Paper 5
GOD’S RELATION TO THE INDIVIDUAL
1. The magnitude of the spiritual difference between the highest personality of universe existence and the lower groups of created intelligences is inconceivable. Were it possible for the lower orders of intelligence to be transported instantly into the presence of the Father himself, they would not know they were there....There is a long, long road ahead of mortal man before he can consistently and within the realm of possibility ask for safe conduct into the Paradise presence of the Universal Father.
2. However Urantia mortals may differ in their intellectual, social, economic, and even moral opportunities and endowments, forget not that their spiritual endowment is uniform and unique....Man is spiritually indwelt by a surviving Thought Adjuster. If such a human mind is sincerely and spiritually motivated, if such a human soul desires to know God and become like him, honestly wants to do the Father’s will, there exists no negative influence of mortal deprivation nor positive power of possible interference which can prevent such a divinely motivated soul from securely ascending to the portals of Paradise.
3. The Father desires all his creatures to be in personal communion with him....To each of you and to all of us, God is approachable, the Father is attainable, the way is open....but so many of his creatures have hidden themselves away in the mists of their own willful decisions and for the time being have separated themselves from the communion of his spirit and the spirit of his Son by the choosing of their own perverse ways and by the indulgence of the self-assertiveness of their intolerant minds and unspiritual natures.
4. Mortal man may draw near God and may repeatedly forsake the divine will so long as the power of choice remains. Man’s final doom is not sealed until he has lost the power to choose the Father’s will. There is never a closure of the Father’s heart to the need and the petition of his children. Only do his offspring close their hearts forever to the Father’s drawing power when they finally and forever lose the desire to do his divine will—to know him and to be like him. Likewise is man’s eternal destiny assured when Adjuster fusion proclaims to the universe that such an ascender has made the final and irrevocable choice to live the Father’s will.
5. The divine presence cannot...be discovered anywhere in nature or even in the lives of God-knowing mortals so fully and so certainly as in your attempted communion with the indwelling Mystery Monitor, the Paradise Thought Adjuster. What a mistake to dream of God far off in the skies when the spirit of the Universal Father lives within your own mind!
6. The fact that you are not intellectually conscious of close and intimate contact with the indwelling Adjuster does not in the least disprove such an exalted experience....The self-realization of such an achievement is mainly, though not exclusively, limited to the realms of soul consciousness, but the proofs are forthcoming and abundant in the manifestation of the fruits of the spirit in the lives of all such inner-spirit contactors.
7. Worship is for its own sake; prayer embodies a self- or creature-interest element....You worship God; pray to, and commune with, the Son; and work out the details of your earthly sojourn in connection with the intelligences of the Infinite Spirit operating on your world and throughout your universe....To the children of a local universe a Michael Son (Christ Jesus) is, to all practical intents and purposes, God. He is the local universe personification of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son.
8. The mind of material limitations can never become highly conscious of the real significance of true worship....True worship, in the last analysis, becomes an experience realized on four cosmic levels: the intellectual, the morontial, the spiritual, and the personal—the consciousness of mind, soul, and spirit, and their unification in personality.
9. The great and immediate service of true religion is the establishment of an enduring unity in human experience, a lasting peace and profound assurance....All nonreligious human activities seek to bend the universe to the distorting service of self; the truly religious individual seeks to identify the self with the universe and then to dedicate the activities of this unified self to the service of the universe family of fellow beings, human and superhuman.
10. The domains of philosophy and art intervene between the nonreligious and the religious activities of the human self. Through art and philosophy the material-minded man is inveigled into the contemplation of the spiritual realities and universe values of eternal meanings.
11. All religions teach the worship of Deity and some doctrine of human salvation. The Buddhist religion promises salvation from suffering....the Greek religion promised salvation from disharmony...Christianity promises salvation from sin....The religion of Jesus is salvation from self....Jesus lived a religion of service. All these religions are of value in that they are valid approaches to the religion of Jesus. Religion is destined to become the reality of the spiritual unification of all that is good, beautiful, and true in human experience....The spiritual status of any religion may be determined by the nature of its prayers.
12. The Christian concept of God is an attempt to combine three separate teachings:
1. The Hebrew concept—God as a vindicator of moral values, a righteous God.
2. The Greek concept—God as a unifier, a God of wisdom.
3. Jesus’ concept—God as a living friend, a loving Father, the divine presence.
It must therefore be evident that composite Christian theology encounters great difficulty in attaining consistency. This difficulty is further aggravated by the fact that the doctrines of early Christianity were generally based on the personal religious experience of three different persons: Philo of Alexandria, Jesus of Nazareth, and Paul of Tarsus.
13. Religion is an independent realm of human response to life situations and is unfailingly exhibited at all states of human development which are post moral....The evolutionary picture of human existence begins and ends with religion, albeit very different qualities of religion, one evolutional and biological, the other revelational and periodical. And so, while religion is normal and natural to man, it is also optional. Man does not have to be religious against his will.
14. Religious experience, being essentially spiritual, can never be fully understood by the material mind; hence the function of theology, the psychology of religion....The difficulties and paradoxes of religion are inherent in the fact that the realities of religion are utterly beyond the mortal capacity for intellectual comprehension.
15. Mortal man secures three great satisfactions from religious experience, even in the days of his temporal sojourn on earth:
1. Intellectually he acquires the satisfactions of a more unified human consciousness.
2. Philosophically he enjoys the substantiation of his ideals of moral values.
3. Spiritually he thrives in the experience of divine companionship, in the spiritual satisfactions of true worship.
16. God-consciousness, as it is experienced by an evolving mortal of the realms, must consist of three varying factors, three differential levels of reality realization....mind consciousness....soul consciousness....spirit consciousness—the realization of the spirit reality of God....the mortal personality at times overspreads all conscious levels with the realization of the personality of God.
17. The experience of God-consciousness remains the same from generation to generation, but with each advancing epoch in human knowledge the philosophic concept and the theologic definitions of God must change. God-knowing, religious consciousness, is a universe reality, but no matter how valid (real) religious experience is, it must be willing to subject itself to intelligent criticism and reasonable philosophic interpretation; it must not seek to be a thing apart in the totality of human experience.
18. When the mind believes God and the soul knows God, and when, with the fostering Adjuster they all desire God, then is survival assured. Limitations of intellect, curtailment of education, deprivation of culture, impoverishment of social status, even inferiority of the human standards of morality resulting from the unfortunate lack of educational, cultural, and social advantages, cannot invalidate the presence of the divine spirit in such unfortunate and humanly handicapped but believing individuals.
19. The Universal Father is the God of personalities....God the Father is the bestower and conservator of every personality. And the Paradise Father is likewise the destiny of all those finite personalities who wholeheartedly choose to do the divine will, those who love God and long to be like him.
20. Personality is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universes....Personality is potential in all creatures who possess a mind endowment ranging from the minimum of self-consciousness to the maximum of God-consciousness. But mind endowment alone is not personality, neither is spirit nor physical energy....Neither is personality a progressive achievement. Personality may be material or spiritual, but there either is personality or there is no personality....The bestowal of personality is the exclusive function of the Universal Father...But the experiential personality of mortal man is not observable as an active and functional reality until after the material life vehicle of the mortal creature has been touched by the liberating divinity of the Universal Father, being thus launched upon the seas of experience as a self-conscious and a (relatively) self-determinative and self-creative personality.
21. No other being, force, creator, or agency in all the wide universe of universes can interfere to any degree with the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will, as it operates within the realms of choice, regarding the eternal destiny of the personality of the choosing mortal....The bestowal of creature personality confers relative liberation from slavish response to antecedent causation....There is a kinship of divine spontaneity in all personality.
22. As all gravity is circuited in the Isle of Paradise, as all mind is circuited in the Conjoint Actor (Infinite Spirit) and all spirit in the Eternal Son, so is all personality circuited in the personal presence of the Universal Father, and this circuit unerringly transmits the worship of all personalities to the Original and Eternal Personality.
U. B. 5: 62-72- Divine Counselor
Discussion Questions
1. Is the long period of spiritual growth and training required before we can stand in God’s presence a more appealing picture than the traditional belief that we are transported into God’s presence immediately after our death?
2. How is morality related to spirituality?
3. How does mind-consciousness differ from soul-consciousness?
4. How does prayer reveal the spiritual status of the one praying?
5. How do we “work out the details” of our lives with our Seraphic Guardians?
6. How is faith related to intellectual comprehension?
7. What are some of the ways in which theology is changing today?