The Most Important Book in My Life
For years I felt that my mom’s spirit was watching over me. My mom – a very intuitive, artistic woman – had died of stomach cancer when I was ten. Nine years later, my dad – a brilliant, humorous illustrator and ladies man – became very ill with lymphatic cancer. As the only child of two successful New York City artists, I knew my world would change dramatically if I lost my dad. Cannabis opened my teenage mind to possibilities and paths as well as providing relief from the mounting pressures of being an only child caring for an ill father.
In 1978, during my first year of college in West Chester, Pennsylvania, I was on a crusade to find truth – any truth – the deeper the better! I was into astrology, every branch of Christianity and many Eastern religions. I had gone from being a born-again Baptist to a Mormon. I used to jog a mile around my neighborhood late at night and have “conversations” with God. It was then, when I was 19, that I found The Urantia Book.
I had intensely devoured almost half the book when, having no one to validate my interest, I fell prey to the opinions of several Mormon friends. They said the UB was tainted, demonic, not for our eyes. When I joined the Mormon church, I was required to cast aside any books that were not officially sanctioned. Consequently the big blue book went up in smoke in the fireplace, along with a couple of dozen astrology, channeled and psychology-cum-religious-hip-hip-hooray books. My LDS experience ran its eventually disappointing course though two marriages, and two great kids from my first marriage.
At long last, eighteen years after my first encounter, I began to pick up Big Blue again at the Barnes & Noble. I would read it for hours then set it sadly back on the shelf, still locked in the guilt of someone else’s dogma. I hoped hard that what I was absorbing wasn’t a brilliant hoax. I continued to be open, and the unified, sultry poetry of concise expressions of truth seeped in deeply.
On New Year’s Day 1997 I splashed out the $50 to buy my precious Urantia Book again. My suffocated spirit was insisting on room to breathe.
I’m ecstatic to say that today the UB is the most important book in my life. Not until 1998 did I finally break free of the chains of organized religion. I turned off my ego long enough to get to know myself and to learn that the kingdom was not some future reward, but was to be sought and experienced now!
