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The Urantia Book: Why are its readers challenged with over 2000 pages of profuse facts and prodigious names???
Sue Tennant, Toronto, Canada
The Urantia Book proclaims: Life on earth is only the tip of the iceberg! The drama of eternity has only just begun! A cosmic adventure beckons!
While living this short, intense life on Urantia, we human beings begin the eternal development of our unique, never-to-be repeated, personalities. Our experience with the indwelling spirit of God, trusting and following its gentle leading, is the passport to that eternity.
Our personalities--essentially our wills--slowly become like God's as we increasingly trust ourselves to him during our ascent through the many worlds that the book tells us exist beyond this first earthly life. That is the purpose of all universe life--to grow perfect, even as God is perfect.
Attaining that perfection takes a long time, far longer than our finite minds can conceive. Today, as mere material mortals, our understanding is limited; but, as morontia progressors, our capacities will expand and as spirit pilgrims, unimagined faculties for experiential growth await us. We must choose freely to cooperate with the learning process. There is absolutely no coercion in God's plan of experiential progress.
We are God's precious offspring, born to grow perfect, to love and to serve throughout eternity.
In its 2097 pages, The Urantia Book encourages us to make God our personal priority. The more we know about God--the amazing, creative, nurturing Cosmic Parent--the more we are empowered to serve others. To love and serve as God loves and serves is the business of living and the source of all lasting joy and fulfillment. To know God as Universal Father, and the whole of humankind as family, is the supreme experience of living. This is the great destiny to which we humans are called. It is a never-ending, thrilling enterprise which fulfills our deepest and most profound personal longings. It is to realize, with absolute assurance, our immutable identity as sons and daughters of God.
Critical thinking and making decisions are more important than we ever imagined.
The Urantia Book is an information tool to know God more deeply and to grow spiritually. It is a book which demands time plus an open and questing mind. The reward for the student is an endlessly fascinating orientation to life, one filled with challenge and meaning. This mind tool leads the reader through new facts and concepts not otherwise available. It generates the confidence in us to risk trusting a loving God and making that trust the obvious and logical course to follow.
It is by our faith decisions that we are advanced. The mortal mind is the connection between the material and the spiritual. How and what we think--our attitudes and our priorities--are crucial. Strenuous thinking and making choices are the keys to progress. Matter, when subject to mind and the overcontrol of spirit can progress to perfection, even an eternal perfection.
People need to belong
The progress of the whole is dependent on the progress of the part. Urantia depends on the progress of the individual to one day achieve perfection status. We belong to a universe in which we are accountable. Our contribution to the evolution of this planet is vital. Progress has to do with the development of our personality potential in our relationships with others through faith attitudes of love, trust, and mercy. The book tells us:
Personality cannot very well perform in isolation. Man is innately a social creature; he is dominated by the craving of belongingness. It is literally true, "No man lives unto himself." (1227)
Of all human needs, none is more compelling than this need to belong. For it is in belonging that we grasp our own reality and validate our sense of worth. All personality development is dependent on a sense of belonging, a sense of identity of the self in relation to others, the part in relation to the whole. The Urantia Papers are very specific about our identity as cosmic citizens in a loving and friendly universe.
The profuse details about the vast, inhabited universes, its multitudinous lifeforms, the facts regarding the history and destiny of our planet, and the description of the administration of the entire cosmic creation, boggle the mind. These details leave little room for the reader to doubt who they are, where they are going, and to whom they belong.
The Urantia Book ventures into the past further than the finite human mind can conceive,
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