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Urantia Book Paper 50 The Planetary Princes
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART II: The Local Universe :
The Evolution Of Local Universes Administration Of The Local Universe The Local
Universe Mother Spirit The Local Universe Sons Of God The Life Carriers
Personalities Of The Local Universe Ministering Spirits Of The Local Universe
The Seraphic Hosts The Ascending Sons Of God Physical Aspects Of The Local
Universe Energy--mind And Matter The Constellations The Celestial Artisans The
Local System Administration The Local System Headquarters The Seven Mansion
Worlds The Morontia Life The Inhabited Worlds The Planetary Princes The
Planetary Adams Planetary Mortal Epochs The Lucifer Rebellion Problems Of The
Lucifer Rebellion The Spheres Of Light And Life Universal Unity
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Paper 50 The Planetary Princes
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Introduction
WHILE belonging to the order of Lanonandek Sons, the Planetary Princes are so
specialized in service that they are commonly regarded as a distinct group.
After their Melchizedek certification as secondary Lanonandeks, these local
universe Sons are assigned to the reserves of their order on the constellation
headquarters. From here they are assigned to various duties by the System
Sovereign and eventually commissioned as Planetary Princes and sent forth to
rule the evolving inhabited worlds.
The signal for a System Sovereign to act in the matter of assigning a ruler to
a given planet is the reception of a request from the Life Carriers for the
dispatch of an administrative head to function on this planet whereon they have
established life and developed intelligent evolutionary beings. All planets
which are inhabited by evolutionary mortal creatures have assigned to them a
planetary ruler of this order of sonship.
1. MISSION OF THE PRINCES
The Planetary Prince and his assistant brethren represent the nearest
personalized approach (aside from incarnation) that the Eternal Son of Paradise
can make to the lowly creatures of time and space. True, the Creator Son
touches the creatures of the realms through his spirit, but the Planetary
Prince is the last of the orders of personal Sons extending out from Paradise
to the children of men. The Infinite Spirit comes very near in the persons of
the guardians of destiny and other angelic beings; the Universal Father lives
in man by the prepersonal presence of the Mystery Monitors; but the Planetary
Prince represents the last effort of the Eternal Son and his Sons to draw near
you. On a newly inhabited world the Planetary Prince is the sole representative
of complete divinity, springing from the Creator Son (the offspring of the
Universal Father and the Eternal Son) and the Divine Minister (the universe
Daughter of the Infinite Spirit).
The prince of a newly inhabited world is surrounded by a loyal corps of helpers
and assistants and by large numbers of the ministering spirits. But the
directing corps of such new worlds must be of the lower orders of the
administrators of a system in order to be innately sympathetic with, and
understanding of, the planetary problems and difficulties. And all of this
effort to provide sympathetic rulership for the evolutionary worlds entails the
increased liability that these near-human personalities may be led astray by
the exaltation of their own minds over and above the will of the Supreme
Rulers.
Being quite alone as representatives of divinity on the individual planets,
these Sons are tested severely, and Nebadon has suffered the misfortune of sev-
top of page - 573
eral rebellions. In the creation of the System Sovereigns and the Planetary
Princes there occurs the personalization of a concept that has been getting
farther and farther away from the Universal Father and the Eternal Son, and
there is an increasing danger of losing the sense of proportion as to one's
self-importance and a greater likelihood of failure to keep a proper grasp of
the values and relationships of the numerous orders of divine beings and their
gradations of authority. That the Father is not personally present in the local
universe also imposes a certain test of faith and loyalty on all these Sons.
But not often do these world princes fail in their missions of organizing and
administering the inhabited spheres, and their success greatly facilitates the
subsequent missions of the Material Sons, who come to engraft the higher forms
of creature life on the primitive men of the worlds. Their rule also does much
to prepare the planets for the Paradise Sons of God, who subsequently come to
judge the worlds and to inaugurate successive dispensations.
2. PLANETARY ADMINISTRATION
All Planetary Princes are under the universe administrative jurisdiction of
Gabriel, the chief executive of Michael, while in immediate authority they are
subject to the executive mandates of the System Sovereigns.
The Planetary Princes may at any time seek the counsel of the Melchizedeks,
their former instructors and sponsors, but they are not arbitrarily required to
ask for such assistance, and if such aid is not voluntarily requested, the
Melchizedeks do not interfere with the planetary administration. These world
rulers may also avail themselves of the advice of the four and twenty
counselors, assembled from the bestowal worlds of the system. In Satania these
counselors are at present all natives of Urantia. And there is an analogous
council of seventy at the constellation headquarters also selected from the
evolutionary beings of the realms.
The rule of the evolutionary planets in their early and unsettled careers is
largely autocratic. The Planetary Princes organize their specialized groups of
assistants from among their corps of planetary aids. They usually surround
themselves with a supreme council of twelve, but this is variously chosen and
diversely constituted on the different worlds. A Planetary Prince may also have
as assistants one or more of the third order of his own group of sonship and
sometimes, on certain worlds, one of his own order, a secondary Lanonandek
associate.
The entire staff of a world ruler consists of personalities of the Infinite
Spirit and certain types of higher evolved beings and ascending mortals from
other worlds. Such a staff averages about one thousand, and as the planet
progresses, this corps of helpers may be increased up to one hundred thousand
or more. At any time need is felt for more helpers, the Planetary Princes have
only to make request of their brothers, the System Sovereigns, and the petition
is granted forthwith.
Planets vary greatly in nature and organization and in administration, but all
provide for tribunals of justice. The judicial system of the local universe has
its beginnings in the tribunals of a Planetary Prince, which are presided over
by a member of his personal staff; the decrees of such courts reflect a highly
fatherly and discretionary attitude. All problems involving more than the
regulation of the planetary inhabitants are subject to appeal to the higher
tribunals,
top of page - 574
but the affairs of his world domain are largely adjusted in accordance with the
personal discretion of the prince.
The roving commissions of conciliators serve and supplement the planetary
tribunals, and both spirit and physical controllers are subject to the findings
of these conciliators. But no arbitrary execution is ever carried out without
the consent of the Constellation Father, for the "Most Highs rule in the
kingdoms of men."
The controllers and transformers of planetary assignment are also able to
collaborate with angels and other orders of celestial beings in rendering these
latter personalities visible to mortal creatures. On special occasions the
seraphic helpers and even the Melchizedeks can and do make themselves visible
to the inhabitants of the evolutionary worlds. The principal reason for
bringing mortal ascenders from the system capital as a part of the staff of the
Planetary Prince is to facilitate communication with the inhabitants of the
realm.
3. THE PRINCE'S CORPOREAL STAFF
On going to a young world, a Planetary Prince usually takes with him a group of
volunteer ascending beings from the local system headquarters. These ascenders
accompany the prince as advisers and helpers in the work of early race
improvement. This corps of material helpers constitutes the connecting link
between the prince and the world races. The Urantia Prince, Caligastia, had a
corps of one hundred such helpers.
Such volunteer assistants are citizens of a system capital, and none of them
have fused with their indwelling Adjusters. The status of the Adjusters of such
volunteer servers remains as of the residential standing on the system
headquarters while these morontia progressors temporarily revert to a former
material state.
The Life Carriers, the architects of form, provide such volunteers with new
physical bodies, which they occupy for the periods of their planetary sojourn.
These personality forms, while exempt from the ordinary diseases of the realms,
are, like the early morontia bodies, subject to certain accidents of a
mechanical nature.
The prince's corporeal staff are usually removed from the planet in connection
with the next adjudication at the time of the second Son's arrival on the
sphere. Before leaving, they customarily assign their various duties to their
mutual offspring and to certain superior native volunteers. On those worlds
where these helpers of the prince have been permitted to mate with the superior
groups of the native races, such offspring usually succeed them.
These assistants to the Planetary Prince seldom mate with the world races, but
they do always mate among themselves. Two classes of beings result from these
unions: the primary type of midway creatures and certain high types of material
beings who remain attached to the prince's staff after their parents have been
removed from the planet at the time of the arrival of Adam and Eve. These
children do not mate with the mortal races except in certain emergencies and
then only by direction of the Planetary Prince. In such an event, their
children--the grandchildren of the corporeal staff--are in status as of the
superior races of their day and generation. All the offspring of these
semimaterial assistants of the Planetary Prince are Adjuster indwelt.
top of page - 575
At the end of the prince's dispensation, when the time comes for this
"reversion staff" to be returned to the system headquarters for the resumption
of the Paradise career, these ascenders present themselves to the Life Carriers
for the purpose of yielding up their material bodies. They enter the transition
slumber and awaken delivered from their mortal investment and clothed with
morontia forms, ready for seraphic transportation back to the system capital,
where their detached Adjusters await them. They are a whole dispensation behind
their Jerusem class, but they have gained a unique and extraordinary
experience, a rare chapter in the career of an ascending mortal.
4. THE PLANETARY HEADQUARTERS AND SCHOOLS
The prince's corporeal staff early organize the planetary schools of training
and culture, wherein the cream of the evolutionary races are instructed and
then sent forth to teach these better ways to their people. These schools of
the prince are located at the material headquarters of the planet.
Much of the physical work connected with the establishment of this headquarters
city is performed by the corporeal staff. Such headquarters cities, or
settlements, of the early times of the Planetary Prince are very different from
what a Urantia mortal might imagine. They are, in comparison with later ages,
simple, being characterized by mineral embellishment and by relatively advanced
material construction. And all of this stands in contrast with the Adamic
regime centering around a garden headquarters, from which their work in behalf
of the races is prosecuted during the second dispensation of the universe Sons.
In the headquarters settlement on your world every human habitation was
provided with abundance of land. Although the remote tribes continued in
hunting and food foraging, the students and teachers in the Prince's schools
were all agriculturists and horticulturists. The time was about equally divided
between the following pursuits:
1. Physical labor. Cultivation of the soil, associated with home building and
embellishment.
2. Social activities. Play performances and cultural social groupings.
3. Educational application. Individual instruction in connection with
family-group teaching, supplemented by specialized class training.
4. Vocational training. Schools of marriage and homemaking, the schools of art
and craft training, and the classes for the training of teachers--secular,
cultural, and religious.
5. Spiritual culture. The teacher brotherhood, the enlightenment of childhood
and youth groups, and the training of adopted native children as missionaries
to their people.
A Planetary Prince is not visible to mortal beings; it is a test of faith to
believe the representations of the semimaterial beings of his staff. But these
schools of culture and training are well adapted to the needs of each planet,
and there soon develops a keen and laudatory rivalry among the races of men in
their efforts to gain entrance to these various institutions of learning.
From such a world center of culture and achievement there gradually radiates to
all peoples an uplifting and civilizing influence which slowly and cer-
top of page - 576
tainly transforms the evolutionary races. Meantime the educated and
spiritualized children of the surrounding peoples who have been adopted and
trained in the prince's schools are returning to their native groups and, to
the best of their ability, are there establishing new and potent centers of
learning and culture which they carry on according to the plan of the prince's
schools.
On Urantia these plans for planetary progress and cultural advancement were
well under way, proceeding most satisfactorily, when the whole enterprise was
brought to a rather sudden and most inglorious end by Caligastia's adherence to
the Lucifer rebellion.
It was one of the most profoundly shocking episodes of this rebellion for me to
learn of the callous perfidy of one of my own order of sonship, Caligastia,
who, in deliberation and with malice aforethought, systematically perverted the
instruction and poisoned the teaching provided in all the Urantia planetary
schools in operation at that time. The wreck of these schools was speedy and
complete.
Many of the offspring of the ascenders of the Prince's materialized staff
remained loyal, deserting the ranks of Caligastia. These loyalists were
encouraged by the Melchizedek receivers of Urantia, and in later times their
descendants did much to uphold the planetary concepts of truth and
righteousness. The work of these loyal evangels helped to prevent the total
obliteration of spiritual truth on Urantia. These courageous souls and their
descendants kept alive some knowledge of the Father's rule and preserved for
the world races the concept of the successive planetary dispensations of the
various orders of divine Sons.
5. PROGRESSIVE CIVILIZATION
The loyal princes of the inhabited worlds are permanently attached to the
planets of their original assignment. Paradise Sons and their dispensations may
come and go, but a successful Planetary Prince continues on as the ruler of his
realm. His work is quite independent of the missions of the higher Sons, being
designed to foster the development of planetary civilization.
The progress of civilization is hardly alike on any two planets. The details of
the unfoldment of mortal evolution are very different on numerous dissimilar
worlds. Notwithstanding these many diversifications of planetary development
along physical, intellectual, and social lines, all evolutionary spheres
progress in certain well-defined directions.
Under the benign rule of a Planetary Prince, augmented by the Material Sons and
punctuated by the periodic missions of the Paradise Sons, the mortal races on
an average world of time and space will successively pass through the following
seven developmental epochs:
1. The nutrition epoch. The prehuman creatures and the dawn races of primitive
man are chiefly concerned with food problems. These evolving beings spend their
waking hours either in seeking food or in fighting, offensively or defensively.
The food quest is paramount in the minds of these early ancestors of subsequent
civilization.
2. The security age. Just as soon as the primitive hunter can spare any time
from the search for food, he turns this leisure to augmenting his security.
top of page - 577
More and more attention is devoted to the technique of war. Homes are
fortified, and the clans are solidified by mutual fear and by the inculcation
of hate for foreign groups. Self-preservation is a pursuit which always follows
self-maintenance.
3. The material-comfort era. After food problems have been partially solved and
some degree of security has been attained, the additional leisure is utilized
to promote personal comfort. Luxury vies with necessity in occupying the center
of the stage of human activities. Such an age is all too often characterized by
tyranny, intolerance, gluttony, and drunkenness. The weaker elements of the
races incline towards excesses and brutality. Gradually these pleasure-seeking
weaklings are subjugated by the more strong and truth-loving elements of the
advancing civilization.
4. The quest for knowledge and wisdom. Food, security, pleasure, and leisure
provide the foundation for the development of culture and the spread of
knowledge. The effort to execute knowledge results in wisdom, and when a
culture has learned how to profit and improve by experience, civilization has
really arrived. Food, security, and material comfort still dominate society,
but many forward-looking individuals are hungering for knowledge and thirsting
for wisdom. Every child is provided an opportunity to learn by doing; education
is the watchword of these ages.
5. The epoch of philosophy and brotherhood. When mortals learn to think and
begin to profit by experience, they become philosophical--they start out to
reason within themselves and to exercise discriminative judgment. The society
of this age becomes ethical, and the mortals of such an era are truly becoming
moral beings. Wise moral beings are capable of establishing human brotherhood
on such a progressing world. Ethical and moral beings can learn how to live in
accordance with the golden rule.
6. The age of spiritual striving. When evolving mortals have passed through the
physical, intellectual, and social stages of development, sooner or later they
attain those levels of personal insight which impel them to seek for spiritual
satisfactions and cosmic understandings. Religion is completing the ascent from
the emotional domains of fear and superstition to the high levels of cosmic
wisdom and personal spiritual experience. Education aspires to the attainment
of meanings, and culture grasps at cosmic relationships and true values. Such
evolving mortals are genuinely cultured, truly educated, and exquisitely
God-knowing.
7. The era of light and life. This is the flowering of the successive ages of
physical security, intellectual expansion, social culture, and spiritual
achievement. These human accomplishments are now blended, associated, and
co-ordinated in cosmic unity and unselfish service. Within the limitations of
finite nature and material endowments there are no bounds set upon the
possibilities of evolutionary attainment by the advancing generations who
successively live upon these supernal and settled worlds of time and space.
After serving their spheres through successive dispensations of world history
and the progressing epochs of planetary progress, the Planetary Princes are
elevated to the position of Planetary Sovereigns upon the inauguration of the
era of light and life.
top of page - 578
6. PLANETARY CULTURE
The isolation of Urantia renders it impossible to undertake the presentation of
many details of the life and environment of your Satania neighbors. In these
presentations we are limited by the planetary quarantine and by the system
isolation. We must be guided by these restrictions in all our efforts to
enlighten Urantia mortals, but in so far as is permissible, you have been
instructed in the progress of an average evolutionary world, and you are able
to compare such a world's career with the present state of Urantia.
The development of civilization on Urantia has not differed so greatly from
that of other worlds which have sustained the misfortune of spiritual
isolation. But when compared with the loyal worlds of the universe, your planet
seems most confused and greatly retarded in all phases of intellectual progress
and spiritual attainment.
Because of your planetary misfortunes, Urantians are prevented from
understanding very much about the culture of normal worlds. But you should not
envisage the evolutionary worlds, even the most ideal, as spheres whereon life
is a flowery bed of ease. The initial life of the mortal races is always
attended by struggle. Effort and decision are an essential part of the
acquirement of survival values.
Culture presupposes quality of mind; culture cannot be enhanced unless mind is
elevated. Superior intellect will seek a noble culture and find some way to
attain such a goal. Inferior minds will spurn the highest culture even when
presented to them ready-made. Much depends, also, upon the successive missions
of the divine Sons and upon the extent to which enlightenment is received by
the ages of their respective dispensations.
You should not forget that for two hundred thousand years all the worlds of
Satania have rested under the spiritual ban of Norlatiadek in consequence of
the Lucifer rebellion. And it will require age upon age to retrieve the
resultant handicaps of sin and secession. Your world still continues to pursue
an irregular and checkered career as a result of the double tragedy of a
rebellious Planetary Prince and a defaulting Material Son. Even the bestowal of
Christ Michael on Urantia did not immediately set aside the temporal
consequences of these serious blunders in the earlier administration of the
world.
7. THE REWARDS OF ISOLATION
On first thought it might appear that Urantia and its associated isolated
worlds are most unfortunate in being deprived of the beneficent presence and
influence of such superhuman personalities as a Planetary Prince and a Material
Son and Daughter. But isolation of these spheres affords their races a unique
opportunity for the exercise of faith and for the development of a peculiar
quality of confidence in cosmic reliability which is not dependent on sight or
any other material consideration. It may turn out, eventually, that mortal
creatures hailing from the worlds quarantined in consequence of rebellion are
extremely fortunate. We have discovered that such ascenders are very early
intrusted with numerous special assignments to cosmic undertakings where
unquestioned faith and sublime confidence are essential to achievement.
top of page - 579
On Jerusem the ascenders from these isolated worlds occupy a residential sector
by themselves and are known as the agondonters, meaning evolutionary will
creatures who can believe without seeing, persevere when isolated, and triumph
over insuperable difficulties even when alone. This functional grouping of the
agondonters persists throughout the ascension of the local universe and the
traversal of the superuniverse; it disappears during the sojourn in Havona but
promptly reappears upon the attainment of Paradise and definitely persists in
the Corps of the Mortal Finality. Tabamantia is an agondonter of finaliter
status, having survived from one of the quarantined spheres involved in the
first rebellion ever to take place in the universes of time and space.
All through the Paradise career, reward follows effort as the result of causes.
Such rewards set off the individual from the average, provide a differential of
creature experience, and contribute to the versatility of ultimate performances
in the collective body of the finaliters.
[Presented by a Secondary Lanonandek Son of the Reserve Corps.]
top of page - 580
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART II: The Local Universe :
The Evolution Of Local Universes Administration Of The Local Universe The Local
Universe Mother Spirit The Local Universe Sons Of God The Life Carriers
Personalities Of The Local Universe Ministering Spirits Of The Local Universe
The Seraphic Hosts The Ascending Sons Of God Physical Aspects Of The Local
Universe Energy--mind And Matter The Constellations The Celestial Artisans The
Local System Administration The Local System Headquarters The Seven Mansion
Worlds The Morontia Life The Inhabited Worlds The Planetary Princes The
Planetary Adams Planetary Mortal Epochs The Lucifer Rebellion Problems Of The
Lucifer Rebellion The Spheres Of Light And Life Universal Unity
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