I
Because back in high school I would have been voted Most Likely to Volunteer for Alien Abduction, I was immediately intrigued by a magazine ad I saw about eighteen months ago for something called The Urantia Book.
The offer was for not just one, but two copies of the book, one indexed and the other not, and they were free. What could I lose? There was the possibility that along with the books would come a few survivalists to whisk me off to a commune in Idaho where I would be forced to hoard water, guns and apocalypse-proof tins of food, but I suspected that if anyone actually did show up with my books, “he” or “she” would have come from somewhere a bit beyond Idaho. So I took the plunge and went to the Web site pitching the book.
Soon a box arrived containing two copies of The Urantia Book. The unindexed version clocked in at 2,097 pages; the indexed version, set in a two-column format, covered 1,814 pages, followed by a 312-page Index. As a result, despite the tissue-thin paper, each volume must have weighed several pounds; not exactly light reading, in every sense of the word.
I studied the front matter and the dust jackets and decided to read the Indexed Version. Maybe I thought the two-column format would go faster—hah!—or that it would be great to have an Index—an invaluable asset indeed, as it turned out—but it was really the back of the dust jacket that sold me on this particular volume, despite the promise that the text within the two books was identical.
“The Urantia Book,” I was informed, “presents comprehensive answers to age-old questions about the nature and personality of God, the life and teachings of Jesus, the relationship between science and religion, spiritual living and much more. It provides detailed descriptions of a vast universe containing millions of worlds … inhabited by a host of diverse celestial personalities, both human and superhuman.”
Even better, I learned, “After this life you continue your spiritual journey of growth and adventure, passing through the many higher worlds of the universe until, in the distant future, you arrive on Paradise, outside of space and time at the geographic center of infinity.” (I did wonder, though: how can infinity have a center if it is, uh, well, infinite? Inquiring minds want to know.)
And even better than that, I read, “Many are convinced that [The Urantia Book] is a genuine revelation, but only personal experience can validate that claim. Explore The Urantia Book and decide for yourself.” I was hooked.
II
Way back in 1989, I went to the first of three week-long in-residence seminars I attended at The Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia, founded by Robert Monroe to explore expanded states of consciousness using a technology called Hemi-Sync. (Check out www.monroeinstitute.com for more information.) Bob Monroe was still alive then and spoke to our group one night. Several times during his presentation he reiterated, “This is not a dogma. This is not a philosophy.” Then, echoing the back cover of The UB, he added, “Go out and explore for yourself.” Now, here in 2009, I was being presented with a similar opportunity, a gift of unlimited potential, another vehicle—short of my own spaceship—whereby I could go out and explore and decide for myself. I turned to the Forward and started reading.
I don’t remember how much later I met R. I’d started to look for other Urantians just as in the late ‘80’s I looked for other students of A Course in Miracles. Sure enough, UB study groups and contact information popped up and there was R., offering a connection.
We bonded instantly and I exhaled; I was not crazy. I was not the only one who bought this book hook, line and sinker and continually marveled at its voice of authenticity. And I was impressed by R.’s command of the book and her ability to distinguish a Life Carrier from a Solitary Messenger from a Brilliant Evening Star. Honeymoon over, I was overwhelmed by the new vocabulary. Morontia. Supernal. Absonite. Havona.
Moreover, I was overwhelmed by the enormity of what I was holding in my hands. R. suggested that I start in the back, as many people do, with Part IV: The Life and Teachings of Jesus. Certainly no less significant than any other part, these Papers nevertheless are like breezing through a novel compared to the dense, difficult and intricate technical writing of the preceding sections.
But there was a part of me that did not want to violate the integrity of the text this way, or rather the integrity of the process of the revelation. And so true to my Virgo nature—astrology’s status as a “superstitious belief”[1] notwithstanding—I returned to the Forward, determined to read The UB straight through.
I brought to this effort considerable preparation, I thought. A search for God that began in earnest in 1979 when I learned to meditate and that took me from the Judaism into which I was born to Buddhism, A Course in Miracles and finally to Christianity, first to the Quakers, then to the Episcopal Church in which I was baptized and confirmed, and then to ordination as a non-Roman Catholic priest within the ISM, or Independent Sacramental Movement. (Google “Independent Catholic” or “Old Catholic” for more information about us Catholics outside of the Roman Church.)
In addition, I had trained as a Reiki Master. I’d had two quite spontaneous out-of-body experiences. I had read The Infinite Way, Conscious Union with God and almost everything else Joel Goldsmith ever wrote. I read Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health from cover to cover. I read M. Scott Peck. I read countless books about healing, about the chakras, and about the afterlife. I practiced meditation and yoga. I became a vegetarian. I prayed. I met Jesus at daily mass. I stumbled upon holosync,[2] a technology similar to Monroe’s hemi-sync and have been meditating with it since 2006.
What I did not bring to my first reading of The Urantia Book was even the most elementary understanding of any of the natural sciences. Very interested in astronomy as a child, it quickly became a mathematical maze, light years beyond the basic arithmetic over which I can still stumble. Later, biology in high school and geology in college got me to graduation having met, in each case, the absolute minimum requirement.
Chemistry? Physics? Fuhgeddaboudit, as we say in Noo Yawk. Not knowing a proton from an electron or a wave from a particle, I was doubly stymied reading Paper 42, for example, all about energy, and Papers 57 through 65 about the history of Urantia, complete with mineral and fossil deposits, dinosaurs, the shifting of land masses and the cooling of the oceans. As I read these Papers—often watching the words float by of their own accord—I wondered what the great minds would have made of it all. What would Einstein and Darwin have thought? What would Isaac Newton have said? Or Copernicus? Or Galileo? And don’t forget Carl Sagan. Surely, they would have had one “Aha!” moment after another, denied me by my lack of education. If there are any scientists-cum-UB readers out there, drinks are on me if I can grill you for a few hours.