Episode:Existential Deity—God the Son (Part 2)
In the local universe ascent the mortals of time look to the Creator Son as the personal representative of the Eternal Son. But when they begin the ascent of the superuniverse training regime, the pilgrims of time increasingly detect the supernal presence of the inspiring spirit of the Eternal Son, and they are able to profit by the intake of this ministry of spiritual energization.
Keywords: Urantia, Spiritual Administration, Superpersonalities, All-Pervading Spirit, Prayer
Opening thought: "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go." —King Claudius, from Hamlet
Note: Justin Armstrong filled in for Andrea Barnes this week.
Summary by Brad
Commentary on putting God at the center
We spent a third of the broadcast discussing how we have trouble thinking literally about the cosmos these days. Our natural tendency is to falsely exalt our lowly time-space engagement of things to the level of existential reality. That is, you naturally assume:
- the finite is the absolute;
- that everything you do is, in some context, absolute;
- that appearance is absolute reality;
- that everything immediate to you is absolutely real;
- that you're the center of reality and everything is defined relative to your experiences;
- that your subjectivity is your objectivity—"your" truth; and therefore
- that, in effect, you are The Absolute... or even God.
This is all immature Luciferian thinking—the wrong assumptions of a self-centered and non-philosophic mind. While it is inevitable that toddlers begin life this way, we must not remain this way if we are to ascend. Because if you keep this up beyond an age-appropriate time and place, you are on some level putting yourself above God. No. You are not the basis for anything! Sorry, not sorry. And this is happening civilization-wide today and it's part of the emergency of this emergency epochal revelation.
Disabusing yourself of your own self-centered immaturity is a first humble step to opening your mind to the philosophic domain. This is all quite disorienting at first. There's an inclination to take it to the other extreme and have everything dissolve away into a mystical mist of no-thing-ness. "Nothing is absolute! Maybe nothing is real! Maybe all of this is an illusion!" We sometimes hear people speak this way.
Thankfully, your connection to the Holy Spirit allows you to re-ground yourself in absolute reality. To be founded on something transcendent of your immediate experiences. Plant your feet in eternity. Discover the true Absolute. Found yourself on that, and then re-discover the reality of yourself from the top down, from an objective vantage point. You'll find your thoughts have re-solidifed again and are no longer built atop a false basis. Do you dare to be cured of the disease of an inappropriately immature mind? Can you be courageous and be religious?
Commentary on literal-ness
Everything that is real is also literal. Spirit gravity is newly revealed in the 5th ER as a literal reality, not metaphorical poetry or imagined vague mists. The phrase "He will draw all men unto him" has a literalness to it. And because there's a literalness, there's also a physics—a nature. Nothing anywhere is arbitrary. No one gets to escape being subject to this literalness of the cosmos, not even God the Father.
Commentary on surviving death
Concerning "your intentions and desires" to survive death—you probably have some—which of these are they:
- Are they warm, flushing feelings about fervent wishes for survival? Or even "I am innately progress-able!"
- Are they "of survival value?" [112:5.6] A literal substance of a certain measurable quality (a value)? [7:1.3]
Only one of these progresses in the cosmos as an individually personal reality. Only one of these sets its standard of goodness as God. The other sets its standard of goodness as itself. You must be saved.
This is not the standard would-be orthodox interpretation within The Urantia Book readership today. Can you entertain ideas that perhaps sound more like how religionists have written and spoken for thousands of years, even as you also entertain new ideas of an epochal revelation?
7:2 The Administration of the Eternal Son
To properly understand the relation of the Eternal Son to the Universe, you cannot limit your understanding to the existential fact of the Eternal Son. To understand the immediacy of his presence outside of Paradise and Havona—how spirit gravity can be felt even by finite beings—you must allow for the mother aspect of Deity (God as immanence) and not only the father aspect of Deity (God as transcendence). There is a mother deity presence of the Second Source and Center here in the universes of time and space.
Please don't think, "ahhh, immanence is transcendence and transcendence is immanance. What a delightful, magical thought." No. Don't embody that kind of fluff. Be precise and literal.
We talked about the complexities of Havona, the pattern universe. Beings and energy there are in exquisite harmony. Closer to home for us, not so much: beings and energy here are out of harmony far more often than not. But Havona is complicated, so we leave it there. Listen to the archive for a bit more.
You might think that literally hugging our own Creator Son would be the heights of a personal experience. But no. The Eternal Son is the absolute of personality. He is infinitely more personal than this downstepped expression in a Creator Son.
Superpersonalities were discussed briefly. They are finite beings, but only tenuously related to the finite. Reflective image aids are needed for them to relate to other finite personalities, even ones as high as Ancients of Days, who require input from these superpersonalities to run their superuniverse governments. See [15:10.21].
"The all-pervading spiritual urge" is spirit gravity, an energy fact. But you can overrule its pull on you by way of your personality and its absolute dimension. Please don't do this; "there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is death." Proverbs 14:12 [139:12.5]
7:3 Relation of the Eternal Son to the Individual
We cannot feel the spirit gravity of the Eternal Son yet. The spirit gravity draw we "feel" now is that localized center: our Creator Son. A Creator Son's downstepping/conditioning/transforming of spirit gravity into this time-space domain is analogous to the dark gravity bodies' function with Paradise gravity. Everything we are told about spirit gravity has a parallel with material gravity—they're both gravity. Dark gravity bodies are subordinate centers to the Isle of Paradise as are Creator Sons subordinate centers to the Eternal Son.
And remember: even if the Creator Son is the source-center of this spirit gravity, there is a reciprocal center-source fact that is the actual delivery mechanism of that spirit gravity: the Local Universe Creative Mother Spirit. This is what makes it a universe, a one-turning: a centering influence that is downstepped and spatially qualified.
We concluded the broadcast discussing how prayer has a liternal-ness to it, at least if the prayer is "spirit indited."
- Are your prayers spirit stuff of a certain quality, or material stuff of a certain quanity?
- Are your prayers light, or heat?
- Are they harmony or the noise of a "tinkling cymbal"?
- Are your supplications even supplications? Do they submit the material to the spiritual?
Only a mind that has submitted can receive the answer to a prayer as a spiritual technique. And we're talking about submitting—down on bended knee—in your inner life, not in the outer life. See [91:8.11]
Notes by Brad
- It's hard for us to understand all this, but there is a logic to it that can help us have a better concept frame.
- For the first time ever, we're told every real is literally so, and it has a gravity.
- Poetically we've said "he will draw all men to him" for a long time. But for this to be literal?
- Because everything is literal, there's a physics of it. A nature of it. There's nothing arbitrary anywhere. There's no such thing as magic.
- Your survival is predicated on the literalness of the existence of spirit value.
- A deep purpose for us receiving these papers as an emergency?
- A mind that can truly get these papers will have been cured of a disease of the troubled times. Times predicated on the immaturity of the animal mind.
- What makes a study worthy of the -logy suffix? Without assuming everything is literal, so-called science is just some clever game we are playing with ourselves, and he who barks the loud and most definitively is who we'll arbitrarily believe.
- The absoluteness of matter is not right under your hand.
- The literal hardness of a brick you touch with your hand only appears to be the brick itself.
- In reality, its solidity derives from the transcendent Isle of Paradise.
- Your engagement of a brick of matter is far, far removed from the Isle.
- Many a so-called scientist today builds their theories on a foundation of fulfillments of their own fervent feeling-ful wishes (or grant-funded mathematical models), instead of considering any possible objective literal-ness.
- Infinite, Eternal, and Universal are not synonyms. Each of these, as a capitalized proper noun, is assigned to one and only one of the three Sources and Centers.
