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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
PAPER 65
THE OVERCONTROL OF EVOLUTION
65:0.1
BASIC evolutionary material life -- premind life -- is
the formulation of the Master Physical Controllers and
the life-impartation ministry of the Seven Master
Spirits in conjunction with the active ministration of
the ordained Life Carriers. As a result of the
co-ordinate function of this threefold creativity there
develops organismal physical capacity for mind --
material mechanisms for intelligent reaction to external
environmental stimuli and, later on, to internal
stimuli, influences taking origin in the organismal mind
itself.
65:0.2
There are, then, three distinct levels of life
production and evolution:
1. The physical-energy domain -- mind-capacity
production.
2. The mind ministry of the adjutant spirits --
impinging upon spirit capacity.
3. The spirit endowment of mortal mind -- culminating in
Thought Adjuster bestowal.
65:0.3
The mechanical-nonteachable levels of organismal
environmental response are the domains of the physical
controllers. The adjutant mind-spirits activate and
regulate the adaptative or nonmechanical-teachable types
of mind -- those response mechanisms of organisms
capable of learning from experience. And as the spirit
adjutants thus manipulate mind potentials, so do the
Life Carriers exercise considerable discretionary
control over the environmental aspects of evolutionary
processes right up to the time of the appearance of
human will -- the ability to know God and the power of
choosing to worship him.
65:0.4
It is the integrated functioning of the Life Carriers,
the physical controllers, and the spirit adjutants that
conditions the course of organic evolution on the
inhabited worlds. And this is why evolution -- on
Urantia or elsewhere -- is always purposeful and never
accidental.
1. LIFE CARRIER FUNCTIONS
65:1.1
The Life Carriers are endowed with potentials of
personality metamorphosis which but few orders of
creatures possess. These Sons of the local universe are
capable of functioning in three diverse phases of being.
They ordinarily perform their duties as mid-phase Sons,
that being the state of their origin. But a Life Carrier
in such a stage of existence could not possibly function
in the electrochemical domains as a fabricator of
physical energies and material particles into units of
living existence.
65:1.2
Life Carriers are able to function and do function on
the following three levels:
1. The physical level of electrochemistry.
2. The usual mid-phase of quasi-morontial existence.
3. The advanced semispiritual level.
65:1.3
When the Life Carriers make ready to engage in life
implantation, and after they have selected the sites for
such an undertaking, they summon the archangel
commission of Life Carrier transmutation. This group
consists of ten orders of diverse personalities,
including the physical controllers and their associates,
and is presided over by the chief of archangels, who
acts in this capacity by the mandate of Gabriel and with
the permission of the Ancients of Days. When these
beings are properly encircuited, they can effect such
modifications in the Life Carriers as will enable them
immediately to function on the physical levels of
electrochemistry.
65:1.4
After the life patterns have been formulated and the
material organizations have been duly completed, the
supermaterial forces concerned in life propagation
become forthwith active, and life is existent. Whereupon
the Life Carriers are immediately returned to their
normal mid-phase of personality existence, in which
estate they can manipulate the living units and maneuver
the evolving organisms, even though they are shorn of
all ability to organize -- create -- new patterns of
living matter.
65:1.5
After organic evolution has run a certain course and
free will of the human type has appeared in the highest
evolving organisms, the Life Carriers must either leave
the planet or take renunciation vows; that is, they must
pledge themselves to refrain from all attempts further
to influence the course of organic evolution. And when
such vows are voluntarily taken by those Life Carriers
who choose to remain on the planet as future advisers to
those who shall be intrusted with the fostering of the
newly evolved will creatures, there is summoned a
commission of twelve, presided over by the chief of the
Evening Stars, acting by authority of the System
Sovereign and with permission of Gabriel; and forthwith
these Life Carriers are transmuted to the third phase of
personality existence -- the semispiritual level of
being. And I have functioned on Urantia in this third
phase of existence ever since the times of Andon and
Fonta.
65:1.6
We look forward to a time when the universe may be
settled in light and life, to a possible fourth stage of
being wherein we shall be wholly spiritual, but it has
never been revealed to us by what technique we may
attain this desirable and advanced estate.
2. THE EVOLUTIONARY PANORAMA
65:2.1
The story of man's ascent from seaweed to the lordship
of earthly creation is indeed a romance of biologic
struggle and mind survival. Man's primordial ancestors
were literally the slime and ooze of the ocean bed in
the sluggish and warm-water bays and lagoons of the vast
shore lines of the ancient inland seas, those very
waters in which the Life Carriers established the three
independent life implantations on Urantia.
65:2.2
Very few species of the early types of marine vegetation
that participated in those epochal changes which
resulted in the animallike borderland organisms are in
existence today. The sponges are the survivors of one of
these early midway types, those organisms through which
the gradual
transition from the vegetable to the animal took place.
These early transition forms, while not identical with
modern sponges, were much like them; they were true
borderline organisms -- neither vegetable nor animal --
but they eventually led to the development of the true
animal forms of life.
65:2.3
The bacteria, simple vegetable organisms of a very
primitive nature, are very little changed from the early
dawn of life; they even exhibit a degree of
retrogression in their parasitic behavior. Many of the
fungi also represent a retrograde movement in evolution,
being plants which have lost their chlorophyll-making
ability and have become more or less parasitic. The
majority of disease-causing bacteria and their auxiliary
virus bodies really belong to this group of renegade
parasitic fungi. During the intervening ages all of the
vast kingdom of plant life has evolved from ancestors
from which the bacteria have also descended.
65:2.4
The higher protozoan type of animal life soon appeared,
and appeared
suddenly. And from these far-distant times the
ameba, the typical single-celled animal organism, has
come on down but little modified. He disports himself
today much as he did when he was the last and greatest
achievement in life evolution. This minute creature and
his protozoan cousins are to the animal creation what
bacteria are to the plant kingdom; they represent the
survival of the first early evolutionary steps in life
differentiation together with
failure of
subsequent development.
65:2.5
Before long the early single-celled animal types
associated themselves in communities, first on the plan
of the Volvox and presently along the lines of the Hydra
and jellyfish. Still later there evolved the starfish,
stone lilies, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, centipedes,
insects, spiders, crustaceans, and the closely related
groups of earthworms and leeches, soon followed by the
mollusks -- the oyster, octopus, and snail. Hundreds
upon hundreds of species intervened and perished;
mention is made only of those which survived the long,
long struggle. Such nonprogressive specimens, together
with the later appearing fish family, today represent
the stationary types of early and lower animals,
branches of the tree of life which failed to progress.
65:2.6
The stage was thus set for the appearance of the first
backboned animals, the fishes. From this fish family
there sprang two unique modifications, the frog and the
salamander. And it was the frog which began that series
of progressive differentiations in animal life that
finally culminated in man himself.
65:2.7
The frog is one of the earliest of surviving human-race
ancestors, but it also failed to progress, persisting
today much as in those remote times. The frog is the
only species ancestor of the early dawn races now living
on the face of the earth. The human race has no
surviving ancestry between the frog and the Eskimo.
65:2.8
The frogs gave rise to the Reptilia, a great animal
family which is virtually extinct, but which, before
passing out of existence, gave origin to the whole bird
family and the numerous orders of mammals.
65:2.9
Probably the greatest single leap of all prehuman
evolution was executed when the reptile became a bird.
The bird types of today -- eagles, ducks, pigeons, and
ostriches -- all descended from the enormous reptiles of
long, long ago.
65:2.10
The kingdom of reptiles, descended from the frog family,
is today represented by four surviving divisions: two
nonprogressive, snakes and lizards, together with their
cousins, alligators and turtles; one partially
progressive, the bird family, and the fourth, the
ancestors of mammals and the direct line of descent of
the human species. But though long departed, the
massiveness of the passing Reptilia found echo in the
elephant and mastodon, while their peculiar forms were
perpetuated in the leaping kangaroos.
65:2.11
Only fourteen phyla have appeared on Urantia, the fishes
being the last, and no new classes have developed since
birds and mammals.
65:2.12
It was from an agile little reptilian dinosaur of
carnivorous habits but having a comparatively large
brain that the placental mammals
suddenly
sprang. These mammals developed rapidly and in many
different ways, not only giving rise to the common
modern varieties but also evolving into marine types,
such as whales and seals, and into air navigators like
the bat family.
65:2.13
Man thus evolved from the higher mammals derived
principally from the
western
implantation of life in the ancient east-west
sheltered seas. The
eastern and
central groups
of living organisms were early progressing favorably
toward the attainment of prehuman levels of animal
existence. But as the ages passed, the eastern focus of
life emplacement failed to attain a satisfactory level
of intelligent prehuman status, having suffered such
repeated and irretrievable losses of its highest types
of germ plasm that it was forever shorn of the power to
rehabilitate human potentialities.
65:2.14
Since the quality of the mind capacity for development
in this eastern group was so definitely inferior to that
of the other two groups, the Life Carriers, with the
consent of their superiors, so manipulated the
environment as further to circumscribe these inferior
prehuman strains of evolving life. To all outward
appearances the elimination of these inferior groups of
creatures was accidental, but in reality it was
altogether purposeful.
65:2.15
Later in the evolutionary unfolding of intelligence, the
lemur ancestors of the human species were far more
advanced in North America than in other regions; and
they were therefore led to migrate from the arena of
western life implantation over the Bering land bridge
and down the coast to southwestern Asia, where they
continued to evolve and to benefit by the addition of
certain strains of the central life group. Man thus
evolved out of certain western and central life strains
but in the central to near-eastern regions.
65:2.16
In this way the life that was planted on Urantia evolved
until the ice age, when man himself first appeared and
began his eventful planetary career. And this appearance
of primitive man on earth during the ice age was not
just an accident; it was by design. The rigors and
climatic severity of the glacial era were in every way
adapted to the purpose of fostering the production of a
hardy type of human being with tremendous survival
endowment.
3. THE FOSTERING OF EVOLUTION
65:3.1
It will hardly be possible to explain to the present-day
human mind many of the queer and apparently grotesque
occurrences of early evolutionary progress. A purposeful
plan was functioning throughout all of these seemingly
strange evolutions of living things, but we are not
allowed arbitrarily to interfere with the development of
the life patterns after they have once been set in
operation.
65:3.2
Life Carriers may employ every possible natural resource
and may utilize any and all fortuitous circumstances
which will enhance the developmental progress of the
life experiment, but we are not permitted mechanically
to intervene in, or arbitrarily to manipulate the
conduct and course of, either plant or animal evolution.
65:3.3
You have been informed that Urantia mortals evolved by
way of primitive frog development, and that this
ascending strain, carried in potential in a single frog,
narrowly escaped extinction on a certain occasion. But
it should not be inferred that the evolution of mankind
would have been terminated by an accident at this
juncture. At that very moment we were observing and
fostering no less than one thousand different and
remotely situated mutating strains of life which could
have been directed into various different patterns of
prehuman development. This particular ancestral frog
represented our third selection, the two prior life
strains having perished in spite of all our efforts
toward their conservation.
65:3.4
Even the loss of Andon and Fonta before they had
offspring, though delaying human evolution, would not
have prevented it. Subsequent to the appearance of Andon
and Fonta and before the mutating human potentials of
animal life were exhausted, there evolved no less than
seven thousand favorable strains which could have
achieved some sort of human type of development. And
many of these better stocks were subsequently
assimilated by the various branches of the expanding
human species.
65:3.5
Long before the Material Son and Daughter, the biologic
uplifters, arrive on a planet, the human potentials of
the evolving animal species have been exhausted. This
biologic status of animal life is disclosed to the Life
Carriers by the phenomenon of the third phase of
adjutant spirit mobilization, which automatically occurs
concomitantly with the exhaustion of the capacity of all
animal life to give origin to the mutant potentials of
prehuman individuals.
65:3.6
Mankind on Urantia must solve its problems of mortal
development with the human stocks it has -- no more
races will evolve from prehuman sources throughout all
future time. But this fact does not preclude the
possibility of the attainment of vastly higher levels of
human development through the intelligent fostering of
the evolutionary potentials still resident in the mortal
races. That which we, the Life Carriers, do toward
fostering and conserving the life strains before the
appearance of human will, man must do for himself after
such an event and subsequent to our retirement from
active participation in evolution. In a general way,
man's evolutionary destiny is in his own hands, and
scientific intelligence must sooner or later supersede
the random functioning of uncontrolled natural selection
and chance survival.
65:3.7
And in discussing the fostering of evolution, it would
not be amiss to point out that, in the long future
ahead, when you may sometime be attached to a corps of
Life Carriers, you will have abundant and ample
opportunity to offer suggestions and make any possible
improvements in the plans and technique of life
management and transplantation. Be patient! If you have
good ideas, if your minds are fertile with better
methods of administration for any part of the universal
domains, you are certainly going to have an opportunity
to present them to your associates and fellow
administrators in the ages to come.
4. THE URANTIA ADVENTURE
65:4.1
Do not overlook the fact that Urantia was assigned to us
as a life-experiment world. On this planet we made our
sixtieth attempt to modify and, if possible, improve the
Satania adaptation of the Nebadon life designs, and it
is of record that we achieved numerous beneficial
modifications of the standard life patterns. To be
specific, on Urantia we worked out and have
satisfactorily demonstrated not less than twenty-eight
features of life modification which will be of service
to all Nebadon throughout all future time.
65:4.2
But the establishment of life on no world is ever
experimental in the sense that something untried and
unknown is attempted. The evolution of life is a
technique ever progressive, differential, and variable,
but never haphazard, uncontrolled, nor wholly
experimental, in the accidental sense.
65:4.3
Many features of human life afford abundant evidence
that the phenomenon of mortal existence was
intelligently planned, that organic evolution is not a
mere cosmic accident. When a living cell is injured, it
possesses the ability to elaborate certain chemical
substances which are empowered so to stimulate and
activate the neighboring normal cells that they
immediately begin the secretion of certain substances
which facilitate healing processes in the wound; and at
the same time these normal and uninjured cells begin to
proliferate -- they actually start to work creating new
cells to replace any fellow cells which may have been
destroyed by the accident.
65:4.4
This chemical action and reaction concerned in wound
healing and cell reproduction represents the choice of
the Life Carriers of a formula embracing over one
hundred thousand phases and features of possible
chemical reactions and biologic repercussions. More than
half a million specific experiments were made by the
Life Carriers in their laboratories before they finally
settled upon this formula for the Urantia life
experiment.
65:4.5
When Urantia scientists know more of these healing
chemicals, they will become more efficient in the
treatment of injuries, and indirectly they will know
more about controlling certain serious diseases.
65:4.6
Since life was established on Urantia, the Life Carriers
have improved this healing technique as it has been
introduced on another Satania world, in that it affords
more pain relief and exercises better control over the
proliferation capacity of the associated normal cells.
65:4.7
There were many unique features of the Urantia life
experiment, but the two outstanding episodes were the
appearance of the Andonic race prior to the evolution of
the six colored peoples and the later simultaneous
appearance of the Sangik mutants in a single family.
Urantia is the first world in Satania where the six
colored races sprang from the same human family. They
ordinarily arise in diversified strains from independent
mutations within the prehuman animal stock and usually
appear on earth one at a time and successively over long
periods of time, beginning with the red man and passing
on down through the colors to indigo.
65:4.8
Another outstanding variation of procedure was the late
arrival of the Planetary Prince. As a rule, the prince
appears on a planet about the time of will development;
and if such a plan had been followed, Caligastia might
have come to Urantia even during the lifetimes of Andon
and Fonta instead of almost five hundred thousand years
later, simultaneously with the appearance of the six
Sangik races.
65:4.9
On an ordinary inhabited world a Planetary Prince would
have been granted on the request of the Life Carriers
at, or sometime after, the appearance of Andon and
Fonta. But Urantia having been designated a
life-modification planet, it was by preagreement that
the Melchizedek observers, twelve in number, were sent
as advisers to the Life Carriers and as overseers of the
planet until the subsequent arrival of the Planetary
Prince. These Melchizedeks came at the time Andon and
Fonta made the decisions which enabled Thought Adjusters
to indwell their mortal minds.
65:4.10
On Urantia the endeavors of the Life Carriers to improve
the Satania life patterns necessarily resulted in the
production of many apparently useless forms of
transition life. But the gains already accrued are
sufficient to justify the Urantia modifications of the
standard life designs.
65:4.11
It was our intention to produce an early manifestation
of will in the evolutionary life of Urantia, and we
succeeded. Ordinarily, will does not emerge until the
colored races have long been in existence, usually first
appearing among the superior types of the red man. Your
world is the only planet in Satania where the human type
of will has appeared in a precolored race.
65:4.12
But in our effort to provide for that combination and
association of inheritance factors which finally gave
rise to the mammalian ancestors of the human race, we
were confronted with the necessity of permitting
hundreds and thousands of other and comparatively
useless combinations and associations of inheritance
factors to take place. Many of these seemingly strange
by-products of our efforts are certain to meet your gaze
as you dig back into the planetary past, and I can well
understand how puzzling some of these things must be to
the limited human viewpoint.
5. LIFE-EVOLUTION VICISSITUDES
65:5.1
It was a source of regret to the Life Carriers that our
special efforts to modify intelligent life on Urantia
should have been so handicapped by tragic perversions
beyond our control: the Caligastia betrayal and the
Adamic default.
65:5.2
But throughout all of this biologic adventure our
greatest disappointment grew out of the reversion of
certain primitive plant life to the prechlorophyll
levels of parasitic bacteria on such an extensive and
unexpected scale. This eventuality in plant-life
evolution caused many distressful diseases in the higher
mammals, particularly in the more vulnerable human
species. When we were confronted with this perplexing
situation, we somewhat discounted the difficulties
involved because we knew that the subsequent admixture
of the Adamic life plasm would so reinforce the
resisting powers of the resulting blended race as to
make it practically immune to all diseases produced by
the vegetable type of organism. But our hopes were
doomed to disappointment owing to the misfortune of the
Adamic default.
65:5.3
The universe of universes, including this small world
called Urantia, is not being managed merely to meet our
approval nor just to suit our convenience, much less to
gratify our whims and satisfy our curiosity. The wise
and all-powerful beings who are responsible for universe
management undoubtedly know exactly what they are about;
and so it becomes Life Carriers and behooves mortal
minds to enlist in patient waiting and hearty
co-operation with the rule of wisdom, the reign of
power, and the march of progress.
65:5.4
There are, of course, certain compensations for
tribulation, such as Michael's bestowal on Urantia. But
irrespective of all such considerations, the later
celestial supervisors of this planet express complete
confidence in the ultimate evolutionary triumph of the
human race and in the eventual vindication of our
original plans and life patterns.
6. EVOLUTIONARY TECHNIQUES OF LIFE
65:6.1
It is impossible accurately to determine,
simultaneously, the exact location and the velocity of a
moving object; any attempt at measurement of either
inevitably involves change in the other. The same sort
of a paradox confronts mortal man when he undertakes the
chemical analysis of protoplasm. The chemist can
elucidate the chemistry of
dead
protoplasm, but he cannot discern either the physical
organization or the dynamic performance of
living
protoplasm. Ever will the scientist come nearer and
nearer the secrets of life, but never will he find them
and for no other reason than that he must kill
protoplasm in order to analyze it. Dead protoplasm
weighs the same as living protoplasm, but it is not the
same.
65:6.2
There is original endowment of adaptation in living
things and beings. In every
living plant
or animal cell, in every
living
organism -- material or spiritual -- there is an
insatiable craving for the attainment of ever-increasing
perfection of environmental adjustment, organismal
adaptation, and augmented life realization. These
interminable efforts of all living things evidence the
existence within them of an innate striving for
perfection.
65:6.3
The most important step in plant evolution was the
development of chlorophyll-making ability, and the
second greatest advance was the evolution of the spore
into the complex seed. The spore is most efficient as a
reproductive agent, but it lacks the potentials of
variety and versatility inherent in the seed.
65:6.4
One of the most serviceable and complex episodes in the
evolution of the higher types of animals consisted in
the development of the ability of the iron in the
circulating blood cells to perform in the double role of
oxygen carrier and carbon dioxide remover. And this
performance of the red blood cells illustrates how
evolving organisms are able to adapt their functions to
varying or changing environment. The higher animals,
including man, oxygenate their tissues by the action of
the iron of the red blood cells, which carries oxygen to
the living cells and just as efficiently removes the
carbon dioxide. But other metals can be made to serve
the same purpose. The cuttlefish employs copper for this
function, and the sea squirt utilizes vanadium.
65:6.5
The continuation of such biologic adjustments is
illustrated by the evolution of teeth in the higher
Urantia mammals; these attained to thirty-six in man's
remote ancestors, and then began an adaptative
readjustment toward thirty-two in the dawn man and his
near relatives. Now the human species is slowly
gravitating toward twenty-eight. The process of
evolution is still actively and adaptatively in progress
on this planet.
65:6.6
But many seemingly mysterious adjustments of living
organisms are purely chemical, wholly physical. At any
moment of time, in the blood stream of any human being
there exists the possibility of upward of 15,000,000
chemical reactions between the hormone output of a dozen
ductless glands.
65:6.7
The lower forms of plant life are wholly responsive to
physical, chemical, and electrical environment. But as
the scale of life ascends, one by one the mind
ministries of the seven adjutant spirits become
operative, and the mind becomes increasingly adjustive,
creative, co-ordinative, and dominative. The ability of
animals to adapt themselves to air, water, and land is
not a supernatural endowment, but it is a superphysical
adjustment.
65:6.8
Physics and chemistry alone cannot explain how a human
being evolved out of the primeval protoplasm of the
early seas. The ability to learn, memory and
differential response to environment, is the endowment
of mind. The laws of physics are not responsive to
training; they are immutable and unchanging. The
reactions of chemistry are not modified by education;
they are uniform and dependable. Aside from the presence
of the Unqualified Absolute, electrical and chemical
reactions are predictable. But mind can profit from
experience, can learn from reactive habits of behavior
in response to repetition of stimuli.
65:6.9
Preintelligent organisms react to environmental stimuli,
but those organisms which are reactive to mind ministry
can adjust and manipulate the environment itself.
65:6.10
The physical brain with its associated nervous system
possesses innate capacity for response to mind ministry
just as the developing mind of a personality possesses a
certain innate capacity for spirit receptivity and
therefore contains the potentials of spiritual progress
and attainment. Intellectual, social, moral, and
spiritual evolution are dependent on the mind ministry
of the seven adjutant spirits and their superphysical
associates.
7. EVOLUTIONARY MIND LEVELS
65:7.1
The seven adjutant mind-spirits are the versatile mind
ministers to the lower intelligent existences of a local
universe. This order of mind is ministered from the
local universe headquarters or from some world connected
therewith, but there is influential direction of
lower-mind function from the system capitals.
65:7.2
On an evolutionary world much, very much, depends on the
work of these seven adjutants. But they are mind
ministers; they are not concerned in physical evolution,
the domain of the Life Carriers. Nevertheless, the
perfect integration of these spirit endowments with the
ordained and natural procedure of the unfolding and
inherent regime of the Life Carriers is responsible for
the mortal inability to discern, in the phenomenon of
mind, aught but the hand of nature and the outworking of
natural processes, albeit you are occasionally somewhat
perplexed in explaining all of everything connected with
the natural reactions of mind as it is associated with
matter. And if Urantia were operating more in accordance
with the original plans, you would observe even less to
arrest your attention in the phenomenon of mind.
65:7.3
The seven adjutant spirits are more circuitlike than
entitylike, and on ordinary worlds they are encircuited
with other adjutant functionings throughout the local
universe. On life-experiment planets, however, they are
relatively isolated. And on Urantia, owing to the unique
nature of the life patterns, the lower adjutants
experienced far more difficulty in contacting with the
evolutionary organisms than would have been the case in
a more standardized type of life endowment.
65:7.4
Again, on an average evolutionary world the seven
adjutant spirits are far better synchronized with the
advancing stages of animal development than they were on
Urantia. With but a single exception, the adjutants
experienced the greatest difficulty in contacting with
the evolving minds of Urantia organisms that they had
ever had in all their functioning throughout the
universe of Nebadon. On this world there developed many
forms of border phenomena -- confusional combinations of
the mechanical-nonteachable and the
nonmechanical-teachable types of organismal response.
65:7.5
The seven adjutant spirits do not make contact with the
purely mechanical orders of organismal environmental
response. Such preintelligent responses of living
organisms pertain purely to the energy domains of the
power centers, the physical controllers, and their
associates.
65:7.6
The acquisition of the potential of the ability to
learn from
experience marks the beginning of the functioning of the
adjutant spirits, and they function from the lowliest
minds of primitive and invisible existences up to the
highest types in the evolutionary scale of human beings.
They are the source and pattern for the otherwise more
or less mysterious behavior and incompletely understood
quick reactions of mind to the material environment.
Long must these faithful and always dependable
influences carry forward their preliminary ministry
before the animal mind attains the human levels of
spirit receptivity.
65:7.7
The adjutants function exclusively in the evolution of
experiencing mind up to the level of the sixth phase,
the spirit of worship. At this level there occurs that
inevitable overlapping of ministry -- the phenomenon of
the higher reaching down to co-ordinate with the lower
in anticipation of subsequent attainment of advanced
levels of development. And still additional spirit
ministry accompanies the action of the seventh and last
adjutant, the spirit of wisdom. Throughout the ministry
of the spirit world the individual never experiences
abrupt transitions of spirit co-operation; always are
these changes gradual and reciprocal.
65:7.8
Always should the domains of the physical
(electrochemical) and the mental response to
environmental stimuli be differentiated, and in turn
must they all be recognized as phenomena apart from
spiritual activities. The domains of physical, mental,
and spiritual gravity are distinct realms of cosmic
reality, notwithstanding their intimate interrelations.
8. EVOLUTION IN TIME AND SPACE
65:8.1
Time and space are indissolubly linked; there is an
innate association. The delays of time are inevitable in
the presence of certain space conditions.
65:8.2
If spending so much time in effecting the evolutionary
changes of life development occasions perplexity, I
would say that we cannot time the life processes to
unfold any faster than the physical metamorphoses of a
planet will permit. We must wait upon the natural,
physical development of a planet; we have absolutely no
control over geologic evolution. If the physical
conditions would allow, we could arrange for the
completed evolution of life in considerably less than
one million years. But we are all under the jurisdiction
of the Supreme Rulers of Paradise, and time is
nonexistent on Paradise.
65:8.3
The individual's yardstick for time measurement is the
length of his life. All creatures are thus time
conditioned, and therefore do they regard evolution as
being a long-drawn-out process. To those of us whose
life span is not limited by a temporal existence,
evolution does not seem to be such a protracted
transaction. On Paradise, where time is nonexistent,
these things are all
present in
the mind of Infinity and the acts of Eternity.
65:8.4
As mind evolution is dependent on, and delayed by, the
slow development of physical conditions, so is spiritual
progress dependent on mental expansion and unfailingly
delayed by intellectual retardation. But this does not
mean that spiritual evolution is dependent on education,
culture, or wisdom. The soul may evolve regardless of
mental culture but not in the absence of mental capacity
and desire -- the choice of survival and the decision to
achieve ever-increasing perfection -- to do the will of
the Father in heaven. Although survival may not depend
on the possession of knowledge and wisdom, progression
most certainly does.
65:8.5
In the cosmic evolutionary laboratories mind is always
dominant over matter, and spirit is ever correlated with
mind. Failure of these diverse endowments to synchronize
and co-ordinate may cause time delays, but if the
individual really knows God and desires to find him and
become like him, then survival is assured regardless of
the handicaps of time. Physical status may handicap
mind, and mental perversity may delay spiritual
attainment, but none of these obstacles can defeat the
whole-souled choice of will.
65:8.6
When physical conditions are ripe,
sudden mental
evolutions may take place; when mind status is
propitious,
sudden spiritual transformations may occur; when
spiritual values receive proper recognition, then cosmic
meanings become discernible, and increasingly the
personality is released from the handicaps of time and
delivered from the limitations of space.
65:8.7
Sponsored by a Life Carrier of Nebadon resident on
Urantia.
*
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