Arena – Summer 2024
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In This Issue
- President’s Report, Summer Arena 2024 – Rita Schaad, Newcastle, NSW
- 2025 ANZURA Conference – Brisbane
- Conference Reflections – Melbourne 2024 – Kathleen Swadling, Sydney
- Opening Address – Prue Scott, Melbourne
- Souls, Space and Bestowal – – Nigel Nunn, ACT
- Principles of Geology for Readers of Part III – Graeme, Brisbane QLD
- Urantia Organisations – Past, Present & Future – Kathleen Swadling, Sydney
- New Zealand Corner – Marion Steward, NZ
- The Violence of Christ – Barry Culligan, Ireland
- The Urantia Book – Our World Our History
- AI on the “Will of God” – AI
- Urantia Book Readthru
- About the Arena Newsletter – ANZURA Admin
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Here we are again at the end of the year with a lot of activity in ANZURA behind us. Our conference in Melbourne was a success thanks to everyone that made our stay at the Edmund Rice Centre comfortable, and to our Melbourne study group team. The sessions were interesting and the camaraderie the usual treat, as Kathleen will recount further on in her reflections.
As always, we conducted our AGM and re-elected the office bearers, which now remain unchanged from last year. Kathleen’s conference presentation, which is featured in this summer’s issue of the Arena, addresses just that! It gives us a great insight into how the Association is actually structured and how a solid foundation is crucial to bring about the desired outcome – mainly that a spiritual awakening could launch a new era for humankind through the spiritual transformation of each individual and all humanity.
We’re pleased to announce that next year’s conference will be in Brisbane 3 – 6 October 2025. See further on in this newsletter for the details.
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3 – 6 October 2025
This year’s ANZURA Annual Conference will be held 3 –6 October at the lovely Santa Teresa Spirituality Centre, which is situated in Ormiston, Brisbane, Queensland on beautifully landscaped grounds overlooking Moreton Bay.
The Sails of Faith Unfurled – “Faith is to religion what sails are to a ship” (159:3.8)
In this physical world, the free-will act of faith by a human mind comes perhaps as close as is possible to actual creation in that it enables what was once only an idea to become real. Even though great physical effort might also be pressed to the task it can usually be said that faith was the essential beginning, like a fundamental “atomic” particle, without which the idea would not have progressed at all.
Sometimes faith is more like a signal, the way the sail of a ship unfurled signals willingness to run with the wind. And for readers of The Urantia Book, faith is the act of beginning on page one feeling like an insect lost on a vast surface of paper and ink (57 square metres in the soft-cover edition) but proceeding anyway, hopefully with an eventual happy transition to a familiar landscape. Here the mind in pursuit of knowledge shows its natural tendency to boldness in matters not completely understood, which is a form of faith in its own ability to climb into trouble and to climb back out again for a gainful experience overall.
On top of all these ways of appreciating faith, as necessary, marvellous, miraculous or surprising, The Urantia Book offers many specifics relating to the operation of mind, spirit, personality, and closeness to God.
It is therefore proposed that in the conduct of the talks and exercises of ANZURA Conference 2025 participants will be gently surrounded with opportunities to appreciate the special ability of the human mind to deal in matters of faith, with high probability of better understanding.
About the Venue
The Santa Teresa Centre is specially designed to provide a spiritual retreat centre and offers several outdoor prayer spaces. The vision for the centre is to facilitate peoples’ encounter with God by taking time out of our lives for an annual spiritual health check, to reconnect with God and to grow deeper in this relationship, and for quiet prayer and reflection in the great natural beauty that calms the spirit and allows us to be renewed in body, heart, mind and spirit amidst the splendour of God’s creation.
A couple of comments from previous guests: “This place is just heaven on earth”, “We’ve used lots of retreat/spirituality centres over the last 18 years and I don’t think we’ve ever been somewhere so attuned to being hospitable, welcoming and creating an environment attuned to fostering the spiritual journey.”
Santa Teresa is located to the east of Brisbane at Ormiston, some 30 kms from both the CBD and Brisbane airport (approximately a 40-minute drive.) There is a train service from the City to Ormiston, (Cleveland line) where guests who do not wish to take the 25-minute gentle walk to Santa Teresa might, by prior arrangement, be collected at the station by a staff member from the Centre.
Please mark your calendars and join us for another annual get-together to enjoy friendship and meaningful conversations about things near and dear to our hearts.
Stay tuned for more information.
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We had a lovely conference this year which was held 4 – 7 October at the Edmund Rice Centre in Lower Plenty, Melbourne. The theme was Urantia Stocktake – Past, Present and Future. Readers attended from Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, NSW, Hawaii and New Zealand. The group was cosy and allowed for plenty of informal interaction. Our thanks go to the Melbourn Study Group members who hosted the gathering – Regina Williamson, Prue Scott, Bevan James and Dennis de-Jong.
There was good mix of presentations and workshops this year with plenty of humour, socialising and music. I heard many people express what a highlight these conferences are in that you can feel safe and comfortable talking about Urantia Book teachings and concepts that you just can’t talk about freely with those who are not familiar with the book.
We held a delightful welcoming “meet and greet” happy hour on Friday afternoon where we socialised and got to know new people who attended for the first time. Each morning before breakfast, the “early birds” attended a worship session with a good mix of silence, prayer and readings from the book. Prue was the MC and opened the conference on Friday evening with an ice-breaker activity whereby we were given a little slip of paper with a question on it. We went around the group, and each read out their own question and then answered it. This was fun and stimulated a lot of discussion.
Here is a list of the presentations given:
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What does it mean to take a “stocktake” of Urantia. In the Collins Dictionary it defines it as “the act of appraising a present situation, condition, degree of progress etc. in terms of accomplishments and ultimate goals.” The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a review and assessment of one’s situation and options.” In relation to The Urantia Book there are three aspects or ‘measures’ 1) Evolution – which is our natural development and maturing over time, 2) Revelation – acknowledging new input, truths and ideas, and 3) Experience – both personal and communal.
By design, and as free will thinkers, we do have a natural curiosity which drives the search for truth. And for we readers of The Urantia Book, by using these revelations, we have actually enhanced our personal experiences according to our own life passage. To subsequently share those experiences, they also can become revealing and educational for others who are not currently in ‘your world of thinking’.
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Glimpses and Speculations from The Urantia Book
(Presented at the ANZURA Conference Melbourne, 2024)
The Urantia Book presents a cosmology that stirs the soul: a central perfect universe, fringed by spacetime shallows in which Finaliters are born. Finaliters, destined to launch from this cosmic continental shelf into oceanic depths, seeding the light and life of personality throughout nested levels of outer space.
Now as we know, in The Urantia Book, “cosmology” means literally the study of beauty, of pattern and harmony. But as we also know, the beauty and harmony in this cosmology are simply “too deep for words”. But we’re not left to flounder: a glimpse of these wonders, however faint, is even now made accessible by three innate and cosmic intuitions. From Paper 16:6.10,
And it is these three cosmic intuitions that give objective validity, reality, to man’s experience in and with things, meanings, and values. 16:6.10 (192.6)
It is the purpose of education to develop and sharpen these innate endowments of the human mind; of civilization to express them; of life experience to realize them; of religion to ennoble them; and of personality to unify them. 16:6.11 (192.7) emphasis added
Paper 16 section 6 reveals that our human adjutant minds have an inbuilt “reality response” to these (quote) “scientific, moral, and spiritual insights” (16:6.9). Paper 196 section 3 adds a little more. Concerning these insights, from Paper 196:3.10 (2094.9),
"…all that the human mind can do is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose." So in the spirit of discovering and interpreting, I’d like simply to share a few thoughts about three aspects of this cosmology, this fresh universe frame in which to think. First, on the salvaging of premature baby souls. Next, on a pair of outer space levels astronomers have found. And finally, on the bestowal of space by Paradise.
Click here to read the full article in a PDF
Click here for the link provided in this article on page 13:
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 | | Artist Graeme, used by permission. |
Part three of The Urantia Book provides a concise, revealed account of the deep history of the Earth and the life that evolved here, and this account is remarkable both for its resemblance to the findings of conventional science and for its surprising points of difference. Although the identification and attempted resolution of such anomalies is interesting enough to pursue, I suggest that where science is concerned it is more rewarding to concentrate on the principles upon which our science has been built.
On this occasion I have in mind that the respectability of geology as a science comes from around two hundred years of applying what Charles Lyell called "The Principles of Geology" which became the title of his three-volume series of books (published 1830-1833). These principles are not laws to be obeyed, nor are they a strict recipe for manufacturing geological wisdom out of a pile of rock samples. Nor are they even very profound, yet these generalizations about the Earth's processes have a way of tuning the mind for better observation and discovery sufficient to withstand all manner of strange ideas without too much upset.
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(Adapted from the Melbourne Conference Talk, October 2024)
Introduction
I was asked by the conference organisers to present something on the Urantia organisations as some people are not too familiar with their history and present-day structures and activities. So we’ll take a look at the various stages of our organisations in the light of our conference theme: “Past, Present and Future—how are we travelling?”
Organisations in general can sometimes be associated with mundane terms such as hierarchies, bureaucracies, autocracies, or other such terms that don’t connote anything very spiritually fragrant. Religious organisations have some added negative connotations by being seen to have priorities such as dogma, theology, and pomp and ceremony rather than with nurturing and espousing spiritual brotherhood and true spiritual values for the individual and community at large.
In The Urantia Book we are told about the vast universe and how it is carefully organised. We are told throughout its many papers about the administrations of the Central, Super and Local Universes, as well as the major and minor sectors, constellations, systems, and planets by a vast array of celestial beings. The pattern to all these organised units contains a stepping down structure in a hierarchy that forms the general framework that allows trillions upon trillions of freewill individuals to operate throughout the cosmos without it all resulting in total chaos and mayhem.
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Another season has rolled past in our corner of the world, and here in New Zealand we are anticipating summer, with hopefully some warmer, drier weather. We are looking ahead to the New Year and have even begun discussing our next face-to-face mini conference, which we hope to hold in March. Although we maintain fortnightly Zoom meetings, the face-to-face experience is so much richer.
Things have been progressing much as normal here. Lots of New Zealanders are moving to Australia, as they always have done, in search of opportunities and a better standard of living. Lots of people from other parts of the world are moving to New Zealand, for much the same reasons. It all contributes to the growing diversity of the global population, with all the challenges that this can bring.
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I've long been intrigued by the vision of Jesus clearing the temple of the money changers. It certainly gives the impression that there are circumstances in which force can and should be used, but when, where, and how... that is the question.
I am reminded of a quote by Aristotle: “Anybody can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
We can say that Jesus was probably the one individual that could do this, but what about the rest of us? It certainly seems like there is a case for the employment of force, but how could it be justified, and how could it be expressed in a way that is in keeping with the teachings of Jesus? That's what I'd like to explore in this article.
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From the YouTube channel of Gary Tonge – used by permission
Our world is an evolutionary sphere—part of a Universe of universes. However, there are significant events in the distant past that have completely changed the evolutionary path of our world, and the repercussions of these tragic events are still being felt on our planet today.
While we have been greatly affected on this world, we are not alone, nor are we left to struggle in vain. There is a divine plan for the long-term betterment of our planet; and we can all be a part of it, if we so choose. The abridged story of our world and our history is presented in this video, with information and truths revealed in The Urantia Book. Read on to see the video.
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(Editor's Note: In this new era of AI technology, readers of The Urantia Book are often testing it (and also using it no doubt) to give summaries of various topics. Here is a sample. AI was asked to summarise what The Urantia Book says about the Will of God. The following is its answer.)
The Urantia Book emphasizes the profound benefits of doing the “will of God,” which primarily involves aligning oneself with divine purpose, living a life of love and service, and seeking spiritual growth. Below are some of the benefits as highlighted in various parts of the book:
1. Inner Peace and Joy
Doing the will of God brings profound inner peace, as it aligns the individual with the cosmic harmony of creation. This peace transcends earthly troubles and is rooted in trust in the divine plan.
“The doing of the will of God is the pathway to the supreme attainment of divine peace on earth and eternal survival in the service of joy in eternity” (The Urantia Book, 111:5.1).
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A project of the Young Readers Group of The Urantia Book
The First Global Urantia Book Reading Project launched in September 2024.
This is a communal, but independent daily reading of The Urantia Book. We will read one section per day, with weekends and some holidays off, and it will take a total of five years and eight and a half months to finish the entire book. At that time, we will celebrate a very important anniversary for our Universe, the 2000th anniversary of the ascension of Jesus and the sovereignty of Michael of Nebadon.
You can participate from anywhere in the world as we will be reading independently but together in spirit, and we will join together for monthly zoom discussions at: https://ureadthru.com/
For more information click these 2 PDF links: Origins of readthru and Contact Us
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The Arena newsletter keeps students of The Urantia Book throughout Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific in touch with Urantia related news, activities and events from our local region as well as from the global Urantia Book reader community. It also provides interesting articles written by readers on a wide range of subjects from the book which we hope may be helpful in assisting with your studies.
The Arena is published by ANZURA two to three times a year and is dedicated to the promotion of goodwill and understanding among readers of The Urantia Book. Articles and editorial contributions that relate to The Urantia Book and its teachings are welcome from readers all over the world.
If you would like to receive the Arena or submit an article, please send us an email at anzura.urantia @ gmail.com
To view current and past issues of the Arena click here.
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