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Lately I have been gaining more appreciation for the concept of assurance and its meaning and value in context of Religion In Human Experience (Paper 100), The Real Nature of Religion (P-101), The Foundations of Religious Faith (P-102), and The Reality of Religious Experience (P-103).
Personal religious experience, when true, delivers an assurance of our being, our personal relationship with God, our safety and survival, our purpose, and our destiny. This experience begins in-mind with the ministry of the Holy Spirit by the Adjutants delivering faith assurance and with the subsequent ministry of the God Fragment/Thought Adjuster by personal revelation delivering truth assurance and with the additional ministry (on our world since Pentecost) of the Spirit of Truth by the confirmation of both faith assurance and truth assurance. In addition to personal revelation, we are advised that we are periodically blessed by epochal revelation (or revelation to the world and all people upon the world, the UB being the 5th such to our world)….the purpose of which is to add facts and truths to eliminate the errors and reduce the confusions of evolutionary religion and science and the limitations of personal revelation.
All of these sources and forms of ministry to mortals deliver “Divine Assurance” in some form or another. It is our Deity Connections and Divine Assurance that spiritualizes and spiritizes us and changes our personal motives, intentions, priorities, decisions, perspective, and develops a philosophy for living that delivers the fruit of the Spirit led life.
It is assurance that allows us to learn to feast on uncertainty and to remain faithful and joyful and trusting in the face of chaos and calamity, and to embrace the adventure of that to come which we cannot predict nor control! Assurance is a most important concept for the UB student to understand and learn to embrace.
God loves us each and blesses us each with personality, mind, free will, and endows each with the ministry of the Spirits – and all of these combine to give us the assurance of God and God’s love and our relationship to God and to one another.
Assurance is related to so many concepts and teaching in the Urantia Book. Here’s a link to the keyword search results:
https://urantia-association.org/search/ … t%5B%5D=-1
101:0.3 Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that “true light which lights every man who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling. The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.
101:1.6 Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.
101:2.4 (1106.3) There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters human survival:
101:2.5 (1106.4) 1. Human experience, personal assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by the
indwelling Thought Adjuster.101:2.6 (1106.5) 2. The revelation of truth, whether by direct personal ministry of the Spirit of Truth, by the world bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of the written word.
101:2.14 Your deepest nature — the divine Adjuster — creates within you a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.
Me here: I think assurance is the bread and water of life – that which satisfies the hunger, thirst, and yearning delivered by the Adjutants and the Thought Adjuster. We yearn for such assurance. We need God. And God responds to our yearn, our hunger, and our thirst. And when we embrace God’s response of assurance, then are we attaching our branch to the living vine to be nurtured by love and guided into truth…and this is The Real Nature of Religion…the experience of growth and personal progress in the Spirit. Religion is “the conviction faith of the personality”!
Bradly
19:5.12 And from all this, you mortals, just now taking your first step on the eternal journey, can well see that you must advance a long way before you will progress by “sight” and “material” assurance. You will long use faith and be dependent on revelation if you hope to progress quickly and safely.
There is a spectrum of reality-awareness that begins in us as young children. It begins with urges and impulses that are natural and inherent as delivered by the Holy Spirit and her Adjutants. We have the awareness of “otherness” or the feeling of God’s presence and existance. This begins the faith of our evolutionary experience and the faith assurance and confirmation of relationship – personal recognition of our dual nature!
Then comes the yearn, hunger, and thirst of the TA – a more constant feedback loop where urges and impulses are augmented and now comes actual personal/self revelation – the voice of the pilot which delivers truth to mind. This is amplified by the Son’s Spirit of Truth which confirms truth and adds the Son’s Spirit Gravity – a true universe force of response and attraction to the quantity AND the quality of our reality-response. Now faith assurance combines with truth assurance in the believer and faith child.
But as we acquire experiential wisdom over time and as we see and know the morontial life to come – now there is evidence and scientific proofs of our inner experience and faith is rewarded by empirical evidence. Only mortals experience this material death and then resurrection – the victory of faith is rewarded!! Then comes fusion!! And we are a whole new being with new levels of confidence in universe realities. Does the TA depend upon faith? No…not like we understand faith. The TA’s have a confidence that is absolute and experiential. As will we. We will progress by “sight” and “material” assurance!
In this material life and the one to come, assurance is complimented by and rewarded with the fruits of the spirit – the only proof of the source and result of faith!
34:6.9 In every mortal there exists a dual nature: the inheritance of animal tendencies and the high urge of spirit endowment. During the short life you live on Urantia, these two diverse and opposing urges can seldom be fully reconciled; they can hardly be harmonized and unified; but throughout your lifetime the combined Spirit ever ministers to assist you in subjecting the flesh more and more to the leading of the Spirit. Even though you must live your material life through, even though you cannot escape the body and its necessities, nonetheless, in purpose and ideals you are empowered increasingly to subject the animal nature to the mastery of the Spirit. There truly exists within you a conspiracy of spiritual forces, a confederation of divine powers, whose exclusive purpose is to effect your final deliverance from material bondage and finite handicaps.
34:6.10 The purpose of all this ministration is, “That you may be strengthened with power through His spirit in the inner man.” And all this represents but the preliminary steps to the final attainment of the perfection of faith and service, that experience wherein you shall be “filled with all the fullness of God,” “for all those who are led by the spirit of God are the sons of God.” *
34:6.11 The Spirit never drives, only leads. If you are a willing learner, if you want to attain spirit levels and reach divine heights, if you sincerely desire to reach the eternal goal, then the divine Spirit will gently and lovingly lead you along the pathway of sonship and spiritual progress. Every step you take must be one of willingness, intelligent and cheerful co-operation. The domination of the Spirit is never tainted with coercion nor compromised by compulsion.
34:6.12 And when such a life of spirit guidance is freely and intelligently accepted, there gradually develops within the human mind a positive consciousness of divine contact and assurance of spirit communion; sooner or later “the Spirit bears witness with your spirit (the Adjuster) that you are a child of God.” Already has your own Thought Adjuster told you of your kinship to God so that the record testifies that the Spirit bears witness “with your spirit,” not to your spirit.
34:6.13 The consciousness of the spirit domination of a human life is presently attended by an increasing exhibition of the characteristics of the Spirit in the life reactions of such a spirit-led mortal, “for the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.” Such spirit-guided and divinely illuminated mortals, while they yet tread the lowly paths of toil and in human faithfulness perform the duties of their earthly assignments, have already begun to discern the lights of eternal life as they glimmer on the faraway shores of another world; already have they begun to comprehend the reality of that inspiring and comforting truth, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” And throughout every trial and in the presence of every hardship, spirit-born souls are sustained by that hope which transcends all fear because the love of God is shed abroad in all hearts by the presence of the divine Spirit.
Assurance is important to all creatures – high and low – and operates on many levels of reality. From the mortal perspective on a primitive world, it can be very difficult to “see” and “know” that everything will work out for the better and that Divine Providence and God’s will prevails. But that is the very assurance even mortals might attain with sufficient faith and the vision that comes from the believer’s perspective. Even in the throes of mortal suffering and the consequences of evil and sin, still can the believer have assurance of our own and our world’s destiny!
48:4.7 [Part II]
3. Prophetic joy. It will perhaps be difficult for mortals to envisage this phase of humor, but we do get a peculiar satisfaction out of the assurance “that all things work together for good” — for spirits and morontians as well as for mortals. This aspect of celestial humor grows out of our faith in the loving overcare of our superiors and in the divine stability of our Supreme Directors. We are told that the TA creates the yearn within, the hunger and the thirst. These are real yearnings which affect mind. Then the TA and Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Truth of the Creator Son (Jesus) feed this hunger and quench this thirst. This need and fulfillment cycle is very real. It is a direct cause and effect activated within the spirit nature of our normal dual nature – the material and the spirit natures. This hunger and thirst is no less active, effective, and real than is the physical/material body’s hunger and thirst!!
Faith and faith assurance is the work of the Holy Spirit (Mother’s Spirit). Revelatory truth and truth assurance comes from both the God Fragment (TA) and the Son’s Spirit (Spirit of Truth. All 3 of these sources of food for the soul and the quenching of the thirst for righteousness also provide a gravity circuit with a very real grip upon Morontia Mind (soul), Personality, and Spirit. As we grow in the Circles of Progress and Spiritization, the mass of soul grows and the gravity grip and effect (the pull of the force of gravity upon the mass of soul and spirit and personality) also grows.
All of this happens without any need for conscious or intellectual understanding. For me, understanding the sources, mechanisms, certainties, forces, sources, causes, and effects of faith increases and enhances that “experiential certainty” pethuel describes. There is a very real conspiracy at work within us. It is not one which diminishes or overrides free will by trickery or coercion or brutality…but it is very real and powerful. We are engineered by the Life Carriers and Adjutants and wired by Deity to respond to this grand conspiracy of Deity and the universe of universes by plan, design, purpose, origin, and destiny to grow from tadpoles to pure spirits. What we discuss here is that interface between the animal/material being and the spirit nature we are endowed with.
0:12.13 We are fully cognizant of the difficulties of our assignment; we recognize the impossibility of fully translating the language of the concepts of divinity and eternity into the symbols of the language of the finite concepts of the mortal mind. But we know that there dwells within the human mind a fragment of God, and that there sojourns with the human soul the Spirit of Truth; and we further know that these spirit forces conspire to enable material man to grasp the reality of spiritual values and to comprehend the philosophy of universe meanings. But even more certainly we know that these spirits of the Divine Presence are able to assist man in the spiritual appropriation of all truth contributory to the enhancement of the ever-progressing reality of personal religious experience—God-consciousness.
Me here: We are taught that faith is a result of our discernment of the evolutionary urges of the Adjutants and the yearn provided by the TA and our response to that “ear” which hears and that mind and soul which responds. This becomes a feedback loop of confirmations and assurances as the hunger is felt and fed and the thirst is quenched….over and over and over again. This “experience” of the inner life grows our faith and feeds our soul which is then gripped by gravitational forces which grow in strength and force drawing us toward our very source in Paradise! Jesus said every choice moves us closer to God or further away…so faith is not something found and fully engaged. As soul grows experientially, so does faith grow, and so does the fruits of the Spirit grow, and so does the grip of the gravity circuits…all of which combine to bring absolute faith and confidence no matter the uncertainties faced in the adventures of living!!
103:0.1 (1129.1) ALL of man’s truly religious reactions are sponsored by the early ministry of the adjutant of worship and are censored by the adjutant of wisdom. Man’s first supermind endowment is that of personality encircuitment in the Holy Spirit of the Universe Creative Spirit; and long before either the bestowals of the divine Sons or the universal bestowal of the Adjusters, this influence functions to enlarge man’s viewpoint of ethics, religion, and spirituality. Subsequent to the bestowals of the Paradise Sons the liberated Spirit of Truth makes mighty contributions to the enlargement of the human capacity to perceive religious truths. As evolution advances on an inhabited world, the Thought Adjusters increasingly participate in the development of the higher types of human religious insight. The Thought Adjuster is the cosmic window through which the finite creature may faith-glimpse the certainties and divinities of limitless Deity, the Universal Father.
103:0.2 (1129.2) The religious tendencies of the human races are innate; they are universally manifested and have an apparently natural origin; primitive religions are always evolutionary in their genesis. As natural religious experience continues to progress, periodic revelations of truth punctuate the otherwise slow-moving course of planetary evolution.
103:9.11 (1142.2) Faith leads to knowing God, not merely to a mystical feeling of the divine presence. Faith must not be overmuch influenced by its emotional consequences. True religion is an experience of believing and knowing as well as a satisfaction of feeling.
103:9.12 (1142.3) There is a reality in religious experience that is proportional to the spiritual content, and such a reality is transcendent to reason, science, philosophy, wisdom, and all other human achievements. The convictions of such an experience are unassailable; the logic of religious living is incontrovertible; the certainty of such knowledge is superhuman; the satisfactions are superbly divine, the courage indomitable, the devotions unquestioning, the loyalties supreme, and the destinies final—eternal, ultimate, and universal.
In our interactions with others do we confirm universe reality and our own faithful assurance of this friendly universe and God’s profound and paternal love and mercy and patience and the evolutionary progress of our world and the safety of all creation and creatures in the universe? Do we share faithful assurance that is proven and demonstrated only by the sharing of the Divine Fruits of the Spirit – the only true evidence of our own religious experience and faith?
How assured do we feel? What certainties do we have and feel related to God’s love? Or are our certainties related to beliefs and knowledge which we think we should impose upon others who are lesser in understanding than us?
Too often do some presume that others need some form of conversion and salvation – when actually what is so often needed most is simply affirmation, reassurance, empathy, support, comfort, and the sharing of Spirit fruit. I think it is this need and perspective that Jesus presented in the parable of the beam in the eye and the Good Samaritan and the talents and the mill stone and his example of finding that truth which is held in common and adding to the spiritual experience of others rather than to attempt to change or remove something and the imperative to never diminish the faith of another in our efforts to minister, preach, or evangelize to others.
Love is never a criticism or a threat or an accusation or blame…and never will be.
So…are we confirmers and affirmers? For that is the pattern of reality we should emulate and aspire to.
I think assurance has a particular property about it for us to consider….the more of it we receive the more assured do we become. To attain sublime peace and confidence in our status as faith children is not merely a one time event by any singular act of insight or faith or rebirth. The fruits of the Spirit come forth by the branch’s attachment to the vine…it’s current attachment and its health and vitality. The strength of that branch’s attachment and the girth and health of that branch determines the flow of Divine truth, beauty, and goodness that brings forth fruits and nourishes that fruit.
Wisdom comes over time and by experience in the Spirit. So does fruit. So does assurance. Certainly do we feel and respond to such assurance upon every taste but the more we taste it the more nourishment we get and the stronger does that bond and that response become. There are those minds and souls which, over time, become self centered and twisted by the mind poisons which distract us from the spiritization of mind and the growth of soul and this attachment to the vine of love and life. And disconnect us from the faith and truth assurance that is our heritage and our normal situation as children of God. We are designed, built, and wired for our connection to the Spirit and this cycle of spiritual nourishment – urge/yearn, response, assurance, yearn, response, assurance, fruit, yearn, response, assurance….over and over it happens!
Thus the value of daily prayer and quiet time with the Lord as we commune and seek that presence and the assurance that delivers every day to us!
One of the most important features of the UB as a Revelation to me is that it is so re-assuring!! Those who read the UB and retain their personal gloomy outlooks and even can still express suspicions and paranoias about this friendly universe are completely defiant of this wondrous gift whose pages are filled front to back with glorious assurances of our source, destiny, and the love of our paternal Creator and rulers in this friendly universe!!
5:1.10 (64.1) The Father is not in spiritual hiding, but so many of his creatures have hidden themselves away in the mists of their own willful decisions and for the time being have separated themselves from the communion of his spirit and the spirit of his Son by the choosing of their own perverse ways and by the indulgence of the self-assertiveness of their intolerant minds and unspiritual natures.
5:5.13 Eternal survival of personality is wholly dependent on the choosing of the mortal mind, whose decisions determine the survival potential of the immortal soul. When the mind believes God and the soul knows God, and when, with the fostering Adjuster, they all desire God, then is survival assured. Limitations of intellect, curtailment of education, deprivation of culture, impoverishment of social status, even inferiority of the human standards of morality resulting from the unfortunate lack of educational, cultural, and social advantages, cannot invalidate the presence of the divine spirit in such unfortunate and humanly handicapped but believing individuals. The indwelling of the Mystery Monitor constitutes the inception and insures the possibility of the potential of growth and survival of the immortal soul.
39:4.14 (435.7) The keys of the kingdom of heaven are: sincerity, more sincerity, and more sincerity. All men have these keys. Men use them—advance in spirit status—by decisions, by more decisions, and by more decisions. The highest moral choice is the choice of the highest possible value, and always—in any sphere, in all of them—this is to choose to do the will of God. If man thus chooses, he is great, though he be the humblest citizen of Jerusem or even the least of mortals on Urantia.
111:1.3 (1216.4) Material mind is the arena in which human personalities live, are self-conscious, make decisions, choose God or forsake him, eternalize or destroy themselves.
111:1.4 (1216.5) Material evolution has provided you a life machine, your body; the Father himself has endowed you with the purest spirit reality known in the universe, your Thought Adjuster. But into your hands, subject to your own decisions, has been given mind, and it is by mind that you live or die. It is within this mind and with this mind that you make those moral decisions which enable you to achieve Adjusterlikeness, and that is Godlikeness.
130:2.9 (1431.4) The next day Ganid talked all this over with his father, and it was in answer to Gonod’s question that Jesus explained that “human wills which are fully occupied with passing only upon temporal decisions having to do with the material problems of animal existence are doomed to perish in time. Those who make wholehearted moral decisions and unqualified spiritual choices are thus progressively identified with the indwelling and divine spirit, and thereby are they increasingly transformed into the values of eternal survival—unending progression of divine service.”
The Revelation also provides endless assurances of social evolution and planetary destiny. How can we enjoy total personal assurance in a material world which appears chaotic and filled with so many forms of temporal risks and suffering? A very relevant question and one which the UB offers us much to consider!
The first related question might be why do people suffer? Why does God allow suffering? We certainly know, here at TB, that God does not cause suffering…but certainly does God allow it. And then we might ask if there is a meaning, value, and purpose to suffering? The UB is clear and redundant that free will, immaturity, evolution, and self importance are all causes of suffering…causes which God will not interfere with except for certain time, proximity, and radial effect-limits on the repercussions of such errors, evils, and sins. And in an evolutionary universe where experiential wisdom is the prize, then certainly is there value and purpose to suffering. The hammer and anvil shape and form and transform the parts into the perfecting causes of Divine effects in the universes of time and space and with the Deity of the Supreme as well! In fact, we are told the greatest affliction we can suffer is no afflictions at all!! Consider that fact and truth.
“Suffering”:
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Suffering+&x=6&y=14
But remember this is all about evolutionary progress, both personal and social…or planetary. The UB says that as go the parts so goes the whole! Our planet’s progress depends on the work of the Most Highs and angels and Midwayers but also on the spiritualization of each person on the planet. But people are here for such a short time. How does a world progress? Such as over the past 1 million years? And the next million years? It’s all in the Urantia Papers!! Interested?
Start by reading Paper 52 – Planetary Mortal Epochs. Every planet, once considered populated by mortals and declared as such, has an inevitable destiny!! Fearmongering doubters and paranoids obviously have not read or do not believe the reality presented in this one Paper or the entirity of the UB. For the detailed history of our own world which admittedly does have a very unique evolutionary path, please read Papers 63-93 for the record of our own progress from savagery and barbarity to today’s environment of semi-savagery and semi-barbarity!! Naturally, in some parts of the world different elements and examples of greater enlightenment can be found…the beacons or flickering lights of progress still to come for the rest of us. As the world progresses, the whole does contribute to the progress of the each as well.
And certain profoundly influential and differential and timely influences are brought to bear upon a world…such as the bestowal of the Sons of God who deliver the Spirit of Truth and unleash the flood of God Fragments upon a world as occured here some 2000 years ago! But there are many such Divine and Deity sourced influences upon this and all worlds to assure the inevitability of attaining Light and Life per Paper 52’s teachings.
One of the more fascinating teachings about the social-perspective in the UB is that the enlightened, informed, and spiritual mind begins to see the world and today and every relationship and decision with a new time unit lens of perspective. Actually the more spiritized the mind the more the world changes in our perspective of it. The world does not change materially but our view of the world SHOULD evolve and change and become more positive and forgiving and hopeful and trusting and ASSURED as to its OBVIOUS evolutionary progress and its trajectory and its vector or target.
118:1.3 There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.
118:1.4 Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
118:1.5 In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.
118:1.6 Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.
118:1.7 To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.
118:1.8 The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
Me here: Those who are ruled by doom and gloom and anxiety and doubt and parnoia are spiritually immature and suffer from blindness and ignorance and prejudice (those last two being the primary obstacles to spiritual progress by the way).
So social assurance comes only by trust in God and by personal spiritual assurance delivered by faith and truth. The one follows the other. To trust God is not naive. To have confidence in God’s purpose, plan, and power is not naive either. May doubters and fearmongers find God within and grow in assurance!!
FEAR NOT !!
So… it is my conclusion/opinion that social assurance is primarily derived from a perspective and philosophy built on faith, truth, and religious experience which delivers a sublime peace as well as the fruits of the Spirit. The additional assurance of knowledge by epochal revelation which corrects and clarifies our view of universe reality should certainly alleviate both personal and social anxieties.
It is the growing sense of personal assurance that delivers social assurances. Jesus spent his entire ministry spreading assurance and sublime confidence in good cheer.
Those who feel fear for self or the planet lack confidence in God’s friendly universe and their own place in it. “Anxiety must be abandoned” we are taught for our own progress and to be of any real help to our family, community, and world. Otherwise we merely add fear to the problem of fear and do not help or serve others.
The very premise and promise of the URANTIA Book IS ASSURANCE!!!
A little reassurance anyone??
159:3.10 You shall not portray your teacher as a man of sorrows. Future generations shall know also the radiance of our joy, the buoyance of our good will, and the inspiration of our good humor. We proclaim a message of good news which is infectious in its transforming power. Our religion is throbbing with new life and new meanings. Those who accept this teaching are filled with joy and in their hearts are constrained to rejoice evermore. Increasing happiness is always the experience of all who are certain about God.
159:3.11 Teach all believers to avoid leaning upon the insecure props of false sympathy. You cannot develop strong characters out of the indulgence of self-pity; honestly endeavor to avoid the deceptive influence of mere fellowship in misery. Extend sympathy to the brave and courageous while you withhold overmuch pity from those cowardly souls who only halfheartedly stand up before the trials of living. Offer not consolation to those who lie down before their troubles without a struggle. Sympathize not with your fellows merely that they may sympathize with you in return.159:3.12 When my children once become self-conscious of the assurance of the divine presence, such a faith will expand the mind, ennoble the soul, reinforce the personality, augment the happiness, deepen the spirit perception, and enhance the power to love and be loved.
159:3.13 Teach all believers that those who enter the kingdom are not thereby rendered immune to the accidents of time or to the ordinary catastrophes of nature. Believing the gospel will not prevent getting into trouble, but it will insure that you shall be unafraid when trouble does overtake you. If you dare to believe in me and wholeheartedly proceed to follow after me, you shall most certainly by so doing enter upon the sure pathway to trouble. I do not promise to deliver you from the waters of adversity, but I do promise to go with you through all of them.
181:1.9 Jesus was determined, persistent, and thoroughly devoted to the accomplishment of his mission, but he was not an unfeeling and calloused stoic; he ever sought for the cheerful aspects of his life experiences, but he was not a blind and self-deceived optimist. The Master knew all that was to befall him, and he was unafraid. After he had bestowed this peace upon each of his followers, he could consistently say, “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
181:1.10 The peace of Jesus is, then, the peace and assurance of a son who fully believes that his career for time and eternity is safely and wholly in the care and keeping of an all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful spirit Father. And this is, indeed, a peace which passes the understanding of mortal mind, but which can be enjoyed to the full by the believing human heart.
195:5.8 Religion is designed to find those values in the universe which call forth faith, trust, and assurance; religion culminates in worship. Religion discovers for the soul those supreme values which are in contrast with the relative values discovered by the mind. Such superhuman insight can be had only through genuine religious experience.
196:0.12 The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child’s trust. His faith was so absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in his religious experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the faith of the child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness. It is not strange that he once said, “Except you become as a little child, you shall not enter the kingdom.” Notwithstanding that Jesus’ faith was childlike, it was in no sense childish.
196:0.13 Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. The Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme requirement, “Follow me.”
Me here: THIS is the message of hope, trust, faith, peace, and assurance in the UB and by the words of the Master!!
This topic offers a wide variety of concepts and text which presents the many facets of assurance and the power that inner assurance provides to the pilgrims of time. We mortal tadpoles striving on the material worlds of our birth to unify and harmonize our dual natures and perspective of reality are given assurance from our very earliest days as mere children by our faith relationship and experience with the adjutants and Holy Spirit.
The impulses and urges innate in our very nature and this basic relationship with God nourishes the dependence upon God we have for happiness and fulfillment – spirit nature nourishment. No different from suckling milk at Mother’s breast for the nurture of the biologic systems is the nourishing of the spirit. Assurance is part of the nutritional content, like vitamins or protein and other elements of nutrition, assurance delivers a very specific and critical functionality and response.
The bread of life and the living waters presented by Jesus are a metaphor perhaps but not really. I consider them more of a comparison to and parallel to that which nourishes the mortal being. We are dual natured and both natures have systems which require nourishment and which respond to nourishment by growth and progressive transformation. These dual natures provide many such parallels of similarity in patterns which reflect and reveal universe realities. As we grow, the nature and source of nourishment also progresses to feed that which is more mature and more demanding and more able to digest and to actualize into nourishment in more complex ways.
Likewise do poisons affect both our material and our spiritual natures and beings. We are given fair warning about mind poisons which cause blindness, stagnation, disability, pain, lack of growth, unhappiness, and can cause death if ingested sufficiently. These mind poisons are not unknown even before and outside of the Revelation. Most all are close cousins to fear and anxiety. Assurance is the antidote to these poisons and which, over time and with sufficient faith and spiritization, should result in being immune to both fear and anxiety. (Fear being specific to cause, incident, circumstance, and situation. Anxiety being more generalized as a condition or state of mind without need for any specific cause, incident, circumstance, or situration.)
This is the importance of assurance to the mortal tadpoles of time. For fear and anxiety are natural, evolutionary traits which are very beneficial and critical to the mortals of the earlier epochs for their very survival and even later deliver important survival benefits which only quick reactions and instincts can deliver. But the more civilized humanity becomes, the more fears and anxieties become unreasoned and dibilitating to personal and social progress. We become slaves to fear and anxiety. And the worry which comes thereby is a poison. And there is only one true antidote – assurance within. Peace of mind. Contentment. Confidence in ultimate outcomes. There is only one source of this one true antidote…God within.
Now I would quibble a bit with the Revelation. It says there is only one proof of spiritization and spiritual growth and that is the fruits of the Spirit. I would not quibble with this if that also likewise means that there is a lack of fear and anxiety. They should come as a package I think. Happiness and confidence, hand in hand. So if we seek evidence of the Spirit within in another….how much happiness and peace and contentment is there and how little anxiety and fear? We may not pretend either or any of these attributes and traits of spiritization.
Let us consider what the Master offers us on the matter:
181:1.8 (1954.5) A certain amount of both stoicism and optimism are serviceable in living a life on earth, but neither has aught to do with that superb peace which the Son of God bestows upon his brethren in the flesh. The peace which Michael gives his children on earth is that very peace which filled his own soul when he himself lived the mortal life in the flesh and on this very world. The peace of Jesus is the joy and satisfaction of a God-knowing individual who has achieved the triumph of learning fully how to do the will of God while living the mortal life in the flesh. The peace of Jesus’ mind was founded on an absolute human faith in the actuality of the divine Father’s wise and sympathetic overcare. Jesus had trouble on earth, he has even been falsely called the “man of sorrows,” but in and through all of these experiences he enjoyed the comfort of that confidence which ever empowered him to proceed with his life purpose in the full assurance that he was achieving the Father’s will.
181:1.9 (1954.6) Jesus was determined, persistent, and thoroughly devoted to the accomplishment of his mission, but he was not an unfeeling and calloused stoic; he ever sought for the cheerful aspects of his life experiences, but he was not a blind and self-deceived optimist. The Master knew all that was to befall him, and he was unafraid. After he had bestowed this peace upon each of his followers, he could consistently say, “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
181:1.10 (1955.1) The peace of Jesus is, then, the peace and assurance of a son who fully believes that his career for time and eternity is safely and wholly in the care and keeping of an all-wise, all-loving, and all-powerful spirit Father. And this is, indeed, a peace which passes the understanding of mortal mind, but which can be enjoyed to the full by the believing human heart.
100:2.7 (1096.4) Jesus portrayed the profound surety of the God-knowing mortal when he said: “To a God-knowing kingdom believer, what does it matter if all things earthly crash?” Temporal securities are vulnerable, but spiritual sureties are impregnable. When the flood tides of human adversity, selfishness, cruelty, hate, malice, and jealousy beat about the mortal soul, you may rest in the assurance that there is one inner bastion, the citadel of the spirit, which is absolutely unassailable; at least this is true of every human being who has dedicated the keeping of his soul to the indwelling spirit of the eternal God.
100:2.8 (1096.5) After such spiritual attainment, whether secured by gradual growth or specific crisis, there occurs a new orientation of personality as well as the development of a new standard of values. Such spirit-born individuals are so remotivated in life that they can calmly stand by while their fondest ambitions perish and their keenest hopes crash; they positively know that such catastrophes are but the redirecting cataclysms which wreck one’s temporal creations preliminary to the rearing of the more noble and enduring realities of a new and more sublime level of universe attainment.
180:5.8 (1950.3) But the highest realization and the truest interpretation of the golden rule consists in the consciousness of the spirit of the truth of the enduring and living reality of such a divine declaration. The true cosmic meaning of this rule of universal relationship is revealed only in its spiritual realization, in the interpretation of the law of conduct by the spirit of the Son to the spirit of the Father that indwells the soul of mortal man. And when such spirit-led mortals realize the true meaning of this golden rule, they are filled to overflowing with the assurance of citizenship in a friendly universe, and their ideals of spirit reality are satisfied only when they love their fellows as Jesus loved us all, and that is the reality of the realization of the love of God.
Assurance comes in many forms in our material life. We have the assurance that comes from the pattern or experience of reliability…that which has dependably worked in the past gives us assurance for the future…the reliability and dependability of gravity or leverage or balance like that gained on a bicycle for example or the behavior pattern of a parent or spouse gives us assurance in similar situations to come. We sign performance contracts and leases for assurance for future outcomes regarding many forms of material support for our assurance. We save money and reduce debt to gain assurance. Assurance delivers a sense of comfort and predictable outcomes in life. It helps overcome, off set, balance, or accept certain risk forms and amounts in life because we are assured that we can survive, manage, compensate for, and survive certain risks to our outcomes and our choices…..assurance addresses the uncertainties in life by adding some certainty to the uncertain in order to reduce anxieties and the fear of future outcomes in life.The words assure, assured, assuring, and assurance are very interesting to consider by definition and by synonym.
Assurance of the spirit goes even further and so much further than any form of material assurances. Assurance removes doubt and is a critical element to faith itself. There can be no faith without assurance. One feeds and upholds the other. The more faith the more assurance, the more assurance the more faith. This experience is the very foundation of personal religious experience. As an analogy, let us consider the ability for the mother (especially) to give assurance to the baby. Babies are calmed by the very presence of their mother. And by their touch and voice and their own calmness and sense of strength and the safety babies feel in their hands and arms, always soothing, touching, engaging, interacting, speaking, laughing with joy – it is the affection connection – it is love. It is a love and affection shared by and between two persons that deliver assurance to the child.
We are told that God is love. That God’s very nature is affectionate and loving with every one of his/her children. Read Paper 2, Section 5.
Assurance is a function and result of our connection to God, it is a result of relationship with God, it derives from the love of God and by our love for God. This relationship begins within us as children. It is the religious experience delivered by the Holy Spirit and the higher Adjutant mind spirits which respond to the impulses and urges and hungers and thirsts of the Spirit within each of us. Every response delivers a growing assurance until suddenly one day we receive our very own fragment of God and begin a very personal relationship of growing trust and assurance of our source and our destiny. Indeed, “…revelation is the assurance of personality survival.”It is love that delivers assurance and the experience and sharing of God’s love with God and with others that delivers confidence and joy in the face of all uncertainties. Which is why our religious experience will eventually deliver us to the time when we will feast upon uncertainty with absolute confidence in outcomes and a sublime peace of assurance that only love can manifest. All love comes from God. All assurance comes from God’s love for us.
26:5.3 (291.3) That, then, is the primary or elementary course which confronts the faith-tested and much-traveled pilgrims of space. But long before reaching Havona, these ascendant children of time have learned to feast upon uncertainty, to fatten upon disappointment, to enthuse over apparent defeat, to invigorate in the presence of difficulties, to exhibit indomitable courage in the face of immensity, and to exercise unconquerable faith when confronted with the challenge of the inexplicable. Long since, the battle cry of these pilgrims became: “In liaison with God, nothing—absolutely nothing—is impossible.”
102:3.12 The pursuit of knowledge constitutes science; the search for wisdom is philosophy; the love for God is religion; the hunger for truth is a revelation. But it is the indwelling Thought Adjuster that attaches the feeling of reality to man’s spiritual insight into the cosmos.
102:6.3 (1124.5) The religionist of philosophic attainment has faith in a personal God of personal salvation, something more than a reality, a value, a level of achievement, an exalted process, a transmutation, the ultimate of time-space, an idealization, the personalization of energy, the entity of gravity, a human projection, the idealization of self, nature’s upthrust, the inclination to goodness, the forward impulse of evolution, or a sublime hypothesis. The religionist has faith in a God of love. Love is the essence of religion and the wellspring of superior civilization.
102:6.4 (1124.6) Faith transforms the philosophic God of probability into the saving God of certainty in the personal religious experience. Skepticism may challenge the theories of theology, but confidence in the dependability of personal experience affirms the truth of that belief which has grown into faith.
16:6.8 (192.4) 3. Worship—the spiritual domain of the reality of religious experience, the personal realization of divine fellowship, the recognition of spirit values, the assurance of eternal survival, the ascent from the status of servants of God to the joy and liberty of the sons of God. This is the highest insight of the cosmic mind, the reverential and worshipful form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:9.1 (195.7) The cosmic-mind-endowed, Adjuster-indwelt, personal creature possesses innate recognition-realization of energy reality, mind reality, and spirit reality. The will creature is thus equipped to discern the fact, the law, and the love of God. Aside from these three inalienables of human consciousness, all human experience is really subjective except that intuitive realization of validity attaches to the unification of these three universe reality responses of cosmic recognition.
16:9.2 The God-discerning mortal is able to sense the unification value of these three cosmic qualities in the evolution of the surviving soul, man’s supreme undertaking in the physical tabernacle where the moral mind collaborates with the indwelling divine spirit to dualize the immortal soul. From its earliest inception the soul is real; it has cosmic survival qualities.
12:7.8 (138.3) The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man present the paradox of the part and the whole on the level of personality. God loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. Yet God thus loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons, and the universality of his love brings into being a relationship of the whole, the universal brotherhood.
12:7.9 (138.4) The love of the Father absolutely individualizes each personality as a unique child of the Universal Father, a child without duplicate in infinity, a will creature irreplaceable in all eternity. The Father’s love glorifies each child of God, illuminating each member of the celestial family, sharply silhouetting the unique nature of each personal being against the impersonal levels that lie outside the fraternal circuit of the Father of all. The love of God strikingly portrays the transcendent value of each will creature, unmistakably reveals the high value which the Universal Father has placed upon each and every one of his children from the highest creator personality of Paradise status to the lowest personality of will dignity among the savage tribes of men in the dawn of the human species on some evolutionary world of time and space.
12:7.10 (138.5) This very love of God for the individual brings into being the divine family of all individuals, the universal brotherhood of the freewill children of the Paradise Father. And this brotherhood, being universal, is a relationship of the whole. Brotherhood, when universal, discloses not the each relationship, but the all relationship. Brotherhood is a reality of the total and therefore discloses qualities of the whole in contradistinction to qualities of the part.
Let us be assured!! We are family!!
Our assurance is a function of love I believe…we feel God’s embrace and respond to all the urges and impulses we are designed and created with when we and as we feel this presence within and the affection of God’s presence within. We become encircuited if you will or plugged into the circuitry of reality and the Divine affection.
This causes the spiritual and religious experience of evolutionary faith and truth revelation. Faith brings assurance which is a form of trust…we begin to trust that our spirit nature is the higher reality and that our spirit is safe and secure. This delivers assurance. What does assurance deliver? Serenity, tranquility, a peace of mind in the midst of material stress, uncertainty, suffering, and even chaos. These effects are a form of salvation or release from so many normal material effects in life!
101:6.8 (1112.4) 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:
101:6.9 (1112.5) 1. Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit.
101:6.10 (1112.6) 2. Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him free.
101:6.11 (1112.7) 3. 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.
101:6.12 (1113.1) 4. 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.
101:6.13 (1113.2) 5. 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.
101:6.14 (1113.3) 6. Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in God-recognition and God-service.
101:6.15 (1113.4) 7. 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.
So…the greatest assurance does not come by or to mind. It is a feeling, a knowing, which does not require an understanding and can never be truly described or articulated. It is much like feeling connected to a current or energy flow that passes through us more than is simply received by us.
Love is such a current. It is received as it is given…in equal measure. A pint cannot hold a quart. That is it cannot hold a quart all at once. But an endless ocean will fit into a pint if the pint gives out its pint over and over, endlessly pouring forth that which is poured in. If the pint gives out its contents it can hold an unlimited quantity!!
God is love. Feeling God’s love is the greatest assurance of all.
“Mortal man cannot possibly know the infinitude of the heavenly Father. Finite mind cannot think through such an absolute truth or fact. But this same finite human being can actually feel—literally experience—the full and undiminished impact of such an infinite Father’s LOVE. Such a love can be truly experienced, albeit while quality of experience is unlimited, quantity of such an experience is strictly limited by the human capacity for spiritual receptivity and by the associated capacity to love the Father in return.” (50.4) 3:4.6
“In God the Father freewill performances are not ruled by power, nor are they guided by intellect alone; the divine personality is defined as consisting in spirit and manifesting himself to the universes as love. Therefore, in all his personal relations with the creature personalities of the universes, the First Source and Center is always and consistently a loving Father. God is a Father in the highest sense of the term. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that tender nature finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved.” (59.2) 4:4.6
Me here: Have you ever stood in slow meandering river? And have you then been swept away by a torrent of current in another? There is always current flowing in every river. There is always an upstream and down. I think early in our spiritualization, the gravity circuits, especially the spirit circuit, are slow, still enough to not feel much current or energy, pushing us toward Paradise. But like material gravity increases its effect and pull on larger and more massive forms (quantity), so does spirit gravity increase its pull and effect upon those souls which grow and progress in the spirit. There is both a quantity and especially a quality to our Circle Progress that adds weight and dimension to soul – more mass for the greater effect of and response to spirit gravity.
Assurance lies within the feeling of this power and energy and inexplicable force delivering us downstream to the inevitability of Paradise. So, it is the giving of love that delivers the growth of soul and it is the growth of soul that increasingly becomes aware of, assured of, and effected by the gravity circuit of the Spirit.
7:1.3 (82.2) Spirit realities respond to the drawing power of the center of spiritual gravity in accordance with their qualitative value, their actual degree of spirit nature. Spirit substance (quality) is just as responsive to spirit gravity as the organized energy of physical matter (quantity) is responsive to physical gravity. Spiritual values and spirit forces are real. From the viewpoint of personality, spirit is the soul of creation; matter is the shadowy physical body.
7:1.4 (82.3) The reactions and fluctuations of spirit gravity are ever true to the content of spiritual values, the qualitative spiritual status of an individual or a world. This drawing power is instantly responsive to the inter- and intraspirit values of any universe situation or planetary condition. Every time a spiritual reality actualizes in the universes, this change necessitates the immediate and instantaneous readjustment of spirit gravity. Such a new spirit is actually a part of the Second Source and Center; and just as certainly as mortal man becomes a spiritized being, he will attain the spiritual Son, the center and source of spirit gravity.
7:1.8 (82.7) All reactions of the spirit-gravity circuit of the grand universe are predictable. We recognize all actions and reactions of the omnipresent spirit of the Eternal Son and find them to be dependable. In accordance with well-known laws, we can and do measure spiritual gravity just as man attempts to compute the workings of finite physical gravity. There is an unvarying response of the Son’s spirit to all spirit things, beings, and persons, and this response is always in accordance with the degree of actuality (the qualitative degree of reality) of all such spiritual values.
The UB is certainly clear that assurance grows according to our faith and our maturity and our wisdom and also by our knowledge of reality. On that last point….this is one of the most important elements of epochal revelation. Whether it is a personal interaction with the Prince’s staff and Dalamatia or with people of the Garden of Eden or with Mel’s missionaries or seeing Jesus preach and teach, or reading the Papers….or whether it is learning of those teachings about the reality of the universe of universes and our source and our destiny by traditions and theologies and the mythologies of our history which originate in truth and fact….epochal revelation is a gift of knowledge meant to expand our thinking and our beliefs and our hopes and our ideals.
Epochal Revelation delivers assurance of God and God’s nature and mortal standing and destiny and connection to our Source and Destiny. Thusly have the Garden and the Jesusonian teachings and the Urantia Papers been so meaningful and valuable to me personally, but also and perhaps more importantly have they been so meaningful and valuable to the entire world. Such knowledge delivers comprehension and hope and assurance of our purpose for being alive and the promise of life eternal!! But certainly such knowledge might merely be fiction that only fools embrace out of desperate hope and a need to believe in something more than we can witness and understand. Perhaps so. Except….
There are also the ministries of faith and truth within delivered by Deity directly and personally!!! We do not receive assurance merely by oral traditions and mythologies and doctrines that require simple belief by a gullible and hopeful mind. No. Assurance is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional and multi-sourced and becomes this profoundly effective feedback loop that grows in volume and effect whose effect becomes cause and whose cause delivers effects. And this truth is a universal pattern of reality. The more faith we have the more faith we get and the more wisdom we have the more wisdom we gain. Mass creates momentum in each of the gravity circuits. The more spiritized we become the more we are responsive to reality itself!!
16:6.4 (191.7) There exists in all personality associations of the cosmic mind a quality which might be denominated the “reality response.” It is this universal cosmic endowment of will creatures which saves them from becoming helpless victims of the implied a priori assumptions of science, philosophy, and religion. This reality sensitivity of the cosmic mind responds to certain phases of reality just as energy-material responds to gravity. It would be still more correct to say that these supermaterial realities so respond to the mind of the cosmos.
16:6.5 (192.1) The cosmic mind unfailingly responds (recognizes response) on three levels of universe reality. These responses are self-evident to clear-reasoning and deep-thinking minds. These levels of reality are:
16:6.6 (192.2) 1. Causation—the reality domain of the physical senses, the scientific realms of logical uniformity, the differentiation of the factual and the nonfactual, reflective conclusions based on cosmic response. This is the mathematical form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:6.7 (192.3) 2. Duty—the reality domain of morals in the philosophic realm, the arena of reason, the recognition of relative right and wrong. This is the judicial form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:6.8 (192.4) 3. Worship—the spiritual domain of the reality of religious experience, the personal realization of divine fellowship, the recognition of spirit values, the assurance of eternal survival, the ascent from the status of servants of God to the joy and liberty of the sons of God. This is the highest insight of the cosmic mind, the reverential and worshipful form of the cosmic discrimination.
16:6.9 (192.5) These scientific, moral, and spiritual insights, these cosmic responses, are innate in the cosmic mind, which endows all will creatures. The experience of living never fails to develop these three cosmic intuitions; they are constitutive in the self-consciousness of reflective thinking. But it is sad to record that so few persons on Urantia take delight in cultivating these qualities of courageous and independent cosmic thinking.
16:6.10 (192.6) In the local universe mind bestowals, these three insights of the cosmic mind constitute the a priori assumptions which make it possible for man to function as a rational and self-conscious personality in the realms of science, philosophy, and religion. Stated otherwise, the recognition of the reality of these three manifestations of the Infinite is by a cosmic technique of self-revelation. Matter-energy is recognized by the mathematical logic of the senses; mind-reason intuitively knows its moral duty; spirit-faith (worship) is the religion of the reality of spiritual experience. These three basic factors in reflective thinking may be unified and co-ordinated in personality development, or they may become disproportionate and virtually unrelated in their respective functions. But [i]when they become unified, they produce a strong character consisting in the correlation of a factual science, a moral philosophy, and a genuine religious experience. And it is these three cosmic intuitions that give [i]objective validity, reality, to man’s experience in and with things, meanings, and values.
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16:6.11 (192.7) 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.Me here: We have considered the role of epochal revelation and personal revelation in delivering assurance to the mortal mind. The spirit ministries of the Holy Spirit and the Adjutants of Worship and Wisdom, the Son’s Spirit of Truth, and the God Fragment or Thought Adjusters – each and all of these combine in a Divine conspiracy to deliver faith and faith assurance and truth and truth assurance to the mind and to the soul of mortals in this life so that we might become spiritized and grow soul and attach our branch to the eternal vine of love, truth, beauty, and goodness. Such growth and attachment delivers the fruits of the Spirit and thereby also an abiding assurance in our safety and the eternal affection and care of our creators and rulers.
Again…here’s the link to the results of the keyword search for “assurance”:
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Assurance+&x=5&y=18
For our next considerations of assurance, please review and study these quotes about “self-revelation”:
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Self-revelation+&x=3&y=19
We also need to study and learn about the relation of self-revelation to the “cosmic mind”:
https://urantia-association.org/search/?zoom_sort=2&zoom_query=Assurance+&x=5&y=18
Based on my own study I think self-revelation is neither personal revelation or epochal revelation but is a form of revelation that is self derived rather than bestowed or imparted. Now when I say “self” please remember that self is the endowments of personality and mind with freewill which is experiential in its acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and is also connected to the circuits of mind, spirit, and personality as well as the direct Divine ministries of God, Son, and Conjoint Actor/Mother Spirit.
The mind circuit delivers to mortals our curiosity and our driving need to know and to understand and also our reality response mechanism. Mind is so powerful. It will invent facts, even total fictions, to explain that which is observed or felt or thought but not understood – the realm of metaphysics. The circuit of mind also delivers insight and inspiration as well as logic and reason and as well as invention. Mind is very powerful. We are able to transcend time with mind and to grasp concepts beyond our understanding and conceptual reach. We can delude ourselves and have life altering and life controlling beliefs that are totally fictitious and inventions of mind. But the mind of self can also reveal reality by its inherent nature and can do so without another and specific personality or spirit as the source of such knowledge and understanding.
The UB claims to rely upon over 1000 of humanity’s highest concepts. Original thinking does occur in mortal mind. Original thoughts which are truly sourced by or discernment of reality. The reality response. Please consider self-revelation and the cosmic mind for a season as we seek to understand how such reality awareness and reality response itself delivers to our mind that essential function of “assurance”. Our discernment, embrace, and response TO reality also delivers ASSURANCE OF REALITY…as does Deity endow agents and ministry of faith and truth and directly deliver faith and truth assurance to us.
Assurance of reality delivers our confidence in reality which enhances the feedback loop, adding volume and meaning and ever greater and greater confidence and poise in the face of all confusions and uncertainties and trials and tribulations!! Assurance is one of the greatest gifts of all the gifts given to the tadpoles of time!!! Blessed are we who live in faith and truth. To those who have, more is given!!
Please consider the following:
16:8.5 (194.5) Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive behavior: self-consciousness and associated relative free will.
16:8.6 (194.6) Self-consciousness consists in intellectual awareness of personality actuality; it includes the ability to recognize the reality of other personalities. It indicates capacity for individualized experience in and with cosmic realities, equivalating to the attainment of identity status in the personality relationships of the universe. Self-consciousness connotes recognition of the actuality of mind ministration and the realization of relative independence of creative and determinative free will.
16:8.7 (194.7) The relative free will which characterizes the self-consciousness of human personality is involved in:
16:8.8 1. Moral decision, highest wisdom.
16:8.9 2. Spiritual choice, truth discernment.
16:8.10 3. Unselfish love, brotherhood service.
16:8.11 4. Purposeful co-operation, group loyalty.
16:8.12 5. Cosmic insight, the grasp of universe meanings.
16:8.13 6. Personality dedication, wholehearted devotion to doing the Father’s will.
16:8.14 7. Worship, the sincere pursuit of divine values and the wholehearted love of the divine Value-Giver.16:8.15 (195.2) The Urantia type of human personality may be viewed as functioning in a physical mechanism consisting of the planetary modification of the Nebadon type of organism belonging to the electrochemical order of life activation and endowed with the Nebadon order of the Orvonton series of the cosmic mind of parental reproductive pattern. The bestowal of the divine gift of personality upon such a mind-endowed mortal mechanism confers the dignity of cosmic citizenship and enables such a mortal creature forthwith to become reactive to the constitutive recognition of the three basic mind realities of the cosmos:
16:8.16 (195.3) 1. The mathematical or logical recognition of the uniformity of physical causation.
16:8.17 (195.4) 2. The reasoned recognition of the obligation of moral conduct.
16:8.18 (195.5) 3. The faith-grasp of the fellowship worship of Deity, associated with the loving service of humanity.16:8.19 (195.6) The full function of such a personality endowment is the beginning realization of Deity kinship. Such a selfhood, indwelt by a prepersonal fragment of God the Father, is in truth and in fact a spiritual son of God. Such a creature not only discloses capacity for the reception of the gift of the divine presence but also exhibits reactive response to the personality-gravity circuit of the Paradise Father of all personalities.
9. Reality of Human Consciousness
16:9.1 (195.7) The cosmic-mind-endowed, Adjuster-indwelt, personal creature possesses innate recognition-realization of energy reality, mind reality, and spirit reality. The will creature is thus equipped to discern the fact, the law, and the love of God. Aside from these three inalienables of human consciousness, all human experience is really subjective except that intuitive realization of validity attaches to the unification of these three universe reality responses of cosmic recognition.
16:9.2 The God-discerning mortal is able to sense the unification value of these three cosmic qualities in the evolution of the surviving soul, man’s supreme undertaking in the physical tabernacle where the moral mind collaborates with the indwelling divine spirit to dualize the immortal soul. From its earliest inception the soul is real; it has cosmic survival qualities.
With assurance comes important attributes and rewards for the one who feels assured in their sonship and relationship with God. Personal contentment and poise are the harvest of assurance and faith is the seed sown for that harvest. Do we trust the Lord and the friendly universe?? Really!!?? Do we? For the more faith we have, the more assurance we have, and the more we trust the Lord in all things. And by that trusting assurance are we blessed with contentment and happiness and confidence in the face of all uncertainties, confusions, trials, tribulations, and suffering. This is God’s promise to the pilgrims and tadpoles of time!!
5. Lesson Regarding Contentment
149:5.1 (1674.3) When Jesus was visiting the group of evangelists working under the supervision of Simon Zelotes, during their evening conference Simon asked the Master: “Why are some persons so much more happy and contented than others? Is contentment a matter of religious experience?” Among other things, Jesus said in answer to Simon’s question:
149:5.2 (1674.4) “Simon, some persons are naturally more happy than others. Much, very much, depends upon the willingness of man to be led and directed by the Father’s spirit which lives within him. Have you not read in the Scriptures the words of the wise man, ‘The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord, searching all the inward parts’? And also that such spirit-led mortals say: ‘The lines are fallen to me in pleasant places; yes, I have a goodly heritage.’ ‘A little that a righteous man has is better than the riches of many wicked,’ for ‘a good man shall be satisfied from within himself.’ ‘A merry heart makes a cheerful countenance and is a continual feast. Better is a little with the reverence of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith. Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred therewith. Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without rectitude.’ ‘A merry heart does good like a medicine.’ ‘Better is a handful with composure than a superabundance with sorrow and vexation of spirit.’
149:5.3 (1674.5) “Much of man’s sorrow is born of the disappointment of his ambitions and the wounding of his pride. Although men owe a duty to themselves to make the best of their lives on earth, having thus sincerely exerted themselves, they should cheerfully accept their lot and exercise ingenuity in making the most of that which has fallen to their hands. All too many of man’s troubles take origin in the fear soil of his own natural heart. ‘The wicked flee when no man pursues.’ ‘The wicked are like the troubled sea, for it cannot rest, but its waters cast up mire and dirt; there is no peace, says God, for the wicked.’
149:5.4 (1674.6) “Seek not, then, for false peace and transient joy but rather for the assurance of faith and the sureties of divine sonship which yield composure, contentment, and supreme joy in the spirit.”
149:5.5 (1675.1) Jesus hardly regarded this world as a “vale of tears.” He rather looked upon it as the birth sphere of the eternal and immortal spirits of Paradise ascension, the “vale of soul making.”
100:4.3 (1097.7) But the great problem of religious living consists in the task of unifying the soul powers of the personality by the dominance of love. Health, mental efficiency, and happiness arise from the unification of physical systems, mind systems, and spirit systems. Of health and sanity man understands much, but of happiness he has truly realized very little. The highest happiness is indissolubly linked with spiritual progress. Spiritual growth yields lasting joy, peace which passes all understanding.
100:6.6 (1101.1) 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….
101:0.3 (1104.3) Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that “true light which lights every man who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling. The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.
Me here: The method of finding comfort with uncertainty and confidence amidst confusion is Divine Assurance!! It is only by such assurance that uncertainty becomes the doorway to adventure and self expression in time!!
In contemplating “self-revelation” I believe this is an expression of God as the First Source and Center of being – being the I AM. As the source of personality, somehow ALL personalities share a level of SELF AWARENESS that is an inherent sense of BEING, a being of being, a part of the original someone. Complicated. Please forgive my clumsiness. Personal revelation is imparted TO us each and epochal revelation is given to us all – but self-revelation is an awareness of being and belonging that comes from the SELF – but we do not exist in isolation. Our mind comes from Original Mind and is part of the Circuit of Mind. Our personality comes from Original Personality and is part of the Circuit of Personality. Mind and personality come from Deity.
As we embrace reality and the Spirit within and become spiritized in cooperation with the God Fragment, we become “volitional parts of the totality of infinity”. I think self-revelation is the feeling and knowing and belonging to the I AM. I have heard and said “I AM” in my own mind. I think every mind with personality hears and says this in mind. I think self-revelation is a function of the indivisibility of God – the source of personality and mind.
1:7.6 (31.6) The higher concepts of universe personality imply: identity, self-consciousness, self-will, and possibility for self-revelation. And these characteristics further imply fellowship with other and equal personalities, such as exists in the personality associations of the Paradise Deities. And the absolute unity of these associations is so perfect that divinity becomes known by indivisibility, by oneness. “The Lord God is one.” Indivisibility of personality does not interfere with God’s bestowing his spirit to live in the hearts of mortal men. Indivisibility of a human father’s personality does not prevent the reproduction of mortal sons and daughters.
106:8.23 (1173.1) As we philosophically conceive of the I AM in past eternity, he is alone, there is none beside him. Looking forward into future eternity, we do not see that the I AM could possibly change as an existential, but we are inclined to forecast a vast experiential difference. Such a concept of the I AM implies full self-realization—it embraces that limitless galaxy of personalities who have become volitional participants in the self-revelation of the I AM, and who will remain eternally as absolute volitional parts of the totality of infinity, final sons of the absolute Father.
Me here: We must also consider the role of Solitary Messengers, as personality coordinators, relative to Assurance and self-revelation. Please read Paper 23 to learn more!
23:1.1 (256.3) Immediately following the creation of the Seven Spirits of the Havona Circuits the Infinite Spirit brought into being the vast corps of Solitary Messengers. There is no part of the universal creation which is pre-existent to the Solitary Messengers except Paradise and the Havona circuits; they have functioned throughout the grand universe from near eternity. They are fundamental to the divine technique of the Infinite Spirit for self-revelation to, and personal contact with, the far-flung creations of time and space.
23:4.1 (262.2) The Solitary Messengers seem to be personality co-ordinators for all types of spirit beings. Their ministry helps to make all the personalities of the far-flung spiritual world akin. They contribute much to the development, in all spirit beings, of a consciousness of group identity. Every type of spirit being is served by special groups of Solitary Messengers who foster the ability of such beings to understand and fraternize with all other types and orders, however dissimilar.
Personality assurance” finds new sources as we make progress. The faith experience and the truth received by personal revelation which begins our religious experience is the seed of the growing and progressive mustard tree of reality awareness, objectivity, and wisdom which comes by time and experience IN reality. The journey in reality itself reveals reality and delivers and grows personality assurance of that reality. Morontia experience, education, and mota are the next contributions to that journey of revelation.
In this life, science and epochal revelation give us the more objective, factual, and impersonal (really non-subjective) perspective…but still are we surrounded by and our perceptions driven by ignorance and prejudice and false beliefs and misunderstandings and mysteries and superstitions….and worse. Faith and revelation may be all that we personally enjoy and embrace that has ANY objective, reality oriented truth and fact and the only source of personality assurance at all. The fact of faith and the truth of religious experience are sufficient in this life and the birth and growth of soul and the delivery of soul to our eternity potential….they are a wide and sturdy bridge over troubled waters and deep chasms of doubt and uncertainty and ignorance and fear and the animal nature.
But on the other side of this life’s bridge is the glory land!! Filled with angels and celestials and guides and teachers and wonder and delight and universe reality and fact and knowledge and MOTA!! Will we still need faith and truth assurance? Absolutely!! But look at all the other supporting elements that will feed our confidence and eliminate our fears and doubts and embolden us in our uncertainties and adventure of being and becoming!! Consider all the many new forms and sources of assurance we will experience on the other side of the Jordon!!
What is the difference between faith and knowledge?? One may find assurance and certainty in both. But knowledge of and in reality and personal spiritualization and mind spiritization over time and by experience delivers “spirit insight” and does reduce our dependence upon faith as the source of our assurance and certainty I think!!
101:2.10 (1106.9) Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for morontia insight on an evolutionary world, enables man to see the same God in nature that faith exhibits in his soul. Thus does revelation successfully bridge the gulf between the material and the spiritual, even between the creature and the Creator, between man and God.
101:5.12 (1111.2) Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of its expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality and the still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession of a character well on the road to the actual acquirement of a morontial personality.
101:5.13 (1111.3) Evolutionary religion provides only the assurance of faith and the confirmation of conscience; revelatory religion provides the assurance of faith plus the truth of a living experience in the realities of revelation. The third step in religion, or the third phase of the experience of religion, has to do with the morontia state, the firmer grasp of mota. Increasingly in the morontia progression the truths of revealed religion are expanded; more and more you will know the truth of supreme values, divine goodnesses, universal relationships, eternal realities, and ultimate destinies.
101:5.14 (1111.4) Increasingly throughout the morontia progression the assurance of truth replaces the assurance of faith. When you are finally mustered into the actual spirit world, then will the assurances of pure spirit insight operate in the place of faith and truth or, rather, in conjunction with, and superimposed upon, these former techniques of personality assurance.
48:8.2 (557.17) There is a definite and divine purpose in all this morontia and subsequent spirit scheme of mortal progression, this elaborate universe training school for ascending creatures. It is the design of the Creators to afford the creatures of time a graduated opportunity to master the details of the operation and administration of the grand universe, and this long course of training is best carried forward by having the surviving mortal climb up gradually and by actual participation in every step of the ascent.
48:8.3 (558.1) The mortal-survival plan has a practical and serviceable objective; you are not the recipients of all this divine labor and painstaking training only that you may survive just to enjoy endless bliss and eternal ease. There is a goal of transcendent service concealed beyond the horizon of the present universe age. If the Gods designed merely to take you on one long and eternal joy excursion, they certainly would not so largely turn[color=#0000FF] the whole universe into one vast and intricate practical training school, [/color]requisition a substantial part of the celestial creation as teachers and instructors, and then spend ages upon ages piloting you, one by one, through this gigantic universe school of experiential training. The furtherance of the scheme of mortal progression seems to be one of the chief businesses of the present organized universe, and the majority of innumerable orders of created intelligences are either directly or indirectly engaged in advancing some phase of this progressive perfection plan.
48:8.4 (558.2) In traversing the ascending scale of living existence from mortal man to the Deity embrace, you actually live the very life of every possible phase and stage of perfected creature existence within the limits of the present universe age. From mortal man to Paradise finaliter embraces all that now can be—encompasses everything presently possible to the living orders of intelligent, perfected finite creature beings. If the future destiny of the Paradise finaliters is service in new universes now in the making, it is assured that in this new and future creation there will be no created orders of experiential beings whose lives will be wholly different from those which mortal finaliters have lived on some world as a part of their ascending training, as one of the stages of their agelong progress from animal to angel and from angel to spirit and from spirit to God.
So…. we now know that Divine Assurance has several sources and methods of delivery to each mortal on all 7 trillion worlds of material, evolutionary origin of souls. The mind, the personality, and the spirit circuits are 3 such sources.
We know that knowledge and experience deliver another form of assurance, a form of the personal certainty of reality, by our personal experiential wisdom and knowledge of reality by our universe education and due to our ever growing objectivity perspective, all of which combines to enhance and supplement our faith and personal revelation assurances gained by the very presence of the personality and the ministry of Holy Spirit and Adjutant Mind Spirits and Thought Adjuster.
Considering physical/material gravity, science has demonstrated that the gravitational effect of the sun (for example) on orbiting worlds grows by how close a world is to the sun. The same mass that is closer to the sun feels a greater gravitational effect and the same mass that is more distant from the sun feels a lesser gravitational effect. Likewise does a greater mass that is the same distance from the sun as a lesser mass have a greater gravitational effect or pull that a smaller or lesser mass does from equidistance.
I am not sure the personality and mind circuits increase their gravitational pull and effects by proximity or mass. Do we gain quality or quantity of mind or personality? We gain both regarding spirituality. We gain knowledge and experience and wisdom and spirituality over time. I don’t think we increase mind or personality though…needs more study!
While I am unsure about the similar effects of personality and mind gravity (doing more research!), the Papers are very clear that spirit-gravity works the same as physical/material gravity regarding both proximity and mass. The center or source of spirit gravity is fixed and so is its gravitational mass, at least during the current epoch of time and space creation. But the pilgrim’s path forward to Paradise includes personal gains in both proximity and mass and both are a function of our spiritization in the Local and Super Universe enroute to Havona on our Paradise ascension journey/adventure.
The more spiritual and spiritized we become, the greater the gravitational effect of the spirit gravity circuit. Such spiritization makes us closer to the Paradise Source (not in distance but in time as a measure of the pilgrim’s path to Paradise – the journey is shortened in time by our progress regardless of our actual location in space) and the more spiritual and spiritized we become, the greater our response due to the quality (mass) of our own spirit nature. Proximity (in time and progress) to Paradise and quality (mass due to progress) of spiritization or spiritual experience both equate to a greater gravitational effect!!
It is my opinion that this increasing response to the spirit gravity circuit ITSELF delivers a profound and growing ASSURANCE to the soul of mortals upon the pilgrim’s path to Paradise. The closer we get to Paradise and our true spirit natures, the more gravitational effects we feel for further response. The path straightens and inclines downward the more spiritized we become. There are fewer obstacles and detours and delays as we become more and more spiritized.
As we transfer the seat of our identity from our material nature to our spirit nature physical gravity loses power while spirit gravity increases its effects. As more and more people on in any world and of any generation gain in spiritization and Circle progress, the more effect does the collective society likewise experience of this gravity circuit.
I think fusion with our God Fragment is a mighty accelerant of our spiritual progress. I also believe we are taught that once we become Finalters and 6th or 7th stage spirit beings we will always enjoy the maximum spirit gravity circuit effects no matter where we are in the universe.
Remember here that the measure of “proximity” in planets and stars is determined by distance in space but proximity in spirit is not distance but spiritization vs. materialism. The purer the spirit form of a being then the closer in proximity is that being to the source and center of spirit gravity. This is true no matter the space distance of the being from Paradise.
Please excuse reposting the same text over but this is to explore gravitational effect which includes both the source and the response to that source:
(82.2) 7:1.3 Spirit realities respond to the drawing power of the center of spiritual gravity in accordance with their qualitative value, their actual degree of spirit nature. Spirit substance (quality) is just as responsive to spirit gravity as the organized energy of physical matter (quantity) is responsive to physical gravity. Spiritual values and spirit forces are real. From the viewpoint of personality, spirit is the soul of creation; matter is the shadowy physical body.
(82.3) 7:1.4 The reactions and fluctuations of spirit gravity are ever true to the content of spiritual values, the qualitative spiritual status of an individual or a world. This drawing power is instantly responsive to the inter- and intraspirit values of any universe situation or planetary condition. Every time a spiritual reality actualizes in the universes, this change necessitates the immediate and instantaneous readjustment of spirit gravity. Such a new spirit is actually a part of the Second Source and Center; and just as certainly as mortal man becomes a spiritized being, he will attain the spiritual Son, the center and source of spirit gravity.
(82.6) 7:1.7 Like the material gravity of Paradise, the spiritual gravity of the Eternal Son is absolute. Sin and rebellion may interfere with the operation of local universe circuits, but nothing can suspend the spirit gravity of the Eternal Son. The Lucifer rebellion produced many changes in your system of inhabited worlds and on Urantia, but we do not observe that the resultant spiritual quarantine of your planet in the least affected the presence and function of either the omnipresent spirit of the Eternal Son or the associated spirit-gravity circuit.
(82.7) 7:1.8 All reactions of the spirit-gravity circuit of the grand universe are predictable. We recognize all actions and reactions of the omnipresent spirit of the Eternal Son and find them to be dependable. In accordance with well-known laws, we can and do measure spiritual gravity just as man attempts to compute the workings of finite physical gravity. There is an unvarying response of the Son’s spirit to all spirit things, beings, and persons, and this response is always in accordance with the degree of actuality (the qualitative degree of reality) of all such spiritual values.
(84.2) 7:3.2 The spiritual-gravity pull of the Eternal Son constitutes the inherent secret of the Paradise ascension of surviving human souls. All genuine spirit values and all bona fide spiritualized individuals are held within the unfailing grasp of the spiritual gravity of the Eternal Son. The mortal mind, for example, initiates its career as a material mechanism and is eventually mustered into the Corps of the Finality as a well-nigh perfected spirit existence, becoming progressively less subject to material gravity and correspondingly more responsive to the inward pulling urge of spirit gravity during this entire experience. The spirit-gravity circuit literally pulls the soul of man Paradiseward.
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