The Urantia Book
I was first introduced to this book in college, back in the mid 70s. I found it to be a phenomenal book then, full of curious combinations of hierarchy and structure of Creation as we know it. Its explanations, whether channeled through some farmer or not, are quite in depth in the revealing of the intricacies of the Nature and Structure of our Being as well. As with any written piece, there are bound to be discrepancies for the discerning reader. Like with the Bible, though, it is more of what is still left to question than what is contained in its pages. It, along with several other texts, have helped me to formulate better questions as to how I can find and flow with the Divine Nature coursing through my arteries and veins.
I find that today, a lot of the stories that are coming through so-called channelers are often extrapolations and interpolations of concepts presented in the text of the U Book. It is quite a laborious read for someone to take on. Many discussion/study groups spend countless hours reading passages and discussing their implications and meanings. Whether these stories are true or not is really not the issue. It is the fact that many new areas of Creation are being discovered and discussed through the exploration of greater order within Creation. There are many levels of Beings, both physical and non-physical, that are responsible for levels of Creation, from Architectural Worlds responsible for physical creation of solar systems to the Seven Supreme Spirit Groups.
Self-consciousness, according the U Book, is in essence a communal consciousness: God and man, Father and son, Creator and creature. In human self-consciousness four universe reality realizations are latent and inherent:
1. The quest for knowledge, the logic of science.
2. The quest for moral values, the sense of duty.
3. The quest for spiritual values, the religious experience.
4. The quest for personality values, the ability to recognize the reality of God as a personality and the concurrent realizations of our fraternal relationship with fellow personalities.
Sounds a bit like, "These truths we hold to be self-evident." Still, there are those who would desire to control or delegate what truth is revealed to the public. I think this is an atrocity that each of us cannot find the truth within through any mechanism we so choose. Some of the methods could be objectionable to the majority of our values, like the senseless killing of our fellow personalities that is occurring on this planet now.
For your own experience contact: The Urantia Fellowship