When I first started browsing through the Urantia Book at a bookstore in 1976, the twenty-eight statements in the "Morontia Mota" section were among the first passages to hold my attention. This series of aphorisms, spread across pages 556 and 557, was a welcome island of simplicity in a book full of dense paragraphs and intricate discussions. For several weeks I kept returning to the bookstore, debating with myself whether to buy the book, and this was one of the sections that sold me. The faith and idealism conveyed in these statements (as well as in the Rodan papers, Paper 100 and the selected excerpts on the dust jacket) reassured me that a moral soundness and an intelligent compassion lay at the heart of the book. Thus assured, I decided to take the plunge into the rest of the text, with its daunting but fascinating complexities.

The appeal of these twenty-eight statements, I’ve since come to see, is widely shared by Urantia Book readers and believers. These aphorisms have appeared more often in Urantia movement newsletters and periodicals than any other part of the Urantia Book, their convenient size making them ideal corner fillers. They have been a topic of study at numerous conference workshops and in Internet message forums. They’ve appeared in calendars and on cards, and have thus become, in some ways, the Urantia Book’s equivalent of the Bible’s Book of Proverbs.

For me they are also special in marking another milestone: They were the first major section of the Urantia Book whose source book I was able to identify. That is, I discovered a book, published before the UB, which contained material so closely parallel to the 28 statements in phraseology and sequence, as to strongly suggest that it was used as the base text in the writing of the section. Finding this book—The New Dictionary of Thoughts (details of which to follow)—spurred me on to search for other sources. As a result, in the past eight years I have found about 100 other books and articles containing passages which, collectively, parallel portions of over 100 papers.

Discovering these books and analyzing how they were used has been a challenging and often delightful experience for me, equaling in emotional impact and educational value my first several years of Urantia Book study. As direct source material continues to be found, the formerly opaque pages of the corresponding Urantia text become more transparent and open to comparative analysis and objective appreciation. The purely original areas of the book are thrown into bolder relief. A new light is cast on the genius of its composition, with the Urantia Book coming into view as both a masterpiece of originality and the product of ingenious techniques of literary borrowing whose traces can be detected from the first page of the book to the last (though certainly not on every page in between).

The discoveries have also led to a healthy disillusionment, as I find my former literalist approach to every statement in the book giving way to a more informed attitude that accepts that creative license was probably taken in fashioning many, if not all, of the book’s narratives.

Joy and puzzlement, confirmation and disillusionment, have gone hand in hand throughout the course of my research. Though my understanding of the Urantia Book’s use of sources has broadened with each newly found source book, my early experience with the "Morontia Mota"/The New Dictionary of Thoughts parallels is fairly typical of the kinds of clarifications and perplexities that have resulted from my later findings. 

In this two-part essay I would like to recount the evolution of my understanding of the "Morontia Mota" section—both before and after discovering its probable sources—in the hope that it will be helpful to the in-depth study of one of the Urantia Book’s best-known sections.

* * * * * 

Resuming the story, then, in 1976 and 1977: After buying the book and beginning to read it sequentially, I gradually became familiar with its presentation of the afterlife—the mortal ascension career. Papers 47 and 48 (the one in which the "Morontia Mota" section appears) were particularly helpful in providing clues to the meaning of the peculiar, impenetrable words "morontia" and "mota," which headed the section and stood in stark contrast to the relatively self-explanatory 28 statements that followed. Through these papers I learned that "morontia" is the level of reality intervening between the material and the spiritual realms, and that the seven "mansion worlds" are the spheres on which reawakened humans proceed gradually to lose their material limitations while approaching spiritual status in personality development and reality response.

I learned that the morontia worlds are administered by numerous corps of angelic beings, one of whose major purposes is to guide the human survivors in their attempts to penetrate the facts and truths of Deity and the cosmos. From the day we are resurrected on the first mansion world to the time we leave the local system for the constellation worlds, angels of various descriptions attend to us, helping to prepare us for higher levels of service and God-consciousness.

Gradually, then, the scenario presented in the first two paragraphs of the "Morontia Mota" section began to make sense: A "morontia instructor" (a type of angel) was teaching a group of newly arrived mortal ascenders on the first mansion world a higher mode of reality comprehension called "mota." Mota is described earlier in Paper 48 as "more than a superior philosophy; it is to philosophy as two eyes are to one; it has a stereoscopic effect on meanings and values.... Mansion world students achieve cosmic perspective—depth—by superimposing the perceptions of the morontia life upon the perceptions of the physical life. And they are enabled to bring these material and morontial viewpoints into true focus largely through the untiring ministry of their seraphic counselors, who so patiently teach the mansion world students and the morontia progressors" (554).

The author at work

Mota is described elsewhere in the papers as "the superphilosophic sensitivity for truth discernment and unity perception" and "the technique of the morontia level. Mota is a supermaterial reality sensitivity which is beginning to compensate incomplete growth, having for its substance knowledge-reason and for its essence  faith-insight" (1136). It is further defined as "a method of reconciling the interplay between the widely separated domains of science and religion ..." (1136). Reference is made as well to "mota logic" (1139) and "mota insight" (508; 631). We also learn the intriguing fact that an individual’s voting power on Jerusem is decided on the basis of his or her "recognized and duly registered personal possession of mota—morontia wisdom," with greater vote value being granted to those who have achieved higher mota status (518).

Because of these definitions of mota—as a "sensitivity," an "insight," a type of "wisdom"—I was quite puzzled by the apparent incongruity of one aspect of the "Morontia Mota" scenario. We are told that: "On the first mansion world it is the practice to teach the less advanced students by the parallel technique; that is, in one column are presented the more simple concepts of mota meanings, and in the opposite column citation is made of analogous statements of mortal philosophy" (556). The incongruity—as I saw it then and still see it now—is that mota is here presented not as a sensitivity, a level of insight, a type of superphilosophical wisdom, but rather as something capable of being delimited into "concepts of mota meanings" which can be placed into a column next to "analogous statements of mortal philosophy."

Mota, which is consistently defined elsewhere in the text as a mindal technique of reality discernment, a kind of perception, is here depicted as a percept, something that can be objectively set down and perceived. Questions immediately arise: How exactly were these "simpler concepts of mota meanings" presented? In what medium was "the mota content of the lesson"—which the author of the paper "may not undertake to present"—conveyed? In script? In a series of pictorial images? In some multimedia display? The use of columns suggests that the presentation was simple and visual, with the mota concepts being symmetrical with the statements of human philosophy. If so, mota concepts are then reduced to the level of linear, finite sentences which can be positioned alongside their human-philosophy counterparts, in the same way that simple phrases in French are set across from their Japanese translations in a tourist phrase book. The question then becomes, What makes the linear language in which the mota concepts are presented, more effective stimulators of mota consciousness than the original statements of human philosophy themselves?

These questions regarding the nature and form of the "mota content of the lesson" and how it was taught by "the parallel technique" baffled me for years. But apart from this frustrating aspect of the "Morontia Mota" section, the general context, with its beautiful and intriguing elements, became clearer.

As for the 28 statements themselves, I did not recognize a single one. To an American teenager in the mid ‘70s, whose only deliberate exposure to aphorisms had been a few casual flips through Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, these statements seemed, on the whole, too high-flown and "cosmic conscious" to have come from Earth. The clean, clear style in which they were expressed, strongly resembled the phraseology of the rest of the Urantia Book. The general ideology running through the statements was completely congruent, as well, with the rest of the papers. So I supposed that these statements had been gleaned from more highly evolved planets in which revealed religion and higher philosophy had had a chance to flourish. (I looked at the "parable prayers," many of which are said to have come from other planets (1621-1624), in a similar way.)

The characterization of these statements as illustrations of "the higher levels of human philosophy" (556) further removed them, I thought, from Earth. My conception of high human philosophy on our planet was epitomized by the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel and certain Indian and Chinese sages; and I saw little resemblance between these writings and the 28 statements. Many of these philosophers had engaged in metaphysics, which the writer of Paper 103 (resonating with Kant, here) deems a failure, prescribing "[p]hilosophy, clarified by revelation" as its only acceptable substitute "in the absence of mota" (1136). Perhaps, then, I was overvaluing these renowned philosophers whose attempts to formulate grand metaphysical systems were shot through with error. Perhaps, I thought, more evolved planets had realized the futility of these endeavors and saw higher truth-value in the enunciation of simpler statements in the realm of faith and morals.

My sense of the extraplanetary origin of these statements was reinforced by no. 23: "Death added nothing to the intellectual possession or to the spiritual endowment ..." The inclusion of this statement under the rubric of "mortal philosophy" seems paradoxical, since the statement refers to death in the past tense, indicating that whoever said it was, by definition, not mortal but morontial—post-mortal. A flesh-and-blood, human philosopher may believe that death adds nothing to our intellectual and spiritual status, but he or she can never assert that such is the case on the basis of actual experience.

Until just recently, I must have overlooked the few indicators in the statements that point to a more earthly, indeed a more English, origin or reference base; namely, the references to mountain tops (no. 13), hornet’s nests (no. 18), and especially pints and quarts (no. 3). Mountain tops are probably not universal features of inhabited planets, and hornets may be peculiar to certain regions of Earth. Pints and quarts, of course, are units of capacity that originated in Europe and have probably only been used as standard measurements in Britain and some of its former possessions.¹

Soon after becoming immersed in the rest of the Urantia Papers, the 28 statements receded in prominence, and months would go by between readings. During these years, when the introductory paragraphs of the "Morontia Mota" section were not fresh in my mind, I sometimes made the mistake of thinking that the 28 statements were themselves the morontia mota. This mistake—which is quite common among Urantia Book readers—led to a distorted sense of their authoritativeness as guides of conduct. Instead of taking them as instances of human philosophy, and therefore as debatable propositions, I saw them more as cosmic laws, unchallengeable commandments. At these times I tried to be careful not to give advice unless it was asked for (in accordance with the recommendation in no. 14), and felt a bit self-conscious when I "transgressed." As a person who enjoys debating, I occasionally wondered whether the protracted arguments I was having with friends and acquaintances on religion and politics were doing a disservice to my friends, myself, and the truth of our respective opinions (bearing in mind the ambiguous observation in no. 28).

Other times, when I did recall that these statements were of human origin, I felt free to criticize some of them, having since realized that many aphorisms can be matched by others with opposite messages. For instance, the observation "Like attracts like" can be countered by "Opposites attract." Therefore, perhaps unasked-for advice ought to be given in certain circumstances, such as when dealing with children. Nevertheless, the idea that these statements had been used on the mansion world, and the fact that they were considered worthy of inclusion in the Urantia Book itself, gave them the stamp of superhuman endorsement and heightened their importance. Fortunately, very few of the statements are expressed as imperatives; the great majority are observational truisms which few people would find objectionable.

Despite all these musings I had through the years, the original impact of some of the statements never waned. Nos. 10, 11, 12, 13, and 16 continued to encourage me whenever I read or remembered them.

And so for several years (from the late 1970s to the mid ‘80s) my understanding and appreciation of these 28 statements plateaued. A small blip occurred in 1982 when I came upon a curiously familiar quote by Robert Browning while leafing through an acquaintance’s Amway training manual: "‘Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do!" This, of course, strongly resembled statement no. 22: "The evolving soul is not made divine by what it does, but rather by what it strives to do." Aha, I thought, a saying from Earth was represented among the 28 after all. Either that, or Browning, in a moment of angelically stimulated inspiration, had voiced a truth well-known throughout the cosmos, but in phraseology remarkably similar to the Urantia Book’s rendition of it. At the very least, the Browning-UB parallel was a happy coincidence.

But real excitement was sparked in 1984 when Gard Jameson, a Urantia Book reader then living in the San Francisco Bay area, circulated a study sheet he’d prepared on "Morontia Mota" which contained fifteen quotations, several of which were exact correlates of some of the 28 statements. Included was a quote by Lavater: "All affectation is the vain and ridiculous attempt of poverty to appear rich." This was, unarguably, either the prototype for or the echo of, statement no. 15: "Affectation is the ridiculous effort of the ignorant to appear wise, the attempt of the barren soul to appear rich." Beecher’s "Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength" was similarly connected with statement no. 25: "Greatness lies not so much in possessing strength as in making a wise and divine use of such strength." Several others in Gard’s list bore equally strong resemblances to their corresponding statements.

I and my fellow study group members in Chicago, having got word of Gard’s findings, eagerly copied the quotes into the blank spaces of the "Morontia Mota" section of our Urantia Books. Some longtime readers in Chicago, including myself, had already been aware of the identification of a few other parallelisms between the book and pre-UB literature. But no-one at that time knew or suspected that the authors of the Urantia Book had drawn copiously and systematically from a small number of previously published books to fashion whole series of papers. Having read the book’s two acknowledgments regarding the authors’ use of human concepts (17; 1343), we understood that thousands of concepts had been drawn from thousands of humans. No one human, and no one book (apart from the Bible), could be responsible for anything but a minuscule amount of material used by the Urantia Book authors.

Gard’s discoveries, impressive as they were, were consistent with these notions. The famous and obscure writers on his list to whom the quotes were attributed had each contributed his or her bit to the 28 statements; no one person monopolized or had a disproportionate share. Moreover, over half the 28 statements remained unaccounted for. We in Chicago heard that Gard had found his quotes in a huge book of quotations published at the turn of the century, so it wasn’t too surprising that a book its size would yield a fair number of parallels. The unidentified statements could well have come from a variety of other sources, published or unpublished, spoken or simply conceived.

Thanks to Gard, I was able to supplement my Robert Browning finding with several new names—Beecher, Goethe, Longfellow, Beaconsfield (who I later learned was Benjamin Disraeli, a British prime minister who had been vested with the title Earl of Beaconsfield by Queen Victoria), and some lesser-known ones like Richter, Moore (Gard’s list only gave surnames, so I didn’t know which Moore it was), and Lavater. Finally, I could put a human face—or, more accurately, several human names—to a section of the Urantia Book.

Gard’s success in identifying human sources rekindled my long-held desire to do the same. For years I had been tantalized by the UB authors’ acknowledgments, and had wanted to find parallels between the book and previous literature for a number of reasons.

The first reason was my strong desire to understand more clearly what was meant in the first acknowledgment by "God-knowing men and women" (17). I figured that if I or others were to find out who some of these people were, I could then study their lives and writings to see how they had arrived at their God-consciousness, and how they had manifested it. They could then serve (up to a point) as spiritual role models. Secondly, after my years-long immersion in the unique thought-world of the Urantia Book, I began to get hungry for context. What areas of the book, I wondered, were truly original or revelatory? Which areas were derived, and which periods, cultures, and religions had the greatest affinities with the book’s diverse teachings? Could the book’s obscure scientific references to "island universes," "mesotrons," and "the hypothetical ether," and the unpleasant phraseology used in its controversial discussions of race and eugenics, be better understood by reading the literature current at the time the Urantia Book was being written? After all, weren’t the papers the result of questions asked by a group of average Americans in the early 20th century, and weren’t the answers given in the terminology and reference points these people could understand?

Interest in familiarizing myself with 19th and early 20th century literature intensified in the late 1980s as I began work in the reader services department of the Urantia Brotherhood (which was later renamed The Fellowship for Readers of the Urantia Book) and received letters from people requesting clarification on the above subjects and others. But my resolve to delve into the literature was positively galvanized in 1991 and 1992, when Kristen Maaherra, a reader then living in Arizona, astonished many in the Urantia community by her discoveries of numerous new parallels which she had found through computer searches. Using new computer technology, Kristen isolated all the non-biblical sentences and clauses in the Urantia Book that had quotation marks around them, and then proceeded systematically to try to identify their human origins by searching various databases. Through her efforts a variety of new names was added to the list of "God-knowing men and women" who had contributed thought gems to the Urantia text. This was all the boost I needed.

About this time, in the spring of 1992, a fellow UB reader who knew of my determination encouraged me to attend the Brandeis book fair, an annual event in a Chicago suburb where thousands of inexpensively priced used books are put on sale. The first thing I did was to phone Gard Jameson to get the name of his huge book of quotations. It was Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts, compiled by Charles Noel Douglas, first published in 1890 and enlarged in 1904. Then I collected the names of the few other books in which parallels with the UB had been found. I arrived at the book fair hoping to find these titles, and intent on buying as many pre-1936² books as I could find which had any recognizable similarity or relevance to material in the UB.

After an unavailing search for Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts, I resignedly settled for another book of quotes called The New Dictionary of Thoughts which, with its copyright date of 1960 and its publication date of 1972, wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. But I thought it might be helpful for purposes of comparison. I added it to my collection and left the sale with two shopping bags full of old books on science, history, philosophy, religion, and sociology.

The quote book I’d bought was low on my to-read list, but I eventually started dipping through it. The blurb on the dust jacket described it as: "Being a Digest of striking thoughts from the master minds of the world begun over ninety years ago and covering a period of over four thousand years." It continued: "A collection of twenty thousand thoughts from eighteen hundred authors, alphabetically arranged under one thousand topics ... " The book was a revised and enlarged version of the original Dictionary of Thoughts, which had been compiled by Tryon Edwards, a descendant of the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, and first published in 1891. The copyright page listed a succession of copyright registrations from that year to 1960, with a curious slew of them occurring in a ten-year period: 1927, 1931, 1933, two in 1934 (one assigned to Orsamus Turner Harris, the other to The R. C. Barnum Company), and one in 1936. The next one was dated 1957.

I searched the authors’ reference index to see if any of the quotes in Gard’s list were included. I was quite pleased to find that many of them were; in fact, every single one of the stronger correlates was present. I was also intrigued when I noticed that the vast majority of the ones found were located in the first several pages of this nearly 800-page volume. Several were under the topic Action, one was under Accident, a couple were under Adversity, one was under Affectation, another under Affliction.... It was turning out to be a veritable "A-list" of quotes!

Since so many of the found quotes clustered near the beginning of the book, I decided to start on page one and try to track down the correlates of those of the 28 statements that were not as yet identified. Within minutes, I became astounded at what I was finding: The correlates of nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4—heretofore unidentified—appeared on the very first page!

This was beyond the possibility of coincidence.

My heart began to pound with awe, ecstasy and trepidation. It seemed as if I was entering previously unknown, and possibly even forbidden, territory. I was half-tempted to discontinue my search for fear of what else I might find, but a detective-like love of puzzle-solving won out, and I went on.

After one or two sessions of parallel tracing in which I managed to find several other new correlates, a disturbing pattern began to come clear. It seemed as if most of the 28 statements had been deliberately patterned, in sequence and in wording, after selected quotes in The New Dictionary of Thoughts which appear in the first 35 or so of its 794 pages. The correlates for statements 1 to 4 were under the topic Ability, statement 5’s seemed to fall under Adversity (although I couldn’t find a close correlate for it among the 40 entries in that section), statements 8 to 11’s were under Action, nos. 12 and 13’s under Adversity, no. 14’s under Advice (although here too I couldn’t find a definite parallel with either of the clauses that make up the statement), no. 15’s under Affectation.... And so on down the alphabetical line until the topics beginning with the letter "A" were exhausted. Statement no. 22’s correlate, found under Aspiration, marked the end of the consecutive series of quotes listed under "A" topics. After that point, the alphabetical order that had more or less been followed broke down, with most of the remaining parallels being drawn from other sections of the text. For instance, the correlate for no. 25 was found under Greatness; no. 27’s under Individuality.

In practically no time at all, my long-held ideas of the transplanetary origin of these statements collapsed in the face of cold, hard print—the first 35 pages of single book!

What was I to make of all this? The first thing I did, in the face of the acute cognitive dissonance that was assailing me, and the panicky suspicion that I had quite possibly unmasked a forgery, was to think of ways to reconcile what I had found with what the Urantia Book says (or doesn’t say, but might allow for). Could it be that an earlier edition of The New Dictionary of Thoughts had been ferried up to the first mansion world and used as a teaching manual by the morontia instructor? Could the parallelism of sequence and phraseology between the NDoT and the 28 statements simply be an astronomical coincidence, or perhaps an angelically orchestrated convergence.

I didn’t have long to dwell on these mystifying questions, for my attention became diverted by another book I’d found at the book fair which had similar sorts of parallels with another section of the Urantia Book: The Sacred Writings of the World’s Great Religions, selected and edited by S. E. Frost, Jr., and published in 1943. I’d bought this book in the hope that it would help identify the origin of some of the scriptural passages described in Paper 131 ("The World’s Religions") as "an abstract of Ganid’s manuscript" which he made during his and Jesus’ Mediterranean tour. Soon enough, I found parallels, many vague, but several others quite close. That is, I identified parallelisms not only in concept but in specific wording, as if the Urantia Book’s renditions were based on a particular English translation of an originally Asian text.

The clearest and most complete instance of this was the parallelism between Paper 131’s and Frost’s extracts of Shinto, which Frost selected from W. G. Aston’s Japanese-to-English translations found in the latter’s Shinto: The Way of the Gods, published in 1905. I was able to find close phraseological correlates in Frost for every single one of the fourteen sentences in the UB’s "Shinto" section (1451). The puzzling feature here was not the overlapping selections in Frost and the UB but rather the fact that the specificities of Aston’s translation were so evident in the UB’s version.

On the other hand, Aston’s and the UB’s renditions were not identical. It appeared as though the UB author had refashioned Aston’s sentences in the same artful and spiritually sensitive way as the selected quotes in The New Dictionary of Thoughts had been.

For example:

(1) Aston: All enjoy my divine power. (from ORACLE OF THE GOD OF KASHIMA)

The UB: Says the Lord: ... You are all recipients of my divine power; all men enjoy my ministry of mercy.

(2) Aston: I derive strength from the multiplication of devout men in the land. (from ORACLE OF THE GOD OF KASHIMA)

The UB: I derive great pleasure in the multiplication of righteous men throughout the land.

(3) Aston: When the sky is clear, and the wind hums in the fir-trees, ‘tis the heart of a God who thus reveals himself. (from GOD OF A TAJIMA SHRINE)

The UB: In both the beauties of nature and the virtues of men does the Prince of Heaven seek to reveal himself and to show forth his righteous nature.

(4) Aston: Of old the people of my country knew not my name. Therefore I was born into the visible world and endured a base existence. (from ORACLE OF ITSUKUSHIMA IN AKI)

The UB: Since the olden people did not know my name, I manifested myself by being born into the world as a visible existence and endured such abasement even that man should not forget my name.

In the first three of these examples, the UB author/editor uses Aston’s renditions as a fulcrum on which to lever a truer portrait of the character of God. In the first case, the UB’s revision recognizes God’s mercifulness as well as his power. In the second, the UB affirms God’s omnipotence by substituting "pleasure" for "strength." In the third, the intimation of nature worship captured in Aston’s version is offset by an emphasis on human virtue and divine righteousness in the UB’s counterpart. In all four—and, in fact, in all fourteen of its Shinto sentences—the UB appears to have used Aston as the basis for further development.³

My shock at the suspiciousness of these Morontia Mota and Shinto parallels was counterbalanced almost immediately by an admiration for the skill and sensitivity with which the original statements had been rephrased. This was not, I saw, the product of a lazy plagiarist or a workmanlike paraphraser; it was, rather, the work of an artist of the spirit engaged in a unique type of literary and conceptual endeavor.⁴ I was reminded of a statement in the second acknowledgment: "When ideas and concepts of Jesus’ life and teachings have been acceptably expressed by a human mind, I invariably gave preference to such apparently human thought patterns. Although I have sought to adjust the verbal expression the better to conform to our concept of the real meaning and the true import of the Master’s life and teachings, as far as possible, I have adhered to the actual human concept and thought pattern in all my narratives" (1343, italics added). Could this technique of appropriation and refinement, applied to pre-existent literature on the life and teachings of Jesus, have been practiced in other sections of the Urantia Book as well? My initial findings seemed to bear out this possibility.

I shared my Morontia Mota and Shinto discoveries with some fellow Urantia Book readers, and even the longtime believers among them, whom Dr. Sadler and Christy⁵ had held in their confidences, were as dumbfounded as I was.

Excited by the realization that I was breaking new ground, I resolved to continue my search for sources, fortified by two maxims from the Urantia Book: "[T]he truth never suffers from honest examination" (1711), and "Only a brave person is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers" (1773).

Further shocks and epiphanies were to follow over the next several months as more and more source books were found and studied. On the one hand, I was alternately dismayed and fascinated by the creative liberties which I perceived had been taken by the writers of the Urantia Book in adapting material from the Bible and more recent books on history, science, sociology, and other literature, for their own narratives. On the other hand, I was (and still am) extremely impressed by the conceptual-linguistic wizardry displayed in their enhancements of religious and philosophical texts. I have found many texts in religion, philosophy and theology which are retuned and reconceived in far more creative, complex and fascinating ways than the material in Frost and The New Dictionary of Thoughts.⁶

Meanwhile I continued research on the "Morontia Mota"/The New Dictionary of Thoughts parallels. In late 1992, I tracked down three editions of the NDoT published prior to my 1960 one, attempting to identify the particular one that was used (presumably) by the writer of the 28 statements. Two editions—the 1901 and the 1931—were missing the correlate for statement no. 27 and so had to be ruled out. However, the 1931 edition contained a quote not included in my 1960 edition, which was the unmistakable correlate for no. 10. Therefore, some edition published after 1931 and before 1960 could well contain the full array of correlates. I checked the copyright page of the 1960 edition and saw four possibilities: the 1933 edition, the two from 1934, and the 1936. I was tempted to rule out the last one since the signature page of Part II indicates that the 25 papers contained in it, among them Paper 48 in which the 28 statements appear, were "indited" and "put ... in the English language, by a technique authorized by our superiors, in the year 1934 of Urantia time" (648).

But it turns out that the 1936 edition may well be the one with the most inclusive set of parallels. I have been unable to find copies of the 1933 and 1934 editions so it would be rash to conclude that this is the case. But the preface to the 1936 edition advertises a new feature of the NDoT : " ... a supplement (p. 725ff.) which brings together representative quotations from modern writers for ready reference." The correlate for no. 27 appears in this supplement, under the topic Individuality, on p. 728. If this supplement of recent thought was indeed introduced in the 1936 edition, then the correlate most probably made its debut there as well. (In the 1960 edition the correlate is integrated into the main body of the text.)

The realization that a book published in 1936 could well be a source—after the Urantia Book itself assigns 1934 as the date of the composition of Parts I and II (354; 648) and 1935 as the date of Part III’s (1319)—caused another wave of cognitive dissonance, but I took it in stride and continued on, divested of another layer of "Urantia Book fundamentalism."

The study of numerous source books enabled me to hone my parallel-detecting skills, to catch the subtler parallelisms I’d missed in earlier readings of a source text, to fine-tune my judgment as to what in fact constituted a "source" and a "parallel," and to become better acquainted with the variety of restating techniques practiced by the Urantia Book’s authors.

From time to time I re-examined the parallels I’d drawn between the 28 statements and their perceived correlates in the NDoT. Such reviews led invariably to revisions—a deletion here, an addition there—and the sense that more work needed to be done.⁷ Five statements in particular—nos. 5, 6, 14, 26, 28—eluded close correlation; various quotes in the NDoT pertained to their subject matter but were more like distant cousins than twins of their respective statements. The posthumously phrased statement on the afterlife—no. 23—was so unearthly that I’d long since given up on finding a correlate for it in mainstream literature.

But I did begin to notice that close phraseological correlations for the above-listed statements could be found in the pages of the Urantia Book itself. For instance, part of statement no. 6—" ... to possess power and steadfastly refuse to use it for self-aggrandizement—these are the marks of high civilization"—found a very close parallel in a passage on p. 1521: "Jesus was now passing through the great test of civilized man, to have power and steadfastly refuse to use it for purely selfish or personal purposes."

After poring through the Urantia Book and doing searches on various words and phrases in the Folio index, I managed to find most of the missing correlates—including no. 23’s! Finally, the remaining pieces of the puzzle were fitting together, and the parallel chart gained a new level of self-evidencing clarity.

Recently, in an attempt to cover all the bases, I obtained a copy of Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts to examine its contents and analyze its relationship with the NDoT. I found that the two books share a number of similarities: They are both American-made compilations of aphorisms, adages, proverbs, and maxims arranged alphabetically by topic and drawn primarily from Western literature, beginning with the ancient Greeks and spanning the centuries to modern times (i.e. the early 20th century). Both were assembled to serve as a resource to "stir the human heart and engage the human mind" (paraphrasing the description given in the preface to Forty Thousand) and as a reference book for teachers, speakers, writers, preachers and other professionals and laypeople. Though there is a great deal of overlap in entries, it appears that the two compilations were made independently of each other. It is also clear that The New Dictionary of Thoughts is the volume with by far the larger number of close correlates, thus making it the primary, if not the exclusive, source of those of the 28 statements not linked to passages appearing elsewhere in the Urantia Papers.

The chart below represents my determination of the parallels as of August 2000. Taking my cue from the morontia instructor referred to in the introduction of the "Morontia Mota" section, I have employed "the parallel technique," displaying the source-correlate in the left-hand column and the respective statement in the right. This is done to facilitate comparative analysis and appreciation.

A few remarks are necessary to explain the citation system used in the left-hand column: The bold heading found at the beginning of most of the entries indicates the topic under which the quote was found in the NDoT. The information about each author’s birthdate, year of death and occupation, was drawn from the authors’ reference index of the 1960 edition, or of the 1936 edition when necessary. (The source authors of statements 1 and 2 were still alive in 1960 but have presumably "graduated" by now.) The number in parentheses at the end of each entry indicates the page in which the quote appears in the 1936 edition. Several entries are followed by a tick mark (√); this means that the entry is also included in the 1904 edition of Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts. An entry followed by "(Forty Thousand)" means the quote was found only in that volume, not in the NDoT. Entries preceded by a bracketed question mark indicate dubious parallels, those varying too widely from their respective statements to qualify as indisputable correlates but sufficiently similar to warrant consideration. Passages from the Urantia Book and the Bible appearing in the left-hand column are printed in reduced type to offset them visually from the NDoT and Forty Thousand entries.

Please peruse the parallels slowly and carefully, as though reading poetry. Try to discern the similarities and differences, both stylistic and conceptual, in each parallel pair. See whether a pattern can be detected in the sequencing of topic and page number of the entries from the NDoT. Scan the biographical data of each source author and see whether a composite profile emerges from this aggregation of thinkers. Study the Urantia Book-derived passages in the left-hand column and observe how closely they parallel their counterparts in the right.

After becoming familiarized with the parallelisms, reflect on the following questions: How can we account for the apparent fact that the 28 statements, reported by an Archangel of Nebadon to have been used "not long since" (556) on the first mansion world of Satania, were drawn primarily from a 1936 American book of quotations and supplemented by lightly revised passages from the Urantia Papers themselves? Can we reconcile this scenario with what we are told about the educational system of the mansion worlds? about the ways thought is stimulated, translated and circulated throughout the cosmos? Is a literalistic interpretation of the scenario still tenable? Can passages be adduced from the book to support it? If not, how are we to readjust our understanding of the "Morontia Mota" section?

[Click here for Part Two of this essay]

THE PARALLELS