© 2003 Dominique Ronfet
© 2003 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
I dedicate this text to the memory of Jacques Dupont who has left us.
Have a good trip, Jacques.
Common sense. Know how to find and cultivate your common sense.
This sentence coming from our masters and given the resurrected situation in which we found ourselves made us smile.
It undoubtedly aimed to stifle the recurring anxieties of some with a touch of humor as much as wisdom.
Indeed the most difficult period was finding balance in our new state.
New body, new mind, fading memories of a former condition, strong intuitions of eternal but still poorly fixed values: some of us found ourselves in a state of ‘paradoxical shock’ as we said.
Nothing serious but it meant that a little longer adaptation time would be necessary.
Fortunately the kindness and patience of our teachers seemed limitless.
One morning…
(roughly speaking the days were divided between class periods, community work in the various workshops, and periods of leisure tourism, we would say that the morning preceded the school period)
…One morning one of our guides said to us:
— “You will pick up your life where you left off.”
What did that mean?
It was no longer a question of short-term social success or prolonged retirement.
All our references seemed to be redrawn around this new form of thought that inhabited us (this new mind that I spoke about above).
The assessment of what remained of us was completely different from what we had on our home planets.
Our thinking was as if freed from superfluous ideas, from prejudices about ourselves or others, from preconceptions linked to our origins.
In fact we looked a lot like the child version of ourselves.
That is to say with an incredible freshness of mind always alert.
Curiously, we were told very little about God, about an original creator.
— “You are still too uneducated to understand what an infinite creator implies.”
Yet each of us rediscovered, little by little, this strange nostalgia, the feeling of an origin, this aspiration towards self-perfection.
We were then told about the inner Friend to whom we could turn.
This double that we were beginning to sense more and more clearly.
Some then ventured towards the temple and shared their impressions with older residents.
…to be continued…perhaps.
Dominique Ronfet