I was a teenager when Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught me about Absolute Being as a source of personal power, a way of discovering “greater fields of happiness.” But he rejected the idea in Western religions of a God who loves you personally. This suited me just fine when I was a young man who’d rejected his Christian church upbringing. I thought of the Absolute as much like “the Force” that Yoda instructs Luke Skywalker how to use in the Star Wars saga. Perhaps the Force was even innately Good as Plato spoke of it—Goodness as an absolute quality, the Perfect Form of goodness. The philosopher Jules Evans writes, “Plato thought our reason was divine, a fragment of God.”  But Plato’s God of Reason had no personal or lovable qualities.

http://philosophyforlife.org/philosophies-for-life/platonists/#sthash.pVJPIBWJ.dpuf

   My examination of these questions began when I made a mess of my life in the big city and was on a forlorn train trip back to my parents’ house. While gazing at the passing countryside out the window, I was overcome by emotion and started to pray for help until I stopped myself with the question, “What was I praying to?” Thinking reasonably, it seemed to me the unknowable Absolute Force would be indifferent to personal pleas although I believed its nature sustained, energized. “True prayer does not … appear until the agency of religious ministry is visualized as personal.” (The UB, 91:1.4, pg. 995)

   Was I trying to go back to the God of my Sunday school upbringing which I debunked as a childhood fairy tale? Was I on my knees praying because of weakness, a pathetic inability to deal with a crisis?

   Obviously I was confused and needed to sort out what I truly believed. I continued to read and study Asian religion and philosophy but this mostly added to my confusion because passages of scripture contradicted each other. After struggling for centuries with the question, spiritual teachers appeared unresolved about Bhagavan, personal nature, and Brahman, the impersonal aspect of the divine.

   Then I read The Urantia Book (The UB) and was astonished by its concept, “The personality of the Paradise Son is absolute and purely spiritual, and this absolute personality is also the divine and eternal pattern, first, of the Father's bestowal of personality upon the Conjoint Actor and, subsequently, of his bestowal of personality upon the myriads of his creatures throughout a far-flung universe.” (6:7.2, pg. 79)

   This information represented a huge irony to me. Where I had been struggling with an either/or “difference,” I actually got a both/and result, two sides of the same Deity. I eventually came to accept the new idea (for me) that the Absolute Being was also the God of love. This happened at the end of a very long struggle. But the question persists to this day. I hear the debate, is God a Person or an impersonal Force? Often in our modern secularized society, we also currently deal with the new aggressive doctrines of atheism.

   When you’re young, they tell you that you have great potential. It pleased me to hear that and it satisfied me temporarily. But I didn’t want to just have potential; I wanted to achieve something. I was partly influenced by our highly individualistic nation where personal motivation to achieve is prized. Our first desire as motivated individuals is to make our dreams real. The question occurred to me, would God be any less motivated than I? Why should God not dream as we do, to have the desire to realize his full potential as a personality? The old proverb, “A stream cannot rise higher than its source,” seemed truly insightful and accurate. I could not imagine that “the source” would possess anything less in its nature than we mere mortals living downstream.

   God had a dream that he wanted to bring to fruition. In my exploration of Hindu literature, I’d read the Rig Veda Creation Hymn that calls this the birth of desire, “first seed of mind.” God wished to be a creator, a creative artist, as well as a divine parent, a father as Jesus taught. He was perfect but also somehow incomplete without the actualization of his idea of nature and the rhythms of evolution. God wished to have the children of nature gathered around him.

   We learn from the Foreword of The UB, that “Total Deity is functional on the following seven levels” (I’ll quote just the first five levels which are most relevant to a consideration of my questions here, leaving out Supreme and Ultimate for the moment):

0:1.4 Static —self-contained and self-existent Deity.

0:1.5 Potential —self-willed and self-purposive Deity.

0:1.6 Associative —self-personalized and divinely fraternal Deity.

0:1.7 Creative —self-distributive and divinely revealed Deity.

0:1.8 Evolutional —self-expansive and creature-identified Deity. (0:1.4-8, pg. 2)

   We can readily observe that the universe is not just static, absolute and unchanging. We are witness to change, creativity, and evolution all around us.

   In Genesis 1:2, the “Spirit brooded over the face of the deep” and suddenly there was a wrinkle in the fabric of eternity. A great personality stirred like the first ripple across the surface of “the waters.” God differentiated himself, rising like a wave out of the Unqualified Absolute, achieving “liberation from the fetters of unqualified infinity through the exercise of … eternal free will,” (0:3.21, pg. 6) to begin a long roll from one end of eternity to the other. This picture I imagine is perhaps inaccurate. Levels of Total Deity are concurrent, coexisting all at once, not unfolding in phases, but my metaphor helps me to understand the different levels of Deity, how Deity is both static—self-contained, and yet also creative—self-distributive and divinely revealed.

   Once I accepted the reality of a Supreme Being, supreme albeit analogous in all aspects to my being, I was cognizant of an innate sense that we are part of a destiny that carries us to the other shore. We can’t see the far shore unless we use what some call the third eye, or the eye of faith. Locating it in our line of vision has to do with the “actualization of the Supreme” (117:4.9, pg. 1284).

   The impulse to create a self and define a direction for that self must have a relationship to the segregation of personality out of static, undifferentiated (absolute) reality. We choose difference, movement and a purpose for this creative act, and we share all these motivations with the Creator, the First Source, who originally instigated the movement.

   The teachings of Jesus expanded our horizons. He made a new revelation of an even higher aspect of the personality of God. “And so I give you this new commandment: That you love one another even as I have loved you. And by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you thus love one another.” (180:1.1, pg. 1944) When he gave his apostles this new commandment, Jesus emphasized the personal aspect of God who loved as a Father.

   "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Live in my love even as I live in the Father's love. If you do as I have taught you, you shall abide in my love even as I have kept the Father's word and evermore abide in his love." (180:2.2, pg. 1945)

   This was the great reward at the end of a long search, my discovery that I have a growing relationship with God the Person (really three Persons) as God the Father. And through Michael, our Creator Son, we are held in the embrace of the Eternal Son, the Absolute personality. A source of refreshment springs up within our weary souls. With water from the pure well, we slake the thirst brought on by our wanderings through the parched landscape of unanswered questions.