I’ve been pondering the attributes and attitudes of God these
many years and marvel more and more at how he can always
be objective about everything that happens. He understands
everything so perfectly that when they nailed his son to the
cross, he loved “them” as much as he did Christ and forgave
them even before they asked. He must have seen the situation
in an entirely different light than we do.
Remember how we reacted to 9/11? The world was
shocked—outraged!—and we wasted no time declaring a
war on terrorism. We saw the destruction of the World Trade
Center and the taking of nearly 3,000 lives as a godless act.
Strangely enough, the terrorists see us as godless, and they
praised Allah for making their attack successful beyond their
expectations. Stranger yet, God is there, knowing exactly
what happened, yet loving the terrorists just the same as their
victims of that fateful day. God is objective. Sin isn’t real to
him. He’s no respecter of persons. He loves all his children
equally.
Webster defines objective as: emphasizing or expressing
the nature of reality AS IT IS, apart from personal reflections or
feelings; also, expressing or involving the use of facts without
distortion by personal feelings or prejudices (emphasis mine).
I thought about this long and hard and figured this is
probably our biggest problem. Human beings are usually
just the opposite—no matter what’s really going on, it’s how
we think and feel about it that we get all fired up about.
Webster says that’s subjective.
Being objective is an important aspect of God’s
perfection. He extended us an invitation to become perfect,
even as he is perfect, so I figured it would behoove me to take
a close look at this aspect of his perfection.
I put myself under a microscope to look at my own
reactions to everyday situations, especially if I was feeling
tested, trying to recognize what I reacted to and why I
reacted that way. Then I’d ask God what was really going
on and how did it appear to him. Then I studied others—
whoever was handy—trying to find out what they reacted
to. Many people like to explain themselves, and it was no
surprise that they were quite willing to talk about the things
they react to. Oftentimes I explained why I was curious
about peoples’ reactions, and there were a few who got into
the spirit of it with me.
The trickiest problem we ran into was facing that
we’re actually being subjective when we think we’re being
objective. In time it became a mind game, and we finally
reached the point where we could laugh at ourselves as we
were caught in the act of being subjective. It’s even better
when we catch ourselves.
The Urantia Book says on page 1094 [100:1.2] that
ignorance and prejudice are the greatest inhibitors of
growth. It’s hard to separate the two or to figure out which
comes first. Are we ignorant because we’re so wrapped up
in our feelings and emotions and preconceived ideas that we
can’t see the forest for the trees? Or, do we misinterpret and
distort reality because we’re ignorant? We can’t see reality as
God sees it; that’s for sure. In fact, we can hardly get ourselves
out of a situation far enough to see it as the angels see it.
In a sense, we each view reality as if we were the center
of the universe. We certainly start out that way—aware only
of our own needs and wants and feelings. Everything else
is outside of our “center” and we eventually grow to have
a lot of thoughts and opinions and more and more feelings
about what goes on “out there.” It is said that by the time
we’re six years old our attitudes are rather firmly established.
Children rarely question what’s really happening “out there”
or why—their primary concern is how it affects them. They
busy themselves learning ways to make things go the way
they want them to. And how they want them to go depends
on how they’ve learned to feel about themselves and their
environment.
Once set, those attitudes and opinions and feelings
are a part of us—unconscious for the most part—and all
new situations are weighed from that point of reference.
“Normal” is what’s normal to us. We assume it’s normal
for everyone. It can, and often does, come as quite a shock
to learn that people we’ve become very close to don’t think
or feel the way we do about some things that are pretty
important to us. Once we realize this, we’re usually inclined
to “set them straight.” For most of us, it’s many a heartache
later before we start to question our own points of view.
Some go to their graves having questioned themselves very
little—the way they see it is the way it is, and there is no other
way. Period. And that’s subjective.
Reality is whatever it is—nothing can change that.
That’s objective. It appears different to each of us because
we see it from our own center-of-the-universe, and that
makes our viewpoint subjective.
Thank heaven for the vicissitudes of existence and
certain inevitabilities we must encounter. [3:5.5-13] (P. 51)
Essentially, vicissitude means change. It implies a change
great enough to constitute a reversal of what has been and
by means that are beyond our control. In the plan of creature
evolution, we’re supposed to switch from subjective (and selfcentered)
to objective (God-like). We’re assured it produces
joy. We’re assured that this joy is ours for the striving.
The pain or negative reactions we experience can
only come from resisting the necessary changes. Oftentimes
we experience discomfort in a situation and honestly don’t
know it’s because we’re resisting some needed change. Most
religions teach something about the virtues of long suffering,
and if we accept that and are brave about it, it may not occur
to us to investigate what we might be doing ourselves that’s
causing the discomfort. We just accept it and find that we’re
better persons for having bravely endured. That certainly
may be true, but that does not mean it was necessary. We
have full control over how much discomfort we experience
in our Paradise ascent, and it is in exact proportion to how
much we resist the change from subjective to objective.
So even though our resistance may be unintentional, it
nonetheless produces discomfort.
Most of our discomfort is intentional but unconscious. We
hold tenaciously to our ideas of what we consider to be right
or wrong. Parties on both sides of a disagreement consider
themselves right, or at least hold the other side to be wrong;
otherwise, there would be no disagreement. Both sides are
probably right, and both are probably wrong. We can see how
others often make that mistake, but we have great difficulty
being objective where our own value systems are concerned.
We’re told quite plainly on page 555 [48:6.22] that we “can
be technically right as to fact and everlastingly wrong in the truth.”
Subjective creatures that we are, we probably interpreted
that as an assurance that those who are in disagreement with
us are wrong. Our own views are “right,” of course, or we
wouldn’t believe in them. We can correct this imbalance by
trading viewpoints and trying to defend theirs against our
own. We can see our views more clearly then.
One of our favorite ways to resist change is also
intentional but unconscious. We blame others for whatever
misery comes our way. We know we wouldn’t intentionally
make ourselves miserable, so it’s obvious someone else is
doing this to us, and we can always come up with someone
to blame. Psychology has made enormous strides forward in
recent years. If we’ve kept abreast with the latest findings,
we can readily see that it doesn’t matter what anyone else
“does to us,” we’re in strict control of how much we suffer
as a result. And if the choice is ours, so is the responsibility
for that choice.
If what we read is true about these people who can
walk barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals without any
sign of burning or pain, we can infer that all of us also have
control over physical pain. We just haven’t learned the trick
yet. We know there are conditions called low and high pain
tolerance. People with low pain tolerance often think people
with high pain tolerance are just lucky. It could be that
people with high pain tolerance make their own “luck” by
their attitude. Most will allow that they just don’t give their
pain any more attention than it takes to make it go away, and
they busy themselves with some kind of work they consider
more important than the pain. It’s a technique of dwelling
less on the self and more on what the self is doing, and that
is a step toward becoming objective.
On page 555 [48:6.26] we find support for this
technique. It says the work we are doing is important. The
self is not. It’s a handy way to get rid of physical pain, but
we find it more noticeably effective in ridding ourselves of
a psychological burden brought on by ego. Who of us has
not had our feathers ruffled more often than we care to
admit? And how often has the real joy of some of our better
efforts been marred because we didn’t get as much reward
or appreciation as we were expecting? It goes on to say we
lose a lot of energy to the wear and tear of ego dignity and
how much more we can accomplish when we correct that
problem. It’s easier said than done, but just think of all the
trouble and energy we’d save if we didn’t resist the change!
Page 555 [48:6 & 7] is full of ideas we can help
ourselves with. We make a lot of plans in our lives that
include other people—marriage, family, work, friends,
groups, etc. The more subjective we are about what we
expect from these relationships, the more certain we can
be of disappointments. An unconscious subjective attitude
is expressed here in slightly exaggerated form by: “I can’t
control myself, so I must control others in order to insure my
happiness (or peace of mind).” Objectively, the opposite is
more apt to succeed: “I can’t control others, but I can control
myself, and I’ll be responsible for my own happiness (or
peace of mind).”
Every day in many ways we’re subjective. Every time
we feel the slightest discomfort, physically or emotionally, we
can probably trace the cause back to some subjective attitude
or opinion we’re not willing to yield up. Some of these we
wouldn’t even admit to ourselves, much less to anyone else, so
we busy ourselves at “growing spiritually.” That’s something
like trying to build a house without a foundation—the first ill
wind that comes along will blow it over. Notice how often the
book refers to our physical (emotional), mindal, and spiritual
growth, and notice, too, that it’s always presented in that
order. I presume that was intentional.
Sometimes we know we’re being subjective and find it
doesn’t produce any discomfort. A closer look at “subjective”
revealed that it comes in two forms–positive and negative.
Humans are subjective creatures–there’s no escaping that
reality. I accept three things then: (1) It must be a part of
God’s plan; (2) God’s plan is perfect and loving; and (3) It
must be to our advantage to be subjective.
It seems we would have to be subjective just to get
started living and keep on living until our minds grow
enough to respond to the spiritual gravity circuit. Babies
might choose to cancel out and call the whole thing off
after that rude slap on the rear they get as they arrive, but
mother’s loving arms may help them decide to stick around
and see what this is all about.
We’d have to be subjective to go inside ourselves and
search for potentials to develop. Whatever motivates us to do
this in the beginning doesn’t matter. Eventually we’ll learn
that this is God’s way of experiencing himself. If we went
on realizing our potentials with that as the sole purpose—so
God can experience himself—that would be pretty darned
objective. We’re probably more motivated by the eternal
reward we’ve been promised, but that’s okay. Our Father
delights in rewarding us.
Most of the time we’re playing a subjective/negative
game called “my will be done.” When we exhaust our
energies and realize it isn’t worth the hassle, we can always
transform and reenergize by taking a subjective/positive
stand: “It is my will that Your will be done,” which is what
the game of life is all about. How much and how long we
play around in the negative is strictly up to us.
I question that anyone but God can ever be totally
objective because he’s the only one who will ever know
all that is. We’ll probably become objective only within
whatever sphere we attain perfection. For us in the flesh,
objectivity—reality comprehension—is an ideal. We will
become increasingly objective as we discern more and more
eternal truths, and the revelators have already advised us
that most of the truth we discern here is more relative and
evolutionary than it is eternal. It’s a long road to objectivity.
So maybe we would be wise to content ourselves with
the awareness that we’re almost totally subjective and spend
more time converting negatives to positives. That’s probably
the key to discerning truths and becoming objective,
anyway.
many years and marvel more and more at how he can always
be objective about everything that happens. He understands
everything so perfectly that when they nailed his son to the
cross, he loved “them” as much as he did Christ and forgave
them even before they asked. He must have seen the situation
in an entirely different light than we do.
Remember how we reacted to 9/11? The world was
shocked—outraged!—and we wasted no time declaring a
war on terrorism. We saw the destruction of the World Trade
Center and the taking of nearly 3,000 lives as a godless act.
Strangely enough, the terrorists see us as godless, and they
praised Allah for making their attack successful beyond their
expectations. Stranger yet, God is there, knowing exactly
what happened, yet loving the terrorists just the same as their
victims of that fateful day. God is objective. Sin isn’t real to
him. He’s no respecter of persons. He loves all his children
equally.
Webster defines objective as: emphasizing or expressing
the nature of reality AS IT IS, apart from personal reflections or
feelings; also, expressing or involving the use of facts without
distortion by personal feelings or prejudices (emphasis mine).
I thought about this long and hard and figured this is
probably our biggest problem. Human beings are usually
just the opposite—no matter what’s really going on, it’s how
we think and feel about it that we get all fired up about.
Webster says that’s subjective.
Being objective is an important aspect of God’s
perfection. He extended us an invitation to become perfect,
even as he is perfect, so I figured it would behoove me to take
a close look at this aspect of his perfection.
I put myself under a microscope to look at my own
reactions to everyday situations, especially if I was feeling
tested, trying to recognize what I reacted to and why I
reacted that way. Then I’d ask God what was really going
on and how did it appear to him. Then I studied others—
whoever was handy—trying to find out what they reacted
to. Many people like to explain themselves, and it was no
surprise that they were quite willing to talk about the things
they react to. Oftentimes I explained why I was curious
about peoples’ reactions, and there were a few who got into
the spirit of it with me.
The trickiest problem we ran into was facing that
we’re actually being subjective when we think we’re being
objective. In time it became a mind game, and we finally
reached the point where we could laugh at ourselves as we
were caught in the act of being subjective. It’s even better
when we catch ourselves.
The Urantia Book says on page 1094 [100:1.2] that
ignorance and prejudice are the greatest inhibitors of
growth. It’s hard to separate the two or to figure out which
comes first. Are we ignorant because we’re so wrapped up
in our feelings and emotions and preconceived ideas that we
can’t see the forest for the trees? Or, do we misinterpret and
distort reality because we’re ignorant? We can’t see reality as
God sees it; that’s for sure. In fact, we can hardly get ourselves
out of a situation far enough to see it as the angels see it.
In a sense, we each view reality as if we were the center
of the universe. We certainly start out that way—aware only
of our own needs and wants and feelings. Everything else
is outside of our “center” and we eventually grow to have
a lot of thoughts and opinions and more and more feelings
about what goes on “out there.” It is said that by the time
we’re six years old our attitudes are rather firmly established.
Children rarely question what’s really happening “out there”
or why—their primary concern is how it affects them. They
busy themselves learning ways to make things go the way
they want them to. And how they want them to go depends
on how they’ve learned to feel about themselves and their
environment.
Once set, those attitudes and opinions and feelings
are a part of us—unconscious for the most part—and all
new situations are weighed from that point of reference.
“Normal” is what’s normal to us. We assume it’s normal
for everyone. It can, and often does, come as quite a shock
to learn that people we’ve become very close to don’t think
or feel the way we do about some things that are pretty
important to us. Once we realize this, we’re usually inclined
to “set them straight.” For most of us, it’s many a heartache
later before we start to question our own points of view.
Some go to their graves having questioned themselves very
little—the way they see it is the way it is, and there is no other
way. Period. And that’s subjective.
Reality is whatever it is—nothing can change that.
That’s objective. It appears different to each of us because
we see it from our own center-of-the-universe, and that
makes our viewpoint subjective.
Thank heaven for the vicissitudes of existence and
certain inevitabilities we must encounter. [3:5.5-13] (P. 51)
Essentially, vicissitude means change. It implies a change
great enough to constitute a reversal of what has been and
by means that are beyond our control. In the plan of creature
evolution, we’re supposed to switch from subjective (and selfcentered)
to objective (God-like). We’re assured it produces
joy. We’re assured that this joy is ours for the striving.
The pain or negative reactions we experience can
only come from resisting the necessary changes. Oftentimes
we experience discomfort in a situation and honestly don’t
know it’s because we’re resisting some needed change. Most
religions teach something about the virtues of long suffering,
and if we accept that and are brave about it, it may not occur
to us to investigate what we might be doing ourselves that’s
causing the discomfort. We just accept it and find that we’re
better persons for having bravely endured. That certainly
may be true, but that does not mean it was necessary. We
have full control over how much discomfort we experience
in our Paradise ascent, and it is in exact proportion to how
much we resist the change from subjective to objective.
So even though our resistance may be unintentional, it
nonetheless produces discomfort.
Most of our discomfort is intentional but unconscious. We
hold tenaciously to our ideas of what we consider to be right
or wrong. Parties on both sides of a disagreement consider
themselves right, or at least hold the other side to be wrong;
otherwise, there would be no disagreement. Both sides are
probably right, and both are probably wrong. We can see how
others often make that mistake, but we have great difficulty
being objective where our own value systems are concerned.
We’re told quite plainly on page 555 [48:6.22] that we “can
be technically right as to fact and everlastingly wrong in the truth.”
Subjective creatures that we are, we probably interpreted
that as an assurance that those who are in disagreement with
us are wrong. Our own views are “right,” of course, or we
wouldn’t believe in them. We can correct this imbalance by
trading viewpoints and trying to defend theirs against our
own. We can see our views more clearly then.
One of our favorite ways to resist change is also
intentional but unconscious. We blame others for whatever
misery comes our way. We know we wouldn’t intentionally
make ourselves miserable, so it’s obvious someone else is
doing this to us, and we can always come up with someone
to blame. Psychology has made enormous strides forward in
recent years. If we’ve kept abreast with the latest findings,
we can readily see that it doesn’t matter what anyone else
“does to us,” we’re in strict control of how much we suffer
as a result. And if the choice is ours, so is the responsibility
for that choice.
If what we read is true about these people who can
walk barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals without any
sign of burning or pain, we can infer that all of us also have
control over physical pain. We just haven’t learned the trick
yet. We know there are conditions called low and high pain
tolerance. People with low pain tolerance often think people
with high pain tolerance are just lucky. It could be that
people with high pain tolerance make their own “luck” by
their attitude. Most will allow that they just don’t give their
pain any more attention than it takes to make it go away, and
they busy themselves with some kind of work they consider
more important than the pain. It’s a technique of dwelling
less on the self and more on what the self is doing, and that
is a step toward becoming objective.
On page 555 [48:6.26] we find support for this
technique. It says the work we are doing is important. The
self is not. It’s a handy way to get rid of physical pain, but
we find it more noticeably effective in ridding ourselves of
a psychological burden brought on by ego. Who of us has
not had our feathers ruffled more often than we care to
admit? And how often has the real joy of some of our better
efforts been marred because we didn’t get as much reward
or appreciation as we were expecting? It goes on to say we
lose a lot of energy to the wear and tear of ego dignity and
how much more we can accomplish when we correct that
problem. It’s easier said than done, but just think of all the
trouble and energy we’d save if we didn’t resist the change!
Page 555 [48:6 & 7] is full of ideas we can help
ourselves with. We make a lot of plans in our lives that
include other people—marriage, family, work, friends,
groups, etc. The more subjective we are about what we
expect from these relationships, the more certain we can
be of disappointments. An unconscious subjective attitude
is expressed here in slightly exaggerated form by: “I can’t
control myself, so I must control others in order to insure my
happiness (or peace of mind).” Objectively, the opposite is
more apt to succeed: “I can’t control others, but I can control
myself, and I’ll be responsible for my own happiness (or
peace of mind).”
Every day in many ways we’re subjective. Every time
we feel the slightest discomfort, physically or emotionally, we
can probably trace the cause back to some subjective attitude
or opinion we’re not willing to yield up. Some of these we
wouldn’t even admit to ourselves, much less to anyone else, so
we busy ourselves at “growing spiritually.” That’s something
like trying to build a house without a foundation—the first ill
wind that comes along will blow it over. Notice how often the
book refers to our physical (emotional), mindal, and spiritual
growth, and notice, too, that it’s always presented in that
order. I presume that was intentional.
Sometimes we know we’re being subjective and find it
doesn’t produce any discomfort. A closer look at “subjective”
revealed that it comes in two forms–positive and negative.
Humans are subjective creatures–there’s no escaping that
reality. I accept three things then: (1) It must be a part of
God’s plan; (2) God’s plan is perfect and loving; and (3) It
must be to our advantage to be subjective.
It seems we would have to be subjective just to get
started living and keep on living until our minds grow
enough to respond to the spiritual gravity circuit. Babies
might choose to cancel out and call the whole thing off
after that rude slap on the rear they get as they arrive, but
mother’s loving arms may help them decide to stick around
and see what this is all about.
We’d have to be subjective to go inside ourselves and
search for potentials to develop. Whatever motivates us to do
this in the beginning doesn’t matter. Eventually we’ll learn
that this is God’s way of experiencing himself. If we went
on realizing our potentials with that as the sole purpose—so
God can experience himself—that would be pretty darned
objective. We’re probably more motivated by the eternal
reward we’ve been promised, but that’s okay. Our Father
delights in rewarding us.
Most of the time we’re playing a subjective/negative
game called “my will be done.” When we exhaust our
energies and realize it isn’t worth the hassle, we can always
transform and reenergize by taking a subjective/positive
stand: “It is my will that Your will be done,” which is what
the game of life is all about. How much and how long we
play around in the negative is strictly up to us.
I question that anyone but God can ever be totally
objective because he’s the only one who will ever know
all that is. We’ll probably become objective only within
whatever sphere we attain perfection. For us in the flesh,
objectivity—reality comprehension—is an ideal. We will
become increasingly objective as we discern more and more
eternal truths, and the revelators have already advised us
that most of the truth we discern here is more relative and
evolutionary than it is eternal. It’s a long road to objectivity.
So maybe we would be wise to content ourselves with
the awareness that we’re almost totally subjective and spend
more time converting negatives to positives. That’s probably
the key to discerning truths and becoming objective,
anyway.
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