Key concepts

Over the years, Symmetry of Soul has converged upon key themes and concepts that serve as lenses for contextually studying the complex text of an epochal revelation. This page is an ongoing attempt to compile and distill those concepts.

At this time the page is, to put it mildly, something of a sprawling mess. Nevertheless, this page is arranged in something like decreasing order of importance and any serious student of The Urantia Book may find the contents here helpful for their own study.

Study Approach/Life Advice

Seek first the kingdom of heaven!
- Inner versus outer life. Don't let your inner life become polluted by godless ideals. Only god-ful ideals belong in there. Confusing the outer life with the inner life can put one's eternal survival at stake.
  - Stop turning yourself inside out
  - Zeal is not God (ZING!)
  - Set a guard on your inner life‏‎
  - Don't let the outrage du jour out there be dragged into your inner life.
  - Don't paint yourself with sepulcher white. Keep your inner life pure, not just an outward appearance.
  - Distinguish ideas versus ideals.
  - Hate versus dislike. Don't confuse the two. Hatred enters the inner life and festers there.
- Put God at the center so you stand on eternity, not the sands of self.
- Religion is a mode of living. Not just some specific function of life
- Try a contemplative practice in your life. Spend time each day in the temple within. It a necessity, not a luxury.
  - Be reflective, not introspective. Contemplation is needed, but excess self-contemplation is "most disastrous."
- Don't be one of the unwitting secularists.
  - Don't pitch your tent in the house of darkness. Pick up your tent and go elsewhere.
  - Heed Amenomope's Psalm 1. Are you blessed as he defined it? Or do you follow the ways of man? Do you "walk in step with the wicked," "sit in the company of mockers," etc?
- Strive to be born again again
- And what is the kingdom of heaven? "The kingdom of Jesus’ teaching: the spiritual ideal of individual righteousness and the concept of man’s divine fellowship with God..." [170:5.9]
- Consecrate yourself to the doing of the will of God...
- Righteousness is first an individual matter. Not (first) what one's community of like-minded folks say is righteous.

Submit to God. It's the secular fashion to submit to no one and no God, but you must to truly survive mortality.
- It is my will that your will be done‏‎, God.
- Love versus law. God is love, yes, but the Paradise Trinity is justice.
- Believe God’s promises ‘’’and’’’ follow God's instructions.
- Be ye perfect..., which is God’s instruction. It is not a mild platitude.
- There is a way that seems right to a man... but the end thereof is death.
- You must be saved. Salvation is not automatic.
- Repent, with humility. It has nothing to do with ghost-cult sacrificial atonement rituals. It's really necessary, though.
- Practice wholehearted devotion to supreme values, with unquestioning loyalty.

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
  - Though only if you're not in darkness. If you're in darkness, you need the fear of the Lord. [149:6.5]
- Aim higher by looking upward
- Face facts and adjust them to ideals
- Be content, not satisfied
- Stay hungry and thirsty, my friends
- Effort, struggle, conflict... and so forth. Our so-called 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
- The problem with anti-‏‎. Be for things, not against things.

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.
  - Don't be befogged by much thinking
  - Come to appreciate etymology. Often the revelators use words in their literal etymological meaning.
  - Discover, recognize, interpret, and choose. Recognize: A place that precedes analysis. Delay analysis and interpretation.
  - Be a truth seeker, not an affirmation seeker‏‎
- Analysis versus synthesis
- Don't assume your job is to proselytize The Urantia Book‏‎
- Have you not read? The Urantia Papers should demand of you more reading of important books, not less. "All you need is The Urantia Book" is incorrect.
- Strive to be in a parallel stream first, then engage the mainstream.
- Strive to be a religionist of philosophic attainment.
- Grow up.
  - Get over yourself.
  - Stop playing with yourself‏‎.
  - You're not the shiniest object in the universe.
- True religion. Settle for nothing less.
- Know thyself‏‎

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
- Beware: False orthodoxies that have become settled thought amongst the majority of Urantia Book readers.
- Beware: using some clever species of self-deception‏‎ to tell yourself you're doing better than you really are at all this.
- Beware: Intellectual assent, credulity, and established authority‏‎
- Beware: Swallowing ocean water and spitting it out again‏‎
- Take delight in cultivating... you relation to higher influences of mind
  - Notably, the three cosmic intuitions
- It's in your freewill hands
- Be sophistry proof
- Possess self-respect, not self-esteem‏‎. Pride goes before a fall.

Strive to be a second miler. Don't assume you are one.
- 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.
- Transcend, don't repress

Essential concepts/analogies/metaphors

Levels of meaning
- This distinction is vital...
- God the Father versus God the Mother

Threefold actuality. Core to the nature of reality.
- Individuality, associativity, and unity
- Superadditive consequence

Four experiential divine ideals
- Preeminence of the individual‏‎

It's one evolutionary system
- Strike step with the wholeness of the cosmos.
- Plan Z is often called for, after Plans A-Y failed to meet the evolutionary moment.
- Revelation versus evolution
- Revolution versus evolution