I am reminded of an old Zen saying: “Things are not as they appear. And neither are they different.”
This is also a teaching from the Urantia Papers.
That is…our perspective of reality is not reality but only our very limited and very subjective point of view (perspective) of reality.
Modern struggles, turmoil, chaos, catastrophes, wars, refugees, crime, racism and fascism, hunger, disease, and politics is only new, or worse, for the current generation who suffer from these primitive expressions and consequences of human false liberty.
It is nothing new. It is not worse than in the past (except as experienced and suffered personally and currently). And it certainly does not, according to the Papers, validate the myth of Armageddon.
The evolutionary progress on Urantia these past 1 million years, and especially the past 2000 years, and most especially since the printing press, is obvious and undeniable. So is the daily expressions of truth, beauty, goodness, love, kindness, generosity, mercy, and forgiveness by Urantia’s 8 billion souls.
195:5.12 (2076.3) As you view the world, remember that the black patches of evil which you see are shown against a white background of ultimate good. You do not view merely white patches of good which show up miserably against a black background of evil.
195:5.13 (2076.4) When there is so much good truth to publish and proclaim, why should men dwell so much upon the evil in the world just because it appears to be a fact? The beauties of the spiritual values of truth are more pleasurable and uplifting than is the phenomenon of evil.
Me here: So, our focus and our perspective in the moment requires the context of history and the inevitable destiny to come to appreciate the arc and trajectory of human evolutionary progress.
Perhaps this is the greatest gift and result by study of the Papers. The celestial reality perspective. The expansion of lens and context to enhance our personal perspective and help to achieve a greater appreciation of evolutionary progress and evolutionary destiny.
118:1.3 (1295.3)There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.
118:1.4 (1295.4) Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
118:1.5 (1295.5) In the maturity of the developing self, the past and future are brought together to illuminate the true meaning of the present. As the self matures, it reaches further and further back into the past for experience, while its wisdom forecasts seek to penetrate deeper and deeper into the unknown future. And as the conceiving self extends this reach ever further into both past and future, so does judgment become less and less dependent on the momentary present. In this way does decision-action begin to escape from the fetters of the moving present, while it begins to take on the aspects of past-future significance.
118:1.6 (1295.6)Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding.
118:1.7 (1295.7) To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future.
118:1.8 (1295.8) The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
“And now have I brought you apart with me and by yourselves for a little while that you may comprehend the glory, and grasp the grandeur, of the life to which I have called you: the faith-adventure of the establishment of my Father’s kingdom in the hearts of mankind, the building of my fellowship of living association with the souls of all who believe this gospel.”