You Can Do This!
Last November I told you about something that kept me awake for weeks. AI. The race to build it, and how far our wisdom lags behind our power. I still believe every word of that. But there is another half to that fear, and this month I can finally write it.
The same tools that frighten the experts are sitting, right now, on the phones of people who have read The Urantia Book for forty years. Many have never touched them. Not out of conviction. Out of a quiet sense that this is not for them – too technical, too strange, too easy to get wrong. So on Sunday, we did something about it.
What happened on Sunday. Ninety minutes on Zoom, with about 30 people. The workshop was convened by Gary Deinstadt and The Urantia Book Fellowship's Education Committee, and I presented it. It was called You Can Do This, and the title was the whole point.
No theory. No slides about the future. Five real things, done by each person with their own hands, on their own account:
Share a passage as an image. One line – "Love is the desire to good to others." (56:10.21) – turned into a card you could send a friend this afternoon.
Understand a hard passage. We pasted in 117:0.1, on the Supreme, one of the densest paragraphs in the book, and asked for it in plain words. Then for three questions a study group could talk abvout for twenty minutes.
A conversation with Melchizedek. This one needs care, so we gave it some. You are not talking with Melchizedek. You are talking with a computer program that has read the book and answers in the style of a figure from it. No celestial is speaking, and nothing it says is revelation. Five plain rules, pasted in first, make it say so – and make it answer "The book does not tell us that" instead of inventing.
Introduce the book to someone you love. A short, warm note to a Catholic friend, or a Jewish one, or one who believes nothing at all, built on one idea from the book, without preaching. The AI drafts. Your voice finishes.
Tell a story. Ganid on the boat at Charax, watching his teacher on the shore, never to know that the man was Joshua – later Jesus of Nazareth (133:9.4). Two hundred words from the boy's side, labeled at the top as imagined. Fiction is not revelation. and we say so.
Three habits ran under everything. Paste the book's words in yourself – never ask the machine to recall a quote. Ask for references, and check one in the book. Keep private details out. Now it's yours. Everything from the day is on one page.
The full recording. Each of the five exercises, step-by-step, every prompt ready to copy – or to open straight in ChatGPT with one click. The prompt sheet and the slides.
And one thing we promised on the day: How to give an AI the whole book. The text of The Urantia Book, about 1.1 million words, split into four plain files, one per Part, so that each fits what ChatGPT and NotebookLM can hold – with a short video showing exactly how. Upload them once, and you have a study companion that searches all 196 papers and can point you to the paragraph it drew on.
Whether you were there or not, you can work through it at your own pace. You need a paid ChatGPT account for the exercises; NotebookLM is free.
Fifteen minutes. Here is the whole method, if you want only one thing: Open the book to one paragraph. Paste it in. Ask for a simple explanation, then for three questions. Check one reference. Fifteen minutes a day is how this becomes yours.
The fear was right. So is this. The tools are going to shape how the next generation meets this revelation – and I would rather they were shaped by people who have read it. If you try it and get stuck, or make something you're proud of, write to me: contact@fer-studios.com
With gratitude,
Gabriel Rymberg