How I Found the Urantia Book - Square Circles Publishing

30 How I Found the Urantia Book
Giant Rock covered 5,800 square feet of ground and was seven stories high.
Beneath it were cave-like rooms, only one of which was open to the public—an
extensive library. It contained primarily books about UFOs; these seemed so
at odds with my view of the scientific world that they held no interest. On one
occasion, just as my parents were calling for me to leave, I took down a large
blue book that seemed different from the others. What I glimpsed in only a few
minutes really excited me. It seemed to speak clearly and with authority about
the nature of God.
I never went back in that library but I never forgot the experience of feeling
assured that it was possible to know something about our Father. Several
years after seeing that book, although I didn’t remember its name, I began reading
many accounts of religious experience by such authors as Jakob Boehme,
George Fox, William Blake, and William James. I also read religious classics
such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads.
Then, when I was 19, a friend came back from Hawaii excited about a book
called the Urantia Book. We looked for it in a few local bookstores, but didn’t
find it, so he ordered it from the publisher, the Urantia Foundation. When it
arrived, we eagerly began to read it. I knew I had found something I had been
looking for all my life. We showed it to friends in Laguna Beach who owned a
bookstore and they ordered it. When it came in, I hitchhiked forty miles to buy
the first copy in the store. It was several years before I realized that this was, in
fact, the same book I had seen so briefly in that library long ago.
Two years later, I wrote to the Foundation, asking if there were other readers
in Southern California. The reply came from a wonderful woman named Julia
Fenderson in Culver City, the town where I had lived until I was 16. The letter
went to my parent’s address, and my mother’s reaction was, “Why is Julia
Fenderson writing to you?” It turned out that I had known her fairly well when
I was in elementary school. She had been in charge of administering IQ and
achievement tests for the Culver City school district. Meeting her again, and
sharing this book with many other readers, has changed so much in my life since
that time. It continues to speak clearly to me about the fundamental questions
of human life.
JOANN EICHMANN: I always enjoy telling the story of the most important
day of my life—the day I found the Urantia Book. That day stands as an
island, everything prior seeming to lead up to it and everything after leading
increasingly back into it.
In 1968 I was living in Newport Beach and attending the University of California
at Irvine where I was majoring in philosophy. One day, upon arriving
home from classes, my next-door neighbor, Ed, met me at my door. Knowing
of my intense spiritual quest, he greeted me by saying, “I ran across a book you
might find interesting.” He handed me the Urantia Book, and the minute I held
it in my hands and leafed through its pages something deep within me exploded.
I knew of a certainty that this was it—the culmination of my search.
Ed told me someone at the hospital where he worked had bought a firstedition
Urantia Book in a secondhand bookstore some years earlier. Although
vaguely aware that the book was in some way special, he hadn’t read much of
it. He loaned it to Ed, telling him that it seemed a difficult book to find and that
he wanted it back the next day. I persuaded Ed to lend me the book until it had