User:Admin/Key Concepts Restructure
From Symmetry of Soul
Seek first the kingdom of heaven
Main article: Seek first the kingdom of heaven
- Put God at the center of your life. Stand on eternity, not the sands of self.
- Consecrate yourself to the doing of the will of God...
- It is my will that your will be done, God. It's the only real gift you can offer God.
- Have the faith of Jesus (the religion of Jesus)
- Of all human knowledge, the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it is of greatest value.
- Religion is a mode of living. Not just some specific function of life
- Be in the world, but not of the world.
- 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?
You must be saved
Main article: You must be saved
- Also known as being born again
- Don't be self-deceived. Salvation is not automatic.
- Ahem... Actually, Lucifer said that!
- There is a way that seems right to a man... but the end thereof is death.
- Repent, with humility. It has nothing to do with ghost-cult sacrificial atonement rituals. It's really necessary, though.
- Submit to God. It's the secular fashion to submit to no one and no God, but you must to truly survive mortality.
- Believe God’s promises and follow God's instructions.
- Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord.
- It's in your freewill hands. Salvation is a free gift of God, but it must be your freewill choice.
Follow God's instructions
- Love versus law. God is love, yes, but the Paradise Trinity is justice.
- Exclusive focus on the love of God and losing sight of God's righteousness makes love a malignant virus, not a benign one.
- You must bear much fruit. The fruits of the spirit, when true, are borne without conscious effort. Because your heart is right.
- Be ye perfect..., which is God’s instruction. It is not a mild platitude.
- Like a mustard seed, spiritual growth can go from small to immense.
- Don't assume your job is to proselytize The Urantia Book
- True religion. Settle for nothing less.
- Righteousness is first an individual matter. Not (first) what one's community of like-minded folks say is righteous.
- You musts are throughout the 5th Epochal Revelation. Can you reflect on them and will you follow what you can?
Supply favorable conditions to be grown
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Main article: Favorable conditions
- Start with yourself
- The beam in your own eye instead of the mote in someone else's eye.
- Get over yourself.
- Parent your material self. The animal-origin self is not something to be listened it, it is something to be changed, adjusted, and controlled.
- You're not the shiniest object in the universe.
- Stop playing with yourself.
- Possess self-respect, not self-esteem. Pride goes before a fall.
- Know thyself
- Incessant clamoring of one's animal-origin self is unavoidable.
- In this life, we must perforce serve two masters
- The lower animal-origin self should be parented by the higher self, and not allowed to rule you.
- Grow up
- Stop regretting the past, whining over the present, and vainly hoping for the future.
- Face facts and adjust them to ideals
- Strive for self-mastery
- 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."
- Reflective thinking
- Aim higher by looking upward
- Sincerity, sincerity, and more sincerity are the keys to the kingdom
- Effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty progress, the so-called Eight-fold path to progress.
- Real progress is hard work, but worthy work. It certainly is not automatic.
- Take delight in cultivating... your relation to higher influences of mind
- Notably, the three cosmic intuitions
Emergency! Be not deceived
Main article: Emergency
- It is sad to record that the Western world is in the state it is in today. But it is.
- Civilization is a choice, not automatic.
- The Lucifer rebellion set the tone, and its ideas are alive and well.
- True liberty versus false liberty. Most people in the world today are very confused about this.
- Philosophic materialism and securlatism have poisoned the waters of Western culture.
- There exists a clever species of self-deception to tell yourself you're doing better than you really are at all this.
- False illusions of success
- You can pollute your temple (the kingdom within)
- Stop turning yourself inside out
- 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.
- 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.
- Hate versus dislike. Don't confuse the two. Hatred enters the inner life and festers there.
- You can rationalize anything
- Preconceived opinions, settled ideas, and long-standing prejudices
- Recall the caveman story
- Lots of people want you to just make their thoughts your thoughts.
- False orthodoxies that have become settled thought amongst the majority of Urantia Book readers.
- Intellectual assent, credulity, and established authority
- Pervasive scientific dictation, social usage, and religious dogma
- Swallowing ocean water and spitting it out again. When you're not really growing or contributing anything real.
- The inevitabilities have become unfashionable. People want Havona and they want it now.
How to be a serious student of The Urantia Papers
Main article: Being a serious student
- First be a truth seeker, then a fact finder
- Be a truth seeker, not an affirmation seeker
- Analysis versus synthesis. Analysis is like ingesting a book; synthesis is like digesting a book.
- Understand how revelation works
- It is the coordination of essential knowledge
- Revelation reveals only that which is beyond discovery.
- It's a double-edged sword. It makes one's life easier in some respects, but harder in other respects.
- The Urantia Book? It's a philosophic text.
- It exhibits a precision of language, not mere poetic sentiment.
- Appreciate etymology. Often the revelators use words in their literal etymological meaning.
- Precise use of language to minimize more or less distortion of meaning
- And yet its authors frequently express "I have no words adequate to this task."
- The fancy-animal dictionary lightheartedly pokes fun at so much incorrect understanding.
- Strive to be a religionist of philosophic attainment.
- 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.
- But don't be befogged by much thinking. A little knowledge is disconcerting. And "complex learning" in an age like ours can lead you astray.
- Seek higher concept frames
- The Urantia Book provides better initial assumptions
- After all, you can only conclude what you assume.
- Practice courageous and independent cosmic thinking
Evolutionary religion is everywhere
- The atheists have a point when it comes to outmoded superstition.
- 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
- The atonement doctrine has its place in the evolutionary process. Don't take it away from someone and cause them to lose the need for the free gift of salvation.
Top 10 other essential concepts
- Levels of meaning
- Mind
- Top-down versus bottom-up
- Threefold actuality. Core to the nature of reality.
- The part and the whole
- This distinction is vital...
- God the Father versus God the Mother
- It's one evolutionary system. Strike step with the wholeness of the cosmos.
- Four experiential divine ideals
- Preeminence of the individual
- The home and family life are the nucleus of civilization
- Four phases of religious philosophy
- Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
- As with the macro, so with the micro
- As above, so below because the cosmos is patterned.
- All good things taken to an extreme become bad
- The seven developmental epochs of progressive civilization, notably the material-comfort era and its excesses.
