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Urantia

300 paragraphs · about 2 hours · 7 chapters

The paragraphs in the index’s own groups, a chapter to each, in the order the index prints them, and in the order of the book within each. A paragraph read in an earlier chapter is named in one line.

celestial government 70 paragraphs

15:14.8The grand uni­verse num­ber of your world, Uran­tia, is 5,342,482,337,666. That is the reg­istry num­ber on Uversa and on Par­a­dise, your num­ber in the cat­a­logue of the in­hab­ited worlds. I know the phys­i­cal-sphere reg­istry num­ber, but it is of such an ex­traor­di­nary size that it is of lit­tle prac­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance to the mor­tal mind.

15:14.9Your planet is a mem­ber of an enor­mous cos­mos; you be­long to a well-nigh in­fi­nite fam­ily of worlds, but your sphere is just as pre­cisely ad­min­is­tered and just as lov­ingly fos­tered as if it were the only in­hab­ited world in all ex­is­tence.

20:4.4Uran­tia has never been host to an Avo­nal Son on a mag­is­te­rial mis­sion. Had Uran­tia fol­lowed the gen­eral plan of in­hab­ited worlds, it would have been blessed with a mag­is­te­rial mis­sion some­time be­tween the days of Adam and the be­stowal of Christ Mi­chael. But the reg­u­lar se­quence of Par­a­dise Sons on your planet was wholly de­ranged by the ap­pear­ance of your Cre­ator Son on his ter­mi­nal be­stowal nine­teen hun­dred years ago.

20:4.5Uran­tia may yet be vis­ited by an Avo­nal com­mis­sioned to in­car­nate on a mag­is­te­rial mis­sion, but re­gard­ing the fu­ture ap­pear­ance of Par­a­dise Sons, not even “the an­gels in heaven know the time or man­ner of such vis­i­ta­tions,” for a Mi­chael-be­stowal world be­comes the in­di­vid­ual and per­sonal ward of a Mas­ter Son and, as such, is wholly sub­ject to his own plans and rul­ings. And with your world, this is fur­ther com­pli­cated by Mi­chael’s prom­ise to re­turn. Re­gard­less of the mis­un­der­stand­ings about the Uran­tian so­journ of Mi­chael of Neb­a­don, one thing is cer­tainly au­then­tic—his prom­ise to come back to your world. In view of this prospect, only time can re­veal the fu­ture or­der of the vis­i­ta­tions of the Par­a­dise Sons of God on Uran­tia.

20:9.1When the prog­ress of events on an evo­lu­tion­ary world in­di­cates that the time is ripe to ini­ti­ate a spir­i­tual age, the Trin­ity Teacher Sons al­ways vol­un­teer for this ser­vice. You are not fa­mil­iar with this or­der of son­ship be­cause Uran­tia has never ex­pe­ri­enced a spir­i­tual age, a mil­len­nium of cos­mic en­light­en­ment. But the Teacher Sons even now visit your world for the pur­pose of for­mu­lat­ing plans con­cern­ing their pro­jected so­journ on your sphere. They will be due to ap­pear on Uran­tia af­ter its in­hab­i­tants have gained com­par­a­tive de­liv­er­ance from the shack­les of an­i­mal­ism and from the fet­ters of ma­te­ri­al­ism.

21:5.9Af­ter his el­e­va­tion to set­tled sov­er­eignty in a lo­cal uni­verse a Par­a­dise Mi­chael is in full con­trol of all other Sons of God func­tion­ing in his do­main, and he may freely rule in ac­cor­dance with his con­cept of the needs of his realms. A Mas­ter Son may at will vary the or­der of the spir­i­tual ad­ju­di­ca­tion and evo­lu­tion­ary ad­just­ment of the in­hab­ited plan­ets. And such Sons do make and carry out the plans of their own choos­ing in all mat­ters of spe­cial plan­e­tary needs, in par­tic­u­lar re­gard­ing the worlds of their crea­ture so­journ and still more con­cern­ing the realm of ter­mi­nal be­stowal, the planet of in­car­na­tion in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh.

21:5.10The Mas­ter Sons seem to be in per­fect com­mu­ni­ca­tion with their be­stowal worlds, not only the worlds of their per­sonal so­journ but all worlds whereon a Mag­is­te­rial Son has be­stowed him­self. This con­tact is main­tained by their own spir­i­tual pres­ence, the Spirit of Truth, which they are able to “pour out upon all flesh.” These Mas­ter Sons also main­tain an un­bro­ken con­nec­tion with the Eter­nal Mother Son at the cen­ter of all things. They pos­sess a sym­pa­thetic reach which ex­tends from the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther on high to the lowly races of plan­e­tary life in the realms of time.

23:0.2These spirit mes­sen­gers were per­son­al­ized in a sin­gle cre­ative episode, and their num­ber is sta­tion­ary. Al­though I have one of these ex­traor­di­nary be­ings as­so­ci­ated with me on this pres­ent mis­sion, I do not know how many such per­son­al­i­ties ex­ist in the uni­verse of uni­verses. I only know, from time to time, how many are of reg­istry-rec­ord as func­tion­ing for the time be­ing within the ju­ris­dic­tion of our super­uni­verse. From the last Uversa re­port I ob­serve that there were al­most 7,690 tril­lion Soli­tary Mes­sen­gers then op­er­at­ing within the bound­aries of Or­von­ton; and I con­jec­ture that this is con­sid­er­ably less than one sev­enth of their to­tal num­ber.

25:3.31. Con­cil­ia­tors to the Worlds. When­ever the super­vis­ing per­son­al­i­ties of the in­di­vid­ual worlds be­come greatly per­plexed or ac­tu­ally dead­locked con­cern­ing the proper pro­ce­dure un­der ex­ist­ing cir­cum­stances, and if the mat­ter is not of suf­fi­cient im­por­tance to be brought be­fore the reg­u­larly con­sti­tuted tri­bu­nals of the realm, then, upon the re­ceipt of a pe­ti­tion of two per­son­al­i­ties, one from each con­tention, a con­cil­i­at­ing com­mis­sion will be­gin to func­tion forth­with.

25:3.4When these ad­min­is­tra­tive and ju­ris­dic­tional dif­fi­cul­ties have been placed in the hands of the con­cil­ia­tors for study and ad­ju­di­ca­tion, they are su­preme in au­thor­ity. But they will not for­mu­late a de­ci­sion un­til all the ev­i­dence has been heard, and there is ab­so­lutely no limit to their au­thor­ity to call wit­nesses from any­where and ev­ery­where. And while their de­ci­sions may not be ap­pealed, some­times mat­ters so de­velop that the com­mis­sion closes its rec­ords at a given point, con­cludes its opin­ions, and trans­fers the whole ques­tion to the higher tri­bu­nals of the realm.

25:3.5The com­mis­sion­ers’ de­ci­sions are placed on the plan­e­tary rec­ords and, if nec­es­sary, are put into ef­fect by the di­vine ex­e­cu­tioner. His power is very great, and the range of his ac­tiv­i­ties on an in­hab­ited world is very wide. Di­vine ex­e­cu­tion­ers are mas­ter­ful ma­nip­u­la­tors of that which is in the in­ter­ests of that which ought to be. Their work is some­times car­ried out for the ap­par­ent wel­fare of the realm, and some­times their acts on the worlds of time and space are dif­fi­cult of ex­pla­na­tion. Though ex­e­cut­ing de­crees in de­fi­ance of nei­ther nat­u­ral law nor the or­dained us­ages of the realm, they do oft­times ef­fect their strange do­ings and en­force the man­dates of the con­cil­ia­tors in ac­cor­dance with the higher laws of the sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tion.

27:0.2Pri­mary super­na­phim are also placed in com­mand of the se­raphic hosts min­is­ter­ing on worlds iso­lated be­cause of re­bel­lion. When a Par­a­dise Son is be­stowed upon such a world, com­pletes his mis­sion, as­cends to the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, is ac­cepted, and re­turns as the ac­cred­ited de­liv­erer of this iso­lated world, a pri­mary super­na­phim is al­ways des­ig­nated by the chiefs of as­sign­ment to as­sume com­mand of the min­is­ter­ing spir­its on duty in the newly re­claimed sphere. Super­na­phim in this spe­cial ser­vice are pe­ri­od­i­cally ro­tated. On Uran­tia the pres­ent “chief of ser­a­phim” is the sec­ond of this or­der to be on duty since the times of the be­stowal of Christ Mi­chael.

28:4.114. The Voice of the An­gelic Hosts. The fourth pri­mary se­con­a­phim and ev­ery sev­enth se­rial prove to be an­gels pe­cu­liarly re­spon­sive to the sen­ti­ments of all or­ders of an­gels, in­clud­ing the super­na­phim above and the ser­a­phim be­low. Thus the at­ti­tude of any com­mand­ing or super­vis­ing an­gel is im­me­di­ately avail­able for con­sid­er­a­tion at any coun­cil of the An­cients of Days. Never a day passes on your world that the chief of ser­a­phim on Uran­tia is not made con­scious of the phe­nom­e­non of re­flec­tive trans­fer­ence, of be­ing drawn upon from Uversa for some pur­pose; but un­less fore­warned by a Soli­tary Mes­sen­ger, she re­mains wholly ig­no­rant of what is sought and of how it is se­cured. These min­is­ter­ing spir­its of time are con­stantly fur­nish­ing this sort of un­con­scious and cer­tainly, there­fore, un­prej­u­diced tes­ti­mony con­cern­ing the end­less ar­ray of mat­ters en­gag­ing the at­ten­tion and coun­sel of the An­cients of Days and their as­so­ciates.

28:7.4We are de­nied the full priv­i­lege of us­ing these an­gels of the re­flec­tive or­der on Uran­tia. They are fre­quent vis­i­tors on your world, ac­com­pa­ny­ing as­signed per­son­al­i­ties, but here they can­not freely func­tion. This sphere is still un­der par­tial spir­i­tual quar­an­tine, and some of the cir­cuits es­sen­tial to their ser­vices are not here at pres­ent. When your world is once more re­stored to the re­flec­tive cir­cuits con­cerned, much of the work of in­ter­plan­e­tary and in­teruni­verse com­mu­ni­ca­tion will be greatly sim­pli­fied and ex­pe­dited. Ce­les­tial work­ers on Uran­tia en­counter many dif­fi­cul­ties be­cause of this func­tional cur­tail­ment of their re­flec­tive as­so­ciates. But we go on joy­fully con­duct­ing our af­fairs with the in­stru­men­tal­i­ties at hand, not­with­stand­ing our lo­cal de­pri­va­tion of many of the ser­vices of these mar­velous be­ings, the liv­ing mir­rors of space and the pres­ence pro­jec­tors of time.

31:0.11One or more com­pa­nies of the mor­tal fi­nal­i­ters are con­stantly in ser­vice on Uran­tia. There is no do­main of uni­verse ser­vice to which they are not as­signed; they func­tion uni­ver­sally and with al­ter­nat­ing and equal pe­ri­ods of as­signed duty and free ser­vice.

33:4.7Ga­briel and his staff are not teach­ers; they are ad­min­is­tra­tors. They were never known to de­part from their reg­u­lar work ex­cept when Mi­chael was in­car­nated on a crea­ture be­stowal. Dur­ing such be­stowals Ga­briel was ever at­ten­dant on the will of the in­car­nated Son, and with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the Union of Days, he be­came the ac­tual di­rec­tor of uni­verse af­fairs dur­ing the later be­stowals. Ga­briel has been closely iden­ti­fied with the his­tory and de­vel­op­ment of Uran­tia ever since the mor­tal be­stowal of Mi­chael.

36:3.9Upon the ar­rival of a Plan­e­tary Prince they pre­pare to leave, though two of the se­nior car­ri­ers and twelve cus­to­di­ans may vol­un­teer, by tak­ing tem­po­rary re­nun­ci­a­tion vows, to re­main in­def­i­nitely on the planet as ad­vis­ers in the mat­ter of the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment and con­ser­va­tion of the life plasm. Two such Sons and their twelve as­so­ciates are now serv­ing on Uran­tia.

37:3.3The arch­an­gel corps of Neb­a­don is di­rected by the first-born of this or­der, and in more re­cent times a di­vi­sional head­quar­ters of the arch­an­gels has been main­tained on Uran­tia. It is this un­usual fact that soon ar­rests the at­ten­tion of ex­tra-Neb­a­don stu­dent vis­i­tors. Among their early ob­ser­va­tions of in­trau­ni­verse trans­ac­tions is the dis­cov­ery that many as­cen­dant ac­tiv­i­ties of the Bril­liant Evening Stars are di­rected from the cap­i­tal of a lo­cal sys­tem, Sa­ta­nia. On fur­ther ex­am­i­na­tion they dis­cover that cer­tain arch­an­gel ac­tiv­i­ties are di­rected from a small and ap­par­ently in­signif­i­cant in­hab­ited world called Uran­tia. And then en­sues the rev­e­la­tion of Mi­chael’s be­stowal on Uran­tia and their im­me­di­ately quick­ened in­ter­est in you and your lowly sphere.

37:3.4Do you grasp the sig­nif­i­cance of the fact that your lowly and con­fused planet has be­come a di­vi­sional head­quar­ters for the uni­verse ad­min­is­tra­tion and di­rec­tion of cer­tain arch­an­gel ac­tiv­i­ties hav­ing to do with the Par­a­dise as­cen­sion scheme? This un­doubt­edly presages the fu­ture con­cen­tra­tion of other as­cen­dant ac­tiv­i­ties on the be­stowal world of Mi­chael and lends a tremen­dous and solemn im­port to the Mas­ter’s per­sonal prom­ise, “I will come again.”

37:8.10Each uni­verse has its own na­tive an­gelic corps; nev­er­the­less, there are oc­ca­sions on which it is very help­ful to have the as­sis­tance of those higher spir­its of ori­gin out­side the lo­cal cre­ation. Super­na­phim per­form cer­tain rare and unique ser­vices; the pres­ent chief of Uran­tia ser­a­phim is a pri­mary super­na­phim of Par­a­dise. The re­flec­tive se­con­a­phim are en­coun­tered wher­ever the super­uni­verse per­son­nel is func­tion­ing, and a great many ter­tiaphim are of tem­po­rary ser­vice as Most High As­sis­tants.

39:2.74. As­sis­tant Teach­ers. The as­sis­tant teach­ers are the helpers and as­so­ciates of their fel­low ser­a­phim, the teach­ing coun­selors. They are also in­di­vid­u­ally con­nected with the ex­ten­sive ed­u­ca­tional en­ter­prises of the lo­cal uni­verse, es­pe­cially with the sev­en­fold scheme of train­ing op­er­a­tive on the man­sion worlds of the lo­cal sys­tems. A mar­velous corps of this or­der of ser­a­phim func­tions on Uran­tia for the pur­pose of fos­ter­ing and fur­ther­ing the cause of truth and righ­teous­ness.

39:4.3These same se­raphic ad­min­is­tra­tors are also at­tached to the gov­ern­ments of the world rulers, the Plan­e­tary Princes. The ma­jor­ity of plan­ets in a given uni­verse are un­der the ju­ris­dic­tion of a sec­ondary La­non­an­dek Son, but on cer­tain worlds, such as Uran­tia, there has been a mis­car­riage of the di­vine plan. In the event of the de­fec­tion of a Plan­e­tary Prince, these ser­a­phim be­come at­tached to the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers and their suc­ces­sors in plan­e­tary au­thor­ity. The pres­ent act­ing ruler of Uran­tia is as­sisted by a corps of one thou­sand of this ver­sa­tile or­der of ser­a­phim.

39:9.2Large num­bers of the com­ple­tion ser­a­phim re­turn to their na­tive uni­verses, there to com­ple­ment the min­istry of di­vine en­dow­ment by the min­istry of ex­pe­ri­en­tial per­fec­tion. Neb­a­don is, com­par­a­tively speak­ing, one of the younger uni­verses and there­fore does not have so many of these re­turned Seraph­ing­ton grad­u­ates as would be found in an older realm; nonethe­less our lo­cal uni­verse is ad­e­quately sup­plied with the com­ple­tion ser­a­phim, for it is sig­nif­i­cant that the evo­lu­tion­ary realms dis­close in­creas­ing need for their ser­vices as they near the sta­tus of light and life. Com­ple­tion ser­a­phim now serve more ex­ten­sively with the su­preme or­ders of ser­a­phim, but some serve with each of the other an­gelic or­ders. Even your world en­joys the ex­ten­sive min­istry of twelve spe­cial­ized groups of the Se­raphic Corps of Com­ple­tion; these mas­ter ser­a­phim of plan­e­tary super­vi­sion ac­com­pany each newly com­mis­sioned Plan­e­tary Prince to the in­hab­ited worlds.

43:3.6Al­though the con­stel­la­tion regime stands be­tween you and the uni­verse ad­min­is­tra­tion, as in­di­vid­u­als you would or­di­nar­ily be lit­tle con­cerned with the con­stel­la­tion gov­ern­ment. Your great in­ter­est would nor­mally cen­ter in the lo­cal sys­tem, Sa­ta­nia; but tem­porar­ily, Uran­tia is closely re­lated to the con­stel­la­tion rulers be­cause of cer­tain sys­tem and plan­e­tary con­di­tions grow­ing out of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion.

43:3.7The Eden­tia Most Highs seized cer­tain phases of plan­e­tary au­thor­ity on the re­bel­lious worlds at the time of the Lu­cifer se­ces­sion. They have con­tin­ued to ex­er­cise this power, and the An­cients of Days long since con­firmed this as­sump­tion of con­trol over these way­ward worlds. They will no doubt con­tinue to ex­er­cise this as­sumed ju­ris­dic­tion as long as Lu­cifer lives. Much of this au­thor­ity would or­di­nar­ily, in a loyal sys­tem, be in­vested in the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign.

43:3.8But there is still an­other way in which Uran­tia be­came pe­cu­liarly re­lated to the Most Highs. When Mi­chael, the Cre­ator Son, was on his ter­mi­nal be­stowal mis­sion, since the suc­ces­sor of Lu­cifer was not in full au­thor­ity in the lo­cal sys­tem, all Uran­tia af­fairs which con­cerned the Mi­chael be­stowal were im­me­di­ately super­vised by the Most Highs of Nor­la­ti­adek.

43:5.119. The Most High me­di­a­tor, the Vo­ron­da­dek Son as­signed to har­mo­nize the spe­cial be­stowal ad­just­ments on Uran­tia with the rou­tine ad­min­is­tra­tion of the con­stel­la­tion. The pres­ence of cer­tain arch­an­gel ac­tiv­i­ties and nu­mer­ous other ir­reg­u­lar min­is­tra­tions on Uran­tia, to­gether with the spe­cial ac­tiv­i­ties of the Bril­liant Evening Stars on Je­ru­sem, ne­ces­si­tates the func­tion­ing of this Son.

43:5.12–15 · four paragraphs not cited here ·

43:5.1210. The Most High judge-ad­vo­cate, the head of the emer­gency tri­bu­nal de­voted to the ad­just­ment of the spe­cial prob­lems of Nor­la­ti­adek grow­ing out of the con­fu­sion con­se­quent upon the Sa­ta­nia re­bel­lion.

43:5.1311. The Most High li­ai­son, the Vo­ron­da­dek Son at­tached to the Eden­tia rulers but com­mis­sioned as a spe­cial coun­selor with the Faith­ful of Days re­gard­ing the best course to pur­sue in the man­age­ment of prob­lems per­tain­ing to re­bel­lion and crea­ture dis­loy­alty.

43:5.1412. The Most High di­rec­tor, the pres­i­dent of the emer­gency coun­cil of Eden­tia. All per­son­al­i­ties as­signed to Nor­la­ti­adek be­cause of the Sa­ta­nia up­heaval con­sti­tute the emer­gency coun­cil, and their pre­sid­ing of­fi­cer is a Vo­ron­da­dek Son of ex­traor­di­nary ex­pe­ri­ence.

43:5.15And this takes no ac­count of the nu­mer­ous Voron­dadeks, en­voys of Neb­a­don con­stel­la­tions, and oth­ers who are also res­i­dent on Eden­tia.

43:5.16Ever since the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion the Eden­tia Fa­thers have ex­er­cised a spe­cial care over Uran­tia and the other iso­lated worlds of Sa­ta­nia. Long ago the prophet rec­og­nized the con­trol­ling hand of the Con­stel­la­tion Fa­thers in the af­fairs of na­tions. “When the Most High di­vided to the na­tions their in­her­i­tance, when he sep­a­rated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the peo­ple.”

44:5.65. The trans­port ad­vis­ers. This corps of tech­ni­cal ad­vis­ers to the trans­port ser­a­phim are most pro­fi­cient in col­lab­o­rat­ing with the star stu­dents in work­ing out rout­ings and in oth­er­wise as­sist­ing the chiefs of trans­port on the worlds of space. They are the traf­fic super­vi­sors of the spheres and are pres­ent on all in­hab­ited plan­ets. Uran­tia is served by a corps of sev­enty trans­port ad­vis­ers.

44:5.76. The ex­perts of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Uran­tia, like­wise, is served by twelve tech­ni­cians of in­ter­plan­e­tary and in­teruni­verse com­mu­ni­ca­tion. These long-ex­pe­ri­enced be­ings are ex­pert in the knowl­edge of the laws of trans­mit­tal and in­ter­fer­ence as ap­plied to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions of the realms. This corps is con­cerned with all forms of space mes­sages ex­cept those of Grav­ity and Soli­tary Mes­sen­gers. On Uran­tia much of their work must be ac­com­plished over the arch­an­gels’ cir­cuit.

45:2.4While all the af­fairs of the iso­lated worlds of Sa­ta­nia have not been re­turned to his ju­ris­dic­tion, Lanaforge dis­closes great in­ter­est in their wel­fare, and he is a fre­quent vis­i­tor on Uran­tia. As in other and nor­mal sys­tems, the Sov­er­eign pre­sides over the sys­tem coun­cil of world rulers, the Plan­e­tary Princes and the res­i­dent gov­er­nors gen­eral of the iso­lated worlds. This plan­e­tary coun­cil as­sem­bles from time to time on the head­quar­ters of the sys­tem—“When the Sons of God come to­gether.”

45:4.1614. Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, the only Son of this or­der to be­stow him­self upon the Uran­tia races. While still num­bered as a Mel­chiz­e­dek, he has be­come “for­ever a min­is­ter of the Most Highs,” eter­nally as­sum­ing the as­sign­ment of ser­vice as a mor­tal as­cender, hav­ing so­journed on Uran­tia in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh at Salem in the days of Abra­ham. This Mel­chiz­e­dek has lat­terly been pro­claimed vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia with head­quar­ters on Je­ru­sem and au­thor­ity to act in be­half of Mi­chael, who is ac­tu­ally the Plan­e­tary Prince of the world whereon he ex­pe­ri­enced his ter­mi­nal be­stowal in hu­man form. Not­with­stand­ing this, Uran­tia is still super­vised by suc­ces­sive res­i­dent gov­er­nors gen­eral, mem­bers of the four and twenty coun­selors.

48:6.8Even on Uran­tia they coun­sel the hu­man teach­ers of truth and righ­teous­ness to ad­here to the preach­ing of “the good­ness of God, which leads to re­pen­tance,” to pro­claim “the love of God, which casts out all fear.” Even so have these truths been de­clared on your world:

48:6.9–21 · 13 paragraphs not cited here ·

48:6.9The Gods are my care­tak­ers; I shall not stray;

48:6.10Side by side they lead me in the beau­ti­ful paths and glo­ri­ous re­fresh­ing of life ev­er­last­ing.

48:6.11I shall not, in this Di­vine Pres­ence, want for food nor thirst for wa­ter.

48:6.12Though I go down into the val­ley of un­cer­tainty or as­cend up into the worlds of doubt,

48:6.13Though I move in lone­li­ness or with the fel­lows of my kind,

48:6.14Though I tri­umph in the choirs of light or fal­ter in the soli­tary places of the spheres,

48:6.15Your good spirit shall min­is­ter to me, and your glo­ri­ous an­gel will com­fort me.

48:6.16Though I de­scend into the depths of dark­ness and death it­self,

48:6.17I shall not doubt you nor fear you,

48:6.18For I know that in the full­ness of time and the glory of your name

48:6.19You will raise me up to sit with you on the bat­tle­ments on high.

48:6.20That is the story whis­pered in the night sea­son to the shep­herd boy. He could not re­tain it word for word, but to the best of his mem­ory he gave it much as it is re­corded to­day.

48:6.21These ser­a­phim are also the evan­gels of the gospel of per­fec­tion at­tain­ment for the whole sys­tem as well as for the in­di­vid­ual as­cender. Even now in the young sys­tem of Sa­ta­nia their teach­ings and plans en­com­pass pro­vi­sions for the fu­ture ages when the man­sion worlds will no longer serve the mor­tal as­cend­ers as step­ping­stones to the spheres on high.

48:6.222. Racial In­ter­preters. All races of mor­tal be­ings are not alike. True, there is a plan­e­tary pat­tern run­ning through the phys­i­cal, men­tal, and spir­i­tual na­tures and ten­den­cies of the var­i­ous races of a given world; but there are also dis­tinct racial types, and very def­i­nite so­cial ten­den­cies char­ac­ter­ize the off­spring of these dif­fer­ent ba­sic types of hu­man be­ings. On the worlds of time the se­raphic racial in­ter­preters fur­ther the ef­forts of the race com­mis­sion­ers to har­mo­nize the var­ied view­points of the races, and they con­tinue to func­tion on the man­sion worlds, where these same dif­fer­ences tend to per­sist in a mea­sure. On a con­fused planet, such as Uran­tia, these bril­liant be­ings have hardly had a fair op­por­tu­nity to func­tion, but they are the skill­ful so­ci­ol­o­gists and the wise eth­nic ad­vis­ers of the first heaven.

50:1.2The prince of a newly in­hab­ited world is sur­rounded by a loyal corps of helpers and as­sis­tants and by large num­bers of the min­is­ter­ing spir­its. But the di­rect­ing corps of such new worlds must be of the lower or­ders of the ad­min­is­tra­tors of a sys­tem in or­der to be in­nately sym­pa­thetic with, and un­der­stand­ing of, the plan­e­tary prob­lems and dif­fi­cul­ties. And all of this ef­fort to pro­vide sym­pa­thetic ruler­ship for the evo­lu­tion­ary worlds en­tails the in­creased li­a­bil­ity that these near-hu­man per­son­al­i­ties may be led astray by the ex­al­ta­tion of their own minds over and above the will of the Su­preme Rulers.

51:3.9Your world has been vis­ited by four or­ders of son­ship: Cali­gas­tia, the Plan­e­tary Prince; Adam and Eve of the Ma­te­rial Sons of God; Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, the “sage of Salem” in the days of Abra­ham; and Christ Mi­chael, who came as the Par­a­dise be­stowal Son. How much more ef­fec­tive and beau­ti­ful it would have been had Mi­chael, the su­preme ruler of the uni­verse of Neb­a­don, been wel­comed to your world by a loyal and ef­fi­cient Plan­e­tary Prince and a de­voted and suc­cess­ful Ma­te­rial Son, both of whom could have done so much to en­hance the life­work and mis­sion of the be­stowal Son! But not all worlds have been so un­for­tu­nate as Uran­tia, nei­ther has the mis­sion of the Plan­e­tary Adams al­ways been so dif­fi­cult or so haz­ardous. When they are suc­cess­ful, they con­tribute to the de­vel­op­ment of a great peo­ple, con­tin­u­ing as the vis­i­ble heads of plan­e­tary af­fairs even far into the age when such a world is set­tled in light and life.

53:6.6This an­gel is still in ser­vice on Uran­tia, func­tion­ing as as­so­ciate chief of ser­a­phim.

65:5.3The uni­verse of uni­verses, in­clud­ing this small world called Uran­tia, is not be­ing man­aged merely to meet our ap­proval nor just to suit our con­ve­nience, much less to grat­ify our whims and sat­isfy our cu­rios­ity. The wise and all-pow­er­ful be­ings who are re­spon­si­ble for uni­verse man­age­ment un­doubt­edly know ex­actly what they are about; and so it be­comes Life Car­ri­ers and be­hooves mor­tal minds to en­list in pa­tient wait­ing and hearty co-op­er­a­tion with the rule of wis­dom, the reign of power, and the march of prog­ress.

65:7.3The seven ad­ju­tant spir­its are more cir­cuit­like than en­tity­like, and on or­di­nary worlds they are en­cir­cuited with other ad­ju­tant func­tion­ings through­out the lo­cal uni­verse. On life-ex­per­i­ment plan­ets, how­ever, they are rel­a­tively iso­lated. And on Uran­tia, ow­ing to the unique na­ture of the life pat­terns, the lower ad­ju­tants ex­pe­ri­enced far more dif­fi­culty in con­tact­ing with the evo­lu­tion­ary or­gan­isms than would have been the case in a more stan­dard­ized type of life en­dow­ment.

65:7.4Again, on an av­er­age evo­lu­tion­ary world the seven ad­ju­tant spir­its are far bet­ter syn­chro­nized with the ad­vanc­ing stages of an­i­mal de­vel­op­ment than they were on Uran­tia. With but a sin­gle ex­cep­tion, the ad­ju­tants ex­pe­ri­enced the great­est dif­fi­culty in con­tact­ing with the evolv­ing minds of Uran­tia or­gan­isms that they had ever had in all their func­tion­ing through­out the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. On this world there de­vel­oped many forms of bor­der phe­nom­ena—con­fu­sional com­bi­na­tions of the me­chan­i­cal-non­teach­able and the non­me­chan­i­cal-teach­able types of or­gan­is­mal re­sponse.

67:6.4Van was left on Uran­tia un­til the time of Adam, re­main­ing as tit­u­lar head of all super­hu­man per­son­al­i­ties func­tion­ing on the planet. He and Amadon were sus­tained by the tech­nique of the tree of life in con­junc­tion with the spe­cial­ized life min­istry of the Mel­chiz­e­deks for over one hun­dred and fifty thou­sand years.

67:6.5The af­fairs of Uran­tia were for a long time ad­min­is­tered by a coun­cil of plan­e­tary re­ceivers, twelve Mel­chiz­e­deks, con­firmed by the man­date of the se­nior con­stel­la­tion ruler, the Most High Fa­ther of Nor­la­ti­adek. As­so­ci­ated with the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers was an ad­vi­sory coun­cil con­sist­ing of: one of the loyal aids of the fallen Prince, the two res­i­dent Life Car­ri­ers, a Trin­i­tized Son in ap­pren­tice­ship train­ing, a vol­un­teer Teacher Son, a Bril­liant Evening Star of Avalon (pe­ri­od­i­cally), the chiefs of ser­a­phim and cheru­bim, ad­vis­ers from two neigh­bor­ing plan­ets, the di­rec­tor gen­eral of sub­or­di­nate an­gelic life, and Van, the com­man­der in chief of the mid­way crea­tures. And thus was Uran­tia gov­erned and ad­min­is­tered un­til the ar­rival of Adam. It is not strange that the coura­geous and loyal Van was as­signed a place on the coun­cil of plan­e­tary re­ceivers which for so long ad­min­is­tered the af­fairs of Uran­tia.

74:2.6The next act was the de­liv­ery of the charge of plan­e­tary cus­tody to Adam and Eve by the se­nior Mel­chiz­e­dek, chief of the coun­cil of re­ceiver­ship on Uran­tia. The Ma­te­rial Son and Daugh­ter took the oath of al­le­giance to the Most Highs of Nor­la­ti­adek and to Mi­chael of Neb­a­don and were pro­claimed rulers of Uran­tia by Van, who thereby re­lin­quished the tit­u­lar au­thor­ity which for over one hun­dred and fifty thou­sand years he had held by virtue of the ac­tion of the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers.

76:5.6The super­ma­te­rial gov­ern­ment of Uran­tia, un­der the di­rec­tion of the Mel­chiz­e­deks, con­tin­ued, but di­rect phys­i­cal con­tact with the evo­lu­tion­ary races had been sev­ered. From the dis­tant days of the ar­rival of the cor­po­real staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince, down through the times of Van and Amadon to the ar­rival of Adam and Eve, phys­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the uni­verse gov­ern­ment had been sta­tioned on the planet. But with the Adamic de­fault this regime, ex­tend­ing over a pe­riod of more than four hun­dred and fifty thou­sand years, came to an end. In the spir­i­tual spheres, an­gelic helpers con­tin­ued to strug­gle in con­junc­tion with the Thought Ad­justers, both work­ing hero­ically for the sal­vage of the in­di­vid­ual; but no com­pre­hen­sive plan for far-reach­ing world wel­fare was pro­mul­gated to the mor­tals of earth un­til the ar­rival of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, in the times of Abra­ham, who, with the power, pa­tience, and au­thor­ity of a Son of God, did lay the foun­da­tions for the fur­ther up­lift and spir­i­tual re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of un­for­tu­nate Uran­tia.

93:0.2The Mel­chiz­e­dek or­der of uni­verse son­ship has been ex­ceed­ingly ac­tive on Uran­tia. A corps of twelve served in con­junc­tion with the Life Car­ri­ers. A later corps of twelve be­came re­ceivers for your world shortly af­ter the Cali­gas­tia se­ces­sion and con­tin­ued in au­thor­ity un­til the time of Adam and Eve. These twelve Mel­chiz­e­deks re­turned to Uran­tia upon the de­fault of Adam and Eve, and they con­tin­ued there­after as plan­e­tary re­ceivers on down to the day when Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, as the Son of Man, be­came the tit­u­lar Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia.

93:9.11But one of the writ­ers of the Book of He­brews un­der­stood the mis­sion of Mel­chiz­e­dek, for it is writ­ten: “This Mel­chiz­e­dek, priest of the Most High, was also king of peace; with­out fa­ther, with­out mother, with­out pedi­gree, hav­ing nei­ther be­gin­ning of days nor end of life but made like a Son of God, he abides a priest con­tin­u­ally.” This writer des­ig­nated Mel­chiz­e­dek as a type of the later be­stowal of Mi­chael, af­firm­ing that Je­sus was “a min­is­ter for­ever on the or­der of Mel­chiz­e­dek.” While this com­par­i­son was not al­to­gether for­tu­nate, it was lit­er­ally true that Christ did re­ceive pro­vi­sional ti­tle to Uran­tia “upon the or­ders of the twelve Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers” on duty at the time of his world be­stowal.

93:10.5Ma­chi­venta con­tin­ued as a plan­e­tary re­ceiver up to the times of the tri­umph of Mi­chael on Uran­tia. Sub­se­quently, he was at­tached to the Uran­tia ser­vice on Je­ru­sem as one of the four and twenty di­rec­tors, only just re­cently hav­ing been el­e­vated to the po­si­tion of per­sonal am­bas­sador on Je­ru­sem of the Cre­ator Son, bear­ing the ti­tle Vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. It is our be­lief that, as long as Uran­tia re­mains an in­hab­ited planet, Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek will not be fully re­turned to the du­ties of his or­der of son­ship but will re­main, speak­ing in the terms of time, for­ever a plan­e­tary min­is­ter rep­re­sent­ing Christ Mi­chael.

93:10.6As his was an emer­gency be­stowal on Uran­tia, it does not ap­pear from the rec­ords what Ma­chi­venta’s fu­ture may be. It may de­velop that the Mel­chiz­e­dek corps of Neb­a­don have sus­tained the per­ma­nent loss of one of their num­ber. Re­cent rul­ings handed down from the Most Highs of Eden­tia, and later con­firmed by the An­cients of Days of Uversa, strongly sug­gest that this be­stowal Mel­chiz­e­dek is des­tined to take the place of the fallen Plan­e­tary Prince, Cali­gas­tia. If our con­jec­tures in this re­spect are cor­rect, it is al­to­gether pos­si­ble that Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek may again ap­pear in per­son on Uran­tia and in some mod­i­fied man­ner re­sume the role of the de­throned Plan­e­tary Prince, or else ap­pear on earth to func­tion as vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince rep­re­sent­ing Christ Mi­chael, who now ac­tu­ally holds the ti­tle of Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. While it is far from clear to us as to what Ma­chi­venta’s des­tiny may be, nev­er­the­less, events which have so re­cently taken place strongly sug­gest that the fore­go­ing con­jec­tures are prob­a­bly not far from the truth.

93:10.7 · one paragraph not cited here ·

93:10.7We well un­der­stand how, by his tri­umph on Uran­tia, Mi­chael be­came the suc­ces­sor of both Cali­gas­tia and Adam; how he be­came the plan­e­tary Prince of Peace and the sec­ond Adam. And now we be­hold the con­fer­ring upon this Mel­chiz­e­dek of the ti­tle Vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. Will he also be con­sti­tuted Vicegerent Ma­te­rial Son of Uran­tia? Or is there a pos­si­bil­ity that an un­ex­pected and un­prece­dented event is to take place, the some­time re­turn to the planet of Adam and Eve or cer­tain of their progeny as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Mi­chael with the ti­tles vicegerents of the sec­ond Adam of Uran­tia?

93:10.8And all these spec­u­la­tions as­so­ci­ated with the cer­tainty of fu­ture ap­pear­ances of both Mag­is­te­rial and Trin­ity Teacher Sons, in con­junc­tion with the ex­plicit prom­ise of the Cre­ator Son to re­turn some­time, make Uran­tia a planet of fu­ture un­cer­tainty and ren­der it one of the most in­ter­est­ing and in­trigu­ing spheres in all the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. It is al­to­gether pos­si­ble that, in some fu­ture age when Uran­tia is ap­proach­ing the era of light and life, af­ter the af­fairs of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion and the Cali­gas­tia se­ces­sion have been fi­nally ad­ju­di­cated, we may wit­ness the pres­ence on Uran­tia, si­mul­ta­ne­ously, of Ma­chi­venta, Adam, Eve, and Christ Mi­chael, as well as ei­ther a Mag­is­te­rial Son or even Trin­ity Teacher Sons.

108:3.5It is in­ter­est­ing to note that lo­cal uni­verse in­spec­tors al­ways ad­dress them­selves, when car­ry­ing out a plan­e­tary ex­am­i­na­tion, to the plan­e­tary chief of Thought Ad­justers, just as they de­liver charges to the chiefs of ser­a­phim and to the lead­ers of other or­ders of be­ings at­tached to the ad­min­is­tra­tion of an evolv­ing world. Not long since, Uran­tia un­der­went such a pe­ri­odic in­spec­tion by Taba­man­tia, the sov­er­eign super­vi­sor of all life-ex­per­i­ment plan­ets in the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. And the rec­ords re­veal that, in ad­di­tion to his ad­mo­ni­tions and in­dict­ments de­liv­ered to the var­i­ous chiefs of super­hu­man per­son­al­i­ties, he also de­liv­ered the fol­low­ing ac­knowl­edg­ment to the chief of Ad­justers, whether lo­cated on the planet, on Sal­ving­ton, Uversa, or Di­vin­ing­ton, we do not def­i­nitely know, but he said:

109:7.7When the plan­e­tary Vo­ron­da­dek ob­server of Uran­tia—the Most High cus­to­dian who not long since as­sumed an emer­gency re­gency of your world—as­serted his au­thor­ity in the pres­ence of the res­i­dent gov­er­nor gen­eral, he be­gan his emer­gency ad­min­is­tra­tion of Uran­tia with a full staff of his own choos­ing. He im­me­di­ately as­signed to all his as­so­ciates and as­sis­tants their plan­e­tary du­ties. But he did not choose the three Per­son­al­ized Ad­justers who ap­peared in his pres­ence the in­stant he as­sumed the re­gency. He did not even know they would thus ap­pear, for they did not so man­i­fest their di­vine pres­ence at the time of a pre­vi­ous re­gency. And the Most High re­gent did not as­sign ser­vice or des­ig­nate du­ties for these vol­un­teer Per­son­al­ized Ad­justers. Nev­er­the­less, these three om­niper­sonal be­ings were among the most ac­tive of the nu­mer­ous or­ders of ce­les­tial be­ings then serv­ing on Uran­tia.

Paper 114, Seraphic Planetary Government, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

114:0.106. The lo­ca­tion on the planet of an arch­an­gels’ cir­cuit.

114:0.117. The more re­cent des­ig­na­tion of the one­time in­car­nated Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek as vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince.

114:1.1The orig­i­nal sov­er­eignty of Uran­tia was held in trust by the sov­er­eign of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem. It was first del­e­gated by him to a joint com­mis­sion of Mel­chiz­e­deks and Life Car­ri­ers, and this group func­tioned on Uran­tia un­til the ar­rival of a reg­u­larly con­sti­tuted Plan­e­tary Prince. Sub­se­quent to the down­fall of Prince Cali­gas­tia, at the time of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion, Uran­tia had no sure and set­tled re­la­tion­ship with the lo­cal uni­verse and its ad­min­is­tra­tive di­vi­sions un­til the com­ple­tion of Mi­chael’s be­stowal in the flesh, when he was pro­claimed, by the Union of Days, Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. Such a procla­ma­tion in surety and in prin­ci­ple for­ever set­tled the sta­tus of your world, but in prac­tice the Sov­er­eign Cre­ator Son made no ges­ture of per­sonal ad­min­is­tra­tion of the planet aside from the es­tab­lish­ment of the Je­ru­sem com­mis­sion of twenty-four for­mer Uran­tians with au­thor­ity to rep­re­sent him in the gov­ern­ment of Uran­tia and all other quar­an­tined plan­ets in the sys­tem. One of this coun­cil is now al­ways res­i­dent on Uran­tia as res­i­dent gov­er­nor gen­eral.

114:1.2Vicegerent au­thor­ity to act for Mi­chael as Plan­e­tary Prince has been re­cently vested in Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, but this Son of the lo­cal uni­verse has made not the slight­est move to­ward mod­i­fy­ing the pres­ent plan­e­tary regime of the suc­ces­sive ad­min­is­tra­tions of the res­i­dent gov­er­nors gen­eral.

114:1.3There is lit­tle like­li­hood that any marked change will be made in the gov­ern­ment of Uran­tia dur­ing the pres­ent dis­pen­sa­tion un­less the vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince should ar­rive to as­sume his tit­u­lar re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. It ap­pears to cer­tain of our as­so­ciates that at some time in the near fu­ture the plan of send­ing one of the twenty-four coun­selors to Uran­tia to act as gov­er­nor gen­eral will be su­per­seded by the for­mal ar­rival of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek with the vicegerent man­date of the sov­er­eignty of Uran­tia. As act­ing Plan­e­tary Prince he would un­doubt­edly con­tinue in charge of the planet un­til the fi­nal ad­ju­di­ca­tion of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion and prob­a­bly on into the dis­tant fu­ture of plan­e­tary set­tle­ment in light and life.

114:1.4Some be­lieve that Ma­chi­venta will not come to take per­sonal di­rec­tion of Uran­tian af­fairs un­til the end of the cur­rent dis­pen­sa­tion. Oth­ers hold that the vicegerent Prince may not come, as such, un­til Mi­chael some­time re­turns to Uran­tia as he prom­ised when still in the flesh. Still oth­ers, in­clud­ing this nar­ra­tor, look for Mel­chiz­e­dek’s ap­pear­ance any day or hour.

114:2.4The mem­bers of this same com­mis­sion of for­mer Uran­tians also act as ad­vi­sory super­vi­sors of the thirty-six other re­bel­lion-iso­lated worlds of the sys­tem; they per­form a very valu­able ser­vice in keep­ing Lanaforge, the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign, in close and sym­pa­thetic touch with the af­fairs of these plan­ets, which still re­main more or less un­der the over­con­trol of the Con­stel­la­tion Fa­thers of Nor­la­ti­adek. These twenty-four coun­selors make fre­quent trips as in­di­vid­u­als to each of the quar­an­tined plan­ets, es­pe­cially to Uran­tia.

114:2.5Each of the other iso­lated worlds is ad­vised by sim­i­lar and vary­ing sized com­mis­sions of its one­time in­hab­i­tants, but these other com­mis­sions are sub­or­di­nate to the Uran­tian group of twenty-four. While the mem­bers of the lat­ter com­mis­sion are thus ac­tively in­ter­ested in ev­ery phase of hu­man prog­ress on each quar­an­tined world in Sa­ta­nia, they are es­pe­cially and par­tic­u­larly con­cerned with the wel­fare and ad­vance­ment of the mor­tal races of Uran­tia, for they im­me­di­ately and di­rectly super­vise the af­fairs of none of the plan­ets ex­cept Uran­tia, and even here their au­thor­ity is not com­plete ex­cept­ing in cer­tain do­mains con­cerned with mor­tal sur­vival.

114:3.5The super­ma­te­rial gov­ern­ment of Uran­tia does not main­tain a very close or­ganic re­la­tion­ship with the higher units of the lo­cal uni­verse. In a way, the res­i­dent gov­er­nor gen­eral rep­re­sents Sal­ving­ton as well as Je­ru­sem since he acts on be­half of the twenty-four coun­selors, who are di­rectly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Mi­chael and Ga­briel. And be­ing a Je­ru­sem cit­i­zen, the plan­e­tary gov­er­nor can func­tion as a spokesman for the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign. The con­stel­la­tion au­thor­i­ties are rep­re­sented di­rectly by a Vo­ron­da­dek Son, the Eden­tia ob­server.

114:4.1The sov­er­eignty of Uran­tia is fur­ther com­pli­cated by the one­time ar­bi­trary seizure of plan­e­tary au­thor­ity by the gov­ern­ment of Nor­la­ti­adek shortly af­ter the plan­e­tary re­bel­lion. There is still res­i­dent on Uran­tia a Vo­ron­da­dek Son, an ob­server for the Most Highs of Eden­tia and, in the ab­sence of di­rect ac­tion by Mi­chael, trus­tee of plan­e­tary sov­er­eignty. The pres­ent Most High ob­server (and some­time re­gent) is the twenty-third thus to serve on Uran­tia.

114:4.2There are cer­tain groups of plan­e­tary prob­lems which are still un­der the con­trol of the Most Highs of Eden­tia, ju­ris­dic­tion over them hav­ing been seized at the time of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion. Au­thor­ity in these mat­ters is ex­er­cised by a Vo­ron­da­dek Son, the Nor­la­ti­adek ob­server, who main­tains very close ad­vi­sory re­la­tions with the plan­e­tary super­vi­sors. The race com­mis­sion­ers are very ac­tive on Uran­tia, and their var­i­ous group chiefs are in­for­mally at­tached to the res­i­dent Vo­ron­da­dek ob­server, who acts as their ad­vi­sory di­rec­tor.

114:4.3In a cri­sis the ac­tual and sov­er­eign head of the gov­ern­ment, ex­cept­ing in cer­tain purely spir­i­tual mat­ters, would be this Vo­ron­da­dek Son of Eden­tia now on ob­ser­va­tion duty. (In these ex­clu­sively spir­i­tual prob­lems and in cer­tain purely per­sonal mat­ters, the su­preme au­thor­ity seems to be vested in the com­mand­ing arch­an­gel at­tached to the di­vi­sional head­quar­ters of that or­der which was re­cently es­tab­lished on Uran­tia.)

114:4.4A Most High ob­server is em­pow­ered, at his dis­cre­tion, to seize the plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment in times of grave plan­e­tary crises, and it is of rec­ord that this has hap­pened thirty-three times in the his­tory of Uran­tia. At such times the Most High ob­server func­tions as the Most High re­gent, ex­er­cis­ing un­ques­tioned au­thor­ity over all min­is­ters and ad­min­is­tra­tors res­i­dent on the planet ex­cept­ing only the di­vi­sional or­ga­ni­za­tion of the arch­an­gels.

114:4.5Vo­ron­da­dek re­gen­cies are not pe­cu­liar to re­bel­lion-iso­lated plan­ets, for the Most Highs may in­ter­vene at any time in the af­fairs of the in­hab­ited worlds, in­ter­pos­ing the su­pe­rior wis­dom of the con­stel­la­tion rulers in the af­fairs of the king­doms of men.

114:5.1The ac­tual ad­min­is­tra­tion of Uran­tia is in­deed dif­fi­cult to de­scribe. There ex­ists no for­mal gov­ern­ment along the lines of uni­verse or­ga­ni­za­tion, such as sep­a­rate leg­isla­tive, ex­ec­u­tive, and ju­di­cial de­part­ments. The twenty-four coun­selors come the near­est to be­ing the leg­isla­tive branch of the plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment. The gov­er­nor gen­eral is a pro­vi­sional and ad­vi­sory chief ex­ec­u­tive with the veto power res­i­dent in the Most High ob­server. And there are no ab­so­lutely au­thor­i­ta­tive ju­di­cial pow­ers op­er­a­tive on the planet—only the con­cil­i­at­ing com­mis­sions.

114:5.2A ma­jor­ity of the prob­lems in­volv­ing ser­a­phim and mid­way­ers are, by mu­tual con­sent, de­cided by the gov­er­nor gen­eral. But ex­cept when voic­ing the man­dates of the twenty-four coun­selors, his rul­ings are all sub­ject to ap­peal to con­cil­i­at­ing com­mis­sions, to lo­cal au­thor­i­ties con­sti­tuted for plan­e­tary func­tion, or even to the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign of Sa­ta­nia.

114:5.3 · one paragraph not cited here ·

114:5.3The ab­sence of the cor­po­real staff of a Plan­e­tary Prince and the ma­te­rial regime of an Adamic Son and Daugh­ter is par­tially com­pen­sated by the spe­cial min­istry of ser­a­phim and by the un­usual ser­vices of the mid­way crea­tures. The ab­sence of the Plan­e­tary Prince is ef­fec­tively com­pen­sated by the tri­une pres­ence of the arch­an­gels, the Most High ob­server, and the gov­er­nor gen­eral.

114:5.4This rather loosely or­ga­nized and some­what per­son­ally ad­min­is­tered plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment is more than ex­pect­edly ef­fec­tive be­cause of the time­sav­ing as­sis­tance of the arch­an­gels and their ever-ready cir­cuit, which is so fre­quently uti­lized in plan­e­tary emer­gen­cies and ad­min­is­tra­tive dif­fi­cul­ties. Tech­ni­cally, the planet is still spir­i­tu­ally iso­lated in the Nor­la­ti­adek cir­cuits, but in an emer­gency this hand­i­cap can now be cir­cum­vented through uti­liza­tion of the arch­an­gels’ cir­cuit. Plan­e­tary iso­la­tion is, of course, of lit­tle con­cern to in­di­vid­ual mor­tals since the pour­ing out of the Spirit of Truth upon all flesh nine­teen hun­dred years ago.

136:3.1Je­sus had en­dured the great temp­ta­tion of his mor­tal be­stowal be­fore his bap­tism when he had been wet with the dews of Mount Her­mon for six weeks. There on Mount Her­mon, as an un­aided mor­tal of the realm, he had met and de­feated the Uran­tia pre­tender, Cali­gas­tia, the prince of this world. That event­ful day, on the uni­verse rec­ords, Je­sus of Naz­a­reth had be­come the Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. And this Prince of Uran­tia, so soon to be pro­claimed su­preme Sov­er­eign of Neb­a­don, now went into forty days of re­tire­ment to for­mu­late the plans and de­ter­mine upon the tech­nique of pro­claim­ing the new king­dom of God in the hearts of men.

176:4.4Many of us are in­clined to be­lieve that Je­sus will re­turn to Uran­tia many times dur­ing the ages to come. We do not have his spe­cific prom­ise to make these plu­ral vis­its, but it seems most prob­a­ble that he who car­ries among his uni­verse ti­tles that of Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia will many times visit the world whose con­quest con­ferred such a unique ti­tle upon him.

history 23 paragraphs

49:5.214. Plan­e­tary-mor­tal epochs. This clas­si­fi­ca­tion rec­og­nizes the suc­ces­sion of tem­po­ral dis­pen­sa­tions as they af­fect man’s ter­res­trial sta­tus and his re­cep­tion of ce­les­tial min­istry.

49:5.22Life is ini­ti­ated on the plan­ets by the Life Car­ri­ers, who watch over its de­vel­op­ment un­til some­time af­ter the evo­lu­tion­ary ap­pear­ance of mor­tal man. Be­fore the Life Car­ri­ers leave a planet, they duly in­stall a Plan­e­tary Prince as ruler of the realm. With this ruler there ar­rives a full quota of sub­or­di­nate aux­il­iaries and min­is­ter­ing helpers, and the first ad­ju­di­ca­tion of the liv­ing and the dead is si­mul­ta­ne­ous with his ar­rival.

49:5.23With the emer­gence of hu­man group­ings, this Plan­e­tary Prince ar­rives to in­au­gu­rate hu­man civ­i­liza­tion and to fo­cal­ize hu­man so­ci­ety. Your world of con­fu­sion is no cri­te­rion of the early days of the reign of the Plan­e­tary Princes, for it was near the be­gin­ning of such an ad­min­is­tra­tion on Uran­tia that your Plan­e­tary Prince, Cali­gas­tia, cast his lot with the re­bel­lion of the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign, Lu­cifer. Your planet has pur­sued a stormy course ever since.

49:5.24On a nor­mal evo­lu­tion­ary world, racial prog­ress at­tains its nat­u­ral bi­o­logic peak dur­ing the regime of the Plan­e­tary Prince, and shortly there­after the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign dis­patches a Ma­te­rial Son and Daugh­ter to that planet. These im­ported be­ings are of ser­vice as bi­o­logic up­lifters; their de­fault on Uran­tia fur­ther com­pli­cated your plan­e­tary his­tory.

49:5.25When the in­tel­lec­tual and eth­i­cal prog­ress of a hu­man race has reached the lim­its of evo­lu­tion­ary de­vel­op­ment, there comes an Avo­nal Son of Par­a­dise on a mag­is­te­rial mis­sion; and later on, when the spir­i­tual sta­tus of such a world is near­ing its limit of nat­u­ral at­tain­ment, the planet is vis­ited by a Par­a­dise be­stowal Son. The chief mis­sion of a be­stowal Son is to es­tab­lish the plan­e­tary sta­tus, re­lease the Spirit of Truth for plan­e­tary func­tion, and thus ef­fect the uni­ver­sal com­ing of the Thought Ad­justers.

49:5.26Here, again, Uran­tia de­vi­ates: There has never been a mag­is­te­rial mis­sion on your world, nei­ther was your be­stowal Son of the Avo­nal or­der; your planet en­joyed the sig­nal honor of be­com­ing the mor­tal home planet of the Sov­er­eign Son, Mi­chael of Neb­a­don.

49:5.27As a re­sult of the min­istry of all the suc­ces­sive or­ders of di­vine son­ship, the in­hab­ited worlds and their ad­vanc­ing races be­gin to ap­proach the apex of plan­e­tary evo­lu­tion. Such worlds now be­come ripe for the cul­mi­nat­ing mis­sion, the ar­rival of the Trin­ity Teacher Sons. This epoch of the Teacher Sons is the vestibule to the fi­nal plan­e­tary age—evo­lu­tion­ary utopia—the age of light and life.

49:5.28This clas­si­fi­ca­tion of hu­man be­ings will re­ceive par­tic­u­lar at­ten­tion in a suc­ceed­ing pa­per.

50:4.11On Uran­tia these plans for plan­e­tary prog­ress and cul­tural ad­vance­ment were well un­der way, pro­ceed­ing most sat­is­fac­to­rily, when the whole en­ter­prise was brought to a rather sud­den and most in­glo­ri­ous end by Cali­gas­tia’s ad­her­ence to the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion.

50:4.12It was one of the most pro­foundly shock­ing episodes of this re­bel­lion for me to learn of the cal­lous per­fidy of one of my own or­der of son­ship, Cali­gas­tia, who, in de­lib­er­a­tion and with mal­ice afore­thought, sys­tem­at­i­cally per­verted the in­struc­tion and poi­soned the teach­ing pro­vided in all the Uran­tia plan­e­tary schools in op­er­a­tion at that time. The wreck of these schools was speedy and com­plete.

50:4.13Many of the off­spring of the as­cend­ers of the Prince’s ma­te­ri­al­ized staff re­mained loyal, de­sert­ing the ranks of Cali­gas­tia. These loy­al­ists were en­cour­aged by the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers of Uran­tia, and in later times their de­scen­dants did much to up­hold the plan­e­tary con­cepts of truth and righ­teous­ness. The work of these loyal evan­gels helped to pre­vent the to­tal oblit­er­a­tion of spir­i­tual truth on Uran­tia. These coura­geous souls and their de­scen­dants kept alive some knowl­edge of the Fa­ther’s rule and pre­served for the world races the con­cept of the suc­ces­sive plan­e­tary dis­pen­sa­tions of the var­i­ous or­ders of di­vine Sons.

51:0.3Al­though you can­not hope to know all about the work of these Sons on all the worlds of Sa­ta­nia and other sys­tems, other pa­pers de­pict more fully the life and ex­pe­ri­ences of the in­ter­est­ing pair, Adam and Eve, who came from the corps of the bi­o­logic up­lifters of Je­ru­sem to up­step the Uran­tia races. While there was a mis­car­riage of the ideal plans for im­prov­ing your na­tive races, still, Adam’s mis­sion was not in vain; Uran­tia has prof­ited im­mea­sur­ably from the gift of Adam and Eve, and among their fel­lows and in the coun­cils on high their work is not reck­oned as a to­tal loss.

52:2.1With the ar­rival of the Plan­e­tary Prince a new dis­pen­sa­tion be­gins. Gov­ern­ment ap­pears on earth, and the ad­vanced tribal epoch is at­tained. Great so­cial strides are made dur­ing a few thou­sand years of this regime. Un­der nor­mal con­di­tions mor­tals at­tain a high state of civ­i­liza­tion dur­ing this age. They do not strug­gle so long in bar­barism as did the Uran­tia races. But life on an in­hab­ited world is so changed by re­bel­lion that you can have lit­tle or no idea of such a regime on a nor­mal planet.

Paper 57, The Origin of Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

57:0.1In pre­sent­ing ex­cerpts from the ar­chives of Je­ru­sem for the rec­ords of Uran­tia re­spect­ing its an­tecedents and early his­tory, we are di­rected to reckon time in terms of cur­rent us­age—the pres­ent leap-year cal­en­dar of 365¼ days to the year. As a rule, no at­tempt will be made to give ex­act years, though they are of rec­ord. We will use the near­est whole num­bers as the bet­ter method of pre­sent­ing these his­toric facts.

57:8.11,000,000,000 years ago is the date of the ac­tual be­gin­ning of Uran­tia his­tory. The planet had at­tained ap­prox­i­mately its pres­ent size. And about this time it was placed upon the phys­i­cal reg­istries of Neb­a­don and given its name, Uran­tia.

Paper 58, Life Establishment on Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 59, The Marine-Life Era on Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 60, Urantia During the Early Land-Life Era, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 61, The Mammalian Era on Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

61:6.21,000,000 years ago Uran­tia was reg­is­tered as an in­hab­ited world. A mu­ta­tion within the stock of the pro­gress­ing Pri­mates sud­denly pro­duced two prim­i­tive hu­man be­ings, the ac­tual an­ces­tors of man­kind.

Paper 62, The Dawn Races of Early Man, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

62:7.7It is just 993,408 years ago (from the year A.D. 1934) that Uran­tia was for­mally rec­og­nized as a planet of hu­man habi­ta­tion in the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. Bi­o­logic evo­lu­tion had once again achieved the hu­man lev­els of will dig­nity; man had ar­rived on planet 606 of Sa­ta­nia.

Paper 63, The First Human Family, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 64, The Evolutionary Races of Color, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 65, The Overcontrol of Evolution, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 66, The Planetary Prince of Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

66:8.3From the ar­rival of Prince Cali­gas­tia, plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion pro­gressed in a fairly nor­mal man­ner for al­most three hun­dred thou­sand years. Aside from be­ing a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion sphere and there­fore sub­ject to nu­mer­ous ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties and un­usual episodes of evo­lu­tion­ary fluc­tu­a­tion, Uran­tia pro­gressed very sat­is­fac­to­rily in its plan­e­tary ca­reer up to the times of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion and the con­cur­rent Cali­gas­tia be­trayal. All sub­se­quent his­tory has been def­i­nitely mod­i­fied by this catas­trophic blun­der as well as by the later fail­ure of Adam and Eve to ful­fill their plan­e­tary mis­sion.

Paper 67, The Planetary Rebellion, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

67:0.1The prob­lems as­so­ci­ated with hu­man ex­is­tence on Uran­tia are im­pos­si­ble of un­der­stand­ing with­out a knowl­edge of cer­tain great epochs of the past, no­tably the oc­cur­rence and con­se­quences of the plan­e­tary re­bel­lion. Al­though this up­heaval did not se­ri­ously in­ter­fere with the prog­ress of or­ganic evo­lu­tion, it did markedly mod­ify the course of so­cial evo­lu­tion and of spir­i­tual de­vel­op­ment. The en­tire super­phys­i­cal his­tory of the planet was pro­foundly in­flu­enced by this dev­as­tat­ing calamity.

Paper 68, The Dawn of Civilization, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 69, Primitive Human Institutions, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 70, The Evolution of Human Government, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 71, Development of the State, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 72, Government on a Neighboring Planet, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 73, The Garden of Eden, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 74, Adam and Eve, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 75, The Default of Adam and Eve, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 76, The Second Garden, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

76:4.6The Adamic chil­dren were usu­ally Ad­juster in­dwelt since they all pos­sessed un­doubted sur­vival ca­pac­ity. These su­pe­rior off­spring were not so sub­ject to fear as the chil­dren of evo­lu­tion. So much of fear per­sists in the pres­ent-day races of Uran­tia be­cause your an­ces­tors re­ceived so lit­tle of Adam’s life plasm, ow­ing to the early mis­car­riage of the plans for racial phys­i­cal up­lift.

Paper 77, The Midway Creatures, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 78, The Violet Race After the Days of Adam, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 79, Andite Expansion in the Orient, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 80, Andite Expansion in the Occident, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 81, Development of Modern Civilization, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 82, The Evolution of Marriage, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 83, The Marriage Institution, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 84, Marriage and Family Life, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 85, The Origins of Worship, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 86, Early Evolution of Religion, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 87, The Ghost Cults, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 88, Fetishes, Charms, and Magic, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 89, Sin, Sacrifice, and Atonement, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 90, Shamanism—Medicine Men and Priests, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 91, The Evolution of Prayer, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 92, The Later Evolution of Religion, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 93, Machiventa Melchizedek, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 94, The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

94:6.1About six hun­dred years be­fore the ar­rival of Mi­chael, it seemed to Mel­chiz­e­dek, long since de­parted from the flesh, that the pu­rity of his teach­ing on earth was be­ing un­duly jeop­ar­dized by gen­eral ab­sorp­tion into the older Uran­tia be­liefs. It ap­peared for a time that his mis­sion as a fore­run­ner of Mi­chael might be in dan­ger of fail­ing. And in the sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ, through an un­usual co-or­di­na­tion of spir­i­tual agen­cies, not all of which are un­der­stood even by the plan­e­tary super­vi­sors, Uran­tia wit­nessed a most un­usual pre­sen­ta­tion of man­i­fold re­li­gious truth. Through the agency of sev­eral hu­man teach­ers the Salem gospel was re­stated and re­vi­tal­ized, and as it was then pre­sented, much has per­sisted to the times of this writ­ing.

Paper 95, The Melchizedek Teachings in the Levant, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 96, Yahweh—God of the Hebrews, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 97, Evolution of the God Concept Among the Hebrews, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 98, The Melchizedek Teachings in the Occident, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 114, Seraphic Planetary Government, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

119:7.2The pub­lic an­nounce­ment that Mi­chael had se­lected Uran­tia as the the­ater for his fi­nal be­stowal was made shortly af­ter we learned about the de­fault of Adam and Eve. And thus, for more than thirty-five thou­sand years, your world oc­cu­pied a very con­spic­u­ous place in the coun­cils of the en­tire uni­verse. There was no se­crecy (aside from the in­car­na­tion mys­tery) con­nected with any step in the Uran­tia be­stowal. From first to last, up to the fi­nal and tri­umphant re­turn of Mi­chael to Sal­ving­ton as su­preme Uni­verse Sov­er­eign, there was the fullest uni­verse pub­lic­ity of all that tran­spired on your small but highly hon­ored world.

Paper 121, The Times of Michael’s Bestowal, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 122, Birth and Infancy of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

122:0.2Af­ter a study of the spe­cial re­port on the sta­tus of seg­re­gated worlds pre­pared by the Mel­chiz­e­deks, in coun­sel with Ga­briel, Mi­chael fi­nally chose Uran­tia as the planet whereon to en­act his fi­nal be­stowal. Sub­se­quent to this de­ci­sion Ga­briel made a per­sonal visit to Uran­tia, and, as a re­sult of his study of hu­man groups and his sur­vey of the spir­i­tual, in­tel­lec­tual, racial, and ge­o­graphic fea­tures of the world and its peo­ples, he de­cided that the He­brews pos­sessed those rel­a­tive ad­van­tages which war­ranted their se­lec­tion as the be­stowal race. Upon Mi­chael’s ap­proval of this de­ci­sion, Ga­briel ap­pointed and dis­patched to Uran­tia the Fam­ily Com­mis­sion of Twelve—se­lected from among the higher or­ders of uni­verse per­son­al­i­ties—which was in­trusted with the task of mak­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion of Jew­ish fam­ily life. When this com­mis­sion ended its labors, Ga­briel was pres­ent on Uran­tia and re­ceived the re­port nom­i­nat­ing three prospec­tive unions as be­ing, in the opin­ion of the com­mis­sion, equally fa­vor­able as be­stowal fam­i­lies for Mi­chael’s pro­jected in­car­na­tion.

Paper 123, The Early Childhood of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 124, The Later Childhood of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 125, Jesus at Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 126, The Two Crucial Years, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 127, The Adolescent Years, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 128, Jesus’ Early Manhood, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 129, The Later Adult Life of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 130, On the Way to Rome, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 131, The World’s Religions, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 132, The Sojourn at Rome, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 133, The Return from Rome, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 134, The Transition Years, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 135, John the Baptist, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 136, Baptism and the Forty Days, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 137, Tarrying Time in Galilee, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 138, Training the Kingdom’s Messengers, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 139, The Twelve Apostles, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 140, The Ordination of the Twelve, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 141, Beginning the Public Work, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 142, The Passover at Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 143, Going Through Samaria, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 144, At Gilboa and in the Decapolis, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 145, Four Eventful Days at Capernaum, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 146, First Preaching Tour of Galilee, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 147, The Interlude Visit to Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 148, Training Evangelists at Bethsaida, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 149, The Second Preaching Tour, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 150, The Third Preaching Tour, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 151, Tarrying and Teaching by the Seaside, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 152, Events Leading up to the Capernaum Crisis, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 153, The Crisis at Capernaum, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 154, Last Days at Capernaum, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 155, Fleeing Through Northern Galilee, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 156, The Sojourn at Tyre and Sidon, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 157, At Caesarea-Philippi, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 158, The Mount of Transfiguration, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 159, The Decapolis Tour, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 160, Rodan of Alexandria, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 161, Further Discussions with Rodan, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 162, At the Feast of Tabernacles, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 163, Ordination of the Seventy at Magadan, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 164, At the Feast of Dedication, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 165, The Perean Mission Begins, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 166, Last Visit to Northern Perea, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 167, The Visit to Philadelphia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 168, The Resurrection of Lazarus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 169, Last Teaching at Pella, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 170, The Kingdom of Heaven, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 171, On the Way to Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 172, Going into Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 173, Monday in Jerusalem, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 174, Tuesday Morning in the Temple, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 175, The Last Temple Discourse, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 176, Tuesday Evening on Mount Olivet, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 177, Wednesday, the Rest Day, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 178, Last Day at the Camp, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 179, The Last Supper, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 180, The Farewell Discourse, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 181, Final Admonitions and Warnings, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 182, In Gethsemane, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 183, The Betrayal and Arrest of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 184, Before the Sanhedrin Court, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 185, The Trial Before Pilate, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 186, Just Before the Crucifixion, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 187, The Crucifixion, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 188, The Time of the Tomb, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 189, The Resurrection, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 190, Morontia Appearances of Jesus, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 191, Appearances to the Apostles and Other Leaders, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 192, Appearances in Galilee, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 193, Final Appearances and Ascension, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 194, Bestowal of the Spirit of Truth, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

Paper 195, After Pentecost, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

mortals of Urantia 39 paragraphs

30:4.9The fol­low­ing nar­ra­tive pre­sents the uni­verse ca­reer of an Ad­juster-in­dwelt mor­tal. The Son- and Spirit-fused mor­tals share por­tions of this ca­reer, but we have elected to tell this story as it per­tains to the Ad­juster-fused mor­tals, for such a des­tiny may be an­tic­i­pated by all of the hu­man races of Uran­tia.

34:7.3The mor­tals of a nor­mal world do not ex­pe­ri­ence con­stant war­fare be­tween their phys­i­cal and spir­i­tual na­tures. They are con­fronted with the ne­ces­sity of climb­ing up from the an­i­mal lev­els of ex­is­tence to the higher planes of spir­i­tual liv­ing, but this as­cent is more like un­der­go­ing an ed­u­ca­tional train­ing when com­pared with the in­tense con­flicts of Uran­tia mor­tals in this realm of the di­ver­gent ma­te­rial and spir­i­tual na­tures.

34:7.4The Uran­tia peo­ples are suf­fer­ing the con­se­quences of a dou­ble de­pri­va­tion of help in this task of pro­gres­sive plan­e­tary spir­i­tual at­tain­ment. The Cali­gas­tia up­heaval pre­cip­i­tated world-wide con­fu­sion and robbed all sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of the moral as­sis­tance which a well-or­dered so­ci­ety would have pro­vided. But even more dis­as­trous was the Adamic de­fault in that it de­prived the races of that su­pe­rior type of phys­i­cal na­ture which would have been more con­so­nant with spir­i­tual as­pi­ra­tions.

34:7.5Uran­tia mor­tals are com­pelled to un­dergo such marked strug­gling be­tween the spirit and the flesh be­cause their re­mote an­ces­tors were not more fully Adamized by the Edenic be­stowal. It was the di­vine plan that the mor­tal races of Uran­tia should have had phys­i­cal na­tures more nat­u­rally spirit re­spon­sive.

34:7.6Not­with­stand­ing this dou­ble dis­as­ter to man’s na­ture and his en­vi­ron­ment, pres­ent-day mor­tals would ex­pe­ri­ence less of this ap­par­ent war­fare be­tween the flesh and the spirit if they would en­ter the spirit king­dom, wherein the faith sons of God en­joy com­par­a­tive de­liv­er­ance from the slave-bond­age of the flesh in the en­light­ened and lib­er­at­ing ser­vice of whole­hearted de­vo­tion to do­ing the will of the Fa­ther in heaven. Je­sus showed man­kind the new way of mor­tal liv­ing whereby hu­man be­ings may very largely es­cape the dire con­se­quences of the Cali­gas­tic re­bel­lion and most ef­fec­tively com­pen­sate for the de­pri­va­tions re­sult­ing from the Adamic de­fault. “The spirit of the life of Christ Je­sus has made us free from the law of an­i­mal liv­ing and the temp­ta­tions of evil and sin.” “This is the vic­tory that over­comes the flesh, even your faith.”

39:4.155. The Trans­port­ers. These are the trans­port ser­a­phim who func­tion in the lo­cal sys­tems. In Sa­ta­nia, your sys­tem, they carry pas­sen­gers back and forth from Je­ru­sem and oth­er­wise serve as in­ter­plan­e­tary trans­port­ers. Sel­dom does a day pass in which a trans­port ser­a­phim of Sa­ta­nia does not de­posit some stu­dent vis­i­tor or some other trav­eler of spirit or semispirit na­ture on the shores of Uran­tia. These very space tra­versers will some­time carry you to and from the var­i­ous worlds of the sys­tem head­quar­ters group, and when you have fin­ished the Je­ru­sem as­sign­ment, they will carry you for­ward to Eden­tia. But un­der no cir­cum­stances will they carry you back­ward to the world of hu­man ori­gin. A mor­tal never re­turns to his na­tive planet dur­ing the dis­pen­sa­tion of his tem­po­ral ex­is­tence, and if he should re­turn dur­ing a sub­se­quent dis­pen­sa­tion, he would be es­corted by a trans­port ser­a­phim of the uni­verse head­quar­ters group.

40:5.17Se­ries three—mor­tals of Ad­juster-fu­sion po­ten­tial. All Fa­ther-fused mor­tals are of an­i­mal ori­gin, just like the Uran­tia races. They em­brace mor­tals of the one-brained, two-brained, and three-brained types of Ad­juster-fu­sion po­ten­tial. Uran­tians are of the in­ter­me­di­ate or two-brained type, be­ing in many ways hu­manly su­pe­rior to the one-brained groups but def­i­nitely lim­ited in com­par­i­son with the three-brained or­ders. These three types of phys­i­cal-brain en­dow­ment are not fac­tors in Ad­juster be­stowal, in se­raphic ser­vice, or in any other phase of spirit min­istry. The in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual dif­fer­en­tial be­tween the three brain types char­ac­ter­izes in­di­vid­u­als who are oth­er­wise quite alike in mind en­dow­ment and spir­i­tual po­ten­tial, be­ing great­est in the tem­po­ral life and tend­ing to di­min­ish as the man­sion worlds are tra­versed one by one. From the sys­tem head­quar­ters on, the pro­gres­sion of these three types is the same, and their even­tual Par­a­dise des­tiny is iden­ti­cal.

49:2.1There is a stan­dard and ba­sic pat­tern of veg­etable and an­i­mal life in each sys­tem. But the Life Car­ri­ers are of­ten­times con­fronted with the ne­ces­sity of mod­i­fy­ing these ba­sic pat­terns to con­form to the vary­ing phys­i­cal con­di­tions which con­front them on nu­mer­ous worlds of space. They fos­ter a gen­er­al­ized sys­tem type of mor­tal crea­ture, but there are seven dis­tinct phys­i­cal types as well as thou­sands upon thou­sands of mi­nor vari­ants of these seven out­stand­ing dif­fer­en­ti­a­tions:

49:2.21. At­mo­spheric types.

49:2.32. El­e­men­tal types.

49:2.43. Grav­ity types.

49:2.54. Tem­per­a­ture types.

49:2.65. Elec­tric types.

49:2.76. En­er­giz­ing types.

49:2.87. Un­named types.

49:2.9The Sa­ta­nia sys­tem con­tains all of these types and nu­mer­ous in­ter­me­di­ate groups, al­though some are very spar­ingly rep­re­sented.

49:2.101. The at­mo­spheric types. The phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences of the worlds of mor­tal habi­ta­tion are chiefly de­ter­mined by the na­ture of the at­mo­sphere; other in­flu­ences which con­tribute to the plan­e­tary dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of life are rel­a­tively mi­nor.

49:2.11The pres­ent at­mo­spheric sta­tus of Uran­tia is al­most ideal for the sup­port of the breath­ing type of man, but the hu­man type can be so mod­i­fied that it can live on both the super­at­mo­spheric and the sub­at­mo­spheric plan­ets. Such mod­i­fi­ca­tions also ex­tend to the an­i­mal life, which dif­fers greatly on the var­i­ous in­hab­ited spheres. There is a very great mod­i­fi­ca­tion of an­i­mal or­ders on both the sub- and the super­at­mo­spheric worlds.

49:2.12Of the at­mo­spheric types in Sa­ta­nia, about two and one-half per cent are sub­breathers, about five per cent super­breathers, and over ninety-one per cent are mid-breathers, al­to­gether ac­count­ing for ninety-eight and one-half per cent of the Sa­ta­nia worlds.

49:2.13Be­ings such as the Uran­tia races are clas­si­fied as mid-breathers; you rep­re­sent the av­er­age or typ­i­cal breath­ing or­der of mor­tal ex­is­tence. If in­tel­li­gent crea­tures should ex­ist on a planet with an at­mo­sphere sim­i­lar to that of your near neigh­bor, Venus, they would be­long to the super­breather group, while those in­hab­it­ing a planet with an at­mo­sphere as thin as that of your outer neigh­bor, Mars, would be de­nom­i­nated sub­breathers.

49:2.14If mor­tals should in­habit a planet de­void of air, like your moon, they would be­long to the sep­a­rate or­der of non­breathers. This type rep­re­sents a rad­i­cal or ex­treme ad­just­ment to the plan­e­tary en­vi­ron­ment and is sep­a­rately con­sid­ered. Non­breathers ac­count for the re­main­ing one and one-half per cent of Sa­ta­nia worlds.

49:2.152. The el­e­men­tal types. These dif­fer­en­ti­a­tions have to do with the re­la­tion of mor­tals to wa­ter, air, and land, and there are four dis­tinct species of in­tel­li­gent life as they are re­lated to these habi­tats. The Uran­tia races are of the land or­der.

49:2.16It is quite im­pos­si­ble for you to en­vis­age the en­vi­ron­ment which pre­vails dur­ing the early ages of some worlds. These un­usual con­di­tions make it nec­es­sary for the evolv­ing an­i­mal life to re­main in its ma­rine nurs­ery habi­tat for longer pe­ri­ods than on those plan­ets which very early pro­vide a hos­pitable land-and-at­mo­sphere en­vi­ron­ment. Con­versely, on some worlds of the super­breathers, when the planet is not too large, it is some­times ex­pe­di­ent to pro­vide for a mor­tal type which can read­ily ne­go­ti­ate at­mo­spheric pas­sage. These air nav­i­ga­tors some­times in­ter­vene be­tween the wa­ter and land groups, and they al­ways live in a mea­sure upon the ground, even­tu­ally evolv­ing into land dwellers. But on some worlds, for ages they con­tinue to fly even af­ter they have be­come land-type be­ings.

49:2.17It is both amaz­ing and amus­ing to ob­serve the early civ­i­liza­tion of a prim­i­tive race of hu­man be­ings tak­ing shape, in one case, in the air and tree­tops and, in an­other, midst the shal­low wa­ters of shel­tered tropic basins, as well as on the bot­tom, sides, and shores of these ma­rine gar­dens of the dawn races of such ex­traor­di­nary spheres. Even on Uran­tia there was a long age dur­ing which prim­i­tive man pre­served him­self and ad­vanced his prim­i­tive civ­i­liza­tion by liv­ing for the most part in the tree­tops as did his ear­lier ar­bo­real an­ces­tors. And on Uran­tia you still have a group of diminu­tive mam­mals (the bat fam­ily) that are air nav­i­ga­tors, and your seals and whales, of ma­rine habi­tat, are also of the mam­malian or­der.

49:2.18In Sa­ta­nia, of the el­e­men­tal types, seven per cent are wa­ter, ten per cent air, sev­enty per cent land, and thir­teen per cent com­bined land-and-air types. But these mod­i­fi­ca­tions of early in­tel­li­gent crea­tures are nei­ther hu­man fishes nor hu­man birds. They are of the hu­man and pre­hu­man types, nei­ther super­fishes nor glo­ri­fied birds but dis­tinctly mor­tal.

49:2.193. The grav­ity types. By mod­i­fi­ca­tion of cre­ative de­sign, in­tel­li­gent be­ings are so con­structed that they can freely func­tion on spheres both smaller and larger than Uran­tia, thus be­ing, in mea­sure, ac­com­mo­dated to the grav­ity of those plan­ets which are not of ideal size and den­sity.

49:2.20The var­i­ous plan­e­tary types of mor­tals vary in height, the av­er­age in Neb­a­don be­ing a tri­fle un­der seven feet. Some of the larger worlds are peo­pled with be­ings who are only about two and one-half feet in height. Mor­tal stature ranges from here on up through the av­er­age heights on the av­er­age-sized plan­ets to around ten feet on the smaller in­hab­ited spheres. In Sa­ta­nia there is only one race un­der four feet in height. Twenty per cent of the Sa­ta­nia in­hab­ited worlds are peo­pled with mor­tals of the mod­i­fied grav­ity types oc­cu­py­ing the larger and the smaller plan­ets.

49:2.214. The tem­per­a­ture types. It is pos­si­ble to cre­ate liv­ing be­ings who can with­stand tem­per­a­tures both much higher and much lower than the life range of the Uran­tia races. There are five dis­tinct or­ders of be­ings as they are clas­si­fied with ref­er­ence to heat-reg­u­lat­ing mech­a­nisms. In this scale the Uran­tia races are num­ber three. Thirty per cent of Sa­ta­nia worlds are peo­pled with races of mod­i­fied tem­per­a­ture types. Twelve per cent be­long to the higher tem­per­a­ture ranges, eigh­teen per cent to the lower, as com­pared with Uran­tians, who func­tion in the mid-tem­per­a­ture group.

49:2.225. The elec­tric types. The elec­tric, mag­netic, and elec­tronic be­hav­ior of the worlds varies greatly. There are ten de­signs of mor­tal life var­i­ously fash­ioned to with­stand the dif­fer­en­tial en­ergy of the spheres. These ten va­ri­eties also re­act in slightly dif­fer­ent ways to the chem­i­cal rays of or­di­nary sun­light. But these slight phys­i­cal vari­a­tions in no way af­fect the in­tel­lec­tual or the spir­i­tual life.

49:2.23Of the elec­tric group­ings of mor­tal life, al­most twenty-three per cent be­long to class num­ber four, the Uran­tia type of ex­is­tence. These types are dis­tributed as fol­lows: num­ber 1, one per cent; num­ber 2, two per cent; num­ber 3, five per cent; num­ber 4, twenty-three per cent; num­ber 5, twenty-seven per cent; num­ber 6, twenty-four per cent; num­ber 7, eight per cent; num­ber 8, five per cent; num­ber 9, three per cent; num­ber 10, two per cent—in whole per­cent­ages.

49:2.246. The en­er­giz­ing types. Not all worlds are alike in the man­ner of tak­ing in en­ergy. Not all in­hab­ited worlds have an at­mo­spheric ocean suited to res­pi­ra­tory ex­change of gases, such as is pres­ent on Uran­tia. Dur­ing the ear­lier and the later stages of many plan­ets, be­ings of your pres­ent or­der could not ex­ist; and when the res­pi­ra­tory fac­tors of a planet are very high or very low, but when all other pre­req­ui­sites to in­tel­li­gent life are ad­e­quate, the Life Car­ri­ers of­ten es­tab­lish on such worlds a mod­i­fied form of mor­tal ex­is­tence, be­ings who are com­pe­tent to ef­fect their life-pro­cess ex­changes di­rectly by means of light-en­ergy and the first­hand power trans­mu­ta­tions of the Mas­ter Phys­i­cal Con­trol­lers.

49:2.25There are six dif­fer­ing types of an­i­mal and mor­tal nu­tri­tion: The sub­breathers em­ploy the first type of nu­tri­tion, the ma­rine dwellers the sec­ond, the mid-breathers the third, as on Uran­tia. The super­breathers em­ploy the fourth type of en­ergy in­take, while the non­breathers uti­lize the fifth or­der of nu­tri­tion and en­ergy. The sixth tech­nique of en­er­giz­ing is lim­ited to the mid­way crea­tures.

49:2.267. The un­named types. There are nu­mer­ous ad­di­tional phys­i­cal vari­a­tions in plan­e­tary life, but all of these dif­fer­ences are wholly mat­ters of anatom­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tion, phys­i­o­logic dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, and elec­tro­chem­i­cal ad­just­ment. Such dis­tinc­tions do not con­cern the in­tel­lec­tual or the spir­i­tual life.

49:5.132. Brain-type se­ries. The one phys­i­cal uni­for­mity of mor­tals is the brain and ner­vous sys­tem; nev­er­the­less, there are three ba­sic or­ga­ni­za­tions of the brain mech­a­nism: the one-, the two-, and the three-brained types. Uran­tians are of the two-brained type, some­what more imag­i­na­tive, ad­ven­tur­ous, and phil­o­soph­i­cal than the one-brained mor­tals but some­what less spir­i­tual, eth­i­cal, and wor­ship­ful than the three-brained or­ders. These brain dif­fer­ences char­ac­ter­ize even the pre­hu­man an­i­mal ex­is­tences.

109:3.5In the three-brained mor­tals of this se­ries of worlds, the Ad­justers are able to gain far more ac­tual con­tact with their sub­jects dur­ing the tem­po­ral life than in the one- and two-brained types. But in the ca­reer af­ter death, the three-brained type pro­ceed just as do the one-brained type and the two-brained peo­ples—the Uran­tia races.

109:4.4The in­dwelling Ad­justers have in no small mea­sure co-op­er­ated with other spir­i­tual in­flu­ences in trans­form­ing and hu­man­iz­ing the de­scen­dants of the prim­i­tive men of olden ages. If the Ad­justers in­dwelling the minds of the in­hab­i­tants of Uran­tia were to be with­drawn, the world would slowly re­turn to many of the scenes and prac­tices of the men of prim­i­tive times; the di­vine Mon­i­tors are one of the real po­ten­tials of ad­vanc­ing civ­i­liza­tion.

112:3.7Upon death the Thought Ad­juster tem­porar­ily loses per­son­al­ity, but not iden­tity; the hu­man sub­ject tem­porar­ily loses iden­tity, but not per­son­al­ity; on the man­sion worlds both re­unite in eter­nal man­i­fes­ta­tion. Never does a de­parted Thought Ad­juster re­turn to earth as the be­ing of for­mer in­dwelling; never is per­son­al­ity man­i­fested with­out the hu­man will; and never does a dis-Ad­jus­tered hu­man be­ing af­ter death man­i­fest ac­tive iden­tity or in any man­ner es­tab­lish com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the liv­ing be­ings of earth. Such dis-Ad­jus­tered souls are wholly and ab­so­lutely un­con­scious dur­ing the long or short sleep of death. There can be no ex­hi­bi­tion of any sort of per­son­al­ity or abil­ity to en­gage in com­mu­ni­ca­tions with other per­son­al­i­ties un­til af­ter com­ple­tion of sur­vival. Those who go to the man­sion worlds are not per­mit­ted to send mes­sages back to their loved ones. It is the pol­icy through­out the uni­verses to for­bid such com­mu­ni­ca­tion dur­ing the pe­riod of a cur­rent dis­pen­sa­tion.

146:7.2Je­sus fur­ther ex­plained to his apos­tles that the spir­its of de­parted hu­man be­ings do not come back to the world of their ori­gin to com­mu­ni­cate with their liv­ing fel­lows. Only af­ter the pass­ing of a dis­pen­sa­tional age would it be pos­si­ble for the ad­vanc­ing spirit of mor­tal man to re­turn to earth and then only in ex­cep­tional cases and as a part of the spir­i­tual ad­min­is­tra­tion of the planet.

150:3.53. The spir­its of the dead do not come back to com­mu­ni­cate with their fam­i­lies or their one­time friends among the liv­ing.

physical aspects 81 paragraphs, 3 read above

0:0.5Your world, Uran­tia, is one of many sim­i­lar in­hab­ited plan­ets which com­prise the lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don. This uni­verse, to­gether with sim­i­lar cre­ations, makes up the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton, from whose cap­i­tal, Uversa, our com­mis­sion hails. Or­von­ton is one of the seven evo­lu­tion­ary super­uni­verses of time and space which cir­cle the never-be­gin­ning, never-end­ing cre­ation of di­vine per­fec­tion—the cen­tral uni­verse of Ha­vona. At the heart of this eter­nal and cen­tral uni­verse is the sta­tion­ary Isle of Par­a­dise, the ge­o­graphic cen­ter of in­fin­ity and the dwell­ing place of the eter­nal God.

15:1.3Uran­tia is sit­u­ated in a lo­cal uni­verse and a super­uni­verse not fully or­ga­nized, and your lo­cal uni­verse is in im­me­di­ate prox­im­ity to nu­mer­ous par­tially com­pleted phys­i­cal cre­ations. You be­long to one of the rel­a­tively re­cent uni­verses. But you are not, to­day, plung­ing on wildly into un­charted space nor swing­ing out blindly into un­known re­gions. You are fol­low­ing the or­derly and pre­de­ter­mined path of the super­uni­verse space level. You are now pass­ing through the very same space that your plan­e­tary sys­tem, or its pre­de­ces­sors, tra­versed ages ago; and some day in the re­mote fu­ture your sys­tem, or its suc­ces­sors, will again tra­verse the iden­ti­cal space through which you are now so swiftly plung­ing.

15:1.4 · one paragraph not cited here ·

15:1.4In this age and as di­rec­tion is re­garded on Uran­tia, super­uni­verse num­ber one swings al­most due north, ap­prox­i­mately op­po­site, in an east­erly di­rec­tion, to the Par­a­dise res­i­dence of the Great Sources and Cen­ters and the cen­tral uni­verse of Ha­vona. This po­si­tion, with the cor­re­spond­ing one to the west, rep­re­sents the near­est phys­i­cal ap­proach of the spheres of time to the eter­nal Isle. Super­uni­verse num­ber two is in the north, prepar­ing for the west­ward swing, while num­ber three now holds the north­ern­most seg­ment of the great space path, hav­ing al­ready turned into the bend lead­ing to the southerly plunge. Num­ber four is on the com­par­a­tively straight­away southerly flight, the ad­vance re­gions now ap­proach­ing op­po­si­tion to the Great Cen­ters. Num­ber five has about left its po­si­tion op­po­site the Cen­ter of Cen­ters while con­tin­u­ing on the di­rect southerly course just pre­ced­ing the east­ward swing; num­ber six oc­cu­pies most of the south­ern curve, the seg­ment from which your super­uni­verse has nearly passed.

15:1.5Your lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don be­longs to Or­von­ton, the sev­enth super­uni­verse, which swings on be­tween super­uni­verses one and six, hav­ing not long since (as we reckon time) turned the south­east­ern bend of the super­uni­verse space level. To­day, the so­lar sys­tem to which Uran­tia be­longs is a few bil­lion years past the swing around the south­ern cur­va­ture so that you are just now ad­vanc­ing be­yond the south­east­ern bend and are mov­ing swiftly through the long and com­par­a­tively straight­away north­ern path. For un­told ages Or­von­ton will pur­sue this al­most di­rect northerly course.

15:1.6Uran­tia be­longs to a sys­tem which is well out to­wards the bor­der­land of your lo­cal uni­verse; and your lo­cal uni­verse is at pres­ent travers­ing the pe­riph­ery of Or­von­ton. Be­yond you there are still oth­ers, but you are far re­moved in space from those phys­i­cal sys­tems which swing around the great cir­cle in com­par­a­tive prox­im­ity to the Great Source and Cen­ter.

15:6.15In your super­uni­verse not one cool planet in forty is hab­it­able by be­ings of your or­der. And, of course, the super­heated suns and the frigid out­ly­ing worlds are un­fit to har­bor higher life. In your so­lar sys­tem only three plan­ets are at pres­ent suited to har­bor life. Uran­tia, in size, den­sity, and lo­ca­tion, is in many re­spects ideal for hu­man habi­ta­tion.

15:14.5Your world is called Uran­tia, and it is num­ber 606 in the plan­e­tary group, or sys­tem, of Sa­ta­nia. This sys­tem has at pres­ent 619 in­hab­ited worlds, and more than two hun­dred ad­di­tional plan­ets are evolv­ing fa­vor­ably to­ward be­com­ing in­hab­ited worlds at some fu­ture time.

15:14.6Sa­ta­nia has a head­quar­ters world called Je­ru­sem, and it is sys­tem num­ber twenty-four in the con­stel­la­tion of Nor­la­ti­adek. Your con­stel­la­tion, Nor­la­ti­adek, con­sists of one hun­dred lo­cal sys­tems and has a head­quar­ters world called Eden­tia. Nor­la­ti­adek is num­ber sev­enty in the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. The lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don con­sists of one hun­dred con­stel­la­tions and has a cap­i­tal known as Sal­ving­ton. The uni­verse of Neb­a­don is num­ber eighty-four in the mi­nor sec­tor of Ensa.

15:14.7The mi­nor sec­tor of Ensa con­sists of one hun­dred lo­cal uni­verses and has a cap­i­tal called Umi­nor the third. This mi­nor sec­tor is num­ber three in the ma­jor sec­tor of Splan­don. Splan­don con­sists of one hun­dred mi­nor sec­tors and has a head­quar­ters world called Uma­jor the fifth. It is the fifth ma­jor sec­tor of the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton, the sev­enth seg­ment of the grand uni­verse. Thus you can lo­cate your planet in the scheme of the or­ga­ni­za­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tion of the uni­verse of uni­verses.

15:14.8 read above, under celestial government

41:2.8The power-en­ergy super­vi­sion of the evo­lu­tion­ary in­hab­ited worlds is the re­spon­si­bil­ity of the Mas­ter Phys­i­cal Con­trol­lers, but these be­ings are not re­spon­si­ble for all en­ergy mis­be­hav­ior on Uran­tia. There are a num­ber of rea­sons for such dis­tur­bances, some of which are be­yond the do­main and con­trol of the phys­i­cal cus­to­di­ans. Uran­tia is in the lines of tremen­dous en­er­gies, a small planet in the cir­cuit of enor­mous masses, and the lo­cal con­trol­lers some­times em­ploy enor­mous num­bers of their or­der in an ef­fort to equal­ize these lines of en­ergy. They do fairly well with re­gard to the phys­i­cal cir­cuits of Sa­ta­nia but have trou­ble in­su­lat­ing against the pow­er­ful Nor­la­ti­adek cur­rents.

41:4.3Cool­ing stars can be phys­i­cally gaseous and tremen­dously dense at the same time. You are not fa­mil­iar with the so­lar super­gases, but these and other un­usual forms of mat­ter ex­plain how even non­solid suns can at­tain a den­sity equal to iron—about the same as Uran­tia—and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and con­tinue to func­tion as suns. The atoms in these dense super­gases are ex­cep­tion­ally small; they con­tain few elec­trons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ul­ti­ma­tonic stores of en­ergy.

41:10.4Dur­ing the ear­lier ages of all these new worlds, earth­quakes are fre­quent, and they are all char­ac­ter­ized by great phys­i­cal dis­tur­bances; es­pe­cially is this true of the gas-con­trac­tion spheres, the worlds born of the im­mense neb­u­lar rings which are left be­hind in the wake of the early con­den­sa­tion and con­trac­tion of cer­tain in­di­vid­ual suns. Plan­ets hav­ing a dual ori­gin like Uran­tia pass through a less vi­o­lent and stormy youth­ful ca­reer. Even so, your world ex­pe­ri­enced an early phase of mighty up­heavals, char­ac­ter­ized by vol­ca­noes, earth­quakes, floods, and ter­rific storms.

41:10.5Uran­tia is com­par­a­tively iso­lated on the out­skirts of Sa­ta­nia, your so­lar sys­tem, with one ex­cep­tion, be­ing the far­thest re­moved from Je­ru­sem, while Sa­ta­nia it­self is next to the out­er­most sys­tem of Nor­la­ti­adek, and this con­stel­la­tion is now travers­ing the outer fringe of Neb­a­don. You were truly among the least of all cre­ation un­til Mi­chael’s be­stowal el­e­vated your planet to a po­si­tion of honor and great uni­verse in­ter­est. Some­times the last is first, while truly the least be­comes great­est.

49:2.11 read above, under mortals of Urantia

Paper 57, The Origin of Urantia, is cited whole. Read it in the reader ›

57:1.1Uran­tia is of ori­gin in your sun, and your sun is one of the mul­ti­far­i­ous off­spring of the And­ro­no­ver neb­ula, which was one­time or­ga­nized as a com­po­nent part of the phys­i­cal power and ma­te­rial mat­ter of the lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don. And this great neb­ula it­self took ori­gin in the uni­ver­sal force-charge of space in the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton, long, long ago.

57:6.1Sub­se­quent to the birth of the so­lar sys­tem a pe­riod of di­min­ish­ing so­lar dis­gorge­ment en­sued. De­creas­ingly, for an­other five hun­dred thou­sand years, the sun con­tin­ued to pour forth di­min­ish­ing vol­umes of mat­ter into sur­round­ing space. But dur­ing these early times of er­ratic or­bits, when the sur­round­ing bod­ies made their near­est ap­proach to the sun, the so­lar par­ent was able to re­cap­ture a large por­tion of this me­te­oric ma­te­rial.

57:6.2The plan­ets near­est the sun were the first to have their rev­o­lu­tions slowed down by tidal fric­tion. Such grav­i­ta­tional in­flu­ences also con­tribute to the sta­bi­liza­tion of plan­e­tary or­bits while act­ing as a brake on the rate of plan­e­tary-ax­ial rev­o­lu­tion, caus­ing a planet to re­volve ever slower un­til ax­ial rev­o­lu­tion ceases, leav­ing one hemi­sphere of the planet al­ways turned to­ward the sun or larger body, as is il­lus­trated by the planet Mer­cury and by the moon, which al­ways turns the same face to­ward Uran­tia.

57:6.3When the tidal fric­tions of the moon and the earth be­come equal­ized, the earth will al­ways turn the same hemi­sphere to­ward the moon, and the day and month will be anal­o­gous—in length about forty-seven days. When such sta­bil­ity of or­bits is at­tained, tidal fric­tions will go into re­verse ac­tion, no longer driv­ing the moon far­ther away from the earth but grad­u­ally draw­ing the satel­lite to­ward the planet. And then, in that far-dis­tant fu­ture when the moon ap­proaches to within about eleven thou­sand miles of the earth, the grav­ity ac­tion of the lat­ter will cause the moon to dis­rupt, and this tidal-grav­ity ex­plo­sion will shat­ter the moon into small par­ti­cles, which may as­sem­ble about the world as rings of mat­ter re­sem­bling those of Sat­urn or may be grad­u­ally drawn into the earth as me­te­ors.

57:6.4If space bod­ies are sim­i­lar in size and den­sity, col­li­sions may oc­cur. But if two space bod­ies of sim­i­lar den­sity are rel­a­tively un­equal in size, then, if the smaller pro­gres­sively ap­proaches the larger, the dis­rup­tion of the smaller body will oc­cur when the ra­dius of its or­bit be­comes less than two and one-half times the ra­dius of the larger body. Col­li­sions among the gi­ants of space are rare in­deed, but these grav­ity-tidal ex­plo­sions of lesser bod­ies are quite com­mon.

57:6.5Shoot­ing stars oc­cur in swarms be­cause they are the frag­ments of larger bod­ies of mat­ter which have been dis­rupted by tidal grav­ity ex­erted by near-by and still larger space bod­ies. Sat­urn’s rings are the frag­ments of a dis­rupted satel­lite. One of the moons of Jupiter is now ap­proach­ing dan­ger­ously near the crit­i­cal zone of tidal dis­rup­tion and, within a few mil­lion years, will ei­ther be claimed by the planet or will un­dergo grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion. The fifth planet of the so­lar sys­tem of long, long ago tra­versed an ir­reg­u­lar or­bit, pe­ri­od­i­cally mak­ing closer and closer ap­proach to Jupiter un­til it en­tered the crit­i­cal zone of grav­ity-tidal dis­rup­tion, was swiftly frag­men­tized, and be­came the pres­ent-day clus­ter of as­ter­oids.

57:6.64,000,000,000 years ago wit­nessed the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the Jupiter and Sat­urn sys­tems much as ob­served to­day ex­cept for their moons, which con­tin­ued to in­crease in size for sev­eral bil­lions of years. In fact, all of the plan­ets and satel­lites of the so­lar sys­tem are still grow­ing as the re­sult of con­tin­ued me­te­oric cap­tures.

57:6.73,500,000,000 years ago the con­den­sa­tion nu­cle­uses of the other ten plan­ets were well formed, and the cores of most of the moons were in­tact, though some of the smaller satel­lites later united to make the pres­ent-day larger moons. This age may be re­garded as the era of plan­e­tary as­sem­bly.

57:6.83,000,000,000 years ago the so­lar sys­tem was func­tion­ing much as it does to­day. Its mem­bers con­tin­ued to grow in size as space me­te­ors con­tin­ued to pour in upon the plan­ets and their satel­lites at a prodi­gious rate.

57:6.9About this time your so­lar sys­tem was placed on the phys­i­cal reg­istry of Neb­a­don and given its name, Mon­ma­tia.

57:6.102,500,000,000 years ago the plan­ets had grown im­mensely in size. Uran­tia was a well-de­vel­oped sphere about one tenth its pres­ent mass and was still grow­ing rapidly by me­te­oric ac­cre­tion.

57:6.11All of this tremen­dous ac­tiv­ity is a nor­mal part of the mak­ing of an evo­lu­tion­ary world on the or­der of Uran­tia and con­sti­tutes the as­tro­nomic pre­lim­i­nar­ies to the set­ting of the stage for the be­gin­ning of the phys­i­cal evo­lu­tion of such worlds of space in prepa­ra­tion for the life ad­ven­tures of time.

57:7.1Through­out these early times the space re­gions of the so­lar sys­tem were swarm­ing with small dis­rup­tive and con­den­sa­tion bod­ies, and in the ab­sence of a pro­tec­tive com­bus­tion at­mo­sphere such space bod­ies crashed di­rectly on the sur­face of Uran­tia. These in­ces­sant im­pacts kept the sur­face of the planet more or less heated, and this, to­gether with the in­creased ac­tion of grav­ity as the sphere grew larger, be­gan to set in op­er­a­tion those in­flu­ences which grad­u­ally caused the heav­ier el­e­ments, such as iron, to set­tle more and more to­ward the cen­ter of the planet.

57:7.22,000,000,000 years ago the earth be­gan de­cid­edly to gain on the moon. Al­ways had the planet been larger than its satel­lite, but there was not so much dif­fer­ence in size un­til about this time, when enor­mous space bod­ies were cap­tured by the earth. Uran­tia was then about one fifth its pres­ent size and had be­come large enough to hold the prim­i­tive at­mo­sphere which had be­gun to ap­pear as a re­sult of the in­ter­nal el­e­men­tal con­test be­tween the heated in­te­rior and the cool­ing crust.

57:7.3Def­i­nite vol­canic ac­tion dates from these times. The in­ter­nal heat of the earth con­tin­ued to be aug­mented by the deeper and deeper burial of the ra­dioac­tive or heav­ier el­e­ments brought in from space by the me­te­ors. The study of these ra­dioac­tive el­e­ments will re­veal that Uran­tia is more than one bil­lion years old on its sur­face. The ra­dium clock is your most re­li­able time­piece for mak­ing sci­en­tific es­ti­mates of the age of the planet, but all such es­ti­mates are too short be­cause the ra­dioac­tive ma­te­ri­als open to your scrutiny are all de­rived from the earth’s sur­face and hence rep­re­sent Uran­tia’s com­par­a­tively re­cent ac­quire­ments of these el­e­ments.

57:7.41,500,000,000 years ago the earth was two thirds its pres­ent size, while the moon was near­ing its pres­ent mass. Earth’s rapid gain over the moon in size en­abled it to be­gin the slow rob­bery of the lit­tle at­mo­sphere which its satel­lite orig­i­nally had.

57:7.5Vol­canic ac­tion is now at its height. The whole earth is a ver­i­ta­ble fiery in­ferno, the sur­face re­sem­bling its ear­lier molten state be­fore the heav­ier met­als grav­i­tated to­ward the cen­ter. This is the vol­canic age. Nev­er­the­less, a crust, con­sist­ing chiefly of the com­par­a­tively lighter gran­ite, is grad­u­ally form­ing. The stage is be­ing set for a planet which can some­day sup­port life.

57:7.6The prim­i­tive plan­e­tary at­mo­sphere is slowly evolv­ing, now con­tain­ing some wa­ter va­por, car­bon monox­ide, car­bon diox­ide, and hy­dro­gen chlo­ride, but there is lit­tle or no free ni­tro­gen or free oxy­gen. The at­mo­sphere of a world in the vol­canic age pre­sents a queer spec­ta­cle. In ad­di­tion to the gases enu­mer­ated it is heav­ily charged with nu­mer­ous vol­canic gases and, as the air belt ma­tures, with the com­bus­tion prod­ucts of the heavy me­te­oric show­ers which are con­stantly hurtling in upon the plan­e­tary sur­face. Such me­te­oric com­bus­tion keeps the at­mo­spheric oxy­gen very nearly ex­hausted, and the rate of me­te­oric bom­bard­ment is still tremen­dous.

57:7.7Pres­ently, the at­mo­sphere be­came more set­tled and cooled suf­fi­ciently to start pre­cip­i­ta­tion of rain on the hot rocky sur­face of the planet. For thou­sands of years Uran­tia was en­veloped in one vast and con­tin­u­ous blan­ket of steam. And dur­ing these ages the sun never shone upon the earth’s sur­face.

57:7.8Much of the car­bon of the at­mo­sphere was ab­stracted to form the car­bon­ates of the var­i­ous met­als which abounded in the su­per­fi­cial lay­ers of the planet. Later on, much greater quan­ti­ties of these car­bon gases were con­sumed by the early and pro­lific plant life.

57:7.9Even in the later pe­ri­ods the con­tin­u­ing lava flows and the in­com­ing me­te­ors kept the oxy­gen of the air al­most com­pletely used up. Even the early de­posits of the soon ap­pear­ing prim­i­tive ocean con­tain no col­ored stones or shales. And for a long time af­ter this ocean ap­peared, there was vir­tu­ally no free oxy­gen in the at­mo­sphere; and it did not ap­pear in sig­nif­i­cant quan­ti­ties un­til it was later gen­er­ated by the sea­weeds and other forms of veg­etable life.

57:7.10The prim­i­tive plan­e­tary at­mo­sphere of the vol­canic age af­fords lit­tle pro­tec­tion against the col­li­sional im­pacts of the me­te­oric swarms. Mil­lions upon mil­lions of me­te­ors are able to pen­e­trate such an air belt to smash against the plan­e­tary crust as solid bod­ies. But as time passes, fewer and fewer prove large enough to re­sist the ever-stronger fric­tion shield of the oxy­gen-en­rich­ing at­mo­sphere of the later eras.

57:8.1 read above, under history

57:8.2The at­mo­sphere, to­gether with in­ces­sant mois­ture pre­cip­i­ta­tion, fa­cil­i­tated the cool­ing of the earth’s crust. Vol­canic ac­tion early equal­ized in­ter­nal-heat pres­sure and crustal con­trac­tion; and as vol­ca­noes rapidly de­creased, earth­quakes made their ap­pear­ance as this epoch of crustal cool­ing and ad­just­ment pro­gressed.

57:8.3The real ge­o­logic his­tory of Uran­tia be­gins with the cool­ing of the earth’s crust suf­fi­ciently to cause the for­ma­tion of the first ocean. Wa­ter-va­por con­den­sa­tion on the cool­ing sur­face of the earth, once be­gun, con­tin­ued un­til it was vir­tu­ally com­plete. By the end of this pe­riod the ocean was world-wide, cov­er­ing the en­tire planet to an av­er­age depth of over one mile. The tides were then in play much as they are now ob­served, but this prim­i­tive ocean was not salty; it was prac­ti­cally a fresh-wa­ter cov­er­ing for the world. In those days, most of the chlo­rine was com­bined with var­i­ous met­als, but there was enough, in union with hy­dro­gen, to ren­der this wa­ter faintly acid.

57:8.4At the open­ing of this far­away era, Uran­tia should be en­vis­aged as a wa­ter-bound planet. Later on, deeper and hence denser lava flows came out upon the bot­tom of the pres­ent Pa­cific Ocean, and this part of the wa­ter-cov­ered sur­face be­came con­sid­er­ably de­pressed. The first con­ti­nen­tal land mass emerged from the world ocean in com­pen­satory ad­just­ment of the equi­lib­rium of the grad­u­ally thick­en­ing earth’s crust.

57:8.5950,000,000 years ago Uran­tia pre­sents the pic­ture of one great con­ti­nent of land and one large body of wa­ter, the Pa­cific Ocean. Vol­ca­noes are still wide­spread and earth­quakes are both fre­quent and se­vere. Me­te­ors con­tinue to bom­bard the earth, but they are di­min­ish­ing in both fre­quency and size. The at­mo­sphere is clear­ing up, but the amount of car­bon diox­ide con­tin­ues large. The earth’s crust is grad­u­ally sta­bi­liz­ing.

57:8.6It was at about this time that Uran­tia was as­signed to the sys­tem of Sa­ta­nia for plan­e­tary ad­min­is­tra­tion and was placed on the life reg­istry of Nor­la­ti­adek. Then be­gan the ad­min­is­tra­tive rec­og­ni­tion of the small and in­signif­i­cant sphere which was des­tined to be the planet whereon Mi­chael would sub­se­quently en­gage in the stu­pen­dous un­der­tak­ing of mor­tal be­stowal, would par­tic­i­pate in those ex­pe­ri­ences which have since caused Uran­tia to be­come lo­cally known as the “world of the cross.”

57:8.7900,000,000 years ago wit­nessed the ar­rival on Uran­tia of the first Sa­ta­nia scout­ing party sent out from Je­ru­sem to ex­am­ine the planet and make a re­port on its adap­ta­tion for a life-ex­per­i­ment sta­tion. This com­mis­sion con­sisted of twenty-four mem­bers, em­brac­ing Life Car­ri­ers, La­non­an­dek Sons, Mel­chiz­e­deks, ser­a­phim, and other or­ders of ce­les­tial life hav­ing to do with the early days of plan­e­tary or­ga­ni­za­tion and ad­min­is­tra­tion.

57:8.8Af­ter mak­ing a painstak­ing sur­vey of the planet, this com­mis­sion re­turned to Je­ru­sem and re­ported fa­vor­ably to the Sys­tem Sov­er­eign, rec­om­mend­ing that Uran­tia be placed on the life-ex­per­i­ment reg­istry. Your world was ac­cord­ingly reg­is­tered on Je­ru­sem as a dec­i­mal planet, and the Life Car­ri­ers were no­ti­fied that they would be granted per­mis­sion to in­sti­tute new pat­terns of me­chan­i­cal, chem­i­cal, and elec­tri­cal mo­bi­liza­tion at the time of their sub­se­quent ar­rival with life trans­plan­ta­tion and im­plan­ta­tion man­dates.

57:8.9In due course ar­range­ments for the plan­e­tary oc­cu­pa­tion were com­pleted by the mixed com­mis­sion of twelve on Je­ru­sem and ap­proved by the plan­e­tary com­mis­sion of sev­enty on Eden­tia. These plans, pro­posed by the ad­vi­sory coun­selors of the Life Car­ri­ers, were fi­nally ac­cepted on Sal­ving­ton. Soon there­after the Neb­a­don broad­casts car­ried the an­nounce­ment that Uran­tia would be­come the stage whereon the Life Car­ri­ers would ex­e­cute their six­ti­eth Sa­ta­nia ex­per­i­ment de­signed to am­plify and im­prove the Sa­ta­nia type of the Neb­a­don life pat­terns.

57:8.10Shortly af­ter Uran­tia was first rec­og­nized on the uni­verse broad­casts to all Neb­a­don, it was ac­corded full uni­verse sta­tus. Soon there­after it was reg­is­tered in the rec­ords of the mi­nor and the ma­jor sec­tor head­quar­ters plan­ets of the super­uni­verse; and be­fore this age was over, Uran­tia had found en­try on the plan­e­tary-life reg­istry of Uversa.

57:8.11This en­tire age was char­ac­ter­ized by fre­quent and vi­o­lent storms. The early crust of the earth was in a state of con­tin­ual flux. Sur­face cool­ing al­ter­nated with im­mense lava flows. Nowhere can there be found on the sur­face of the world any­thing of this orig­i­nal plan­e­tary crust. It has all been mixed up too many times with ex­trud­ing lavas of deep ori­gins and ad­mixed with sub­se­quent de­posits of the early world-wide ocean.

57:8.12Nowhere on the sur­face of the world will there be found more of the mod­i­fied rem­nants of these an­cient pre­o­cean rocks than in north­east­ern Canada around Hud­son Bay. This ex­ten­sive gran­ite el­e­va­tion is com­posed of stone be­long­ing to the pre­o­ceanic ages. These rock lay­ers have been heated, bent, twisted, up­crum­pled, and again and again have they passed through these dis­tort­ing meta­mor­phic ex­pe­ri­ences.

57:8.13Through­out the oceanic ages, enor­mous lay­ers of fos­sil-free strat­i­fied stone were de­posited on this an­cient ocean bot­tom. (Lime­stone can form as a re­sult of chem­i­cal pre­cip­i­ta­tion; not all of the older lime­stone was pro­duced by ma­rine-life de­po­si­tion.) In none of these an­cient rock for­ma­tions will there be found ev­i­dences of life; they con­tain no fos­sils un­less, by some chance, later de­posits of the wa­ter ages have be­come mixed with these older pre­life lay­ers.

57:8.14The earth’s early crust was highly un­sta­ble, but moun­tains were not in pro­cess of for­ma­tion. The planet con­tracted un­der grav­ity pres­sure as it formed. Moun­tains are not the re­sult of the col­lapse of the cool­ing crust of a con­tract­ing sphere; they ap­pear later on as a re­sult of the ac­tion of rain, grav­ity, and ero­sion.

57:8.15The con­ti­nen­tal land mass of this era in­creased un­til it cov­ered al­most ten per cent of the earth’s sur­face. Se­vere earth­quakes did not be­gin un­til the con­ti­nen­tal mass of land emerged well above the wa­ter. When they once be­gan, they in­creased in fre­quency and sever­ity for ages. For mil­lions upon mil­lions of years earth­quakes have di­min­ished, but Uran­tia still has an av­er­age of fif­teen daily.

57:8.16850,000,000 years ago the first real epoch of the sta­bi­liza­tion of the earth’s crust be­gan. Most of the heav­ier met­als had set­tled down to­ward the cen­ter of the globe; the cool­ing crust had ceased to cave in on such an ex­ten­sive scale as in for­mer ages. There was es­tab­lished a bet­ter bal­ance be­tween the land ex­tru­sion and the heav­ier ocean bed. The flow of the sub­crustal lava bed be­came well-nigh world-wide, and this com­pen­sated and sta­bi­lized the fluc­tu­a­tions due to cool­ing, con­tract­ing, and su­per­fi­cial shift­ing.

57:8.17Vol­canic erup­tions and earth­quakes con­tin­ued to di­min­ish in fre­quency and sever­ity. The at­mo­sphere was clear­ing of vol­canic gases and wa­ter va­por, but the per­cent­age of car­bon diox­ide was still high.

57:8.18Elec­tric dis­tur­bances in the air and in the earth were also de­creas­ing. The lava flows had brought to the sur­face a mix­ture of el­e­ments which di­ver­si­fied the crust and bet­ter in­su­lated the planet from cer­tain space-en­er­gies. And all of this did much to fa­cil­i­tate the con­trol of ter­res­trial en­ergy and to reg­u­late its flow, as is dis­closed by the func­tion­ing of the mag­netic poles.

57:8.19800,000,000 years ago wit­nessed the in­au­gu­ra­tion of the first great land epoch, the age of in­creased con­ti­nen­tal emer­gence.

57:8.20Since the con­den­sa­tion of the earth’s hy­dro­sphere, first into the world ocean and sub­se­quently into the Pa­cific Ocean, this lat­ter body of wa­ter should be vi­su­al­ized as then cov­er­ing nine tenths of the earth’s sur­face. Me­te­ors falling into the sea ac­cu­mu­lated on the ocean bot­tom, and me­te­ors are, gen­er­ally speak­ing, com­posed of heavy ma­te­ri­als. Those falling on the land were largely ox­i­dized, sub­se­quently worn down by ero­sion, and washed into the ocean basins. Thus the ocean bot­tom grew in­creas­ingly heavy, and added to this was the weight of a body of wa­ter at some places ten miles deep.

57:8.21The in­creas­ing down­thrust of the Pa­cific Ocean op­er­ated fur­ther to up­thrust the con­ti­nen­tal land mass. Eu­rope and Africa be­gan to rise out of the Pa­cific depths along with those masses now called Aus­tralia, North and South Amer­ica, and the con­ti­nent of Antarc­tica, while the bed of the Pa­cific Ocean en­gaged in a fur­ther com­pen­satory sink­ing ad­just­ment. By the end of this pe­riod al­most one third of the earth’s sur­face con­sisted of land, all in one con­ti­nen­tal body.

57:8.22With this in­crease in land el­e­va­tion the first cli­matic dif­fer­ences of the planet ap­peared. Land el­e­va­tion, cos­mic clouds, and oceanic in­flu­ences are the chief fac­tors in cli­matic fluc­tu­a­tion. The back­bone of the Asi­atic land mass reached a height of al­most nine miles at the time of the max­i­mum land emer­gence. Had there been much mois­ture in the air hov­er­ing over these highly el­e­vated re­gions, enor­mous ice blan­kets would have formed; the ice age would have ar­rived long be­fore it did. It was sev­eral hun­dred mil­lions of years be­fore so much land again ap­peared above wa­ter.

57:8.23750,000,000 years ago the first breaks in the con­ti­nen­tal land mass be­gan as the great north-and-south crack­ing, which later ad­mit­ted the ocean wa­ters and pre­pared the way for the west­ward drift of the con­ti­nents of North and South Amer­ica, in­clud­ing Green­land. The long east-and-west cleav­age sep­a­rated Africa from Eu­rope and sev­ered the land masses of Aus­tralia, the Pa­cific Is­lands, and Antarc­tica from the Asi­atic con­ti­nent.

57:8.24700,000,000 years ago Uran­tia was ap­proach­ing the ripen­ing of con­di­tions suit­able for the sup­port of life. The con­ti­nen­tal land drift con­tin­ued; in­creas­ingly the ocean pen­e­trated the land as long fin­ger­like seas pro­vid­ing those shal­low wa­ters and shel­tered bays which are so suit­able as a habi­tat for ma­rine life.

57:8.25650,000,000 years ago wit­nessed the fur­ther sep­a­ra­tion of the land masses and, in con­se­quence, a fur­ther ex­ten­sion of the con­ti­nen­tal seas. And these wa­ters were rapidly at­tain­ing that de­gree of salti­ness which was es­sen­tial to Uran­tia life.

57:8.26It was these seas and their suc­ces­sors that laid down the life rec­ords of Uran­tia, as sub­se­quently dis­cov­ered in well-pre­served stone pages, vol­ume upon vol­ume, as era suc­ceeded era and age grew upon age. These in­land seas of olden times were truly the cra­dle of evo­lu­tion.

57:8.27[Pre­sented by a Life Car­rier, a mem­ber of the orig­i­nal Uran­tia Corps and now a res­i­dent ob­server.]

58:3.1Dur­ing the ear­lier times of uni­verse ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion the space re­gions are in­ter­spersed with vast hy­dro­gen clouds, just such as­tro­nomic dust clus­ters as now char­ac­ter­ize many re­gions through­out re­mote space. Much of the or­ga­nized mat­ter which the blaz­ing suns break down and dis­perse as ra­di­ant en­ergy was orig­i­nally built up in these early ap­pear­ing hy­dro­gen clouds of space. Un­der cer­tain un­usual con­di­tions atom dis­rup­tion also oc­curs at the nu­cleus of the larger hy­dro­gen masses. And all of these phe­nom­ena of atom build­ing and atom dis­so­lu­tion, as in the highly heated neb­u­lae, are at­tended by the emer­gence of flood tides of short space rays of ra­di­ant en­ergy. Ac­com­pa­ny­ing these di­verse ra­di­a­tions is a form of space-en­ergy un­known on Uran­tia.

58:3.2This short-ray en­ergy charge of uni­verse space is four hun­dred times greater than all other forms of ra­di­ant en­ergy ex­ist­ing in the or­ga­nized space do­mains. The out­put of short space rays, whether com­ing from the blaz­ing neb­u­lae, tense elec­tric fields, outer space, or the vast hy­dro­gen dust clouds, is mod­i­fied qual­i­ta­tively and quan­ti­ta­tively by fluc­tu­a­tions of, and sud­den ten­sion changes in, tem­per­a­ture, grav­ity, and elec­tronic pres­sures.

58:3.3These even­tu­al­i­ties in the ori­gin of the space rays are de­ter­mined by many cos­mic oc­cur­rences as well as by the or­bits of cir­cu­lat­ing mat­ter, which vary from mod­i­fied cir­cles to ex­treme el­lipses. Phys­i­cal con­di­tions may also be greatly al­tered be­cause the elec­tron spin is some­times in the op­po­site di­rec­tion from that of the grosser mat­ter be­hav­ior, even in the same phys­i­cal zone.

58:3.4The vast hy­dro­gen clouds are ver­i­ta­ble cos­mic chem­i­cal lab­o­ra­to­ries, har­bor­ing all phases of evolv­ing en­ergy and meta­mor­phos­ing mat­ter. Great en­ergy ac­tions also oc­cur in the marginal gases of the great bi­nary stars which so fre­quently over­lap and hence ex­ten­sively com­min­gle. But none of these tremen­dous and far-flung en­ergy ac­tiv­i­ties of space ex­erts the least in­flu­ence upon the phe­nom­ena of or­ga­nized life—the germ plasm of liv­ing things and be­ings. These en­ergy con­di­tions of space are ger­mane to the es­sen­tial en­vi­ron­ment of life es­tab­lish­ment, but they are not ef­fec­tive in the sub­se­quent mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the in­her­i­tance fac­tors of the germ plasm as are some of the longer rays of ra­di­ant en­ergy. The im­planted life of the Life Car­ri­ers is fully re­sis­tant to all of this amaz­ing flood of the short space rays of uni­verse en­ergy.

58:3.5All of these es­sen­tial cos­mic con­di­tions had to evolve to a fa­vor­able sta­tus be­fore the Life Car­ri­ers could ac­tu­ally be­gin the es­tab­lish­ment of life on Uran­tia.

58:4.3500,000,000 years ago prim­i­tive ma­rine veg­etable life was well es­tab­lished on Uran­tia. Green­land and the arc­tic land mass, to­gether with North and South Amer­ica, were be­gin­ning their long and slow west­ward drift. Africa moved slightly south, cre­at­ing an east and west trough, the Med­i­ter­ra­nean basin, be­tween it­self and the mother body. Antarc­tica, Aus­tralia, and the land in­di­cated by the is­lands of the Pa­cific broke away on the south and east and have drifted far away since that day.

58:4.4We had planted the prim­i­tive form of ma­rine life in the shel­tered tropic bays of the cen­tral seas of the east-west cleav­age of the break­ing-up con­ti­nen­tal land mass. Our pur­pose in mak­ing three ma­rine-life im­plan­ta­tions was to in­sure that each great land mass would carry this life with it, in its warm-wa­ter seas, as the land sub­se­quently sep­a­rated. We fore­saw that in the later era of the emer­gence of land life large oceans of wa­ter would sep­a­rate these drift­ing con­ti­nen­tal land masses.

58:5.1The con­ti­nen­tal land drift con­tin­ued. The earth’s core had be­come as dense and rigid as steel, be­ing sub­jected to a pres­sure of al­most 25,000 tons to the square inch, and ow­ing to the enor­mous grav­ity pres­sure, it was and still is very hot in the deep in­te­rior. The tem­per­a­ture in­creases from the sur­face down­ward un­til at the cen­ter it is slightly above the sur­face tem­per­a­ture of the sun.

58:5.2The outer one thou­sand miles of the earth’s mass con­sists prin­ci­pally of dif­fer­ent kinds of rock. Un­der­neath are the denser and heav­ier metal­lic el­e­ments. Through­out the early and preat­mo­spheric ages the world was so nearly fluid in its molten and highly heated state that the heav­ier met­als sank deep into the in­te­rior. Those found near the sur­face to­day rep­re­sent the ex­u­date of an­cient vol­ca­noes, later and ex­ten­sive lava flows, and the more re­cent me­te­oric de­posits.

58:5.3The outer crust was about forty miles thick. This outer shell was sup­ported by, and rested di­rectly upon, a molten sea of basalt of vary­ing thick­ness, a mo­bile layer of molten lava held un­der high pres­sure but al­ways tend­ing to flow hither and yon in equal­iza­tion of shift­ing plan­e­tary pres­sures, thereby tend­ing to sta­bi­lize the earth’s crust.

58:5.4Even to­day the con­ti­nents con­tinue to float upon this non­crys­tal­lized cush­iony sea of molten basalt. Were it not for this pro­tec­tive con­di­tion, the more se­vere earth­quakes would lit­er­ally shake the world to pieces. Earth­quakes are caused by slid­ing and shift­ing of the solid outer crust and not by vol­ca­noes.

58:5.5The lava lay­ers of the earth’s crust, when cooled, form gran­ite. The av­er­age den­sity of Uran­tia is a lit­tle more than five and one-half times that of wa­ter; the den­sity of gran­ite is less than three times that of wa­ter. The earth’s core is twelve times as dense as wa­ter.

58:5.6The sea bot­toms are more dense than the land masses, and this is what keeps the con­ti­nents above wa­ter. When the sea bot­toms are ex­truded above the sea level, they are found to con­sist largely of basalt, a form of lava con­sid­er­ably heav­ier than the gran­ite of the land masses. Again, if the con­ti­nents were not lighter than the ocean beds, grav­ity would draw the edges of the oceans up onto the land, but such phe­nom­ena are not ob­serv­able.

58:5.7The weight of the oceans is also a fac­tor in the in­crease of pres­sure on the sea beds. The lower but com­par­a­tively heav­ier ocean beds, plus the weight of the over­ly­ing wa­ter, ap­prox­i­mate the weight of the higher but much lighter con­ti­nents. But all con­ti­nents tend to creep into the oceans. The con­ti­nen­tal pres­sure at ocean-bot­tom lev­els is about 20,000 pounds to the square inch. That is, this would be the pres­sure of a con­ti­nen­tal mass stand­ing 15,000 feet above the ocean floor. The ocean-floor wa­ter pres­sure is only about 5,000 pounds to the square inch. These dif­fer­en­tial pres­sures tend to cause the con­ti­nents to slide to­ward the ocean beds.

58:5.8De­pres­sion of the ocean bot­tom dur­ing the pre­life ages had up­thrust a soli­tary con­ti­nen­tal land mass to such a height that its lat­eral pres­sure tended to cause the east­ern, west­ern, and south­ern fringes to slide down­hill, over the un­der­ly­ing semivis­cous lava beds, into the wa­ters of the sur­round­ing Pa­cific Ocean. This so fully com­pen­sated the con­ti­nen­tal pres­sure that a wide break did not oc­cur on the east­ern shore of this an­cient Asi­atic con­ti­nent, but ever since has that east­ern coast line hov­ered over the precipice of its ad­join­ing oceanic depths, threat­en­ing to slide into a wa­tery grave.

58:7.1The vast group of rock sys­tems which con­sti­tuted the outer crust of the world dur­ing the life-dawn or Pro­tero­zoic era does not now ap­pear at many points on the earth’s sur­face. And when it does emerge from be­low all the ac­cu­mu­la­tions of sub­se­quent ages, there will be found only the fos­sil re­mains of veg­etable and early prim­i­tive an­i­mal life. Some of these older wa­ter-de­posited rocks are com­min­gled with sub­se­quent lay­ers, and some­times they yield fos­sil re­mains of some of the ear­lier forms of veg­etable life, while on the top­most lay­ers oc­ca­sion­ally may be found some of the more prim­i­tive forms of the early ma­rine-an­i­mal or­gan­isms. In many places these old­est strat­i­fied rock lay­ers, bear­ing the fos­sils of the early ma­rine life, both an­i­mal and veg­etable, may be found di­rectly on top of the older un­dif­fer­en­ti­ated stone.

58:7.2–5 · four paragraphs not cited here ·

58:7.2Fos­sils of this era yield al­gae, coral­like plants, prim­i­tive Pro­to­zoa, and spon­ge­like tran­si­tion or­gan­isms. But the ab­sence of such fos­sils in the early rock lay­ers does not nec­es­sar­ily prove that liv­ing things were not else­where in ex­is­tence at the time of their de­po­si­tion. Life was sparse through­out these early times and only slowly made its way over the face of the earth.

58:7.3The rocks of this olden age are now at the earth’s sur­face, or very near the sur­face, over about one eighth of the pres­ent land area. The av­er­age thick­ness of this tran­si­tion stone, the old­est strat­i­fied rock lay­ers, is about one and one-half miles. At some points these an­cient rock sys­tems are as much as four miles thick, but many of the lay­ers which have been as­cribed to this era be­long to later pe­ri­ods.

58:7.4In North Amer­ica this an­cient and prim­i­tive fos­sil-bear­ing stone layer comes to the sur­face over the east­ern, cen­tral, and north­ern re­gions of Canada. There is also an in­ter­mit­tent east-west ridge of this rock which ex­tends from Penn­syl­va­nia and the an­cient Adiron­dack Moun­tains on west through Michi­gan, Wis­con­sin, and Min­nesota. Other ridges run from New­found­land to Al­abama and from Alaska to Mex­ico.

58:7.5The rocks of this era are ex­posed here and there all over the world, but none are so easy of in­ter­pre­ta­tion as those about Lake Su­pe­rior and in the Grand Canyon of the Col­orado River, where these prim­i­tive fos­sil-bear­ing rocks, ex­ist­ing in sev­eral lay­ers, tes­tify to the up­heavals and sur­face fluc­tu­a­tions of those far­away times.

58:7.6This stone layer, the old­est fos­sil-bear­ing stra­tum in the crust of the earth, has been crum­pled, folded, and grotesquely twisted as a re­sult of the up­heavals of earth­quakes and the early vol­ca­noes. The lava flows of this age brought much iron, cop­per, and lead up near the plan­e­tary sur­face.

62:7.1We did not have to wait long. At noon, the day af­ter the run­away of the twins, there oc­curred the ini­tial test flash of the uni­verse cir­cuit sig­nals at the plan­e­tary re­cep­tion-fo­cus of Uran­tia. We were, of course, all astir with the re­al­iza­tion that a great event was im­pend­ing; but since this world was a life-ex­per­i­ment sta­tion, we had not the slight­est idea of just how we would be ap­prised of the rec­og­ni­tion of in­tel­li­gent life on the planet. But we were not long in sus­pense. On the third day af­ter the elope­ment of the twins, and be­fore the Life Car­rier corps de­parted, there ar­rived the Neb­a­don arch­an­gel of ini­tial plan­e­tary cir­cuit es­tab­lish­ment.

62:7.2It was an event­ful day on Uran­tia when our small group gath­ered about the plan­e­tary pole of space com­mu­ni­ca­tion and re­ceived the first mes­sage from Sal­ving­ton over the newly es­tab­lished mind cir­cuit of the planet. And this first mes­sage, dic­tated by the chief of the arch­an­gel corps, said:

81:6.12You are some­times shocked at the rav­ages of war, but you should rec­og­nize the ne­ces­sity for pro­duc­ing large num­bers of mor­tals so as to af­ford am­ple op­por­tu­nity for so­cial and moral de­vel­op­ment; with such plan­e­tary fer­til­ity there soon oc­curs the se­ri­ous prob­lem of over­pop­u­la­tion. Most of the in­hab­ited worlds are small. Uran­tia is av­er­age, per­haps a tri­fle un­der­sized. The op­ti­mum sta­bi­liza­tion of na­tional pop­u­la­tion en­hances cul­ture and pre­vents war. And it is a wise na­tion which knows when to cease grow­ing.

189:3.2The cir­cuit of the arch­an­gels then op­er­ated for the first time from Uran­tia. Ga­briel and the arch­an­gel hosts moved to the place of the spir­i­tual po­lar­ity of the planet; and when Ga­briel gave the sig­nal, there flashed to the first of the sys­tem man­sion worlds the voice of Ga­briel, say­ing: “By the man­date of Mi­chael, let the dead of a Uran­tia dis­pen­sa­tion rise!” Then all the sur­vivors of the hu­man races of Uran­tia who had fallen asleep since the days of Adam, and who had not al­ready gone on to judg­ment, ap­peared in the res­ur­rec­tion halls of man­so­nia in readi­ness for mor­ontia in­vesti­ture. And in an in­stant of time the ser­a­phim and their as­so­ciates made ready to de­part for the man­sion worlds. Or­di­nar­ily these se­raphic guard­i­ans, one­time as­signed to the group cus­tody of these sur­viv­ing mor­tals, would have been pres­ent at the mo­ment of their awak­ing in the res­ur­rec­tion halls of man­so­nia, but they were on this world it­self at this time be­cause of the ne­ces­sity of Ga­briel’s pres­ence here in con­nec­tion with the mor­ontia res­ur­rec­tion of Je­sus.

problems 6 paragraphs, 5 read above

34:7.3 read above, under mortals of Urantia

34:7.4 read above, under mortals of Urantia

34:7.5 read above, under mortals of Urantia

52:2.9The races are pu­ri­fied and brought up to a high state of phys­i­cal per­fec­tion and in­tel­lec­tual strength be­fore the end of this era. The early de­vel­op­ment of a nor­mal world is greatly helped by the plan of pro­mot­ing the in­crease of the higher types of mor­tals with pro­por­tion­ate cur­tail­ment of the lower. And it is the fail­ure of your early peo­ples to thus dis­crim­i­nate be­tween these types that ac­counts for the pres­ence of so many de­fec­tive and de­gen­er­ate in­di­vid­u­als among the pres­ent-day Uran­tia races.

52:2.10One of the great achieve­ments of the age of the prince is this re­stric­tion of the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of men­tally de­fec­tive and so­cially un­fit in­di­vid­u­als. Long be­fore the times of the ar­rival of the sec­ond Sons, the Adams, most worlds se­ri­ously ad­dress them­selves to the tasks of race pu­rifi­ca­tion, some­thing which the Uran­tia peo­ples have not even yet se­ri­ously un­der­taken.

52:2.11This prob­lem of race im­prove­ment is not such an ex­ten­sive un­der­tak­ing when it is at­tacked at this early date in hu­man evo­lu­tion. The pre­ced­ing pe­riod of tribal strug­gles and rugged com­pe­ti­tion in race sur­vival has weeded out most of the ab­nor­mal and de­fec­tive strains. An id­iot does not have much chance of sur­vival in a prim­i­tive and war­ring tribal so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion. It is the false sen­ti­ment of your par­tially per­fected civ­i­liza­tions that fos­ters, pro­tects, and per­pet­u­ates the hope­lessly de­fec­tive strains of evo­lu­tion­ary hu­man stocks.

52:2.12It is nei­ther ten­der­ness nor al­tru­ism to be­stow fu­tile sym­pa­thy upon de­gen­er­ated hu­man be­ings, un­salv­able ab­nor­mal and in­fe­rior mor­tals. There ex­ist on even the most nor­mal of the evo­lu­tion­ary worlds suf­fi­cient dif­fer­ences be­tween in­di­vid­u­als and be­tween nu­mer­ous so­cial groups to pro­vide for the full ex­er­cise of all those no­ble traits of al­tru­is­tic sen­ti­ment and un­selfish mor­tal min­istry with­out per­pet­u­at­ing the so­cially un­fit and the morally de­gen­er­ate strains of evolv­ing hu­man­ity. There is abun­dant op­por­tu­nity for the ex­er­cise of tol­er­ance and the func­tion of al­tru­ism in be­half of those un­for­tu­nate and needy in­di­vid­u­als who have not ir­re­triev­ably lost their moral her­itage and for­ever de­stroyed their spir­i­tual birthright.

55:3.21The great hand­i­cap con­fronting Uran­tia in the mat­ter of at­tain­ing the high plan­e­tary des­tiny of light and life is em­braced in the prob­lems of dis­ease, de­gen­er­acy, war, mul­ti­col­ored races, and mul­ti­lin­gual­ism.

66:8.3 read above, under history

67:0.1 read above, under history

77:2.2The phys­i­cal mem­bers of the Prince’s staff had been con­sti­tuted sex crea­tures for the pur­pose of par­tic­i­pat­ing in the plan of pro­cre­at­ing off­spring em­body­ing the com­bined qual­i­ties of their spe­cial or­der united with those of the se­lected stock of the An­don tribes, and all of this was in an­tic­i­pa­tion of the sub­se­quent ap­pear­ance of Adam. The Life Car­ri­ers had planned a new type of mor­tal em­brac­ing the union of the con­joint off­spring of the Prince’s staff with the first-gen­er­a­tion off­spring of Adam and Eve. They had thus pro­jected a plan en­vi­sion­ing a new or­der of plan­e­tary crea­tures whom they hoped would be­come the teacher-rulers of hu­man so­ci­ety. Such be­ings were de­signed for so­cial sov­er­eignty, not civil sov­er­eignty. But since this project al­most com­pletely mis­car­ried, we shall never know what an aris­toc­racy of be­nign lead­er­ship and match­less cul­ture Uran­tia was thus de­prived of. For when the cor­po­real staff later re­pro­duced, it was sub­se­quent to the re­bel­lion and af­ter they had been de­prived of their con­nec­tion with the life cur­rents of the sys­tem.

status 64 paragraphs, 19 read above

15:14.5 read above, under physical aspects

15:14.6 read above, under physical aspects

15:14.7 read above, under physical aspects

15:14.8 read above, under celestial government

20:5.5Un­der­stand­ing more about the be­stowal Sons, you dis­cern why so much in­ter­est at­taches to Uran­tia in the his­tory of Neb­a­don. Your small and in­signif­i­cant planet is of lo­cal uni­verse con­cern sim­ply be­cause it is the mor­tal home world of Je­sus of Naz­a­reth. It was the scene of the fi­nal and tri­umphant be­stowal of your Cre­ator Son, the arena in which Mi­chael won the su­preme per­sonal sov­er­eignty of the uni­verse of Neb­a­don.

20:5.6At the head­quar­ters of his lo­cal uni­verse a Cre­ator Son, es­pe­cially af­ter the com­ple­tion of his own mor­tal be­stowal, spends much of his time in coun­sel­ing and in­struct­ing the col­lege of as­so­ciate Sons, the Mag­is­te­rial Sons and oth­ers. In love and de­vo­tion, with ten­der mercy and af­fec­tion­ate con­sid­er­a­tion, these Mag­is­te­rial Sons be­stow them­selves upon the worlds of space. And in no way are these plan­e­tary ser­vices in­fe­rior to the mor­tal be­stowals of the Mi­cha­els. It is true that your Cre­ator Son se­lected for the realm of his fi­nal ad­ven­ture in crea­ture ex­pe­ri­ence one which had had un­usual mis­for­tunes. But no planet could ever be in such a con­di­tion that it would re­quire the be­stowal of a Cre­ator Son to ef­fect its spir­i­tual re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion. Any Son of the be­stowal group would have equally suf­ficed, for in all their work on the worlds of a lo­cal uni­verse the Mag­is­te­rial Sons are just as di­vinely ef­fec­tive and all wise as would have been their Par­a­dise brother, the Cre­ator Son.

20:6.6When the be­stowal Sons, Cre­ator or Mag­is­te­rial, en­ter the por­tals of death, they reap­pear on the third day. But you should not en­ter­tain the idea that they al­ways meet with the tragic end en­coun­tered by the Cre­ator Son who so­journed on your world nine­teen hun­dred years ago. The ex­traor­di­nary and un­usu­ally cruel ex­pe­ri­ence through which Je­sus of Naz­a­reth passed has caused Uran­tia to be­come lo­cally known as “the world of the cross.” It is not nec­es­sary that such in­hu­man treat­ment be ac­corded a Son of God, and the vast ma­jor­ity of plan­ets have af­forded them a more con­sid­er­ate re­cep­tion, al­low­ing them to fin­ish their mor­tal ca­reers, ter­mi­nate the age, ad­ju­di­cate the sleep­ing sur­vivors, and in­au­gu­rate a new dis­pen­sa­tion, with­out im­pos­ing a vi­o­lent death. A be­stowal Son must en­counter death, must pass through the whole of the ac­tual ex­pe­ri­ence of mor­tals of the realms, but it is not a re­quire­ment of the di­vine plan that this death be ei­ther vi­o­lent or un­usual.

23:2.12The con­fu­sion and tur­moil of Uran­tia do not sig­nify that the Par­a­dise Rulers lack ei­ther in­ter­est or abil­ity to man­age af­fairs dif­fer­ently. The Cre­ators are pos­sessed of full power to make Uran­tia a ver­i­ta­ble par­a­dise, but such an Eden would not con­tribute to the de­vel­op­ment of those strong, no­ble, and ex­pe­ri­enced char­ac­ters which the Gods are so surely forg­ing out on your world be­tween the anvils of ne­ces­sity and the ham­mers of an­guish. Your anx­i­eties and sor­rows, your tri­als and dis­ap­point­ments, are just as much a part of the di­vine plan on your sphere as are the ex­qui­site per­fec­tion and in­fi­nite adap­ta­tion of all things to their su­preme pur­pose on the worlds of the cen­tral and per­fect uni­verse.

32:3.10The fact of an­i­mal evo­lu­tion­ary ori­gin does not at­tach stigma to any per­son­al­ity in the sight of the uni­verse as that is the ex­clu­sive method of pro­duc­ing one of the two ba­sic types of fi­nite in­tel­li­gent will crea­tures. When the heights of per­fec­tion and eter­nity are at­tained, all the more honor to those who be­gan at the bot­tom and joy­fully climbed the lad­der of life, round by round, and who, when they do reach the heights of glory, will have gained a per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence which em­bod­ies an ac­tual knowl­edge of ev­ery phase of life from the bot­tom to the top.

36:2.15The plan­e­tary life-plan­ning lab­o­ra­to­ries are sit­u­ated on the sec­ond satel­lite of this world num­ber two. In these lab­o­ra­to­ries the Life Car­ri­ers and all their as­so­ciates col­lab­o­rate with the Mel­chiz­e­deks in the ef­fort to mod­ify and pos­si­bly im­prove the life de­signed for im­plan­ta­tion on the dec­i­mal plan­ets of Neb­a­don. The life now evolv­ing on Uran­tia was planned and par­tially worked out on this very world, for Uran­tia is a dec­i­mal planet, a life-ex­per­i­ment world. On one world in each ten a greater vari­ance in the stan­dard life de­signs is per­mit­ted than on the other (non­ex­per­i­men­tal) worlds.

37:3.4 read above, under celestial government

40:7.5Fu­sion with a frag­ment of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther is equiv­a­lent to a di­vine val­i­da­tion of even­tual Par­a­dise at­tain­ment, and such Ad­juster-fused mor­tals are the only class of hu­man be­ings who all tra­verse the Ha­vona cir­cuits and find God on Par­a­dise. To the Ad­juster-fused mor­tal the ca­reer of uni­ver­sal ser­vice is wide open. What dig­nity of des­tiny and glory of at­tain­ment await ev­ery one of you! Do you fully ap­pre­ci­ate what has been done for you? Do you com­pre­hend the grandeur of the heights of eter­nal achieve­ment which are spread out be­fore you?—even you who now trudge on in the lowly path of life through your so-called “vale of tears”?

41:10.5 read above, under physical aspects

43:0.1Uran­tia is com­monly re­ferred to as 606 of Sa­ta­nia in Nor­la­ti­adek of Neb­a­don, mean­ing the six hun­dred sixth in­hab­ited world in the lo­cal sys­tem of Sa­ta­nia, sit­u­ated in the con­stel­la­tion of Nor­la­ti­adek, one of the one hun­dred con­stel­la­tions of the lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don. Con­stel­la­tions be­ing the pri­mary di­vi­sions of a lo­cal uni­verse, their rulers link the lo­cal sys­tems of in­hab­ited worlds to the cen­tral ad­min­is­tra­tion of the lo­cal uni­verse on Sal­ving­ton and by re­flec­tiv­ity to the super­ad­min­is­tra­tion of the An­cients of Days on Uversa.

48:6.22 read above, under celestial government

49:0.3Sa­ta­nia it­self is an un­fin­ished sys­tem con­tain­ing only 619 in­hab­ited worlds. Such plan­ets are num­bered se­ri­ally in ac­cor­dance with their reg­is­tra­tion as in­hab­ited worlds, as worlds in­hab­ited by will crea­tures. Thus was Uran­tia given the num­ber 606 of Sa­ta­nia, mean­ing the 606th world in this lo­cal sys­tem on which the long evo­lu­tion­ary life pro­cess cul­mi­nated in the ap­pear­ance of hu­man be­ings. There are thirty-six un­in­hab­ited plan­ets near­ing the life-en­dow­ment stage, and sev­eral are now be­ing made ready for the Life Car­ri­ers. There are nearly two hun­dred spheres which are evolv­ing so as to be ready for life im­plan­ta­tion within the next few mil­lion years.

49:5.11Nor­mal ad­just­ments to plan­e­tary con­di­tions fol­low the gen­eral phys­i­cal pat­terns pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered. The worlds of the non­breathers typ­ify the rad­i­cal or ex­treme ad­just­ment, but other types are also in­cluded in this group. Ex­per­i­men­tal worlds are usu­ally ide­ally adapted to the typ­i­cal life forms, and on these dec­i­mal plan­ets the Life Car­ri­ers at­tempt to pro­duce ben­e­fi­cial vari­a­tions in the stan­dard life de­signs. Since your world is an ex­per­i­men­tal planet, it dif­fers markedly from its sis­ter spheres in Sa­ta­nia; many forms of life have ap­peared on Uran­tia that are not found else­where; like­wise are many com­mon species ab­sent from your planet.

49:5.12–22 · eleven paragraphs not cited here ·

49:5.12In the uni­verse of Neb­a­don, all the life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion worlds are se­ri­ally linked to­gether and con­sti­tute a spe­cial do­main of uni­verse af­fairs which is given at­ten­tion by des­ig­nated ad­min­is­tra­tors; and all of these ex­per­i­men­tal worlds are pe­ri­od­i­cally in­spected by a corps of uni­verse di­rec­tors whose chief is the vet­eran fi­nal­i­ter known in Sa­ta­nia as Taba­man­tia.

49:5.13 read above, under mortals of Urantia

49:5.14From the two-hemi­sphere type of the Uran­tian cere­bral cor­tex you can, by anal­ogy, grasp some­thing of the one-brained type. The third brain of the three-brained or­ders is best con­ceived as an evolve­ment of your lower or rudi­men­tary form of brain, which is de­vel­oped to the point where it func­tions chiefly in con­trol of phys­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ties, leav­ing the two su­pe­rior brains free for higher en­gage­ments: one for in­tel­lec­tual func­tions and the other for the spir­i­tual-coun­ter­part­ing ac­tiv­i­ties of the Thought Ad­juster.

49:5.15While the ter­res­trial at­tain­ments of the one-brained races are slightly lim­ited in com­par­i­son with the two-brained or­ders, the older plan­ets of the three-brained group ex­hibit civ­i­liza­tions that would as­tound Uran­tians, and which would some­what shame yours by com­par­i­son. In me­chan­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and ma­te­rial civ­i­liza­tion, even in in­tel­lec­tual prog­ress, the two-brained mor­tal worlds are able to equal the three-brained spheres. But in the higher con­trol of mind and de­vel­op­ment of in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual re­cip­ro­ca­tion, you are some­what in­fe­rior.

49:5.16All such com­par­a­tive es­ti­mates con­cern­ing the in­tel­lec­tual prog­ress or the spir­i­tual at­tain­ments of any world or group of worlds should in fair­ness rec­og­nize plan­e­tary age; much, very much, de­pends on age, the help of the bi­o­logic up­lifters, and the sub­se­quent mis­sions of the var­i­ous or­ders of the di­vine Sons.

49:5.17While the three-brained peo­ples are ca­pa­ble of a slightly higher plan­e­tary evo­lu­tion than ei­ther the one- or two-brained or­ders, all have the same type of life plasm and carry on plan­e­tary ac­tiv­i­ties in very sim­i­lar ways, much as do hu­man be­ings on Uran­tia. These three types of mor­tals are dis­tributed through­out the worlds of the lo­cal sys­tems. In the ma­jor­ity of cases plan­e­tary con­di­tions had very lit­tle to do with the de­ci­sions of the Life Car­ri­ers to project these var­ied or­ders of mor­tals on the dif­fer­ent worlds; it is a pre­rog­a­tive of the Life Car­ri­ers thus to plan and ex­e­cute.

49:5.18These three or­ders stand on an equal foot­ing in the as­cen­sion ca­reer. Each must tra­verse the same in­tel­lec­tual scale of de­vel­op­ment, and each must mas­ter the same spir­i­tual tests of pro­gres­sion. The sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tion and the con­stel­la­tion over­con­trol of these dif­fer­ent worlds are uni­formly free from dis­crim­i­na­tion; even the regimes of the Plan­e­tary Princes are iden­ti­cal.

49:5.193. Spirit-re­cep­tion se­ries. There are three groups of mind de­sign as re­lated to con­tact with spirit af­fairs. This clas­si­fi­ca­tion does not re­fer to the one-, two-, and three-brained or­ders of mor­tals; it refers pri­mar­ily to gland chem­istry, more par­tic­u­larly to the or­ga­ni­za­tion of cer­tain glands com­pa­ra­ble to the pi­tu­itary bod­ies. The races on some worlds have one gland, on oth­ers two, as do Uran­tians, while on still other spheres the races have three of these unique bod­ies. The in­her­ent imag­i­na­tion and spir­i­tual re­cep­tiv­ity is def­i­nitely in­flu­enced by this dif­fer­en­tial chem­i­cal en­dow­ment.

49:5.20Of the spirit-re­cep­tion types, sixty-five per cent are of the sec­ond group, like the Uran­tia races. Twelve per cent are of the first type, nat­u­rally less re­cep­tive, while twenty-three per cent are more spir­i­tu­ally in­clined dur­ing ter­res­trial life. But such dis­tinc­tions do not sur­vive nat­u­ral death; all of these racial dif­fer­ences per­tain only to the life in the flesh.

49:5.21 read above, under history

49:5.22 read above, under history

49:5.23 read above, under history

49:5.24–25 · two paragraphs not cited here ·

49:5.24 read above, under history

49:5.25 read above, under history

49:5.26 read above, under history

50:6.2The de­vel­op­ment of civ­i­liza­tion on Uran­tia has not dif­fered so greatly from that of other worlds which have sus­tained the mis­for­tune of spir­i­tual iso­la­tion. But when com­pared with the loyal worlds of the uni­verse, your planet seems most con­fused and greatly re­tarded in all phases of in­tel­lec­tual prog­ress and spir­i­tual at­tain­ment.

50:6.3–4 · two paragraphs not cited here ·

50:6.3Be­cause of your plan­e­tary mis­for­tunes, Uran­tians are pre­vented from un­der­stand­ing very much about the cul­ture of nor­mal worlds. But you should not en­vis­age the evo­lu­tion­ary worlds, even the most ideal, as spheres whereon life is a flow­ery bed of ease. The ini­tial life of the mor­tal races is al­ways at­tended by strug­gle. Ef­fort and de­ci­sion are an es­sen­tial part of the ac­quire­ment of sur­vival val­ues.

50:6.4Cul­ture pre­sup­poses qual­ity of mind; cul­ture can­not be en­hanced un­less mind is el­e­vated. Su­pe­rior in­tel­lect will seek a no­ble cul­ture and find some way to at­tain such a goal. In­fe­rior minds will spurn the high­est cul­ture even when pre­sented to them ready-made. Much de­pends, also, upon the suc­ces­sive mis­sions of the di­vine Sons and upon the ex­tent to which en­light­en­ment is re­ceived by the ages of their re­spec­tive dis­pen­sa­tions.

50:6.5You should not for­get that for two hun­dred thou­sand years all the worlds of Sa­ta­nia have rested un­der the spir­i­tual ban of Nor­la­ti­adek in con­se­quence of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion. And it will re­quire age upon age to re­trieve the re­sul­tant hand­i­caps of sin and se­ces­sion. Your world still con­tin­ues to pur­sue an ir­reg­u­lar and check­ered ca­reer as a re­sult of the dou­ble tragedy of a re­bel­lious Plan­e­tary Prince and a de­fault­ing Ma­te­rial Son. Even the be­stowal of Christ Mi­chael on Uran­tia did not im­me­di­ately set aside the tem­po­ral con­se­quences of these se­ri­ous blun­ders in the ear­lier ad­min­is­tra­tion of the world.

51:3.9 read above, under celestial government

51:5.1When a Plan­e­tary Adam and Eve ar­rive on an in­hab­ited world, they have been fully in­structed by their su­pe­ri­ors as to the best way to ef­fect the im­prove­ment of the ex­ist­ing races of in­tel­li­gent be­ings. The plan of pro­ce­dure is not uni­form; much is left to the judg­ment of the min­is­ter­ing pair, and mis­takes are not in­fre­quent, es­pe­cially on dis­or­dered, in­sur­rec­tionary worlds, such as Uran­tia.

52:3.6The re­sult of the gift of the Adamic life plasm to the mor­tal races is an im­me­di­ate up­step­ping of in­tel­lec­tual ca­pac­ity and an ac­cel­er­a­tion of spir­i­tual prog­ress. There is usu­ally some phys­i­cal im­prove­ment also. On an av­er­age world the post-Adamic dis­pen­sa­tion is an age of great in­ven­tion, en­ergy con­trol, and me­chan­i­cal de­vel­op­ment. This is the era of the ap­pear­ance of mul­ti­form man­u­fac­ture and the con­trol of nat­u­ral forces; it is the golden age of ex­plo­ration and the fi­nal sub­du­ing of the planet. Much of the ma­te­rial prog­ress of a world oc­curs dur­ing this time of the in­au­gu­ra­tion of the de­vel­op­ment of the phys­i­cal sci­ences, just such an epoch as Uran­tia is now ex­pe­ri­enc­ing. Your world is a full dis­pen­sa­tion and more be­hind the av­er­age plan­e­tary sched­ule.

52:5.1When a cer­tain stan­dard of in­tel­lec­tual and spir­i­tual de­vel­op­ment is at­tained on an in­hab­ited world, a Par­a­dise be­stowal Son al­ways ar­rives. On nor­mal worlds he does not ap­pear in the flesh un­til the races have as­cended to the high­est lev­els of in­tel­lec­tual de­vel­op­ment and eth­i­cal at­tain­ment. But on Uran­tia the be­stowal Son, even your own Cre­ator Son, ap­peared at the close of the Adamic dis­pen­sa­tion, but that is not the usual or­der of events on the worlds of space.

52:5.2When the worlds have be­come ripe for spir­i­tu­al­iza­tion, the be­stowal Son ar­rives. These Sons al­ways be­long to the Mag­is­te­rial or Avo­nal or­der ex­cept in that case, once in each lo­cal uni­verse, when the Cre­ator Son pre­pares for his ter­mi­nal be­stowal on some evo­lu­tion­ary world, as oc­curred when Mi­chael of Neb­a­don ap­peared on Uran­tia to be­stow him­self upon your mor­tal races. Only one world in near ten mil­lion can en­joy such a gift; all other worlds are spir­i­tu­ally ad­vanced by the be­stowal of a Par­a­dise Son of the Avo­nal or­der.

52:6.2Even on nor­mal evo­lu­tion­ary worlds the re­al­iza­tion of the world-wide broth­er­hood of man is not an easy ac­com­plish­ment. On a con­fused and dis­or­dered planet like Uran­tia such an achieve­ment re­quires a much longer time and ne­ces­si­tates far greater ef­fort. Un­aided so­cial evo­lu­tion can hardly achieve such happy re­sults on a spir­i­tu­ally iso­lated sphere. Re­li­gious rev­e­la­tion is es­sen­tial to the re­al­iza­tion of broth­er­hood on Uran­tia. While Je­sus has shown the way to the im­me­di­ate at­tain­ment of spir­i­tual broth­er­hood, the re­al­iza­tion of so­cial broth­er­hood on your world de­pends much on the achieve­ment of the fol­low­ing per­sonal trans­for­ma­tions and plan­e­tary ad­just­ments:

52:6.3–7 · five paragraphs not cited here ·

52:6.31. So­cial fra­ter­nity. Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of in­ter­na­tional and in­ter­ra­cial so­cial con­tacts and fra­ter­nal as­so­ci­a­tions through travel, com­merce, and com­pet­i­tive play. De­vel­op­ment of a com­mon lan­guage and the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of mul­ti­lin­guists. The racial and na­tional in­ter­change of stu­dents, teach­ers, in­dus­tri­al­ists, and re­li­gious philoso­phers.

52:6.42. In­tel­lec­tual cross-fer­til­iza­tion. Broth­er­hood is im­pos­si­ble on a world whose in­hab­i­tants are so prim­i­tive that they fail to rec­og­nize the folly of un­mit­i­gated self­ish­ness. There must oc­cur an ex­change of na­tional and racial lit­er­a­ture. Each race must be­come fa­mil­iar with the thought of all races; each na­tion must know the feel­ings of all na­tions. Ig­no­rance breeds sus­pi­cion, and sus­pi­cion is in­com­pat­i­ble with the es­sen­tial at­ti­tude of sym­pa­thy and love.

52:6.53. Eth­i­cal awak­en­ing. Only eth­i­cal con­scious­ness can un­mask the im­moral­ity of hu­man in­tol­er­ance and the sin­ful­ness of frat­ri­ci­dal strife. Only a moral con­science can con­demn the evils of na­tional envy and racial jeal­ousy. Only moral be­ings will ever seek for that spir­i­tual in­sight which is es­sen­tial to liv­ing the golden rule.

52:6.64. Po­lit­i­cal wis­dom. Emo­tional ma­tu­rity is es­sen­tial to self-con­trol. Only emo­tional ma­tu­rity will in­sure the sub­sti­tu­tion of in­ter­na­tional tech­niques of civ­i­lized ad­ju­di­ca­tion for the bar­barous ar­bitra­ment of war. Wise states­men will some­time work for the wel­fare of hu­man­ity even while they strive to pro­mote the in­ter­est of their na­tional or racial groups. Self­ish po­lit­i­cal sagac­ity is ul­ti­mately sui­ci­dal—de­struc­tive of all those en­dur­ing qual­i­ties which in­sure plan­e­tary group sur­vival.

52:6.75. Spir­i­tual in­sight. The broth­er­hood of man is, af­ter all, pred­i­cated on the rec­og­ni­tion of the fa­ther­hood of God. The quick­est way to re­al­ize the broth­er­hood of man on Uran­tia is to ef­fect the spir­i­tual trans­for­ma­tion of pres­ent-day hu­man­ity. The only tech­nique for ac­cel­er­at­ing the nat­u­ral trend of so­cial evo­lu­tion is that of ap­ply­ing spir­i­tual pres­sure from above, thus aug­ment­ing moral in­sight while en­hanc­ing the soul ca­pac­ity of ev­ery mor­tal to un­der­stand and love ev­ery other mor­tal. Mu­tual un­der­stand­ing and fra­ter­nal love are tran­scen­dent civ­i­liz­ers and mighty fac­tors in the world-wide re­al­iza­tion of the broth­er­hood of man.

52:6.8If you could be trans­planted from your back­ward and con­fused world to some nor­mal planet now in the postbestowal Son age, you would think you had been trans­lated to the heaven of your tra­di­tions. You would hardly be­lieve that you were ob­serv­ing the nor­mal evo­lu­tion­ary work­ings of a mor­tal sphere of hu­man habi­ta­tion. These worlds are in the spir­i­tual cir­cuits of their realm, and they en­joy all the ad­van­tages of the uni­verse broad­casts and the re­flec­tiv­ity ser­vices of the super­uni­verse.

55:2.10Could you but visit a planet in an ad­vanced stage of de­vel­op­ment, you would quickly grasp the rea­sons for pro­vid­ing for the dif­fer­en­tial re­cep­tion of as­cend­ing mor­tals on the man­sion and higher mor­ontia worlds. You would read­ily un­der­stand that be­ings pass­ing on from such highly evolved spheres are pre­pared to re­sume their Par­a­dise as­cent far in ad­vance of the av­er­age mor­tal ar­riv­ing from a dis­or­dered and back­ward world like Uran­tia.

55:5.1Mor­tal crea­tures liv­ing on a sin-stricken, evil-dom­i­nated, self-seek­ing, iso­lated world, such as Uran­tia, can hardly con­ceive of the phys­i­cal per­fec­tion, the in­tel­lec­tual at­tain­ment, and the spir­i­tual de­vel­op­ment which char­ac­ter­ize these ad­vanced epochs of evo­lu­tion on a sin­less sphere.

55:6.9If the mor­tals of dis­traught Uran­tia could only view one of these more ad­vanced worlds long set­tled in light and life, they would nev­er­more ques­tion the wis­dom of the evo­lu­tion­ary scheme of cre­ation. Were there no fu­ture of eter­nal crea­ture pro­gres­sion, still the su­perb evo­lu­tion­ary at­tain­ments of the mor­tal races on such set­tled worlds of per­fected achieve­ment would am­ply jus­tify man’s cre­ation on the worlds of time and space.

57:8.6 read above, under physical aspects

57:8.7 read above, under physical aspects

57:8.8 read above, under physical aspects

57:8.9 read above, under physical aspects

57:8.10 read above, under physical aspects

58:0.1In all Sa­ta­nia there are only sixty-one worlds sim­i­lar to Uran­tia, life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion plan­ets. The ma­jor­ity of in­hab­ited worlds are peo­pled in ac­cor­dance with es­tab­lished tech­niques; on such spheres the Life Car­ri­ers are af­forded lit­tle lee­way in their plans for life im­plan­ta­tion. But about one world in ten is des­ig­nated as a dec­i­mal planet and as­signed to the spe­cial reg­istry of the Life Car­ri­ers; and on such plan­ets we are per­mit­ted to un­der­take cer­tain life ex­per­i­ments in an ef­fort to mod­ify or pos­si­bly im­prove the stan­dard uni­verse types of liv­ing be­ings.

58:1.1600,000,000 years ago the com­mis­sion of Life Car­ri­ers sent out from Je­ru­sem ar­rived on Uran­tia and be­gan the study of phys­i­cal con­di­tions prepara­tory to launch­ing life on world num­ber 606 of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem. This was to be our six hun­dred and sixth ex­pe­ri­ence with the ini­ti­a­tion of the Neb­a­don life pat­terns in Sa­ta­nia and our six­ti­eth op­por­tu­nity to make changes and in­sti­tute mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the ba­sic and stan­dard life de­signs of the lo­cal uni­verse.

62:7.1 read above, under physical aspects

62:7.2–5 · four paragraphs not cited here ·

62:7.2 read above, under physical aspects

62:7.3“To the Life Car­ri­ers on Uran­tia—Greet­ings! We trans­mit as­sur­ance of great plea­sure on Sal­ving­ton, Eden­tia, and Je­ru­sem in honor of the reg­is­tra­tion on the head­quar­ters of Neb­a­don of the sig­nal of the ex­is­tence on Uran­tia of mind of will dig­nity. The pur­pose­ful de­ci­sion of the twins to flee north­ward and seg­re­gate their off­spring from their in­fe­rior an­ces­tors has been noted. This is the first de­ci­sion of mind—the hu­man type of mind—on Uran­tia and au­to­mat­i­cally es­tab­lishes the cir­cuit of com­mu­ni­ca­tion over which this ini­tial mes­sage of ac­knowl­edg­ment is trans­mit­ting.”

62:7.4Next over this new cir­cuit came the greet­ings of the Most Highs of Eden­tia, con­tain­ing in­struc­tions for the res­i­dent Life Car­ri­ers for­bid­ding us to in­ter­fere with the pat­tern of life we had es­tab­lished. We were di­rected not to in­ter­vene in the af­fairs of hu­man prog­ress. It should not be in­ferred that Life Car­ri­ers ever ar­bi­trar­ily and me­chan­i­cally in­ter­fere with the nat­u­ral out­work­ing of the plan­e­tary evo­lu­tion­ary plans, for we do not. But up to this time we had been per­mit­ted to ma­nip­u­late the en­vi­ron­ment and shield the life plasm in a spe­cial man­ner, and it was this ex­traor­di­nary, but wholly nat­u­ral, super­vi­sion that was to be dis­con­tin­ued.

62:7.5And no sooner had the Most Highs left off speak­ing than the beau­ti­ful mes­sage of Lu­cifer, then sov­er­eign of the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem, be­gan to plan­e­tize. Now the Life Car­ri­ers heard the wel­come words of their own chief and re­ceived his per­mis­sion to re­turn to Je­ru­sem. This mes­sage from Lu­cifer con­tained the of­fi­cial ac­cep­tance of the Life Car­ri­ers’ work on Uran­tia and ab­solved us from all fu­ture crit­i­cism of any of our ef­forts to im­prove the life pat­terns of Neb­a­don as es­tab­lished in the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem.

62:7.6These mes­sages from Sal­ving­ton, Eden­tia, and Je­ru­sem for­mally marked the ter­mi­na­tion of the Life Car­ri­ers’ age­long super­vi­sion of the planet. For ages we had been on duty, as­sisted only by the seven ad­ju­tant mind-spir­its and the Mas­ter Phys­i­cal Con­trol­lers. And now, will, the power of choos­ing to wor­ship and to as­cend, hav­ing ap­peared in the evo­lu­tion­ary crea­tures of the planet, we re­al­ized that our work was fin­ished, and our group pre­pared to de­part. Uran­tia be­ing a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion world, per­mis­sion was granted to leave be­hind two se­nior Life Car­ri­ers with twelve as­sis­tants, and I was cho­sen as one of this group and have ever since been on Uran­tia.

62:7.7 read above, under history

63:0.2“Man-mind has ap­peared on 606 of Sa­ta­nia, and these par­ents of the new race shall be called An­don and Fonta. And all arch­an­gels pray that these crea­tures may speed­ily be en­dowed with the per­sonal in­dwelling of the gift of the spirit of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.”

65:4.1Do not over­look the fact that Uran­tia was as­signed to us as a life-ex­per­i­ment world. On this planet we made our six­ti­eth at­tempt to mod­ify and, if pos­si­ble, im­prove the Sa­ta­nia adap­ta­tion of the Neb­a­don life de­signs, and it is of rec­ord that we achieved nu­mer­ous ben­e­fi­cial mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the stan­dard life pat­terns. To be spe­cific, on Uran­tia we worked out and have sat­is­fac­to­rily demon­strated not less than twenty-eight fea­tures of life mod­i­fi­ca­tion which will be of ser­vice to all Neb­a­don through­out all fu­ture time.

65:4.2–6 · five paragraphs not cited here ·

65:4.2But the es­tab­lish­ment of life on no world is ever ex­per­i­men­tal in the sense that some­thing un­tried and un­known is at­tempted. The evo­lu­tion of life is a tech­nique ever pro­gres­sive, dif­fer­en­tial, and vari­able, but never hap­haz­ard, un­con­trolled, nor wholly ex­per­i­men­tal, in the ac­ci­den­tal sense.

65:4.3Many fea­tures of hu­man life af­ford abun­dant ev­i­dence that the phe­nom­e­non of mor­tal ex­is­tence was in­tel­li­gently planned, that or­ganic evo­lu­tion is not a mere cos­mic ac­ci­dent. When a liv­ing cell is in­jured, it pos­sesses the abil­ity to elab­o­rate cer­tain chem­i­cal sub­stances which are em­pow­ered so to stim­u­late and ac­ti­vate the neigh­bor­ing nor­mal cells that they im­me­di­ately be­gin the se­cre­tion of cer­tain sub­stances which fa­cil­i­tate heal­ing pro­cesses in the wound; and at the same time these nor­mal and un­in­jured cells be­gin to pro­lif­er­ate—they ac­tu­ally start to work cre­at­ing new cells to re­place any fel­low cells which may have been de­stroyed by the ac­ci­dent.

65:4.4This chem­i­cal ac­tion and re­ac­tion con­cerned in wound heal­ing and cell re­pro­duc­tion rep­re­sents the choice of the Life Car­ri­ers of a for­mula em­brac­ing over one hun­dred thou­sand phases and fea­tures of pos­si­ble chem­i­cal re­ac­tions and bi­o­logic reper­cus­sions. More than half a mil­lion spe­cific ex­per­i­ments were made by the Life Car­ri­ers in their lab­o­ra­to­ries be­fore they fi­nally set­tled upon this for­mula for the Uran­tia life ex­per­i­ment.

65:4.5When Uran­tia sci­en­tists know more of these heal­ing chem­i­cals, they will be­come more ef­fi­cient in the treat­ment of in­juries, and in­di­rectly they will know more about con­trol­ling cer­tain se­ri­ous dis­eases.

65:4.6Since life was es­tab­lished on Uran­tia, the Life Car­ri­ers have im­proved this heal­ing tech­nique as it has been in­tro­duced on an­other Sa­ta­nia world, in that it af­fords more pain re­lief and ex­er­cises bet­ter con­trol over the pro­lif­er­a­tion ca­pac­ity of the as­so­ci­ated nor­mal cells.

65:4.7There were many unique fea­tures of the Uran­tia life ex­per­i­ment, but the two out­stand­ing episodes were the ap­pear­ance of the An­donic race prior to the evo­lu­tion of the six col­ored peo­ples and the later si­mul­ta­ne­ous ap­pear­ance of the San­gik mu­tants in a sin­gle fam­ily. Uran­tia is the first world in Sa­ta­nia where the six col­ored races sprang from the same hu­man fam­ily. They or­di­nar­ily arise in di­ver­si­fied strains from in­de­pen­dent mu­ta­tions within the pre­hu­man an­i­mal stock and usu­ally ap­pear on earth one at a time and suc­ces­sively over long pe­ri­ods of time, be­gin­ning with the red man and pass­ing on down through the col­ors to in­digo.

65:4.8An­other out­stand­ing vari­a­tion of pro­ce­dure was the late ar­rival of the Plan­e­tary Prince. As a rule, the prince ap­pears on a planet about the time of will de­vel­op­ment; and if such a plan had been fol­lowed, Cali­gas­tia might have come to Uran­tia even dur­ing the life­times of An­don and Fonta in­stead of al­most five hun­dred thou­sand years later, si­mul­ta­ne­ously with the ap­pear­ance of the six San­gik races.

65:4.9On an or­di­nary in­hab­ited world a Plan­e­tary Prince would have been granted on the re­quest of the Life Car­ri­ers at, or some­time af­ter, the ap­pear­ance of An­don and Fonta. But Uran­tia hav­ing been des­ig­nated a life-mod­i­fi­ca­tion planet, it was by prea­gree­ment that the Mel­chiz­e­dek ob­servers, twelve in num­ber, were sent as ad­vis­ers to the Life Car­ri­ers and as over­seers of the planet un­til the sub­se­quent ar­rival of the Plan­e­tary Prince. These Mel­chiz­e­deks came at the time An­don and Fonta made the de­ci­sions which en­abled Thought Ad­justers to in­dwell their mor­tal minds.

66:8.3 read above, under history

71:8.15These are the pre­req­ui­sites of pro­gres­sive gov­ern­ment and the ear­marks of ideal state­hood. Uran­tia is far from the re­al­iza­tion of these ex­alted ide­als, but the civ­i­lized races have made a be­gin­ning—man­kind is on the march to­ward higher evo­lu­tion­ary des­tinies.

72:12.5The pour­ing out of the Spirit of Truth pro­vides the spir­i­tual foun­da­tion for the re­al­iza­tion of great achieve­ments in the in­ter­ests of the hu­man race of the be­stowal world. Uran­tia is there­fore far bet­ter pre­pared for the more im­me­di­ate re­al­iza­tion of a plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment with its laws, mech­a­nisms, sym­bols, con­ven­tions, and lan­guage—all of which could con­tribute so might­ily to the es­tab­lish­ment of world-wide peace un­der law and could lead to the some­time dawn­ing of a real age of spir­i­tual striv­ing; and such an age is the plan­e­tary thresh­old to the utopian ages of light and life.

74:1.5This Je­ru­sem pair left be­hind them on the cap­i­tal of Sa­ta­nia and else­where, one hun­dred off­spring—fifty sons and fifty daugh­ters—mag­nif­i­cent crea­tures who had es­caped the pit­falls of pro­gres­sion, and who were all in com­mis­sion as faith­ful stew­ards of uni­verse trust at the time of their par­ents’ de­par­ture for Uran­tia. And they were all pres­ent in the beau­ti­ful tem­ple of the Ma­te­rial Sons at­ten­dant upon the farewell ex­er­cises as­so­ci­ated with the last cer­e­monies of the be­stowal ac­cep­tance. These chil­dren ac­com­pa­nied their par­ents to the de­ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion head­quar­ters of their or­der and were the last to bid them farewell and di­vine speed as they fell asleep in the per­son­al­ity lapse of con­scious­ness which pre­cedes the prepa­ra­tion for se­raphic trans­port. The chil­dren spent some time to­gether at the fam­ily ren­dezvous re­joic­ing that their par­ents were soon to be­come the vis­i­ble heads, in re­al­ity the sole rulers, of planet 606 in the sys­tem of Sa­ta­nia.

74:2.8Then was heard the arch­an­gels’ procla­ma­tion, and the broad­cast voice of Ga­briel de­creed the sec­ond judg­ment roll call of Uran­tia and the res­ur­rec­tion of the sleep­ing sur­vivors of the sec­ond dis­pen­sa­tion of grace and mercy on 606 of Sa­ta­nia. The dis­pen­sa­tion of the Prince has passed; the age of Adam, the third plan­e­tary epoch, opens amidst scenes of sim­ple grandeur; and the new rulers of Uran­tia start their reign un­der seem­ingly fa­vor­able con­di­tions, not­with­stand­ing the world-wide con­fu­sion oc­ca­sioned by lack of the co-op­er­a­tion of their pre­de­ces­sor in au­thor­ity on the planet.

75:8.4In es­ti­mat­ing the re­sults of the Adamic mis­sion on your world, jus­tice de­mands the rec­og­ni­tion of the con­di­tion of the planet. Adam was con­fronted with a well-nigh hope­less task when, with his beau­ti­ful mate, he was trans­ported from Je­ru­sem to this dark and con­fused planet. But had they been guided by the coun­sel of the Mel­chiz­e­deks and their as­so­ciates, and had they been more pa­tient, they would have even­tu­ally met with suc­cess. But Eve lis­tened to the in­sid­i­ous pro­pa­ganda of per­sonal lib­erty and plan­e­tary free­dom of ac­tion. She was led to ex­per­i­ment with the life plasm of the ma­te­rial or­der of son­ship in that she al­lowed this life trust to be­come pre­ma­turely com­min­gled with that of the then mixed or­der of the orig­i­nal de­sign of the Life Car­ri­ers which had been pre­vi­ously com­bined with that of the re­pro­duc­ing be­ings once at­tached to the staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince.

76:5.4And this was a great mys­tery to Adam and Eve. They could com­pre­hend the veiled prom­ise of a pos­si­ble spe­cial res­ur­rec­tion in this mes­sage, and such a pos­si­bil­ity greatly cheered them, but they could not grasp the mean­ing of the in­ti­ma­tion that they might rest un­til the time of a res­ur­rec­tion as­so­ci­ated with Mi­chael’s per­sonal ap­pear­ance on Uran­tia. And so the Edenic pair al­ways pro­claimed that a Son of God would some­time come, and they com­mu­ni­cated to their loved ones the be­lief, at least the long­ing hope, that the world of their blun­ders and sor­rows might pos­si­bly be the realm whereon the ruler of this uni­verse would elect to func­tion as the Par­a­dise be­stowal Son. It seemed too good to be true, but Adam did en­ter­tain the thought that strife-torn Uran­tia might, af­ter all, turn out to be the most for­tu­nate world in the sys­tem of Sa­ta­nia, the en­vied planet of all Neb­a­don.

76:5.5–6 · two paragraphs not cited here ·

76:5.5Adam lived for 530 years; he died of what might be termed old age. His phys­i­cal mech­a­nism sim­ply wore out; the pro­cess of dis­in­te­gra­tion grad­u­ally gained on the pro­cess of re­pair, and the in­ev­i­ta­ble end came. Eve had died nine­teen years pre­vi­ously of a weak­ened heart. They were both buried in the cen­ter of the tem­ple of di­vine ser­vice which had been built in ac­cor­dance with their plans soon af­ter the wall of the colony had been com­pleted. And this was the ori­gin of the prac­tice of bury­ing noted and pi­ous men and women un­der the floors of the places of wor­ship.

76:5.6 read above, under celestial government

76:5.7Mis­for­tune has not, how­ever, been the sole lot of Uran­tia; this planet has also been the most for­tu­nate in the lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don. Uran­tians should count it all gain if the blun­ders of their an­ces­tors and the mis­takes of their early world rulers so plunged the planet into such a hope­less state of con­fu­sion, all the more con­founded by evil and sin, that this very back­ground of dark­ness should so ap­peal to Mi­chael of Neb­a­don that he se­lected this world as the arena wherein to re­veal the lov­ing per­son­al­ity of the Fa­ther in heaven. It is not that Uran­tia needed a Cre­ator Son to set its tan­gled af­fairs in or­der; it is rather that the evil and sin on Uran­tia af­forded the Cre­ator Son a more strik­ing back­ground against which to re­veal the match­less love, mercy, and pa­tience of the Par­a­dise Fa­ther.

77:8.1At the last ad­ju­di­ca­tion of this world, when Mi­chael re­moved the slum­ber­ing sur­vivors of time, the mid­way crea­tures were left be­hind, left to as­sist in the spir­i­tual and semispir­i­tual work on the planet. They now func­tion as a sin­gle corps, em­brac­ing both or­ders and num­ber­ing 10,992. The United Mid­way­ers of Uran­tia are at pres­ent gov­erned al­ter­nately by the se­nior mem­ber of each or­der. This regime has ob­tained since their amal­ga­ma­tion into one group shortly af­ter Pen­te­cost.

93:10.1Dur­ing the years of Ma­chi­venta’s in­car­na­tion the Uran­tia Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers func­tioned as eleven. When Ma­chi­venta con­sid­ered that his mis­sion as an emer­gency Son was fin­ished, he sig­nal­ized this fact to his eleven as­so­ciates, and they im­me­di­ately made ready the tech­nique whereby he was to be re­leased from the flesh and safely re­stored to his orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek sta­tus. And on the third day af­ter his dis­ap­pear­ance from Salem he ap­peared among his eleven fel­lows of the Uran­tia as­sign­ment and re­sumed his in­ter­rupted ca­reer as one of the plan­e­tary re­ceivers of 606 of Sa­ta­nia.

94:12.7All Uran­tia is wait­ing for the procla­ma­tion of the en­nobling mes­sage of Mi­chael, un­en­cum­bered by the ac­cu­mu­lated doc­trines and dog­mas of nine­teen cen­turies of con­tact with the re­li­gions of evo­lu­tion­ary ori­gin. The hour is strik­ing for pre­sent­ing to Bud­dhism, to Chris­tian­ity, to Hin­duism, even to the peo­ples of all faiths, not the gospel about Je­sus, but the liv­ing, spir­i­tual re­al­ity of the gospel of Je­sus.

97:7.6At last Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek be­held hu­man teach­ers pro­claim­ing a real God to mor­tal man. Like Isa­iah the first, this leader preached a God of uni­ver­sal cre­ation and up­hold­ing. “I have made the earth and put man upon it. I have cre­ated it not in vain; I formed it to be in­hab­ited.” “I am the first and the last; there is no God be­side me.” Speak­ing for the Lord God of Is­rael, this new prophet said: “The heav­ens may van­ish and the earth wax old, but my righ­teous­ness shall en­dure for­ever and my sal­va­tion from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion.” “Fear you not, for I am with you; be not dis­mayed, for I am your God.” “There is no God be­side me—a just God and a Sav­ior.”

109:3.4On worlds such as Uran­tia (the se­ries three group) there is a real be­trothal with the di­vine gifts, a life and death en­gage­ment. If you sur­vive, there is to be an eter­nal union, an ev­er­last­ing fu­sion, the mak­ing of man and Ad­juster one be­ing.

111:6.3The prob­lem of sin is not self-ex­is­tent in the fi­nite world. The fact of finite­ness is not evil or sin­ful. The fi­nite world was made by an in­fi­nite Cre­ator—it is the hand­i­work of his di­vine Sons—and there­fore it must be good. It is the mis­use, dis­tor­tion, and per­ver­sion of the fi­nite that gives ori­gin to evil and sin.

111:7.5“Much of my dif­fi­culty was due to the un­end­ing con­flict be­tween the two na­tures of my sub­ject: the urge of am­bi­tion op­posed by an­i­mal in­do­lence; the ide­als of a su­pe­rior peo­ple crossed by the in­stincts of an in­fe­rior race; the high pur­poses of a great mind an­tag­o­nized by the urge of a prim­i­tive in­her­i­tance; the long-dis­tance view of a far-see­ing Mon­i­tor coun­ter­acted by the near­sight­ed­ness of a crea­ture of time; the pro­gres­sive plans of an as­cend­ing be­ing mod­i­fied by the de­sires and long­ings of a ma­te­rial na­ture; the flashes of uni­verse in­tel­li­gence can­celled by the chem­i­cal-en­ergy man­dates of the evolv­ing race; the urge of an­gels op­posed by the emo­tions of an an­i­mal; the train­ing of an in­tel­lect an­nulled by the ten­den­cies of in­stinct; the ex­pe­ri­ence of the in­di­vid­ual op­posed by the ac­cu­mu­lated propen­si­ties of the race; the aims of the best over­shad­owed by the drift of the worst; the flight of ge­nius neu­tral­ized by the grav­ity of medi­ocrity; the prog­ress of the good re­tarded by the in­er­tia of the bad; the art of the beau­ti­ful be­smirched by the pres­ence of evil; the buoy­ancy of health neu­tral­ized by the de­bil­ity of dis­ease; the foun­tain of faith pol­luted by the poi­sons of fear; the spring of joy em­bit­tered by the wa­ters of sor­row; the glad­ness of an­tic­i­pa­tion dis­il­lu­sioned by the bit­ter­ness of re­al­iza­tion; the joys of liv­ing ever threat­ened by the sor­rows of death. Such a life on such a planet! And yet, be­cause of the ever-pres­ent help and urge of the Thought Ad­juster, this soul did achieve a fair de­gree of hap­pi­ness and suc­cess and has even now as­cended to the judg­ment halls of man­so­nia.”

114:0.3Ser­a­phim and their as­so­ci­ated cheru­bim have much to do with the de­tails of the super­hu­man gov­ern­ment of a planet, es­pe­cially of worlds which have been iso­lated by re­bel­lion. The an­gels, ably as­sisted by the mid­way­ers, func­tion on Uran­tia as the ac­tual super­ma­te­rial min­is­ters who ex­e­cute the man­dates of the res­i­dent gov­er­nor gen­eral and all his as­so­ciates and sub­or­di­nates. Ser­a­phim as a class are oc­cu­pied with many as­sign­ments other than those of per­sonal and group guardian­ship.

114:0.4Uran­tia is not with­out proper and ef­fec­tive super­vi­sion from the sys­tem, con­stel­la­tion, and uni­verse rulers. But the plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment is un­like that of any other world in the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem, even in all Neb­a­don. This unique­ness in your plan of super­vi­sion is due to a num­ber of un­usual cir­cum­stances:

114:0.51. The life mod­i­fi­ca­tion sta­tus of Uran­tia.

114:0.62. The ex­i­gen­cies of the Lu­cifer re­bel­lion.

114:0.73. The dis­rup­tions of the Adamic de­fault.

114:0.84. The ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties grow­ing out of the fact that Uran­tia was one of the be­stowal worlds of the Uni­verse Sov­er­eign. Mi­chael of Neb­a­don is the Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia.

114:0.95. The spe­cial func­tion of the twenty-four plan­e­tary di­rec­tors.

114:0.10 read above, under celestial government

114:7.14Uran­tia mor­tals should not al­low the com­par­a­tive spir­i­tual iso­la­tion of their world from cer­tain of the lo­cal uni­verse cir­cuits to pro­duce a feel­ing of cos­mic de­ser­tion or plan­e­tary or­phan­age. There is op­er­a­tive on the planet a very def­i­nite and ef­fec­tive super­hu­man super­vi­sion of world af­fairs and hu­man des­tinies.

114:7.15 · one paragraph not cited here ·

114:7.15But it is true that you can have, at best, only a mea­ger idea of an ideal plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment. Since the early times of the Plan­e­tary Prince, Uran­tia has suf­fered from the mis­car­riage of the di­vine plan of world growth and racial de­vel­op­ment. The loyal in­hab­ited worlds of Sa­ta­nia are not gov­erned as is Uran­tia. Nev­er­the­less, com­pared with the other iso­lated worlds, your plan­e­tary gov­ern­ments have not been so in­fe­rior; only one or two worlds may be said to be worse, and a few may be slightly bet­ter, but the ma­jor­ity are on a plane of equal­ity with you.

114:7.16No one in the lo­cal uni­verse seems to know when the un­set­tled sta­tus of the plan­e­tary ad­min­is­tra­tion will ter­mi­nate. The Neb­a­don Mel­chiz­e­deks are in­clined to the opin­ion that lit­tle change will oc­cur in the plan­e­tary gov­ern­ment and ad­min­is­tra­tion un­til Mi­chael’s sec­ond per­sonal ar­rival on Uran­tia. Un­doubt­edly at this time, if not be­fore, sweep­ing changes will be ef­fected in plan­e­tary man­age­ment. But as to the na­ture of such mod­i­fi­ca­tions of world ad­min­is­tra­tion, no one seems to be able even to con­jec­ture. There is no prece­dent for such an episode in all the his­tory of the in­hab­ited worlds of the uni­verse of Neb­a­don. Among the many things dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand con­cern­ing the fu­ture gov­ern­ment of Uran­tia, a promi­nent one is the lo­ca­tion on the planet of a cir­cuit and di­vi­sional head­quar­ters of the arch­an­gels.

114:7.17Your iso­lated world is not for­got­ten in the coun­sels of the uni­verse. Uran­tia is not a cos­mic or­phan stig­ma­tized by sin and shut away from di­vine watch­care by re­bel­lion. From Uversa to Sal­ving­ton and on down to Je­ru­sem, even in Ha­vona and on Par­a­dise, they all know we are here; and you mor­tals now dwell­ing on Uran­tia are just as lov­ingly cher­ished and just as faith­fully watched over as if the sphere had never been be­trayed by a faith­less Plan­e­tary Prince, even more so. It is eter­nally true, “the Fa­ther him­self loves you.”

116:0.2When view­ing the ex­qui­sitely per­fect spheres of Ha­vona, it is both rea­son­able and log­i­cal to be­lieve they were made by a per­fect, in­fi­nite, and ab­so­lute Cre­ator. But that same rea­son and logic would com­pel any hon­est be­ing, when view­ing the tur­moil, im­per­fec­tions, and in­equities of Uran­tia, to con­clude that your world had been made by, and was be­ing man­aged by, Cre­ators who were sub­ab­so­lute, pre­in­fi­nite, and other than per­fect.

119:8.8Uran­tia is the sen­ti­men­tal shrine of all Neb­a­don, the chief of ten mil­lion in­hab­ited worlds, the mor­tal home of Christ Mi­chael, sov­er­eign of all Neb­a­don, a Mel­chiz­e­dek min­is­ter to the realms, a sys­tem sav­ior, an Adamic re­deemer, a se­raphic fel­low, an as­so­ciate of as­cend­ing spir­its, a mor­ontia pro­gres­sor, a Son of Man in the like­ness of mor­tal flesh, and the Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. And your rec­ord tells the truth when it says that this same Je­sus has prom­ised some­time to re­turn to the world of his ter­mi­nal be­stowal, the World of the Cross.

120:1.1“My Cre­ator brother, I am about to wit­ness your sev­enth and fi­nal uni­verse be­stowal. Most faith­fully and per­fectly have you ex­e­cuted the six pre­vi­ous com­mis­sions, and I en­ter­tain no thought but that you will be equally tri­umphant on this, your ter­mi­nal sov­er­eignty be­stowal. Here­to­fore you have ap­peared on your be­stowal spheres as a fully de­vel­oped be­ing of the or­der of your choos­ing. Now you are about to ap­pear upon Uran­tia, the dis­or­dered and dis­turbed planet of your choice, not as a fully de­vel­oped mor­tal, but as a help­less babe. This, my com­rade, will be a new and un­tried ex­pe­ri­ence for you. You are about to pay the full price of be­stowal and to ex­pe­ri­ence the com­plete en­light­en­ment of the in­car­na­tion of a Cre­ator in the like­ness of a crea­ture.

140:8.3Je­sus made clear to the three the dif­fer­ence be­tween the re­quire­ments of apos­tle­ship and dis­ci­ple­ship. And even then he did not for­bid the ex­er­cise of pru­dence and fore­sight by the twelve. What he preached against was not fore­thought but anx­i­ety, worry. He taught the ac­tive and alert sub­mis­sion to God’s will. In an­swer to many of their ques­tions re­gard­ing fru­gal­ity and thrifti­ness, he sim­ply called at­ten­tion to his life as car­pen­ter, boat­maker, and fish­er­man, and to his care­ful or­ga­ni­za­tion of the twelve. He sought to make it clear that the world is not to be re­garded as an en­emy; that the cir­cum­stances of life con­sti­tute a di­vine dis­pen­sa­tion work­ing along with the chil­dren of God.

145:5.1Nei­ther did Je­sus sleep much that Sat­ur­day night. He re­al­ized that the world was filled with phys­i­cal dis­tress and over­run with ma­te­rial dif­fi­cul­ties, and he con­tem­plated the great dan­ger of be­ing com­pelled to de­vote so much of his time to the care of the sick and af­flicted that his mis­sion of es­tab­lish­ing the spir­i­tual king­dom in the hearts of men would be in­ter­fered with or at least sub­or­di­nated to the min­istry of things phys­i­cal. Be­cause of these and sim­i­lar thoughts which oc­cu­pied the mor­tal mind of Je­sus dur­ing the night, he arose that Sun­day morn­ing long be­fore day­break and went all alone to one of his fa­vorite places for com­mu­nion with the Fa­ther. The theme of Je­sus’ prayer on this early morn­ing was for wis­dom and judg­ment that he might not al­low his hu­man sym­pa­thy, joined with his di­vine mercy, to make such an ap­peal to him in the pres­ence of mor­tal suf­fer­ing that all of his time would be oc­cu­pied with phys­i­cal min­istry to the ne­glect of the spir­i­tual. Though he did not wish al­to­gether to avoid min­is­ter­ing to the sick, he knew that he must also do the more im­por­tant work of spir­i­tual teach­ing and re­li­gious train­ing.

149:5.5Je­sus hardly re­garded this world as a “vale of tears.” He rather looked upon it as the birth sphere of the eter­nal and im­mor­tal spir­its of Par­a­dise as­cen­sion, the “vale of soul mak­ing.”

176:2.3In fur­ther an­swer to Pe­ter’s ques­tion, Je­sus said: “Why do you still look for the Son of Man to sit upon the throne of David and ex­pect that the ma­te­rial dreams of the Jews will be ful­filled? Have I not told you all these years that my king­dom is not of this world? The things which you now look down upon are com­ing to an end, but this will be a new be­gin­ning out of which the gospel of the king­dom will go to all the world and this sal­va­tion will spread to all peo­ples. And when the king­dom shall have come to its full fruition, be as­sured that the Fa­ther in heaven will not fail to visit you with an en­larged rev­e­la­tion of truth and an en­hanced dem­on­stra­tion of righ­teous­ness, even as he has al­ready be­stowed upon this world him who be­came the prince of dark­ness, and then Adam, who was fol­lowed by Mel­chiz­e­dek, and in these days, the Son of Man. And so will my Fa­ther con­tinue to man­i­fest his mercy and show forth his love, even to this dark and evil world. So also will I, af­ter my Fa­ther has in­vested me with all power and au­thor­ity, con­tinue to fol­low your for­tunes and to guide in the af­fairs of the king­dom by the pres­ence of my spirit, who shall shortly be poured out upon all flesh. Even though I shall thus be pres­ent with you in spirit, I also prom­ise that I will some­time re­turn to this world, where I have lived this life in the flesh and achieved the ex­pe­ri­ence of si­mul­ta­ne­ously re­veal­ing God to man and lead­ing man to God. Very soon must I leave you and take up the work the Fa­ther has in­trusted to my hands, but be of good cour­age, for I will some­time re­turn. In the mean­time, my Spirit of the Truth of a uni­verse shall com­fort and guide you.

176:4.1Of all the Mas­ter’s teach­ings no one phase has been so mis­un­der­stood as his prom­ise some­time to come back in per­son to this world. It is not strange that Mi­chael should be in­ter­ested in some­time re­turn­ing to the planet whereon he ex­pe­ri­enced his sev­enth and last be­stowal, as a mor­tal of the realm. It is only nat­u­ral to be­lieve that Je­sus of Naz­a­reth, now sov­er­eign ruler of a vast uni­verse, would be in­ter­ested in com­ing back, not only once but even many times, to the world whereon he lived such a unique life and fi­nally won for him­self the Fa­ther’s un­lim­ited be­stowal of uni­verse power and au­thor­ity. Uran­tia will eter­nally be one of the seven na­tiv­ity spheres of Mi­chael in the win­ning of uni­verse sov­er­eignty.

184:4.4The hu­man heart can­not pos­si­bly con­ceive of the shud­der of in­dig­na­tion that swept out over a vast uni­verse as the ce­les­tial in­tel­li­gences wit­nessed this sight of their beloved Sov­er­eign sub­mit­ting him­self to the will of his ig­no­rant and mis­guided crea­tures on the sin-dark­ened sphere of un­for­tu­nate Uran­tia.

188:4.1Al­though Je­sus did not die this death on the cross to atone for the racial guilt of mor­tal man nor to pro­vide some sort of ef­fec­tive ap­proach to an oth­er­wise of­fended and un­for­giv­ing God; even though the Son of Man did not of­fer him­self as a sac­ri­fice to ap­pease the wrath of God and to open the way for sin­ful man to ob­tain sal­va­tion; not­with­stand­ing that these ideas of atone­ment and pro­pi­ti­a­tion are er­ro­neous, nonethe­less, there are sig­nif­i­cances at­tached to this death of Je­sus on the cross which should not be over­looked. It is a fact that Uran­tia has be­come known among other neigh­bor­ing in­hab­ited plan­ets as the “World of the Cross.”

196:2.9Je­sus led men to feel at home in the world; he de­liv­ered them from the slav­ery of taboo and taught them that the world was not fun­da­men­tally evil. He did not long to es­cape from his earthly life; he mas­tered a tech­nique of ac­cept­ably do­ing the Fa­ther’s will while in the flesh. He at­tained an ide­al­is­tic re­li­gious life in the very midst of a re­al­is­tic world. Je­sus did not share Paul’s pes­simistic view of hu­mankind. The Mas­ter looked upon men as the sons of God and fore­saw a mag­nif­i­cent and eter­nal fu­ture for those who chose sur­vival. He was not a moral skep­tic; he viewed man pos­i­tively, not neg­a­tively. He saw most men as weak rather than wicked, more dis­traught than de­praved. But no mat­ter what their sta­tus, they were all God’s chil­dren and his breth­ren.

the future 17 paragraphs, 3 read above

3:5.3In the af­fairs of men’s hearts the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther may not al­ways have his way; but in the con­duct and des­tiny of a planet the di­vine plan pre­vails; the eter­nal pur­pose of wis­dom and love tri­umphs.

12:7.1There is op­er­a­tive through­out all time and space and with re­gard to all re­al­ity of what­ever na­ture an in­ex­orable and im­per­sonal law which is equiv­a­lent to the func­tion of a cos­mic prov­i­dence. Mercy char­ac­ter­izes God’s at­ti­tude of love for the in­di­vid­ual; im­par­tial­ity mo­ti­vates God’s at­ti­tude to­ward the to­tal. The will of God does not nec­es­sar­ily pre­vail in the part—the heart of any one per­son­al­ity—but his will does ac­tu­ally rule the whole, the uni­verse of uni­verses.

12:7.2–6 · five paragraphs not cited here ·

12:7.2In all his deal­ings with all his be­ings it is true that the laws of God are not in­her­ently ar­bi­trary. To you, with your lim­ited vi­sion and fi­nite view­point, the acts of God must of­ten ap­pear to be dic­ta­to­rial and ar­bi­trary. The laws of God are merely the habits of God, his way of re­peat­edly do­ing things; and he ever does all things well. You ob­serve that God does the same thing in the same way, re­peat­edly, sim­ply be­cause that is the best way to do that par­tic­u­lar thing in a given cir­cum­stance; and the best way is the right way, and there­fore does in­fi­nite wis­dom al­ways or­der it done in that pre­cise and per­fect man­ner. You should also re­mem­ber that na­ture is not the ex­clu­sive act of De­ity; other in­flu­ences are pres­ent in those phe­nom­ena which man calls na­ture.

12:7.3It is re­pug­nant to the di­vine na­ture to suf­fer any sort of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion or ever to per­mit the ex­e­cu­tion of any purely per­sonal act in an in­fe­rior way. It should be made clear, how­ever, that, if, in the di­vin­ity of any sit­u­a­tion, in the ex­trem­ity of any cir­cum­stance, in any case where the course of su­preme wis­dom might in­di­cate the de­mand for dif­fer­ent con­duct—if the de­mands of per­fec­tion might for any rea­son dic­tate an­other method of re­ac­tion, a bet­ter one, then and there would the all-wise God func­tion in that bet­ter and more suit­able way. That would be the ex­pres­sion of a higher law, not the re­ver­sal of a lower law.

12:7.4God is not a habit-bound slave to the chronic­ity of the rep­e­ti­tion of his own vol­un­tary acts. There is no con­flict among the laws of the In­fi­nite; they are all per­fec­tions of the in­fal­li­ble na­ture; they are all the un­ques­tioned acts ex­pres­sive of fault­less de­ci­sions. Law is the un­chang­ing re­ac­tion of an in­fi­nite, per­fect, and di­vine mind. The acts of God are all vo­li­tional not­with­stand­ing this ap­par­ent same­ness. In God there “is no vari­able­ness nei­ther shadow of chang­ing.” But all this which can be truly said of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther can­not be said with equal cer­tainty of all his sub­or­di­nate in­tel­li­gences or of his evo­lu­tion­ary crea­tures.

12:7.5Be­cause God is change­less, there­fore can you de­pend, in all or­di­nary cir­cum­stances, on his do­ing the same thing in the same iden­ti­cal and or­di­nary way. God is the as­sur­ance of sta­bil­ity for all cre­ated things and be­ings. He is God; there­fore he changes not.

12:7.6And all this stead­fast­ness of con­duct and uni­for­mity of ac­tion is per­sonal, con­scious, and highly vo­li­tional, for the great God is not a help­less slave to his own per­fec­tion and in­fin­ity. God is not a self-act­ing au­to­matic force; he is not a slav­ish law-bound power. God is nei­ther a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion nor a chem­i­cal for­mula. He is a free­will and pri­mal per­son­al­ity. He is the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther, a be­ing sur­charged with per­son­al­ity and the uni­ver­sal fount of all crea­ture per­son­al­ity.

12:7.7The will of God does not uni­formly pre­vail in the heart of the God-seek­ing ma­te­rial mor­tal, but if the time frame is en­larged be­yond the mo­ment to em­brace the whole of the first life, then does God’s will be­come in­creas­ingly dis­cern­i­ble in the spirit fruits which are borne in the lives of the spirit-led chil­dren of God. And then, if hu­man life is fur­ther en­larged to in­clude the mor­ontia ex­pe­ri­ence, the di­vine will is ob­served to shine brighter and brighter in the spir­i­tu­al­iz­ing acts of those crea­tures of time who have be­gun to taste the di­vine de­lights of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the re­la­tion­ship of the per­son­al­ity of man with the per­son­al­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther.

37:3.4 read above, under celestial government

44:1.15While you have as­sem­bled some beau­ti­ful mel­o­dies on Uran­tia, you have not pro­gressed mu­si­cally nearly so far as many of your neigh­bor­ing plan­ets in Sa­ta­nia. If Adam and Eve had only sur­vived, then would you have had mu­sic in re­al­ity; but the gift of har­mony, so large in their na­tures, has been so di­luted by strains of un­mu­si­cal ten­den­cies that only once in a thou­sand mor­tal lives is there any great ap­pre­ci­a­tion of har­mon­ics. But be not dis­cour­aged; some day a real mu­si­cian may ap­pear on Uran­tia, and whole peo­ples will be en­thralled by the mag­nif­i­cent strains of his mel­o­dies. One such hu­man be­ing could for­ever change the course of a whole na­tion, even the en­tire civ­i­lized world. It is lit­er­ally true, “mel­ody has power a whole world to trans­form.” For­ever, mu­sic will re­main the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of men, an­gels, and spir­its. Har­mony is the speech of Ha­vona.

46:8.2When Sa­ta­nia can re­turn to the con­stel­la­tion fold, then will come up for con­sid­er­a­tion the read­mis­sion of the iso­lated worlds into the sys­tem fam­ily of in­hab­ited plan­ets, ac­com­pa­nied by their restora­tion to the spir­i­tual com­mu­nion of the realms. But even if Uran­tia were re­stored to the sys­tem cir­cuits, you would still be em­bar­rassed by the fact that your whole sys­tem rests un­der a Nor­la­ti­adek quar­an­tine par­tially seg­re­gat­ing it from all other sys­tems.

46:8.3But ere long, the ad­ju­di­ca­tion of Lu­cifer and his as­so­ciates will re­store the Sa­ta­nia sys­tem to the Nor­la­ti­adek con­stel­la­tion, and sub­se­quently, Uran­tia and the other iso­lated spheres will be re­stored to the Sa­ta­nia cir­cuits, and again will such worlds en­joy the priv­i­leges of in­ter­plan­e­tary com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­ter­sys­tem com­mu­nion.

46:8.4There will come an end for rebels and re­bel­lion. The Su­preme Rulers are mer­ci­ful and pa­tient, but the law of de­lib­er­ately nour­ished evil is uni­ver­sally and unerringly ex­e­cuted. “The wages of sin is death”—eter­nal oblit­er­a­tion.

55:7.3When such an era is at­tained on your world, no doubt Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, now the vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia, will oc­cupy the seat of the Plan­e­tary Sov­er­eign; and it has long been con­jec­tured on Je­ru­sem that he will be ac­com­pa­nied by a son and daugh­ter of the Uran­tia Adam and Eve who are now held on Eden­tia as wards of the Most Highs of Nor­la­ti­adek. These chil­dren of Adam might so serve on Uran­tia in as­so­ci­a­tion with the Mel­chiz­e­dek-Sov­er­eign since they were de­prived of pro­cre­ative pow­ers al­most 37,000 years ago at the time they gave up their ma­te­rial bod­ies on Uran­tia in prepa­ra­tion for tran­sit to Eden­tia.

77:9.10Mid­way­ers are the skill­ful min­is­ters who com­pen­sate that gap be­tween the ma­te­rial and spir­i­tual af­fairs of Uran­tia which ap­peared upon the death of Adam and Eve. They are like­wise your el­der breth­ren, com­rades in the long strug­gle to at­tain a set­tled sta­tus of light and life on Uran­tia. The United Mid­way­ers are a re­bel­lion-tested corps, and they will faith­fully en­act their part in plan­e­tary evo­lu­tion un­til this world at­tains the goal of the ages, un­til that dis­tant day when in fact peace does reign on earth and in truth is there good will in the hearts of men.

93:10.6 read above, under celestial government

93:10.7We well un­der­stand how, by his tri­umph on Uran­tia, Mi­chael be­came the suc­ces­sor of both Cali­gas­tia and Adam; how he be­came the plan­e­tary Prince of Peace and the sec­ond Adam. And now we be­hold the con­fer­ring upon this Mel­chiz­e­dek of the ti­tle Vicegerent Plan­e­tary Prince of Uran­tia. Will he also be con­sti­tuted Vicegerent Ma­te­rial Son of Uran­tia? Or is there a pos­si­bil­ity that an un­ex­pected and un­prece­dented event is to take place, the some­time re­turn to the planet of Adam and Eve or cer­tain of their progeny as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Mi­chael with the ti­tles vicegerents of the sec­ond Adam of Uran­tia?

93:10.8 read above, under celestial government

115:3.13The three Ab­so­lutes of po­ten­tial­ity are op­er­a­tive on the purely eter­nal level of the cos­mos, hence never func­tion as such on sub­ab­so­lute lev­els. On the de­scend­ing lev­els of re­al­ity the tri­odity of po­ten­tial­ity is man­i­fest with the Ul­ti­mate and upon the Su­preme. The po­ten­tial may fail to time-ac­tu­al­ize with re­spect to a part on some sub­ab­so­lute level, but never in the ag­gre­gate. The will of God does ul­ti­mately pre­vail, not al­ways con­cern­ing the in­di­vid­ual but in­vari­ably con­cern­ing the to­tal.

142:2.2When Ja­cob fin­ished speak­ing, Je­sus re­plied: “Ja­cob, you have well stated the teach­ings of the olden proph­ets who taught the chil­dren of their gen­er­a­tion in ac­cor­dance with the light of their day. Our Fa­ther in Par­a­dise is change­less. But the con­cept of his na­ture has en­larged and grown from the days of Moses down through the times of Amos and even to the gen­er­a­tion of the prophet Isa­iah. And now have I come in the flesh to re­veal the Fa­ther in new glory and to show forth his love and mercy to all men on all worlds. As the gospel of this king­dom shall spread over the world with its mes­sage of good cheer and good will to all men, there will grow up im­proved and bet­ter re­la­tions among the fam­i­lies of all na­tions. As time passes, fa­thers and their chil­dren will love each other more, and thus will be brought about a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the love of the Fa­ther in heaven for his chil­dren on earth. Re­mem­ber, Ja­cob, that a good and true fa­ther not only loves his fam­ily as a whole—as a fam­ily—but he also truly loves and af­fec­tion­ately cares for each in­di­vid­ual mem­ber.”

143:1.4“I have come into this world to do the will of my Fa­ther and to re­veal his lov­ing char­ac­ter to all man­kind. That, my breth­ren, is my mis­sion. And this one thing I will do, re­gard­less of the mis­un­der­stand­ing of my teach­ings by Jews or gen­tiles of this day or of an­other gen­er­a­tion. But you should not over­look the fact that even di­vine love has its se­vere dis­ci­plines. A fa­ther’s love for his son of­ten­times im­pels the fa­ther to re­strain the un­wise acts of his thought­less off­spring. The child does not al­ways com­pre­hend the wise and lov­ing mo­tives of the fa­ther’s re­strain­ing dis­ci­pline. But I de­clare to you that my Fa­ther in Par­a­dise does rule a uni­verse of uni­verses by the com­pelling power of his love. Love is the great­est of all spirit re­al­i­ties. Truth is a lib­er­at­ing rev­e­la­tion, but love is the su­preme re­la­tion­ship. And no mat­ter what blun­ders your fel­low men make in their world man­age­ment of to­day, in an age to come the gospel which I de­clare to you will rule this very world. The ul­ti­mate goal of hu­man prog­ress is the rev­er­ent rec­og­ni­tion of the fa­ther­hood of God and the lov­ing ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion of the broth­er­hood of man.

176:1.1In an­swer­ing Na­than­iel’s ques­tion, Je­sus said: “Yes, I will tell you about the times when this peo­ple shall have filled up the cup of their in­iq­uity; when jus­tice shall swiftly de­scend upon this city of our fa­thers. I am about to leave you; I go to the Fa­ther. Af­ter I leave you, take heed that no man de­ceive you, for many will come as de­liv­er­ers and will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and ru­mors of wars, be not trou­bled, for though all these things will hap­pen, the end of Je­ru­sa­lem is not yet at hand. You should not be per­turbed by famines or earth­quakes; nei­ther should you be con­cerned when you are de­liv­ered up to the civil au­thor­i­ties and are per­se­cuted for the sake of the gospel. You will be thrown out of the syn­a­gogue and put in prison for my sake, and some of you will be killed. When you are brought up be­fore gov­er­nors and rulers, it shall be for a tes­ti­mony of your faith and to show your stead­fast­ness in the gospel of the king­dom. And when you stand be­fore judges, be not anx­ious be­fore­hand as to what you should say, for the spirit will teach you in that very hour what you should an­swer your ad­ver­saries. In these days of tra­vail, even your own kins­folk, un­der the lead­er­ship of those who have re­jected the Son of Man, will de­liver you up to prison and death. For a time you may be hated by all men for my sake, but even in these per­se­cu­tions I will not for­sake you; my spirit will not desert you. Be pa­tient! doubt not that this gospel of the king­dom will tri­umph over all en­e­mies and, even­tu­ally, be pro­claimed to all na­tions.”

195:9.2But pa­ganized and so­cial­ized Chris­tian­ity stands in need of new con­tact with the un­com­pro­mised teach­ings of Je­sus; it lan­guishes for lack of a new vi­sion of the Mas­ter’s life on earth. A new and fuller rev­e­la­tion of the re­li­gion of Je­sus is des­tined to con­quer an em­pire of ma­te­ri­al­is­tic sec­u­lar­ism and to over­throw a world sway of mech­a­nis­tic nat­u­ral­ism. Uran­tia is now quiv­er­ing on the very brink of one of its most amaz­ing and en­thralling epochs of so­cial read­just­ment, moral quick­en­ing, and spir­i­tual en­light­en­ment.

195:10.16The great hope of Uran­tia lies in the pos­si­bil­ity of a new rev­e­la­tion of Je­sus with a new and en­larged pre­sen­ta­tion of his sav­ing mes­sage which would spir­i­tu­ally unite in lov­ing ser­vice the nu­mer­ous fam­i­lies of his pres­ent-day pro­fessed fol­low­ers.

196:3.33Be not dis­cour­aged; hu­man evo­lu­tion is still in prog­ress, and the rev­e­la­tion of God to the world, in and through Je­sus, shall not fail.

Onward

See Lucifer rebellion: on Urantia; geologic ages; life: biological; moon (Urantia’s); quarantine; Jesus: second coming

See also Monmatia; geologic ages; mortals; mortals: planetary types; planetary epochs

Cited alongside: mortals, planetary epochs, Jesus, Michael of Nebadon, Planetary Prince of Urantia, Satania, Christ, decimal planets