This conference will carry forward from last year’s conference in Canberra, where we postulated that we were poised on the threshold of the Fifth Epochal Revelation.
The Urantia Book has now been in publication for 46years and last year 39,071 books in seven different languages were distributed worldwide, making an approximate total of 500,000 books circulating around our planet, and with distribution dramatically increasing each year. We feel the time has come to dynamically cross that threshold.
So our theme this weekend is “Organising the Soul for Dynamic Service.” It’s about how we as individuals, and working together, can assist in the grand scheme of things, by living God’s will more dynamically here on Urantia.
Given our theme, this was always going to be a special conference, but with the events that have taken place since September the 11th, and the accelerated pace of change, we may all have to face great challenges as future events unfold. I suggest that never has there been a more appropriate time to individually find a greater spiritual substance. Not only to help us keep our own equilibrium, but to help and support those around us.
The decision to organise the soul for dynamic service is very personal, for each of us is the master of our destiny. So we are not here to get you to sign a pledge. You will make that decision when you decide the time is right.
What we are here for is for each of us to reach deep within and share with each other the many, many ways that we could go about organising our souls dynamically both on a personal level and in service to others. And also the many advantages that decision might make, both on a spiritual and material level.
When I looked up dynamic in the dictionary the explanations were: of motive force / force in actual operation / active / potent and energetic. To me that sounds like setting oneself up for a continuous turbo boost of God consciousness, by actively making the will of God our highest priority. What we are doing here is starting to lay a stronger foundation, not only for ourselves but for all of Urantia, which includes our children and our children’s children.
There is a very straight forward quote in The Urantia Book:
“Do you not realize that the hope of a better nation—or a better world—is bound up in the progress and enlightenment of the individual?”[Paper 145:2.8, page 1630.4]
I think everybody here would understand that, and this conference will focus on some of the many down to earth ways to go about it. Apart from each of us hopefully coming away from this conference with increased motivation and fresh new ideas to actively work towards, the main object is to enjoy your time here. As Jesus might say if he were here “be of good cheer” and we have this lovely venue with lots of socialising, workshops, and fun-things planed to do as we come together and work towards our theme.
I happened to mention at one of our pre-conference meetings that I felt very positive about our theme, but I hoped it wouldn’t scare people away. I could imagine someone saying, “Look, I love The Urantia Book but I’m having such a busy time trying to survive down here, that I don’t think I could possibly find time to organise my soul for dynamic service, it sounds like a lot of work to me.” But when you start looking at how you might go about organising your soul dynamically, you realise the changes that you need to make can only enhance your life here and now and this knowledge, I feel could be the pivot point of this conference, not only for our personal realisation, but also in helping others accept the value in devoting a greater amount of attention to the spiritual or religious content of their lives.
At last year’s conference, William very eloquently put forward a disclaimer before his presentation. He said, “We don’t really know what we are talking about. We are in the position of small children trying to form ideas about the big wide world.” And then he went on to talk about introducing frames of reference in which to view the Fifth Epochal Revelation.
This conference is a little different. We are not so much concentrating on the big picture but more on a personal level here and now.
How do we go about organising our souls for dynamic service? What may be the impact on our lives? How might our lives change?
Each person here will have his or her own ideas and feelings about those questions because each of us has a unique personally and history of life experiences. Therefore we are able to share our uniqueness with absolute authority; each of us is the expert on our feelings and ideas, there is no right or wrong if you are actively working to prepare your soul for dynamic service. So let’s all feel proud about sharing our individual contributions towards a greater spiritual harmony this weekend.
At this point, I would like to spend a short time outlining some of the content for our theme, as revealed by The Urantia Book. Let’s look at a little at what The Urantia Book tells us about the soul.
The presence of the divine Adjuster in the human mind makes it forever impossible for either science or philosophy to attain a satisfactory comprehension of the evolving soul of the human personality. The morontia soul is the child of the universe and may be really known only through cosmic insight and spiritual discovery. [Paper 111:0.1, page 1215:1]
The human personality is identified with mind and spirit held together in functional relationship by life in a material body. This functioning relationship of such mind and spirit does not result in some combination of the qualities or attributes of mind and spirit but rather in an entirely new, original, and unique universe value of potentially eternal endurance, the soul. [Paper 111:2.3, page1218:1]
Now the information in The Urantia Book is so beautifully and concisely condensed, that you could just about have a study group on every sentence. So if you were trying to explain what we have just read to a younger person who wasn’t as clever as we are what would you say? Maybe something like this: Here you are on this beautiful planet. You have been provided with a unique personality, a physical body, an endowment of mind, and most of all free will, so you can direct that combination in any direction you wish. Now this is only a temporary state and your body will only exist while you are here, gathering experience. While you are here, you will have many good times and not so good times.
But there is something within you that keeps you moving forward. You try to place that feeling on things around you but when you do it never lasts. That feeling is calling you from beyond this lifetime to the being who is responsible for all you have now, and all the wonders that await you in the future. That Being is God. So to fulfill your destiny and make this wonderful journey to God, you need to build a special spaceship to take over when you have finished with your physical body.
The spaceship is invisible while you are here, but you have everything you need right here, to build it with. You might ask, “How do I start to build this ship?” Well along with that mind endowment I mentioned there is also a personal essence of God called your Thought Adjuster, and he has the blueprint. All you have to do is allow him to help you by using your free will to connect with him and he will help you build the most amazing spaceship. The more you connect and plan with him, and actively incorporate the knowledge into your life now, the more dynamic your ship will become. When you have finished with this temporary body you will become the space ship and with the new endowment of cosmic mind, both you and the space ship will further refine that vehicle until it becomes so attractive that your Thought Adjuster also comes aboard, and then your journey is truly assured.
The book also tells us that the soul is our vehicle and embryo of the universes, and once initiated cannot be stopped, but we of course still have the choice until adjuster fusion to continue our ascension or be as we never where.
So if you where pretty sure that your soul had been initiated why go to all the trouble of putting the extra effort in to prepare it for dynamic service? Couldn’t that wait until we got to the mansion worlds and weren’t so busy? There is no doubt about it preparing the soul for dynamic service does mean pushing your boundaries, going the extra mile, and continually connecting within.
It is probably the most personal and important decision that can be made while we have a human body. Why? Let’s read the paragraph that contains our theme.
Religion is not a technique for attaining a static and blissful peace of mind; it is an impulse for organizing the soul for dynamic service. It is the enlistment of the totality of selfhood in the loyal service of loving God and serving man. Religion pays any price essential to the attainment of the supreme goal, the eternal prize. There is a consecrated completeness in religious loyalty which is superbly sublime. And these loyalties are socially effective and spiritually progressive. [Paper 100:3.1, page 1096.6]
And also:
But true religion is a living love, a life of service. The religionist’s detachment from much that is purely temporal and trivial never leads to social isolation, and it should not destroy the sense of humor. Genuine religion takes nothing away from human existence, but it does add new meanings to all of life; it generates new types of enthusiasm, zeal, and courage. …One of the most amazing earmarks of religious living is that dynamic and sublime peace, that peace which passes all human understanding, that cosmic poise which betokens the absence of all doubt and turmoil. Such levels of spiritual stability are immune to disappointment. [Paper 100:6.5-6, page 1100.8-9]
And that, I feel is the double whammy in making the choice to organise our souls for dynamic service, not only for our ascension sake but for the substance and enjoyment that we may experience in our lives here and now. So today we are looking at dynamic service on a personal level, and tomorrow, how we may be of service to others.
Without even going into the book I think we would all agree that one stems from the other. The more efficient we become in dynamically preparing our own souls, the more effective we will be in service to others.
…[Jesus].. did not teach that the essence of his religion consisted in social service, but rather that social service was one of the certain affects of the possession of the spirit of true religion. [Paper 159:5.8, page 1769.10]
So by the sound of that, service to others may be a natural progression when we choose to organise our souls for dynamic service.
When I thought about organising my soul for dynamic service, three things came to mind, first my free will decision to do it. Secondly, to adjust my values so that it was the most important value in my life, and thirdly, to step up the active demonstration of my faith—to quickly look at faith. The Urantia Book defines faith as active participation towards your belief. We need do very little to believe, but to actively demonstrate faith, we need to direct our choices and actions from moment to moment to the highest level of the will of God, as we understand it at that moment.
How do we understand the will of God? There is no greater knowledge to be had on Urantia than the life and teachings of Jesus. The Urantia Book also tells us that, if your own mind does not serve you well, you can exchange it for the mind of Jesus of Nazareth, who always serves you well.
W.W.J.D?—What would Jesus do?
If we apply that to every life situation, we might not be right on the money but we will probably be a lot closer to God’s will
than applying our own logic. Values! There is nothing of value in the material world. There are a couple of necessities—food and shelter, or we might not survive. But apart from the necessities there is nothing of value until we decide that something is valuable to us. That is quite an amazing thought; that I can walk around bestowing my values on whatever takes my fancy. And how different are the things we bestow our values on—better cars, bigger houses, more jewellery, what team wins the grand final, or a lot more money—just to name a few.
As I explained to my young friend earlier, this feeling of value is beyond this lifetime. In most cases, when we acquire the things we feel we passionately need, they loose most of their value. “If I won lotto I would be happy.” No, if I won lotto I would have more money. I won’t be happy until I take the steps to understand what happy is. I’m not talking about human happiness, happy today— unhappy tomorrow. I’m talking about that feeling of joy that is beyond disappointment. To put it another way, if I won God’s lotto and was sent straight to Paradise, would I be happy? Well The Urantia Book tells us that if we were transported to Paradise while in a human body we would not even know we were there. The perfection of Paradise is not so much in the destination, as it is in the beings that have earned the right to be there. There are no short cuts in realising our potential, and our potential for true happiness can only be realised by the decision to actively move towards God consciousness.
Now the decision: The decision to dynamically prepare your soul is the key that opens the door to attain a greater personal substance of God consciousness. Thereby experiencing something we may never have the chance to experience again—how to live with increasing cosmic poise as a human being. And as the Northern Territory ad a few years ago said, “If you never never go, then you will never never know.”
First we make the decision and do it before we can experience it. So putting off dynamically preparing your soul until you get to the mansion worlds might at first seem the easier option. But we have already started our ascension and from a builder’s point of view, when you build something that you want to last for a long time you need a very good foundation. And what we are doing on Urantia in this lifetime is building a foundation for ourselves that may last for an eternity. Now to turn the double whammy content of my presentation into a triple whammy let’s read from page 578 the rewards of isolation:
On first thought it might appear that Urantia and its associated isolated worlds are most unfortunate in being deprived of the beneficent presence and influence of such superhuman personalities as a Planetary Prince and a Material Son and Daughter. But isolation of these spheres affords their races a unique opportunity for the exercise of faith and for the development of a peculiar quality of confidence in cosmic reliability which is not dependent on sight or any other material consideration. It may turn out, eventually, that mortal creatures hailing from the worlds quarantined in consequence of rebellion are extremely fortunate. We have discovered that such ascenders are very early entrusted with numerous special assignments to cosmic undertakings where unquestioned faith and sublime confidence are essential to achievement.
On Jerusem the ascenders from these isolated worlds occupy a residential sector by themselves and are known as the agondonters, meaning evolutionary will creatures who can believe without seeing, persevere when isolated, and triumph over insuperable difficulties even when alone…
All through the Paradise career, reward follows effort as the result of causes. Such rewards set off the individual from the average, provide a differential of creature experience, and contribute to the versatility of ultimate performances in the collective body of the finaliters. [Paper 50:7.1-3, page 578.6 – page 579.2]
Every time I read that I feel a rush of passion and the inspiration to endeavour to reach my greatest potential while I am here on Urantia. And for me there seems no better way to do it than to make the decision and actively go about organising my soul for dynamic service.