PAPER 101: Section 6.
Progressive Religious Experience
P1111:5, 101:6.1
The morontia phase of revealed religion has to do with the experience of
survival, and its great urge is the attainment of spirit perfection. There
also is present the higher urge of worship, associated with an impelling call
to increased ethical service. Morontia insight entails an ever-expanding consciousness
of the Sevenfold, the Supreme, and even the Ultimate.
P1111:6, 101:6.2
Throughout all religious experience, from its earliest inception on the material
level up to the time of the attainment of full spirit status, the Adjuster
is the secret of the personal realization of the reality of the existence
of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the secrets of your faith
in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential personality
of evolving man, united to the Adjuster essence of the existential God, constitutes
the potential completion of supreme existence and is inherently the basis
for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental personality.
P1111:7, 101:6.3
Moral will embraces decisions based on reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom,
and sanctioned by religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and
evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of morontia personality
and eventually of true spirit status.
P1111:8, 101:6.4
The evolutionary type of knowledge is but the accumulation of protoplasmic
memory material; this is the most primitive form of creature consciousness.
Wisdom embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in process of
association and
recombination, and such phenomena differentiate human mind
from mere animal mind. Animals have knowledge, but only man possesses wisdom
capacity. Truth is made accessible to the
wisdom-endowed individual by the
bestowal on such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the Thought
Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.
P1112:1, 101:6.5
Christ Michael, when bestowed on Urantia, lived under the reign of evolutionary
religion up to the time of his baptism. From that moment up to and including
the event of his crucifixion he carried forward his work by the combined guidance
of evolutionary and revealed religion. From the morning of his resurrection
until his ascension he traversed the manifold phases of the morontia life
of mortal transition from the world of matter to that of spirit. After his
ascension Michael became master of the experience of Supremacy, the realization
of the Supreme; and being the one person in Nebadon possessed of unlimited
capacity to experience the reality of the Supreme, he forthwith attained to
the status of the sovereignty of supremacy in and to his local universe.
P1112:2, 101:6.6
With man, the eventual fusion and resultant oneness with the indwelling Adjuster
-- the personality synthesis of man and the essence of God -- constitute him,
in potential, a living part of the Supreme and insure for such a onetime mortal
being the eternal birthright of the endless pursuit of finality of universe
service for and with the Supreme.
P1112:3, 101:6.7
Revelation teaches mortal man that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing
adventure through space by means of the progression of time, he should begin
by the organization of knowledge into idea-decisions; next, mandate wisdom
to labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming
self-possessed ideas
into increasingly practical but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts
which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster
dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such
association in the finite mind as will constitute them the actual human complement
thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space
manifestations of Paradise truth -- universal truth. The co-ordination of
idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession
of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal admission to the ever-expanding
and increasingly spiritual realities of the morontia worlds.
P1112:4, 101:6.8
The teachings of Jesus constituted the first Urantian religion which so fully
embraced a harmonious co-ordination of knowledge, wisdom, faith, truth, and
love as completely and simultaneously to provide temporal tranquillity, intellectual
certainty, moral enlightenment, philosophic stability, ethical sensitivity,
God-consciousness, and the positive assurance of personal survival. The faith
of Jesus pointed the way to finality of human salvation, to the ultimate of
mortal universe attainment, since it provided for:
- Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit.
- Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him free.
- Salvation from spiritual blindness, the human realization of the fraternity of mortal beings and the morontian awareness of the brotherhood of all universe creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values.
- Salvation from incompleteness of self through the attainment of the spirit levels of the universe and through the eventual realization of the harmony of Havona and the perfection of Paradise.
- Salvation from self, deliverance from the limitations of self-consciousness through the attainment of the cosmic levels of the Supreme mind and by co-ordination with the attainments of all other self-conscious beings.
- Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in God-recognition and God-service.
- Salvation from the finite, the perfected oneness with Deity in and through the Supreme by which the creature attempts the transcendental discovery of the Ultimate on the postfinaliter levels of the absonite.
P1113:5, 101:6.9 Such a sevenfold salvation is the equivalent of the completeness and perfection of the realization of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith of the human experience of religion. And it can be so contained since the faith of Jesus was nourished by, and was revelatory of, even realities beyond the ultimate; the faith of Jesus approached the status of a universe absolute in so far as such is possible of manifestation in the evolving cosmos of time and space.
P1113:6, 101:6.10 Through the appropriation of the faith of Jesus, mortal man can foretaste in time the realities of eternity. Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of the Final Father, and his brothers in the flesh of mortal life can follow him along this same experience of Father discovery. They can even attain, as they are, the same satisfaction in this experience with the Father as did Jesus as he was. New potentials were actualized in the universe of Nebadon consequent upon the terminal bestowal of Michael, and one of these was the new illumination of the path of eternity that leads to the Father of all, and which can be traversed even by the mortals of material flesh and blood in the initial life on the planets of space. Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby man can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed shall be his for but the asking. In Jesus there is abundantly demonstrated both the beginnings and endings of the faith experience of humanity, even of divine humanity.