With just three lessons and three weeks left, it is time to begin summarizing the course. On the way to becoming like God, to the grandeur of genuine character achievement, the beautiful wholeness of righteousness—we are learning to coordinate spiritual living with a clear, realistic, robust, excellent embrace of fact, causation, and evolution as we discern the path of loving service in the Father’s will.
Exhorted to face our number one growth need, our front-burner issue, which fits into the mosaic of overarching growth needs in our lives and in our world, we build on our gifts and accomplishments but go beyond them, following the spirit into the high seas of discovery.
Seeking a wiser engagement with cosmic reality, we have begun to expand our attitude in response to the friendly universe to include progressive cosmic attitudes regarding features of evolution that may challenge our positive attitude: uncertainty, disappointment, apparent defeat, difficulties, the immensity of some tasks, and the inexplicable.
Last week we aimed for some perhaps small but meaningful step forward in biologically responsible living, seeking out frontiers in health and ecology.
This week the topic is psychologically responsible living. The group focus is on understanding others; but if you have a front-burner issue in this area, by all means turn to it.
This week we cease to rely on previously acquired knowledge, allowing The Urantia Book to summarize science for us, and we find some time to seek out new knowledge to illuminate our tasks.
Week 5. Learning to Love Wisely
The theme for this week is drawn from something Jesus said to Ganid.
130:2.6 (1431.1) To become acquainted with one’s brothers and sisters, to know their problems and to learn to love them, is the supreme experience of living.”
Sometimes our love is unwise. But divine love is always wise. So we have the adventure of taking the human steps that allow us to receive the gift of growth so that our love becomes increasingly divine. When we are doing our best in the momentum of divine love, we are naturally led into the relevant phases of scientific living. Nevertheless, as part of our education in the schools of thinking, feeling, and doing, we pause and study, cultivating the dimensions of our being to become more sensitive to what divinity may be inviting us to undertake on the way to a more mature love.
Our love grows in divinity through truth-coordination. Without divine love as our motivation, we go absolutely nowhere. With divine love, we can incorporate relevant dimensions of scientific living into our adventure of loving others.
The Stop and Ponder Quotes for the Week
This week you are invited to add to the class Stop and Ponder quote by selecting, if you so desire, an additional quote, not necessarily from this document that especially speaks to you regarding our new project phase, psychologically responsible living.
Love is the outworking of the divine and inner urge of life. It is founded upon understanding, nurtured by unselfish service, and perfected in wisdom.(174:1.5/1898.5)
How Realistic Is our Love?
A provocative stimulus to integrating scientific living into our love comes from Sigmund Freud, who challenged the law of love for the neighbor (any and every neighbor) because of the dangers in trying to love everyone.
We do not have the energy to get involved emotionally with everyone. We need to make time for energy intake and replenishment as well as for energy output.
Be careful to retain your self-respect.
Do not neglect your duties as family member, economic agent, citizen, and so on. Your duties to these different categories of person are not equal.
Some strangers are untrustworthy.
Do not burden yourself with unrealistically idealistic expectations of perfection.
We have to make provision for energy intake as well as for energy output.
We need to find ways to acknowledge the fact of our aggression and learn to rechannel those energies rather than deny them.
This list depends on thorough scholarship that was published in Ernest Wallwork, “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself: The Freudian Critique.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 10 (1982), 264-319. I like to transform this list of Freud’s criticisms into a positive list of scientific living pointers for wise loving. See Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, pp. 23-24.
Two Circuits of Love
There are two circuits of love, the primary circuit and the great circuit.
1:0.2 (21.2) The myriads of planetary systems were all made to be eventually inhabited by many different types of intelligent creatures, beings who could know God, receive the divine affection, and love him in return.
I call this the primary circuit of love. Do we need to take more time for this knowing, receiving, and loving in return? If so, this becomes a Stop and Ponder quote for us.
The next circuit is called the great circuit of love.
117:6.10 (1289.3) All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows. Love is dynamic. It can never be captured; it is alive, free, thrilling, and always moving. Man can never take the love of the Father and imprison it within his heart. The Father’s love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man’s personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows. The great circuit of love is from the Father, through sons to brothers, and hence to the Supreme. The love of the Father appears in the mortal personality by the ministry of the indwelling Adjuster. Such a God-knowing son reveals this love to his universe brethren, and this fraternal affection is the essence of the love of the Supreme.
Our intellectual attention this week focuses more on the great circuit of love.
How Jesus Learned to Love: Socializing, Getting to Know People,
Asking questions, Social Service . . .
On the one hand, love is something that sometimes sweeps through us divinely (or not quite divinely). On the other hand, we learn to love. Jesus said to Ganid,
130:2.6 (1431.1) To become acquainted with one’s brothers and sisters, to know their problems and to learn to love them, is the supreme experience of living.”
Note: there are ways to discover other people’s problems without their having to describe them explicitly and, perhaps, to ask for help.
For those who desire to learn to love people, the most obvious component relevant to scientific living is the activity of getting to know others. The most magnificent treasure chest of lessons in getting to know others are the “growing up with Jesus Papers,” which cover the human Jesus up to the time of his baptism, constitute a university for those who wish to grow up with Jesus, noting their own growth needs as they behold the unfolding of the Master’s superb development and design projects for themselves in which they undertake activities that enable them to achieve something akin to Jesus’ growth. In all this, they gain a mature fullness, a symmetry and balance comparable to the perfected lines of the Jesus personality; and they are in a better position to cooperate with Jesus’ Spirit of Truth, who lives within us to help us with that very growth.
If we study to observe how Jesus learned to know and love people, we observe that he did not overwhelm people with his curiosity about them. There would be a phase of socialization. Meeting Stephen at the Passover, Jesus began the casual conversation which led to their becoming interested in one another, and which led to a four-hour discussion about God and his true worship. This socialization was not a mere preliminary, a mere tactic or technique, but it expressed Jesus’ delight in interacting with ordinary people—all kinds of them, white and black, spiritual and unspiritual, immoral and moral. Imagine what “small talk” might have been like with one so loving, and how naturally such casual conversation could flow into a higher level of interaction.
Jesus made a systematic study of the peoples of our world that he was able to meet in the flesh. He interviewed over 150 boys his own age when he went to the Temple for his bar mitzvah. He made an extraordinary study of the ways in which people earned a living, the kinds of work they did, in many cases undertaking that very work for a season to discover what it was like as an experience of his own. In the UYAI study group last year, we spent a couple of months studying how Jesus got to know people, and we began to discover the great values of learning about another person’s work (vocational inquiry is rooted in practical facts; it is generally not personally invasive; it gives an opportunity for a person to show their strengths—and to share challenges and triumphs without asking explicitly for personal help.)
The standard of the Fifth Epochal Revelation is high as regards our getting to know others.
100:4.6 (1098.3) Love is only born of thoroughgoing understanding of your neighbor’s motives and sentiments.
We live in a society that makes little time for this kind of understanding; so we have to be artistic in acquiring such understanding as we are reasonably able to do.
Finally we want to be active in sharing truth, and in order to do so wisely, we need to understand our conversation partners. “It is experience in and with the human religions that develops the capacity for subsequent reception of increased bestowals of divine wisdom and cosmic insight” (100:6.9/1101.4). “But it is only foolish to attempt the too sudden acceleration of religious growth. A race or nation can only assimilate from any advanced religion that which is reasonably consistent and compatible with its current evolutionary status, plus its genius for adaptation” (94:2.4/1004.7). “If revelation is to exalt and upstep the religions of evolution, then must such divine visitations portray teachings which are not too far removed from the thought and reactions of the age in which they are presented. Thus must and does revelation always keep in touch with evolution. Always must the religion of revelation be limited by man’s capacity of receptivity” (92:4.1/1007.1).
The Beautiful Wholeness of Love: Love as the Culmination of Diverse Paths of Growth
Why do we find the revelators putting love at the end of lists? Some revealed lists may be given to us without any particular significance attached to their sequence. Some lists are explicitly sequential: First, next, and last. As we interpret text, seeking the divine design behind phenomena, we find that some lists invite us to learn what we can from interpretative hypotheses.
2:7.10 (43.3) Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love.
What would it mean for our love to be based on truth, beauty, and goodness?
Here we have an explicit sequence.
100:4.4 (1098.1) If once you understand your neighbor, you will become tolerant, and this tolerance will grow into friendship and ripen into love.
What are the implications of this sequence? (Tolerance, etymologically speaking, means bearing something that may be initially unwelcome; it can mean putting up with something, not resentfully, but bearing another’s burdens as Jesus does with us as we evolve.)
When we are loving at our best, fine. At other times, we need to turn within and wait for the motivation to come forth. And sometimes, we need an on-ramp to love such as one of the sequences gathered here. And since love is such a high, divine, and spiritual quality of relating, we need multiple on-ramps—even when we are already loving at our best. What do you think?
110:3.7 (1206.5) 1. Choosing to respond to divine leading; sincerely basing the human life on the highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness, and then co-ordinating these qualities of divinity through wisdom, worship, faith, and love.
What happens if you take time to meditate your way through this path?
From his last year of childhood through the two in-between years prior to his adolescence, Jesus went through a protracted moral and ethical struggle to reconcile his duty to follow his own convictions of truth and righteousness with his duty to his parents. The product of this struggle was a concept based on four virtues.
124:4.9 (1372.6) [Jesus] never shirked the responsibility of making the necessary daily adjustments between these realms of loyalty to one’s personal convictions and duty toward one’s family, and he achieved the satisfaction of effecting an increasingly harmonious blending of personal convictions and family obligations into a masterful concept of group solidarity based upon loyalty, fairness, tolerance, and love.
How do the first three virtues enhance mature love?
Jesus taught six levels of interpretation of the golden rule of treating others as we want to be treated. He made it clear that we cannot attain the highest level without going through the other levels, from sympathy and pity, to a philosophical and cosmic ethics. Note that scientific living is essential to level three, that most of us would have felt satisfied if Jesus had concluded with level four; remember that 27:3.1 (300.4) The higher you ascend in the scale of life, the more attention must be paid to universe ethics. , been . 25:1.6 (274.3) “The satisfying joy of high duty is the eclipsing emotion of spiritual beings” (25:1.6/274.3). Such statements may appear to stand in tension with remarks about duty akin to this one: “The idea of duty signifies that you are servant-minded and hence are missing the mighty thrill of doing your service as a friend and for a friend. The impulse of friendship transcends all convictions of duty . . . . (180:1.6/1945.3) It becomes clear that the limitations of duty pertain to duty conceived by the intellect in isolation from the other functions of cosmic mind, causation and worship. “These three basic factors in reflective thinking may be unified and co-ordinated in personality development, or they may become disproportionate and virtually unrelated in their respective functions. But when they become unified, they produce a strong character consisting in the correlation of a factual science, a moral philosophy, and a genuine religious experience.” (16:6.10/192.6) “The flight from duty is the sacrifice of truth.” (130:1.2/1428.2)
Notice how these dimensions of the golden rule prompt us to expand our understanding of others.
147:4.4 (1650.5) “1. The level of the flesh. Such a purely selfish and lustful interpretation would be well exemplified by the supposition of your question.
147:4.5 (1650.6) “2. The level of the feelings. This plane is one level higher than that of the flesh and implies that sympathy and pity would enhance one’s interpretation of this rule of living.
147:4.6 (1650.7) “3. The level of mind. Now come into action the reason of mind and the intelligence of experience. Good judgment dictates that such a rule of living should be interpreted in consonance with the highest idealism embodied in the nobility of profound self-respect.
147:4.7 (1651.1) “4. The level of brotherly love. Still higher is discovered the level of unselfish devotion to the welfare of one’s fellows. On this higher plane of wholehearted social service growing out of the consciousness of the fatherhood of God and the consequent recognition of the brotherhood of man, there is discovered a new and far more beautiful interpretation of this basic rule of life.
147:4.8 (1651.2) “5. The moral level. And then when you attain true philosophic levels of interpretation, when you have real insight into the rightness and wrongness of things, when you perceive the eternal fitness of human relationships, you will begin to view such a problem of interpretation as you would imagine a high-minded, idealistic, wise, and impartial third person would so view and interpret such an injunction as applied to your personal problems of adjustment to your life situations.
147:4.9 (1651.3) “6. The spiritual level. And then last, but greatest of all, we attain the level of spirit insight and spiritual interpretation which impels us to recognize in this rule of life the divine command to treat all men as we conceive God would treat them. That is the universe ideal of human relationships. And this is your attitude toward all such problems when your supreme desire is ever to do the Father’s will. I would, therefore, that you should do to all men that which you know I would do to them in like circumstances.” (147:4/1650–51)
This explicit sequence forbids us to imagine that we can love as Jesus loved without going through the earlier constructive stages 2-5. (We release, or ask God to create a clean heart in us as we seek cleansing from level one, flesh-based projections, conscious or unconscious.)
How does each level of interpretation prompt us to gain a better understanding of others?
Loving our enemies (and others whom we find difficult to love)
Jesus’ love was no tepid omni-tolerance toward every form of conduct, no matter how destructive. And when persons in a social system were not in their right position—especially if it was a position of representing the Father and the way of his worship—Jesus did not assume a veneer of accommodating niceness.
126:0.3 (1386.3) As he grew older, Jesus’ pity and love for the Jewish people deepened, but with the passing years, there developed in his mind a growing righteous resentment of the presence in the Father’s temple of the politically appointed priests. Jesus had great respect for the sincere Pharisees and the honest scribes, but he held the hypocritical Pharisees and the dishonest theologians in great contempt; he looked with disdain upon all those religious leaders who were not sincere.
Note, however, that Jesus’ restrained the expression of his antagonism until supreme moments, when circumstances warranted strong words and deeds, for example, in the epochal sermon or the cleansing of the temple.
159:3.9 (1766.5) Tell my children that I am not only tender of their feelings and patient with their frailties, but that I am also ruthless with sin and intolerant of iniquity. I am indeed meek and humble in the presence of my Father, but I am equally and relentlessly inexorable where there is deliberate evil-doing and sinful rebellion against the will of my Father in heaven.
Some of us may not yet be ready to give the kind of advanced teaching that Jesus gave to the speaker at the forum in Rome:
132:4.7 (1461.5) To the speaker at the forum he said: “Your eloquence is pleasing, your logic is admirable, your voice is pleasant, but your teaching is hardly true. If you could only enjoy the inspiring satisfaction of knowing God as your spiritual Father, then you might employ your powers of speech to liberate your fellows from the bondage of darkness and from the slavery of ignorance.” This was the Marcus who heard Peter preach in Rome and became his successor. When they crucified Simon Peter, it was this man who defied the Roman persecutors and boldly continued to preach the new gospel.
I propose a path to acquire the capacity for confrontation with Jesusonian effectiveness (Stephen G. Post calls it “carefrontation”).
188:5.2 (2018.1) The cross forever shows that the attitude of Jesus toward sinners was neither condemnation nor condonation, but rather eternal and loving salvation. Jesus is truly a savior in the sense that his life and death do win men over to goodness and righteous survival. Jesus loves men so much that his love awakens the response of love in the human heart. Love is truly contagious and eternally creative. Jesus’ death on the cross exemplifies a love which is sufficiently strong and divine to forgive sin and swallow up all evil-doing. Jesus disclosed to this world a higher quality of righteousness than justice — mere technical right and wrong. Divine love does not merely forgive wrongs; it absorbs and actually destroys them. The forgiveness of love utterly transcends the forgiveness of mercy. Mercy sets the guilt of evil-doing to one side; but love destroys forever the sin and all weakness resulting therefrom. Jesus brought a new method of living to Urantia. He taught us not to resist evil but to find through him a goodness which effectually destroys evil. The forgiveness of Jesus is not condonation; it is salvation from condemnation. Salvation does not slight wrongs; it makes them right. True love does not compromise nor condone hate; it destroys it. The love of Jesus is never satisfied with mere forgiveness. The Master’s love implies rehabilitation, eternal survival. It is altogether proper to speak of salvation as redemption if you mean this eternal rehabilitation.
188:5.3 (2018.2) Jesus, by the power of his personal love for men, could break the hold of sin and evil. He thereby set men free to choose better ways of living. Jesus portrayed a deliverance from the past which in itself promised a triumph for the future. Forgiveness thus provided salvation. The beauty of divine love, once fully admitted to the human heart, forever destroys the charm of sin and the power of evil.
To swallow-up evildoing is to absorb it, to use yourself as a through-put device. Remember the extraordinary visual symbol of this process in the protagonist from the Tom Hanks film, The Green Mile: the condemned prisoner would hug an ill person with such divine warmth that he took into himself and destroyed the other person’s disease.
Inasmuch as sin concerns the relation of the individual with God, there may be phases of discerning and forgiving sin that are beyond us, but at the very least we can engage in constructive relating so as to help another person come to the place of seeking the consciousness of restored loyalty relations with the Father. “The forgiveness of sin by Deity is the renewal of loyalty relations following a period of the human consciousness of the lapse of such relations as the consequence of conscious rebellion” (89:10.6/985.1); and remember the “degrees of disloyalty: the partial loyalty of indecision; the divided loyalty of confliction; the dying loyalty of indifference; and the death of loyalty exhibited in devotion to godless ideals.”
There is a lot of ugliness stressing our planet now, and this is a time with extra need for our best efforts in spiritual-and-practical response. Some or all of you are already putting forth maximum effort; you may need to relax a bit. Think of the high school runner who came out for practice one afternoon and was asked by his coach to run around the 440-yard track as fast as he could. He did so, and came in with a good time. Then the coach invited him to relax into it a bit, take a little off his pace, and go around again at about 7/8 speed. He set out once again . . . and came in with a better time.
Possibly a wisdom enhancement will enable you to add a new layer of cosmic power to your love. In any case, we pray for you and support your efforts to love with ever-expanding divine fullness.
Reading Assignments
In addition to the present document, please read pp. 23–24 in Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
Learning Exercises
Learning Exercise 1. Work especially with your adjutants of knowledge and counsel this week: get to know someone in conversation that begins with, but goes beyond, socialization to enter the stage of inquiry. You do not need to select a total stranger, but don’t do this with someone you already know well. Think of Jesus interviewing people in order to learn about their lives and how they worked for a living. (When I tried this, as a total beginner, as part of a class some months ago, I asked what the person liked about her work, what difficulties she experienced, and how she coped with these difficulties when she was at her best. I immediately sensed the tremendous getting-to-know power of the vocational interview.) Obviously, you could use another model for your getting-to-know conversation. For example, Jesus’ personal ministry in Rome was with brothers and sisters whom he was meeting for the first time, many of whom were folks who were, in one way or another, down and out (132:4.1-2/1460).
Learning Exercise 2. Explore to discover and read (part of) a book, article, or web document written by a psychologist or sociologist that gives you additional information about some aspect of the person you are getting to know.
Learning Exercise 3. If possible, find some creative way to serve the person whom you are getting to know so as to benefit in some way from what you discover in your interview and your research.
