Sirach 38:32

The purpose of an ancient city wall was to protect against ferocious beasts as well as to prevent surprise attacks by hostile humans. Those living without the walls and in the forest were dependent on tree dwellings, stone huts, and the maintenance of night fires. It was therefore very natural that these teachers should devote much time to instructing their pupils in the improvement of human dwellings. By employing improved techniques and by the use of traps, great progress was made in animal subjugation.

About twelve thousand years ago the era of the independent cities was dawning. And these primitive trading and manufacturing cities were always surrounded by zones of agriculture and cattle raising. While it is true that industry was promoted by the elevation of the standards of living, you should have no misconception regarding the refinements of early urban life. The early races were not overly neat and clean, and the average primitive community rose from one to two feet every twenty-five years as the result of the mere accumulation of dirt and trash. Certain of these olden cities also rose above the surrounding ground very quickly because their unbaked mud huts were short-lived, and it was the custom to build new dwellings directly on top of the ruins of the old.

There are cities “whose builder and maker is God.” In spirit counterpart we have all that you mortals are familiar with and inexpressibly more. We have homes, spirit comforts, and morontia necessities. For every material satisfaction which humans are capable of enjoying, we have thousands of spiritual realities that serve to enrich and enlarge our existence. The divine builders function in seven groups:

For ages silent barter continued before men would meet, unarmed, on the sacred market place. These same market squares became the first places of sanctuary and in some countries were later known as “cities of refuge.” Any fugitive reaching the market place was safe and secure against attack.

I have often reflected that it would be quite useless for me to go to Divinington; I probably should be unable to see any resident beings except such as the Personalized Adjusters, and I have seen them elsewhere. I am very sure there is nothing on Divinington of real value or profit to me, nothing essential to my growth and development, or I should not have been forbidden to go there.

1. The circles — the nonnative residential areas.

These beings, together with the energy transformers, are indispensable to the maintenance of mortal existence on those worlds having an impoverished atmosphere, and they are an integral part of the technique of life on the nonbreathing planets.

These people are self-sustaining, that is, they can live indefinitely without importing anything from the surrounding nations. Their natural resources are replete, and by scientific techniques they have learned how to compensate for their deficiencies in the essentials of life. They enjoy a brisk domestic commerce but have little foreign trade owing to the universal hostility of their less progressive neighbors.

There would, however, be no civilized society to sit in criticism upon primitive man except for these far-flung and multifarious taboos, and the taboo would never have endured but for the upholding sanctions of primitive religion. Many of the essential factors in man’s evolution have been highly expensive, have cost vast treasure in effort, sacrifice, and self-denial, but these achievements of self-control were the real rungs on which man climbed civilization’s ascending ladder.

None of the physical beings of the central universe would be visible to Urantians. Neither would any of the physical stimuli of those faraway worlds excite a reaction in your gross sense organs. If a Urantia mortal could be transported to Havona, he would there be deaf, blind, and utterly lacking in all other sense reactions; he could only function as a limited self-conscious being deprived of all environmental stimuli and all reactions thereto.