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Goals and Purposes
"The goal of self-realization should be spiritual, not material. The only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual, and eternal." (1096)
So what are these divine, spiritual, eternal realities that we should be pursuing? From the Papers we learn that:
Spirituality is at, once, the indicator of our nearness to God--and our nearness to God is, at once, the indicator of our spirituality.
Spirituality is the real measure of our usefulness to our fellow human beings.
Spirituality enhances our ability to discover beauty in things, recognize truth in meanings, and discover goodness in values.
Spiritual development is determined by the capacity therefore.
Spirituality is directly proportional to the elimination of the selfish qualities in our love for God and for our fellows.
Spirituality is the measure of our Deity attainment, our attunement with the indwelling Spirit of the Father--our Godlikeness.
"Spirit-born individuals are so re-motivated in life that they can calmly stand by while their fondest ambitions perish and their keenest hopes crash; they positively know that such catastrophes are but the redirecting cataclysms that wreck one's temporal creations preliminary to the rearing of the more noble and enduring realities of a new and more sublime level of universe attainment." (1096)
Essentially, our reality is proportional to our selflessness, our attunement to the spirit forces within, and the degree to which we dedicate our mortal lives to the spiritual progress of our fellows.
Also, that same reality is inversely proportional to the degree of our worldly desires, our craving for recognition, fame, or fortune.
We mortal beings are so accustomed to thinking in terms of material values that the intangibles of the spirit world--love, truth, beauty, goodness--have little reality when divorced from association with things material. For us finite beings, to love another is to see to their material welfare, to seek truth is to look for it in material relationships, to measure beauty we do so by the strength of our emotional responses, and we judge goodness in terms of conformity to social mores.
The revelators of the Urantia Papers see reality quite differently. To love our neighbor is to be concerned for their career in eternity, to see beauty in another is to see beauty in their soul, truth is measured in terms of the qualities of the Universal Father who is also the ne plus ultra of goodness. They tell us we can only love a God who is good--and surely we have now progressed beyond gauging God's goodness by the amount of bread in our stomachs.
Love, truth, beauty, goodness, seen purely for their spiritual value, have their principal measure in terms of relationships with other personalities. The beauty of another's soul is something that can be experienced, something that can be felt in their presence, but never can it be measured or defined.
It is these intangibles that Jesus was referring to when he enjoined us to seek to be perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect; they are the intangibles that Jesus requires should appear in his followers as the fruits of the spirit.
"When you have by faith once established yourself as a son of God, nothing else matters as regards the surety of survival. But make no mistake! this survival faith is a living faith, and it increasingly manifests the fruits of that divine spirit which first inspired it in the human heart. That you have once accepted sonship in the heavenly kingdom will not save you in the face of the knowing and persistent rejection of those truths which have to do with the progressive spiritual fruit-bearing of the sons of God in the flesh." (1916)
As we progress spiritually, so do our responsibilities and obligations increase. From the one who has little, little is expected, but from those who have much, much is expected. The Urantia Papers were not given to us in order that we should bask in the light of the knowledge we have acquired. The more we know, the more is expected from us. Primarily what is expected from us must derive from the living example of our personal lives, for if we are to be the messengers of a spiritual message, we must live a spiritual life.
"In the old order you fasted and prayed; as the new creature of the rebirth of the spirit, you are taught to believe and rejoice. In the Father's kingdom you are to become new creatures; old things are to pass away; behold I show you how all things are to become new. And by your love for one another you are to convince the world that you have passed from bondage to liberty, from death into life everlasting.
"By the old way you seek to suppress, obey, and conform to the rules of living; by the new way you are first transformed by the Spirit of Truth and thereby strengthened in your inner
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