Key concepts
From Symmetry of Soul
Contents
Study Approach/Life Advice
- Seek first the kingdom of heaven
- Inner versus outer life
- Set a guard on your inner life
- Don't let the outrage du jour out there be dragged into your inner life.
- Strive to be born again again
- Supply favorable conditions to be grown
- Be a loyal tadpole
- Stop regretting the past, whining over the present, and vainly hoping for the future.
- Start with yourself and know thyself
- Take your salvation for granted
- Let go
- Fear not
- Aim higher by looking upward
- Face facts and adjust them to ideals
- Be content, not satisfied
- Stay hungry and thirsty, my friends
- Eight-fold path to progress
- Spirit energy and faith are like a mustard seed
- Sincerity, sincerity, and more sincerity are the keys to the kingdom
- Do this and you will bear the fruits of the spirit without conscious effort.
- Do this and you will have real peace that passes all understanding
- Being a serious student of The Urantia Book
- Seek ever higher concept frames
- The Urantia Book provides better initial assumptions
- After all, you can only conclude what you assume.
- Precise use of language to minimize more or less distortion of meaning
- Don't put new wine in old wineskins, even as you don't take away another person's faint flicker of faith.
- Download the real God, don't upload the god cult
- Don't fall into dual spiritism
- Steer clear of the atonement doctrine
- After all, the atheists have a point when it comes to outmoded superstition.
- First be a truth seeker, then a fact finder
- Quid est veritas?. It isn't words on a page, it must be lived.
- Truth versus correct understanding
- Don't be befogged by much thinking
- Come to appreciate etymology. Often the revelators use words in their literal etymological meaning.
- Analysis versus synthesis
- Don't assume your job is to proselytize The Urantia Book
- Read more, not less
- Strive to be in a parallel stream first, then engage the mainstream.
- Seek ever higher concept frames
- Practice courageous and independent cosmic thinking
- Reflective thinking
- Beware: False illusions of success
- Beware: You can rationalize anything
- Beware: Preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices
- Recall the caveman story
- Take delight in cultivating... you relation to higher influences of mind
- Notably, the three cosmic intuitions
- It's in your freewill hands
- Be unnatural, that is, artful (artificial)
- Don't be a helpless victim of antecedent causation
- Be more than a fancy animal.
- Strive for self-mastery
- Natural versus artificial
- Do better than your built-in error and evil detector
- Be a human, not a computer
- Have an unnatural positive response to a negative stimulus.
- Strive to be a second miler, and don't just assume you are one.
- Transcend, don't repress
Essential concepts/metaphors
- Threefold actuality. Core to the nature of reality.
- Levels of meaning
- Fourteen facets of Deity.
- One evolutionary system
- Love versus law
- Top-down versus bottom-up
- Hourglass analogy of mind
- False dichotomy
- Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
- As with the macro, so with the micro
- As above, so below because the cosmos is patterned.
- Spirit is not innately divine
- Superadditive consequence
- There's no such thing as magic
- Seven adjutant mind-spirits
- Four phases of religious philosophy
- Seven developmental epochs of progressive civilization
- The value is in the potentiality, not the actuality
- Time is an appearance, not a reality
- Positive response to a negative stimulus
- Lucifer Rebellion
- Preservation, observation, and conservation
- Place versus direction
- Perfect versus perfecting
- Happiness versus joy
- Quality versus quantity
- Mind made and personality managed
- Ill-humor versus ill-will, avoid hatred because it is self-destructive
- Pride goes before a fall
- Parenting advice because family is the nucleus of civilization
- Choice versus decision
- Appearance versus reality
- Thoughts versus feelings
- Fact versus truth
- Ideas versus ideals
- Unity versus uniformity
- Sight versus insight
Sociological observations
- The emergency that prompted the 5th Epochal Revelation
- Particularly material idealism
- The inevitabilities have become unfashionable
- Sad to record...
- True liberty versus false liberty
- Pervasive scientific dictation, social usage, and religious dogma
- All good things taken to an extreme become bad
- Civilization is a choice
- The indispensables to civilization
- Society, culture, and civilization
Additional Important Concepts
- 6th century B.C.
- Acquire a long-distance view
- Always be -ing
- Believing in versus believing with Jesus
- Capital-J Judges
- End from the beginning
- Error is falsehood given form in your mind
- Every moment is a divine dispensation
- God's infinite and eternal nature
- Hemisphere analogy
- In supremacy, there are no coincidences
- Incessant clamoring
- Look before leaping
- Origin, history, and destiny
- In this life, man must perforce serve two masters
- Possess self-respect, not self-esteem
- Preeminence of the individual
- Self-assertion versus free will
- Spirit is a substance
- Stop playing with yourself
- Swallowing ocean water and spitting it out again
- The problem with anti-
- Three great satisfactions
- Through the looking glass of Deity.
- Tornado through a junkyard
- Will, action, and purpose
- Wisdom, insight, and foresight
- Words appearing in all caps
- Levels of mortal wisdom
- 12 properties of a religionist
- Conditions of effective prayer
- Doing versus being
- Error, evil, sin, and iniquity
- Individuality, associativity, and unity
- Personality versus temperament
- Rocky and Bullwinkle effect
- Seven levels of salvation
- Seven psychic circles
- The Urantia Book, The Urantia Papers, and the Fifth epochal revelation
- True monogamy
- Ours is a universe of motion, not fundamentally a universe of matter.
- Commandments
- You musts
- Change without growth is potential evil
- Facets of cosmic character
- Gospel of the kingdom
- What is human experience? Active and questioning selves required!
- Human sources for the authors of The Urantia Book.
- Infinity has consequences
- Mota
- Of all human knowledge...
- Pilate's greatest hits
- Suddenly
- The home
- The meaning of life is its adaptability
- The mind of perfect poise
- The observer is not the thing observed
- This is the way
- Deity and reality explained with a two sides of your hand analogy
- Uncertainty with security
Language Discrimination
The fancy-animal dictionary lightheartedly pokes at all of this incorrect understanding.
- Chance versus luck
- Chaos versus cosmos
- Character versus temperament
- Compassion versus sympathy. The former is in the inner life. The latter in expressed in the outer life.
- Courage versus bravery
- Created equal versus born equal
- Deity versus reality
- Egoism versus altruism
- Equality versus equity
- Essence versus substance
- Ethical versus moral
- Faith and trust versus trust and faith
- Faith versus belief
- Form versus substance
- God-consciousness versus God-knowingness
- Good versus evil
- Intention versus motivation
- Inventive versus creative
- Liberty versus freedom
- Personality itself versus the personalized self
- Progress versus growth
- Religious experience versus spiritual experience
- Revelation versus evolution
- Ubiquitous versus omnipresent
- Urge versus impulse
