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Living as Jesus lived--in a family environment.
Attempting to live our life as Jesus lived his while we are at home and among those who know us best may bring us face to face with problems we didn't even know we had. Such problems derive from habits that commenced developing in our early childhood and are held more or less unconsciously--so much so that we ignore them as being normal behavior.
Arising from our evolutionary animal heritage, many such habits originated from a deeply embedded trait found principally in herd and pack animals that we may label as dominance behavior. Coupled with this is a more widespread trait sometimes called territorialism. Singly or together these traits may appear in related behavioral forms such as self-centeredness, aggression, cowardice, anger, fear, resentment, revenge, impatience, intolerance, meanness, avarice, and violent, abusive and anti-social behavior.
Because these habits develop slowly, and mainly through trial and error procedures, they tend to be held unconsciously. Thus, we can become thoroughly nasty people without being in the slightest aware of our failings.
The Urantia Papers inform us, "the better man understands his neighbor, the easier it will be to forgive him, even to love him." But what if we do not understand even ourselves? And are therefore wide open to the criticism of "physician, heal thyself."
For most nasty people like us then, when seeking to enter the kingdom of heaven, we must first expend a major effort on self-healing, at the same time accepting, forgiving, and loving our neighbors without expecting to understand what makes them as they are.
Some of our basic behavior patterns are genetically inherited, others are learned. But most come from a combination of both. An example of why we cannot expect to understand what makes another as they are, comes from a recent discovery that a single gene controls the level of the brain enzyme, monamine oxidase. There are two forms of this gene, one good, the other bad. The gene plays an important role in what may be expressed in human males as violent and abusive behavior patterns.
A staggering 85% of males who inherit the bad form of the gene,1 and also had a poor home environment, will exhibit violent and antisocial behavior in later life. This may include child abuse if they themselves have experienced abuse during their own childhood. But if they have experienced a good home life, then they are no more likely to go off the rails than those with the good form of the gene.
This is one of the few cases in which behavior can be linked with a genetic abnormality--but even then the actual outcome is unpredictable. However, what has now become obvious is that human behavior is extraordinarily complex--thus indicating that it will be a long, long time before we understand very much about what makes our neighbor, our associates, or even our spouse, behave as they do.
Therefore, if our behavioral interaction with others is to improve to the point that our Jesus-like behavior will have positive effects on others, our repair work needs to be directed virtually entirely to within ourselves.
Almost all of our obnoxious behavior derives directly from our evolutionary animal heritage--and Jesus proved it can be defeated.2 That is what life on Earth, this first phase of our journey into eternity, is about. And in a first step in our liberation, we need to recognize that things material and worldly are of little consequence for our eternal life--as evidenced by Jesus' declaration that the only realities worth striving for are divine, spiritual, and eternal.
Having recognized that all human beings, and especially ourselves, are afflicted with inherited behavioral habits, we can embark on our own cure. Each of us will have at least some of the symptoms mentioned above--self-centeredness, resentment, impatience, intolerance and so on. If we are to be of any use in the struggle to bring the Jesus' way to this world, these must be defeated. And for that we will need the help and guidance of our indwelling Spirit-Guides, our Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.
Help is also available from the account we have of Jesus' early life in which he tackled these same problems and overcame them by learning never to react to the will of another, but only to the will of God and his own will.3 We can emulate Jesus by doing the same thing--refusing to react emotionally to the behavior of others by first pausing to think, then referring our problem to the God-Within, and only after that responding as we believe Jesus would have responded.3
If we can convert this process to becoming habitual, we are on our way to becoming the victors. However we will have difficulty in responding as we believe Jesus would have responded except that we have a thorough knowledge of the life of Jesus--which is why the revelators have said that of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it. (2090)
Strangely enough it is the quiet and unobtrusive defeat of our animalistic behavior patterns being carried out in our home environment that turns out to have by far the most potential to influence the long term spiritual advancement of our planet.
Past experience of religionists has shown that shouting our message from the rooftops will
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