The Urantia Book

67. The Planetary Rebellion

5. Immediate Results of Rebellion

^67.5.1 Great confusion reigned in Dalamatia and thereabout for almost fifty years after the instigation of rebellion. The complete and radical reorganization of the whole world was attempted; revolution displaced evolution as the policy of cultural advancement and racial improvement. Among the superior and partially trained sojourners in and near Dalamatia there appeared a sudden advancement in cultural status, but when these new and radical methods were attempted on the outlying peoples, indescribable confusion and racial pandemonium was the immediate result. Liberty was quickly translated into license by the half-evolved primitive men of those days.

^67.5.2 Very soon after the rebellion the entire staff of sedition were engaged in energetic defense of the city against the hordes of semisavages who besieged its walls as a result of the doctrines of liberty which had been prematurely taught them. And years before the beautiful headquarters went down beneath the southern waves, the misled and mistaught tribes of the Dalamatia hinterland had already swept down in semisavage assault on the splendid city, driving the secession staff and their associates northward.

^67.5.3 The Caligastia scheme for the immediate reconstruction of human society in accordance with his ideas of individual freedom and group liberties, proved a swift and more or less complete failure. Society quickly sank back to its old biologic level, and the forward struggle began all over, starting not very far in advance of where it was at the beginning of the Caligastia regime, this upheaval having left the world in confusion worse confounded.

^67.5.4 One hundred and sixty-two years after the rebellion a tidal wave swept up over Dalamatia, and the planetary headquarters sank beneath the waters of the sea, and this land did not again emerge until almost every vestige of the noble culture of those splendid ages had been obliterated.

^67.5.5 When the first capital of the world was engulfed, it harbored only the lowest types of the Sangik races of Urantia, renegades who had already converted the Father's temple into a shrine dedicated to Nog, the false god of light and fire.

6. Van - The Steadfast

^67.6.1 The followers of Van early withdrew to the highlands west of India, where they were exempt from attacks by the confused races of the lowlands, and from which place of retirement they planned for the rehabilitation of the world as their early Badonite predecessors had once all unwittingly worked for the welfare of mankind just before the days of the birth of the Sangik tribes.

^67.6.2 Before the arrival of the Melchizedek receivers, Van placed the administration of human affairs in the hands of ten commissions of four each, groups identical with those of the Prince's regime. The senior resident Life Carriers assumed temporary leadership of this council of forty, which functioned throughout the seven years of waiting. Similar groups of Amadonites assumed these responsibilities when the thirty-nine loyal staff members returned to Jerusem.

^67.6.3 These Amadonites were derived from the group of 144 loyal Andonites to which Amadon belonged, and who have become known by his name. This group comprised thirty-nine men and one hundred and five women. Fifty-six of this number were of immortality status, and all (except Amadon) were translated along with the loyal members of the staff. The remainder of this noble band continued on earth to the end of their mortal days under the leadership of Van and Amadon. They were the biologic leaven which multiplied and continued to furnish leadership for the world down through the long dark ages of the postrebellion era.

^67.6.4 Van was left on Urantia until the time of Adam, remaining as titular head of all superhuman personalities functioning on the planet. He and Amadon were sustained by the technique of the tree of life in conjunction with the specialized life ministry of the Melchizedeks for over one hundred and fifty thousand years.

^67.6.5 The affairs of Urantia were for a long time administered by a council of planetary receivers, twelve Melchizedeks, confirmed by the mandate of the senior constellation ruler, the Most High Father of Norlatiadek. Associated with the Melchizedek receivers was an advisory council consisting of: one of the loyal aids of the fallen Prince, the two resident Life Carriers, a Trinitized Son in apprenticeship training, a volunteer Teacher Son, a Brilliant Evening Star of Avalon (periodically), the chiefs of seraphim and cherubim, advisers from two neighboring planets, the director general of subordinate angelic life, and Van, the commander in chief of the midway creatures. And thus was Urantia governed and administered until the arrival of Adam. It is not strange that the courageous and loyal Van was assigned a place on the council of planetary receivers which for so long administered the affairs of Urantia.

^67.6.6 The twelve Melchizedek receivers of Urantia did heroic work. They preserved the remnants of civilization, and their planetary policies were faithfully executed by Van. Within one thousand years after the rebellion he had more than three hundred and fifty advanced groups scattered abroad in the world. These outposts of civilization consisted largely of the descendants of the loyal Andonites slightly admixed with the Sangik races, particularly the blue men, and with the Nodites.

^67.6.7 Notwithstanding the terrible setback of rebellion there were many good strains of biologic promise on earth. Under the supervision of the Melchizedek receivers, Van and Amadon continued the work of fostering the natural evolution of the human race, carrying forward the physical evolution of man until it reached that culminating attainment which warranted the dispatch of a Material Son and Daughter to Urantia.

^67.6.8 Van and Amadon remained on earth until shortly after the arrival of Adam and Eve. Some years thereafter they were translated to Jerusem, where Van was reunited with his waiting Adjuster. Van now serves in behalf of Urantia while awaiting the order to go forward on the long, long trail to Paradise perfection and the unrevealed destiny of the assembling Corps of Mortal Finality.

^67.6.9 It should be recorded that, when Van appealed to the Most Highs of Edentia after Lucifer had sustained Caligastia on Urantia, the Constellation Fathers dispatched an immediate decision sustaining Van on every point of his contention. This verdict failed to reach him because the planetary circuits of communication were severed while it was in transit. Only recently was this actual ruling discovered lodged in the possession of a relay energy transmitter where it had been marooned ever since the isolation of Urantia. Without this discovery, made as the result of the investigations of the Urantia midwayers, the release of this decision would have awaited the restoration of Urantia to the constellation circuits. And this apparent accident of interplanetary communication was possible because energy transmitters can receive and transmit intelligence, but they cannot initiate communication.

^67.6.10 The technical status of Van on the legal records of Satania was not actually and finally settled until this ruling of the Edentia Fathers was recorded on Jerusem.

7. Remote Repercussions of Sin

^67.7.1 The personal (centripetal) consequences of the creature's willful and persistent rejection of light are both inevitable and individual and are of concern only to Deity and to that personal creature. Such a soul-destroying harvest of iniquity is the inner reaping of the iniquitous will creature.

^67.7.2 But not so with the external repercussions of sin: The impersonal (centrifugal) consequences of embraced sin are both inevitable and collective, being of concern to every creature functioning within the affect-range of such events.

^67.7.3 By fifty thousand years after the collapse of the planetary administration, earthly affairs were so disorganized and retarded that the human race had gained very little over the general evolutionary status existing at the time of Caligastia's arrival three hundred and fifty thousand years previously. In certain respects progress had been made; in other directions much ground had been lost.

^67.7.4 Sin is never purely local in its effects. The administrative sectors of the universes are organismal; the plight of one personality must to a certain extent be shared by all. Sin, being an attitude of the person toward reality, is destined to exhibit its inherent negativistic harvest upon any and all related levels of universe values. But the full consequences of erroneous thinking, evil-doing, or sinful planning are experienced only on the level of actual performance. The transgression of universe law may be fatal in the physical realm without seriously involving the mind or impairing the spiritual experience. Sin is fraught with fatal consequences to personality survival only when it is the attitude of the whole being, when it stands for the choosing of the mind and the willing of the soul.

^67.7.5 Evil and sin visit their consequences in material and social realms and may sometimes even retard spiritual progress on certain levels of universe reality, but never does the sin of any being rob another of the realization of the divine right of personality survival. Eternal survival can be jeopardized only by the decisions of the mind and the choice of the soul of the individual himself.

^67.7.6 Sin on Urantia did very little to delay biologic evolution, but it did operate to deprive the mortal races of the full benefit of the Adamic inheritance. Sin enormously retards intellectual development, moral growth, social progress, and mass spiritual attainment. But it does not prevent the highest spiritual achievement by any individual who chooses to know God and sincerely do his divine will.

^67.7.7 Caligastia rebelled, Adam and Eve did default, but no mortal subsequently born on Urantia has suffered in his personal spiritual experience because of these blunders. Every mortal born on Urantia since Caligastia's rebellion has been in some manner time-penalized, but the future welfare of such souls has never been in the least eternity-jeopardized. No person is ever made to suffer vital spiritual deprivation because of the sin of another. Sin is wholly personal as to moral guilt or spiritual consequences, notwithstanding its far-flung repercussions in administrative, intellectual, and social domains.

^67.7.8 While we cannot fathom the wisdom that permits such catastrophes, we can always discern the beneficial outworking of these local disturbances as they are reflected out upon the universe at large.

8. The Human Hero of the Rebellion

^67.8.1 The Lucifer rebellion was withstood by many courageous beings on the various worlds of Satania; but the records of Salvington portray Amadon as the outstanding character of the entire system in his glorious rejection of the flood tides of sedition and in his unswerving devotion to Van - they stood together unmoved in their loyalty to the supremacy of the invisible Father and his Son Michael.

^67.8.2 At the time of these momentous transactions I was stationed on Edentia, and I am still conscious of the exhilaration I experienced as I perused the Salvington broadcasts which told from day to day of the unbelievable steadfastness, the transcendent devotion, and the exquisite loyalty of this onetime semisavage springing from the experimental and original stock of the Andonic race.

^67.8.3 From Edentia up through Salvington and even on to Uversa, for seven long years the first inquiry of all subordinate celestial life regarding the Satania rebellion, ever and always, was: “What of Amadon of Urantia, does he still stand unmoved?”

^67.8.4 If the Lucifer rebellion has handicapped the local system and its fallen worlds, if the loss of this Son and his misled associates has temporarily hampered the progress of the constellation of Norlatiadek, then weigh the effect of the far-flung presentation of the inspiring performance of this one child of nature and his determined band of 143 comrades in standing steadfast for the higher concepts of universe management and administration in the face of such tremendous and adverse pressure exerted by his disloyal superiors. And let me assure you, this has already done more good in the universe of Nebadon and the superuniverse of Orvonton than can ever be outweighed by the sum total of all the evil and sorrow of the Lucifer rebellion.

^67.8.5 And all this is a beautifully touching and superbly magnificent illumination of the wisdom of the Father's universal plan for mobilizing the Corps of Mortal Finality on Paradise and for recruiting this vast group of mysterious servants of the future largely from the common clay of the mortals of ascending progression - just such mortals as the impregnable Amadon.

^67.8.6 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]