Teacher-Brother Dave's Compilation of TOPICAL STUDIES from THE NEW EPOCHAL REVELATION OF TRUTH. NOW UPDATED TOPICAL STUDIES INDEX Check these out: TOPICAL STUDIES INDEX Topical Study number 138 Selected Spiritual Highlights from The Urantia Book Part 3 NOTE: The Urantia Book is public domain and may be shared. My added comments of explanation in these [square brackets] are copyright. The Urantia book Paper 50 The Planetary Princes 7. The Rewards of Isolation [Paper:Section.Paragraph (numbers)] 50:7.1 On first thought it might appear that Urantia [Earth] and its associated isolated worlds are most unfortunate in being deprived of the beneficent presence and influence of such superhuman personalities as a Planetary Prince and a Material Son and Daughter. But isolation of these spheres affords their races a unique opportunity for the exercise of faith and for the development of a peculiar quality of confidence in cosmic reliability which is not dependent on sight or any other material consideration. It may turn out, eventually, that mortal creatures hailing from the worlds quarantined in consequence of rebellion [Lucifer and Satan rebellion 200,000 years ago and then the partial default of our Adam and Eve biological uplifters 37,000 years ago] are extremely fortunate. We have discovered that such ascenders are very early intrusted with numerous special assignments to cosmic undertakings where unquestioned faith and sublime confidence are essential to achievement. 50:7.2 On Jerusem [our local system spiritual headquarters over 619 human-inhabited worlds including ours] the ascenders from these isolated worlds occupy a residential sector by themselves and are known as the agondonters, meaning evolutionary will creatures who can believe without seeing, persevere when isolated, and triumph over insuperable difficulties even when alone. This functional grouping of the agondonters persists throughout the ascension of the local universe and the traversal of the superuniverse; it disappears during the sojourn in Havona but promptly reappears upon the attainment of Paradise and definitely persists in the Corps of the Mortal Finality. Tabamantia is an agondonter of finaliter status, having survived from one of the quarantined spheres involved in the first rebellion ever to take place in the universes of time and space. 50:7.3 All through the Paradise career, reward follows effort as the result of causes. Such rewards set off the individual from the average, provide a differential of creature experience, and contribute to the versatility of ultimate performances in the collective body of the finaliters. Paper 52 Planetary Mortal Epochs 5. Post-Bestowal Son Man 52:5.4 The bestowal Son lives and dies for the spiritual uplift of the mortal races of a world. He establishes the “new and living way”; his life is an incarnation of Paradise truth in mortal flesh, that very truth—even the Spirit of Truth—in the knowledge of which men shall be free. 52:5.5 On Urantia the establishment of this “new and living way” was a matter of fact as well as of truth. The isolation of Urantia in the Lucifer rebellion had suspended the procedure whereby mortals can pass, upon death, directly to the shores of the mansion worlds. Before the days of Christ Michael on Urantia all souls slept on until the dispensational or special millennial resurrections. Even Moses was not permitted to go over to the other side until the occasion of a special resurrection, the fallen Planetary Prince, Caligastia, contesting such a deliverance. But ever since the day of Pentecost, [May 18, A.D. 30 -on when Jesus Ascended abd returned here as The Father-Son Union Spirit of Truth ! See some of that in John chapters 16 and 17] Urantia mortals again may proceed directly to the morontia spheres. [The next soul-reality Heavens. Thank You, our Universe Sovereign God-Man Jesus Christ Michael !] 52:5.6 Upon the resurrection of a bestowal Son, on the third day after yielding up his incarnated life, he ascends to the right hand of the Universal Father, receives the assurance of the acceptance of the bestowal mission, and returns to the Creator Son at the headquarters of the local universe. Thereupon the bestowal Avonal and the Creator Michael send their joint spirit, the Spirit of Truth, into the bestowal world. This is the occasion when the “spirit of the triumphant Son is poured out upon all flesh.” The Universe Mother Spirit also participates in this bestowal of the Spirit of Truth, and concomitant therewith there issues the bestowal edict of the Thought Adjusters. Thereafter all normal-minded will creatures of that world will receive Adjusters as soon as they attain the age of moral responsibility, of spiritual choice. [Here at about five years and ten months on average. Our planet Urantia has the special honor that our Bestowal Son of God was the highest in our local universe: Our Creator Son Jesus Christ Michael ! Only one of the 10,000,000 human-inhabited planets in a local universe has that great honor. Urantia was selected by our Christ Michael because of its very confused condition from the Lucifer Rebellion and the Adam and Eve partial default !] Paper 56 Universal Unity 4. Personality Unification 56:4.3 Notwithstanding that God is manifest from the domains of the Sevenfold up through supremacy and ultimacy to God the Absolute, the personality circuit, centering on Paradise and in the person of God the Father, provides for the complete and perfect unification of all these diverse expressions of divine personality so far as concerns all creature personalities on all levels of intelligent existence and in all the realms of the perfect [Eternal Paradise], perfected [one billion Havona Super Heavens], and perfecting [700,000 space-time] universes. 56:4.4 While God is to and in the universes all that we have portrayed, nevertheless, to you and to all other God-knowing creatures he is one, your Father and their Father. To personality God cannot be plural. God is Father to each of his creatures, and it is literally impossible for any child to have more than one father. 56:4.5 Philosophically, cosmically, and with reference to differential levels and locations of manifestation, you may and perforce must conceive of the functioning of plural Deities and postulate the existence of plural Trinities; but in the worshipful experience of the personal contact of every worshiping personality throughout the master universe, God is one; and that unified and personal Deity is our Paradise parent, God the Father, the bestower, conservator, and Father of all personalities from mortal man on the inhabited worlds to the Eternal Son on [Paradise] the central Isle of Light. 8. The Supreme Unifier 56:8.1 The Supreme Being has a threefold function in the experience of mortal man: First, he is the unifier of time-space divinity, God the Sevenfold; second, he is the maximum of Deity which finite creatures can actually comprehend; third, he is mortal man’s only avenue of approach to the transcendental experience of consorting with absonite mind, eternal spirit, and Paradise personality. 56:8.2 Ascendant finaliters, having been born in the local universes, nurtured in the superuniverses, and trained in the central universe, embrace in their personal experiences the full potential of the comprehension of the time-space divinity of God the Sevenfold unifying in the Supreme. Finaliters serve successively in [all seven] superuniverses other than those of nativity, thereby superimposing experience upon experience until the fullness of the sevenfold diversity of possible creature experience has been encompassed. Through the ministry of the indwelling Adjusters the finaliters are enabled to find the Universal Father, but it is by these techniques of experience that such finaliters come really to know the Supreme Being, and they are destined to the service and the revelation of this Supreme Deity in and to the future universes of outer space. 56:8.3 Bear in mind, all that God the Father and his Paradise Sons do for us, we in turn and in spirit have the opportunity to do for and in the emerging Supreme Being. The experience of love, joy, and service in the universe is mutual. God the Father does not need that his sons should return to him all that he bestows upon them, but they do (or may) in turn bestow all of this upon their fellows and upon the evolving Supreme Being. 56:8.4 All creational phenomena are reflective of antecedent creator-spirit activities. Said Jesus, and it is literally true, “The Son does only those things which he sees the Father do.” In time you mortals may begin the revelation of the Supreme to your fellows, and increasingly may you augment this revelation as you ascend Paradiseward. In eternity you may be permitted to make increasing revelations of this God of evolutionary creatures on supreme levels—even ultimate—as seventh-stage finaliters. [The Highest ! What a glorious Eternal Destiny we are given by our loving and merciful Father God as Revealed in Jesus and One with Him !] 9. Universal Absolute Unity 56:9.6 God the Father is discernible on all levels from the finite to the infinite, and though his creatures from Paradise to the evolutionary worlds have variously perceived him, only the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit [in the Paradise Trinity] know him as an infinity. [God the Universal Father-Infinite I AM] 56:9.13 The ceaseless and expanding march of the Paradise creative forces through space seems to presage the ever-extending domain of the gravity grasp of the Universal Father and the never-ending multiplication of varied types of intelligent creatures who are able to love God and be loved by him, and who, by thus becoming God-knowing, may choose to be like him, may elect to attain Paradise and find God. 56:9.14 The universe of universes is altogether unified. God is one in power and personality. There is co-ordination of all levels of energy and all phases of personality. Philosophically and experientially, in concept and in reality, all things and beings center in the Paradise Father. God is all and in all, and no things or beings exist without him. [God has no outside and no beyond; as He is Omnipresent ! He is fully Eternal; and thus He has no past and not future ! Those are our limitations now when existing in time and space and not yet eternal Paradise Residents !] 10. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness 56:10.20 To finite man truth, beauty, and goodness embrace the full revelation of divinity reality. As this love-comprehension of Deity finds spiritual expression in the lives of God-knowing mortals, there are yielded the fruits of divinity: intellectual peace, social progress, moral satisfaction, spiritual joy, and cosmic wisdom. The advanced mortals on a world in the seventh stage of light and life have learned that love is the greatest thing in the universe—and they know that God is love. 56:10.21 Love is the desire to do good to others. PART III THE HISTORY OF URANTIA Paper 65 The Overcontrol of Evolution 2. The Evolutionary Panorama 65:2.3 The bacteria, simple vegetable organisms of a very primitive nature, are very little changed from the early dawn of life; they even exhibit a degree of retrogression in their parasitic behavior. Many of the fungi also represent a retrograde movement in evolution, being plants which have lost their chlorophyll-making ability and have become more or less parasitic. The majority of disease-causing bacteria and their auxiliary virus bodies really belong to this group of renegade parasitic fungi. During the intervening ages all of the vast kingdom of plant life has evolved from ancestors from which the bacteria have also descended. 6. Evolutionary Techniques of Life 65:6.6 But many seemingly mysterious adjustments of living organisms are purely chemical, wholly physical. At any moment of time, in the blood stream of any human being there exists the possibility of upward of 15,000,000 chemical reactions between the hormone output of a dozen ductless glands. [All life is possibly infinitely complex; as life originates in the Eternal Paradise Trinity !] 8. Evolution in Time and Space 65:8.3 The individual’s yardstick for time measurement is the length of his life. All creatures are thus time conditioned, and therefore do they regard evolution as being a long-drawn-out process. To those of us whose life span is not limited by a temporal existence, evolution does not seem to be such a protracted transaction. On Paradise, where time is nonexistent, these things are all PRESENT in the mind of Infinity and the acts of Eternity. [!!!] 65:8.4 As mind evolution is dependent on, and delayed by, the slow development of physical conditions, so is spiritual progress dependent on mental expansion and unfailingly delayed by intellectual retardation. But this does not mean that spiritual evolution is dependent on education, culture, or wisdom. The soul may evolve regardless of mental culture but not in the absence of mental capacity and desire—the choice of survival and the decision to achieve ever-increasing perfection—to do the will of the Father in heaven. Although survival may not depend on the possession of knowledge and wisdom, progression most certainly does. [With God the Father, human eternal life is a free Gift ! With God the Supreme here with us in space and time, ever more Godly doings are required of you as you continue to ever seek spiritual perfection.] 65:8.5 In the cosmic evolutionary laboratories mind is always dominant over matter, and spirit is ever correlated with mind. Failure of these diverse endowments to synchronize and co-ordinate may cause time delays, but if the individual really knows God and desires to find him and become like him, then survival is assured regardless of the handicaps of time. Physical status may handicap mind, and mental perversity may delay spiritual attainment, but none of these obstacles can defeat the whole-souled choice of will. 65:8.6 When physical conditions are ripe, SUDDEN mental evolutions may take place; when mind status is propitious, SUDDEN spiritual transformations may occur; when spiritual values receive proper recognition, then cosmic meanings become discernible, and increasingly the personality is released from the handicaps of time and delivered from the limitations of space. [Wonderful ! The four main limitations of humans here now are, listed easy to hard to achieve: fear, hunger, time, space] 65:8.7 [Sponsored by a Life Carrier of Nebadon resident on Urantia.] Paper 66 The Planetary Prince of Urantia 8. Misfortunes of Caligastia [Lucifer, Satan and Caligastia all rebelled against the rule of God and our Christ Michael around 200,000 years ago in the roughly one million year history to date of mankind here.] 66:8.5 The power of the fallen Prince [of Urantia] to disturb human affairs was enormously curtailed by the mortal incarnation of Machiventa Melchizedek in the days of Abraham; [4,000 years ago] and subsequently, during the life of Michael in the flesh, [around 2,000 years ago,] this traitorous Prince was finally shorn of all authority on Urantia. [! Thank Jesus that there are no more demonic possessions of any humans ! Only a few low-intelligence humans back then could be possessed.] 66:8.6 The doctrine of a personal devil on Urantia, though it had some foundation in the planetary presence of the traitorous and iniquitous Caligastia, was nevertheless wholly fictitious in its teachings that such a “devil” could influence the normal human mind against its free and natural choosing. Even before Michael’s bestowal on Urantia, neither Caligastia nor Daligastia was ever able to oppress mortals or to coerce any normal individual into doing anything against the human will. The free will of man is supreme in moral affairs; even the indwelling Thought Adjuster refuses to compel man to think a single thought or to perform a single act against the choosing of man’s own will. 66:8.7 And now this rebel of the realm, shorn of all power to harm his former subjects, awaits the final adjudication, by the [our Orvonton Superuniverse] Uversa Ancients of Days, of all who participated in the Lucifer rebellion. 66:8.8 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.] Paper 68 The Dawn of Civilization 3. Socializing Influence of Ghost Fear 68:3.4 Hunger and love drove men together; vanity and ghost fear held them together. But these emotions alone, without the influence of peace-promoting revelations, are unable to endure the strain of the suspicions and irritations of human interassociations. Without help from superhuman sources the strain of society breaks down upon reaching certain limits, and these very influences of social mobilization—hunger, love, vanity, and fear—conspire to plunge mankind into war and bloodshed. 68:3.5 The peace tendency of the human race is not a natural endowment; it is derived from the teachings of revealed religion, from the accumulated experience of the progressive races, but more especially from the teachings of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. [Part IV of this mighty Fifth Epochal Revelation of Truth -- The Urantia Book, pages 1323 - 2097, THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS will help insure the continuous progress worldwide into eventual Light and Life -- knowing and doing God's will !] Paper 69 Primitive Human Institutions 9. Private Property [Best to peruse all 19 paragraphs] 69:9.17 The right to property is not absolute; it is purely social. But all government, law, order, civil rights, social liberties, conventions, peace, and happiness, as they are enjoyed by modern peoples, have grown up around the private ownership of property. 69:9.18 The present social order is not necessarily right—not divine or sacred—but mankind will do well to move slowly in making changes. That which you have is vastly better than any system known to your ancestors. Make certain that when you change the social order you change for the better. Do not be persuaded to experiment with the discarded formulas of your forefathers. Go forward, not backward! Let evolution proceed! Do not take a backward step. [such as kings, queens, secular socialism, and Communism !] 69:9.19 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.] Paper 70 The Evolution of Human Government 3. Early Human Associations 70:3.4 The peace of Urantia will be promoted far more by international trade organizations than by all the sentimental sophistry of visionary peace planning. Trade relations have been facilitated by development of language and by improved methods of communication as well as by better transportation. 70:3.5 The absence of a common language has always impeded the growth of peace groups, but money has become the universal language of modern trade. Modern society is largely held together by the industrial market. The gain motive is a mighty civilizer when augmented by the desire to serve. Paper 71 Development of the State 4. Progressive Civilization 71:4.1 Economics, society, and government must evolve if they are to remain. Static conditions on an evolutionary world are indicative of decay; only those institutions which move forward with the evolutionary stream persist. 71:4.2 The progressive program of an expanding civilization embraces: 71:4.3 1. Preservation of individual liberties. 71:4.4 2. Protection of the home. 71:4.5 3. Promotion of economic security. 71:4.6 4. Prevention of disease. 71:4.7 5. Compulsory education. 71:4.8 6. Compulsory employment. [!] 71:4.9 7. Profitable utilization of leisure. 71:4.10 8. Care of the unfortunate. 71:4.11 9. Race improvement. [Positive eugenics] 71:4.12 10. Promotion of science and art. 71:4.13 11. Promotion of philosophy—wisdom. 71:4.14 12. Augmentation of cosmic insight—spirituality. 71:4.15 And this progress in the arts of civilization leads directly to the realization of the highest human and divine goals of mortal endeavor—the social achievement of the brotherhood of man and the personal status of God-consciousness, which becomes revealed in the supreme desire of every individual to do the will of the Father in heaven. 71:4.16 The appearance of genuine brotherhood signifies that a social order has arrived in which all men delight in bearing one another’s burdens; they actually desire to practice the golden rule. But such an ideal society cannot be realized when either the weak or the wicked lie in wait to take unfair and unholy advantage of those who are chiefly actuated by devotion to the service of truth, beauty, and goodness. In such a situation only one course is practical: The “golden rulers” may establish a progressive society in which they live according to their ideals while maintaining an adequate defense against their benighted fellows who might seek either to exploit their pacific predilections or to destroy their advancing civilization. 71:4.17 Idealism can never survive on an evolving planet if the idealists in each generation permit themselves to be exterminated by the baser orders of humanity. And here is the great test of idealism: Can an advanced society maintain that military preparedness which renders it secure from all attack by its war-loving neighbors without yielding to the temptation to employ this military strength in offensive operations against other peoples for purposes of selfish gain or national aggrandizement? National survival demands preparedness, and religious idealism alone can prevent the prostitution of preparedness into aggression. Only love, brotherhood, can prevent the strong from oppressing the weak. [Part 4 of this Topical Study number 138 will be published here Monday, May 23, 2022 at about 8:00 PM CDT] Spiritual High-Lights of Jesus Christ Spiritual High-Lights of the Fifth Epochal Revelation FIFTH EPOCHAL REVELATION (full text and my added comments) INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES (shorter, with some FER)