LESSON 8: Learn How To Fail Gracefully
Jesus Knows all About Us
The Son of Man experienced those wide ranges of human emotion which reach from superb joy
to profound sorrow. He was a child of joy and a being of rare good humor; likewise was he a
‘man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' In a spiritual sense, he did live through the mortal
life from the bottom to the top, from the beginning to the end. From a material point of view, he
might appear to have escaped living through both social extremes of human existence, but
intellectually he became wholly familiar with the entire and complete experience of humankind.
Jesus knows about the thoughts and feelings, the urges and impulses, of the evolutionary and
ascendant mortals of the realms, from birth to death. He has lived the human life from the
beginnings of physical, intellectual, and spiritual selfhood up through infancy, childhood, youth,
and adulthood— even to the human experience of death. He not only passed through these usual
and familiar human periods of intellectual and spiritual advancement, but he also fully
experienced those higher and more advanced phases of human and Adjuster reconciliation which
so few Urantia mortals ever attain. And thus he experienced the full life of mortal man, not only
as it is lived on your world, but also as it is lived on all other evolutionary worlds of time and
space, even on the highest and most advanced of all the worlds settled in light and life. 129:4.4
Learning How To Fail Gracefully
“But life will become a burden of existence unless you learn how to fail gracefully. There is an
art in defeat which noble souls always acquire; you must know how to lose cheerfully; you must
be fearless of disappointment. Never hesitate to admit failure. Make no attempt to hide failure
under deceptive smiles and beaming optimism. It sounds well always to claim success, but the
end results are appalling. Such a technique leads directly to the creation of a world of unreality
and to the inevitable crash of ultimate disillusionment.” (1779.5) 160:4.13
TRUE SUCCESS
“The career of a God-seeking man may prove to be a great success in the light of eternity, even
though the whole temporal-life enterprise may appear as an overwhelming failure, provided each
life failure yielded the culture of wisdom and spirit achievement. Do not make the mistake of
confusing knowledge, culture, and wisdom. They are related in life, but they represent vastly
differing spirit values; wisdom ever dominates knowledge and always glorifies culture.” (1780.2)
160:4.16