The Road Ahead

   

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By Mo Siegel, President, Urantia Foundation, Colorado, USA

To us mere mortals, life on Urantia feels fast and fluid. The rate at which things are changing is enough to take your breath away. Everywhere you turn economic, environmental, and social readjustments abound. When The Urantia Book was published on October 12, 1955, only two billion people lived on Earth. Today the world’s population exceeds six billion and is projected to exceed nine billion by 2040.

If one considers the rapid growth of world populations, juxtaposed with the economic expansion of China and India, life in the next 30 years will certainly be different from life in the previous thirty years. These are times of unprecedented change, but if you follow the trends of the last 500 years, life is better today than it has ever been. A hundred years from now people will likely look back and marvel at the progress made since 2009.

How does The Urantia Book fit into this rapidly changing and advancing world? Some believe that the Revelators started planning for The Urantia Book’s appearance around 700 years ago. The book says that the text was put into the English language in 1934 and 1935. When they planned and commissioned the creation of The Urantia Book, be it 700 or 70 years ago, the Revelators operated with a long-term plan for our world. The Urantia Book was given to us so that society would be gradually leavened and the world turned right side up! Today’s accelerating change probably comes as little surprise to them. They knew where this world had come from and could foresee the road ahead.

I’ve heard it humorously said that it’s a shame the Urantia Revelation didn’t come with a companion booklet titled “How to Run a Revelation.” For the social groups, finding the path forward is more difficult than it is for Urantia Foundation. In the Religion Papers 99-103, Melchizedek promises that each and every individual can personally find and experience the heavenly Father for themselves. These Papers articulate the strengths and dangers of institutional religion. After reading them, you’re certain that religionists need to share with one another, but you’re just not sure how that should happen. New forms of enlightened spiritual communities will emerge, but for now, our most successful social experiences occur at local study groups. Today more than 500 study groups meet around the world, and it’s likely that within the next 30 years the number will increase to at least 1000. If that happens, real and significant social progress will have occurred for the Urantia Revelation. Today’s active study groups germinate the seeds of a greater social and religious expression yet to emerge.

For Urantia Foundation, the work sitting on our desks seems very straight forward, and we invite you to join us in these tasks. We use the acronym PTPE to keep us on track. The first P stands for protecting The Urantia Book, the T stands for translating, the second P for publishing, and the E for education. Today we are distributing books, physically and digitally, in 12 (soon to be 15) languages. Each new translation brings challenges and opportunities for distribution in countries where the book has never appeared. Protection of the fifth epochal revelation also comes from this increased distribution. By putting more books in the world, the text finds safety in sheer numbers.

Discussing the educational side of our work would make this article much longer. Suffice it to say that sharing the most dramatic intervention in human history in the past 2000 years requires education, and Urantia Foundation is committed to this long-term educational challenge.

We are all blessed to be in a remarkable situation because the Fifth Epochal Revelation has been launched during our lifetime. These are the days to remember; these are the days to cherish. Like the early followers of Jesus, we have a chance to serve this unstoppable power of good that will one day envelop this world. The Urantia Revelation is here to transform spiritually hungry men and women into faith children of our heavenly Father. It is here to sow the seeds of normalcy and, as a Divine Counselor from Orvonton states on page 1 of the Foreword, “to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception.”

Mo