Fusion Power
by Stan Hartman"Emancipation of the mind and soul can never be effected without the driving power of an intelligent enthusiasm which borders on religious zeal." ( p. 1773)
The present crisis within the Urantia community, between those who are for or against the Foundation's copyright on the revelation, will not be resolved by denial or avoidance, but it doesn't have to consume all our creative energies either. There’s work to be done that’s more important than the current lawsuits, though those legal actions are clearly not meaningless or insignificant. Ultimately, the judgments of the Most Highs will rule on our world, and though they certainly won't come down on the side of deceit and prevarication, the celestial government can’t be happy with the proliferation of enemy-mindedness on both sides of the dispute. We have to stand up for what we believe is right, but to judge the motives of those who oppose us is a useless, energy-wasting habit which is really an outgrowth of fear, not faith. We can oppose the decisions and actions of our brothers and sisters, but if we also delight in condemning their spirit-indwelt personalities, we're betraying the Master's teachings. Those who secretly guide the evolution of our civilization are watching what we do with our "talent," and if we bury it to keep it "safe," or neglect it while we engage in resisting evil within the readership, rather than overcoming evil with good, our gift will be taken away from us and given to others who will invest it more wisely.
The Urantia Book is our "talent," and belongs to no human being or group of human beings. It was entrusted to us to enrich all our planet. All who know it's true are its trustees, and have a responsibility to spread the news of it to the world, regardless of disagreements about how to do that. A house cannot stand divided against itself any more than it can with a rotten foundation.
All we can realistically ask of ourselves and others is sincerity, and appropriate humility, not perfect judgment. When we find ourselves in conflict, as so many have within the Urantia community recently, direct confrontation is not always necessary, and it would be wonderful if we could all keep in mind that tact and tolerance are the earmarks of a great soul. It's sometimes necessary to deal with discord head-on, but there's another progressive option, if we're honest with ourselves when we select it. We can transform such conflicts by more focused dedication to the values and needs that lie deeper than such friction. Dishonesty, manipulation, and attempts to claim arbitrary authority over others have to be seen and condemned for what they are, but letting such spiritual crimes also distract us from more important things needlessly compounds the harm they do. Jesus' way was to strengthen good, not waste time trying to destroy evil. We have a responsibility to keep in mind his warning about the beam and the mote (p.1571), and one of the statements that simulates mota: "The argumentative defense of any proposition is inversely proportional to the truth contained" (p.557). The truth is contained not in our personal judgments of others but in the quality of our brotherhood, including our kinship with those who disagree with us -- especially those whom we like the least. "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me" (p. 1727).
Denial and avoidance are also dangers, of course, when we attempt this higher attitude. It's easy to think we're transforming something when in reality we're simply avoiding it. A clue to whether we're involved in transformation or avoidance is whether or not we're free of fear and defensiveness, and whether or not the energy motivating our actions is spiritual enthusiasm. The Urantia Book speaks of Jesus being "surcharged with divine enthusiasm" (p. 1102), which simply had no time for the petty conflicts in the lives of the mortals he passed among. That this enthusiasm can turn into fanaticism shouldn't lead us to believe it's an evil in itself, or that we can truly follow him without it.
Of course, we're not Jesus, and have to beware of kidding ourselves that we're "above it all." Not all conflicts are petty, either. Nevertheless, compared to the potential of a truly dedicated Urantia community, such frictions have little power to thwart our positive efforts unless we grant them undue attention. We can't afford to let the illusion of worldly influence, for instance (such as court cases), convince us that something is a serious threat to our mission on earth -- keeping in mind that our mission is something we have yet to discover and clearly define, and thereby let clearly define our community. Much more serious dangers to "the Urantia movement" are fear and its by-products, like suspicion, doubt, prejudice, short-sightedness, impatience, ignorance of the book itself, selfish ambition, power-hunger, enemy-mindedness, jealousy, and subservience to arbitrary human authority.
Fear and its byproducts will have little power in a truly unified Urantia community, a genuine family which welcomes sincere disagreements because it's ready to use them to find deeper unity. Within each of us, even now, lives an enthusiasm which can crowd out anxiety and hostility and replace them, if we allow it to, with the joy of loyalty to Father's will. As a community, we can help each other put away our fears and the animosities they give birth to, and find the balance that frees the divine passion inherent in our spiritual birthright, that faith that consumes all timidity, a certainty and divine enthusiasm that made the boy Jesus shake from head to foot and cry out to the spectacle below him, "O Jerusalem!"
This spiritual passion is the prelude to the eternal ecstasy of fusion, and it requires our constant loyalty and care. We need also to keep before us a vision of our fusion as a family, the unification of our community in God's purpose for us, and let that vision guide us forward. We can't do God's will by backing into the future, keeping our anxious attention locked on how the community may have failed and supposed dangers to it. As the authors of the book point out (p.135), "only forward-looking and progressive attitudes are personally real." The only serious threat to our mission on earth is our personal and collective doubt.
Passionate, ecstatic -- these are words not always associated with healthy spiritual community. But when our faith is real and strong, as individuals and as a family, such adjectives are appropriate -- especially if we add another: peaceful. "Genuine spiritual ecstasy is usually associated with great outward calmness and almost perfect emotional control" (p. 1000).
Our problems of living and relating are real, yet if we acquire this calm but overwhelming passion, "taking the kingdom by storm," we'll find many of our difficulties dissolving effortlessly, without any anxious striving to resolve them or make them disappear. Unlike avoidance and conflict, which try to exclude things from our lives, this passion transforms difficulties by including them as part of a vision of much greater things. Crises become opportunities, for growth and service.
Trying to exclude things, ideas, or people from our lives is inherently full of stress, anxiety, constant caution, and worry, since it's focused on what it doesn't want, and has to keep it in mind in order to avoid or conquer it. It fixes on what it wants to be free of, like a novice sailor staring at the rolling sea beneath him, making his seasickness worse by watching the apparent source of his trouble. If he would look up to the distant horizon instead, his vision would include the waves but find an anchor for his balance also, the foundation for a graceful dance with a circling certainty.
How do we attain such a stable vision, that can serve as the basis for spiritually passionate action? It's easy for the sailor -- he just looks up. But where do we look for the stable horizon of our lives, as individuals and as the Urantia family, when we find ourselves surrounded by things much more complex and confusing than the sea, including those conflicts within our still actualizing spiritual community?
We certainly need, in the first place, to deeply believe in such stability. We need to ask ourselves honestly if we know our spirits are real, and if we’re sure of the truth of our fusion destiny -- not merely intellectually, but in our deepest hearts and souls -- faith that's proven outwardly by our actions. If we fail to find such faith in ourselves, we need to ask for it. If we succeed in finding it, we need to focus on it within the distractions of our time, and ask others who share our faith to help us stay consciously in touch with it, as we pledge to help them as well. From such focusing on our faith and all its implications, the peaceful power of spiritual enthusiasm just naturally emerges, and so too does a stable, spiritually passionate, effective community.
Keeping our spiritual poise in the face of the distractions of planetary life is simply a matter of learning a new skill, like the sailor's learning to dance with the sea, until the horizon becomes for him finally not a visual perception but a feeling, that steadies him even below deck or in fog. As in learning to ride a bicycle, we really "get it" only when we discover how such dynamic balance feels.
Like all skills, maintaining spiritual poise begins with paying attention. As a wonderful healer, Moshe Feldenkrais, once put it: "You can't do what you want until you know what you're doing." When we act, communicate, think, or feel, do we know what beliefs we're actually expressing? We tell ourselves we believe we're sons of God, but if our thoughts, feelings, actions, and communications fail to confirm that at any given moment, then for that moment it's not true that we believe it. What do we believe then, if not this truth? When we're angry, fearful, ambitious, hurt, vindictive, lonely, depressed, discouraged, what do we believe? If we hope to change such beliefs, rather than keep falling into them now and then, we need to be aware of what we really believe at such times, just as the sailor has to watch what he's doing, as the ship rolls and heels, if he's to learn how to ride the sea and work upon it, and eventually get beyond his need to be watchful.
An important prerequisite for this learning, however, is refusing to feel ashamed of our mistakes and clumsiness, and refusing to blame others for theirs, while we learn. Without giving ourselves some "slack," as a sailor would put it, learning a new skill becomes needlessly painful and difficult. When we catch ourselves in behaviors incompatible with conscious sonship, if we haven't taken such missteps deliberately, we need to be forgiving, and ideally even develop a sense of humor about them ‑ that "divine antidote to exaltation of ego." Putting ourselves or others down for our mistakes, or standing idly by while someone else does (face to face or in gossip), is a spiritual disservice to ourselves, others, and God, and a serious obstacle to our mission on earth. We can't afford the luxury of such guilt and blame, or let them be excuses to avoid further growth. Evaluating our own or others' motives or potentials is the height of arrogance, and incompatible with present, honest, living faith in the divine sonship we share. In fact, even fear is a great arrogance, assuming much more certainty than it usually can have of the dangers it thinks it foresees.
This principle applies to the community also. As a spiritual family, we have neither the ability nor the need to evaluate ourselves or other spiritual communities. Our need is to go forward honestly with our spiritual growth and service, based on our sincere decisions. This will inevitably involve mistakes and setbacks, surprising and disastrous only to our egos, and we have to refuse to let these supposed setbacks tempt us into the distractions of judgments. Forgiveness, forgiveness, and more forgiveness is Jesus' way, leaving judgments to those who can see much more than we can, until finally forgiveness is no longer necessary because the habit of blaming and labelling has been left behind us.
Our planet needs The Urantia Book. It doesn't need our conflicts about how best to make the world aware of it. We are its protectors -- all of us who know of it. We can't foist on a few, even if they would like us to, the responsibility that lies with all of us who know the book is what it says it is. Generations have passed since its arrival, yet it's still largely unknown and misunderstood. If we're to assign blame for this, each of us should begin with ourselves, but it would be better not to begin with that at all, but rather begin doing what a true son would.
Those of us who refuse to take responsibility for what we know, who insist on living in conflict, judgment, or denial, need to suffer the full consequences of our choices, until we accept our responsibilities. Those of us blessed with more humility and faith need to go onward with what needs to be done, staying loyal to our highest, most honest, most personally enlightened vision of what that is -- regardless of how confused, tentative, or short-sighted we may have been in the past, even if that past was only a moment ago.
We need to support each another in what we do, also, always keeping in mind that not all of us should or will serve in the same way. Just as Jesus warned of the dangers of too much faith, there can also be danger in too much community, that gives undue attention to its merely visible, formal activities. We don't need to create the family of Urantians, we need to nourish it as it already exists. Cults, if you recall, cannot be created. They need to evolve. Remember the book's warning about the mistake of the early Christians -- that they became a community in too much of a social rather than a spiritual sense? Yet we do need to show the world we're the kind of family that evolving sons of God rightfully become with one another -- a family committed to truth, love, mercy, compassion, service, spontaneous friendliness, wise generosity, and, not least for this generation on earth, the dissemination of The Urantia Book to those to whom it belongs -- all the peoples of the planet.
It's not enough to form study groups that talk about the book, any more than it's enough to focus only on the book itself. Study is important, but can't be an excuse for inaction or spiritual slumber. We have a treasure that belongs not only to us, which is a tremendous source of spiritual nourishment in a world where millions are starving for want of its truths, but the book's greatest value is in the vision it invites us to embrace. Christianity's greatest mistake was in focusing so much on the figure of Jesus rather than the truth and value of his teachings. Let's not repeat that mistake with The Urantia Book, no matter how much we love it. Of all those who choose not to embrace its form in our day, few will resist the attraction of its spirit. Our highest obligation is to live that spirit, not to distribute a book, no matter how great it is. Certainly we should do the one, but not to the point of ignoring the other.
Those who feel loyalty to human authority have an obligation to do whatever their sincerity inspires in them, while those who see human authority as fraudulent also have an obligation to act according to their highest ideals of dedication to the Father's will. Jesus didn't hesitate to break laws he found to be interfering with the relationship between man and God, but always respected those that did not. Which are which in our time is something each of us has to determine as honestly as possible for ourselves, while refusing to assume others are insincere who differ with us about it. If we can love only those who agree with us, we're hardly ambassadors of a better world.
In all that we do, we need to be as honest as possible about our own true motives. We need to recognize when we're acting out of faith and when we're acting out of doubt or presumption. The world has had enough of religionists who violate the very principles they proselytize. There's no place for stubborn personal animosities and expressions of moral or spiritual superiority within a community of people who claim to believe they are sons of God and live according to his will. Let's see the better world of his will, in the way we, as Urantians, behave toward one another, including those we differ with. Let's prove we believe what we say we believe, or else humbly and sincerely ask for help to believe what we know we should believe. By professing to be students of the revelation, no matter how our opinions diverge, we assume a responsibility demanding much more of us than what's expected of those who don't profess such faith.
It's not the book alone, after all, that belongs not solely to us. Even our lives belong not solely to us. We've been entrusted with them, put in control of them to a large extent, but they're not ours alone by right. Our selves are relationships. Anyone who sees the true depths of human experience doesn't think of his or her life as my life, but as our life -- a life being lived in partnership with God, in the awesome, joyful responsibility of becoming with God the coparents of an evolving soul. With this perspective, life becomes the supreme value of cocreating with God a being you and God want to be.
Let's rediscover the wonder and enthusiasm that gripped us the first time we felt the book was true. That enthusiasm was rooted in the fire ignited in us by the divine spark that found our minds as children, the fire that may have fallen to embers for lack of tending before finding The Urantia Book, and may have faded again after we discovered it, for any of many temporary reasons. Let's realize, and help each other remember, that we can and will fan that fire with our faith until it builds to passion that consumes all doubt, uniting us forever with the Final Father -- even on this world, if we nourish it as we have power to. Let's support one another in learning the walk, not just the talk, to that final union.
It is time to do this. It's time to forge a true community of believers -- or better still, faithers, knowers -- who help each other when we stumble, steady each other when we succeed, and support each other with our true-son relationships in learning to walk as he walked, perfectly, who did it all before us.
He journeyed in the flesh here all but alone, without companions who truly understood him. We have each other, and him in the midst of us, and two thousand years of his Truth's work behind us as our solid foundation. Let's use him, and each other, to fulfill the promise our spirits saw in us before they came to dwell in us in childhood. Apart, it would be an awesome task. Together, surrounded by others sincerely practicing the way he showed us so clearly, we can help each other stay loyal to what we know is the deepest truth of our lives, with all its joy and freedom.
We are Urantians, who walk with God, who see the earth's part in an eternal universe, who know the true roots and destiny of the world, and know the greatest story ever told as it's never been told before.
That knowledge is our power. Finally and forever, let us use it in the way he did, the only way it can be used. His story continues in us, if we choose. Let's show the universe what his love for us, and ours for him, can make of us, and make of our suffering planet. Let's show those watching us from the stars that his faith in us is justified. Let's let the greatness of his story unfold the fullness of its beauty from our souls, until all the world knows that what we know must be true.