The Morontia Life

48:8.1From the time of grad­u­a­tion from the man­sion worlds to the at­tain­ment of spirit sta­tus in the super­uni­verse ca­reer, as­cend­ing mor­tals are de­nom­i­nated mor­ontia pro­gres­sors. Your pas­sage through this won­der­ful bor­der­land life will be an un­for­get­table ex­pe­ri­ence, a charm­ing mem­ory. It is the evo­lu­tion­ary por­tal to spirit life and the even­tual at­tain­ment of crea­ture per­fec­tion by which as­cend­ers achieve the goal of time—the find­ing of God on Par­a­dise.

48:8.2There is a def­i­nite and di­vine pur­pose in all this mor­ontia and sub­se­quent spirit scheme of mor­tal pro­gres­sion, this elab­o­rate uni­verse train­ing school for as­cend­ing crea­tures. It is the de­sign of the Cre­ators to af­ford the crea­tures of time a grad­u­ated op­por­tu­nity to mas­ter the de­tails of the op­er­a­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tion of the grand uni­verse, and this long course of train­ing is best car­ried for­ward by hav­ing the sur­viv­ing mor­tal climb up grad­u­ally and by ac­tual par­tic­i­pa­tion in ev­ery step of the as­cent.

48:8.3The mor­tal-sur­vival plan has a prac­ti­cal and ser­vice­able ob­jec­tive; you are not the re­cip­i­ents of all this di­vine la­bor and painstak­ing train­ing only that you may sur­vive just to en­joy end­less bliss and eter­nal ease. There is a goal of tran­scen­dent ser­vice con­cealed be­yond the hori­zon of the pres­ent uni­verse age. If the Gods de­signed merely to take you on one long and eter­nal joy ex­cur­sion, they cer­tainly would not so largely turn the whole uni­verse into one vast and in­tri­cate prac­ti­cal train­ing school, req­ui­si­tion a sub­stan­tial part of the ce­les­tial cre­ation as teach­ers and in­struc­tors, and then spend ages upon ages pi­lot­ing you, one by one, through this gi­gan­tic uni­verse school of ex­pe­ri­en­tial train­ing. The fur­ther­ance of the scheme of mor­tal pro­gres­sion seems to be one of the chief busi­nesses of the pres­ent or­ga­nized uni­verse, and the ma­jor­ity of in­nu­mer­able or­ders of cre­ated in­tel­li­gences are ei­ther di­rectly or in­di­rectly en­gaged in ad­vanc­ing some phase of this pro­gres­sive per­fec­tion plan.

48:8.4In travers­ing the as­cend­ing scale of liv­ing ex­is­tence from mor­tal man to the De­ity em­brace, you ac­tu­ally live the very life of ev­ery pos­si­ble phase and stage of per­fected crea­ture ex­is­tence within the lim­its of the pres­ent uni­verse age. From mor­tal man to Par­a­dise fi­nal­i­ter em­braces all that now can be—en­com­passes ev­ery­thing pres­ently pos­si­ble to the liv­ing or­ders of in­tel­li­gent, per­fected fi­nite crea­ture be­ings. If the fu­ture des­tiny of the Par­a­dise fi­nal­i­ters is ser­vice in new uni­verses now in the mak­ing, it is as­sured that in this new and fu­ture cre­ation there will be no cre­ated or­ders of ex­pe­ri­en­tial be­ings whose lives will be wholly dif­fer­ent from those which mor­tal fi­nal­i­ters have lived on some world as a part of their as­cend­ing train­ing, as one of the stages of their age­long prog­ress from an­i­mal to an­gel and from an­gel to spirit and from spirit to God.

48:8.5[Pre­sented by an Arch­an­gel of Neb­a­don.]