For years, the single fully-formed sentence: “The universe was designed for the growth of souls” would tumble constantly through my mind, at odd hours of the day or night. I had been interested in the possibility of life on other planets, even as a thirteen-year old, and at age fifteen, while still at boarding school, I was drawn to the works of Aristotle and Plato in the local library and I found myself becoming deeply concerned with philosophy, the search for eternal truth, and the best way for humans to govern or be governed.

Not only was I a white South African, growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, daily confronted with the injustices, inequalities and oppression I saw around me, but I was also beginning to read Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Dostoyevsky, and their exploration of the human condition. Looking at the world from the position of a young Afrikaner teenager, and feeling myself deeply implicated by the injustices I could perceive around me, I was deeply aware that “this is not it, this is not it at all…”

Only decades later, after having studied philosophy, political philosophy and women’s history,  would my intergalactic longings and my search for universal justice be nurtured when a blonde, blue-eyed hairdresser in Mowbray, Cape Town, (who was a descendant of a Scottish missionary and a Hopi Indian woman, and who acted as pipe holder for the visiting American Hopi mystic Two Birds Johnson), while cutting my hair, presented me with a reading list that encompassed intergalactic themes, including the works of Zecharia Sitchin and the Urantia Book, a 2097 page spiritual and philosophic book on the nature and character of God and the Universe.

After reading this book, and becoming acquainted with the channeled transcripts of celestial/mortal communication that has become known as the Urantia Teaching Mission, I was ready to understand the sentence. “The universe was designed for the growth of souls.”

The Urantia book describes a vast spiritual administration of a universe concerned with the ascending eternal careers of “trillions of sentient, soul-filled individuals” from “billions of inhabited worlds”. It explains that we are cosmic citizens of an ordered, lovingly administrated and God-centered universe, concerned with the growth of our eternal souls, and that, during the history of humanity on our planet, humans have at times been in the presence of immortal spiritual beings. Machiventa Melchizedek and the being we know as Jesus of Nazareth are identified as two such immortal beings.

The time we are living in is described as a Correcting time, and we are cautioned that humanity can only become socially sustainably by alignment with the values of the First Source and Center of this lovingly administrated universe, measuring every decision we make against seven minimum values, namely life, quality of life, growth and equality, with love, compassion and empathy. We are reminded that there are seven dimensions to human development, namely the physical, the emotional, the mental, the intellectual, the cultural, the social, and the spiritual, and that there are more than 98 qualities of soul we should master to be prepared for the morontia worlds that await us when we die. These qualities include love, kindness, patience, compassion, forgiveness, humility, forbearance, generosity, tolerance, truth, beauty, and goodness.

It is clear that our planet is far removed from these ideals of governance for the growth of souls. To govern for the growth of souls, celestial teachers urge us, we will need to become aware  of the fragment of Divinity that indwells us, make daily Conscious Contact with that magnificent spiritual presence, establish learning centers for sustainable families, capable of inculcating the qualities of soul needed for our eternal ascendant journeys, and make all our decisions collectively, using the seven minimum values to ensure that we are governing for the growth of eternal soul qualities. We are also urged to use co-creative design teams to refine our collective decision-making, which will allow us as humans to evolve towards a predicted planetary era of Light and Life.

We are taught that governance for the growth of souls is an ongoing commitment to creating an enlightened, compassionate, and inclusive society in a God-centered universe. By integrating wisdom, inclusivity, and ethical leadership, based on seven core values, governance nurtures and empowers individuals to flourish. As we align governance with the divine plan aimed at the growth of our eternal souls, we help establish an era of truth, beauty, and goodness, guiding humanity toward planetary enlightenment.

Marthe Muller, February 13 2025.