The Urantia Book Paper 111 - The Inner Life

Recognition is the intellectual process of fitting the sensory impressions received from the outside world into the memory patterns of the individual. Understanding connotes that these recognized sensory impressions and their associated memory patterns have become integrated or organized into a dynamic network of principles. Meanings are derived from a combination of recognition and understanding. Meanings are nonexistent in a world wholly material or sensory. Meanings and values are perceived only in the innermost or supermaterial spheres of human experience.



All the advances of true civilization are born in this inner world of mankind. It is only the inner life that is truly creative. Civilization can hardly progress if the majority of the youth of any generation dedicated their interests and energies to the materialistic pursuits of the sensory or outer world. The inner and outer worlds have a different set of values. Any civilization is in jeopardy when three quarters of its youth are engaged in materialistic professions and the pursuit of the sensory activities of the outer world. Civilization is in danger when youth neglect to interest themselves in ethics, sociology, eugenics, philosophy, the arts, religion and cosmology.



Only in the higher levels of the superconscious mind as it intrudes into the spiritual realm of human experience can you find those higher concepts in association with effective original models that will contribute to building a better and more enduring civilization. Personality is inherently creative, but it works well only in the inner life of the individual. Snow crystals are always hexagonal in form, but no two are identical. Children correspond to types, but no two are exactly identical, even if the twins. Personality is consistent with the types but is always unique.



Happiness and joy originate in the inner life. You can not experience real joy all by yourself. A solitary life is fatal to happiness. Even families and nations will enjoy life more if they share it with others.  You can not completely control the external world -the environment. Is the creativity of the inner world that is most subject to your direction because there your personality is so largely liberated from the fetters of the laws of antecedent causation. It exists in association with personality a limited sovereignty of will.



Since this inner life of man is truly creative, each person has the responsibility to choose whether this creativity shall be spontaneous and wholly haphazard or controlled, directed , and constructive. How can a creative imagination produce worthy children when the stage on which it acts is already preoccupied by prejudice, hate, fears, resentments, revenge and intolerances? Ideas can originate in the stimuli from the outside world, but ideals are born only in the creative realms of the inner world. Currently the world 's nations are led by men who have a superabundance of ideas, but great poverty of ideals. This is the explanation of poverty, divorce, war , and racial hatreds.



This is the problem: if the man has free will is endowed with powers of creativity in the inner man, then must we recognize that freewill creativity embraces the potential of destructiveness by free will. And when creativity turns destructiveness, you are confronted with the devastation of evil and sin, oppression, war and destruction. Evil is a partiality of creativity which tends toward disintegration and eventual destruction. All conflict is bad in that it inhibits the creative function of the inner life it is a species of civil war in the personality.
Inner creativity contributes to ennoblement of character through personality integration and selfhood unification. It is forever true: The past is unchangeable; only the future can be changed by the ministry of the present creativity of the inner self. 

Presented by a Solitary Messenger of Orvonton