SAFE HARBOR
CENTER FOR SPIRITUAL HEALING
Safe Harbor Urantia Book Fellowship
Facilitated by Cathy Ginter, Spiritual Healer
The Safe Harbor Urantia Book Fellowship is an online study group. Each Thursday, I will post a different selection from the Urantia Book that I feel is particularly relevant. Your input is important to me so be sure to share your thoughtful insights, questions and commentary on the guest book.
*** This Week's Selection from the Urantia Book, May 8 - 14 ***
Paper 1. 2: THE REALITY OF GOD
God is primal reality in the spirit world; God is the source of truth in the mind spheres; God overshadows all throughout the material realms. To all created intelligences God is a personality, and to the universe of universes he is the First Source and Center of eternal reality. God is neither manlike nor machinelike. The First Father is universal spirit, eternal truth, infinite reality, and father personality.The eternal God is infinitely more than reality idealized or the universe personalized. God is not simply the supreme desire of man, the mortal quest objectified. Neither is God merely a concept, the power-potential of righteousness. The Universal Father is not a synonym for nature, neither is he natural law personified. God is a transcendent reality, not merely man's traditional concept of supreme values. God is not a psychological focalization of spiritual meanings, neither is he "the noblest work of man." God may be any or all of these concepts in the minds of men, but he is more. He is a saving person and a loving Father to all who enjoy spiritual peace on earth, and who crave to experience personality survival in death.The actuality of the existence of God is demonstrated in human experience by the indwelling of the divine presence, the spirit Monitor sent from Paradise to live in the mortal mind of man and there to assist in evolving the immortal soul of eternal survival. The presence of this divine Adjuster in the human mind is disclosed by three experiential phenomena:1.The intellectual capacity for knowing God - God-consciousness.2.The spiritual urge to find God - God-seeking.3.The personality craving to be like God - the wholehearted desire to do the Father's will.The existence of God can never be proved by scientific experiment or by the pure reason of logical deduction. God can be realized only in the realms of human experience; nevertheless, the true concept of the reality of God is reasonable to logic, plausible to philosophy, essential to religion, and indispensable to any hope of personality survival.Those who know God have experienced the fact of his presence; such God-knowing mortals hold in their personal experience the only positive proof of the existence of the living God which one human being can offer to another. The existence of God is utterly beyond all possibility of demonstration except for the contact between the God-consciousness of the human mind and the God-presence of the Thought Adjuster that indwells the mortal intellect and is bestowed upon man as the free gift of the Universal Father.In theory you may think of God as the Creator, and he is the personal creator of Paradise and the central universe of perfection, but the universes of time and space are all created and organized by the Paradise corps of the Creator Sons. The Universal Father is not the personal creator of the local universe of Nebadon; the universe in which you live is the creation of his Son Michael. Though the Father does not personally create the evolutionary universes, he does control them in many of their universal relationships and in certain of their manifestations of physical, mindal, and spiritual energies. God the Father is the personal creator of the Paradise universe and, in association with the Eternal Son, the creator of all other personal universe Creators.As a physical controller in the material universe of universes, the First Source and Center functions in the patterns of the eternal Isle of Paradise, and through this absolute gravity center the eternal God exercises cosmic overcontrol of the physical level equally in the central universe and throughout the universe of universes. As mind, God functions in the Deity of the Infinite Spirit; as spirit, God is manifest in the person of the Eternal Son and in the persons of the divine children of the Eternal Son. This interrelation of the First Source and Center with the co-ordinate Persons and Absolutes of Paradise does not in the least preclude the direct personal action of the Universal Father throughout all creation and on all levels thereof. Through the presence of his fragmentized spirit the Creator Father maintains immediate contact with his creature children and his created universes.Those of us, who have been graced with the divine experience of knowing God, even for the briefest of moments, become the Wayshowers on Urantia. As Isaiah states so perfectly in Paper 97: "The Lord will give you rest from your sorrow and from your fear and from the hard bondage wherein man has been made to serve. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, 'this is the way, walk in it.'"
View last week's selection ~ The Living Organism of the Grand Universe
Light & Life ~ Cathy Ginter
448 Fisher Road
Cabot, PA 16023-2110 USA
(30 miles north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
(724) 352-4692
"Children of Time" Haiku by Cathy Ginter ~ August 2007
Photograph of Bug Nebula compliments of the Hubble Space Telescope
Photographs of Cathy Ginter and Safe Harbor by Melody Rose Nolan
The text of The Urantia Book is in the public domain in the USA.
This website, including the poetry, articles, essays and reviews
unless otherwise noted, is the design and creation of:
CATHY GINTER © MMI-MMVIII
You might also be interested in:
(an account of my very personal spiritual journey)
Or for more information, please contact:
Cathy Ginter
CATHY GINTER, SPIRITUAL HEALER & MASTER TAROTOLOGIST
Committed to the Path of Wisdom and Inner Peace
I am devoted to our One Self... that is LOVE!!!
Oh, Children of time,
Loved by God in all His Grace,
Guided by His Light!
Renaissance
Of all the planets in all the galaxies of our Universe,
The holy child chose Earth,
Giver of grain, weaver of wind and water,
Spinner of dust and sand,
Whose volcanic ash cooled,
Then carried by rivers of rain,
Birthed forests of conifers, moss, ferns and
Wildflowers across the burgeoning land.
Hope watched in wonder as each strand of time
Turned in the boundlessness of space
And spiraled to become tamed
By love's strong, but gentle force.
A breath was taken
That would recast the vision of humanity for eternity;
A path, blazed from the wellspring of creation,
Carved a majestic course.
But we, explorers of mind,
Who quest fulfillment in materialism and greed,
Have, by our desires, been deceived
And left abandoned by our temptations;
As have our injustices,
Once exposed by dayspring, betrayed our origins.
Wavering on the precipice,
We fall to our knees and pray for redemption.
Once we own our choices
And seize honor by seeking meaning in each moment,
We come like travelers from afar,
Bearing gifts of painting, song and poem.
Uniting the will of the world,
We raise high the voice of our compassion,
Awakening a renaissance of inner peace
That sweeps the reach of our globe.
"Renaissance" © August 31, 2007 by Cathy Ginter
I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life.
*** One of my very favorite passages from the Urantia Book ***
Paper 3: 4. 5-7 GOD'S LIMITLESSNESS
"Mortal man cannot possibly know the infinitude of the heavenly Father. Finite mind cannot think through such an absolute truth or fact. But this same finite human being can actually feel —literally experience—the full and undiminished impact of such an infinite Father's LOVE. Such a love can be truly experienced, albeit while quality of experience is unlimited, quantity of such an experience is strictly limited by the human capacity for spiritual receptivity and by the associated capacity to love the Father in return.Finite appreciation of infinite qualities far transcends the logically limited capacities of the creature because of the fact that mortal man is made in the image of God—there lives within him a fragment of infinity. Therefore man's nearest and dearest approach to God is by and through love, for God is love. And all of such a unique relationship is an actual experience in cosmic sociology, the Creator-creature relationship—the Father-child affection."
