Episode:Existential Deity—God the Son (Part 3)
The Eternal Son is the personal trustee, the divine custodian, of the Father’s universal plan of creature ascension. Having promulgated the universal mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect,” the Father intrusted the execution of this tremendous undertaking to the Eternal Son; and the Eternal Son shares the fostering of this supernal enterprise with his divine co-ordinate, the Infinite Spirit.
Keywords: Urantia, Spiritual Administration, Superpersonalities, All-Pervading Spirit, Prayer
Opening thought: The Gods who ordained that mortal man should climb to higher levels of spiritual intelligence through long ages of evolutionary trials and tribulations, take note of his status and needs at every stage of the ascent; and always are they divinely fair and just, even charmingly merciful, in the final judgments of these struggling mortals of the early days of the evolving races. [40:5.11]
Note: Justin Armstrong filled in for Kermit Anderson this week.
Summary by Andrea
Commentary after Review
We discussed individuality, associativity, and unity and how that pattern can be found throughout the universe even to Deity in a generalized sense. This pattern can seem like it’s everywhere. However, as we explore these we must be careful not to rationalize some triad as the three-fold actuality. After all, these terms are relative.
Then we moved to a continuation of last week’s conversation about prayer. The two terms, both supplication and submission, were defined in almost the same way. That is because the sup- prefix, followed by a root beginning with a p in Latin is the same as the sub- prefix.
Supplication literally means to fold down, or kneel down. When we think of the 5 favorable conditions for growth this action is what comes naturally when we feel humility.
To submit means we are sending our animal self below. It means we take control of our animal nature. We put it in its proper place. It’s proper to have self-respect but without personality control it can go beyond that to self-esteem and then most improperly to self-love if we are not careful. True humility and submitting our will to the will of God is where we find the balance. This is easy to do if we simply reflect on the fact that we are not the source of anything.
To have a prayer be actually Spirit indited means that in order for us to interface with God we have to be of like-nature. He cannot engage something that is not of His nature. “The content of any petition which is not "spirit indited" can find no place in the universal spiritual circuit; such purely selfish and material requests fall dead; they do not ascend in the circuits of true spirit values.” The term “fall dead” caught our attention. If we overplay our selfish and material natures and spirit is in play then we risk what is talked about in the following quote [146:2]: "That prayer which is inconsistent with the known and established laws of God is an abomination to the Paradise Deities."
This is why we especially need courageous cosmic thinking. We do face a severe test. Because if we’ve been born again we have spirit in play and along with that comes the possibility of destructivity. Hence the strong word the revelators used when they said the prayer could “fall dead.” Let us ask ourselves if our prayers conform to the laws of spirit, mind, and matter. Otherwise, our prayers are an abomination. Yikes!!!
There is always a reason that something exists even if, relative to perfection, it is highly primitive. There’s always a thread that can be taken up, and that is what a revelation does. For example, submission is not something an animal does the way a human would do it. We do it because there is a thread of truth that pulls us. And with that pulling, we realize our place in the cosmos. In this lowly state, submission is not only appropriate and called for but a necessary part of striking step with the eternal purpose.
Another question was raised about whether a child should be taught from the beginning to pray as an adult or to let them naturally pray as they do. The life carriers programmed us to pray and that little child naturally looks to a higher power and prays at their own level. Let ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny. Let the child mature and let them see our loyalty to God. We can trust God to grow our children. We cannot do that for our children or for ourselves.
7:4 The Divine Perfection Plans
In the first paragraph of this section, we hear that “in divine faithfulness, the Son is the eternal equal of the Father.” The question arose, “What is the Eternal Son putting himself into cooperative subordination to?” And we learned that he is attuning to the Paradise Trinity. We are not asked to do anything He has not already done. The Father, Son, and Spirit are putting themselves together, as one, in cooperative subordination to the Paradise Trinity, which is the basis for the ascension scheme.
With this in mind, the Revelators talk about the divine plan of perfection attainment, which embraces three unique, though marvelously correlated, enterprises of universal adventure.
The first is the Plan of Progressive Attainment. This requires the introduction of two potentials into a system that doesn’t innately have those potentials available.
Those two potentials include Spirit and Personality:
- Bringing spirit into play into matter and mind is a must, because spirit brings progressability. This spirit fragment nucleus which is the Father’s initiating engagement will eventually be the basis of our reality/individuality and eventually lead us back to the Isle of Paradise.
- Because this is about perfection plans, we have to have perfectibility in play, and that comes with the addition of personality. Personality injects that potential of perfectibility into the system upon the foundation of the spirit, thereby injecting progressability into the system.
And personality has the dominance. It is above spirit, and we wield spirit with our personality with the potential of creativity or destructivity. Remember, Spirit is just stuff that can be used for good or bad purposes. It is not innately divine.
In the bible and also in the UB they remind us of the mandate, “Let us make mortal creatures in our own image.” That image is our personality fact. It is a level of deified reality that they refer to when saying we are created in their image.
The second enterprise of universal adventure is The Bestowal Plan.
“The Paradise Sons stand pledged and ready to function as retrievers, to go into the very realms of rebellion and there restore the spiritual status of the spheres.”
In this section, it’s important to note that they are talking about co-ordinate, not subordinate sons. This is about the Paradise Creator Sons gaining sovereignty over their domains with the 7 bestowal missions that they do. Chris mentioned checking out his paper in the library called Finite Careers of Creature and Creator Sons, which helps explain these complex parallels between ascending and descending sons.
We, as lowly humans, can ascend to the high levels we do, and in the ways we do, because the universe has been made open to that possibility via the descending Creator Sons doing their 7 bestowals. It’s all interwoven to make the ascension scheme possible. A brilliant physics that we can hardly imagine.
And finally the third part of the divine plan is The Plan of Mercy Ministry.
The Infinite Spirit functions truly and literally as the conjoint executive of the Father and the Son. This service is so essential to the practical and effective operation of the universe. It is the Infinite Spirit who sets up the unimaginable number of beings and systems that make everything happen; think of our seraphim who help us do things like making the adjuster more effective and they literally carry our soul to the first mansion worlds.
The infinite spirit creates all the beings between here and there which makes all of this ascension scheme happen. It’s where the rubber meets the road with mercy ministry.
Because the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit share Mother Deity in common, the potentials set up by the Father can be actualized.
7:5 The Spirit of Bestowal
The Eternal Son broadcasted to all creation: "Be you perfect, even as your Father in Havona is perfect." The Eternal Son and his vast family of co-ordinate and associated Sons are "the way, the truth, and the life." When we hear this we want to finish it by adding from John 14:6 “and no one comes to the Father except through me.”
That “be you perfect” quote is from Genesis. The Revelators show us how we can bring these biblical references alive when we see them in the light of the 5th ER and the physics involved.
“The Eternal Son cannot contact directly with human beings as does the Father through the gift of the prepersonal Thought Adjusters, but the Eternal Son does draw near to created personalities by a series of down-stepping gradations of divine sonship until he is enabled to stand in man's presence and, at times, as man himself.”
This down-stepping encompasses all the descending sons. The Eternal Son cannot fragment himself the way the Father can. But he has sons that can, for example, stand on a world as a planetary prince. The Eternal Son in this way engages in the time/space adventure through the divine personality of his sons, much the same way the Father does through his bestowal of the Thought Adjusters.
The Son cannot get at us through the front door, but through the Mother, he can get to us through the back door. Incarnations always involve the Mother.
The Eternal Son did his own bestowals in the times of Grandfanda. Over and over, they are telling us how the bestowals are integral to the ascension scheme. The truth of the Eternal Son’s sevenfold bestowal is manifested in the fact of the firstborn Creator Son’s sevenfold bestowal. We constantly see patterns within patterns.
The truth of the Eternal Son’s bestowals resides in the fact that all ordinate and subordinate sons, including those unrevealed to us, all partake in the wonderful willingness to bestow themselves upon the varied orders of creature life and as the creatures themselves.
Our Creator Son, when he incarnated here, was devoted to doing the will of the Father and for that reason does not exactly fit into the divinely perfect portraiture of the Original Son as do these other bestowal sons, but to that of the Father.
