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SEla_Kelly this is a thread I can literally put my heart around. After so many years of searching this out I could write and write and write but as I am not interested in merely seeing if I can bore you I will attempt to make it concise.
I will try to highlight some of the key points of my guide's more obvious (at least to me) contacts (insights) but please understand that I am leaving out much more than I am including. Feel free to dig and dig deeply into any statement I make. I am an open book, but I am not a movie. You have to want to see.
First and foremost I must say that after being raised in a family of non-believers in anything spiritual I was unsure how or why to even want to know. But with a longing in my inner being to know how life was put together I began to seek some way to know reality. My first decision to seek at all, was made with the statement, "I want to know the TRUTH with a capital "T"." In other words I wanted to know and know I knew that what I was following was REAL. Somehow I knew I could know if something was real. See paper 16 section 6 paragraph 4 on the three ways we are able to identify reality. This is the first sense of real guidance from my Thought Adjuster and it happened long before I discovered the Urantia Book. At this point I had not discovered any more than that I knew I would know when I found it. I guess I had faith in the fact of faith without even knowing that I was doing it. I must have believed there was something (God as it turned out) and that the only way to know him for sure was to follow when I found him. I suppose my Thought Adjuster made that clear to me before I started looking. I have always tried to be as deeply honest with myself as I could find a way to be. That might be a key issue.
Well some months later I had a literal experience of a series of dioramas (visions if you will) that showed me that Jesus was "everything he said he was" and that I could follow him forever. I was so excited and convinced I had found everything I was looking for. What I didn't know was that I had also found something I had brought with me that was not wanted, by me or God. I was shown a vision of me standing about a half mile away from three crosses holding out my hand with my thumb pointed DOWN! I was faced with the realization that had I been in the crowd in Jerusalem during the trial before Pilate I would have yelled, "Crucify Him" as hard as I could. For that I had to beg forgiveness and repent of my self-centeredness. When I did that I was literally made new, I was reborn as a child of the living God. All of this was done while walking down a street in broad daylight. I was directed to those insights and visions but they were not for anyone but me. God was showing me about me and him. Just like the revelation says, it was autorevelation. The people on the street around me had no idea what was going on in me. I was alone with God though in a crowd of people.
Later and after I had been led to the Urantia Book, I decided to use the same intensity of determination to make myself into a real follower of Jesus (even that is a self endorsement). And by the way, I have never allowed myself to put the Urantia Book ahead of my decision to follow Jesus and our Father. That is always first and foremost. I found that I had lots and lots of personal issues that were in my way, so I decided to get busy. I was immature, self centered, self righteous, moody, self absorbed, scared, confused and on top of all that, embarrassed to be me. Many of these are still issues I work with, some I no longer have. I have found that growing with God takes time and though we can make it happen more slowly than it has to we can't speed it up. I decided to try not to impede it as the best thing I could do. So far that hasn't worked all that well and I am 68. I see growing up as merely cleaning up our own messes. I really think someone somewhere back in history realized we are each our own problems and decided to call this "original sin". I think we are really only inexperienced in dealing with all levels of issues so we have to grow through each one. Now here is a place where God can be known. If we decide that we are not responsible for an issue that is bothering us, he has no way to guide us. If, on the other hand, we decide that the mess is ours, he can. Then we have to seek his guidance and decide to follow it. We can't fix him but we can fix us. First we have to acknowledge that it is us that is the issue. That is the hard part. I always repeat to myself, "If I say some issue or other isn't my responsibility so I won't have to look at it, I will never really know if that is true. If I say it is and find out I was wrong and it really wasn't, I am better off because at least I know for sure. If I say it is and it really is, then I can learn to do something about it and grow. So part one is we must decide to clean up our own messes.
Part two is following the right guidance. Next we have to allow ourselves to actually try to live according to the teachings of Jesus. We must love God our Father and serve our fellows. I have found the Urantia Book an excellent aid in that. I decided when I found the Urantia Book in 1970 that the only way to prove it was to test it against the reality guide I knew by experience. To that point in time I didn't feel I had the requisite experience to allow a judgement of that import. That meant that I had to do that long enough to grow enough to be able to make that determination. This is exactly as it is stated in paper 101. It works. If anybody asks me if I believe in God I say, the real question is do I believe him, not merely believe in him. To that I answer that I do and ask if they do. To the same point, when people ask me if I believe in the Urantia Book I say no, but I do believe it. I believe it because I have experientially proven it to be authentic in the areas I have allowed my life to be tested by it's procedures. I cannot attest to the cosmology of the universe because I have no experience there. I can attest to the reality of the way we humans interact with God's spirit influences because I have 45 years of experience there. Because of that when I read your statements and your answers to my questions I know they are not authentic. This is not because I know what is in your head or heart but because I know what is authentic, from experience, deliberate experience. I believe you want to know as well.
I will stop there for the time being. I will be happy to deeply and honestly discuss any issue you may desire with reality, verifiable reality as the guide. I have asked for real guidance in this response so I pray you hear this in your soul.
Jim
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