Episode:Our Local System of Inhabited Worlds—Administration (Part 2)
The chief executive of a local system of inhabited worlds is a primary Lanonandek Son, the System Sovereign. In our local universe these sovereigns are intrusted with large executive responsibilities, unusually wide powers of personal discretion in the direction of system affairs. But in all the history of Nebadon these untrammeled executives have exhibited disloyalty only three times.
Keywords: Urantia, System Sovereign, Lanaforge, Satania Government, Four and Twenty Counselors
Opening thought: "If the general is weak and without authority; if his orders are not clear and distinct; if there are no fixed duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganization." —Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Note: This was Ruthie's last show as a regular co-host.
Summary by David
We discussed the logical hierarchy order of things and beings. Many readers question why wisdom comes after worship in the sequential order of the seven adjutant mind-spirits. This is an initial step of not just blowing past that tension in our minds and facing it and upending our old perspectives. The very fact that we tend to question whether the spirit of worship should be above the spirit of wisdom is why the book is here. Our ungoverned zeal has a lot to do with why there is an emergency on our planet.
If you indeed desire revelation, you desire to come upon passages in the book that directly challenge you and will change you if you don’t put yourself first. You’ll be changed for the better, if you have the courage to change. When we encounter those points of subjective contention, we need to have the courage to see through the annoyance of those differentials and take them on directly. To up end our old wineskins.
The more secular man becomes here in this growing endarkenment, the more disturbing almost everything in the revelation becomes to us. It’s becoming such an extreme confrontation of preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices now. Even religious world views of course are challenged but it’s harder and harder to find an actual religious worldview on our planet. The revelators remind us that many of the world’s religionists are unwittingly actual secularists.
If we find some valid thread of truth, and we find that to be upheld in the revelation, there’s a great challenge not to make that experience about yourself. It’s very easy to say something like “wow, I really did that there, check me out.” We naturally want to have some aspect of our experience orbiting about our self, and the challenge is to seek first the kingdom of heaven, the recognition of the real nucleus about which everything orbits. It's natural to look for confirmation of your preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices. Once we get into the kingdom though, we’re expected to get moving just as soon as we can.
We need all things in balanced proportions to maintain symmetry. When studying the revelation, even in the immediacy of what could get you excited and potentially over excited to where you lose that symmetry, there are humbling statements in the accompanying words that can easily be overlooked.
The challenge is to see all the words as they’re written and avoid the temptation from your unity eye to just fuzz out all those pesky details that have nothing to do with your feelings. Especially when we might need to be grounded a little bit more solidly because we’ve come upon words that begin to propel you upwards. Symmetry of soul! Keep your balance. Keep your proportion. And when you keep your eyes on all the words, you’ll notice they’ve constructed the revelation masterly and help us in that regard.
The revelators directly take on the philosophic issues of all doctrines in the revelation. They wrote this book for genuine religionists who are ready to take the journey upwards towards being born again, again—an achieved religiosity of philosophical attainment. True religionists of philosophic attainment must go through those philosophical issues.
We discussed clarifying what the revelators mean when they use the words “spirit” or “spiritualize”. Spiritualize is used when your sense of self is over spiritualizing something. For instance, God is spirit, and God is good, but all good things taken to extreme become bad. Technically if you’re speaking about someone being spiritual as in a personal context, you’re declaring that person isn’t merely in possession of a functioning mind, but in addition to some degree that person's mind is under personality management. You’re declaring that this person uses their personality management to wield spirit upon their mind to reframe it so that it functions in a different fashion than it functions normally.
A spiritual person has modalities of mind activity that cannot be explained by their mere biologic framing of their mind. Spiritual people have changed that framing so that now their mind functions differently than it would naturally.
What it means to be a spiritual human is to be artificial, unnatural. A person that exhibits a mind that’s under personality management and not just moving through life causally as its biologic temperament would dictate. Once you begin to manage your mind and say to yourself that you’re not going to just let it function as my God-given biology would have it function. I’m going to change its functioning. The immediate challenge is to figure out lots of individual facts: What’s right? What's wrong? Good and bad? And attempt to find the proper balance and proportion to everything.
We begin to have the start of a self-awareness on the third level of meaning—the level of self-regard. As the Master pointed out to us, he finds us basically functioning on the first two levels of meaning: the level of the flesh, and the level of our feelings. Getting the vantage point on the next level above that on the level of the mind, you can take regard of that basic natural modality of your mind down there on those lower levels.
The next level up, the fourth level of meaning: now you have a spiritual vantage point. The first level in that spiritualized mind in the upper domain, and from that vantage point you can literally look back on all the levels of your self. Respect—to look back. You can have true self-respect in the full sense of that self. You can look back upon and have a beginning objectivity about yourself. Foundationally that’s as far as you should take that uplift of self. That fourth level is a balanced, and proportionate amount of uplift. If you allow that sense of self to reach the fifth level of meaning it’s beginning to turn negative. Self-respect becomes self-esteem.
From that fifth level you could easily sell yourself on how fancy you are when observing your sense of self on the first four levels. You could end up mistakenly giving some of that spiritualized mind on the fourth level a incorporation into just your biologic nature. You’re overplaying yourself. We must recognize that what we see from that vantage point is not there because you were born and it’s not a part of you and what you are naturally. That’s there by the grace of God alone, and a humble recognition of that fact is required of each of us.
If you go up to the sixth level of meaning you now willfully make that self-esteem fully negative as self-admiration—self-love. We use the word over-spiritualization versus using a term like false spiritualization for instance because we have to lift it up from the level of the flesh where it’s very woe is me we have no self-respect. We have to lift it up by allowing spiritual gravity lift our sense of self up some but we need to immediately take control of it from there and not allow it to continue up any further. To allow it to go any further would be to over spiritualize the sense of self with misapplication of spirit.
The sixth adjutant (the spirit of zeal) dawned in the collective in the middle of the twentieth century and there was an additional energization of people’s minds, and a false exaltation began to manifest. In a very cultural and collective way you literally had these “self-esteem” movements begin to form. Revelation tells us that self-esteem is a negative word! Why would we want to foster the corruption of mankind in a movement?
The revelators give us the clues when they say things like “the problematic self-esteem of the apostle John.” They don’t tell us, wouldn’t it be great if John only had the self-esteem movement to help him out. Again, seeing all the words as they are and not allowing ourselves to gloss over them is a skill we must develop if we sincerely seek truth, and seek to have revelation reveal itself to us each time we sit to study The Urantia Book.
The word ego is not a negative word. It literally means a self-aware self. You want to be a self-aware self, if you want to be a human, animals are not self-aware. Unfortunately, the word ego has become a synonym for the word egotism. Egotism is a negative word because it falsely exalts the self, misapplying spirit beyond a balanced proportion. Ego is good in and of itself, because it allows us to pull ourselves out of the mud and see ourselves as children of God, but all things taken to an extreme become bad. Adding the T in egotism indicates that you’ve taken a good thing to an extreme and now it’s bad.
As the Master tells us, you have to first consciously reality-ize your own child of Godness to be born again. After that initiation, that happens by grace alone for us, then we must take control of the situation (I don’t mean reality TV show character from New Jersey).
After secure entrance into the kingdom, we’re expected to properly manage our own ascension so that it’s creative rather than destructive. We must courageously take that leap of faith and cross that threshold by stepping into the domain of personal responsibility and manage ourself properly. True liberty is predicated on personal responsibility and self-control.
45:2 The System Sovereign
In the local universes we have three basic levels of cosmological structure to the local universes. The local system level at the bottom, the constellation level in the middle, and the local universe headquarters level at the top. The three branches of government in a local universe have seats that are hierarchically arranged. There is executive, legislative, and judicial throughout, but each of those branches of local universe government has a seat in this hierarchical three-level system:
- The executive branch is seated at the local system level,
- the legislative branch is seated at the constellation level, and
- the judicial branch is seated at the local universe headquarters level.
When we start talking about the local systems, that’s the immediacy of the administration that we’re talking about. The primary seat is the executive branch, not legislative or judicial.
Also, we have this name for our local system: Satania. Why is it fundamentally called Satania? When you’re reading the revelation, you need to think in not so much in theological terms, but more in philosophical terms and all the sciences within the philosophical frame. One of those sciences is etymology—the logic of the words being used. Etymology focuses on the literalness of the word.
We have this word Satan, which the revelators use, that coming from Hebrew roots. The word Satan in Hebrew translates as adversary. If you capitalize it, it becomes “the Adversary” with capital A. The general Hebrew verb that they’re playing with means to be adverse. The name of our local system is based upon that. The literalness of the word Satania, is the nation of adversity. Our local system, out of all the local systems—nations—is the nation of adversity because this rebellion was the most widespread of all in our local universe.
The -verse part of the word adverse means turn. A turning to the opposite is the sense of it. This is further fleshed out in the notes about etymology in the library of Perfecting Horizons Institute.
The Lucifer rebellion up-ended itself. It seductively led astray and turned the whole order to the opposite of a logical recognition and engagement with both Deity and Reality.
This is a philosophical argument, and they use these words because they want us to engage this text philosophically. Fundamentally, this text is for religionists who desire to become religionists of philosophic attainment. The don’t want us to react with the typical simplistic, theological, knee-jerk religious reaction to the word like comes natural for all of us.
We’ve all been exposed to so much of this unbridled liberty here and we must get back between the lines again. The whole tension of “you’re not the boss of me?” Well there is a boss of you, and it’s the system sovereign.
Ever since the U.S. Constitution was drafted there’s been a tension of people who say, “we had some difficulties there in that area; I think we should change the technique.” The revelators are telling us, no, no, no, we need to trust the technique that’s been wisely constructed. Don’t start by getting the eraser out and rewriting things. We need to gracefully and humbly allow it to play forward. Evolutional, not revolutional.
That tension to think or say “you’re not the boss of me” is a tendency to revolution in the face of difficulty as opposed to trusting in the evolutionary process in a wisely conceived frame. Let it play out.
When we go on high, we’re talking about literally perfect beings being in the construct of things. For example, The Ancients of Days, don’t need their technique of government amended based upon any further experience. Ever. And it trickles all the way down to us in our vast imperfection.
45:3. The System Government
This reviewer sincerely attempts to summarize with the aim of highlighting, in my own way, the truth that I recognize in the show that I’ve been gifted with the opportunity to review. So, with that said, and in full cooperative subordination to my unity consciousness bias that I have, I’ve decided to forego the details of how this reviewer has come to this conclusion and just share the truth of it.
Lanaforge is Rad!
Be sure to listen to the archives for individual details of how I formed that conclusion, and for your own recognition of truth like I’ve been given here today by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
