Ch. 39, Rodan of Alexandria
“Son of Man: Urantia,” 2nd edition
Rodan of Alexandria
On Sunday morning, September 18th Andrew told everyone to take a week off. All of them except for Thomas and Nathanial went to visit their friends and families. Jesus stayed to himself and managed to get almost a full week of rest. Thomas and Nathanial spent their time talking with a Greek philosopher, Rodan of Alexandria. He had been brought into the kingdom by one of Abner’s groups. Rodan had come to Magadan wanting two things—to obtain a copy of the gospel of the kingdom, and to talk with Jesus about how he should harmonize his philosophy with Jesus’ new teachings. Jesus welcomed Rodan to the camp but he declined to talk with him. Instead, he told Thomas and Nathanial to listen to what he had to say and to then in turn teach Rodan the gospel.
Rodan’s Greek Philosophy
Monday morning Rodan began what turned out to be ten lectures to Thomas, Nathanial, and about two dozen other believers who just happened to be at the Magadan camp. In summary, Rodan said that life is based on urges, lures, and desires. To develop a strong character—a commanding personality—a person has to transform those drives into the social art of living: that a person’s material goals have to morph into higher spiritual desires.
The faster our civilization advances and the more complex it becomes, the harder it will be to develop strong characters and convert our base desires into a higher order of life. If progress is to continue, humanity must relearn how to live every ten generations. And if humanity becomes too smart and advances even more quickly we will need to relearn how to live every generation. If our highest ideals of how to exist together do not keep pace with our technology or the systems that frame our lives, people will fall back to simply meeting life’s basic urges and neither humanity nor our societies will ever mature.
Social maturity is the measure of the people’s willingness to give up the immediate satisfaction of getting what they want now, for the delayed satisfaction of more permanent and soul-progressing ideals. But the real marker of a society’s level of development is the willingness of the people to put aside the goal of an easy life, and instead show the courage to walk the active, uncertain, and often unsettling path into undiscovered spiritual realities.
Animals respond well to the urge to live but humanity can create an art of living, even though most people only ever live as animals. We can convert the goal of staying alive into the desire for higher levels of spirituality. People have the ability to choose—to make the choice to live in ways that lead to spiritual ecstasy. People not only have the ability to recognize values and understand the meaning of things, they are aware that they are actually having those thoughts and making those decisions. Animals never question why they are alive; they do not know the meaning of life so they never worry about it. But neither do they commit suicide. The fact that people kill themselves shows that they elevated themselves from living like animals, but were unable to survive the chaos moving to higher levels of spiritual life.
When people have the courage to forgo their animal nature and instead live by higher spiritual values, which is a path of adventure and uncertainty, they have to expect emotional turmoil—times of doubt, conflict, and unhappiness. At least that will be the case until the person regains some stability: until they reach a certain degree of emotional and intellectual maturity. Traits like worry, laziness, and discouragement show that a person is still not morally mature. Humanity is faced with two problems: how to help the individual mature, and how to do the same for the entire race. When people have grown up morally and emotionally, they treat others with tolerance and tenderness and look at less mature people with the same kind of love and consideration that parents do their children.
A successful life is nothing more or less than mastering the art solving common problems. The first step is recognizing that there is a problem, and its importance. The biggest mistake is to let fear stop us from meeting adversity. The next mistake is not letting go of our false feelings of safety and security once we realize that we were wrong: we have to admit our jealousy of others, get rid of our favorite prejudices, and drop our feelings of self-importance. It takes a brave and honest person to face and accept without fear what a sincere logical mind discovers.
To find the best solution to any problem requires that the person’s mind is free of bias, passion, and anything else that may cloud the issue. Solving life’s problems requires courage and sincerity: only brave and honest souls can boldly follow the leading of a fearless mind. To reach this level of mental freedom requires a passion bordering on religious zeal, and that craving has to have a strong enough lure to cause the person to set out on a path filled with material and intellectual hazards.
Even though people may have the honesty and bravery to meet life’s problems, they cannot expect success without the ability to get along with others and gain their support: they must have tact and tolerance. But the best way to solve life’s problems I learned from your master, from Jesus. And that is to isolate oneself and worship God. By going into meditation and talking with his Father in heaven he not only gains the wisdom and strength to meet conflicts, but also the energy needed to solve problems at a spiritual level. Still, correct techniques for meeting life’s problems will not overcome defects in the person’s personality or a lack of hunger for true righteousness.
I am impressed with Jesus’ habit of going off to meditate to look for new wisdom and increased energy. He quickens life’s purpose by releasing himself to God, and in the process refining his personality and ability to see the truth. And he does all of this with a singular purpose—to glorify God and to enact his favorite prayer, “Not my will, but yours be done.”
Jesus’ practice of going off by himself to worship and meditate relaxes him and renews his mind. This habit inspires the soul, does away with weakening fear, gives the person the courage to bravely meet life’s problems, and infuses them with the knowledge that they are one with God. The relaxation that comes from worship relieves tension and strengthens the personality. All of these ideas plus the gospel of the kingdom make up the new religion as I best understand it.
Prejudice stops the soul from being able to see the truth: it is inseparable from selfishness. The only thing that can remove prejudice is to devote oneself to a cause that is not only loftier than oneself, but greater than all of humanity: the search for divinity. The measure of someone’s maturity is how well they can direct human desire into the constant search for ever higher and more divine ideals.
In a world and social order that is constantly evolving, it is impossible for us to have set and fast material goals. Having a stable personality means that the person has instead chosen the living God inside of them as their eternal goal. This shift from time to eternity, from Earth to Paradise, from the human to the divine requires that the person becomes born again as a child of the divine spirit and enters the brotherhood of the kingdom of heaven. All religions and philosophies that fall short of these ideals are immature. This philosophy that I teach along with the gospel of the kingdom that you preach is the new religion of maturity: the ideal for all future generations.
This is true because our ideal is perfect, eternal, infinite, and universal. My philosophy led me to search for the truth, to reach for maturity. But the urge itself was not enough: it lacked a driving force; I was uncertain: I lacked direction. These problems have been solved with the new insights, higher ideals, and definite goal of Jesus’ gospel. Now I have no doubts, and I can wholeheartedly strive for God.
The Art of Living
There are two ways that people can live together: like animals or like people with a spiritual nature. Animals have limited communication using sounds and signals that do not carry ideas, values, or meanings. Humanity communicates messages with symbols that specify those ideals. Animals do not develop personalities like people do because they cannot share ideas like people do. This ability to share ideas allows us to build civilization. Knowledge accumulates because humanity can share what we know today with future generations, and this elevates art, science, religion, and philosophy.
Social groups come into being because we use symbols to communicate. The most valuable social group is the family, specifically the two parents. Affection for one another is the spiritual glue that holds those material groups together. Devotion to genuine friendships between people of the same sex also shows this same possibility. Friendships and family units based on mutual affection are socially uplifting because they bring about the following higher levels of living.
Mutual self-expression and self-understanding. Many good ideas never happen because the person does not have anyone to tell. It is not good for a person to be alone. High character requires more than having morals and a smart mind: everyone needs a certain amount of recognition and appreciation and the genuine love found in a home to develop a balanced character. The most important relationship for developing higher character is a man and woman dealing with the issues that come up in a healthy marriage. I glorify family life because your Master has chosen the father-child relationship as the cornerstone of his gospel of the kingdom. Such a relationship, a man and woman embracing the highest ideals of time, is so satisfying that it is worth any price or sacrifice to obtain.
Union of souls: the mobilization of wisdom. Each person sooner or later develops their particular set of ideas about this world and what is coming next. It is not only possible for us to unite these ideas, but it is important that we do. Otherwise prejudice or narrowmindedness can distort our vision. Fear, envy, and egotism can only be prevented by close contact with other people. By pooling our spiritual possessions we enrich our souls. I remind you that Jesus never sends you out to work alone: you always go out in pairs. Wisdom is super-knowledge, and combining wisdom lets the group share in all knowledge.
The enthusiasm for living. Isolation can exhaust the soul. Being around friends is vital to renewing a person’s zest for life, and crucial for keeping up the courage needed to fight those battles that come with the ascent to higher spiritual levels. Friendships increase joy and glorify life’s victories; they enhance all beauty and intensify all that is good; they take away sadness and bitterness when suffering, and they provide a space to mutually stimulate our imaginations. There is immense spiritual power in people knowing they are wholeheartedly devoted to a mutual cause and cosmic Deity.
The enhanced defense against all evil. Friendships work to ensure against evil. Defeat, sadness, difficulties, and disappointment are harder to bear when alone. Friendship does not transform evil into righteousness, but it makes it easier to bear. Your Master said “Happy are they who mourn” if a friend is at hand to comfort. There is strength knowing that you live for the welfare of others, and that those others in the same way live for your welfare and advancement. People waste away in isolation: they become discouraged when all they see are the passing events of time. The present moment when separated from the past and the future becomes annoyingly trivial. Only glimpsing the circle of eternity can inspire people to their best, and at their best they can unselfishly live for the good of their fellow travelers through time and eternity.
I repeat, the most wonderful friendship possible is in marriage. True, even though much can be attained from marriage many of them utterly fail to produce these spiritual fruits. Too many times people enter into marriage with lower level desires than these higher levels of spiritual living. An ideal marriage has to be based on something more stable than sex and emotions: it must be grounded on true mutual devotion to one another. If you can build enough of these small, effective, and trustworthy groups between people, when you bring them all together the world will see a magnificent social structure: a mature human civilization. People living like this might someday realize your Master’s ideal of “peace on Earth and good will among humanity.” While the society would not be perfect, it would at least be close to mature.
The Lures of Maturity
Growing into maturity requires energy, but from where does that energy come? While physical things can be taken for granted, your Master has well said “People cannot live by bread alone.” After having a normal body and good health we need to look for what else stimulates people’s sleeping spiritual forces. Jesus teaches us that God lives in people, so how can we teach people to release these powers of divinity? How can we help people to release the God inside of them, and in the process of blessing, uplifting, and enlightening countless other souls refresh their own? How can we best awaken these latent powers for good that sleep in our souls? One thing is certain, emotions are not the ideal way to stimulate the spirit. Excitement does not increase energy; it exhaust both the mind and soul. So where does the energy come from to do these things? Watch Jesus. Right now he is out in the hills taking in energy while we are here using up ours. The secret to all of this is spiritual worship, the combination of meditation and relaxation. Meditation connects the mind to spirit, and relaxation increases the person’s capacity to receive spirit. This trading of weakness for strength, fear for courage, and the self for the will of God is worship. At least that is the way this philosopher sees it.
With repetition, this combination of meditation and relaxation crystalizes into lifelong sustaining habits to feed a person’s spiritual character in the creation of a mature personality. While these practices are difficult and time consuming at first, when mastered they are both restful and save time. The more complex society becomes, the more urgent it is for God-knowing people to protect themselves with habits that conserve and increase their spiritual energy. Spiritual maturity also requires the ability to adjust to ever-changing social environments. Immature people get on other people’s nerves: they annoy others. To multiply the fruits of his life’s efforts, a mature person tries to win the sincere cooperation of others. My understanding of life tells me that at times I must fight to defend my beliefs, but I do not doubt that Jesus with a more mature spiritual personality would gracefully win by taking the higher road of tact and tolerance.
Too often when we fight for what we think is right, both sides lose. Only yesterday I heard your Master say “the wise person when wanting to open a locked door looks for the key instead of breaking it down.” Too often we fight just to prove to ourselves that we are not afraid to do so. This new gospel gives a person a richer reason to live: the noble goal of a supreme life purpose. That idea itself, that there is a divine and eternal goal for life, stimulates the best in people’s nature.
At the peak of all intellectual thought is strength for the soul, relaxation for the mind, and communion for the spirit. From this vantage point a person rises above material problems and lower levels of thought based in envy, worry, pride, revenge, and jealousy. These continuously ascending souls are able to remove themselves from the trifles of living and in the process become aware of higher spiritual concepts and celestial communications. But in pursuing one’s supreme life’s purpose the person must guard against both the temptation to take the easy way out, and the disastrous consequences of fanaticism.
The Balance of Maturity
While a person can focus on eternity, they also have to provide for material life. Spirit may be the goal but flesh is a fact. Usually we have to work for what we need. The two critical personal problems in life are making a living here, and eternal survival later. Even making a living needs religion to be done well. In fact, true religion is not separate from the person but the essence of their personality.
The essential needs of material life as I see them are skill and ability; good physical health; clear and clean thinking; ability to withstand defeat; wealth: the good things of life, and culture—wisdom and education. Even health and fitness are best achieved when viewed from Jesus’ lesson that the mind and body are the dwelling place of God: the spirit of God becoming the spirit of the person, and the mind of person becoming the mediator between material things and spiritual realities.
To succeed in life requires intelligence. It is wrong to think that just by going to work every day you will become wealthy. Prosperity requires wise planning and using the known channels for making money: only those people can expect to profit well. Poverty will always be the result of isolated efforts. An unwise person can devote their life to their generation without any material reward, while someone else can inherit a fortune and roll in luxury without doing anything of value for the world.
You inherit ability while you learn your skills. Life has no real purpose for someone who cannot do one thing well: one of the satisfactions of living comes from being skillful at something. Ability implies that one has the gift of a long-term vision. Do not be fooled or tempted by dishonest wealth: be willing to wait for the rewards that come from honest work. The wise person can see the difference between the means and the end, and will not allow over planning for the future to defeat its own purpose. As one seeking pleasure, you should always be both a producer as well as a consumer.
Train your memory to remember the good events in life and build for yourself a gallery of truth, beauty, and goodness that can be recalled at will for strength, learning, and enjoyment. Still, the noblest of all treasured memories are those of fantastic friendships: spiritual worship radiates the highest of those influences in a person’s life. But life will become nothing more than a burden if you do not learn to fail gracefully. Noble souls make an art of defeat: you must know how to lose cheerfully, and you must have no fear of disappointment. Never hesitate to admit failure: do not try to hide it under false smiles and beaming optimism. It may sound like a good thing to always claim success, but the results are terrible—a world based on unreality and the person’s life destined to crash in ultimate disillusionment.
Success can give a person courage and confidence, but wisdom comes from failure. People who prefer daydreams to reality never become wise. Only people who can face the facts of life according to their values can find wisdom. Wisdom combines reality with ideals and saves the person from either of the unproductive extremes: the side where idealism denies the facts of life, and the side where materialism is blind to spirit.
Those weak souls who can only survive on false delusions of success will eventually suffer failure as they wake up from their imagination’s false dreams. It is in this process of continually facing failure and adjusting to defeat where religion has its major influence on humanity. Failure is simply a learning tool: it comes from people’s attempts to learn as they explore the higher levels of universe reality. A person may appear to be a complete failure in this life on Earth, but if they have learned from their mistakes and earned the wisdom they contain, then their life as seen from the standpoint of eternity might become a huge success.
Do not confuse culture, wisdom, and knowledge. They are related, but represent different spiritual values. Wisdom always dominates knowledge, and wisdom always glorifies culture.
The Religion of the Ideal
You have said that Jesus sees genuine religion as the person’s experience with spiritual realities. I have seen it as a person’s reaction to something worthy of humanity’s devotion. Religion shows our ultimate devotion to our highest ideals of reality and goals for spiritual achievement. When people believe their religion is related to their race, tribe, or nation they do not consider outsiders human. People always think their God is worthy for all people. Religion can never be based on just intellectual belief or philosophical reasoning: it will always be a way of reacting to life’s events. It is a way of life; a way of conduct. Religion brings together feeling, thinking, and conduct in the worship of that worthy of universal adoration.
If you have experienced something as religion, it is self-evident that you are already actively promoting that religion since you feel the God of your religion is worthy of worship by all people and celestial entities. If you are not out promoting your religion, you are fooling yourself with a traditional belief or simple intellectual philosophy. If your religion is spiritual what you worship must represent your highest ideals.
All religions based on fear, emotion, tradition, and philosophy I call intellectual religions; those based on true spiritual experience I call true religions. The purpose of religious devotion can be true or false, real or unreal, human or divine, material or spiritual. In other words, religions can be good or evil. Morality and religion are not necessarily the same. A system based on morals with something to worship can become a religion. A religion, if it loses its base in supreme devotion, can become a philosophical code of morals.
True religion always seeks to convert the person and transform the world. Religion implies that there are undiscovered ideals far beyond our highest morals and most advanced civilizations. True religion looks for divine wisdom, superhuman values, undiscovered ideals, unexplored realities, and true spiritual fulfilment: all other ways of belief are not worthy to be called religion. Regardless of its name, the object of this spirit reality is God.
You cannot have a genuine spiritual religion without the ideal of an eternal God. Religion without God is humanity’s invention, a system of lifeless intellectual beliefs and meaningless emotional ceremonies. A religion may say that it is devoted to a splendid ideal, but unreal ideals are illusionary and not attainable. The only ideals humans can achieve are the infinite values in the fact of the eternal God. The word or idea of God as opposed to the ideal of God can become part of any religion no matter how false it may be. This idea of God can become anything those people want to make it. Lower religions shape their idea of God to the natural state of the human heart; higher religions demand that the human heart shapes itself to the ideals of true religion.
Jesus’ religion surpasses all others because he not only shows his Father as the ideal of ultimate reality, but he also says that this divine source and eternal center of the universe can be reached by every person who enters the kingdom of heaven on Earth and accordingly accepts sonship with God and the brotherhood of humanity. That, I say, is the highest idea of religion the world has ever known, and there can never be an idea higher because the gospel includes the divinity of values, infinity of realities, and eternity of universal achievements: the result of the idealism of the supreme and the ultimate.
I am both fascinated by this religion’s ideals and moved to say that I believe Jesus when he says that these spiritual ideals are reachable, and that we can enter this eternal adventure assured of our ultimate arrival at the portals of Paradise. My friends, I believe. I have started the journey; I am going with you on this eternal venture. The Master says that he came from the Father and that he will show us the way. I believe he speaks the truth. I am finally convinced that there is no ideal reality other than the eternal and universal Father.
I worship then not only the God of reality, but the God of all future realities. If your devotion to a supreme ideal is to be real, it must be to this God of the past, present, and future universes of things and beings. There is no other God for there cannot possibly be any other God. All other gods are distortions of false logic, figments of the imagination, illusions of the mortal mind, and the self-deceptive idols of those who created them. Yes, you can have a religion without this God,
but it does not mean anything. If you try to substitute the word God for the ideal of the living God you are only deluding yourself by putting an idea in the place of an ideal, a divine reality. These are merely religions of wishful thinking.
In Jesus’ teachings I see religion at its best. This gospel lets us seek for the true God, and to find him. But are we willing to pay the price to enter the kingdom of heaven? Are we willing to be born again? To be remade? Are we willing to subject ourselves to this testing and terrible process of self-destruction and soul reconstruction? Has not the Master said “Whoever would save his life must lose it? Do not think that I have come to bring peace, but rather a soul struggle.” True, after we pay the price of dedicating ourselves to the Father’s will we will experience majestic peace if we continue to walk in the spiritual paths of a holy life.
Now we are truly giving up the desires of the existence we know to unconditionally dedicate ourselves to the goals of an unknown and unexplored existence: a future life of adventure exploring the spirit worlds of higher divine reality. We look for those ways to teach other people about Jesus’ new religion, and we never stop praying for the day when all of humanity is thrilled by this shared vision of supreme truth. In our hearts we know God as spirit; to our friends we demonstrate that God as love.
Jesus’ religion demands living spiritual experience. Other religions may consist of emotional feelings, traditional beliefs, and philosophical consciousness but the Master’s teachings require actual spiritual progression. Knowing one has the impulse to be like God is not true religion; emotional urges to worship God are not true religion; the conviction to forsake oneself to serve God is not true religion, and the wisdom behind the reason that this religion is the best is not religion as a personal and spiritual experience. True religion relates to destiny and the reality of spiritual progression, as well as to the reality and idealism of what is wholeheartedly accepted by faith. All of this must be made personal to us by the revelation of the Spirit of Truth.
That ended the dissertations of the Greek philosopher who became a believer in the gospel of the kingdom, one of the most impressive men of his culture.