The Morontia Life

48:0.1The Gods can­not—at least they do not—trans­form a crea­ture of gross an­i­mal na­ture into a per­fected spirit by some mys­te­ri­ous act of cre­ative magic. When the Cre­ators de­sire to pro­duce per­fect be­ings, they do so by di­rect and orig­i­nal cre­ation, but they never un­der­take to con­vert an­i­mal-ori­gin and ma­te­rial crea­tures into be­ings of per­fec­tion in a sin­gle step.

48:0.2The mor­ontia life, ex­tend­ing as it does over the var­i­ous stages of the lo­cal uni­verse ca­reer, is the only pos­si­ble ap­proach whereby ma­te­rial mor­tals could at­tain the thresh­old of the spirit world. What magic could death, the nat­u­ral dis­so­lu­tion of the ma­te­rial body, hold that such a sim­ple step should in­stantly trans­form the mor­tal and ma­te­rial mind into an im­mor­tal and per­fected spirit? Such be­liefs are but ig­no­rant su­per­sti­tions and pleas­ing fa­bles.

48:0.3Al­ways this mor­ontia tran­si­tion in­ter­venes be­tween the mor­tal es­tate and the sub­se­quent spirit sta­tus of sur­viv­ing hu­man be­ings. This in­ter­me­di­ate state of uni­verse prog­ress dif­fers markedly in the var­i­ous lo­cal cre­ations, but in in­tent and pur­pose they are all quite sim­i­lar. The ar­range­ment of the man­sion and higher mor­ontia worlds in Neb­a­don is fairly typ­i­cal of the mor­ontia tran­si­tion regimes in this part of Or­von­ton.