MONKEY MAG

No time to ruminate today, the new MONKEY is in hand, and it’s a beautiful day to catch up with our human-animal friends, and have a nap in the banana trees, too.

Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife
Doomed is your soul and damned is your life.
—Lord John Whorfin

There are only two ways we mortal bipeds can live together:  the material, or animal way, and the spiritual, or human way.  FEAR is the powerful and dominant animal vestige of our animal origin heritage.  When humans fail to discriminate the ends of their mortal striving, they find themselves functioning on the animal level of existence. (See Limpbot, Hannity, etc. )

The one indispensable aspect of being human is the soul— the self-reflective, truth-discerning, and spirit-perceiving part of a human— which elevates the human being above the level of the animal world.  Moral choice and spiritual attainment, the ability to know God and the urge to be like him, are the chief characteristics of the soul;  but the soul  simply cannot exist apart from genuine moral thinking and spiritual activity.
That means a stagnant soul is a dying soul, and a dying soul means you’re just another  sometime human animal, but an animal just the same.

Animals respond nobly to the blind and instinctive urge of life, but only humans are able to master the Art of Living; though very few of us put much energy into living beyond the fear-dominated urge to live.  Like their animal cousins, many men and women make no inquiries into the purposes of life;  Dancing with the Stars and pizza on the weekend is all they can handle.

When [we] dare to forsake a life of natural craving for one of adventurous art and uncertain logic, [we] must expect to suffer the consequent hazards of emotional casualties— conflicts, unhappiness, and uncertainties— at least until the time of [our] attainment of some degree of intellectual and emotional maturity.  Discouragement, worry, and indolence are positive evidence of moral immaturity.  —The Urantia Book

Modern human society is confronted with two problems that are hardly ever even noticed:  attainment of the maturity of the individual— and attainment of the maturity of the human race.  Hopefully you’re not asking, “Why is this important?”  Because mature human beings look upon all other human beings with feelings of tenderness, and with emotions of tolerance.  Mature human beings view immature folks with the love and consideration that loving parents bear their children.

…When life problems excite our profound fears, we refuse to recognize them. When the acknowledgment of our difficulties entails the reduction of our long-cherished conceit, the admission of envy, or the abandonment of deep-seated prejudices, the average human prefers to cling to the old illusions of safety and to the long-cherished false feelings of security. Only a brave human being is willing honestly to admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers.  —The Urantia Book

And just how many “brave” monkeys do you know?  Right;  and how many fearful, prejudiced monkeys do you know?  I thought so.  Prejudice blinds the soul— your humanity— to the recognition of truth;  and prejudices, which are invariably rooted in fear and hatred, can only be removed by the sincere devotion of the soul to the adoration of a cause that is all-embracing and all-inclusive of one’s fellow men.  Prejudice is inseparably linked to selfishness.

Moral acts are those human performances
which are characterized by the highest intelligence,
directed by selective discrimination in the choice of superior
ends as well as in the selection of moral means to attain these ends.
—The Urantia Book