© 2007 Alain Coulombe
© 2007 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The President's Word | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 41 — Winter 2007 | A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 1) |
This text was written by my former department head, who was, for a long time, a very assiduous reader (at least seven readings) of the UB and whom Pascal knew well. If I remember correctly, he addressed this text to people who had no knowledge of the UB, but were “curious” enough to look into it more thoroughly. It’s up to you to see if he had any chance of achieving his “goal” with this text…
Alain Coulombe
¶ PRESENTATION (1st part)
The planet on which you live is reaching a turning point in its history. There is still, in truth, a great risk that it will disappear in the coming decades in a general conflagration. The most powerful and most advanced nations are by no means safe from destructive turmoil likely to overwhelm them and all are at the mercy of the multiplication of weapons, the excess of nationalism, the outbreak of new dangers and the gangrene of corruption. But it is comforting to say that it nevertheless seems likely to emerge, in the coming centuries, when the murderous and stupid upheavals which tear people apart will tend to calm down, the timid dawn of real and lasting human progress, a prelude to the establishment of a later age of relative perfection.
In all certainty, the vital choice between these two outcomes lies in the hands of those who will cultivate altruism, tolerance, strict integrity, imagination, perseverance, courage. Even more, this choice lies in the hands of those who, among these beings of moral greatness, will place their efforts under the aegis of a cosmic thought of wisdom and peace and, having discovered the destiny of perfection that the creator offers them, will learn to put, in joy and serenity, their will, their intelligence, their knowledge and their energy at the service of human fraternity and planetary progress.
May those who embark on this path not let themselves be put off by any of the obstacles that will inevitably arise under their feet and make them stumble. May they know that no sincere and thoughtful act is ever useless, even if it seems trivial in comparison with the work to be accomplished. May they therefore decide, day after day, to take the right path, the path of self-control and self-denial in the service of a world that their efforts aim to make, and will have the effect of making more just and more responsible, more attentive to reason, balance and beauty, freer and more human.
If it is true that the consciousness of God and the search for cosmic thought are not necessary for the unfolding of material existence, they are, on the other hand, necessary for the attainment of a broader vision of the world, of a deeper wisdom and, even more, for the conquest of survival, since it is the attempts at spiritualization and the adequacy of human decisions to divine incitement which construct and make the soul grow and since the soul is the only entity which, surviving physical death, is able to animate an immaterial body on other worlds.
Human creatures have only a limited glimpse of the universal cosmos. While the material structure of the peripheral evolutionary Universe in which they live becomes partly familiar to them, almost all of them are ignorant of the existence of the gigantic Central Universe, without temporal beginning, governed by laws different from those of the evolutionary worlds and in which mental and spiritual forces entirely dominate material forces.
That this perfect Universe remains inaccessible for all eternity is not strange, since the very light which bathes it cannot escape.
Those who postulate the existence of a creator may regard God as the sum of the material, mental and spiritual energies of the Universes and as an infinite reservoir of cosmic potentialities and they will be right, but God is much more than that. They may also regard him as an absolute personality, capable of contact with the other personalities of the Universe, and they will also be right because the attributes of the creator encompass and transcend those of the creatures, but God, who is in truth the universal dispenser of the status of personality is even more than that, without his immensity and diversity being able to be discerned by the material creatures limited in their conception of the Universe and practically incapable of detecting spiritual messages.
As a primordial entity, God can transform, fragment, condition and animate his own infinity outside of all temporal and spatial constraints, resulting in a creative power of which human beings can only analyze distant and partial physical manifestations.
Within an initial cosmos where time and the evolutionary universe did not exist, God projected out of himself and brought into existence, by a creative act of self-limitation, a second divine entity whose presence has from all eternity made him the ancestral creative Father, while from the two poles of this unfathomable primary segregation there flashed forth, like an eternal hyphen of active intelligence, the spiritual lightning of a third divine entity. Thus there exist, outside the evolutionary worlds, in the eternally stable paradisiacal heart of the Central Universe, three personal spiritual powers, equal in divinity but distinct in hierarchy and attributes, the Universal Father, the eternal Son, and the infinite Spirit, in truth one God in three persons. And these three divine personalities ensured the creation of an immeasurable number of other spiritual personalities, some of whom populate the perfect central Universe and others of whom have, from the dawn of time, initiated the creation and ensured the organization of the peripheral Universe.
The material human mind cannot attribute to God any known form. If it happened that a material being could one day be transported to Paradise, it would detect nothing there. The luminosity of the three persons of the Trinity, the unheard-of splendors of the paradisiacal structure and the myriads of creatures that populate it would escape it entirely, just as it would escape the gigantic intensity of the spiritual currents that unfold there, some of which are pure spiritual currents of love, capable of draining towards God any creature with an eternal destiny.
Unlike the central Universe and the immense processions of spheres that compose it and gravitate eternally around the island of perfect cosmic equilibrium of Paradise, the peripheral Universe was created imperfect, subject to the inexorable constraint of time and bubbling with the rich and uncertain potentialities of revolution. Powerful spiritual organizers, among whom were creator Sons directly issued from the Universal Father and the eternal Son associated with personalities created by the infinite Spirit, received the mission of ensuring the population of the billions of planets that were to be formed in the course of the ages and would slowly become capable of receiving life. It is thus that one of these creator Sons, assisted by a creative personality of the infinite Spirit, is today responsible for the destiny of a local group of a few million inhabited planets of which the Earth is a part. This creator son ensured that life was implanted on these planets and that the material creatures resulting from this implantation benefited from a biological development giving the most advanced of them the capacity to conceive of the existence of a spiritual world and the possibility of reaching it. Long before the appearance of the habitable planets, the two associated creative personalities brought into existence the myriads of spiritual creatures necessary for the functioning of the segment of the universe for which they were responsible and programmed the construction of the thousands of capital and satellite spheres on which most of the supermaterial life and activities of the local evolutionary universes take place.
A creator son must not only ensure the organization, population and management of his local universe. He must, on seven different occasions, live the life of one of his own creatures. Thus, and thus alone, can he claim the full and true knowledge of his creation, spiritual and material. It was the surprising destiny of the Earth to host two thousand years ago, the creator Son of the segment of the Universe of which it is a part, during the brief and unique incarnation in human form of this divine Son.
The power and perfection of the spiritual creatures of the local evolutionary universes decrease as the scope of their responsibilities is reduced and their ordinary duties bring them closer to material creatures. This, combined with the great freedom of action granted to them, can lead them to stumble and millennia can then be necessary for the sometimes catastrophic consequences of their errors to be corrected. The Earth and a few dozen neighboring planets have unfortunately suffered in the past from such a mishap and many of the afflictions that humanity has known are partly the consequence. One of the happy effects of the incarnation of the Creator Son of the local Universe from which the Earth benefited was to trigger the long restoration of order on these disturbed planets.
The injunction of the Universal Father to human creatures is simple: “Rise up to me by progressing in the path of perfection.” And this injunction is doubled by this one: “Bring with tolerance, patience, intelligence and wisdom, your help to other human creatures and respect them, because all have the same potential for eternity as you.” The Universal Father is however not personally present in the evolutionary Universe to deliver this message, he does so through his spiritual creatures who ensure that the light of truth never goes out entirely on the inhabited planets, despite the dramas and upheavals that disturb them. But more directly still, the Universal Father distils this message by introducing into human thought a fragment of himself, in the form of a spark of pure spirituality which lovingly and unfailingly accompanies each human creature from the day of his first moral choice. Rare and difficult, however, is the contact between this divine presence, perfectly but exclusively spiritual, and a human intelligence almost entirely material, too often selfish and sometimes deeply misguided. How can we pay attention to the tiny inner voice that says what is right and true, when we let ourselves be carried away by the torrent of emotions, furies, desires and hatreds and are pushed towards the inexorable whirlwind of sterile accomplishments, by the vain constraints and perverse temptations of an unthinking world.
to be continued
| The President's Word | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 41 — Winter 2007 | A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 1) |