Episode:Existential Deity—The Eternal Son (Part 3)
To avoid confusing error, ever remember: The Eternal Son is the personal portrayal of the spirit Father to all creation. The Son is personal and nothing but personal in the Deity sense; such a divine and absolute personality cannot be disintegrated or fragmentized. God the Father and God the Spirit are truly personal, but they are also everything else in addition to being such Deity personalities.
Keywords: Urantia, Omniscience, Omnipotence, Personal Limitations, Mindedness
Opening thought: Then the Lord said: "I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world...Obey what I command you today...Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land; for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices as well..." Exodus 34:10
Summary by Kermit
Commentary after Review
We briefly speculated about how an Avonal Paradise Son bestowal mission differs from a Creator Son’s seventh bestowal mission. A Creator Son on his seventh bestowal incarnates as a mortal and prosecutes his mission obedient to the will of the heavenly Father as the initiator. The magisterial bestowal is executed consonant with the will of the Eternal Son. This opens his bestowal to fuller Mother Deity expressions in addition to portraying God as the initiator. Commentary also followed concerning the different conditions which would be encountered by a bestowal Son to a world in which no rebellion and default had occurred versus our world Urantia. We can hardly imagine what life is like on a normal post-bestowal-son world.
Jesus’ life proved that in spite of the handicaps incurred from the calamities of the past we mortals have the capabilities and faculties needed to actualize the potentials he revealed to us for cosmic progress and growth. By the same token neither should we imagine our cosmic status to be greater than it actually is. The revelation itself with its disclosure of far distant future destinies could contribute to the premature exaltation of our station in the universe. The watchword here is patience.
We concluded our prereading commentary with a discussion of the perils of modern man attempting to meet the challenge of securing his eternal existence without a personal religion. Technology provides absolutely no solutions to this problem. Only through the cultivation of sharing the inner life with God can the existential foundations for eternal life be secured. So it is that we pursue this arc on existential Deity. Those who learn the secret of submission to God’s will can expect to survive.
6:4.7 Attributes of the Eternal Son (cont.)
The Eternal Son is fully self-conscious and the equal to the Father in wisdom. Likewise the Second Source and Center’s omniscience is indistinguishable from that of the First Source and Center. How are we to think about existential omniscience with respect to knowledge and wisdom? As with many aspects and functions of the three Persons behind the scenes we look for the presence and function of the Paradise Trinity. So it is with knowledge and wisdom from the existential perspective. The Paradise Trinity is the singular Deity fact that directly engages each fact point of the totality of reality—existential knowledge. Dare to believe that a shadow of this phenomenon can be found in the creature inner life contemplation of sharing the inner life with God.
Because of the inexorable progression of the Supreme today’s Paradise pilgrims begin their ascension journey at a considerably advanced cosmic starting point compared with say the contemporaries of Elijah and Enoch. Add to this the myriad of external life distractions which compete with the essential task of cultivating a genuine religious inner life of philosophic attainment and you have a high bar indeed for eternalizing your personal self.
The Father and Son are omniscient with respect to the number and whereabouts of all spirits and spiritualized beings in all of creation through the Son’s omnipresent spirit and along with the Father’s and Conjoint Actor’s utilization of the vast reflectivity intelligence of the Supreme Being. This is puzzling given the Father’s exclusive existential nature. We are asked to attempt thinking about such things in hard-to-imagine terms such as the essence of the existential found within the reflectivity system.
The Eternal Son is the existential equal to the Father as a loving, merciful, and ministering personality. In his affectionate personal contact with ascendent beings of the lower realms the Son shares experiential equality with the Paradise Sons. The Eternal Son bridges the existential aspects he shares with the Father (above) and experiential nature he shares with Paradise Sons (below).
6:5 Limitations of the Eternal Son
The Son does not function in the physical domains and in mind ministry only through the Conjoint Actor. His omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence is limited to the spiritual. However, any so-called limitations we encounter with the existential Deities should be considered as self-willed limitations, not impositions. Remember the cooperative subordination pledge to the Paradise Trinity. The Eternal Son’s primacy in the spiritual domain applies only to spirit actualities and not the spirit potentialities of the Deity Absolute.
The Son takes a back seat to the both the Universal Father and the Conjoint Actor in terms of personality bestowal. He is limited to cocreatorship with the other two Persons. He is the Absolute personality and not a reservoir of personality. In the Son’s and Father’s cocreation of additional universe Sons with creative attributes, such attributes are not further transmissible, as with the Creator Sons. Yet in the example of a Creator Son, their first offspring in their local universe is a Bright and Morning Star we know as Gabriel in our local universe. While not a creator, he is a procreator, retaining a limited reflection of the creative attributes of the Creator Son.
The Son is exclusively personal in the Deity sense and as such indivisible—unfragmentable. God the Father and God the Spirit are truly personal but not exclusively so, having a plethora of other attributes which allow them to bestow individualized portions of selfhood upon other universe creatures.
Regarding the difference between creator personality and creature personality, we creatures have mindal selves which are personalized. A Creator has a Deity self which is personalized and manifests in reality. A creature has a reality self that is personalized by an individuated Deity influence superimposed thereupon. Personality (a level of deified reality) is always fundamentally a Deity phenomenon.
Listen to the archive for the discussion of the implications and meaning of the biblical phrase “Let us make mortal man in our own image” as it relates to the bestowal of personality.
6:6 The Spirit Mind
The mind of the Eternal Son differs markedly from creature mind with which we are familiar. Mind directly allied with spirit is not comparable to the mind which coordinates spirit and matter or matter only. Both Deity and spirit are innately minded. And spirit is a reality expression of Deity “stuff”.
Mindedness, the ability to know and be known is found in Deity and spirit. The mind of the Father and the Son is ancestral to the absolute mind of the Third Source and Center and is likened to the premind of the Thought Adjusters which are not part of the mind circuits of the Conjoint Actor. They are able to know and be known and enjoy the equivalent of human thinking.
Only upon our attainment of spirit status can we expect these spirit mysteries to clarify as we progress through the superuniverse and Havona training and begin to be endowed with the “mind of the spirit”.
Notes by Brad
- It's difficult enough to remember what experiential wisdom is (it's gained through tribulation). What about the existential wisdom the Eternal Son and Father have?
- It's one thing to think of not being experientially surprised -- what about not being existentially surprised?
- Reflecting on these can help you find your inner life, a domain whose basis is in eternity.
- finding this inner life is going to be harder for us now than for Enoch and Elijah. Mind has moved on in supremacy since those days.
- It's not getting easier to find the inner life. The bar is higher than even 2,000 years ago.
- The Eternal Son self limits. He knows his nature perfectly, and choose to be a perfect manifestation of that.
- He didn't go grasping for omniscience over mind and matter. He knows he is about spirit.
- Can you do this, too? Know yourself, and accept your limitations cheerfully?
- There's always a willful self-limitation on high, so that all the puzzle pieces fit together. Can you also be humble?
- You cannot really resist that which is above you. You must self-limit and submit to it.
- Creator versus creature: A Creator has a Deity self that has an avatar in reality. A creature is fundamentally in reality, not in Deity.
