© 2000 Jean-Claude Romeuf
© 200 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 14 — Summer 2000 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 14 — Summer 2000 | The Dual Nature of Supremacy |
According to The Urantia Book, the universe of universes is made of different parts:
Movement and especially rotation characterize the entire Cosmic Reality. The whole of this reality revolves around a stationary Central Island, the only immobile center of the master universe.
The ellipse seems to be the fundamental unit of any physical system
At the same time as they rotate on themselves, the galaxies seem to move towards a precise axis.
Adding to all this, according to our astronomers, the universe is expanding but readers of The Urantia Book know about the breathing of space (Page 123).
At the level of matter, the infinitely small joins the infinitely large. Atoms strangely resemble solar systems in which the planets are only electrons. Time and space are relative: everything depends on the eye of the observer. When the revelators speak to us of the dimensions of the Central Universe, this corresponds more to their vision than to ours. This is a reality that is not very compatible with our mind and our means of spatiotemporal measurements.
Havona and even less Paradise are not a creation of time. Havona borders on absoluteness and Paradise is an absolute. However, an absolute cannot be circumscribed. The center of all things cannot therefore be included in a space as humans conceive it. Moreover, it is said:
“The absolute level is beginningless, endless, timeless, and spaceless. For example: On Paradise, time and space are nonexistent; the time-space status of Paradise is absolute. This level is Trinity attained, existentially, by the Paradise Deities, but this third level of unifying Deity expression is not fully unified experientially. Whenever, wherever, and however the absolute level of Deity functions, Paradise-absolute values and meanings are manifest.” (UB 0:1.13)
“*The Isle of Paradise—*Paradise not otherwise qualified—is the Absolute of the material-gravity control of the First Source and Center. Paradise is motionless, being the only stationary thing in the universe of universes. The Isle of Paradise has a universe location but no position in space. This eternal Isle is the actual source of the physical universes—past, present, and future. The nuclear Isle of Light is a Deity derivative, but it is hardly Deity; neither are the material creations a part of Deity; they are a consequence.” (UB 0:4.12)
Physical or astronomical space, as we can observe and know it, devoid of beings endowed with mind, spirituality, personality and absonity is the domain of the Unqualified Absolute: we must not include Paradise, Havona and the architectural worlds.
Time and space are the prerogatives of the Supreme. Even the Outer Spaces which will be inhabited
the Age of Ultimate are currently in the Age of Supremacy.
It is therefore useless to scan the starry sky with a telescope to try to locate the Central Universe or to graphically represent it on a map by associating it with the seven superuniverses and the four levels of Outer Space.
The Central Island is the absolute archetype of all material reality and is limited only by the will of a deified Absolute (the will of the three persons of Paradise, which is somewhat different from the Deity Absolute or Qualified Absolute). It is the model of the infinitely small: around it revolves every atom. It is the model of the infinitely large: around it revolves every universe. It can be contained in material reality and in this case it is the central point around which the vast universe revolves or it is the container of all this reality and then becomes its support.
The things and beings of our Age (of supremacy) have the ultimate goal of achieving perfection. If evolutionary personalities are to follow the supreme commandment “Be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect”, they must have the privilege of being able to evolve in an ambient environment where everything has the obligation to become perfect as the Isle of Paradise is perfect. Everything that does not evolve towards perfection is destined to disappear. The physical world is no exception to this rule: the observable cosmos may appear chaotic, but its ultimate goal is to achieve stability, symmetry and security. Believing in the divine perfection of beauty, truth and goodness is also believing in the actualized or potential perfection of the entire material universe.
For the moment, only the worlds of eternal origin, the architectural spheres and the worlds anchored in light escape chaos, instability and insecurity.
Does security in stability mean “static existence”? Doesn’t the mind retain the prerogative to act more or less on the material environment whatever its degree of perfection? Don’t beings, even in Paradise, have the possibility of modifying their environment? Are there green pastures up there maintained by finaliters?
For a local universe, “to be anchored in the light” is to have become a realm of evolutionary perfection (UB 18:6.6); in other words, it is to have exhausted its physical possibilities (UB 32:3.2)
This universe is then safe from any cosmic accident, each planet, each sun that composes it, is also. It thus escapes the natural law which is: “birth, growth and death”. For this to be possible, it would have to be isolated from any unstable physical influence coming from neighboring local universes contained within an unstabilized superuniverse.
Is there a magnetic or other barrier, manufactured by the super-evolved natives of these worlds or by their celestial supervisors, preventing any external aggression? Or, to get out of the rugged space, is it necessary for a planet, a local universe, to have an entity comparable to the human soul serving as its duplicate and allowing it to survive natural destruction? In this case, there would have to be a place comparable to the world of houses which, like it, would be in space, but sheltered from the accidents of space and which would allow the “storage” of worlds that have entered the light.
The term dark island(s) appears fifteen times in the Urantia Book. These are clusters of very concentrated matter acting like dynamos that attract matter and concentrate it. The analogy with the black holes of our astronomers seems obvious, especially since they appear to have the same properties. We know from the Urantia Book that the center of our System is a dark island in space (UB 41:2.2). These black holes are matter collapsed on itself that can act as a center of gravity. Their volume is therefore infinitely smaller than their density. They can be single or multiple suns and why not entire galaxies concentrated on themselves.
The word nebulae can have different meanings in the book. It can be globular clusters, star-producing nebulae like M. 16 Eagle, $1 42, the Horsehead Nebula or galaxies, etc.
For today’s astronomers, our galaxy (the Milky Way) is a celestial object resembling an olive. It is composed of a disk (the dense core) in the shape of a spiral one hundred thousand light years in diameter occupying the central part and a galactic halo (the fleshy part) two hundred and fifty thousand light years in radius in which other galaxies of small dimensions evolve. As for the distance separating the outer part of the halo and the geographic center of the disk, there is no antagonism between scientists and our revelators, because it is the same as that found in the Urantia Book. (UB 32:2.11)
At UB 12:2.3 it says: “The seven superuniverses are still growing; the periphery of each is undergoing gradual expansion; new nebulae are constantly being stabilized and organized; and some of the nebulae which Urantia astronomers regard as extragalactic are actually on the fringes of Orvonton and continuing their journey with us…”
Here, it must be a question of small galaxies resembling those which have been discovered in the recent past. They are located in the halo or are close to it; they bear the pretty names of Draco, Sculptor, Pegasus, Fornax, Sextans, Ursa Major, Leo I and Leo II etc. They are added to the Magellanic clouds and form or will form with them and the Milky Way the seventh superuniverse of Orvonton.
The two parties also agree that it is in the halo that almost all of the globular clusters are found, a certain quantity of which is visible through binoculars.
UB 15:4.8 The globular type of star cluster predominates in the vicinity of the outer limits of Orvonton (these limits correspond to the limits of the halo and not of the disk).
The agreement is no longer the same when we consider our geographical position:
There is also a small difference in estimates of the distance to Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us in Outer Space.
But where have superuniverses #1 and #6 gone, which according to the Book are our neighbors? At UB 15:3.1 it is said: “Practically all the starry kingdoms visible from Urantia to the naked eye belong to the seventh section of the grand universe, the superuniverse of Orvonton.” It is not possible to observe, even with an amateur telescope, a single star in Andromeda (and even the Magellanic Clouds). The use of the word practically can allow us to deduce that certain stars or certain groups of stars not belonging to the 7th superuniverse are visible to the naked eye. In this case, they are necessarily part of the 1st or 6th superuniverse.
The proximity of the latter can hide their existence from us. If one or two galaxies were very close to us, it would be impossible for us to differentiate them with our optical instruments because then their stars would merge with our stars.
To support this theory, we can take as an example M51, a celestial object located in the direction of the constellation of Canes Venatici. It is composed of two galaxies whose stars each keep the gravity of their own galaxy but whose space of one is crossed by the space of the other. This is known to us thanks to our observation position. If there were inhabitants on each of these two galaxies, none of them would be aware of the existence of the other world. It is only a few million years later that the phenomenon would be visible to these inhabitants, when the two galaxies would have moved away from each other.
We know that the Andromeda galaxy is outside the space containing the seven superuniverses and is approximately two million light years from us. We can deduce from this that superuniverses #1 and #6 are much closer. Honestly, I don’t think they are embedded in our space as one might think I wanted to demonstrate above. However, their luminosity would be insufficient to allow us to properly discern their shape (especially with powerful optical instruments) if these celestial objects had an apparent diameter greater than a few degrees. We can however try to detect them with the naked eye and it may be possible, but we cannot see them with strong telescopes: these inhabited worlds are somewhere in the light of our galaxy. It is this light that hides them from us and the narrow diameter of optical instruments prevents us from seeing them in their entirety.
The distance given to us from Andromeda (spiral galaxy known to be the closest to us) also allows us to affirm that the Milky Way and the small Galaxies associated with it form the Orvonton superuniverse containing the ten major sectors. It is not possible because of the significant distance separating us from the other galaxies of the Virgo cluster to believe that we can associate them with our 7th superuniverse when we know that the first level of exterior space is less than two million light years away.
All this, of course, remains in the realm of suppositions. However, we know that the Grand Universe has not yet exhausted its physical possibilities and has therefore not achieved the cosmic harmony which must certainly characterize the spheres anchored in light. We should therefore not expect to discover seven superuniversal organizations centered symmetrically around a central axis. In reality, taking into account the evolutionary theory which characterizes our age, the seven superuniverses are not yet in perfect symmetrical harmony and are not in balanced and regular rotation around a perfectly central axis. The image of seven galaxies arranged harmoniously around the Paradise-Havona system is false.
For the four levels of Outer Space, it’s even worse.
Jean-Claude Romeuf
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 14 — Summer 2000 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 14 — Summer 2000 | The Dual Nature of Supremacy |