Hello Andre and Occerpa, I am not sure I understand the issue you are speaking to Occerpa and its associate with Andre. I keep reading your post above Occerpa, to glean and bring into my mind some clarity just what you are addressing. But let me address something I think is at least related, and that is the death mask of man is fully outsized in belief, but hardly mattering to the human who has died, and leaves the husk of the body behind to be buried.
The Urantia Book clarifies one aspect of the death mask (death mask = leaving the body behind to bury) by saying the body is merely a conveyance of life to contact environmental reality. Anyone who has thought about the matter will agree a lifeless form I call the death mask, is without any purpose and must be disposed of entirely. Theorists of many places on this planet, especially among the Christians, hold the body is useless and must be disposed of immediately. In India they make funeral pyres out of the deceased, put them on a raft, set it afire, and let it float down the River of Life, the Brahmaputra. Those pyres purify the soul to leave for the Buddha to take on in the after life. I do not mind people signifying it this way, but the Urantia Book signifies the after death view of the body as a useless form finally discarded to its own fate of material dissolution, and that is all it considers it to be, period.
Without epochal revelation-- and I do not quite know what you mean Occerpa speaking to "evolutionary revelation," which term means to me "self revelation" and no other type of evolution comes out of it. The church and religions are commodities of human thought mixed with the views of revelatory individuals such as the Brahmaputra River delivers to the gods of India. There is no process in India to decide judgement of the quality of the soul departed, but the Urantia Book makes it clear, there is judgement and the soul departing gets sorted out into various means of proceeding to heaven in many ways. I dare not speculate why they take this entire matter of body death as very minor to bury and forget about it as it must return dust to dust in the Urantia Book and in Christianity.
Let me say this: In my travels about this burial routine, I am fully aware of my distaste of the whole subject. I find it alienating and cold beyond my ability to comprehend why dematerialization is so fraught with days of ceremony, but I do understand the loss of the power of life to make contact with the material reality one is born into. Christianity concerns itself with life more than death, and Jesus himself never speaks much to it except as a transition. Only m an makes a big deal out of it to the point we go through expensive funerals and temples to the departed entirely. However, I know my dear mother left and I could not console myself she really was gone. When we received her ashes in a beautiful earn, I suggested to the funeral home it be buried as the urn with my departed human father too. That was done, but to be hones, there is nothing left to reverence except a picture I have of the urn in my Journal. There is stays into oblivion I am sure. However, my memory is more accurate at how cold it was to sit in a ten in the cemetery and wathc it disappear down a mechanical shaft to be buried underground. To this day it means absolutely nothing to me emotionally.
Now that is where we probably differ Occerpa and maybe Andre. That urn being buried beneath to a small vault that also held the remains of my biological father, means nothing to God or to man, anymore. To me it is a mechanical disposal, and the body of a parent disposed of in republican honor but without a single salute to the life it once held or a single care anymore forever. What the people of India do is at least a salute to the care that personality achieved on earth before it left. In North America, the box called a casket or otherwise, a headstone, or a plaque, and the matter is finished, done. The Urantia Book speaks to it merely as a discard, and I prefer to think of it that way myself and seek not to endlessly mourn the loss knowing full well the unsubstantial part of the departed is already well taken care as it is placed into the que of Judgement. Then that knowledge transfers to the mourner as it is "better hands, now" and off we go to finish our part of life then.
Here is MICHAEL OF NEBADON, to help finish this response:
"Ron you are familiar too much with departures, Your best friends were killed in a horrible place crash on Christmas Eve, your biological father lay in mouring a scant ten hours before they cremated him and so on. You had no real mourning for any of them as everything was cleaned up and buried in a matter of a day or two. But the Urantia Book makes it clear that what is left after death is life fully re-entered into, and that satisfyies you better than the church pronouncing rituals to bury the body. I clarify that with you in particular Ron, as you consider them transferred to a better system of life than you even have and are glad to let them reestablish life "up there" than worry what is left of them "down here."
"Yet you lament it is all so finished, and let the memory sentimentally speak to you with a tear now and then. You do not forget them ever, and even your friends who died so tragically Christmas Eve, have a full rampart of care even today. They are fully aware of your jocularity with them but must move ov as without you so to speak. They do and have and are no longer easily spoken to, but you persist slightly to remember them. They return with a squeeze of love and off they go into their daily routines up here. You seek to establish identify yet, but they are from being identified like you knew them any more, and the one called Gary is still deeply mourned as he had so much to give and his life taken crushed under a mechanical object.
"For reasons of state let it be known to the reader, they adhere to Ron yet too, and there is nothing left between them but the material memory, and Ron fully adheres to the idea they are not their bodies but their lives again and alive and very well so to speak all the time. Occerpa you run the gamut of caring and not caring, and that is Ron too. Andre you are scientist and hold things bombastically well and yet deep in the part of your heart for what once was. We all truly do that. I lost my father, Joseph, far too soon to identify with his wonderful sense of humor, and his trial to keep Mary pregnant again, as he mourned the loss of tow children after I was born, not still born, but out of fear by Mary she would make a mess and she hid herself to give birth and they suffocated. I am still mourning the loss of my little sister written about in the Urantia Book, as she died quite young in an accident playing with friends near the house and the wall fell on her too. Yet, she was vivacious and caring and came to me in a dream shortly after she was placed in burial, and told me it was a wonderful place to live again. We let it stand that way to my heart today as well.
"Jesus speaks to Ron frequently and well and Ron returns it with care and tears quite often. He is entering the last part of his natural human life, but care very little of what they have to bury. He has requested that nothing be left at his death and it is honored fully so there is ho need for clean up, but beware of all who request such things it leaves things undone on Urantia in this case. Ron has instructed his heir to plead innocence about the body's disappearance and he should as the heir is inopportune to really understand what Ron is fully about anymore. That said Ron has prepared a certified statement he hopes is read but we doubt it as man is sloppy and cannot make sense of anything he cannot feel, see, and touch. In any case Ron has to face a lot of turmoil again over this proposal as I, MICHAEL OF NEBADON, refuse to let him go without more service, such as to what I write here as well:
"Finally to you Occerpa, the loss of a child or the loss of a wife or the loss of someone else, such is so keenly felt by you, you are hard to collect your life back up again. Andre does not guide himself so much sentimentally, but is fully aware of loss and laments their passing so seriously he cannot work for some time again. That is our wish to you Ron, and that is to enjoy the prospect of returning "home," as you tend to call it, and for me to release you from the idea of Urantia service no more than to say we come to that service in a slightly different form.
"That is not satisfactory to you Occerpa, as it leaves a gap to fill you cannot do so for yourself, but Ron is quite a bandy coot and refuses to mourn dust, and insists he finish his preference for the end of life by finishing what he promised to do down here on Urantia. Up and down to Ron is heaven or hell too as he is just finished mourning the death of all in Gaza. He does so and leaves the future to ME to determine how he should proceed. He will proceed as you all proceed, nothing special, but I do leave one small character on Urantia to remember what he managed to do no one else has done for centuries on Urantia, and that was to fuse with an embarrass Adjuster who wanted "chariots of fire," to end this brilliant life of add and substract toget through a normal Urantia career without killing himself or others with him, as he refuses to live life normally, and as you all should yourselves. However let us not get into that any further and to say this:
"I, MICHAEL OF NEBADON, have asked the "powers-to-be" to let this life run a little longer than usual to finish the established decision to built free electricity broadcasts Ron has discover thanks to RAYSON, and to allow him to finish this life with an electrical plant that does these marvelous things for man in spite of man and his cruel views of decency. Other than that, the idea of the immaterial vs the material is a false argument at all Occerpa, as it contains only the fantasy of man trying to understand death without epochal revelation to speak to it much more clearly. I leave it at that for now. K MICHAEL OF NEBADON at your service."
Ron here - I do not feel I may have responded fully to the issues between you two as I cannot quite pick out what you are fully discussing. That is not you but my head is full of burrs over approaching anger at the loss of so many in wars again, and my distaste to leave things along temporarily over the proposed spiritual MISSIONS to our planet being so slowly developed I cannot fathom what they are doing easily at all at this point and just let it lie. Thank you all for reading through this response, and I look forward to more of these kinds of discussions which elicit epochal revelation from the Deities, because these discussions are substantial in a world hardly to notice its humanity is dying out at an alarming rate over much ado about nothing. K
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