Continuing Religious Experience

Continuing religious experience

101:6.1 (1111.5)The morontia phase of revealed religion has to do with the experience of survival, and the great driving force in this phase is the attainment of spirit perfection. You also experience there the higher impulse to worship God, as well as an urgent call to higher ethical service. Morontia insight entails becoming increasingly aware of the Sevenfold, the Supreme and even the Ultimate.

101:6.2 (1111.6)Throughout religious experience, from its very inception at the material level to the time when the full status of spirit is attained, the Richter constitutes the secret of personal awareness of the reality of the existence of the Supreme; in this same Richter also lie the secrets of your belief in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential personality of the evolving man, united with the Richter-essence of the existential God, constitutes the potential completion of the supreme existence and, according to its nature, is the basis for the transcendental resultant of the transcendental personality.

101:6.3 (1111.7)The moral will involves decisions grounded in reasoned knowledge, deepened by wisdom and ratified by religious faith. Such choices are acts of a moral nature and attest to the existence of the moral personality, the precursor of the morontia personality, and ultimately of true spirit-status.

101:6.4 (1111.8)Knowledge of the evolutionary type is merely the accumulation of protoplasmic memory material; this is the most primitive form of created consciousness. Wisdom involves the ideas formulated by association and recombination from protoplasmic memory; these phenomena distinguish human consciousness from purely animal consciousness. Animals have knowledge, but only humans possess the capacity for wisdom. Truth becomes accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual because to such a consciousness are bestowed the spirits of the Father and of the Sons, the Thought Giver and the Spirit of Truth.

101:6.5 (1112.1)When Christ Michael had given himself to Urantia, he lived under the rule of evolutionary religion until the moment of his baptism. From that moment until the event of his crucifixion, he continued his labor under the combined leadership of evolutionary and revealed religion. From the morning of his resurrection to his ascension, he passed through the multiple stages of morontia life of the mortal transition from the world of matter to that of spirit. After his ascension, Michael came into possession of the experience of the Supreme Reign, the awareness of the Supreme; and since he is the only person in Nebadon who possesses an unlimited ability to experience the reality of the Supreme, he immediately attained the status of the sovereignty of supreme power in, and before the eyes of, his local universe.

101:6.6 (1112.2)As for man, his ultimate fusion and consequent oneness with the indwelling Richter-the personality synthesis of man with the essence of God-make him, in potentiality, a living part of the Supreme, and guarantee that such a formerly mortal being has the eternal birthright to the never-ending after- striving of finality of universe-serving for, and together with, the Supreme.

101:6.7 (1112. 3)Revelation teaches mortal man that in order to embark on such a wonderful, intriguing adventure through space through the progression of time, he must begin by organizing his knowledge into idea-decisions; then he must instruct wisdom to labor unceasingly in its noble task of transforming the ideas he has made his own into ever more practical but nevertheless elevated ideals, into those conceptions which are so reasonable as ideas, and so logical as ideals, that the Richter dares to combine and spiritualize them to such an extent that they can be linked together in finite consciousness in such a way that they form the actual human complement thus prepared for the activity of the Truth-Spirit of Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise-truth-universal truth. The coordination of idea-decisions, logical ideals and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character, the prerequisite for the mortal's access to the ever-expanding, ever-more spiritual realities of the morontia worlds.

101:6.8 (1112.4)The teaching of Jesus was the first religion on Urantia that involved such complete, harmonious coordination of knowledge, wisdom, faith, truth and love that it provided complete and simultaneous tranquility in worldly affairs, intellectual certainty, moral enlightenment, philosophical stability, ethical sensitivity, God-consciousness and the positive certainty of personal survival. The faith of Jesus pointed the way to the finality of human preservation, to the ultimate of mortal universe-acquisition, by providing:

101:6.9 (1112.5)1. deliverance from material fetters in the personal realization of his sonship of God, who is spirit;

101:6.10 (1112.6)2. deliverance from intellectual bondage: man will know the truth and the truth will set him free;

101:6.11 (1112.7)3. deliverance from spiritual blindness, the human sense of the brotherhood of mortals and the morontial sense of the brotherhood of all creatures in the universe; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the service-revelation of the goodness of spirit-values;

101:6.12 (1113.1)4. redemption from the incompleteness of the self through the attainment of the mind-levels of the universe, and through the final realization of the harmony of Havona and the perfection of Paradise;

101:6.13 (1113.2)5. redemption of the self, liberation from the limitations of self-consciousness, through attainment of the cosmic levels of Supreme consciousness and through coordination with what has been achieved by all other self-conscious beings;

101:6.14 (1113.3)6. redemption from time, attaining an eternal life of never-ending progress in recognizing God and serving God;

101:6.15 (1113.4)7. redemption of the finite, the perfected union with the Godhead in and through the Supreme, through which the creature seeks to discover the Ultimate transcendent on the post-complete levels of the absonite.

101:6.16 (1113.5)This sevenfold redemption is the equivalent of the completeness and perfection of the realization of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all this is potentially contained in the reality of faith as man experiences it in religion. And it may also be contained herein, because the faith of Jesus was nourished by and revealed realities even beyond the ultimate; the faith of Jesus approached the status of an absolute universe-reality, insofar as such a reality can manifest itself in the evolving cosmos of time and space.

101:6.17 (1113.6)By appropriating the faith of Jesus, mortal man can already taste in time the realities of eternity. Jesus discovered the Final Father in his human experience, and his brothers according to the flesh in mortal life can imitate him in this experience of discovering the Father. They can even, as they are now, achieve the same satisfaction in this experience with the Father that Jesus achieved as he was. New potentialities were actualized in the universe Nebadon as a result of the final self-gifting of Michael, and one of these was the new light on the path of eternity that leads to the Father of all, and that can be traveled even by the mortals of material flesh and blood during their initial life on the planets in space. Jesus was and is the new, living way through which man can arrive at the divine inheritance which, according to the Father has ordained, will be his if man only asks for it. In Jesus it is abundantly demonstrated what is the very beginning and also the end and completion of man's experience of faith, even of divine man.

A Thought for Consideration from The Urantia Book