Our initial invitation to aspirants worldwide salvington college seminary at sovrnty society

Salvington College Seminary at Sovrnty Society

Our Initial Invitation to Aspirant Candidates Worldwide Discipleship and Private Study with the Creator Son Michael and the Infinite Creative Mother Spirit

Consideration in taking that Next Step in the Application Process Welcome. We’re here to guide you through the process of your consideration in applying to Salvington College Seminary. It all starts here...

You've explored Sovrnty Society and discovered that Salvington College Seminary is a good fit for you.

Everything you need to start your application can be found here, including instructions, deadlines, application requirements, and links to application forms.

Before you begin, here are a few things we would like you to know. 

Salvington College Seminary welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. We are looking for the best and the brightest students who will take advantage of the one-of-a-kind opportunity available here.

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Future Salvington Students will come from public and private schools, businesses, from very small towns and great urban centers, and from every corner of the world.

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Some admitted students will be the first in their families to attend our college. Many will need some or all financial assistance to attend.

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All incoming Aspirants will bring dazzling talents of every kind to this extraordinary community of candidates preparing for their own Eternal Embrace into the Immortal octaves of life.

Salvington College Seminary is among a small group of the world’s greatest educational communities throughout the world. Given that, we attract more students than we can accept each year. We simply don’t have enough room in our class for all the students we would like to admit. Our difficult - yet fascinating and rewarding - job is to select those aspirants who have the heart and the readiness to go further into the sublime teachings and divine ideal that we offer. How do we do it?

An applicant’s moral character, respect and receptivity, and willingness to learn and grow in leaps and bounds is a portion of their academic strength that is our first consideration. We review each applicant on their own merits independent of any external criteria such as grades, standardized test scores, and evaluations by a counselor and other teachers to determine their academic strength and ability to succeed with our curriculum. The admissions committee also factors in student qualities such as motivation, curiosity, energy, leadership ability, and the distinctive talents and internal resources in which to draw upon when tested.

Ultimately, our goal is to build an extraordinary class of aspirants. If you want to be a part of it, we welcome your application.

If you desire to get started and apply, please email our registration office at the following address for the necessary application package: salvingtoncollege@sovrnty.org

Paradise Trinity Endowment and Association with Us at Sovrnty Society and Salvington College Seminary (Portions of text are offered courtesy of the Urantia Papers)

There are three distinct spirit circuits in the local universe of Nebadon: 1. The bestowal spirit of the Creator Son, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth.

2. The spirit circuit of the Divine Minister, the Holy Spirit.

3. The intelligence-ministry circuit, including the more or less unified activities but diverse functioning of the seven adjutant mind-spirits. The seven adjutants have been given the following names: the spirit of wisdom, the spirit of worship, the spirit of counsel, the spirit of knowledge, the spirit of courage, the spirit of understanding, the spirit of intuition — of quick perception.

The Divine Minister co-operates with the Creator Son in the formulation of life and the creation of new orders of beings up to the time of his seventh bestowal and, subsequently, after his elevation to the full sovereignty of the universe, continues to collaborate with the Son and the Son’s bestowed spirit in the further work of world ministry and planetary progression.

On the inhabited worlds the Spirit begins the work of evolutionary progression, starting with the lifeless material of the realm, first endowing vegetable life, then the animal organisms, then the first orders of human existence; and each succeeding impartation contributes to the further unfolding of the evolutionary potential of planetary life from the initial and primitive stages to the appearance of will creatures. This labor of the Spirit is largely effected through the seven adjutants, the spirits of promise, the unifying and coordinating spirit-mind of the evolving planets, ever and unitedly leading the races of men towards higher ideas and spiritual ideals.

Mortal man first experiences the ministry of the Spirit in conjunction with mind when the purely animal mind of evolutionary creatures develops reception capacity for the adjutants of worship and of wisdom.

This ministry of the sixth and seventh adjutants indicates mind evolution crossing the threshold of spiritual ministry. And immediately are such minds of worship- and wisdom-function included in the spiritual circuits of the Divine Minister.

When mind is thus endowed with the ministry of the Holy Spirit, it possesses the capacity for (consciously or unconsciously) choosing the spiritual presence of the Universal Father — the Thought Adjuster. But it is not until a bestowal Son has liberated the Spirit of Truth for planetary ministry to all mortals that all normal minds are automatically prepared for the reception of the Thought Adjusters.

The Spirit of Truth works as one with the presence of the spirit of the Divine Minister. This dual spirit liaison hovers over the worlds, seeking to teach truth and to spiritually enlighten the minds of men, to inspire the souls of the creatures of the ascending races, and to lead the peoples dwelling on the evolutionary planets ever towards their Paradise goal of divine destiny.

Though the Spirit of Truth is poured out upon all flesh, this spirit of the Son is almost wholly limited in function and power by man’s personal reception of that which constitutes the sum and substance of the mission of the bestowal Son. The Holy Spirit is partly independent of human attitude and partially conditioned by the decisions and co-operation of the will of man. Nevertheless, the ministry of the Holy

Spirit becomes increasingly effective in the sanctification and spiritualization of the inner life of those mortals who the more fully obey the divine leadings.

As individuals you do not personally possess a segregated portion or entity of the spirit of the Creator Father-Son or the Creative Mother Spirit; these ministries do not contact with, nor indwell, the thinking centers of the individual’s mind as do the Mystery Monitors. Thought Adjusters are definite individualizations of the prepersonal reality of the Universal Father, actually indwelling the mortal mind as a very part of that mind, and they ever work in perfect harmony with the combined spirits of the Creator Son and Creative Spirit.

The presence of the Holy Spirit of the Universe Daughter of the Infinite Spirit, of the Spirit of Truth of the Universe Son of the Eternal Son, and of the Adjuster-spirit of the Paradise Father in or with an evolutionary mortal, denotes symmetry of spiritual endowment and ministry and qualifies such a mortal consciously to realize the faith-fact of sonship with God. With the advancing evolution of an inhabited planet and the further spiri tualization of its inhabitants, additional spiritual influences may be received by such mature personalities. As mortals progress in mind control and spirit perception, these multiple spirit ministries become more and more co-ordinate in function; they become increasingly blended with the overministry of the Paradise Trinity.

Although Divinity may be plural in manifestation, in human experience Deity is singular, always one.

Neither is spiritual ministry plural in human experience. Regardless of plurality of origin, all spirit influences are one in function. Indeed they are one, being the spirit ministry of God the Sevenfold in and to the creatures of the grand universe; and as creatures grow in appreciation of, and receptivity for, this unifying ministry of the spirit, it becomes in their experience the ministry of God the Supreme.

From the heights of eternal glory the divine Spirit descends, by a long series of steps, to meet you as you are and where you are and then, in the partnership of faith, lovingly to embrace the soul of mortal origin and to embark on the sure and certain retracement of those steps of condescension, never stopping until the evolutionary soul is safely exalted to the very heights of bliss from which the divine Spirit originally sallied forth on this mission of mercy and ministry.

Spiritual forces unerringly seek and attain their own original levels. Having gone out from the Eternal, they are certain to return thereto, bringing with them all those children of time and space who have espoused the leading and teaching of the indwelling Adjuster, those who have been truly “born of the Spirit,” the faith sons of God. The divine Spirit is the source of continual ministry and encouragement to the children of men. Your power and achievement is “according to his mercy, through the renewing of the Spirit.” Spiritual life, like physical energy, is consumed. Spiritual effort results in relative spiritual exhaustion. The whole ascendant experience is real as well as spiritual; therefore, it is truly written, “It is the Spirit that quickens.” “The Spirit gives life.”

The dead theory of even the highest religious doctrines is powerless to transform human character or to control mortal behavior. What the world of today needs is the truth which your teacher of old declared: “Not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit.” The seed of theoretical truth is dead, the highest moral concepts without effect, unless and until the divine Spirit breathes upon the forms of truth and quickens the formulas of righteousness.

Those who have received and recognized the indwelling of God have been born of the Spirit. “You are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwells in you.” It is not enough that this spirit be poured out upon you; the divine Spirit must dominate and control every phase of human experience.

It is the presence of the divine Spirit, the water of life, that prevents the consuming thirst of mortal discontent and that indescribable hunger of the unspiritualized human mind. Spirit-motivated beings “never thirst, for this spiritual water shall be in them a well of satisfaction springing up into life everlasting.” Such divinely watered souls are all but independent of material environment as regards the joys of living and the satisfactions of earthly existence. They are spiritually illuminated and refreshed, morally strengthened and endowed.

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.

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.” 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.

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.

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.

Portions Courtesy of the Urantia Papers ~Salvington College Seminary at Sovrnty Society

Salvington College Seminary foundations are designed in the Ideal of Pure Religious Faith

"Pure religion is always built upon sincere relationship with God, the realization of His Imminent Presence, and the revelatory progressions of the aspiring candidate who has eternally determined to live the very will of the Universal Father. For the aspiring soul seeking the Eternal Embrace of the ages, as their personality soul becomes healed, blessed, educated, enlightened, and finally illuminated through the normal faith trust perpetual communion with the Universal Father Spirit who presides within their immediate midst, their are always clear signposts along the way that give credence and righteousness to the soul's personal efforts to attain victory through eternal life.

"At Salvington College Seminary, the milestones become clear to the candidate who is willing and able to surrender and sacrifice, to become more selfless and silent in their pursuits, and who is of a mind that can offer themselves in the great service that the Host of Heaven has fashioned for humanity." ~Michael of Nebadon

Religion, as a human experience, ranges from the primitive fear slavery of the evolving savage up to the sublime and magnificent faith liberty of those civilized mortals who are superbly conscious of sonship with the eternal God. Religion is the ancestor of the advanced ethics and morals of progressive social evolution. But religion, as such, is not merely a moral movement, albeit the outward and social manifestations of religion are mightily influenced by the ethical and moral momentum of human society. Always is religion the inspiration of man’s evolving nature, but it is not the secret of that evolution.

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.

True Religion True religion is not a system of philosophic belief which can be reasoned out and substantiated by natural proofs, neither is it a fantastic and mystic experience of indescribable feelings of ecstasy which can be enjoyed only by the romantic devotees of mysticism. Religion is not the product of reason, but viewed from within, it is altogether reasonable. Religion is not derived from the logic of human philosophy, but as a mortal experience it is altogether logical. Religion is the experiencing of divinity in the consciousness of a moral being of evolutionary origin; it represents true experience with eternal realities in time, the realization of spiritual satisfactions while yet in the flesh.

The Thought Adjuster has no special mechanism through which to gain self-expression; there is no mystic religious faculty for the reception or expression of religious emotions. These experiences are made available through the naturally ordained mechanism of mortal mind. And therein lies one explanation of the Adjuster’s difficulty in engaging in direct communication with the material mind of its constant indwelling.

The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward.

The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind. But the mind that really discerns God, hears the indwelling Adjuster, is the pure mind. “Without holiness no man may see the Lord.”

All such inner and spiritual communion is termed spiritual insight. Such religious experiences result from the impress made upon the mind of man by the combined operations of the Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth as they function amid and upon the ideas, ideals, insights, and spirit strivings of the evolving sons of God. Religion lives and prospers, then, not by sight and feeling, but rather by faith and insight. It consists not in the discovery of new facts or in the finding of a unique experience, but rather in the discovery of new and spiritual meanings in facts already well known to mankind. The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions. It is, rather, a profoundly deep and actual experience of spiritual communion with the spirit influences resident within the human mind, and as far as such an experience is definable in terms of psychology, it is simply the experience of experiencing the reality of believing in God as the reality of such a purely personal experience.

While religion is not the product of the rationalistic speculations of a material cosmology, it is, nonetheless, the creation of a wholly rational insight which originates in man’s mind-experience.

Religion is born neither of mystic meditations nor of isolated contemplations, albeit it is ever more or less mysterious and always indefinable and inexplicable in terms of purely intellectual reason and philosophic logic. The germs of true religion originate in the domain of man’s moral consciousness, and they are revealed in the growth of man’s spiritual insight, that faculty of human personality which accrues as a consequence of the presence of the God-revealing Thought Adjuster in the God-hungry mortal mind.

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.

Thus it may be seen that religious longings and spiritual urges are not of such a nature as would merely lead men to want to believe in God, but rather are they of such nature and power that men are

profoundly impressed with the conviction that they ought to believe in God. The sense of evolutionary duty and the obligations consequent upon the illumination of revelation make such a profound impression upon man’s moral nature that he finally reaches that position of mind and that attitude of soul where he concludes that he has no right not to believe in God. The higher and superphilosophic wisdom of such enlightened and disciplined individuals ultimately instructs them that to doubt God or distrust his goodness would be to prove untrue to the realest and deepest thing within the human mind and soul — the divine Adjuster.

The Fact of Religion The fact of religion consists wholly in the religious experience of rational and average human beings.

And this is the only sense in which religion can ever be regarded as scientific or even psychological. The proof that revelation is revelation is this same fact of human experience: the fact that revelation does synthesize the apparently divergent sciences of nature and the theology of religion into a consistent and logical universe philosophy, a coordinated and unbroken explanation of both science and religion, thus creating a harmony of mind and satisfaction of spirit which answers in human experience those questionings of the mortal mind which craves to know how the Infinite works out his will and plans in matter, with minds, and on spirit.

Reason is the method of science; faith is the method of religion; logic is the attempted technique of philosophy. Revelation compensates for the absence of the soul viewpoint by providing a technique for achieving unity in the comprehension of the reality and relationships of matter and spirit by the mediation of mind. And true revelation never renders science unnatural, religion unreasonable, or philosophy illogical.

Reason, through the study of science, may lead back through nature to a First Cause, but it requires religious faith to transform the First Cause of science into a God of salvation; and revelation is further required for the validation of such a faith, such spiritual insight.

There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters human survival: 1. Human experience, personal assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by the indwelling Thought Adjuster.

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.

Science ends its reason-search in the hypothesis of a First Cause. Religion does not stop in its flight of faith until it is sure of a God of salvation. The discriminating study of science logically suggests the reality and existence of an Absolute. Religion believes unreservedly in the existence and reality of a God who fosters personality survival. What metaphysics fails utterly in doing, and what even philosophy fails partially in doing, revelation does; that is, affirms that this First Cause of science and religion’s God of salvation are one and the same Deity.

Reason is the proof of science, faith the proof of religion, logic the proof of philosophy, but revelation is validated only by human experience. Science yields knowledge; religion yields happiness; philosophy yields unity; revelation confirms the experiential harmony of this triune approach to universal reality.

The contemplation of nature can only reveal a God of nature, a God of motion. Nature exhibits only matter, motion, and animation — life. Matter plus energy, under certain conditions, is manifested in living forms, but while natural life is thus relatively continuous as a phenomenon, it is wholly transient as to individualities. Nature does not afford ground for logical belief in human-personality survival. The religious man who finds God in nature has already and first found this same personal God in his own soul.

Faith reveals God in the soul. Revelation, the substitute for soul 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. The contemplation of nature does logically point in the direction of intelligent guidance, even living supervision, but it does not in any satisfactory manner reveal a personal God. On the other hand, nature discloses nothing which would preclude the universe from being looked upon as the handiwork of the God of religion. God cannot be found through nature alone, but man having otherwise found him, the study of nature becomes wholly consistent with a higher and more spiritual interpretation of the universe.

Revelation as an epochal phenomenon is periodic; as a personal human experience it is continuous.

Divinity functions in mortal personality as the Adjuster gift of the Father, as the Spirit of Truth of the Son, and as the Holy Spirit of the Universe Spirit, while these three supermortal endowments are unified in human experiential evolution as the ministry of the Supreme.

True religion is an insight into reality, the faith-child of the moral consciousness, and not a mere intellectual assent to any body of dogmatic doctrines. True religion consists in the experience that “the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.” Religion consists not in theologic propositions but in spiritual insight and the sublimity of the soul’s trust.

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.

The realization of religion never has been, and never will be, dependent on great learning or clever logic.

It is spiritual insight, and that is just the reason why some of the world’s greatest religious teachers,

even the prophets, have sometimes possessed so little of the wisdom of the world. Religious faith is available alike to the learned and the unlearned.

Religion must ever be its own critic and judge; it can never be observed, much less understood, from the outside. Your only assurance of a personal God consists in your own insight as to your belief in, and experience with, things spiritual. To all of your fellows who have had a similar experience, no argument about the personality or reality of God is necessary, while to all other men who are not thus sure of God no possible argument could ever be truly convincing.

Psychology may indeed attempt to study the phenomena of religious reactions to the social environment, but never can it hope to penetrate to the real and inner motives and workings of religion.

Only theology, the province of faith and the technique of revelation, can afford any sort of intelligent account of the nature and content of religious experience.

The Characteristics of Religion Religion is so vital that it persists in the absence of learning. It lives in spite of its contamination with erroneous cosmologies and false philosophies; it survives even the confusion of metaphysics. In and through all the historic vicissitudes of religion there ever persists that which is indispensable to human progress and survival: the ethical conscience and the moral consciousness.

Faith-insight, or spiritual intuition, is the endowment of the cosmic mind in association with the Thought Adjuster, which is the Father’s gift to man. Spiritual reason, soul intelligence, is the endowment of the Holy Spirit, the Creative Spirit’s gift to man. Spiritual philosophy, the wisdom of spirit realities, is the endowment of the Spirit of Truth, the combined gift of the bestowal Sons to the children of men. And the co-ordination and interassociation of these spirit endowments constitute man a spirit personality in potential destiny.

It is this same spirit personality, in primitive and embryonic form, the Adjuster possession of which survives the natural death in the flesh. This composite entity of spirit origin in association with human experience is enabled, by means of the living way provided by the divine Sons, to survive (in Adjuster custody) the dissolution of the material self of mind and matter when such a transient partnership of the material and the spiritual is divorced by the cessation of vital motion.

Through religious faith the soul of man reveals itself and demonstrates the potential divinity of its emerging nature by the characteristic manner in which it induces the mortal personality to react to certain trying intellectual and testing social situations. Genuine spiritual faith (true moral consciousness) is revealed in that it: 1. Causes ethics and morals to progress despite inherent and adverse animalistic tendencies.* 2. Produces a sublime trust in the goodness of God even in the face of bitter disappointment and crushing defeat.

3. Generates profound courage and confidence despite natural adversity and physical calamity.

4. Exhibits inexplicable poise and sustaining tranquillity notwithstanding baffling diseases and even acute physical suffering.

5. Maintains a mysterious poise and composure of personality in the face of maltreatment and the rankest injustice.

6. Maintains a divine trust in ultimate victory in spite of the cruelties of seemingly blind fate and the apparent utter indifference of natural forces to human welfare.

7. Persists in the unswerving belief in God despite all contrary demonstrations of logic and successfully withstands all other intellectual sophistries.

8. Continues to exhibit undaunted faith in the soul’s survival regardless of the deceptive teachings of false science and the persuasive delusions of unsound philosophy.

9. Lives and triumphs irrespective of the crushing overload of the complex and partial civilizations of modern times.

10. Contributes to the continued survival of altruism in spite of human selfishness, social antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political maladjustments.

11. Steadfastly adheres to a sublime belief in universe unity and divine guidance regardless of the perplexing presence of evil and sin.

12. Goes right on worshiping God in spite of anything and everything. Dares to declare, “Even though he slay me, yet will I serve him.”

We know, then, by three phenomena, that man has a divine spirit or spirits dwelling within him: first, by personal experience — religious faith; second, by revelation — personal and racial; and third, by the amazing exhibition of such extraordinary and unnatural reactions to his material environment as are illustrated by the foregoing recital of twelve spiritlike performances in the presence of the actual and trying situations of real human existence. And there are still others.

And it is just such a vital and vigorous performance of faith in the domain of religion that entitles mortal man to affirm the personal possession and spiritual reality of that crowning endowment of human nature, religious experience.

The Limitations of Revelation Because your world is generally ignorant of origins, even of physical origins, it has appeared to be wise from time to time to provide instruction in cosmology. And always has this made trouble for the future.

The laws of revelation hamper us greatly by their proscription of the impartation of unearned or premature knowledge. Any cosmology presented as a part of revealed religion is destined to be

outgrown in a very short time. Accordingly, future students of such a revelation are tempted to discard any element of genuine religious truth it may contain because they discover errors on the face of the associated cosmologies therein presented.

Mankind should understand that we who participate in the revelation of truth are very rigorously limited by the instructions of our superiors. We are not at liberty to anticipate the scientific discoveries of a thousand years. Revelators must act in accordance with the instructions which f orm a part of the revelation mandate. We see no way of overcoming this difficulty, either now or at any future time. We full well know that, while the historic facts and religious truths of this series of revelatory presentations will stand on the records of the ages to come, within a few short years many of our statements regarding the physical sciences will stand in need of revision in consequence of additional scientific developments and new discoveries. These new developments we even now foresee, but we are forbidden to include such humanly undiscovered facts in the revelatory records.

Let it be made clear that revelations are not necessarily inspired. The cosmology of these revelations is not inspired. It is limited by our permission for the co-ordination and sorting of present-day knowledge. While divine or spiritual insight is a gift, human wisdom must evolve.

Truth is always a revelation: autorevelation when it emerges as a result of the work of the indwelling Adjuster; epochal revelation when it is presented by the function of some other celestial agency, group, or personality.

In the last analysis, religion is to be judged by its fruits, according to the manner and the extent to which it exhibits its own inherent and divine excellence.

Truth may be but relatively inspired, even though revelation is invariably a spiritual phenomenon.

While statements with reference to cosmology are never inspired, such revelations are of immense value in that they at least transiently clarify knowledge by: 1. The reduction of confusion by the authoritative elimination of error.

2. The co-ordination of known or about-to-be-known facts and observations.

3. The restoration of important bits of lost knowledge concerning epochal transactions in the distant past.

4. The supplying of information which will fill in vital missing gaps in otherwise earned knowledge.

5. Presenting cosmic data in such a manner as to illuminate the spiritual teachings contained in the accompanying revelation.

Religion Expanded by Revelation Revelation is a technique whereby ages upon ages of time are saved in the necessary work of sorting and sifting the errors of evolution from the truths of spirit acquirement.

Science deals with facts; religion is concerned only with values. Through enlightened philosophy the mind endeavors to unite the meanings of both facts and values, thereby arriving at a concept of complete reality. Remember that science is the domain of knowledge, philosophy the realm of wisdom, and religion the sphere of the faith experience. But religion, nonetheless, presents two phases of manifestation: 1. Evolutionary religion. The experience of primitive worship, the religion which is a mind derivative.

2. Revealed religion. The universe attitude which is a spirit derivative; the assurance of, and belief in, the conservation of eternal realities, the survival of personality, and the eventual attainment of the cosmic Deity, whose purpose has made all this possible. It is a part of the plan of the universe that, sooner or later, evolutionary religion is destined to receive the spiritual expansion of revelation.

Both science and religion start out with the assumption of certain generally accepted bases for logical deductions. So, also, must philosophy start its career upon the assumption of the reality of three things: 1. The material body.

2. The supermaterial phase of the human being, the soul or even the indwelling spirit.

3. The human mind, the mechanism for intercommunication and interassociation between spirit and matter, between the material and the spiritual.

Scientists assemble facts, philosophers co-ordinate ideas, while prophets exalt ideals. Feeling and emotion are invariable concomitants of religion, but they are not religion. Religion may be the feeling of experience, but it is hardly the experience of feeling. Neither logic (rationalization) nor emotion (feeling) is essentially a part of religious experience, although both may variously be associated with the exercise of faith in the furtherance of spiritual insight into reality, all according to the status and temperamental tendency of the individual mind.

Evolutionary religion is the outworking of the endowment of the local universe mind adjutant charged with the creation and fostering of the worship trait in evolving man. Such primitive religions are directly concerned with ethics and morals, the sense of human duty. Such religions are predicated on the assurance of conscience and result in the stabilization of relatively ethical civilizations.

Personally revealed religions are sponsored by the bestowal spirits representing the three persons of the Paradise Trinity and are especially concerned with the expansion of truth. Evolutionary religion drives home to the individual the idea of personal duty; revealed religion l ays increasing emphasis on loving, the golden rule.

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 soull personality.

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 soul state, the firmer grasp of mota. Increasingly in the soul 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.

Increasingly throughout the soul 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.

Progressive Religious Experience The soul phase of revealed religion has to do with the experience of survival, and its great urge is the attainment of spirit perfection. There also is present the higher urge of worship, associated with an impelling call to increased ethical service. Soul insight entails an ever-expanding consciousness of the Sevenfold, the Supreme, and even the Ultimate.

Throughout all religious experience, from its earliest inception on the material level up to the time of the attainment of full spirit status, the Adjuster is the secret of the personal realization of the reality of the existence of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the secrets of your faith in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential personality of evolving man, united to the Adjuster essence of the existential God, constitutes the potential completion of supreme existence and is inherently the basis for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental personality.

Moral will embraces decisions based on reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom, and sanctioned by religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of soul personality and eventually of true spirit status.

The evolutionary type of knowledge is but the accumulation of protoplasmic memory material; this is the most primitive form of creature consciousness. Wisdom embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in process of association and recombination, and such phenomena differentiate human mind from mere animal mind. Animals have knowledge, but only man possesses wisdom capacity. Truth is made accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual by the bestowal on such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.

Christ Michael, when bestowed on Urantia, lived under the reign of evolutionary religion up to the time of his baptism. From that moment up to and including the event of his crucifixion he carried forward his work by the combined guidance of evolutionary and revealed religion. From the morning of his resurrection until his ascension he traversed the manifold phases of the soul life of mortal transition from the world of matter to that of spirit. After his ascension Michael became master of the experience of Supremacy, the realization of the Supreme; and being the one person in Nebadon possessed of unlimited capacity to experience the reality of the Supreme, he forthwith attained to the status of the sovereignty of supremacy in and to his local universe.

With man, the eventual fusion and resultant oneness with the indwelling Adjuster — the personality synthesis of man and the essence of God — constitute him, in potential, a living part of the Supreme and insure for such a onetime mortal being the eternal birthright of the endless pursuit of finality of universe service for and with the Supreme.

Revelation teaches mortal man that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space by means of the progression of time, he should begin by the organization of knowledge into ideadecisions; next, mandate wisdom to labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming self -possessed ideas into increasingly practical but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such association in the finite mind as will constitute them the actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise truth — universal truth. The co-ordination of idea-decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the soul worlds.

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: 1. Salvation from material fetters in the personal realization of sonship with God, who is spirit.

2. Salvation from intellectual bondage: man shall know the truth, and the truth shall set him free.

3. Salvation from spiritual blindness, the human realization of the fraternity of mortal beings and the soul awareness of the brotherhood of all universe creatures; the service-discovery of spiritual reality and the ministry-revelation of the goodness of spirit values.

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.

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 selfconscious beings.

6. Salvation from time, the achievement of an eternal life of unending progression in God-recognition and God-service.

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.

Such a sevenfold salvation is the equivalent of the completeness and perfection of the realization of the ultimate experience of the Universal Father. And all this, in potential, is contained within the reality of the faith of the human experience of religion. And it can be so contained since the faith of Jesus was nourished by, and was revelatory of, even realities beyond the ultimate; the faith of Jesus approached the status of a universe absolute in so far as such is possible of manifestation in the evolving cosmos of time and space.

Through the appropriation of the faith of Jesus, mortal man can foretaste in time the realities of eternity. Jesus made the discovery, in human experience, of the Final Father, and his brothers in the flesh of mortal life can follow him along this same experience of Father discovery. They can even attain, as they are, the same satisfaction in this experience with the Father as did Jesus as he was.

New potentials were actualized in the universe of Nebadon consequent upon the terminal bestowal of Michael, and one of these was the new illumination of the path of eternity that leads to the Father of all, and which can be traversed even by the mortals of material flesh and blood in the initial life on the planets of space. Jesus was and is the new and living way whereby man can come into the divine inheritance which the Father has decreed shall be his for but the asking. In Jesus there is abundantly demonstrated both the beginnings and endings of the faith experience of humani ty, even of divine humanity.

A Personal Philosophy of Religion An idea is only a theoretical plan for action, while a positive decision is a validated plan of action. A stereotype is a plan of action accepted without validation. The materials out of which to build a personal philosophy of religion are derived from both the inner and the environmental experience of the individual. The social status, economic conditions, educational opportunities, moral trends, institutional influences, political developments, racial tendencies, and the religious teachings of one’s time and place all become factors in the formulation of a personal philosophy of religion. Even the inherent temperament and intellectual bent markedly determine the pattern of religious philosophy . Vocation, marriage, and kindred all influence the evolution of one’s personal standards of life.

A philosophy of religion evolves out of a basic growth of ideas plus experimental living as both are modified by the tendency to imitate associates. The soundness of philosophic conclusions depends on keen, honest, and discriminating thinking in connection with sensitivity to meanings and accuracy of evaluation. Moral cowards never achieve high planes of philosophic thinking; it requires courage to invade new levels of experience and to attempt the exploration of unknown realms of intellectual living.

Presently new systems of values come into existence; new formulations of principles and standards are achieved; habits and ideals are reshaped; some idea of a personal God is attained, followed by enlarging concepts of relationship thereto.

The great difference between a religious and a nonreligious philosophy of living consists in the nature and level of recognized values and in the object of loyalties. There are four phases in the evolution of religious philosophy: Such an experience may become merely conformative, resigned to submission to tradition and authority. Or it may be satisfied with slight attainments, just enough to stabilize the daily living, and therefore becomes early arrested on such an adventitious level. Such mortals believe in letting well enough alone. A third group progress to the level of logical intellectuality but there stagnate in consequence of cultural slavery. It is indeed pitiful to behold giant intellects held so securely within the cruel grasp of cultural bondage. It is equally pathetic to observe those who trade their cultural bondage for the materialistic fetters of a science, falsely so called. The fourth level of philosophy attai ns freedom from all conventional and traditional handicaps and dares to think, act, and live honestly, loyally, fearlessly, and truthfully.

The acid test for any religious philosophy consists in whether or not it distinguishes between the realities of the material and the spiritual worlds while at the same moment recognizing their unification in intellectual striving and in social serving. A sound religious philosophy does not confound the things of God with the things of Caesar. Neither does it recognize the aesthetic cult of pure wonder as a substitute for religion.

Philosophy transforms that primitive religion which was largely a fairy tale of conscience into a living experience in the ascending values of cosmic reality.

Faith and Belief Belief has attained the level of faith when it motivates life and shapes the mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere belief. Neither is certainty nor conviction faith.

A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it actually dominates the mode of living. Faith is a living attribute of genuine personal religious experience. One believes truth, admires beauty, and reverences goodness, but does not worship them; such an attitude of saving faith is centered on God alone, who is all of these personified and infinitely more.

Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates. But living religious faith is more than the association of noble beliefs; it is more than an exalted system of philosophy; it is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values; it is God-knowing and man-serving. Beliefs may become group possessions, but faith must be personal. Theologic beliefs can be suggested to a group, but faith can rise up only in the heart of the individual religionist.

Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes to deny realities and to confer upon its devotees assumed knowledge. Faith is a traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity and belittles loyalty to supreme values and divine ideals. Faith never shuns the problem-solving duty of mortal living. Living faith does not foster bigotry, persecution, or intolerance.

Faith does not shackle the creative imagination, neither does it maintain an unreasoning prejudice toward the discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist heroically to live the golden rule. The zeal of faith is according to knowledge, and its strivings are the preludes to sublime peace.

Religion and Morality No professed revelation of religion could be regarded as authentic if it failed to recognize the duty demands of ethical obligation which had been created and fostered by preceding evolutionary religion.

Revelation unfailingly enlarges the ethical horizon of evolved religion while it simultaneously and unfailingly expands the moral obligations of all prior revelations.

When you presume to sit in critical judgment on the primitive religion of man (or on the re ligion of primitive man), you should remember to judge such savages and to evaluate their religious experience in accordance with their enlightenment and status of conscience. Do not make the mistake of judging another’s religion by your own standards of knowledge and truth.

True religion is that sublime and profound conviction within the soul which compellingly admonishes man that it would be wrong for him not to believe in those soul realities which constitute his highest ethical and moral concepts, his highest interpretation of life’s greatest values and the universe’s deepest realities. And such a religion is simply the experience of yielding intellectual loyalty to the highest dictates of spiritual consciousness.

The search for beauty is a part of religion only in so far as it is ethical and to the extent that it enriches the concept of the moral. Art is only religious when it becomes diffused with purpose which has been derived from high spiritual motivation.

The enlightened spiritual consciousness of civilized man is not concerned so much with some specific intellectual belief or with any one particular mode of living as with discovering the truth of living, the good and right technique of reacting to the ever-recurring situations of mortal existence. Moral

consciousness is just a name applied to the human recognition and awareness of those ethical and emerging soul values which duty demands that man shall abide by in the day-by-day control and guidance of conduct.

Though recognizing that religion is imperfect, there are at least two practical manifestations of its nature and function: 1. The spiritual urge and philosophic pressure of religion tend to cause man to project his estimation of moral values directly outward into the affairs of his fellows — the ethical reaction of religion.

2. Religion creates for the human mind a spiritualized consciousness of divine reality based on, and by faith derived from, antecedent concepts of moral values and co-ordinated with superimposed concepts of spiritual values. Religion thereby becomes a censor of mortal affairs, a form of glorified moral trust and confidence in reality, the enhanced realities of time and the more enduring realities of eternity.

Faith becomes the connection between moral consciousness and the spiritual concept of enduring reality. Religion becomes the avenue of man’s escape from the material limitations of the temporal and natural world to the supernal realities of the eternal and spiritual world by and through the technique of salvation, the progressive soul transformation.

Religion as Man’s Liberator Intelligent man knows that he is a child of nature, a part of the material universe; he likewise discerns no survival of individual personality in the motions and tensions of the mathematical level of the energy universe. Nor can man ever discern spiritual reality through the examination of physical causes and effects.

A human being is also aware that he is a part of the ideational cosmos, but though concept may endure beyond a mortal life span, there is nothing inherent in concept which indicates the personal survival of the conceiving personality. Nor will the exhaustion of the possibilities of logic and reason ever reveal to the logician or to the reasoner the eternal truth of the survival of personality.

The material level of law provides for causality continuity, the unending response of effect to antecedent action; the mind level suggests the perpetuation of ideational continuity, the unceasing flow of conceptual potentiality from pre-existent conceptions. But neither of these levels of the universe discloses to the inquiring mortal an avenue of escape from partiality of status and from the intolerable suspense of being a transient reality in the universe, a temporal personality doomed to be extinguished upon the exhaustion of the limited life energies.

It is only through the soul avenue leading to spiritual insight that man can ever break the fetters inherent in his mortal status in the universe. Energy and mind do lead back to Paradise and Deity, but neither the energy endowment nor the mind endowment of man proceeds directly from such Paradise Deity. Only in the spiritual sense is man a child of God. And this is true because it is only in the spiritual sense that man is at present endowed and indwelt by the Paradise Father. Mankind can never discover

divinity except through the avenue of religious experience and by the exercise of true faith. The faith acceptance of the truth of God enables man to escape from the circumscribed confines of material limitations and affords him a rational hope of achieving safe conduct from the material realm, whereon is death, to the spiritual realm, wherein is life eternal.

The purpose of religion is not to satisfy curiosity about God but rather to afford intellectual constancy and philosophic security, to stabilize and enrich human living by blending the mortal with the divine, the partial with the perfect, man and God. It is through religious experience that man’s concepts of ideality are endowed with reality.

Never can there be either scientific or logical proofs of divinity. Reason alone can never validate the values and goodnesses of religious experience. But it will always remain true: Whosoever wills to do the will of God shall comprehend the validity of spiritual values. This is the nearest approach that can be made on the mortal level to offering proofs of the reality of religious experience. Such faith affords the only escape from the mechanical clutch of the material world and from the error di stortion of the incompleteness of the intellectual world; it is the only discovered solution to the impasse in mortal thinking regarding the continuing survival of the individual personality. It is the only passport to completion of reality and to eternity of life in a universal creation of love, law, unity, and progressive Deity attainment.

Religion effectually cures man’s sense of idealistic isolation or spiritual loneliness; it enfranchises the believer as a son of God, a citizen of a new and meaningful universe. Religion assures man that, in following the gleam of righteousness discernible in his soul, he is thereby identifying himself with the plan of the Infinite and the purpose of the Eternal. Such a liberated soul immediately begins to feel at home in this new universe, his universe.

When you experience such a transformation of faith, you are no longer a slavish part of the mathematical cosmos but rather a liberated volitional son of the Universal Father. No longer is such a liberated son fighting alone against the inexorable doom of the termination of temporal existence; no longer does he combat all nature, with the odds hopelessly against him; no longer is he staggered by the paralyzing fear that, perchance, he has put his trust in a hopeless phantasm or pinned his faith to a fanciful error.

Now, rather, are the sons of God enlisted together in fighting the battle of reality’s triumph over the partial shadows of existence. At last all creatures become conscious of the fact that God and all the divine hosts of a well-nigh limitless universe are on their side in the supernal struggle to attain eternity of life and divinity of status. Such faith-liberated sons have certainly enlisted in the struggles of time on the side of the supreme forces and divine personalities of eternity; even the stars in their courses are now doing battle for them; at last they gaze upon the universe from within, from God’s viewpoint, and all is transformed from the uncertainties of material isolation to the sureties of eternal spiritual progression. Even time itself becomes but the shadow of eternity cast by Paradise realities upon the moving panoply of space. [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]

Courtesy of the Urantia Book Revelations

Illumination for the Aspirant Soul at Salvington College Seminary SALVINGTON COLLEGE SEMINARY at SOVRNTY SOCIETY At Salvington College Seminary, the illuminated cross symbolizes our dedicated cooperation with expanding the Kingdom of His Sovereignty and Supremacy by reaching inward and upward to the Fatherhood of God and extending love and mercy outward to the Brotherhood of Humanity.

“Our educational fellowship at Salvington College Seminary brings an intellectual emancipation and a spiritual Illumination to the individual willing to dedicate themselves to discipleship with the Creator Son Michael and the Creative Mother Spirit. For those courageous enough to seek and find God within their heart and mind, our educational fellowship and curriculum will take them by the hand and show the way to this everlasting fulfillment of the ages.

“By the old way you seek to suppress, obey, and conform to the rules of living; by the new way you are first transformed by the Spirit of Truth and thereby strengthened in your inner soul by the constant spiritual renewing of your mind, and so are you endowed with the power of the certain and joyous performance of the gracious, acceptable, and perfect will of God. “Forget not — it is your personal faith in the exceedingly great and precious promises of God that ensures your becoming partakers of the divine nature.

“Thus by your faith and the spirit’s transformation, you become in reality the temples of God, and his spirit actually dwells within you. If, then, the spirit dwells within you, you are no longer slaves of the flesh but free and liberated sons of the spirit. The new law of the spirit endows you with the liberty of self-mastery in place of the old law of the fear of self-bondage and the slavery of self-denial. ~Michael of Nebadon

SOVRNTY SOCIETY and SALVINGTON COLLEGE SEMINARY A non-profit religious corporation in the State of Oregon functioning under the guidelines of a 'church or temple' that serves as a platform to disseminate the teachings of Michael of Nebadon and the Creative Mother Spirit with the Host of Heaven.

The Society and College Seminary serve as an educational fellowship and sanctuary for aspirants of the Spirit of Truth Holy Comforter of Michael and the Holy Spirit of the Creative Universe Mother Spirit.

OUR ADVICE TO INCOMING CANDIDATES ENTERING INTO THE APPLICATION PROCESS WITH US

The Consecration of Choice The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God — with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning-value possible. Sharing is Godlike — divine. God shares all with the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, while they, in turn, share all things with the divine Sons and spirit Daughters of the universes.

The imitation of God is the key to perfection; the doing of his will is the secret of survival and of perfection in survival.

Mortals live in God, and so God has willed to live in mortals. As men trust themselves to him, so has he — and first — trusted a part of himself to be with men; has consented to live in men and to indwell men subject to the human will.

Peace in this life, survival in death, perfection in the next life, service in eternity — all these are achieved (in spirit) now when the creature personality consents — chooses — to subject the creature will to the Father’s will. And already has the Father chosen to make a fragment of himself subject to the will of the creature personality.

Such a creature choice is not a surrender of will. It is a consecration of will, an expansion of will, a glorification of will, a perfecting of will; and such choosing raises the creature will from the level of temporal significance to that higher estate wherein the personality of the creature son communes with the personality of the spirit Father.

This choosing of the Father’s will is the spiritual finding of the spirit Father by mortal man, even though an age must pass before the creature son may actually stand in the factual presence of God on Paradise.

This choosing does not so much consist in the negation of creature will — “Not my will but yours be done” — as it consists in the creature’s positive affirmation: “It is my will that your will be done.” And if this choice is made, sooner or later will the God-choosing son find inner union (fusion) with the indwelling God fragment, while this same perfecting son will find supreme personality satisfaction in the worship communion of the personality of man and the personality of his Maker, two personalities whose creative attributes have eternally joined in self-willed mutuality of expression — the birth of another eternal partnership of the will of man and the will of God.

The Soul Self Just as a butterfly emerges from the caterpillar stage, so will the true personalities of human beings emerge on the mansion worlds, for the first time revealed apart from their onetime enshroudment in the material flesh. The soul career in the local universe has to do with the continued elevation of the personality mechanism from the beginning soul level of soul existence up to the final soul level of progressive spirituality.

It is difficult to instruct you regarding your soul personality forms for the local universe career. You will be endowed with soul patterns of personality manifestability, and these are investments which, in the

last analysis, are beyond your comprehension. Such forms, while entirely real, are not energy patterns of the material order which you now understand. They do, however, serve the same purpose on the local universe worlds as do your material bodies on the planets of human nativity.

To a certain extent, the appearance of the material body-form is responsive to the character of the personality identity; the physical body does, to a limited degree, reflect something of the inherent nature of the personality. Still more so does the soul form. In the physical life, mortals may be outwardly beautiful though inwardly unlovely; in the soul life, and increasingly on its higher levels, the personality form will vary directly in accordance with the nature of the inner person. On the spiritual level, outward form and inner nature begin to approximate complete identification, which grows more and more perfect on higher and higher spirit levels.

In the soul estate the ascending mortal is endowed with the Nebadon modification of the cosmic-mind endowment of the Master Spirit of Orvonton. The mortal intellect, as such, has perished, has ceased to exist as a focalized universe entity apart from the undifferentiated mind circuits of the Creative Spirit.

But the meanings and values of the mortal mind have not perished. Certain phases of mind are continued in the surviving soul; certain experiential values of the former human mind are held by the Adjuster; and there persist in the local universe the records of the human life as it was lived in the flesh, together with certain living registrations in the numerous beings who are concerned with the final evaluation of the ascending mortal, beings extending in range from seraphim to Universal Censors and probably on beyond to the Supreme.

Creature volition cannot exist without mind, but it does persist in spite of the loss of the material intellect. During the times immediately following survival, the ascending personality is in great measure guided by the character patterns inherited from the human life and by the newly appearing action of soul mota. And these guides to mansonia conduct function acceptably in the early stages of the soul life and prior to the emergence of soul will as a full-fledged volitional expression of the ascending personality.

There are no influences in the local universe career comparable to the seven adjutant mind-spirits of human existence. The soul mind must evolve by direct contact with cosmic mind, as this cosmic mind has been modified and translated by the creative source of local universe intellect — the Divine Minister.

Mortal mind, prior to death, is self-consciously independent of the Adjuster presence; adjutant mind needs only the associated material-energy pattern to enable it to operate. But the soul soul, being superadjutant, does not retain self-consciousness without the Adjuster when deprived of the material mind mechanism. This evolving soul does, however, possess a continuing character derived from the decisions of its former associated adjutant mind, and this character becomes active memory when the patterns thereof are energized by the returning Adjuster.

The persistence of memory is proof of the retention of the identity of original selfhood; it is essential to complete self-consciousness of personality continuity and expansion. Those mortals who ascend without Adjusters are dependent on the instruction of seraphic associates for the reconstruction of human memory; otherwise the soul souls of the Spirit-fused mortals are not limited. The pattern of memory persists in the soul, but this pattern requires the presence of the former Adjuster to become immediately self-realizable as continuing memory. Without the Adjuster, it requires considerable time for the mortal survivor to re-explore and relearn, to recapture, the memory consciousness of the meanings and values of a former existence.

The soul of survival value faithfully reflects both the qualitative and the quantitative actions and motivations of the material intellect, the former seat of the identity of selfhood. In the choosing of truth, beauty, and goodness, the mortal mind enters upon its presoul universe career under the tutelage of the seven adjutant mind-spirits unified under the direction of the spirit of wisdom. Subsequently, upon the completion of the seven circles of presoul attainment, the superimposition of the endowment of soul mind upon adjutant mind initiates the prespiritual or soul career of local universe progression.

When a creature leaves his native planet, he leaves the adjutant ministry behind and becomes solely dependent on soul intellect. When an ascender leaves the local universe, he has attained the spiritual level of existence, having passed beyond the soul level. This newly appearing spirit entity then becomes attuned to the direct ministry of the cosmic mind of Orvonton.

Adjuster Fusion Thought Adjuster fusion imparts eternal actualities to personality which were previously only potential.

Among these new endowments may be mentioned: fixation of divinity quality, past-eternity experience and memory, immortality, and a phase of qualified potential absoluteness.

When your earthly course in temporary form has been run, you are to awaken on the shores of a better world, and eventually you will be united with your faithful Adjuster in an eternal embrace. And this fusion constitutes the mystery of making God and man one, the mystery of finite creature evolution, but it is eternally true. Fusion is the secret of the sacred sphere of Ascendington, and no creature, save those who have experienced fusion with the spirit of Deity, can comprehend the true meaning of the actual values which are conjoined when the identity of a creature of time becomes eternally one with the spirit of Paradise Deity.

Fusion with the Adjuster is usually effected while the ascender is resident within his local system. It may occur on the planet of nativity as a transcendence of natural death; it may take place on any one of the mansion worlds or on the headquarters of the system; it may even be delayed until the time of the constellation sojourn; or, in special instances, it may not be consummated until the ascender is on the local universe capital.

When fusion with the Adjuster has been effected, there can be no future danger to the eternal career of such a personality. Celestial beings are tested throughout a long experience, but mortals pass through a relatively short and intensive testing on the evolutionary and soul worlds.

Fusion with the Adjuster never occurs until the mandates of the superuniverse have pronounced that the human nature has made a final and irrevocable choice for the eternal career. This is the at-onement authorization, which, when issued, constitutes the clearance authority for the fused personality eventually to leave the confines of the local universe to proceed sometime to the headquarters of the superuniverse, from which point the pilgrim of time will, in the distant future, enseconaphim for the long flight to the central universe of Havona and the Deity adventure.

On the evolutionary worlds, selfhood is material; it is a thing in the universe and as such is subject to the laws of material existence. It is a fact in time and is responsive to the vicissitudes thereof. Survival decisions must here be formulated. In the soul state the self has become a new and more enduring universe reality, and its continuing growth is predicated on its increasing attunement to the mind and spirit circuits of the universes. Survival decisions are now being confirmed. When the self attains the spiritual level, it has become a secure value in the universe, and this new value is predicated upon the fact that survival decisions have been made, which fact has been witnessed by eternal fusion with the Thought Adjuster. And having achieved the status of a true universe value, the creature becomes liberated in potential for the seeking of the highest universe value — God. Such fused beings are twofold in their universe reactions: They are discrete soul individuals not altogether unlike seraphim, and they are also beings in potential on the order of the Paradise finaliters.

But the fused individual is really one personality, one being, whose unity defies all attempts at analysis by any intelligence of the universes. And so, having passed the tribunals of the local universe from the lowest to the highest, none of which have been able to identify man or Adjuster, the one apart from the other, you shall finally be taken before the Sovereign of Nebadon, your local universe Father. And there, at the hand of the very being whose creative fatherhood in this universe of time has made possible the fact of your life, you will be granted those credentials which entitle you eventually to proceed upon your superuniverse career in quest of the Universal Father.

Has the triumphant Adjuster won personality by the magnificent service to humanity, or has the valiant human acquired immortality through sincere efforts to achieve Adjusterlikeness? It is neither; but they together have achieved the evolution of a member of one of the unique orders of the ascending personalities of the Supreme, one who will ever be found serviceable, faithful, and efficient, a candidate for further growth and development, ever ranging upward and never ceasing the supernal ascent until the seven circuits of Havona have been traversed and the onetime soul of earthly origin stands in worshipful recognition of the actual personality of the Father on Paradise .

Throughout all this magnificent ascent the Thought Adjuster is the divine pledge of the future and full spiritual stabilization of the ascending mortal. Meanwhile the presence of the mortal free will affords the Adjuster an eternal channel for the liberation of the divine and infinite nature. Now have these two

identities become one; no event of time or of eternity can ever separate man and Adjuster; they are inseparable, eternally fused.

On the Adjuster-fusion worlds the destiny of the Mystery Monitor is identical with that of the ascending mortal — the Paradise Corps of the Finality. And neither Adjuster nor mortal can attain that unique goal without the full co-operation and faithful help of the other. This extraordinary partnership is one of the most engrossing and amazing of all the cosmic phenomena of this universe age.

From the time of Adjuster fusion the status of the ascender is that of the evolutionary creature. The human member was the first to enjoy personality and, therefore, outranks the Adjuster in all matters concerned with the recognition of personality. The Paradise headquarters of this fused being is Ascendington, not Divinington, and this unique combination of God and man ranks as an ascending mortal all the way up to the Corps of the Finality.

When once an Adjuster fuses with an ascending mortal, the number of that Adjuster is stricken from the records of the superuniverse. What happens on the records of Divinington, I do not know, but I surmise that the registry of that Adjuster is removed to the secret circles of the inner courts of Grandfanda, the acting head of the Corps of the Finality.

With Adjuster fusion the Universal Father has completed his promise of the gift of himself to his material creatures; he has fulfilled the promise, and consummated the plan, of the eternal bestowal of divinity upon humanity. Now begins the human attempt to realize and to actualize the limitless possibilities that are inherent in the supernal partnership with God which has thus factualized.

The present known destiny of surviving mortals is the Paradise Corps of the Finality; this is also the goal of destiny for all Thought Adjusters who become joined in eternal union with their mortal companions.

At present the Paradise finaliters are working throughout the grand universe in many undertakings, but we all conjecture that they will have other and even more supernal tasks to perform in the distant future after the seven superuniverses have become settled in light and life, and when the finite God has finally emerged from the mystery which now surrounds this Supreme Deity.

You have been instructed to a certain extent about the organization and personnel of the central universe, the superuniverses, and the local universes; you have been told something about the character and origin of some of the various personalities who now rule these far-flung creations. You have also been informed that there are in process of organization vast galaxies of universes far out beyond the periphery of the grand universe, in the first outer space level. It has also been intimated in the course of these narratives that the Supreme Being is to disclose his unrevealed tertiary function in these now uncharted regions of outer space; and you have also been told that the finaliters of the Paradise corps are the experiential children of the Supreme.

We believe that the mortals of Adjuster fusion, together with their finaliter associates, are destined to function in some manner in the administration of the universes of the first oute r space level. We have not the slightest doubt that in due time these enormous galaxies will become inhabited universes. And

we are equally convinced that among the administrators thereof will be found the Paradise finaliters whose natures are the cosmic consequence of the blending of creature and Creator.

What an adventure! What a romance! A gigantic creation to be administered by the children of the Supreme, these personalized and humanized Adjusters, these Adjusterized and eternalized mortals, these mysterious combinations and eternal associations of the highest known manifestation of the essence of the First Source and Center and the lowest form of intelligent life capable of comprehending and attaining the Universal Father. We conceive that such amalgamated beings, such partnerships of Creator and creature, will become superb rulers, matchless administrators, and understanding and sympathetic directors of any and all forms of intelligent life which may come into existence throughout these future universes of the first outer space level.

True it is, you mortals are of earthly, animal origin; your frame is indeed dust. But if you actually will, if you really desire, surely the heritage of the ages is yours, and you shall someday serve throughout the universes in your true characters — children of the Supreme God of experience and divine sons of the Paradise Father of all personalities.

[Presented by a Solitary Messenger of Orvonton.]

The Foundations of Religious Faith TO THE unbelieving materialist, man is simply an evolutionary accident. His hopes of survival are strung on a figment of mortal imagination; his fears, loves, longings, and beliefs are but the reaction of the incidental juxtaposition of certain lifeless atoms of matter. No display of energy nor expression of trust can carry him beyond the grave. The devotional labors and inspirational genius of the best of men are doomed to be extinguished by death, the long and lonely night of eternal oblivion and soul extinction.

Nameless despair is man’s only reward for living and toiling under the temporal sun of mortal existence.

Each day of life slowly and surely tightens the grasp of a pitiless doom which a hostile and relentless universe of matter has decreed shall be the crowning insult to everything in human desire which is beautiful, noble, lofty, and good.

But such is not man’s end and eternal destiny; such a vision is but the cry of despair uttered by some wandering soul who has become lost in spiritual darkness, and who bravely struggles on in the face of the mechanistic sophistries of a material philosophy, blinded by the confusion and distortion of a complex learning. And all this doom of darkness and all this destiny of despair are forever dispelled by one brave stretch of faith on the part of the most humble and unlearned of God’s children on earth.

This saving faith has its birth in the human heart when the moral consciousness of man realizes that human values may be translated in mortal experience from the material to the spiritual, from the human to the divine, from time to eternity.

Assurances of Faith The work of the Thought Adjuster constitutes the explanation of the translation of man’s primitive and evolutionary sense of duty into that higher and more certain faith in the eternal reali ties of revelation.

There must be perfection hunger in man’s heart to insure capacity for comprehending the faith paths to supreme attainment. If any man chooses to do the divine will, he shall know the way of truth. It is literally true, “Human things must be known in order to be loved, but divine things must be loved in order to be known.” But honest doubts and sincere questionings are not sin; such attitudes merely spell delay in the progressive journey toward perfection attainment. Childlike trust secures man’s entrance into the kingdom of heavenly ascent, but progress is wholly dependent on the vigorous exercise of the robust and confident faith of the full-grown man.

The reason of science is based on the observable facts of time; the faith of religion argues from the spirit program of eternity. What knowledge and reason cannot do for us, true wisdom admonishes us to allow faith to accomplish through religious insight and spiritual transformation.

Owing to the isolation of rebellion, the revelation of truth on Urantia has all too often been mixed up with the statements of partial and transient cosmologies. Truth remains unchanged from generation to generation, but the associated teachings about the physical world vary from day to day and from year to year. Eternal truth should not be slighted because it chances to be found in company with obsolete ideas regarding the material world. The more of science you know, the less sure you can be; the more of religion you have, the more certain you are.

The certainties of science proceed entirely from the intellect; the certitudes of religion spring from the very foundations of the entire personality. Science appeals to the understanding of the mind; religion appeals to the loyalty and devotion of the body, mind, and spirit, even to the whole personality.

God is so all real and absolute that no material sign of proof or no demonstration of so-called miracle may be offered in testimony of his reality. Always will we know him because we trust him, and our belief in him is wholly based on our personal participation in the divine manifestations of his infinite reality.

The indwelling Thought Adjuster unfailingly arouses in man’s soul a true and searching hunger for perfection together with a far-reaching curiosity which can be adequately satisfied only by communion with God, the divine source of that Adjuster. The hungry soul of man refuses to be satisfied with anything less than the personal realization of the living God. Whatever more God may be than a high and perfect moral personality, he cannot, in our hungry and finite concept, be anything less.

Religion and Reality Observing minds and discriminating souls know religion when they find it in the lives of their fellows.

Religion requires no definition; we all know its social, intellectual, moral, and spiritual fruits. And this all grows out of the fact that religion is the property of the human race; it is not a child of culture. True, one’s perception of religion is still human and therefore subject to the bondage of ignorance, the slavery of superstition, the deceptions of sophistication, and the delusions of false philosophy.

One of the characteristic peculiarities of genuine religious assurance is that, notwithstanding the absoluteness of its affirmations and the stanchness of its attitude, the spirit of its expression is so poised and tempered that it never conveys the slightest impression of self-assertion or egoistic exaltation. The wisdom of religious experience is something of a paradox in that it is both humanly original and Adjuster derivative. Religious force is not the product of the individual’s personal prerogatives but rather the outworking of that sublime partnership of man and the everlasting source of all wisdom. Thus do the words and acts of true and undefiled religion become compellingly authoritative for all enlightened mortals.

It is difficult to identify and analyze the factors of a religious experience, but it is not difficult to observe that such religious practitioners live and carry on as if already in the presence of the Eternal. Believers react to this temporal life as if immortality already were within their grasp. In the lives of such mortals there is a valid originality and spontaneity of expression that forever segregate them from those of their fellows who have imbibed only the wisdom of the world. Religionists seem to live in effective emancipation from harrying haste and the painful stress of the vicissitudes inherent in the temporal currents of time; they exhibit a stabilization of personality and a tranquility of character not explained by the laws of physiology, psychology, and sociology.

Time is an invariable element in the attainment of knowledge; religion makes its endowments immediately available, albeit there is the important factor of growth in grace, definite advancement in all phases of religious experience. Knowledge is an eternal quest; always are you learning, but never are you able to arrive at the full knowledge of absolute truth. In knowledge alone there can never be absolute certainty, only increasing probability of approximation; but the religious soul of spiritual illumination knows, and knows now. And yet this profound and positive certitude does not lead such a sound-minded religionist to take any less interest in the ups and downs of the progress of human wisdom, which is bound up on its material end with the developments of slow-moving science.

Even the discoveries of science are not truly real in the consciousness of human experience until they are unraveled and correlated, until their relevant facts actually become meaning through encircuitment in the thought streams of mind. Mortal man views even his physical environment from the mind level, from the perspective of its psychological registry. It is not, therefore, strange that man should place a highly unified interpretation upon the universe and then seek to identify this energy unity of his science with the spirit unity of his religious experience. Mind is unity; mortal consciousness lives on the mind level and perceives the universal realities through the eyes of the mind endowment. The mind perspective will not yield the existential unity of the source of reality, the First Source and Center, but it can and sometime will portray to man the experiential synthesis of energy, mind, and spirit in and as the Supreme Being. But mind can never succeed in this unification of the diversity of reality unless such mind is firmly aware of material things, intellectual meanings, and spiritual values; only in the harmony of the triunity of functional reality is there unity, and only in unity is there the personality satisfaction of the realization of cosmic constancy and consistency.

Unity is best found in human experience through philosophy. And while the body of philosophic thought must ever be founded on material facts, the soul and energy of true philosophic dynamics is mortal spiritual insight.

Evolutionary man does not naturally relish hard work. To keep pace in his life experience with the impelling demands and the compelling urges of a growing religious experience means incessant activity in spiritual growth, intellectual expansion, factual enlargement, and social service. There is no real religion apart from a highly active personality. Therefore do the more indolent of men often seek to escape the rigors of truly religious activities by a species of ingenious self-deception through resorting to a retreat to the false shelter of stereotyped religious doctrines and dogmas. But true religion is alive.

Intellectual crystallization of religious concepts is the equivalent of spiritual death. You cannot conceive of religion without ideas, but when religion once becomes reduced only to an idea, it is no longer religion; it has become merely a species of human philosophy.

Again, there are other types of unstable and poorly disciplined souls who would use the sentimental ideas of religion as an avenue of escape from the irritating demands of living. When certain vacillating and timid mortals attempt to escape from the incessant pressure of evolutionary life, religion, as they conceive it, seems to present the nearest refuge, the best avenue of escape. But it is the mission of religion to prepare man for bravely, even heroically, facing the vicissitudes of life. Religion is evolutionary man’s supreme endowment, the one thing which enables him to carry on and “endure as seeing Him who is invisible.� Mysticism, however, is often something of a retreat from life which is embraced by those humans who do not relish the more robust activities of living a religious life in the open arenas of human society and commerce. True religion must act. Conduct will be the result of religion when man actually has it, or rather when religion is permitted truly to possess the man. Never will religion be content with mere thinking or unacting feeling.

We are not blind to the fact that religion often acts unwisely, even irreligiously, but it acts. Aberrations of religious conviction have led to bloody persecutions, but always and ever religion does something; it is dynamic!

Knowledge, Wisdom, and Insight Intellectual deficiency or educational poverty unavoidably handicaps higher religious attainment because such an impoverished environment of the spiritual nature robs religion of its chief channel of philosophic contact with the world of scientific knowledge. The intellectual factors of religion are important, but their overdevelopment is likewise sometimes very handicapping and embarrassing.

Religion must continually labor under a paradoxical necessity: the necessity of making effective use of thought while at the same time discounting the spiritual serviceableness of all thinking.

Religious speculation is inevitable but always detrimental; speculation invariably falsifies its object.

Speculation tends to translate religion into something material or humanistic, and thus, while directly interfering with the clarity of logical thought, it indirectly causes religion to appear as a function of the temporal world, the very world with which it should everlastingly stand in contrast. Therefore will

religion always be characterized by paradoxes, the paradoxes resulting from the absence of the experiential connection between the material and the spiritual levels of the universe — soul mota, the superphilosophic sensitivity for truth discernment and unity perception.

Material feelings, human emotions, lead directly to material actions, selfish acts. Religious insights, spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic benevolence.

Religious desire is the hunger quest for divine reality. Religious experience is the realization of the consciousness of having found God. And when a human being does find God, there is experienced within the soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that he has found God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal goodness within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows. Real religion leads to increased social service.

Science, knowledge, leads to fact consciousness; religion, experience, leads to value consciousness; philosophy, wisdom, leads to co-ordinate consciousness; revelation (the substitute for soul mota) leads to the consciousness of true reality; while the co-ordination of the consciousness of fact, value, and true reality constitutes awareness of personality reality, maximum of being, together with the belief in the possibility of the survival of that very personality.

Knowledge leads to placing men, to originating social strata and castes. Religion leads to serving men, thus creating ethics and altruism. Wisdom leads to the higher and better fellowship of both ideas and one’s fellows. Revelation liberates men and starts them out on the eternal adventure.

Science sorts men; religion loves men, even as yourself; wisdom does justice to differing men; but revelation glorifies man and discloses his capacity for partnership with God. Science vainly strives to create the brotherhood of culture; religion brings into being the brotherhood of the spirit. Philosophy strives for the brotherhood of wisdom; revelation portrays the eternal brotherhood, the Paradise Corps of the Finality.

Knowledge yields pride in the fact of personality; wisdom is the consciousness of the meaning of personality; religion is the experience of cognizance of the value of personality; revelation is the assurance of personality survival.

Science seeks to identify, analyze, and classify the segmented parts of the limitless cosmos. Religion grasps the idea-of-the-whole, the entire cosmos. Philosophy attempts the identification of the material segments of science with the spiritual-insight concept of the whole. Wherein philosophy fails in this attempt, revelation succeeds, affirming that the cosmic circle is universal, eternal, absolute, and infinite.

This cosmos of the Infinite I AM is therefore endless, limitless, and all -inclusive — timeless, spaceless, and unqualified. And we bear testimony that the Infinite I AM is also the Father of Michael of Nebadon and the God of human salvation.

Science indicates Deity as a fact; philosophy presents the idea of an Absolute; religion envisions God as a loving spiritual personality. Revelation affirms the unity of the fact of Deity, the idea of the Absolute, and the spiritual personality of God and, further, presents this concept as our Father — the universal fact of existence, the eternal idea of mind, and the infinite spirit of life.

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.

In science, the idea precedes the expression of its realization; in religion, the experience of realization precedes the expression of the idea. There is a vast difference between the evolutionary will-to-believe and the product of enlightened reason, religious insight, and revelation — the will that believes.

In evolution, religion often leads to man’s creating his concepts of God; revelation exhibits the phenomenon of God’s evolving man himself, while in the earth life of Christ Michael we behold the phenomenon of God’s revealing himself to man. Evolution tends to make God manlike; revelation tends to make man Godlike.

Science is only satisfied with first causes, religion with supreme personality, and philosophy with unity.

Revelation affirms that these three are one, and that all are good. The eternal real is the good of the universe and not the time illusions of space evil. In the spiritual experience of all personalities, always is it true that the real is the good and the good is the real.

The Fact of Experience Because of the presence in your minds of the Thought Adjuster, it is no more of a mystery for you to know the mind of God than for you to be sure of the consciousness of knowing any other mind, human or superhuman. Religion and social consciousness have this in common: They are predicated on the consciousness of other-mindness. The technique whereby you can accept another’s idea as yours is the same whereby you may “let the mind which was in Christ be also in you.”

What is human experience? It is simply any interplay between an active and questioning self and any other active and external reality. The mass of experience is determined by depth of concept plus totality of recognition of the reality of the external. The motion of experience equals the force of expectant imagination plus the keenness of the sensory discovery of the external qualities of contacted reality. The fact of experience is found in self-consciousness plus other-existences — other-thingness, othermindness, and other-spiritness.

Man very early becomes conscious that he is not alone in the world or the universe. There develops a natural spontaneous self-consciousness of other-mindness in the environment of selfhood. Faith translates this natural experience into religion, the recognition of God as the reality — source, nature, and destiny — of other-mindness. But such a knowledge of God is ever and always a reality of personal

experience. If God were not a personality, he could not become a living part of the real religious experience of a human personality.

The element of error present in human religious experience is directly proportional to the content of materialism which contaminates the spiritual concept of the Universal Father. Man’s prespirit progression in the universe consists in the experience of divesting himself of these erroneous ideas of the nature of God and of the reality of pure and true spirit. Deity is more than spirit, but the spiritual approach is the only one possible to ascending man.

Prayer is indeed a part of religious experience, but it has been wrongly emphasized by modern religions, much to the neglect of the more essential communion of worship. The reflective powers of the mind are deepened and broadened by worship. Prayer may enrich the life, but worship illuminates destiny.

Revealed religion is the unifying element of human existence. Revelation unifies history, co-ordinates geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and psychol ogy. Spiritual experience is the real soul of man’s cosmos.

The Supremacy of Purposive Potential Although the establishment of the fact of belief is not equivalent to establishing the fact of that which is believed, nevertheless, the evolutionary progression of simple life to the status of personality does demonstrate the fact of the existence of the potential of personality to start with. And in the time universes, potential is always supreme over the actual. In the evolving cosmos the potential is what is to be, and what is to be is the unfolding of the purposive mandates of Deity.

This same purposive supremacy is shown in the evolution of mind ideation when primitive animal fear is transmuted into the constantly deepening reverence for God and into increasing awe of the universe.

Primitive man had more religious fear than faith, and the supremacy of spirit potentials over mind actuals is demonstrated when this craven fear is translated into living faith in spiritual realities.

You can psychologize evolutionary religion but not the personal-experience religion of spiritual origin.

Human morality may recognize values, but only religion can conserve, exalt, and spiritualize such values.

But notwithstanding such actions, religion is something more than emotionalized morality. Religion is to morality as love is to duty, as sonship is to servitude, as essence is to substance. Morality discloses an almighty Controller, a Deity to be served; religion discloses an all-loving Father, a God to be worshiped and loved. And again this is because the spiritual potentiality of religion is dominant over the duty actuality of the morality of evolution.

The Certainty of Religious Faith The philosophic elimination of religious fear and the steady progress of science add greatly to the mortality of false gods; and even though these casualties of man-made deities may momentarily befog the spiritual vision, they eventually destroy that ignorance and superstition which so long obscured the

living God of eternal love. The relation between the creature and the Creator is a living experience, a dynamic religious faith, which is not subject to precise definition. To isolate part of life and call it religion is to disintegrate life and to distort religion. And this is just why the God of worship claims all allegiance or none.

The gods of primitive men may have been no more than shadows of themselves; the living God is the divine light whose interruptions constitute the creation shadows of all space.

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 gravi ty, 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.

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.

Convictions about God may be arrived at through wise reasoning, but the individual becomes God knowing only by faith, through personal experience. In much that pertains to life, probability must be reckoned with, but when contacting with cosmic reality, certainty may be experienced when such meanings and values are approached by living faith. The God-knowing soul dares to say, “I know,” even when this knowledge of God is questioned by the unbeliever who denies such certitude because it is not wholly supported by intellectual logic. To every such doubter the believer only replies, “How do you know that I do not know?”

Though reason can always question faith, faith can always supplement both reason and logic. Reason creates the probability which faith can transform into a moral certainty, even a spiritual experience. God is the first truth and the last fact; therefore does all truth take origin in him, while all facts exist relative to him. God is absolute truth. As truth one may know God, but to understand — to explain — God, one must explore the fact of the universe of universes. The vast gulf between the experience of the truth of God and ignorance as to the fact of God can be bridged only by living faith. Reason alone cannot achieve harmony between infinite truth and universal fact.

Belief may not be able to resist doubt and withstand fear, but faith is always triumphant over doubting, for faith is both positive and living. The positive always has the advantage over the negative, truth over error, experience over theory, spiritual realities over the isolated facts of time and space. The convincing evidence of this spiritual certainty consists in the social fruits of the spirit which such believers, faithers, yield as a result of this genuine spiritual experience. Said Jesus: “If you love your fellows as I have loved you, then shall all men know that you are my disciples.”

To science God is a possibility, to psychology a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an actuality of religious experience. Reason demands that a philosophy which cannot find the God of probability should be very respectful of that religious faith which can and does find the God of certitude. Neither should science discount religious experience on grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the assumption that man’s intellectual and philosophic endowments emerged from increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, finally taking origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of all thinking and feeling.

The facts of evolution must not be arrayed against the truth of the reality of the certainty of the spiritual experience of the religious living of the God-knowing mortal. Intelligent men should cease to reason like children and should attempt to use the consistent logic of adulthood, logic which tolerates the concept of truth alongside the observation of fact. Scientific materialism has gone bankrupt when it persists, in the face of each recurring universe phenomenon, in refunding its current objections by referring what is admittedly higher back into that which is admittedly lower. Consistency demands the recognition of the activities of a purposive Creator.

Organic evolution is a fact; purposive or progressive evolution is a truth which makes consistent the otherwise contradictory phenomena of the ever-ascending achievements of evolution. The higher any scientist progresses in his chosen science, the more will he abandon the the ories of materialistic fact in favor of the cosmic truth of the dominance of the Supreme Mind. Materialism cheapens human life; the gospel of Jesus tremendously enhances and supernally exalts every mortal. Mortal existence must be visualized as consisting in the intriguing and fascinating experience of the realization of the reality of the meeting of the human upreach and the divine and saving downreach.

The Certitude of the Divine The Universal Father, being self-existent, is also self-explanatory; he actually lives in every rational mortal. But you cannot be sure about God unless you know him; sonship is the only experience which makes fatherhood certain. The universe is everywhere undergoing change. A changing universe is a dependent universe; such a creation cannot be either final or absolute. A finite universe is wholly dependent on the Ultimate and the Absolute. The universe and God are not identical; one is cause, the other effect. The cause is absolute, infinite, eternal, and changeless; the effect, time-space and transcendental but ever changing, always growing.

God is the one and only self-caused fact in the universe. He is the secret of the order, plan, and purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. The everywhere-changing universe is regulated and stabilized by absolutely unchanging laws, the habits of an unchanging God. The fact of God, the divine law, is changeless; the truth of God, his relation to the universe, is a relative revelation which is ever adaptable to the constantly evolving universe.

Those who would invent a religion without God are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without parents. You cannot have effects without causes; only the I AM is causeless. The fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience must be a personal Deity. You cannot pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a mathematical equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate, commune with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold loving fellowship with a law.

True, many apparently religious traits can grow out of nonreligious roots. Man can, intellectually, deny God and yet be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. Man may graft many purely humanistic branches onto his basic spiritual nature and thus apparently prove his contentions in behalf of a godless religion, but such an experience is devoid of survival values, God-knowingness and Godascension. In such a mortal experience only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual . The graft determines the nature of the fruit, notwithstanding that the living sustenance is drawn from the roots of original divine endowment of both mind and spirit.

The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love and service.

The God-knowing individual is not one who is blind to the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which stand in the way of finding God in the maze of superstition, tradition, and materialistic tendencies of modern times. He has encountered all these deterrents and triumphed over them, surmounted them by living faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual experience in spite of them.

But it is true that many who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and cleverness of those who assemble objections and magnify difficulties about believing in God. It requires no great depth of intellect to pick flaws, ask questions, or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of mind to answer these questions and solve these difficulties; faith certainty is the greatest technique for dealing with all such superficial contentions.

If science, philosophy, or sociology dares to become dogmatic in contending with the prophets of true religion, then should God-knowing men reply to such unwarranted dogmatism with that more farseeing dogmatism of the certainty of personal spiritual experience, “I know what I have experienced because I am a son of I AM.� If the personal experience of a faither is to be challenged by dogma, then this faithborn son of the experiencible Father may reply with that unchallengeable dogma, the statement of his actual sonship with the Universal Father.

Only an unqualified reality, an absolute, could dare consistently to be dogmatic. Those who assume to be dogmatic must, if consistent, sooner or later be driven into the arms of the Absolute of energy, the Universal of truth, and the Infinite of love.

If the nonreligious approaches to cosmic reality presume to challenge the certainty of faith on the grounds of its unproved status, then the spirit experiencer can likewise resort to the dogmatic challenge of the facts of science and the beliefs of philosophy on the grounds that they are likewise unproved; they are likewise experiences in the consciousness of the scientist or the philosopher.

Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, and the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.

The Evidences of Religion The highest evidence of the reality and efficacy of religion consists in the fact of human experience; namely, that man, naturally fearful and suspicious, innately endowed with a strong instinct of self-preservation and craving survival after death, is willing fully to trust the deepest interests of his present and future to the keeping and direction of that power and person designated by his faith as God. That is the one central truth of all religion. As to what that power or person requires of man in return for this watchcare and final salvation, no two religions agree; in fact, they all more or less disagree.

Regarding the status of any religion in the evolutionary scale, it may best be judged by its moral judgments and its ethical standards. The higher the type of any religion, the more it encourages and is encouraged by a constantly improving social morality and ethical culture. We cannot judge religion by the status of its accompanying civilization; we had better estimate the real nature of a civilization by the purity and nobility of its religion. Many of the world’s most notable religious teachers have been virtually unlettered. The wisdom of the world is not necessary to an exercise of saving faith in eternal realities.

The difference in the religions of various ages is wholly dependent on the difference in man’s comprehension of reality and on his differing recognition of moral values, ethical relationships, and spirit realities.

Ethics is the external social or racial mirror which faithfully reflects the otherwise unobservable progress of internal spiritual and religious developments. Man has always thought of God in the terms of the best he knew, his deepest ideas and highest ideals. Even historic religion has always created its God conceptions out of its highest recognized values. Every intelligent creature gives the name of God to the best and highest thing he knows.

Religion, when reduced to terms of reason and intellectual expression, has always dared to criticize civilization and evolutionary progress as judged by its own standards of ethical culture and moral progress.

While personal religion precedes the evolution of human morals, it is regretfully recorded that institutional religion has invariably lagged behind the slowly changing mores of the human races.

Organized religion has proved to be conservatively tardy. The prophets have usually led the people in religious development; the theologians have usually held them back. Religion, being a matter of inner or personal experience, can never develop very far in advance of the intellectual evolution of the races.

But religion is never enhanced by an appeal to the so-called miraculous. The quest for miracles is a harking back to the primitive religions of magic. True religion has nothing to do with alleged miracles, and never does revealed religion point to miracles as proof of authority. Religion is ever and always rooted and grounded in personal experience. And your highest religion, the life of Jesus, was just such a personal experience: man, mortal man, seeking God and finding him to the fullness during one short life in the flesh, while in the same human experience there appeared God seeking man and finding him to the full satisfaction of the perfect soul of infinite supremacy. And that is religion, even the highest yet revealed in the universe of Nebadon — the earth life of Jesus of Nazareth.

[Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]

Science and Religion Science is sustained by reason, religion by faith. Faith, though not predicated on reason, is reasonable; though independent of logic, it is nonetheless encouraged by sound logic. Faith cannot be nourished even by an ideal philosophy; indeed, it is, with science, the very source of such a philosophy. Faith, human religious insight, can be surely instructed only by revelation, can be surely elevated only by personal mortal experience with the spiritual Adjuster presence of the God who is spirit.

True salvation is the technique of the divine evolution of the mortal mind from matter identification through the realms of soul liaison to the high universe status of spiritual correlation. And as material intuitive instinct precedes the appearance of reasoned knowledge in terrestrial evolution, so does the manifestation of spiritual intuitive insight presage the later appearance of soul and spirit reason and experience in the supernal program of celestial evolution, the business of transmuting the potentials of man the temporal into the actuality and divinity of man the eternal, a Paradise finaliter.

But as ascending man reaches inward and Paradiseward for the God experience, he will likewise be reaching outward and spaceward for an energy understanding of the material cosmos. The progression of science is not limited to the terrestrial life of man; his universe and superuniverse ascension experience will to no small degree be the study of energy transmutation and material metamorphosis.

God is spirit, but Deity is unity, and the unity of Deity not only embraces the spiritual values of the Universal Father and the Eternal Son but is also cognizant of the energy facts of the Universal Controller and the Isle of Paradise, while these two phases of universal reality are perfectly correlated in the mind relationships of the Conjoint Actor and unified on the finite level in the emerging Deity of the Supreme Being.

The union of the scientific attitude and the religious insight by the me diation of experiential philosophy is part of man’s long Paradise-ascension experience. The approximations of mathematics and the certainties of insight will always require the harmonizing function of mind logic on all levels of experience short of the maximum attainment of the Supreme.

But logic can never succeed in harmonizing the findings of science and the insights of religion unless both the scientific and the religious aspects of a personality are truth dominated, sincerely desirous of following the truth wherever it may lead regardless of the conclusions which it may reach.

Logic is the technique of philosophy, its method of expression. Within the domain of true science, reason is always amenable to genuine logic; within the domain of true religion, faith is always logical from the basis of an inner viewpoint, even though such faith may appear to be quite unfounded from the inlooking viewpoint of the scientific approach. From outward, looking within, the universe may appear to be material; from within, looking out, the same universe appears to be wholly spiritual.

Reason grows out of material awareness, faith out of spiritual awareness, but through the mediation of a philosophy strengthened by revelation, logic may confirm both the inward and the outw ard view, thereby effecting the stabilization of both science and religion. Thus, through common contact with the logic of philosophy, may both science and religion become increasingly tolerant of each other, less and less skeptical.

What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness in evolutionary status. The teachers of both science and religion are often altogether too self-confident and dogmatic. Science and religion can only be self-critical of their facts. The moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic.

The truth — an understanding of cosmic relationships, universe facts, and spiritual val ues — can best be had through the ministry of the Spirit of Truth and can best be criticized by revelation. But revelation originates neither a science nor a religion; its function is to co-ordinate both science and religion with the truth of reality. Always, in the absence of revelation or in the failure to accept or grasp it, has mortal man resorted to his futile gesture of metaphysics, that being the only human substitute for the revelation of truth or for the mota of soul personality.

The science of the material world enables man to control, and to some extent dominate, his physical environment. The religion of the spiritual experience is the source of the fraternity impulse which enables men to live together in the complexities of the civilization of a scientific age. Metaphysics, but more certainly revelation, affords a common meeting ground for the discoveries of both science and religion and makes possible the human attempt logically to correlate these separate but interdependent domains of thought into a well-balanced philosophy of scientific stability and religious certainty.

In the mortal state, nothing can be absolutely proved; both science and religion are predicated on assumptions. On the soul level, the postulates of both science and religion are capable of partial proof by mota logic. On the spiritual level of maximum status, the need for finite proof gradually vanishes before the actual experience of and with reality; but even then there is much beyond the finite that remains unproved.

All divisions of human thought are predicated on certain assumptions which are accepted, though unproved, by the constitutive reality sensitivity of the mind endowment of man. Science starts out on its vaunted career of reasoning by assuming the reality of three things: matter, motion, and life. Religion starts out with the assumption of the validity of three things: mind, spirit, and the universe — the Supreme Being.

Science becomes the thought domain of mathematics, of the energy and material of time in space.

Religion assumes to deal not only with finite and temporal spirit but also with the spirit of eternity and supremacy. Only through a long experience in mota can these two extremes of universe perception be made to yield analogous interpretations of origins, functions, relations, realities, and destinies. The maximum harmonization of the energy-spirit divergence is in the encircuitment of the Seven Master Spirits; the first unification thereof, in the Deity of the Supreme; the finality unity thereof, in the infinity of the First Source and Center, the I AM. Reason is the act of recognizing the conclusions of consciousness with regard to the experience in and with the physical world of energy and matter. Faith is the act of recognizing the validity of spiritual consciousness — something which is incapable of other mortal proof. Logic is the synthetic truthseeking progression of the unity of faith and reason and is founded on the constitutive mind endowments of mortal beings, the innate recognition of things, meanings, and values.

There is a real proof of spiritual reality in the presence of the Thought Adjuster, but the validity of this presence is not demonstrable to the external world, only to the one who thus experiences the indwelling of God. The consciousness of the Adjuster is based on the intellectual reception of truth, the supermind perception of goodness, and the personality motivation to love.

Science discovers the material world, religion evaluates it, and philosophy endeavors to interpret its meanings while co-ordinating the scientific material viewpoint with the religious spiritual concept. But history is a realm in which science and religion may never fully agree.

Philosophy and Religion Although both science and philosophy may assume the probability of God by their reason and logic, only the personal religious experience of a spirit-led man can affirm the certainty of such a supreme and personal Deity. By the technique of such an incarnation of living truth the philosophic hypothesis of the probability of God becomes a religious reality.

The confusion about the experience of the certainty of God arises out of the dissimilar interpretations and relations of that experience by separate individuals and by different races of men. The experiencin g of God may be wholly valid, but the discourse about God, being intellectual and philosophical, is divergent and oftentimes confusingly fallacious.

A good and noble man may be consummately in love with his wife but utterly unable to pass a satisfactory written examination on the psychology of marital love. Another man, having little or no love

for his spouse, might pass such an examination most acceptably. The imperfection of the lover’s insight into the true nature of the beloved does not in the least invalidate either the reality or sincerity of his love.

If you truly believe in God — by faith know him and love him — do not permit the reality of such an experience to be in any way lessened or detracted from by the doubting insinuations of science, the caviling of logic, the postulates of philosophy, or the clever suggestions of well -meaning souls who would create a religion without God. The certainty of the God-knowing religionist should not be disturbed by the uncertainty of the doubting materialist; rather should the uncertainty of the unbeliever be mightily challenged by the profound faith and unshakable certainty of the experiential believer.

Philosophy, to be of the greatest service to both science and religion, should avoid the extremes of both materialism and pantheism. Only a philosophy which recognizes the reality of personality — permanence in the presence of change — can be of moral value to man, can serve as a liaison between the theories of material science and spiritual religion. Revelation is a compensation for the frailties of evolving philosophy.

The Essence of Religion Theology deals with the intellectual content of religion, metaphysics (revelation) with the philosophic aspects. Religious experience is the spiritual content of religion. Notwithstanding the mythologic vagaries and the psychologic illusions of the intellectual content of religion, the metaphysical assumptions of error and the techniques of self-deception, the political distortions and the socioeconomic perversions of the philosophic content of religion, the spiritual experience of personal religion remains genuine and valid.

Religion has to do with feeling, acting, and living, not merely with thinking. Thinking is more closely related to the material life and should be in the main, but not altogether, dominated by reason and the facts of science and, in its nonmaterial reaches toward the spirit realms, by truth. No matter how illusory and erroneous one’s theology, one’s religion may be wholly genuine and everlastingly true.

Buddhism in its original form is one of the best religions without a God which has arisen throughout all the evolutionary history of Urantia, although, as this faith developed, it did not remain godless. Religion without faith is a contradiction; without God, a philosophic inconsistency and an intellectual absurdity.

The magical and mythological parentage of natural religion does not invalidate the reality and truth of the later revelational religions and the consummate saving gospel of the religion of Jesus. Jesus’ life and teachings finally divested religion of the superstitions of magic, the illusions of mythology, and the bondage of traditional dogmatism. But this early magic and mythology very effectively prepared the way for later and superior religion by assuming the existence and reality of supermaterial values and beings.

Although religious experience is a purely spiritual subjective phenomenon, such an experience embraces a positive and living faith attitude toward the highest realms of universe objective reality. The ideal of religious philosophy is such a faith-trust as would lead man unqualifiedly to depend upon the absolute love of the infinite Father of the universe of universes. Such a genuine religious experience far transcends the philosophic objectification of idealistic desire; it actually takes salvation for granted and concerns itself only with learning and doing the will of the Father in Paradise. The earmarks of such a religion are: faith in a supreme Deity, hope of eternal survival, and love, especially of one’s fellows.

When theology masters religion, religion dies; it becomes a doctrine instead of a life. The mission of theology is merely to facilitate the self-consciousness of personal spiritual experience. Theology constitutes the religious effort to define, clarify, expound, and justify the experiential claims of religion, which, in the last analysis, can be validated only by living faith. In the higher philosophy of the universe, wisdom, like reason, becomes allied to faith. Reason, wisdom, and faith are man’s highest human attainments. Reason introduces man to the world of facts, to things; wisdom introduces him to a world of truth, to relationships; faith initiates him into a world of divinity, spiritual experience.

Faith most willingly carries reason along as far as reason can go and then goes on with wisdom to the full philosophic limit; and then it dares to launch out upon the limitless and never-ending universe journey in the sole company of TRUTH. Science (knowledge) is founded on the inherent (adjutant spirit) assumption that reason is valid, that the universe can be comprehended. Philosophy (co-ordinate comprehension) is founded on the inherent (spirit of wisdom) assumption that wisdom is valid, that the material universe can be co-ordinated with the spiritual. Religion (the truth of personal spiritual experience) is founded on the inherent (Thought Adjuster) assumption that faith is valid, that God can be known and attained.

The full realization of the reality of mortal life consists in a progressive willingness to believe these assumptions of reason, wisdom, and faith. Such a life is one motivated by truth and dominated by love; and these are the ideals of objective cosmic reality whose existence cannot be materially demonstrated.

When reason once recognizes right and wrong, it exhibits wisdom; when wisdom chooses between right and wrong, truth and error, it demonstrates spirit leading. And thus are the functions of mind, soul, and spirit ever closely united and functionally interassociated. Reason deals with factual knowledge; wisdom, with philosophy and revelation; faith, with living spiritual experience. Through truth man attains beauty and by spiritual love ascends to goodness.

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.

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. [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]

Courtesy of the Urantia Book Revelation Salvington College Seminary

Our enrollment process is ongoing. We add student disciples throughout the year. Upon your consideration of entering into Our association together, it may be reasonable that you will need to talk with some of our current students.

If this is the case, you may contact three members of our staff who will be happy to share with you their experience, and to place you in touch with others who have taken the next steps into developing and establishing their own godhood in preparation for the Eternal Embrace.

Contact: Edgar Leon edgar@sovrnty.org

Alicia Cristina Hassan Polo acristina@sovrnty.org

Michalis Balaouras michalis@sovrnty.org

Salvington College Seminary salvingtoncollege@sovrnty.org