It was July 1989, and I was at a friend’s house party. The entire time my attention kept getting drawn over to large blue book sitting by itself on a small table next to the window. It was pushed back and out of the way, but for me it was like a beacon - like the book was radiating this bright blue light just for me to see. No one else seemed to be noticing anything out of the normal. I learned later that was called a luminous experience. It was powerful; thirty-three years ago, and the memory’s like yesterday.
Eventually that night, I went over to the book. Like I said, it was big – almost twelve inches tall, several inches thick, and several pounds heavy. Over a million words written on over 2097 pages of biblical paper. And, as I scanned some of what was inside, I went into mild shock. It was hard to believe what I was reading, yet I felt myself being drawn to it.
The host of the party came over and stood next to me. Again, this was a telling moment. I sensed this woman, whether she knew it or not, was being used as a conduit to get that book into my hands. As it turns out, she had been given the Urantia Book by a guy who would later be a friend for many years. And today I’m using another copy of the Urantia Book that he gave me much later in life, after I had lost mine.
I took the book home, and today it looks like that night long ago was the start of this project. Though, as you’ll read, it’s one effort of several over time.
The Urantia Book has influenced me more than any other book I’ve read. It was also the catalyst for entering college at 44 years old to explore the possibility of human sovereignty, a prerequisite for ending war on Earth according to the Urantia Book.
With all of that said, I still hold the Urantia material lightly. I don’t take it as gospel, or in any way the absolute word of God. While I support those maintaining the original version of the document for future generations, that doesn’t mean it’s sacred or that it can’t be adapted to be better accepted by people of different eras.
I was thirty-one years old when I first read the Urantia Book. I was five years into a seven-year apprenticeship program to become a journey power linesman out of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Works (IBEW) Fairbanks, Alaska, Local 1547. I was married, out of work, and we had a two-year old son named Zachariah. While I was bright and inquisitive and I’d read more than most of the people around me, I was still uneducated in any kind of formal sense. The Urantia Book, for me, was like trying to read Greek. But I was ready to grow into the experience.
It took me at least a year to get through the revelation the first time. I remember being scared to start it. So, in the beginning my exploration was mostly of the type where you open the book up to some page and just start reading. I remember times sitting at the kitchen table, my head in my hands as I stared down at the pages trying to understand what I was seeing. Sometimes it’d take thirty minutes or more just to get through a single paragraph.
But it was more than just the big words and unfamiliar vocabulary that was throwing me. It was also the writing style, which seemed odd and unworldly. And throughout it all there was this blending of things familiar on the one hand, with things that were new and strange on the other. I felt like I was either being shammed, or for some reason, being groomed for something unknown. And somewhere out there flittering on the edge of my mind was the feeling that I had known or heard about this book before.
As the years wore on, almost every page of my original Urantia Book, and a copy of the Concordex, by Clyde Bedell, were filled with highlights or finely scribbled notes in pencil. By the time I lost my copies of those books about five years ago, each was so worn the title couldn’t be read and both spines had failed and needed to be fixed with a tube of construction caulking. If you find it, you’ll know it.
My name’s written inside the cover and I’m offering a $50 reward. It’s probably in the Eugene, Oregon, area.
Eventually, I got the urge to write about the Urantia Book in a way my pole-partners could understand. Alaskan linesmen are the gods of the trade and Fairbanks was our Mt. Olympus; there are none in the world tougher or smarter. But we were still linesman, not scholars. In other words, hardly any of the guys I was working with could’ve or would’ve tackled reading the book itself.
To be clear: reading ability is not itself an indicator of innate intelligence. Reading and education, globally, are a privilege that varies greatly across the world. And even if someone can read, many don’t or are intimidated by doing so. Especially with a book like the Urantia revelation.
This was in the late 1990’s. The internet and email and Macintosh computers were just coming out. At least for us in Alaska. My first effort to spread the the Urantia revelation was a newsletter. My goal was to counter fear-based ideas about God. These newsletters were five or six pages long – all single spaced very dense and grammatically flawed writing. As you’d expect, that didn’t work.
Another effort to promote the Urantia Book had to do with my best friend, Butch, who had difficulty being inside a classroom. Something had happened when he was a young lad in grade school. He and I never could really pinpoint what it was, because he’d blocked the memories around it. But the anxiety of being in a classroom setting overwhelmed him. This limited his education to an extent, and reading the Urantia Book just wasn’t going to happen.
But Butch was interested in it. On Sundays, we’d get together for our guy-time in his garage slash man-cave, and the Urantia Book was always a major topic of discussion. His wife had joined one of the churches in town, and he was questioning a lot of the intolerance he was hearing and seeing in that community. So, I started recording the papers about Jesus’ life on to cassettes. Each of these recordings was between forty-five and sixty minutes long, and he’d listen to them as he drove the shuttle bus back and forth between our town of Delta Junction, and Fairbanks, a two-hour run up the road.
This plan worked, and it was one of the most rewarding. Butch was grateful for the effort, and he listened to those recordings almost every day. I could see the ideas taking root, and maturing him into a finer man. And, while Butch played the social part he needed to in our community, in his heart he’d dropped the fear-based ideas of God that surrounded him. Instead, he opted for the love-based truth that an actual part of God is in all of us, and that nothing in the kosmos, not a priest or religion or some evil spirit, has any influence what-so-ever on the person’s spiritual well-being.
Butch was exactly one month older than me. He passed on from pancreatic cancer when we were 55-years-old. If the Urantia Book is true, then right now my friend is progressing through the Mansion Worlds: 560 spheres of increasing spiritual reality. He’s now in a body that doesn’t have to worry about disease, and knowing Butch, he’s working every angle there’s to work in the Morantia Realm. Miss you brother, and when we meet again it’ll be you guiding me, old friend.
The next idea I came up with makes me both proud, and cringe. I decided it was time to introduce Zak and his mom, Tina, to the Urantia Book.
I’m proud in the sense that I was wanting to help my family and taking responsibility for our spiritual growth. Zak was more my focus than Tina. That makes sense, he was my son and a kid needing guidance; she was an adult with her own ideas.
As for the “cringe” part, I had them sit and listen to me read the entire Part 4 of the Urantia Book, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.” Yeah, it took months.
Okay, it wasn’t that bad.
Here’s what I did. This was somewhere around the first of the year, 2000. I was homeschooling Zak for seventh and eighth grades because the school system in our town had imploded. My great idea was to start our school day by reading to Zak and his mom one paper, or chapter, a day. The goal was to time it so we finished the story on Easter a few months later in the year. So, I’d wake Zak up an hour early and he’d go to our bedroom and get in bed next to his mom. I’d bring Tina her coffee, then I’d sit down on the floor with my back up against the wall and read to them.
Yes, I took more pleasure out of this than they did. And yes, half the times I’d look up and they’d both be asleep. But that’s okay, we got through it.
At the end of 2001, life changed. I left Alaska and started my academic career the spring term of 2002 at the University of Oregon, Eugene. I was forty-four years old and a full-time college boy complete with back-pack, ten-speed, long hair, four or five part-time jobs, and growing student debt. I entered the academy with the goal of earning my PhD, and I designed my own program around degrees in international studies, religious studies, and Spanish.
I had two primary goals:
1. To explore the Urantia revelation’s idea of human sovereignty ending war on Earth.
2. To find out if I, personally, had anything original to offer our world, and if so, do it. But, if I didn’t have anything special to offer, then my plan was to find someone who does, and give them my support (Elon Musk, I might be looking for a job!).
But the undergraduate level of college is not where one challenges academic dogma: It’s the force-fed part of higher education, and it’s where the gate-keepers try to keep undesirable academic trouble makers from continuing on to their PhD. For me, it was a constant effort not to just scream “Bullshit!” at the top of my lungs.
It wasn’t until the year-long break before my master’s program that I could try and meld the Urantia Book with my new education. This approach was based on the idea of us each having a personal relationship with God, and qualifying our actions based on the degree of truth, beauty, and goodness they contain. The result was a short book titled, God Refined: A Proposal for Peace. It was much better than my previous efforts, but it was still too laden with “me” and my hang-ups.
The 3-year master’s program in integral theory at John F. Kennedy University, San Francisco, was the most intense academic experience of my life. It was so far over the top in work and expectations that almost no one else survived and completed the full three years of classes. I still don’t think I’ve recovered.
But the master’s program was also where I could finally approach the Urantia material as an academic. This was tricky, because the book is of unknown and questionable origin. It makes wild claims, and counters key aspects of our culture’s dominate spiritual beliefs. But at the same time, it speaks of historical and scientific facts that were unknown when the Urantia Book was written, and yet, have been found to be correct. This makes the Urantia Book unique among all other spiritual texts on the planet. So, I wrote a paper for one of my classes using integral theory to examine Jesus as he’s described in the Urantia Book. That paper was accepted, and a few years later I rewrote it as my first peer-reviewed article published in an academic journal. It’s titled, “Integral Christ: Identifying the Kosmic Address of the Christ of the Urantia Revelation,” and it’s published in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 5(3), pages 157 – 174.
A few years later, author Byron Belitsos quoted from my article in his new book, Your Evolving Soul: The cosmic spirituality of the Urantia Revelation.
In a section of Evolving Soul that deals with the melding of the human personality and it’s Thought Adjuster, Belitsos writes:
“In a breakthrough interpretation, Urantia Book scholar Robert Kezer has mapped onto this…model his understanding of Jesus’s growth to perfection...Kezer states:
“According the Urantia Revelation, Christ achieved permanent nondual realization in his thirty-first year when he went into isolation for six weeks on the slopes of Mt. Hermon for the purpose of completing the work of mastering his human mind. During this period, he finished his “mortal task of achieving the circles of mind-understanding and personality control.” [134:7.6–7] In effect, this terminated the period of his mortal bestowal—the period of being known as the “son of man”—and in doing so he met God’s requirement of fully experiencing life as a mortal [and demonstrated] the qualities of a unified personality.115
Soon after, Kezer continues, Jesus presented himself to John the Baptist on the shores of the Jordan. He is now “a mortal of the realm who had attained the pinnacle of human evolutionary ascension. . . . Perfect synchrony and full communication had become established between the mortal mind of Jesus and the Indwelling Spirit Adjuster.” [136:2.2]”
The Integral Christ, article is an academic presentation and a bit heavy. But the conclusion is more personal, and for me, the gem of that writing. So, I recommend that you read the conclusion first, and then decide if you want to dive into the deeper analysis in the rest of the paper.
My doctorate work was on civil disobedience: How to use nonviolent methods to counter violent oppression. Gandhi and King of course come to mind, of course, but they also carry the implication that one needs to be a saint or adopt certain religious principles to participate in those types of actions. I found that this isn’t the case, and that the values and principles one holds dear are also reason enough to participate.
In the conclusion of my PhD dissertation, I present the idea of the Project for the People’s Global Mandate (PPGM). This is my first attempt to find our path to human sovereignty. Almost all cultures and religions, at their highest levels of understanding, share common values. The PPGM is an attempt to identify those common values, and with the internet and instantaneous communications, develop a global politic around those shared beliefs and enforce this new global constitution through decentralized civil resistance progressing as needed from the local to national to global level. In other words, humanity united globally through shared values and then forcing all people, governments, and corporations to conduct their and our business according to those shared values.
After receiving my PhD, I wrote my first novel, The Boétie Legacy and a World in Peril. In Legacy I present the idea of the PPGM, and I tie it to the original idea in the Urantia revelation. The story is also used to bring people past the traditional idea of enlightenment, all is One, that continues to confuse our relationship with God. In other words, yes, all is One, but there’s more. When the mortal personality melds with God to form a new eternal soul, that soul is itself unique from all others in the vast kosmos. In other words, I’m Bobby flavored God, you’re Jane flavored God, and on and on. All one, yet each unique.
This brings us to now.
The Urantia revelation states that the life and teachings of Jesus contain the most important knowledge we can gain in this lifetime.
The Son of Man: Urantia project is designed to make Jesus’s story more accessible to people, and then those who wish to do so can read the original text.
After the first drafts are all published, I’ll review the comments received over the next year or so, re-edit, and then republish the papers in final form. The goal is to then translate everything into Spanish for Latin America, and go on from there.
I’ll post additional articles and commentary as I’m able. Some of these papers will go deeper into the Urantia material, and others will be my ideas on how to integrate the lessons into our lives and personal spiritual practice. But please be patient with me. I’m a bit overwhelmed putting this together, and life in Ecuador is a bit shaky between a failing state, social unrest, and drug cartels battling it out for territory. It’s bad, and getting worse.
Some people have suggested that my Son of Man: Urantia, project is sacrilegious. In other words, that it is extremely disrespectful toward something sacred, which means something of God that deserves veneration. This idea is not supported in the Urantia revelation: The Urantia Book is not sacred, it’s not to be venerated, and Jesus supported the idea of others preaching his teachings in their way.
Finally, I’m still not sure how I’m going to fund this project. But I need to, because I need to feed my family. I really don’t want to do subscriptions, and I doubt that would work anyway. Also, I want Son of Man: Urantia, available to anyone who wants access to greatest story on Earth, because that’s the whole reason for the project. So, I’m looking at sponsorships, asking for donations, or any other ideas you fine people may have.
Okay, everyone. Welcome onboard, and enjoy the journey!
Bob
updated 19 December 2022