© 2007 Jean-Claude Romeuf
© 2007 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 1) | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 41 — Winter 2007 | AFLLU Autumn Meeting in AIX-LES-BAINS |
The facts. Below flowed a river. Him, having bathed under the waterfalls many times, knew it well. Its pools were filled with exotic fish, the same multi-colored fish that populate the atolls of tropical islands. Very often, he had been surprised to be able to breathe underwater.
Jumping upstream, from rock to rock, he had noticed that the river was also a reserve of gold. How many vials of this precious metal had he filled while searching in the cracks? He could not say; nor did he remember in which hiding place he had buried them.
Him was now walking on the path overlooking and running alongside the river a few meters away. To the right stood immense impassable cliffs, but Him knew that by following the path made of rock and earth, he would surely one day arrive at the white summit of the mountain. Up there where the sky merges with the earth, the path and the river, he was sure, must meet. As he was deeply convinced, he would see that a spring would gush forth at the place where the path ended.
Not far away, on the edge, a barn appeared that seemed to emerge from the medieval dream of a herald or a troubadour. Him had no doubt that this hovel belonged to him. It was almost a ruin, but the foundations were solid and if he got to work, he would make it a pretty Cévennes farmhouse. What intrigued him the most was a sort of wooden trapdoor located at the top of the building and through which birds the color of turtledoves flew away, but the breed of these birds was totally unknown to him. If they had been white doves, Him would not have failed to think that he had been dealing with God!
Him climbed up to the trapdoor without difficulty and hoisted himself inside a room, a sort of attic filled with straw. He expected to find a multitude of birds there, but the room was empty. A large nest located in the center contained, he judged, nearly two hundred eggs. No bird was there to hatch them, which made Him a little sad: the eggs were going to rot!
The straw was welcoming, he lay down and fell asleep.
Meanings. Him knew that no fact is useless provided that it is given a meaning. He called this “the positive reaction to events”. When he woke up, he understood that the river was a stream of life flowing indefinitely, loaded with beneficial influences that the gods incessantly send to men so that they can make the most of their experience of life.
The path that led up, parallel to the river and not far from it, seemed to represent Him’s slow progression in search of spirituality, throughout time and eternity.
The sun rises every day, but why does it do so? Basking in the sun without asking why it rises does not benefit the evolution of thought or the mind.
That day, the weather was very nice. The birds that flew away, he knew right away, were the developers who left him a book. The developers had left, but the eggs remained. The eggs represented the booklets contained in the book. There were exactly one hundred and ninety-six of them. But why weren’t they hatched? Him felt a little bitter; he understood that to really enjoy them, it would be up to him to hatch them. In other words, he had to read and reread the pages of the booklets!
He was a little ashamed of having held a treasure in his hands for so long and of having wasted so much time not making it grow sufficiently.
Values. They did not yet belong to him entirely. Were they the property of the star that inhabited him? No more than he knew where he had put the gold he had picked up in the river, he did not know where the values of his life were stored. Explaining the rotation of the earth around the sun by physical sciences can only remain a rotation around human meanings, but seeing God through the beauty of human sciences is like admiring the beauty of God through a sunrise. It is a value of eternity! These values, thought Him, help men to climb their path and build their house.
He knew that reading his book would help him satisfy his curiosity, to give birth to new concepts, new meanings; it was commendable, but was it enough? Perhaps, despite everything, it would generate somewhere in his soul, horizons of new values - a growth in the divine native to an increased consciousness or knowledge of the Deity and the cosmos - but of that, nothing was certain! Him took the book back from the beginning, he began with the Introduction, he concentrated several times on the passages dealing with the Deities, the Eternal Island and the Universe. He realized that each reading led him to new questions; what he had thought he understood until then turned out to be insufficient and imperfect. Each page led him to reflect, a forgotten passage or one read too quickly, was often the key that allowed one to open one of the doors of truth. He decided to take notes in a small notebook.
He first sought to elucidate the complexity of cosmic reality in which everything sometimes seemed to contradict itself in the book, but he realized that the revelators had two ways of apprehending space depending on whether they placed themselves on the absolute level or on the finite level. In all cases the cosmos had a limit.
Space, they said, does not exist on the absolute surfaces of the Eternal Island. It itself exists outside of time and without location in space. It is therefore natural, thought Him, that the vision of space of the beings who populate it is different from ours.
For these beings, on the absolute level, the vertical profile of the totality of space resembles a Maltese cross. The horizontal arms represent the penetrated space, that is to say formed of galaxies, black holes (dark islands), suns, planets. The vertical arms represent the unpenetrated space (devoid of force energy) which is a potential reservoir of volume and at the same time one of the stabilizers of the penetrated space. While one contracts, the other is expanding. This is what explains the current and visible expansion of the galaxies. Between the four arms, there is a semi-quiet zone of median space separating the different levels of the universe.
Now, these same beings, living in the absolute, know how to project themselves into the finite. When they speak of our universe and no longer of Paradise, their vision of the cosmos is no longer the same: When we go from the divine center outwards in any direction we end up arriving at the outer limits of the great universe. This would contradict the previous analysis if we did not take into account the absolute or finite levels, but comes closer to our own astronomical concept.
This second vision of the cosmos, different from the first, resembles what our astronomers can observe with their telescopes. Indeed, from any point where one is in the universe, space seems to unfold in all directions. Science, although it knows the galaxies, is currently unaware of the existence of the four levels of exterior space, but it knows that the galaxies are separated from each other by zones where matter becomes rarefied (the middle space). It presumes that our cosmos has a limit beyond which nothing would exist (the unpenetrated space). Let’s not talk about nothingness here, it doesn’t exist!
Him continued to write that the description of a paradisiacal center of the different material levels is necessary to make humans understand their profile of spiritual ascension. The fact that the revelators give him a geographical location serves to make them conceive of a spatial path parallel to the spiritual development of each man, the ultimate goal being Paradise. Him said to himself that it would take him ages and ages to reach the top of the mountain, but after all, that mattered little to him: he was not so bad off on earth, on the path near the river. He had to build his house first, it would take a long time! He began to think a little more.
He had read that space did not touch Paradise, he did not care about that either. The important thing was that Paradise could touch space! Why would it not? Paradise, being an Absolute, the absolute model of space, must have this power. The Universal Father, he said to himself, as far away as he is, does indeed live in the hearts of men?
If Paradise did not have the power to meet space, if it were as far away as one might believe, the power of space which is the cosmic reservoir of all material universes, could not penetrate into the great universe and even less into the outer universes. Now, the power of space coming from Paradise is the ancestral reserve of all force, energy or matter and is always present in space. It is not a level of actual reality, but it is the potential of all cosmic reality revealed and organized by the Unqualified Absolute.
Jean Claude Romeuf
December 2, 2007
| A Little Reflection on the Power of Loving (Part 1) | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 41 — Winter 2007 | AFLLU Autumn Meeting in AIX-LES-BAINS |