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My Time with Brad Garner - Second Generation Reader · Urantia Radio

0:00
Welcome to another edition of the Urantia Radio Podcast.
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It's very good to have you here, and I appreciate you taking time
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out to enjoy the subject matter as we unpack the Urantia book
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and all of his facets. And today, we're very happy to
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have with us Brad Garner, who is one of the lead instructors or
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hosts of Symmetry of Soul, which is an online study group of
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sorts, which is also led by Chris Halverson.
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Dr. Halverson in Boulder, many people who listen to this
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podcast or who are familiar with Boulder, Co and the Urantia
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community that we have there. No Chris.
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And we will be having a great conversation today with Brad
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Garner. We'll talk about his experience
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in growing up in a Urantia Book household and what he learned
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along the way as far as his dabblings with Christianity as
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well as the Urantia book. And we'll talk about other
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things too, what's going on socially and where Brad
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envisions the Urantia book is headed.
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All this and very much more on our candid conversation with
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Brad Garner, this time up on the Urantia Radio podcast.
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Brad Garner is part of the group behind Symmetry of Soul, which
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is, I'll let him describe it. But what makes also Brad a very
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interesting person. He's one of the few people that
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I actually know who. Grew up around the Urantia book.
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So he is a second generation Urantia book student, meaning
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that one or more of his parents actually raised him in the
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environment of the Urantia book. So I'm curious about that
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starting that off. I just want to welcome you to
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the show and say thank you and glad you're here.
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You're also part of your. You work with the foundation as
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well, part of the IT so. That's right, Jim.
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Yeah. Yeah, that's exciting.
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But to start off, what was it like for you growing up in
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retrospect with parents who read the Oranga book?
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Share that experience with us. Yeah, thanks, Jim.
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I really appreciate the opportunity to be here on on
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your on your program. It, it was an interesting
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upbringing for sure. On the very easy plus side,
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there was never a time in my life I can think back to where I
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thought we might be alone in the universe.
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I guess I just took it as a given that there are other
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inhabited worlds. Carl Sagan has spent his whole
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life wondering might there be life on other worlds.
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And I always wondered what's he so pent wrought up about?
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Of course there is. So the night sky was just filled
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with life. It was a little intimidating.
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This Urantia book is not like the Bible.
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The Bible is a carrying forward of oral tradition in many ways.
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So the stories in it can be very, some of them can be very
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heavy, but they're very accessible.
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The story of Jonah and the whale, you can tell that to a
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six year old. The story of the 10 councils of
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Dalamatia, it's a little more abstract for a six year old.
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I do remember. I'll just share with this I when
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I was eight, I wanted to try to find a way to connect with what
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my parents were doing. So I tried to make an audio book
3:14
version of the Urantia book on cassette tape.
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I got like 4 pages in and I was spelling every other word,
3:20
apologizing profusely. So I gave up quickly, but I was
3:23
trying to somehow connect. But yeah, yeah, I was eight.
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My, I have AI had two sisters and one of them also took to the
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book around age 8. And they've been a very
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primitive way. She started attending the study
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group that was held every week in our house.
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That was never my cup of tea, but she got down there and
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started underlining passages long before she could possibly
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understand them. So it was the one of the main
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thing I'd say beyond all these funny little anecdotes.
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There was a lot of tension because we also nominatively
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tried to be Christians. We went to a Methodist Church,
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we tried a Baptist Church. We went to some what you might
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call evangelical churches, almost like tent revivals.
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And every time we would leave, there was this discussion that
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the parents would have with the children about the atonement
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doctrine, the number one doctrinal quibble.
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You might say that we all wrestle with his readers of the
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Urantia Book. So that set up some tension in
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our childhood mind. What are we supposed to believe?
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The pastor says this, our parents say that.
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Yeah, those are hard questions when you're young.
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And how did you overcome that? Because a lot of people don't.
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I've heard people, or even recently when we were doing the
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Spotlight series, someone, I, it may even been you, that there
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are people who refuse to even consider the Urantia book simply
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because of the way the atonement doctrine is spelled out in the
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Urantia book, which maybe we should try to explain for people
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who don't know what that means. But how did you overcome that?
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It's been a lifelong journey I could take with the statement
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you just said. There are people who won't
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consider the Urantia book because of its position on
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atonement. There are people who won't
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consider Christianity because of its position on the atonement.
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There are people standing on both sides of what seems to be a
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Grand Canyon sized gulf. And this doctrine, this idea
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that God requires some kind of super material sacrifice to make
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us humans in our lowliest state pleasing to him, once again
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reachable by him. It's a very old idea.
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You can read papers in the Urantia book around the upper
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80's, the lower 90s that talk about the the early origins of
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primitive religion. And you can see that we early
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on, even before there was rebellion or default or
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secularism or anything, we felt we were somehow in debt to the
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gods or the ethereal forces, the ghosts.
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So it's naturally born in us to feel we have some sort of debt.
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It's almost, it seems that this concept of sin, sacrifice, and
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atonement is something that is supposed to develop in US and
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then eventually we can find ways to evolve past while still
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respecting that it was part of our either individual
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development or our collective societal development.
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To answer your question, it's been a lifelong developmental
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process. If you had met me at age 20, I
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was running around my university campus fervently trying to
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disabuse very well-intentioned Christians of their atonement
6:15
doctrine notions, which without even knowing it, like I was
6:17
probably accidentally trying to take them away from God.
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To them, the atonement doctrine is how they can communicate,
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commune with God. Now, you, if you caught me
6:27
today, you'd see that my wife and I attend, but cannot be
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considered members of an evangelical church.
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The preaching that that takes place there, the quality of the
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sermons, the practicality and the living connection that
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people have. We don't adhere to the atonement
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doctrine, but we can see it for what it is now, a part of the
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evolutionary process. In a, in a sense, because of the
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defaults of Adam and Eve and the fall of the garden and all that,
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we have to respect the idea that in, in a, in a way, we were
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orphaned. It had Adam and Eve succeeded,
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they would still be with us today.
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There would be a shining civilizations.
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I envision probably some sort of a spiritual center of learning
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somewhere in the Middle East, maybe even right there in
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Baghdad, what is now Baghdad or so.
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But that didn't happen. As kids that are rejected when
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they're young, the first thing they assume and it's their fault
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that they did something wrong. So I think that's wired into us.
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We feel like we have to earn God's favor negotiating with
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God. Good luck, bad luck.
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But it's not a very high notion of justice, as the revelators
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say. At one point, most kids would
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see through the illogic of that What judge would allow one
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person to take the penalty for someone else's crime?
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Right. Yeah.
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'Cause I've studied the tried to get a holistic grasp of the
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Urantia book, I see that the revelators are the authors of
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all these papers are trying to strike a balance.
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They come out of the gate swinging.
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It's a very memorable paper. Section paragraph.
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It's paper 4, Section 5, paragraph 6456.
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That is the paragraph that says what a travesty upon the
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infinite character of God. And it's just this takedown,
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brutal of the atonement doctrine.
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And if you read that and you start, you turn your brain off
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then and don't read all the other things in the rancher book
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and say, yeah, stick it to those atonement freaks.
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And you just stick with that, that the heat on that one
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paragraph. You won't see there's a whole
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section over in the meanings, that of the death on the cross,
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where they talk about Jesus didn't just die for for your
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sins. He lived and died for our entire
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world and our entire universe. They try to recontextualize it.
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He lived and died. Death was a part of life.
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This was the way that he died. So they're trying to give us a
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way to to step it up without throwing out entirely, 'cause
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there are people who only get through every day right now
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because they think they have God's favor through the shedding
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of His beloved Son's blood. To me, the sense of, and I don't
8:50
know where you stand on the issue, but climate, the climate
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crisis, people in the West feel that they have it so good that
8:58
they have to pay a sacrifice, but.
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If there's one thing that your rancher book helps us see is the
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lessons of history. The more things change, the more
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they stay the same. You can look around today if you
9:08
have eyes to see it and you can see that there is a new form of
9:11
shaman or high priest that's being invented, but in a secular
9:14
way. You might call it a techno
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shaman. We tend to worship those high
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technology figures that run the gigantic corporate technology
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companies. I'm a computer guy, but I'm also
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a, a, a geologist by training in a in a past life of mine
9:27
somewhat. And I know that not just from
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the the secular story of geologic history on our Earth,
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which says the climate moves around all the time, but from
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the story in the Urantia book that first two human beings and
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on Infanta, what was one of the first forces they were subject
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to other than the pressures of their immediate family and their
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circumstance. It was climate.
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They started going north and it was cold.
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So they that forced them to adapt to find, to discover fire
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and to have skins to put on them.
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Like the lesson of climate pushing us and poking us and
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prodding us around the planet is not that we should try to
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sacrifice to some climate God to keep things in stasis, but that
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we should adapt because the meaning of life is its
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adaptability, To quote the The Rancher book.
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But back to the parents. How did they come to be?
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Were they part of the original fellowship or the 70 that would
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read the book? Tell me a little bit of history
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about your parents. So here, here's what my how my
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parents did not come to the book for, for those who know any of
10:30
the history of this, they, they were not in and around the
10:32
Chicago area part of the forum or the folks at at the
10:36
headquarters building that were first reading it.
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So they weren't part of that sort of Midwestern phenomenon.
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They also weren't part of that early 1970s kind of outgrowth of
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the Jesus movement in America that brought a lot of long
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haired people with high ideals to the Arantia book knocking on
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the door of the Chicago headquarters saying, hey man,
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far out. They weren't that either.
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My mom came to the book in 1979 because she was taking a systems
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analysis course at her university.
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And when the course was over, she went to the office hours of
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the professor and she said this course was great.
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But all this philosophy you just keep peppering in every now and
11:11
then. Where are you getting this stuff
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from? I want to know.
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And he said, come to my study group.
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So she found it there and she brought it home and my dad took
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to it like a fish to water. I don't know the exact history
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of that. My dad passed away a few years
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ago and he never really narratized it, but he seemed
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very down with it. I think he was a very he was a
11:28
mechanical engineer by trade, so I think he appreciated the
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logical way the universe operates rather than some of the
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leftover magical notions that is part of some of the baggage, the
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part and parcel of Christianity. So that that was how they came
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to it. My mom through incidentally
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through a systems analysis course.
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But she asked the question. See, it was the in the asking.
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It's always about the in the asking.
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It's always starts with the ask. The appetite, that's right,
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that's. Right, that's right.
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OK, so growing up, there was a period of your life where you
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shrugged it all off. Call it rebellion, whatever you
12:03
want. Tell us about that experience.
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What was going on, where you said I'm walking away from this?
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Honestly, the the the simplest way, quite unintentionally, just
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one step at a time. As these things so often are, I
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started feeling the need to be popular.
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I went back to Graduate School in my mid 20s.
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I'd gotten a computer science degree and I went back to
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Graduate School for a a geology degree.
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I was really interested in how the world functions and actually
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I'd, I'd use the Urantia book to really whet my appetite on that.
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But I got into grad school and it was a very secular, almost
12:35
hostilely atheistic environment. You certainly no one talked
12:39
about God and you couldn't. And you know, my days were
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filled with midterms and thesises and sample collection
12:46
for my master's degree. I discovered I didn't have much
12:50
time for God and so I just drifted naturally away, but then
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ended up getting into a relationship where we played off
12:57
of each other's like mockery of the worst superstitions of
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Christianity. You know, I'm not proud of it,
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but I just I drifted away because the secular pull.
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I mean, they warned us throughout paper 195 about this.
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I know, you know, that's a favorite of yours, Jim.
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It's it is magnetic these days. There are things out there that
13:15
don't just want to separate church from state.
13:18
Maybe that's all well and good and very practical, but they
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want to separate man from God, which is will destroy
13:24
civilization and destroy souls. Just the idea that people need
13:29
to re engage with this idea that what lies within them is truly
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eternal. And how do you get them to get
13:36
to that point? Because I see a lot of
13:38
hopelessness and I see a lot of doubt driving mental illness.
13:42
I think how Lindsay of all people who wrote the late great
13:45
Planet Earth, and I remember reading this in the 70s, it says
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you can go a week without eating.
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You can go three days without water, but you can only go a few
13:54
minutes without hope. And what gives you hope is the
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belief that that we're here for a reason.
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I I. Think so for some reason you,
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you jogged my memory. Not to go on a tangent, but my,
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my favorite movie, like many people of my generation of all
14:07
time is the Shawshank Redemption.
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And it's you could see it as a religious or spiritual movie
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and, and many people do it as almost a Christian allegory, but
14:16
they they claim that was unintentional.
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But the central theme of it is hope, is that even in the worst
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hell on earth of this horrible prison, there are always shining
14:25
moments of hope. And that's what brings meaning
14:28
and light. And in that movie, at least
14:30
ultimately, the redemption of the the actual main character.
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Earlier you mentioned this orphanhood that we suffer from.
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And I think that's so important to remember, not to harp on it
14:40
in a sentimental way. You can read lots of Charles
14:42
Dickens and feel very sentimental appropriately about
14:44
orphans. You should That's but it really
14:49
when you read the first 10 papers of the Urantia book very
14:52
slowly and you pay attention. We've been doing this daily read
14:55
through project with some people where we read a section a day.
14:58
It's going to take us almost six years.
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You notice how many times the authors of the papers go out of
15:06
their way to say you are not an orphan, you are not a lonely,
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you're not the only inhabited world.
15:11
Somewhere in the middle of the book there's a whole sentence
15:13
that's italicized that says man is not an evolutionary accident.
15:18
If you think about it, they're trying to tell these poor hurt
15:21
little children tadpoles. If you want to follow their
15:24
analogy, you're not alone. We know you feel alone, but
15:27
you're not. We know that Adam and Eve felt
15:29
alone their first night in the garden cause of the the
15:31
quarantine of the planet. But you're not alone.
15:33
That was the beginning of their era when they they isolated
15:36
themselves. You should be connected to the
15:39
cosmos. You're not alone.
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Just briefly, I this is one of the things that began to give me
15:43
a beef with Christianity growing up.
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Some of the tension I alluded to, I was in Dallas, TX growing
15:49
up, which is the heart of the televangelist movement of the
15:51
1980s. You want to talk about an easy
15:54
target for looking for charlatans who are trying to
15:57
peddle credulous people out of their money to so they can fly
16:00
on their private jet planes? They were a dime a dozen around
16:03
Dallas, Fort Worth. And I, I saw that all the time.
16:06
Like, this can't be true religion.
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Like, I can see right through this.
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He's trying to tell you that he will, if you give him $1000, God
16:12
will magically send you $10,000 or he'll heal your cancer.
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And I don't think that's the way the cosmos works.
16:18
But that's not true hope. That's a false hope being
16:21
peddled. And it can lead people to
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ultimately to bitterness and nihilism because it's not true.
16:27
So the atonement doctrine declares that, and Franklin
16:31
Graham says this on his commercials, the idea that you
16:35
have to confess your sins. What is the Urantia book?
16:40
How does it deal with that? Because that's central core to
16:44
Christianity. Most Christians would say that
16:46
until you go through that process of accepting your
16:50
frailty. And what's your interpretation
16:53
of that? I think.
16:54
It, it's, it's like most things in the Urantia book, it's
16:57
multifaceted. On the one hand, certainly the
16:59
idea of literally sitting in a small box and confessing your
17:02
sins to someone who has a certain ecclesiastical
17:04
authority, the Catholic tradition that that's not
17:07
supported by the revelators, They look at that and give it a
17:10
they look once and they pass by, to quote Dante as Virgil's going
17:14
through all these strange things, look once and pass by.
17:17
That's just part of evolutionary religion.
17:19
Is that come from the same place as a feeling of always having to
17:23
negotiate with God? I think it's.
17:26
I really can't quote it verbatim from memory.
17:28
There's a part where they talk about people who keep up their
17:31
daily activities by false illusions of success.
17:33
I do think I got that phrase right.
17:35
You could search for false illusions of success.
17:37
There are a lot of ways that we can fool ourselves into thinking
17:40
we're doing better than we actually are in life.
17:43
The old aphorism whistling past the graveyard comes to mind.
17:47
You trick yourself and say, I'm doing great.
17:49
But there always comes a point. You can confess to an
17:52
ecclesiastical authority. You can confess to your spouse,
17:55
to a friend, to your a a group, or just to yourself in the
17:59
mirror where you've got to get honest with yourself at some
18:03
point. And I think that's the false
18:05
illusions of success the revelators allude to you.
18:08
You've got to become disillusioned, pulled apart from
18:11
the illusions you hold about yourself and the life you're
18:14
living. Every four year old has an
18:15
amazing ego. They think they're the center of
18:18
the universe. There's a natural disillusioning
18:21
process we're supposed to go through.
18:22
It's healthy to find your appropriate sense of smallness.
18:25
Or is. The revelators define that
18:27
humility. I think it was Alice Cooper of
18:29
all people. It was trending socially.
18:32
This is Alice Cooper, school's out for summer.
18:35
You were all singing that, eating snakes heads and all this
18:39
stuff on stage and all that. And he says once you realize,
18:42
when you really realize who Jesus is, you stop pretending.
18:47
And that to me is very profound, especially coming from someone
18:50
who you would not expect to say that once you realize what is
18:54
going on around us. And I think the Urantia book
18:58
presents reality so that we have a good grasp of what we're doing
19:03
here and why we're here and how it all came to be.
19:06
Then you, you really do fully appreciate the majesty of
19:10
creation, as opposed to it being more like a fairy tale where you
19:15
go to heaven and you get wings and then you just spend eternity
19:20
at God's feet worshipping him. That is so far from the truth,
19:23
yet that childlike impression is what people hold on to.
19:28
And I think that's why I like the Urantia book, because
19:30
intellectually it's satisfying. Yeah, that's, that was the point
19:33
I was going to make. I was, I've been trying to
19:35
backfill my unfortunate education where I didn't learn
19:38
the classics like Plato's Republic.
19:40
But so, you know, you try to read something like Plato's
19:42
Republic, which is one of these secular pillars of Western
19:46
civilization, but then it got threaded into the message, the
19:48
gospel and Christianity and all that.
19:50
In any given generation, there's probably less than 1% of people
19:54
who read Plato's Republic. It is very difficult.
19:57
It is very hidden, very intellectual and abstract.
20:00
But that 1% has been enough to get the lessons from it to get
20:04
translated and go out further. I've begun wondering if the
20:07
Urantia book isn't something like that.
20:09
So I, I think you make an important point there.
20:12
They're giving us a cosmology that just blows everything else
20:15
away. They're like, let's talk about.
20:17
200 billion years ago when your creator son 1 of 700,000 set up
20:21
his administration and you were part of the Super universe.
20:24
Other point the revelators make with regard to The Big Bang.
20:27
Of course, that term didn't exist as a common phrase when
20:30
the main corpus of the book was written.
20:32
So it, you won't find that in the book.
20:34
They're, they're, they're saying, look, you're seeing a
20:36
lot of things out there. There are other things that
20:39
cause stars to shift to the red. There is space respiration where
20:42
space itself expands. And I, I personally think that's
20:46
a lot of what Hubble may have been measuring.
20:48
But if you don't have a larger concept frame to fit that all
20:51
in, and you don't have a notion of, for example, paradise
20:54
gravity, some transcendent gravity that's not just Newton's
20:57
gravity, you're going to end up with a lot of very strange
21:00
rabbit holes you go down. You're going to end up saying
21:02
there's something called dark matter that accounts for almost
21:05
everything in the universe. Yeah, because you don't know
21:07
about paradise gravity or whatever.
21:08
You don't know about dark islands of space.
21:10
So is this supposed to be a book, A revelation of better
21:14
initial assumptions that a scientist could take and then
21:18
proceed forward with their theories and get much better
21:21
explanations for the observations in their data?
21:25
And I think the James Webb telescope is going to go a lot
21:28
of ways to substantiating many of the Urantia book portrayals
21:32
of, of the universe at large because we're finding galaxies
21:35
that, based on our current understanding of, of science,
21:38
shouldn't even exist. The current cosmological model,
21:41
they're like, this Galaxy doesn't fit our model, let's
21:43
just see if we can squeeze it in there anyway, because it would
21:46
be really uncomfortable to throw the model out.
21:48
But that's the structure of Scientific Revolutions, to quote
21:51
Thomas Kuhn. At some point a theory, any
21:54
given theory, busts at the seams and you have to throw it away
21:58
and come up with a new, larger, better explanatory frame.
22:02
And the Urantia book claims to be that frame that we could
22:05
inhabit for 1000 years with our scientific, philosophic and
22:08
religious theories. We're talking with Brad Garner.
22:12
He's with the organization Symmetry of Soul.
22:14
I want to talk about that. How did that come to be?
22:17
What is it? And it's just judging from the
22:20
website, which is easy to find, symmetryofsoul.org.
22:23
But what is that all about? How did you get involved with
22:26
that? And talk about some of the
22:27
people that are involved. Chris Halverson.
22:30
Symmetry of Souls started about 15 years ago as just a little
22:33
kernel of an idea that actually my mom who got me the Urantia
22:37
book, she started this as a virtual kind of online weekly
22:41
radio at the time. At that time it was on something
22:43
called Blog Talk Radio. It started, it was basically a
22:46
group of people were at a conference, some kind of get
22:49
together. The details are lost to history,
22:51
but she was there with Chris Halverson and James Woodward was
22:54
there and they were just talking about what the how do we think
22:58
about this thing and found this certain kindredness.
23:01
And so it's symmetry of soul started as an offshoot of this
23:04
cosmic citizen weekly radio Internet broadcast of let's just
23:08
make it an interview. We'll talk to people actually a
23:10
lot like your program here, Jim, in many ways.
23:13
But pretty quickly it became clear that the where the
23:16
evolutionary path was taking it was that Doctor Chris Halverson
23:20
lives up there in Boulder, has a PhD in physics.
23:22
I imagine any number of your listeners may be familiar with
23:25
the name. He, he has a particular
23:28
interpretive take on the Arantia book that is very studied and
23:31
very well considered and and very holistic.
23:34
And so basically evolved into something like a four person
23:38
virtual weekly study group where we methodically go paragraph by
23:43
paragraph. Not, we don't read a whole
23:44
section at a time and then talk about it.
23:46
We read a paragraph at a time and we try to take each
23:49
paragraph and say, how does this relate to the whole?
23:51
We're seeing a little and and we're interested in etymology.
23:54
We see a word here. What does the word race mean?
23:58
I think I know what it means, but I learned that with the word
24:00
race or the word love when I was in 3rd grade.
24:02
What is what are the, how are the revelators using it?
24:04
So it's an attempt to study the Urantia book in a very
24:09
scholastic manner, but still make it the language, the way we
24:12
talk, very accessible. So we've been on the air for 15
24:16
years and we're still at it. Chris is, we call him our lead
24:19
unpacker, like he's the one you'd hear the his voice the
24:22
most kind of, if you were from the biblical tradition, you
24:25
would call what he does exegesis, like taking a passage
24:28
and then expounding upon it, explaining what might be the
24:31
meaning of it. And we all interact to try to
24:34
deepen our meanings of it and we play off of each other and just
24:37
try to relate this back to our lives.
24:39
It's essentially a virtual study group, but we try to.
24:42
There's a certain flavor that we try to give to it that may not
24:44
look like a typical Urantia study group, if there is such a
24:47
thing. I just think he's a a brilliant
24:50
he. He's one of these guys that can
24:52
take the complex and make it simple.
24:54
You know who else was like that was Bill Sadler Junior.
24:57
If you listen to some of the old tapes where he was in Oklahoma
25:01
back in the 60s and he the way that he would, it was almost
25:04
like listening to Johnny Carson or somebody of that stature.
25:07
Just a great command of the human language.
25:10
And Chris is very much like that too.
25:11
I want to delve into the soul for a minute.
25:14
I turned to page 1217 and they talk about the nature of the
25:19
soul and it reads, and I want to get your interpretation because
25:23
I think this is a great example of how the Urantia book explains
25:28
things and it reads throughout the mind functions of cosmic
25:31
intelligence. The totality of mind is dominant
25:35
over parts of the intellectual function.
25:37
Mind in its essence is functional unity.
25:41
It's almost like what some people theorize is that we are
25:45
just cells in a brain, that that all the individual planets are
25:50
nerve endings. It's almost like we all exist in
25:54
a cosmic body. God is this body and we are just
25:57
little parts of it. I believe there's a direct
26:00
reference to the, you know, the universe of universes being a
26:04
cosmic Organism. I think that's right there in
26:06
paper 112 real close to where you were just reading throughout
26:10
the Urantia book. There's if you to talk about
26:12
mind, there is there's a provocative statement that says
26:15
the universe is mind made and personality managed.
26:18
Mind is central to the ability for the universe is we know it
26:23
to exist. Again, in your favorite, my
26:25
favorite paper 195, they they reflect.
26:27
If it weren't for the activity of mind and personality, the
26:31
universe would eventually become uniform.
26:33
There'd be no spontaneity, it'd be just mechanistic.
26:36
To say that mind emerged from matter explains nothing.
26:40
Nothing. Yeah.
26:41
Are we in agreement here? That mind came before matter.
26:45
The mind of God was pre existent to matter.
26:48
Matter was subsequent to mind. But mind doesn't emerge from
26:52
matter. Mind descends down and rests
26:55
gently upon matter to meet it, to try to draw it upward
26:59
Godward. I like the term functional
27:01
unity. The unity of mind invariably
27:04
seeks for spirit coordination on all levels of its association
27:08
with cells of will, dignity and ascension Prerogatives.
27:12
But in other words, people who are possessed of mind, their
27:16
mind seeks for unity and it seeks for spirit coordination.
27:20
There's something bonafide that is taking people and making
27:24
them, for lack of a better word, be more spiritual.
27:28
There's a dry now a lot of people ignore that and they,
27:30
we've been taught in our society, that's just religious.
27:35
Something you ignore it is, is no longer valid.
27:37
It's not science, as they would say.
27:40
The revelators would even point out in another one of my
27:42
favourites, Paper 65, you can see echoes of this attempt at
27:47
functional unity even in the animal and plant Kingdom any
27:51
what people would call natural selection, what they refer to as
27:54
the environmental adjustment, the organismal adaptation and
27:57
augmented life realization. Even animals have striving for
28:02
perfection. Now they're not self-conscious
28:04
beings with personalities, they're just reflective of
28:07
something of of the local universe, mother spirit.
28:09
But even in animals attempts to better their circumstances and
28:12
build a better nest and adapt, that is a striving for some kind
28:16
of unity on that basal animal level.
28:18
So how much more must it be with us, and how much more than us
28:21
must it be with high spirit beings?
28:24
They said there's a great line in the Aranta book where it says
28:26
human beings are a lot like atoms.
28:29
We cluster. Right, we or, you know, cluster,
28:34
we huddle, we, we do all sorts of.
28:35
Things we huddle, Yeah. It's one it's not surprising
28:38
that you can find patterns on high patterns at our level and
28:41
patterns all the way down to the atom like the universe is
28:44
patterned it it starts with the I am and the father son spirit
28:48
like these patterns of 137. They they downstep all the way
28:53
through and it makes the universe comprehensible.
28:56
Here's a good one. The material mind of mortal man
28:59
is the cosmic gloom that carries the maracha fabrics on which the
29:02
indwelling thought adjuster threads the spirit patterns of
29:06
the universe, character of enduring values and divine
29:09
meanings. Just the writing is incredible.
29:12
It's and the consistency too. You just quoted something from
29:16
somewhere around again, paper 112.
29:18
But the weaving analogy, there it goes all the way back to one
29:23
of the first paragraphs in the book.
29:24
They describe the warp of Marancha as spiritual.
29:26
Its woof is physical. So there's like 2 places
29:29
separated by hundreds of pages where they bring in this weaving
29:32
analogy as a hint to us of how you might think about the soul
29:35
in a very analogous kind of way. It's just a, it's just an
29:38
analogy. It's not literal.
29:41
Says the human personality as identified with mind and spirit,
29:45
held together in functional relationship by life in a
29:49
material body. How many of us have said that
29:53
they've realized at some point that we're not bodies with a
29:56
mind, We're minds with bodies, we're spirits with bodies?
29:59
And there are plenty of Christian theologians.
30:01
A pastor of the church we attend, I mean, I think he was
30:04
quoting CS Lewis. He said you aren't a mind, a
30:07
body with a soul. You're a soul that has a body.
30:09
All these no, turn it through the looking glass and see it
30:12
from the top down. You are a child of God being
30:15
called upward. And there's a top down
30:17
influence, not just this bottom up looking through the
30:20
distortions of the water rippling on the surface as you
30:23
look from way down in the depths.
30:24
But the The Rancher book tries to show us like how you can see
30:27
it from the top down with clarity.
30:37
If you had to predict Brad, when do you think the Urantia book
30:41
will have its day? For a brief time I growing up I
30:45
thought it might have been back in the mid 90s, but it would
30:48
have been brief moment of infamy.
30:50
There was a Dateline NBC article about a certain group that had a
30:53
certain set of thoughts around the Urantia book living out in
30:56
the desert. Kind of following up a shaman
30:59
like figure and then Martin Gardner, skeptic of his
31:02
generation, published a book trying to be a takedown to the
31:06
Urantia book. But it was unfortunately it was
31:08
not particularly scholarly. I've tried to read it with a
31:11
charitable anyway, I thought people that might get mass
31:14
exposure, but honestly, Jim, I've begun to wonder if it may
31:19
not be in North America and but like right now there is more
31:22
activity happening in South America, Latin America and
31:25
Brazil, Colombia, the readers of the translations of these books
31:29
and in the book into Spanish and Portuguese.
31:31
It it's really lighting the world up it.
31:33
It looks maybe like what the Urantia book looked like in the
31:36
early 70s here, but they're bringing in a very rich
31:41
Catholic, religious, family oriented tradition to it now
31:44
that's going to bring its own flavor and color.
31:46
They're reading like it may light up down there.
31:49
The torch may be passed to South of the equator.
31:53
Because I think a lot of people are afraid to talk about the
31:55
book in public. I I I'm glad you asked that,
31:59
because if there was anyone who ought to be afraid to talk about
32:01
it in public, it would be a a guy from the South who grew up
32:05
in the late 20th century. You would not mention this in
32:08
you wouldn't think in the polite company of Southern Baptists if
32:11
you wanted to still be invited to Thanksgiving.
32:13
But I'll, I'll tell you 2 quick stories just along that line.
32:15
My my mom read her the rancher book.
32:18
She mentioned it to her parents who were from the Deep South
32:21
Mississippi practically never left the state.
32:23
She mentioned it to them and her mom heard the argument, heard it
32:27
all. They're Baptist.
32:29
And her, the way my mom tells it, her mom listened and nodded
32:32
and she said, that's very interesting.
32:34
And that's not something that we can go along with or believe in,
32:38
but that's your thing. And let's never talk about it
32:40
again because again, Southerners are focused on politeness.
32:43
We shall never speak of this again, my daughter.
32:45
But to your question of what's the worst experience, I'm
32:48
smiling because when I looked back on my life, I
32:51
recontextualized this and saw it as a good experience right out
32:54
of college. There was a fellow at the first
32:56
job I had out of college who was really down on us luck.
32:59
He was a military vet from Iraq and he'd put his life together
33:02
enough to get a job in high tech as in the computer industry.
33:06
But he was just an emotional wreck, had all these problems.
33:09
And, and he and I started, we became friends, we became gym
33:12
buddies and we just spent a lot of time talking.
33:14
And before you know it, it drifted to the Urantia book.
33:16
And like, he vacuumed it up. Like he's one of those people
33:20
who like sleeplessly read it in three weeks.
33:23
I don't even know how that's possible, but some people can do
33:25
that. Like he really had a spiritual
33:27
hungering and it fed him for a while.
33:30
I'm like one, one more soul for the Urantia book Kingdom.
33:33
I, I put a little badge on my lapel.
33:36
But then a little bit more time went by and he found his way
33:40
back into the evangelical church, which is what he was,
33:43
what he grew up in. At the time, in my spiritual
33:46
immaturity, I processed this as a tremendous defeat.
33:50
I'd even took it personally. I'm like, how could you?
33:53
All this stuff in the Rancho book and now you're going to go
33:54
back to this thing. But Jim, when I look back on it
33:57
now with the eyes of whatever it is I have now in my mid 40s,
34:02
that man was a lost sheep who found God again.
34:05
And he found it through a book that he then later decided by
34:09
the he despised or thought it was of the devil.
34:11
But God found him nonetheless. And I have no doubt that he did
34:16
find the real God and did find that in his evangelical church.
34:19
And I'm not going to take that away from him.
34:21
So my greatest initial proselytizing success turned
34:25
proselytizing defeat. When I look back through the
34:27
years of of reflection, I'm like, the man came back to God.
34:31
That's a win. I I like the parable of the seed
34:35
where sometimes it falls in places where it grabs soil and
34:38
it, and to me, the Urantia book in the Bible are are completely
34:42
compatible because the Urantia book is explaining what the
34:47
stories are in the Bible with so much more clarity that you have
34:51
a much greater appreciation, for example, for the Hebrew prophets
34:55
and what the Jews had to put up with by carrying monotheism
34:58
forward. I mean, in many ways it was a
35:01
blessing. In many ways it was also a
35:03
curse. The.
35:04
The continuity with the past that revelation doesn't throw
35:08
out the past. It takes the best of it and
35:10
upholds it and then carries it forward with the same that
35:13
happened with Jesus. It happens with the Urantia
35:15
Book. The Bible is the single largest
35:17
quoted work in the Urantia Book. It would be really
35:20
intellectually dishonest to utterly despise the Bible when
35:24
it is the single most cited work in the Urantia Book.
35:26
If you if you claim to be an adherent of the Urantia Book,
35:29
that's what I say. The Urantia book.
35:42
People read the Urantia book. It's a cult.
35:44
It's a cult this, it's a cult that.
35:46
What do you think of that? What?
35:47
What would you say to somebody who said that?
35:49
It's important to remember what the word cult really means,
35:52
certainly as the word appears in the Urantia book itself.
35:55
What, dozens of times? Hundreds of times?
35:57
100 years ago, the word cult was a completely neutral word from
36:01
some sort of moral or ethical evaluation.
36:03
It comes from the word culture. It's literally just the a
36:06
shortening of the word culture. It's just the practices and the
36:09
habits of a given group of people.
36:10
It's their culture. Lately in the late 20th century
36:14
with the was it Jim Jones and some other New Heaven's gates?
36:17
Some of these notorious incidents, like it took on a
36:19
very negative connotation. I have no problem having someone
36:23
say, oh, he, he's in a cult. Like if you mean I will attend a
36:27
conference every now and then and hang out with people who
36:29
also want to think about the best things.
36:32
As Paul wrote in one of the epistles, Think on high things
36:35
and we have a shared vocabulary and a shared set of stories from
36:38
the Urantia book. I can talk to people about Van
36:40
and Amadon freely when they read the Urantia book and we can
36:43
reflect on it. If that makes me part of a
36:45
certain culture, then sign me up.
36:48
Of having thrown my mind out in deference to some shaman who is
36:52
telling me what to think and what to wear and what to eat.
36:54
No, I reject that because that's just not what I do and the
36:58
evidence would bear that out. Is there anything that you would
37:01
like to promote or talk about that you would invite listeners
37:05
to participate in before we say goodbye?
37:07
I would just say symmetryofseoul.org, that's our
37:10
website, just all one word symmetry of seoul.org.
37:13
You can go there and we'll be, we're live on Tuesday evenings
37:17
and you can listen to a slide. You can even call in and raise
37:20
your hand and ask a question if you'd like to.
37:22
But if you don't want to listen live, you can listen to every
37:24
past episode. It's we have an RSS podcast feed
37:27
and we also have a lot of written material.
37:29
We summarize every one of our two hour episodes on our website
37:32
with a little write up. So there's plenty of things you
37:34
can read there and search on and we just have a lot of written
37:37
materials. Check out symmetry of soul.org
37:39
if if you like. If you care for the cut of my
37:41
jib, I guess they. Might say, Are you astounded at
37:45
how much revelatory information that's being ignored by science?
37:49
I'd say what astounds me the most about the Urantia book,
37:53
sure answer is yes, of course. It's not even that.
37:56
The facts fact, the continental drift fact this this geologic
37:59
age fact, this thing about the dinosaurs, it's the truth of the
38:03
Urantia book that the earth evolves for the purpose of there
38:07
being will creatures who can worship God and try to be like
38:10
him. That is a great truth that all
38:12
the facts point to the same truth.
38:14
The Urantia Book is not a scientific intro geology
38:17
textbook. It gives you just enough to whet
38:19
your appetite. Or you could then go into a
38:21
geologic science and see it anew, or go into a sociologic
38:25
science and see it anew. But it's not a whole sociology
38:28
or geology textbook. It's not meant to be.
38:30
It's a philosophic text. My conversation with Brad Garner
38:34
and we sure enjoyed him stopping by this time up on the Air
38:37
Rancher Radio podcast say some good news to talk about.
38:40
I have my new book that is going to be published probably in the
38:43
next week or so. I'll have more information on
38:46
that, but you can get a sneak preview if you go to theub.net.
38:51
Theub.net, you can listen to our first presentation where we take
38:57
elements of the book on the concepts of the Urantia book.
39:00
The name of the book that's coming out in a few weeks is
39:02
called Introduction to Urantia Concepts.
39:05
I hope you'll check it out. It'll be on Amazon and I'll be
39:07
sure to let you know when the book is available for you to
39:10
download and keep a copy for yourself.
39:13
I think you'll enjoy it and I think it's something that you
39:16
can share with other people. And you can also check out our
39:19
newly revamped website@theub.net theub.net Tell next time if you
39:26
want to reach out, you can contact us through the website,
39:29
but you can also e-mail us at your rancher book
39:32
radio@gmail.com. Jim Watkins and I thank you so
39:35
much for stopping by.