Ken Glasziou

   Spirituality can be "felt" within. It cannot be defined. What spirituality is, what spirituality means, the spiritual value or content of any thought, words, or action, all of these must grow upon us as we consume and digest what is revealed to us about spirituality. Patience, and familiarity with the Urantia Papers' content  are keys to understanding spirituality.

   The Papers inform us: "The Thought Adjuster will recall and rehearse for you only those memories and experiences which are a part of, and essential to, your universe career….But much of your past life and its memories, having neither spiritual meaning nor morontia value, will perish with the material brain; much of material experience will pass away as onetime scaffolding which, having bridged you over to the morontia level, no longer serves a purpose in the universe." (1235)
   From a personal viewpoint, our Urantia career will have been a total waste if all we take with us is the "faintest flicker of faith" that gave us the chance to begin all over in a morontia career. Rarely would even one whit of our earthly career have had spiritual value and scarcely a single memory of mortal life would be likely to survive.

    From a worldly viewpoint, our exposure to the Urantia Revelation will also have been wasted--for unless that exposure is the catalyst for a quantum shift in ourselves from an existence dominated by matter and materialism to one dominated by the spirituality of our very being, then we will have failed our Urantian brothers and sisters in their desperate need to know the God that has been made known to us.

   "Now, mistake not, my Father will ever respond to the faintest flicker of faith. He takes note of the physical and superstitious emotions of the primitive man….But you who have been called out of darkness into the light are expected to believe with a whole heart; your faith shall dominate the combined attitudes of body, mind, and spirit." (1733)

   In an article in the previous issue of Innerface we explored quotations from the Papers that provide an insight into what "spiritual meanings and values" actually are. Those that follow were selected with the hope they would assist devotees in their quest to become more spiritual.

  "...the spiritual experience (having realized God) demands that man find him and sincerely strive to be like him." (68)

   "When man fails to discriminate the ends of his mortal striving, he finds himself functioning on the animal level of existence. He has failed to avail himself of the superior advantages of that material acumen, moral discrimination, and spiritual insight which are an integral part of his cosmic-mind endowment as a personal being." (193)

   "Spiritual insight. The brotherhood of man is, after all, predicated on the recognition of the fatherhood of God. The quickest way to realize the brotherhood of man on Urantia is to effect the spiritual transformation of present-day humanity. The only technique for accelerating the natural trend of social evolution is that of applying spiritual pressure from above, thus augmenting moral insight while enhancing the soul capacity of every mortal to understand and love every other mortal." (598)
 
   "But there is also a domain of prayer wherein the intellectually alert and spiritually progressing individual attains more or less contact with the superconscious levels of the human mind, the domain of the indwelling Thought Adjuster. In addition, there is a definite spiritual phase of true prayer which concerns its reception and recognition by the spiritual forces of the universe, and which is entirely distinct from all human and intellectual association." (996)

   "The psychic and spiritual concomitants of the prayer of faith are immediate, personal, and experiential. There is no other technique whereby every man, regardless of all other mortal accomplishments, can so effectively and immediately approach the threshold of that realm wherein he can communicate with his Maker, where the creature contacts with the reality of the Creator, with the indwelling Thought Adjuster." (1000)

   "Habits which favor religious growth embrace cultivated sensitivity to divine values, recognition of religious living in others, reflective meditation on cosmic meanings, worshipful problem solving, sharing one's spiritual life with one's fellows, avoidance of selfishness, refusal to presume on divine mercy, living as in the presence of God." (1095)

   "Spiritual development depends, first, on the maintenance of a living spiritual connection with true spiritual forces and, second, on the continuous bearing of spiritual fruit: yielding the ministry to one's fellows of that which has been received from one's spiritual benefactors. Spiritual progress is predicated on intellectual recognition of spiritual poverty coupled with the self-consciousness of perfection-hunger, the desire to know God and be like him, the wholehearted purpose to do the will of the Father in heaven." (1095)