Harry Allen OverstreetBesprekingen

1/17/23

2/28/22

2/28/22

2/28/22

2/28/22

Amazingly, this book is as if it was written by someone else, not Overstreet. It is no comparison with his earlier books "The Enduring Quest" and "The Mature Mind". I cannot recommend it and I couldn't force myself to finish it beyond the first 120 pages or so.

First and foremost I recommend this book to the young parents and to the future soon-to-become parents. If I had read this book earlier in life I would have done many things differently. Nevertheless, even now, as I was reading this book and taking in the wisdom it so freely and graciously imparted, I saw myself re-telling what I was being taught to my elder daughter. The author considers (among other things) the chief obstacles to the process of maturing of our minds, namely: newspapers, radio, advertisements and Hollywood's motion pictures (nowadays called "movies", I believe). If he were to write the book today he would have to add TV to the list. He proves beyond a shadow of doubt that all these influences being controlled as they are by the purely money-making motivations, arrest the development of our minds. The reason is quite simple, really: it is good for the business if the population is turned into idiots, i.e. people with adult body but the mind of a child. Such "consumers" (as they are openly and shamelessly called!) have very short span of attention focus, don't like to read books (and that is good for the business too, because you can't insert an advertisement into a book), prefer mediocre so-called "modern music" and generally prefer their minds to be entertained rather than applied to solving complex problems. So, what can we possibly do about it, apart from the obvious self-protection measure of not buying newspapers, not listening to radio (or watching TV) and never buying anything based on an advertisement? The solution is just as clear as the problem: we should grow from immaturity into maturity, from the ego-centred selfishness into unselfish loving-kindness and self-forgetfulness. Instead of desiring to be entertained we should apply our minds to constant education, learning and solving complex problems purely for the benefit of all mankind, rather than for selfish profit-making reasons. Then, the money-makers would have nothing to sell to us, because it is not in their province to sell (or produce) anything useful that such mature minds would desire to have. Because the "things" which a mature mind desires are not of this material world --- they are the high ideals of an enlightened future age of brotherhood and the high quality thoughts which will in fact become the chief motivation for living in such a future age, which, by the way, Jesus of Nazareth predicted 2000 years ago.

The book "The Enduring Quest" by professor and head of department of philosophy and psychology (College of the City of New York) H.A. Overstreet was used as the chief source of Section 9 of Paper 12 of the Fifth Epochal Revelation ("the Urantia Papers"), as was recently discovered by the researches of Matthew Block (see https://urantiabooksources.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/012.pdf). Moreover, if we do not limit ourselves to direct word-for-word matching paragraphs and consider the general (and yet unique enough to be identified unambiguously) thoughts of the author, then we find that his influence spreads far beyond Paper 12, for example to Paper 196 and others.

The book begins with the consideration of the influence of the latest discoveries in physics on the complex issues of human psychology, such as the meaning of human life viewed in its wholeness. He often quotes the works of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and Sir James Jeans and it is curious to note that those two authors happen to be the two chief sources of other papers in the above-mentioned Urantia Papers set, namely papers 41 and 42. Then he considers the fallacy of abstraction and what it means to really "know an individual" and the kinds of knowledge there can be. His philosophical ideas on the connection between matter and knowledge (information) resonate somewhat with the new "purely scientific" ideas rediscovered in the setting of quantum infodynamics. But the most dramatic part is Overstreet's revelation of "Man as a Revealer". The basis for this concept is not that of some "special prophet", isolated from the rest of mankind, but, quite the contrary, the cosmic integration of the personality and maturity of the mind (the theme is developed further in Overstreet's other book "The Mature Mind"). He emphasises that the orthodox considerations of the process of evolution tend to look backward rather than forward, i.e. treat the past forms and stages of development as somehow "more fundamental" and thereby totally neglect the signs of the emerging "future forms". In this sense a growing human soul with an open, maturing mind can be truly considered "a revealer, a prophet". He even suggests to use a different word to describe this new concept: "advolution", i.e. "evolution towards" as opposed to "evolution", i.e. "evolution out of". The clear manifestation of this process is the "advolution of the concept of God" and the error of all evolutionary religions which tenaciously hold to their traditions and dogmas because of looking backward rather than forward. The "prophet" of the evolutionary religions is a kind of "superman" (as if coming out of the mad mind of Nietzsche, whose philosophy, by the way, Overstreet considers to be an "invitation to madness", just like the capitalist pseudo-economic ideas of Adam Smith and belligerent class struggle ideas of Karl Marx) representing the anthropomorphic God of the savage tribes from the past, rather than the true God of love who dwells within every fellow human being and inspires us to love. So, the religion of revelation could be called "advolutionary religion" as opposed to "evolutionary religions" like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and so on.

I cannot recommend this book enough --- read it with a living mind eager to learn and unfettered by the shackles of tradition and dogma and you will enjoy it, for the process of growth always brings joy!