The Urantia Book
PAPER 65
THE OVERCONTROL OF EVOLUTION
Sponsored by a Life Carrier of Nebadon resident on Urantia.
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.