48:7.8 6. To enjoy privilege without abuse, to have liberty without license, to possess power and steadfastly refuse to use it for self-aggrandizement — these are the marks of high civilization.
48:7.9 7. Blind and unforeseen accidents do not occur in the cosmos. Neither do the celestial beings assist the lower being who refuses to act upon his light of truth.
48:7.10 8. Effort does not always produce joy, but there is no happiness without intelligent effort.
48:7.11 9. Action achieves strength; moderation eventuates in charm.
48:7.12 10. Righteousness strikes the harmony chords of truth, and the melody vibrates throughout the cosmos, even to the recognition of the Infinite.
48:7.13 11. The weak indulge in resolutions, but the strong act. Life is but a day’s work — do it well. The act is ours; the consequences God’s.
48:7.14 12. The greatest affliction of the cosmos is never to have been afflicted. Mortals only learn wisdom by experiencing tribulation.
48:7.15 13. Stars are best discerned from the lonely isolation of experiential depths, not from the illuminated and ecstatic mountain tops.
48:7.16 14. Whet the appetites of your associates for truth; give advice only when it is asked for.
48:7.17 15. Affectation is the ridiculous effort of the ignorant to appear wise, the attempt of the barren soul to appear rich.
48:7.18 16. You cannot perceive spiritual truth until you feelingly experience it, and many truths are not really felt except in adversity.
48:7.19 17. Ambition is dangerous until it is fully socialized. You have not truly acquired any virtue until your acts make you worthy of it.
48:7.20 18. Impatience is a spirit poison; anger is like a stone hurled into a hornet’s nest.
48:7.21 19. Anxiety must be abandoned. The disappointments hardest to bear are those which never come.
48:7.22 20. Only a poet can discern poetry in the commonplace prose of routine existence.
48:7.23 21. The high mission of any art is, by its illusions, to foreshadow a higher universe reality, to crystallize the emotions of time into the thought of eternity.
48:7.24 22. The evolving soul is not made divine by what it does, but by what it strives to do.
48:7.25 23. Death added nothing to the intellectual possession or to the spiritual endowment, but it did add to the experiential status the consciousness of
48:7.26 24. The destiny of eternity is determined moment by moment by the achievements of the day by day living. The acts of today are the destiny of tomorrow.
48:7.27 25. Greatness lies not so much in possessing strength as in making a wise and divine use of such strength.
48:7.28 26. Knowledge is possessed only by sharing; it is safeguarded by wisdom and socialized by love.
48:7.29 27. Progress demands development of individuality; mediocrity seeks perpetuation in standardization.
48:7.30 28. The argumentative defence of any proposition is inversely proportional to the truth contained.
48:7.31 ¶ Such is the work of the beginners on the first mansion world while the more advanced pupils on the later worlds are mastering the higher levels of cosmic insight and morontia mota.
8. THE MORONTIA PROGRESSORS
48:8.1 From the time of graduation from the mansion worlds to the attainment of spirit status in the superuniverse career, ascending mortals are denominated morontia progressors. Your passage through this wonderful borderland life will be an unforgettable experience, a charming memory. It is the evolutionary portal to spirit life and the eventual attainment of creature perfection by which ascenders achieve the goal of time — the finding of God on Paradise.
48:8.2 There is a definite and divine purpose in all this morontia and subsequent spirit scheme of mortal progression, this elaborate universe training school for ascending creatures. It is the design of the Creators to afford the creatures of time a graduated opportunity to master the details of the operation and administration of the grand universe, and this long course of training is best carried forward by having the surviving mortal climb up gradually and by actual participation in every step of the ascent.
48:8.3 The mortal-survival plan has a practical and serviceable objective; you are not the recipients of all this divine labour and painstaking training only that you may survive just to enjoy endless bliss and eternal ease. There is a goal of transcendent service concealed beyond the horizon of the present universe age. If the Gods designed merely to take you on one long and eternal joy excursion, they certainly would not so largely turn the whole universe into one vast and intricate practical training school, requisition a substantial part of the celestial creation as teachers and instructors, and then spend ages upon ages piloting you, one by one, through this gigantic universe school of experiential training. The furtherance of the scheme of mortal progression seems to be one of the chief businesses of the present organized universe, and the majority of innumerable orders of created intelligences are either directly or indirectly engaged in advancing some phase of this progressive perfection plan.
48:8.4 In traversing the ascending scale of living existence from mortal man to the Deity embrace, you actually live the very life of every possible phase and stage of perfected creature existence within the limits of the present universe age. From mortal man to Paradise finaliter embraces all that now can be — encompasses everything presently possible to the living orders of intelligent, perfected finite creature beings. If the future destiny of the Paradise finaliters is service in new universes now in the making, it is assured that in this new and future creation there will be no created orders of experiential beings whose lives will be wholly different from those which mortal finaliters have lived on some world as a part of their ascending training, as one of the stages of their agelong progress from animal to angel and from angel to spirit and from spirit to God.
48:8.5 [Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.]
PAPER № 49
THE INHABITED WORLDS
49:0.1 All mortal-inhabited worlds are evolutionary in origin and nature. These spheres are the spawning ground, the evolutionary cradle, of the mortal races of time and space. Each unit of the ascendant life is a veritable training school for the stage of existence just ahead, and this is true of every stage of man’s progressive Paradise ascent; just as true of the initial mortal experience on an evolutionary planet as of the final universe headquarters school of the Melchizedeks, a school which is not attended by ascending mortals until just before their translation to the regime of the superuniverse and the attainment of first-stage spirit existence.
49:0.2 ¶ All inhabited worlds are basically grouped for celestial administration into the local systems, and each of these local systems is limited to about 1,000 evolutionary worlds. This limitation is by the decree of the Ancients of Days, and it pertains to actual evolutionary planets whereon mortals of survival status are
