Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:29 am +0000
Posts: 6039
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Finnish Urantian wrote: Having taken a few days off to absorb the information here and do some self reflection, i did come to a conclusion that i was overly harsh here. I saw and see the world through my own misery and despair, and i admit being wrong here. Thanks for Van for being patient with me. I do not know if i ever can see the world in a positive light, but at least i can admit that my view of the world is negatively biased. Being in despair and misery all the time does take a toll, and eventually you stop seeing the positive and good in the world, and you only see the suffering and bad, this biased viewing of the world is something i can try to change at the very least. Anyway, i do apologize for my negativity on this topic. I try to do better in the future.
It is important to understand how our reality perspective is distorted by our personal and subjective experience, knowledge, wisdom, preconceptions, misconceptions, and our emotional state of being. The UB teaches that we lose subjectivity and gain objectivity slowly in time and by gains in knowledge and understanding and experiential wisdom and spiritization.
But before we can even begin to address and correct our distorted perspective, we must first acknowledge that we, like all evolutionary and experiential ascenders, suffer from such bias and distorted reality perspective (as you have so courageously done so above!). The Urantia Papers teach that our ignorance and prejudice are our greatest obstacles to spiritual progress and enlightened wisdom!!!
An old Zen saying is that things are not at they appear... and neither are they different! Things will never "appear" differently to us until our perspective changes by greater knowledge, insight, understanding, experience, and wisdom. Then things will "appear" different. And yet things will still not be as they appear.
Probably, things ARE as they appear only to God. All other personalities suffer, to some degree, experiential limits and bias in our/their reality perspective.
The UB lists several mind and spirit poisons which offer even greater distortions to our personal reality perspective.
Nothing distorts our reality perspective more than or worse than anxiety, fear, anger, blame, resentments, suspicion, impatience, and intolerance.
110:1.5 (1204.3) The Adjuster remains with you in all disaster and through every sickness which does not wholly destroy the mentality. But how unkind knowingly to defile or otherwise deliberately to pollute the physical body, which must serve as the earthly tabernacle of this marvelous gift from God. All physical poisons greatly retard the efforts of the Adjuster to exalt the material mind, while the mental poisons of fear, anger, envy, jealousy, suspicion, and intolerance likewise tremendously interfere with the spiritual progress of the evolving soul.
Of the 7+ billion souls on Urantia, it truly is quite easy and simple to find endless examples of truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, forgiveness, mercy, generosity, duty, loyalty, idealism, hope, faith, and love. Such inspiration surrounds us. They're everywhere. Everyday. All day long.
The number of volunteer service hours and money donated to righteous causes has never been so great around the planet, and has been measurably increasing, decade after decade, for over the past century. By the wealthy, the working class, the poor, and even those in crisis, suffering desperate circumstances and personal deprivation.
It's incredible to see the changes and planetary evolutionary progress since the printing press, and industrialization, and the ages of electricity and radio and digitization and global travel and computerization and space exploration and wireless communication and personal access to the world's collective knowledge, etc., etc., etc.
We may choose to turn a blind eye to such stupendous progress and its likely, even inevitable, trajectories of epochal transformation. We may choose to embrace anxiety... or we may choose to have faith in God's goodness and power and plan, and the friendly universe of eternal adventures and progress.
We choose our perspective of universe reality.
Let us choose wisely!!
100:7.7 (1102.4) Of Jesus it was truly said, “He trusted God.” As a man among men he most sublimely trusted the Father in heaven. He trusted his Father as a little child trusts his earthly parent. His faith was perfect but never presumptuous. No matter how cruel nature might appear to be or how indifferent to man’s welfare on earth, Jesus never faltered in his faith. He was immune to disappointment and impervious to persecution. He was untouched by apparent failure.
100:7.8 (1102.5) He loved men as brothers, at the same time recognizing how they differed in innate endowments and acquired qualities. “He went about doing good.”
100:7.9 (1102.6) Jesus was an unusually cheerful person, but he was not a blind and unreasoning optimist. His constant word of exhortation was, "Be of good cheer.” He could maintain this confident attitude because of his unswerving trust in God and his unshakable confidence in man. He was always touchingly considerate of all men because he loved them and believed in them. Still he was always true to his convictions and magnificently firm in his devotion to the doing of his Father’s will.
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"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
Last edited by fanofVan on Sat May 04, 2024 6:17 am +0000, edited 3 times in total.
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