Continued from The Urantia:  (the underlines are my addition) 

“Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus.  You may preach a religion about Jesus but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus.  In enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ.  The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road.   

The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul.  Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. 

Jesus’ life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from the early ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual communion until he arrived at that advanced and exalted status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Universe.  In one short life, he traversed the experience of religious spiritual progression.  Jesus progressed from a purely human consciousness to the sublime heights of realization of his divine nature.  He progressed from humble human to the consciousness of achieved divinity.  And this progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an exclusively mortal achievement.  And when he had thus attained divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God. 

The greatest mistake was made in that, while the human Jesus was recognized as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a religion.  Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus from Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and heroism of his indwelling Spiritual Presence, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to becoming one with divinity, thus revealing the way all mortals ascend from humanity to divinity.   

Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were usually wanton and irreligious.  He would equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man of wealth. 

Jesus led men to feel at home in the world; he delivered them from slavery of taboo and taught that the world was not fundamentally evil.  He did not long to escape from his earthly life; he mastered a technique while in the flesh.  He attainted 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 sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future.   He was not a moral skeptic; he viewed man positively, not negatively.  He saw most men as weak rather then wicked, more distraught then depraved.  But no matter what their status, they were all God’s children and his brethren. 

He taught men to place a high value upon themselves in time and in eternity. 

He offered no rules for social advancement; his was a religious mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience.   

Personal, spiritual religious experience is an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties; it is an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all problems.  Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them.  True religion unifies the personality enabling effective adjustment to all requirements.   Religious faith – the positive leading of the indwelling divine Presence – unfailingly enables the God–knowing man to bridge the gulf existing between intellectual logic and positive affirmations of the soul. 

There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation.  The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy, and truth.  Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith – physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality.  We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning, and value. 

The progressive comprehension of reality is the equivalent of approaching God.  The finding of God, the consciousness of identity with reality; is the equivalent of the experience of self-completion. —- self-entirety, self-totality.  The experiencing of total reality is the full realization of God, the finality of the God-knowing experience. 

The full summation of human life is the knowledge that man is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved – justified – by religious faith.  

Physical certainty consists in the logic of science; moral certainty, in the wisdom of philosophy; spiritual certainty, in the truth of genuine religious experience.  

The mind of man can attain high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding spheres of divinity of values because it is not wholly material.  There is a Spirit nucleus in the mind of man – the Divine Presence.  There are three separate evidences of the Spirit indwelling the human mind.  

1. Humanitarian fellowship – love.  The purely animal mind may be gregarious for self-protection, but only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and unconditionally loving.
     
2. Interpretation of the universe – wisdom.  Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
3.  Spiritual evaluation of life – worship.   Only the spirit-indwelt man can realize the divine Presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with this foretaste of divinity.

 The human mind does not create real values; human experience does not yield universe insight.  Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do is to discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.  

Unless a divine lover lived in man, he could not unselfishly and spiritually love.  Unless an interpreter lived in the mind of man, man could not truly realize the unity of the universe.  Unless an evaluator lived in man, he could not possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings.  And this lover hails from the very source of infinite love; this interpreter is a part of Universe Unity; this evaluator is the child of the Center and Source of all absolute values of divine and eternal reality. 

True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception.  Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality.  Man aspires by worship to be better and thereby eventually attains the best.  

The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods – gods in man’s image – but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin.  The God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling Spirit. 

Some men’s lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being merely successful.  The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the religious man transcends his environment and in his way escapes the limitations of the present material world through this insight of divine love.  This concept of love generates in the soul of man that is super-animal effort to find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find them, he is glorified in their embrace; he is consumed with the desire to live them. 

Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress; revelation will not fail. 

The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communications with the divine Presence that dwells within him.  Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh is the well balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness – contact with the divine Presence.  Such an experience constitutes God-consciousness, an experience mightily confirmative of the pre-existent truth of the religious experience of knowing God.  Such spirit-consciousness is the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of sonship with God.  Otherwise, the assurance of sonship is the experience of faith. 

God-consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the Universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality.” 

This journey of man getting to know God and God getting to know man, takes place in 12 stages.  Just as any seed requires different radiations of the sun to come to full expression, spring, summer, and fall, so does Man.  Each of these 12 (radiations/gates) cover approximately 2400-2500 years; the sum total of which equals a full progression of the ages, coming full circle, every 25,000 to 26,000 years.  It’s one of these events that keeps being discussed concerning the year 2012.  It is a time of Completion.

What follows are the 12 steps, the 12 gates we pass through in dancing the dream awake.  

Over the past couple of weeks I was drawn to one of my books.  As happens all the time, I’ve read it and re-read it, over and over.  Like the information was some sort of pinball that had to rattle around inside my mind for a while before I knew what to make of it.
 

Make of it…what am I going to give physical birth to this time?  Talk about Creative.  Somebody ‘upstairs’ must have me confused with a rabbit.  

I don’t even ask what’s about to come out of me at this point.  I’ve learned better.  Asking only increases any anxieties I may have or feel.  So I don’t ask.  I make like a leaf floating down the river, trusting the current will take me wherever I need to go.
 

I begin by quoting from the Urantia:

“Christainity has indeed done a great service for this world but what is now most needed is Jesus.  The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men.  Christianity must go forward from where we find ourselves.  Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel.  And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.  Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of Spirit in personal experience.  

‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving Spirit.

It is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love.  Christianity even now goes the first mile, but mankind languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second milers – so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.

The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh.

No social system or political regime which denies the reality of Spirit can contribute in any constructive and lasting manner to the advancement of human civilization.  But Christianity, as it is subdivided and secularized today, presents the greatest single obstacle to its further advancement.

Ecclesiasticism is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing Spirit, and firsthand experience of Jesus in the brotherhood of man, in the spiritual association of the kingdom of heaven. The praiseworthy desire to preserve traditions of past achievement often leads to the defense of outgrown systems of worship. The well meant desire to foster ancient thought systems effectively prevents the sponsoring of new and adequate means and methods designed to satisfy the spiritual longings of the expanding and advancing minds of modern men.  Likewise, the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as great, but wholly unconscious, obstacles to the immediate advancement of the real gospel. – the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many earnest persons who would gladly yield loyalty to the Christ of the gospel find it very difficult enthusiastically to support a church which exhibits so little of the Spirit of his life and teachings, and which they have erroneously taught he founded.  Jesus did not found the so-called Christian church.

Christianity is seriously confronted with the doom embodied in one of its own slogans: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’   The living Jesus is the only hope of a possible Unification of Christianity.  The true church – the Jesus brotherhood – is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by Unity, not necessarily uniformity.  Uniformity is the earmark of the physical world of mechanistic nature.  Spiritual Unity is the fruit of faith union.  The visible church should refuse longer to handicap the progress of the invisible and spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom of God.  This brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. 

There is no excuse for the involvement of the church in commerce and politics; such unholy alliances are a flagrant betrayal of the Master.  And the genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this power institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox raiment.

It is all too true that such a church would not have survived unless there had been men in the world who preferred such a style of worship.  Many spiritually indolent souls crave an ancient and authoritative religion of ritual and sacred traditions.  But in the brotherhood of Jesus, there is no place for sectarian rivalry, group bitterness, nor assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility.

Most throughout the world do not understand that there is a religion of Jesus separate, and somewhat apart, from Christianity, which has more and more become a religion about Jesus.

If Christianity could only grasp more of Jesus’ teachings, it could do so much more in helping modern man to solve his new and increasingly complex problems.

Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as part of the social system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization; and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality. 

The hope of modern Christianity is that it should cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly extols, there to learn anew. From Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortal man can ever hear – the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”

Walk Right In

Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout a new way of walkin’
Do you want to lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on

Walk right in, sit right down
Baby, let your hair hang down
Walk right in, sit right down
Baby, let your hair hang down
Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout a new way of walkin’
Do you want to lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down
Baby, let your hair hang down

Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout a new way of walkin’
Do you want to lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Daddy, let your mind roll on

ROFL…

It’s safe to come home now {{Catherine}}.

When you told me the estimates were 2-3 weeks and to prepare for the worst, I said I didn’t believe it.  I said I knew Who I was and, was going  to re-write reality.  Watch for Miracles…

Our power came back on at 12:45 AM last night.

But the crappy furnace isn’t working; neither do we have any hot water.

Greetings EveryOne!

{{Catherine}} is my upstairs neighbor and friend.  {{Debbie}} GentleEssenced, left a comment on “Love’s Extensions” but I couldn’t approve it until this morning.  BECAUSE….

I’m in the middle of the disaster area called the Pacific Northwest.   Specifically, the Olympic Peninsula.  As of 11:30PM Sunday night, our entire county has been without power and mudslides, have blocked all the roads in and out.  Some places are quoted as looking like bombs went off, as the slides took trees, houses, etc., and desposited everything in the middle of the highways. 

For me, the story began Sunday night.   Howling winds rocked the house, making me thankful {{Catherine and her girls}} weren’t up there.  Right as we went to bed, the lights went out.   We fell asleep with ideas the electricity would be back on by morning.  And we were mistaken.    Monday morning’s conversation went something like this:

My husband says to the young man who has been staying with us, our friend, ”Go out to the garage and get the generator and the 1000 foot extension cord.” *presto*  We had power.   Normally, I’m not much of a coffe drinker but that cup of hot coffee sure did taste good.  Then we hooked up a TV to the generator to see if we could get any news about what was going on.  The news wasn’t good.  Our entire county was without power; floods and mudslides had left people stranded wherever they happened to be on the peninsula, as flood waters started rising every where else.  We weren’t warm but we were dry!

Strange….the way some things just work out…

Last week we had heard from a business partner of ours, an investor, that he could sure use my husband’s help with one of his properties.   And this property had a FIREPLACE.  That my husband had just fixed the day before.  We packed up our generator, coffee maker and my ironstone cookware and, drove 3 blocks to get there.   We had PLENTY of firewood…construction debris.

I emptied my frig of hot dogs and hot links.  Unlike the supermarket shelves, I also had bread and buns.   Banking some hot coals in the corner of the fireplace,  I cooked a pot of chili.   We had warmth, we had light, we had hot food and we had each other for good company.

Then we ran out of gas for the generator.  When my husband and our friend went out looking for gas, that’s when we started finding out how ‘bad’ things were.  No pumps in town were working.  And all traffic out of here was being turned back. 

I spent that evening nestled before a fire, drinking my hot tea, radiating waves of Gratitude for my whole day.  I thought of the line of cars and those huddled in them, trying to keep warm and running out of gas with no place to go and, wished I had the means to knock on car windows and invite them all to come to my place.  Or at least the means to offer blankets, hot coffee and cocoa.  

Around midnight we made the decision to come home to huddle in our beds with blankets and each other for warmth.  That night was as close as I got to misery.   A hot flash would wake me up with sweat pouring from every pore but, when the evaporative cooling stage came, it sent me to the other extreme, since our inside temperature was 50 degrees.(f)   Having a wet head was my biggest concern.  But my cat took care of that by sleeping across my head.

Tuesday we woke to no power and no gas for the generator.  We had managed to locate a battery operated radio…my daughter’s mp3 player and listened to what roads might be open.  That’s when I got the idea to syphon the gas from our old ford that had been sitting in the driveway for months with a cracked engine block.   But we found out someone else had had the idea before us.  The tank was already dry.   So was the tank in our friend’s car, that had been parked outside our house along the curb.   It was about that time {{Catherine}} showed up, telling me we had been declared a disaster area.

The transmission towers and lines that powered our PUD had been blown over.  

{{Catherine}} packed up some stuff, gave me the use of her little space heater, should our power come back on and, headed back to stay at a relative’s house, who still had power.  She is such a sweetheart, that she asked about my blog.  So I gave her suggestions on how to get the word out, for all my friends and family in blogland, to please specifically focus Loving thoughts in this direction.  In the Spirit of Christmas, please express it.  “Tell them I am fine and I BELIEVE in Miracles!”

The economy has been halted.  No businesses are open and most of the people here live pay check to pay check if they are lucky.  The only stores open ONLY take cash and no ATM’s or banks are working.   And no supplies can get through until the roads are cleared.

My lights and computer are running because I live 6 blocks from the PUD headquarters.   Bonneville Power got one feeder line in operation and energized it at midnight.  How long it’s going to take to get power back on depends on how far people are from the PUD headquarters.  Everyone who headed to the coast for the weekend is stuck there, without any power.  Literally 100′s of trees were blown down.  Estimates  of 500-700 trees down across the road on one county road alone.

Our young friend had cabin fever, so he volunteered to brave driving out of here to find gas yesterday.  My daughter rode along for company, while the cold and the chill in the house put my husband and I to sleep.  Our friend grew up here.  He knew the roads.  He kept going to the 3rd town outside of here and found gas.    Coming back, he also let us know that the restaurant, that we had so enjoyed the night of our fiasco a couple of weeks ago, had slid into the middle of the highway.

Again, we headed to the house with the fireplace.

“2-3 weeks, I just DON’T believe it.  I’m going to IMAGINE something different”, I said, sitting in front of a roaring fire, as I finally got warm, , for the very first time that day.   We ate chili.  We ate luncheon meat and cheese on crackers.  We drank hot tea; we drank hot coffee;  we watched “Harry Potter” on my daughter’s portable DVD player.  And we played around with the idea of hanging some Christmas lights, as a reminder of the season but, knew all our neighbors would most likely be pissed.

As I grew tired, my husband rolled out the carpet pad, that had yet to be installed.  I laid my blanket out on 3 layers of padding before the fire as my husband left to go back home to  collect more blankets, pillows and movies. 

And as he drove down the street, all the streetlights began coming back on. 

He got to our house and turned on the furnace.  It worked.  So back home we came.  We watched an “Earnest” movie on TV, as we started to unwind.  As the temp reached 69, the furnace quit working.

Understanding the way ‘new’ energy works, as our ‘old’ energy systems go down, I ask to IMAGINE 2 things for myself and my community.

I would dearly love to be warm.  And I would dearly love a hot shower.  

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.