Evolutionary Deity and Cosmic Spirituality

Truth is to be found neither in the thesis or the antithesis, but in the synthesis of the two.

—George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

In a scene near the end of the movie The Grapes of Wrath, the story’s hero, Tom Joad, is about to flee a rural camp in California that is overflowing with migrant farmworkers, most of them displaced Oklahoma farm families. Company thugs have been beating up the Okies to keep them from striking, and now a posse is out searching for Joad (played by Henry Fonda). In the middle of the night Joad wakes up scared. Resolving to take flight, he goes to Ma to say goodbye. In this dialogue, she asks him what he’ll do when he is on the run.

Tom: Maybe I can do somethin’ . . . maybe I can just find out something,’ just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom: Well, maybe it’s like Casey says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then . . .

Ma: Then what, Tom?

Tom: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark—I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look—wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build . . . I’ll be there, too.

Ma: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom: Me, neither, Ma, but—just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

This classic piece of Americana is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s idea of the collective soul and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over-Soul. And Tom Joad is right, I think. Our evolving soul is not merely some private possession; it’s actually “a little piece of a big soul.” And if Joad lives from “big soul,” he’ll “be everywhere,” as he puts it. (The collective soul is, after all, nonlocal.) The spirit of Joad will be out looking to spread justice, as well as fulfillment, to everyone.

Because injustice reigns on our world, “big-soul work” needs willing hands. Theologically speaking, there are righteous tasks to be done because the cocreative God of evolution—the evolving Supreme Being revealed in the Urantia Revelation—is an incomplete Deity-in-the-making.

The great oversoul evolves, but only when little souls contribute their “piece” to the big soul. As the UB puts it, “To the extent that we do the will of God in whatever universe station we may have our existence, in that measure the Supreme becomes one step more actual.” (117:0.1) It’s up to us and our divine collaborators, and that’s why it’s “somethin’ we need to be thinkin’ about.”

The evolving God of time and space is not omnipotent. It is a tragic fact that war, crime, and atrocities can and do take place during the current phase of this unfinished God’s evolutionary unfolding. And that’s why the “God of this world”¹²² may sometimes appear to us like the Demiurge of the Gnostics. (For a more thorough review, see chapter 6.) The ancient Christian Gnostics predated Darwin by eighteen hundred years. They simply could not envision an evolving universe, so they concluded that the material world—being so unfair and hellish—must have somehow “fallen” and was being held down by the malice of the Demiurge. Salvation, they thought, required escaping the illusory world of matter by uniting with the divine spark within that was provided by the high Gods in their merciful effort to circumvent the Demiurge.

Such is the cosmic escapism of Gnosticism. Its powerful logic has had a perennial impact on humankind, showing up in a variety of compelling teachings in the world’s wisdom traditions. These sincere teachers of old, with a few possible exceptions such as the Egyptians, had no pathway for conceiving of an evolving soul. They could not help but miss the evolutionary imperatives of soul-making and the need for political and social transformation on Earth. At the high point of the Axial Age, it was widely believed that there was nowhere to go but “up and out” toward union with the One. Liberation from the “prison of matter” could only be accomplished by shedding material desires—letting go of all bodily and worldly concerns.

Many of today’s teachers of monism and nondual spirituality, especially those following in the tradition of Ramana Maharshi, have successfully updated and restated for modern ears this classic preference for otherworldly bliss. But according to philosopher Steve McIntosh, nondualism of this sort misses what he calls “the evolutionary necessity of a spiritually real evolving soul.” The nondualist teachings that are currently so popular, he points out, conflate the Indwelling Spirit and evolving soul into a static “Higher Self.” (Of course, they don’t distinguish the unique personality either.) The nondual practitioner’s task, these new movements teach, is to disidentify with our illusory ego and realize the “always-already” presence of spiritual perfection in an as the Self. McIntosh writes:

These teachings leave little room for the evident truth of the evolving soul that is growing out of the interplay of the Higher Self and the ego-identity. . . . But if our spirituality has no place in its teachings for an evolving soul—if our conception includes only the relatively unreal ego and the everlast­ing and unchanging absolute self (or no-self)—then the spiritual value of what is evolving in our consciousness goes missing. Stated another way, if the goal is simply to overcome our identification with the lower self and recognize that the always-already-perfect nature of the Higher Self is who we are, then the spiritual reality of the “becoming” is collapsed or reduced to timeless “being” alone.¹²³

In the face of hard suffering, the impulse of the monist is to escape the pain and the darkness by collapsing the uncertainties of evolution into “timeless ‘being’ alone,” which at a minimum implies that evolutionary decision-action is ultimately meaningless and valueless. This fallacy of impartiality misses the richness of the architecture of evolutionary panentheism that, as McIntosh points out, maintains the creative polarity between time and eternity as well as a fruitful dialectic of the one and the many.

And the meeting point for this dialectic is the sacred triad within. On the one hand, the evolving universe depends on the human choice-experience that produces soul-making decisions. On the other, the Eternal Father cosponsors the effort through the gifts of the God Fragment and the unifying presence of the freewill personality. By revealing the hybrid nature of human selfhood—a self-system that is designed to be embedded in a God-centered evolutionary cosmology as an agent of change and continuity—the UB offers an essential correction to nondualism. This view of self and soul literally transcends but includes the monistic impulse, thereby correcting its tendency to nihilism.

But we don’t need to lose sight of the fact that nondual spirituality offers essential truths, even if one sided. For example, imagine that a nondual practitioner sitting in satsang is able to dissolve the witness consciousness and allow her vantage point to become nondual. Achieving and stabilizing this advanced state represents a series of choices that are, paradoxically, profoundly soul-making for her. Her efforts can, at least potentially, harvest the creative tension between the arrow of time and the stillness of eternal being. The bliss of the spiritual energy that she liberates by her practice generates profound well-being in her life; but if this attainment were to be consciously informed by a sense of evolutionary moral duty (with the help of what McIntosh would call a “dialectical epistemology”), the very same energy could overflow into equally profound political engagement. Such was the sadhana of Mahatma Gandhi, for example.

Preserving the polarity of time and eternity also has great import for our understanding of the meaning of suffering and injustice. If we adopt the UB’s version of evolutionary panentheism, the presence of so much evil and darkness should not cause bewilderment. Instead, we can logically infer that the direct Creators of our world—while being of origin from the Paradise Deites—are also nonperfect divine beings who are evolving right along with us. Just like us, but on a vastly greater scale, they too have access to divine gifts provisioned by existential Deity. But they don’t have the power to summarily remove evildoers and they do not and cannot, by divine fiat, create utopias. Instead, they must cocreatively evolve each imperfect planet by the technique of fostering creature choices in favor of the true, the beautiful, and the good. This profound quote sums up the point:

If man recognized that his Creators—his immediate supervisors—while being divine were also finite, and that the God of time and space was an evolving and nonabsolute Deity, then would the inconsistencies of temporal inequalities cease to be profound religious paradoxes. No longer would religious faith be prostituted to the promotion of social smugness in the fortunate while serving only to encourage stoical resignation in the unfortunate victims of social deprivation. When viewing the exquisitely perfect spheres of Havona [in the central universe], it is both reasonable and logical to believe they were made by a perfect, infinite, and absolute Creator. But that same reason and logic would compel any honest being, when viewing the turmoil, imperfections, and inequities of Urantia, to conclude that your world had been made by, and was being managed by, Creators who were subabsolute, preinfinite, and other than perfect. [116:0.1-2]

The Grand Project of the Ages

Process theology, an American invention of another kind, represents a philosopher’s version of Tom Joad’s “big soul.” It also agrees in broad outline with the UB’s evolutionary theology outlined above. But I noted in chapter 3 that process philosophy needs more clarification regarding one piece of the puzzle: how God can remain utterly transcendent while self-limiting his Deity manifestations in order to enable cosmic evolution.

As a Tom Joad might put it, the “big God” should remain infinite while making it possible for “little-gods-in-the-making.” Or, as the Urantia Revelation expresses it, time and eternity remain in creative polarity because infinity encompasses the capability of self-limitation. “The Father is infinite and eternal, but to deny the possibility of his volitional self-limitation amounts to a denial of this very concept of his volitional absoluteness.” [4:4:4]

As such, God as Primal Father is a self-emptying or kenotic God—as many contemporary theologians also teach.¹²⁴ As the UB explains, the Father delegates “every power and all authority that could be delegated” and bestows “all of himself and all of his attributes, everything he possibly could divest himself of, in every way, in every age, in every place, and to every person, and in every universe.” [10:1:2]

God is able bestow these gifts because of a self-imposed limitation on his infinitude. And significantly, this kenosis reflects “the outworking of the infinite love of the Universal Father.” [32:4:10] Accordingly, God calls forth the possibility of an evolving universe of loving relationships. The Father-Mother creates a finite space in which other subabsolute beings can engage in independent action for the sake of self-divinization. And the Divine Person also provides these finite beings with the resources they need to move forward with safe passage. A biblical analogy may help here: out of love, Yahweh parts the Red Sea to allow Moses and the chosen people to safely pass to the promised land.¹²⁵

In the first “step,” the Father-Infinite bestows all that is possible to bestow—including absolute personhood—on his coequal divine partners. God also sources Paradise, the gravitational and energetic center of all things. Then, together with the Son, the Father creates (in eternity) the central universe, and the Infinite Spirit “eternalizes” along with these eternal worlds. After the creation of the perfect central universe, the imperfect realms of space and time appear—the seven superuniverses comprising approximately seven hundred thousand inhabited galaxies—along with their evolving creatures.

In a sense, the perfect central universe is the thesis, the perfecting space-time universe is the antithesis, and the soul-making and cosmic individuating activity of God’s creatures is the synthesis.¹²⁶

The outworking of infinite love also supplies energy so that the evolving realms can operate sustainably. In eternity the Father unveils the Unqualified Absolute, the stupendous reservoir of energy that vitalizes the unfolding realms of space, wherein “we live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28]. This cosmic power supply is known to today’s visionary scientists as the quantum plenum, a technical concept inherited from quantum physics that I discuss in Appendix D, “The Quantum Plenum and Space Potency.” This nonliving energy that is inherently resident in space itself as space potency—along with the divine energy of life itself—“proceeds” from the Father-Infinite in a beginningless and endless stream to all universes.

God also lovingly delegates the oversight of the evolutionary domains to the evolving Deities of space-time known as the Supreme Creators. The so-called Creator Sons and Creative Daughters are the most important members of this corps.¹²⁷ Like all of the Supreme Creators, they are both divine and evolutional. They create and rule local universes with a love and mercy that reflects the Paradise Deities from whom they take origin. Operating as coequal male and female Deity complements, they carve out local universes of millions of inhabitable worlds and then create, out of the dust, the evolutionary biological lineages that produce the intelligent animals that we call humans—who then receive directly from the Father their unique personalities and God Fragments. (See Appendix B for more information about our local universe Creators, known to us as Mother Spirit and Christ Michael, who incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth.)

This beautiful quote encapsulates the overall work of the Supreme Creators:

Unqualified Paradise Deity is incomprehensible to the evolving creatures of time and space. . . . Therefore does Paradise Deity attenuate and otherwise qualify the extra-Paradise personalizations of divinity, thus bringing into existence the Supreme Creators and their associates, who ever carry the light of life farther and farther from its Paradise source until it finds its most distant and beautiful expression in the earth lives of the bestowal Sons on the evolutionary worlds. [116:2.3]

By attenuating or emptying himself in all of these ways, the Father sets the stage for the project of the ages: the grand dialectic between eternal God as existential and infinite and space-time Deity as evolutional and finite.

Here’s a summary description of this cosmic dialectic:

God removes himself from all-pervading perfection and infinitude. A nonperfect “gap” appears that we call the finite realm, in which creatures can evolve. This realm provides a space, conditioned by time, in which imperfect creatures can swing back to God as perfecting beings. As philosopher McIntosh puts it, God’s kenosis “leaves a vacuum which evolution rushes into, restoring organized information, value, and consciousness, increasingly by steps.”¹²⁸ And as the UB says, “Emptiness does have its virtue, for it may become experientially filled.” [117:2.8]

This dance of the perfect and the perfecting is like a joyous universal symphony in which one of the leitmotifs is descent and the other is ascent. God’s divine power and love descend from Paradise and, in passionate response, evolving beings ascend back to their Creator, streaming in to the center of all things from their home worlds out in the far periphery of the evolving universes. And this magnificent journey requires “a love supreme” to make it all transpire. Allow me to quote at length:

The enlightened worlds all recognize and worship the Universal Father, the eternal maker and infinite upholder of all creation. The will creatures of universe upon universe have embarked upon the long, long Paradise journey, the fascinating struggle of the eternal adventure of attaining God the Father. The transcendent goal of the children of time is to find the eternal God, to comprehend the divine nature, to recognize the Universal Father. God-knowing creatures have only one supreme ambition, just one consuming desire, and that is to become, as they are in their spheres, like him as he is in his Paradise perfection of personality and in his universal sphere of righteous supremacy. From the Universal Father who inhabits eternity there has gone forth the supreme mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.” In love and mercy the messengers of Paradise have carried this divine exhortation down through the ages and out through the universes, even to such lowly animal-origin creatures as the human races of Urantia. [UB: 1:0.3]

When described in this way, the universal dance seems almost unfathomable. It encompasses imperfect beings from trillions of inhabited planets, each striving to attain perfection by their own choice-experience. All of them become like “migrants headed to the north country of Paradise,” but in this case the resources for their journey are plentiful. As the First Source and Center of all things, God can meet all the capital requirements of the project. He provides the endless reservoir of energy, the strategic plan, the project design, the support personnel, and the final goal—a place on Paradise that is reserved for the pilgrims hailing from thousands of galaxies.

In the outward phase of God’s divine emanation (as it is revealed in the great dialectic), a self-limiting but self-distributing aspect of God descends into time and space in the form of what are sometimes called the Descending Sons of God. The creative work of these descending beings “incarnates” into evolving space-time reality as almighty power—a technical phrase (discussed later) that stands for the totality of the activity of the evolutionary realms. This outward phase of the dialectic is also known as primordial God in process theology.

During the inwardly moving phase of the dialectic (known as the consequent God in process theology), self-organization and evolutionary emergence is the great theme. Those ascenders who aspire to perfection “rock” back to the eternal center of all things. During their long, long journey to Paradise they actually do achieve perfection—that is, those who previously opted into Thought Adjuster fusion.¹²⁹

It is fascinating to note that the Creator Sons (and all other Descending Sons who incarnate on planets) are able to achieve an analogous fusion of unlike elements. By virtue of incarnating, these Creators “acquire the natures and cosmic viewpoints of their actual local universe children.” [116:4.9] They literally become the eternal synthesis of Creator and creature, containing the experiential essence of human nature in their divine being. For example, the soul and the human essence of our Jesus of Nazareth is a treasured possession that eternally resides in the bosom of Christ Michael, our local Creator Son.¹³⁰

And now, let’s factor in the role of the Supreme Being as we dive further into the divine dialectic.

I’ve often noted that the spiritual realities depicted in the UB are ultimately personal. Accordingly, the evolving universes are managed by the Supreme, a divine person-in-the-making. She could well be described as the orchestrator of the cosmic symphony, but she does so from behind the scenes; as we will see shortly, her divine personality is currently enshrouded.

The Supreme is, first of all, the universal synthesis of the incoming and outgoing activity of the great symphony, we are told in the UB. She portrays the sum total of the cocreative interaction of the creatures and the Supreme Creators, as explained in this statement:

The evolving divine nature of the Supreme is becoming a faithful portrayal of the matchless experience of all creatures and of all Creators in the grand universe. In the Supreme, creatorship and creaturehood are at one; they are forever united by that experience which was born of the vicissitudes attendant upon the solution of the manifold problems which beset all finite creation as it pursues the eternal path in quest of perfection and liberation from the fetters of incompleteness. [117:1:6]

The Supreme is an on-the-fly unifier of Creator and creature experience. At any one point, she is the up-to-the-moment summa or “embodiment” of evolution in all domains. The Supreme is, simply put, the product of all experience. She grows to completion in and through the efforts of evolving creatures and evolving Creators. She encompasses and totalizes the choice-experience of all space-time spheres as well as of all higher-dimensional worlds.

Think of her as the cosmic Mississippi River. She receives and registers within herself¹³¹ the incoming stream of the experiences of incarnating avatars such as Jesus; the steady flow of the skillful efforts of divine administrators at all levels; the rivers of uncountable ministering activities of the angelic orders; and the rivulets of all the soul-makers hailing from the trillions of lowly planets.¹³² All of this time-space activity contributes to the emerging experiential nature of the Supreme; nothing of lasting value is ever lost, including the souls and personalities of those who don’t survive. These, too, contribute something of value.

But Supreme is even more than this. She is actually more akin to a living and personal organism whose “evolving soul” is actualizing within her.¹³³ In fact, the Supreme has direct analogues to our inner sacred triad, whose selfhood reality is evolutional; her divine selfhood is also in the making over time.

We generally see ourselves as comprising body, mind, soul, spirit, and personality. In the same way, the Supreme has a composite identity. Roughly speaking, her components are technically known as the Almighty Supreme (her “body and soul,” which is the entirety of the energies, personalities, and structures of space-time); the Supreme Mind (bestowed directly by the Infinite Spirit); and God the Supreme (the Supreme’s so-called “spirit-personality” derived from the Eternal Trinity).

In other words, she is not just an evolutional “big soul.” She has real personhood, mindedness, and self-awareness. In her guise as God the Supreme, she even has will, for we read that she is a “volutional and creative participant in [her] own deity actualization.” [117:3.7]

But mark well this odd circumstance: her personality is not contactable by the evolving universes. It abides out of reach in the perfect domains of the central universe—and actually resides on a unique world therein.

Like all other personalities, God the Supreme (God as the Supreme person) is unchanging. Her personality functions as a unifier—much like ours does—but in her case it unifies and systematizes the activities of the body-mind-soul-spirit complex of the grand cosmos. But she will not be available as a person operating recognizably in the space-time realms until all of her constituent elements (i.e., the Almighty Supreme) achieve evolutionary completion. In that awesome moment, she will emerge for all of us to engage with—and will be designated by the formal title of “the Supreme Being.” Only then will she be contactable as a universal Person in her own right, possessing a fully integrated mind, body, soul, spirit, and personality.

Again, this is much like our own growth challenge. Just as we have to unify all the components of our selfhood in order to achieve adult maturity and much later undergo Thought Adjuster fusion, so does the Supreme have to “fuse” all of her parts into one integral whole.

You and I engage in soul-synthesis by striving to actualize higher meanings and values in our life experiences while embedded in the vehicle of our body-mind; and the Supreme goes through a roughly similar process, but on a gigantic collective scale. This is known as power-personality synthesis—an advanced concept in the UB that is a bit beyond the scope of our discussion. But in brief: The aggregate almighty power of the evolving universes (her body and soul), through the meditation of mind (her Supreme Mind), fuses “at the fulfillment of time” with God the Supreme, her spirit-personality. When this jubilee event of the ages occurs, an exalted Deity whose personhood is resident in the central universe literally unites, forever, with the entirety of the perfected space-time universe—that is, all of its perfected energies and all of its perfected beings, and that means all of us.

The upshot is that the Supreme Being has a telos. Her evolution will culminate when all of us, creatures and Supreme Creators alike, succeed in perfecting ourselves and loving one another with the love of the Father-Mother of all Creation. It is then that she moves from a noncontactable status to being universally contactable.

But must you or I be around for this greatest of all festivals? It turns out that making our unique contribution is highly desirable, but it is not necessary that we participate. If any one of us rejects the path of self-perfection, someone else will fill the experiential void we leave behind. This is a great tragedy for us, but not a lasting barrier to the Supreme.

The great challenge that has been given to mortal man is this: Will you decide to personalize the experiencible value meanings of the cosmos into your own evolving selfhood? or by rejecting survival, will you allow these secrets of Supremacy to lie dormant, awaiting the action of another creature at some other time who will in his way attempt a creature contribution to the evolution of the finite God? But that will be his contribution to the Supreme, not yours. [117:4.12]

For a fanciful analogy to the culminating event of cosmic evolution, think of the Supreme as the impresario of a cosmic opera who modestly remains backstage. We cannot personally contact her or actually see her visage until the curtain falls at the end of the performance. When everyone in the great performance hall (including the audience, the singers, the chorus, the orchestra, and those back stage) achieves perfection at the end of the great opera (a very lengthy one indeed), she then saunters out for the lengthy applause and loud cheers. She takes a slow bow. Flowers are thrown. And thus begins the greatest party of all time, in which all things are shared universally.¹³⁴ This quote explains it in a more sober fashion, as only the UB can:

Man’s urge for Paradise perfection, his striving for God-attainment, creates a genuine divinity tension in the living cosmos which can only be resolved by the evolution of an immortal soul; this is what happens in the experience of a single mortal creature. But when all creatures and all Creators in the grand universe likewise strive for God-attainment and divine perfection, there is built up a profound cosmic tension which can only find resolution in the sublime synthesis of almighty power with the spirit person of the evolving God of all creatures, the Supreme Being. [116:7.6]

Genuine God-realization dates from our fusion with the Indwelling Spirit—our Father Fusion. Fusion is, with very rare exceptions, unattainable in the flesh; we achieve this status generally on the fifth or sixth mansion world of the ascendant career, we are told. A finaliter, by contrast, is hundreds of levels beyond the afterlife status of God Fusion, having progressed tens of millions of years up the line. Individuals who reach that level enjoy an inconceivably vast career in the higher worlds of the afterlife.

So, what exactly does it take to get there? Hindus, most Buddhists, and many New Agers may think of themselves as having inhabited scores of bodies in their rounds of reincarnation on Earth, before they finally get “off the wheel” to disappear into the void of Brahman. And Christians may believe in the transactions of the Last Day, when the elect are bodily resurrected from the grave and ascend directly to heaven to dwell in their body of glory with Christ in eternity. But a finaliter, we are told, has progressed through 580 glorified embodiments in the educational worlds of the higher dimensions. In other words, they have ascended through 580 spheres of light, being re-keyed (in UB terminology) with new bodies on each higher world. Additionally they have sojourned for ages in the central universe training worlds, outside of the evolving realms.

Their intellectual education might be compared to having received several thousand PhDs after being trained to perfection in all disciplines of study. But they have also advanced to an equivalent degree in socialization, having fraternized with ascenders from millions of planets in situations that would make the Star Wars bar scene look like a bland Starbucks in a white suburb of Chicago. They’ve been taught and ministered to and companioned by myriads of celestial beings of all orders, high and low. Plus, of course, finaliters have attained levels of spiritual realization utterly beyond our conception.

Here is how the UB attempts to depict their final embrace with the Universal Father on Paradise: “Some day, doubt not, you shall stand in the divine and central presence and see him, figuratively speaking, face to face.” [5:1.9]

Having recognized the Father on Paradise, finaliters will not only have attained perfection but also completed their preparation for a new career in their post-perfection existence. In addition to their training in all subjects and practices imaginable and unimaginable, we are told that they have been given eons of education in administration—not for running a heavenly hotel or cosmic educational center but rather specialized training in universe administration.

And their final destiny? Out beyond the inhabited galaxies are the vast uninhabited realms—those billions of galaxies in outer space that, we are told, are not yet populated. And here the finaliters will pursue the adventure of the coming ages. They will embark on this voyage of future eternity only after the Supreme Being has personalized, in that moment when the last of the inhabited galaxies of the space-time realms become fully settled utopias of light and life. And even then there will be much, very much, more adventure to be had.

¹²² “Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.” (2 Corinthians 4 NLV)

¹²³ See The Presence of the Infinite, p. 177.

¹²⁴ Among these are Philip Clayton (a Protestant) and John Haught (a Catholic).

¹²⁵ This image is suggested by Stuart Kerr, author of the first full-length book about the Supreme Being entitled God, Man, and Supreme–Origin and Destiny (CreateSpace, 2016).

¹²⁶ This idea appears in the work of Steve McIntosh in Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins (Select Books, 2012) and is also found in the writings of William S. Sadler, Jr., one of the original Contact Commissioners of the Urantia Revelation. He is the author one of the very best secondary works on the UB available, A Study of the Master Universe: A Development of Concepts in the Urantia Book (Second Society Foundation, 1968).

¹²⁷ In the local universes the Creators evolve: “The [Creative Daughter] presence . . . evolves from a living power focus to the status of the divine personality of a Universe Mother Spirit; the Creator Son evolves from the nature of existential Paradise divinity to the experiential nature of supreme sovereignty. The local universes are the starting points of true evolution, the spawning grounds of bona fide imperfect personalities endowed with the freewill choice of becoming cocreators of themselves as they are to be.” [116:4.8]

¹²⁸ Steve McIntosh, Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins (Select Books, 2012), p. 175.

¹²⁹ Here is a helpful summary in UB phraseology: “In the persons of the Supreme Creators the Gods have descended from Paradise to the domains of time and space, there to create and to evolve creatures with Paradise-attainment capacity who can ascend thereto in quest of the Father. This universe procession of descending God-revealing Creators and ascending God-seeking creatures is revelatory of the Deity evolution of the Supreme, in whom both descenders and ascenders achieve mutuality of understanding, the discovery of eternal and universal brotherhood. The Supreme Being thus becomes the finite synthesis of the experience of the perfect-Creator cause and the perfecting-creature response.” [117:1.2]

¹³⁰ By engaging in and completing a series of such incarnating activities over eons of time, they achieve the undisputed sovereignty of the local universe of their creation. When our Creator Son completed his life on Earth as Jesus, that was his final bestowal in the likeness of one of his creatures. After his resurrection and ascension, he became the “Master Son” of our local universe. See 21.5.

¹³¹ The revelators state that they are not certain, but it is believed that these “registrations” of creature experience occur through the persons of the Supreme Creators. See 117:5, “The Oversoul of Creation.”

¹³² The aggregators of these “flowing waters” are the seven superuniverses, the great agglomerations of thousands of inhabited galaxies.

¹³³ In this connection see “The Living Organism of the Grand Universe” at 116:7.

¹³⁴ “Since all creature experiencing registers in, and is a part of, the Supreme, when all creatures attain the final level of finite existence, and after total universe development makes possible their attainment of God the Supreme as an actual divinity presence, then, inherent in the fact of such contact, is contact with total experience.” [117:5.14]