Shared currents

The mortals of a normal world do not experience constant warfare between their physical and spiritual natures. They are confronted with the necessity of climbing up from the animal levels of existence to the higher planes of spiritual living, but this ascent is more like undergoing an educational training when compared with the intense conflicts of Urantia mortals in this realm of the divergent material and spiritual natures.

4. Political wisdom. Emotional maturity is essential to self-control. Only emotional maturity will insure the substitution of international techniques of civilized adjudication for the barbarous arbitrament of war. Wise statesmen will sometime work for the welfare of humanity even while they strive to promote the interest of their national or racial groups. Selfish political sagacity is ultimately suicidal—destructive of all those enduring qualities which insure planetary group survival.

7. The spirit of wisdom — the inherent tendency of all moral creatures towards orderly and progressive evolutionary advancement. This is the highest of the adjutants, the spirit co-ordinator and articulator of the work of all the others. This spirit is the secret of that inborn urge of mind creatures which initiates and maintains the practical and effective program of the ascending scale of existence; that gift of living things which accounts for their inexplicable ability to survive and, in survival, to utilize the co-ordination of all their past experience and present opportunities for the acquisition of all of everything that all of the other six mental ministers can mobilize in the mind of the organism concerned. Wisdom is the acme of intellectual performance. Wisdom is the goal of a purely mental and moral existence.

As mortals you can now recognize your place in the family of divine sonship and begin to sense the obligation to avail yourselves of the advantages so freely provided in and by the Paradise plan for mortal survival, which plan has been so enhanced and illuminated by the life experience of a bestowal Son. Every facility and all power have been provided for insuring your ultimate attainment of the Paradise goal of divine perfection.

The two prime manifestations of finite reality, innate perfection and evolved perfection, be they personalities or universes, are co-ordinate, dependent, and integrated. Each requires the other to achieve completion of function, service, and destiny.

4. Quickeners of Morality. On the mansion worlds you begin to learn self-government for the benefit of all concerned. Your mind learns co-operation, learns how to plan with other and wiser beings. On the system headquarters the seraphic teachers will further quicken your appreciation of cosmic morality—of the interactions of liberty and loyalty.

The Universal Father has poured out himself, as it were, to make all creation rich in personality possession and potential spiritual attainment. God has given us himself that we may be like him, and he has reserved for himself of power and glory only that which is necessary for the maintenance of those things for the love of which he has thus divested himself of all things else.

All the worlds of Satania can join in the hope of the one who wrote: “Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwells righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that you look for such things, be diligent that you may be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless.”

3. The material-comfort era. After food problems have been partially solved and some degree of security has been attained, the additional leisure is utilized to promote personal comfort. Luxury vies with necessity in occupying the center of the stage of human activities. Such an age is all too often characterized by tyranny, intolerance, gluttony, and drunkenness. The weaker elements of the races incline towards excesses and brutality. Gradually these pleasure-seeking weaklings are subjugated by the more strong and truth-loving elements of the advancing civilization.

On this world the highest honor conferred upon a citizen was the order of “supreme service,” being the only degree of recognition ever to be granted in the morontia temple. This recognition was bestowed upon those who had long distinguished themselves in some phase of supermaterial discovery or planetary social service.

In the more advanced planetary ages these seraphim enhance man’s appreciation of the truth that uncertainty is the secret of contented continuity. They help the mortal philosophers to realize that, when ignorance is essential to success, it would be a colossal blunder for the creature to know the future. They heighten man’s taste for the sweetness of uncertainty, for the romance and charm of the indefinite and unknown future.

Thus, in the final analysis, it would be hardly proper to use the words “greater” or “lesser” in contrasting the destinies of the ascending orders of sonship. Every such son of God shares the fatherhood of God, and God loves each of his creature sons alike; he is no more a respecter of ascendant destinies than is he of the creatures who may attain such destinies. The Father loves each of his sons, and that affection is not less than true, holy, divine, unlimited, eternal, and unique—a love bestowed upon this son and upon that son, individually, personally, and exclusively. And such a love utterly eclipses all other facts. Sonship is the supreme relationship of the creature to the Creator.

It is neither tenderness nor altruism to bestow futile sympathy upon degenerated human beings, unsalvable abnormal and inferior mortals. There exist on even the most normal of the evolutionary worlds sufficient differences between individuals and between numerous social groups to provide for the full exercise of all those noble traits of altruistic sentiment and unselfish mortal ministry without perpetuating the socially unfit and the morally degenerate strains of evolving humanity. There is abundant opportunity for the exercise of tolerance and the function of altruism in behalf of those unfortunate and needy individuals who have not irretrievably lost their moral heritage and forever destroyed their spiritual birthright.

God is not a self-centered personality; the Father freely distributes himself to his creation and to his creatures. He lives and acts, not only in the Deities, but also in his Sons, whom he intrusts with the doing of everything that it is divinely possible for them to do. The Universal Father has truly divested himself of every function which it is possible for another being to perform. And this is just as true of mortal man as of the Creator Son who rules in God’s stead at the headquarters of a local universe. Thus we behold the outworking of the ideal and infinite love of the Universal Father.

Down through the ages there has been great confusion on Urantia regarding the various universe rulers. Many later teachers confused their vague and indefinite tribal deities with the Most High Fathers. Still later, the Hebrews merged all of these celestial rulers into a composite Deity. One teacher understood that the Most Highs were not the Supreme Rulers, for he said, “He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” In the Urantia records it is very difficult at times to know exactly who is referred to by the term “Most High.” But Daniel fully understood these matters. He said, “The Most High rules in the kingdom of men and gives it to whomsoever he will.”

The mortal-survival plan has a practical and serviceable objective; you are not the recipients of all this divine labor and painstaking training only that you may survive just to enjoy endless bliss and eternal ease. There is a goal of transcendent service concealed beyond the horizon of the present universe age. If the Gods designed merely to take you on one long and eternal joy excursion, they certainly would not so largely turn the whole universe into one vast and intricate practical training school, requisition a substantial part of the celestial creation as teachers and instructors, and then spend ages upon ages piloting you, one by one, through this gigantic universe school of experiential training. The furtherance of the scheme of mortal progression seems to be one of the chief businesses of the present organized universe, and the majority of innumerable orders of created intelligences are either directly or indirectly engaged in advancing some phase of this progressive perfection plan.

Many fusion candidates may be assembled in the spacious temple at the same time. And what a beautiful occasion when mortals thus forgather to witness the ascension of their loved ones in spiritual flames, and what a contrast to those earlier ages when mortals must commit their dead to the embrace of the terrestrial elements! The scenes of weeping and wailing characteristic of earlier epochs of human evolution are now replaced by ecstatic joy and the sublimest enthusiasm as these God-knowing mortals bid their loved ones a transient farewell as they are removed from their material associations by the spiritual fires of consuming grandeur and ascending glory. On worlds settled in light and life, “funerals” are occasions of supreme joy, profound satisfaction, and inexpressible hope.

John the Revelator saw a vision of the arrival of a class of advancing mortals from the seventh mansion world to their first heaven, the glories of Jerusem. He recorded: “And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire; and those who had gained the victory over the beast that was originally in them and over the image that persisted through the mansion worlds and finally over the last mark and trace, standing on the sea of glass, having the harps of God, and singing the song of deliverance from mortal fear and death.” (Perfected space communication is to be had on all these worlds; and your anywhere reception of such communications is made possible by carrying the “harp of God,” a morontia contrivance compensating for the inability to directly adjust the immature morontia sensory mechanism to the reception of space communications.)

The moral will creatures of the evolutionary worlds are always bothered with the unthinking question as to why the all-wise Creators permit evil and sin. They fail to comprehend that both are inevitable if the creature is to be truly free. The free will of evolving man or exquisite angel is not a mere philosophic concept, a symbolic ideal. Man’s ability to choose good or evil is a universe reality. This liberty to choose for oneself is an endowment of the Supreme Rulers, and they will not permit any being or group of beings to deprive a single personality in the wide universe of this divinely bestowed liberty — not even to satisfy such misguided and ignorant beings in the enjoyment of this misnamed personal liberty.

The divine Spirit is the source of continual ministry and encouragement to the children of men. Your power and achievement is “according to his mercy, through the renewing of the Spirit.” Spiritual life, like physical energy, is consumed. Spiritual effort results in relative spiritual exhaustion. The whole ascendant experience is real as well as spiritual; therefore, it is truly written, “It is the Spirit that quickens.” “The Spirit gives life.”