Holistic personal growth—ahhh, yes! It feels so good when we make a step of progress—or see it in someone we know.
Yes, we know it’s work, but with the right approach, doing the work feels great.
Ultimately, holistic personal growth is about the quest for divine perfection. We begin it in this life, and we attain it on Paradise. And even then, there’s more.
The July 2019 conference of the Estonian Urantia Association is titled “Sowing seeds– Qualitative Internal and Quantitative External Growth. My presentation: “A path to the beautiful wholeness of righteousness“
The section on growth is organized in three parts. The first is based on Part IV of the Urantia Book, where we find an amazing sequence of papers, beginning with paper 123, on Jesus’ early childhood to paper 129 on his later adult life. Here we see the pattern of human growth up to the level of complete readiness for eternal fusion with the indwelling spirit of God.
So let’s grow up with Jesus. “Although the average mortal of Urantia cannot hope to attain the high perfection of character which Jesus of Nazareth acquired while sojourning in the flesh, it is altogether possible for every mortal believer to develop a strong and unified personality along the perfected lines of the Jesus personality” (100:7.1/1101.5).
In order to grow up with Jesus by studying to discover what achievements he gained at each stage of his life and then ask: What areas would I like to work on as I strengthen and unify my personality? These questions to stimulate experiential education are wide-ranging. They are designed to launch personal growth projects that can take months or more. The questions bring together references from different parts of the Urantia Book. Here are the growing up with Jesus questions.
The second area of the section on growth is a collection of essays. We draw on all kinds of resources for our growth. To make best use of them, we transplant them into the framework of the Urantia Book. Some of the following essays show how to do that; others are based only on the Urantia Book.
The perfection we can attain in this life: From the hunger and thirst for righteousness, through righteousness as a gift, to the beautiful wholeness of righteousness (text to be unveiled after presentation in Tallinn, Estonia, July 12, 2019).
Some people rely on the Urantia Book as practically their sole source of wisdom and truth. Other readers find a gem in the culture and embrace it completely. My approach is to seek widely, and when I find another gem, to transplant it into the garden (adjust it within the framework) of the Urantia Book. Here are two examples of that transplanting.
The 12-step program and the Urantia Book
Spiritual pressure from above: How to use jazz pianist Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery to leverage our personal growth.
The final section of growth documents were created for an experiential course at Urantia University on truth-coordinated living—a concept based on the following paragraphs.
“Consider the Greeks, who have a science without religion, while the Jews have a religion without science. And when men become thus misled into accepting a narrow and confused disintegration of truth, their only hope of salvation is to become truth-co-ordinated—converted.
“Let me emphatically state this eternal truth: If you, by truth co-ordination, learn to exemplify in your lives this beautiful wholeness of righteousness, your fellow men will then seek after you that they may gain what you have so acquired.” (155:1.4/1726.1)
Because many students of the Urantia Book are full of ideas about spiritual living but unfamiliar with the concept of scientific living, the following documents place greater emphasis on scientific living.
Week 1 Truth-Coordinated Living: An Introduction
Week 2 The Joy of Understanding Causation
Week 3 A friendly universe cosmology
Week 4 Biologically responsible living
Week 5 Learning to Love
Week 6 The Urantia Book in the Mosaic of the Post-Bestowal Age
