free will but it is dubious that proof of either contention will ever be available.
The Urantia Papers remove enough of our ignorance to permit us to think as Jesus thought, for in this regard, he was wholly man. So having acquired this necessary knowledge from the Urantia Papers it becomes possible for any of us to appreciate how and why Jesus could look upon the universe as friendly despite all appearances to the contrary. The hostility we experience is in our own minds--as is the fear. If we see the universe as unfriendly, it will be so. If we see other humans as unfriendly, we virtually guarantee that is how our relationships will be.
To experience the friendly universe as Jesus experienced it we have to turn our minds over to his Spirit of Truth.
"The true cosmic meaning of this (golden) rule of universal relationship is revealed only in its spiritual realization, in the interpretation of the law of conduct by the spirit of the Son to the spirit of the Father that indwells the soul of mortal man.
"And when such spirit-led mortals realize the true meaning of this golden rule, they are filled to overflowing with the assurance of citizenship in a friendly universe, and their ideals of spirit reality are satisfied only when they love their fellows as Jesus loved us all, and that is the reality of the realization of the love of God."
Attitudes thus make all the difference. Jesus never perceived the apparent hostility of others as being truly unfriendly but rather as their being misinformed and misguided.
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