© 1996 Jean Davier
© 1996 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| A short story about personality | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 1 — Summer 1996 | Reflection: They tell us... |
We read and appreciated the article by Jacques Tétrault in issue 100 of “Réflectivité” and entitled “priority”. This text is fundamental, it turns out to be more than a one-off study on a subject that is often quickly forgotten or becomes secondary.
Jacques Tétrault reveals and summarizes a vibrant experience of reality extending over a long period; it implies a lot of work, struggle, effort. His text reveals a maturity that becomes a questioning of oneself, of our methods, of our rules of life. It offers us not an outlet for our disillusionment but an opening onto true human reality, the one that is a difficult struggle to reach through the hard path of human realities: super emotional clairvoyance, cosmic vision guiding us towards the morontia mota and the spirit.
It is written in UB 48:7.14: “in the cosmos, the greatest affliction is never to have been afflicted. Mortals learn wisdom only by undergoing tribulations”. There is no need to illustrate this text with comments; many of us find ourselves paralyzed for all sorts of reasons: health, family, relationship problems, work, money. “Such are the ways of the Lord” according to the old adage.
Forced by circumstances to tone down our group meetings and the delivery of the book, we decided not to withdraw into ourselves but to reflect on our previous actions made of errors and failures, to blame only ourselves and to work from now on to reduce our own inadequacies before considering less fruitless future action.
A first reflection imposed itself on us, it borrows a lot from UB 102:3.2: “religion will therefore always be characterized by paradoxes resulting from the absence of the experiential connection between the material and spiritual levels of the universe”, as well as from UB 112:1.12 “many of the difficulties experienced by mortals in their study of the human personality could be avoided if the finite creature would remember that the dimensional levels and the spiritual levels are not coordinated in the experiential development of the personality”.
Unable to coordinate, synchronize the two mental and spirit parameters, we cannot impose our own “ready to think” even if it seems superior to us. As one of us expressed it: “we must not kill the living experience of beings”. Jesus gave us back our freedom from doctrinal and sectarian wanderings and it is written: beauty is in the eye of the beholder", no point in trying to see in the other’s place. Let us resist the temptation to throw a fragile bridge over the morontial abyss that separates the mind from the spirit, perhaps try it in ourselves. But how to impose it on others: that would amount to equipping a united army to cross this abyss with a uniform and a common anthem, soon the anthem would be discordant and the army prey to fratricidal struggles.
Are we alone, in a state of hypnosis, destined to remain alone?; should we rejoice in the morbid way of the romantic dreamers who are victims of a lethargic nostalgia? We spend most of our hours forgetting that we are not alone, that there exists in us a fragment of the absolute essence of the Father, the Infinite Eternal Source saturated with the Love of God, prisoner of the spiritual experience in our thought. “He is there, I am no longer alone” exclaimed a reader friend recently after having read and reread the chapters relating to the Adjuster. We must form a new idea of those around us; our brothers now have a new, restored value, which triggers in us an admiring questioning. Summarizing the five chapters relating to the Adjusters would be a subjective work, it is better to drink directly from the source, to discover that they are truly our spiritual lights, that they should be part of our most intimate experiences, however they exist on a monistic level outside of space-time and prior to any energetic and spiritual divergence.
Jesus said, “the door of salvation is open to him who knocks”. A few of us gathered around a convivial table shared a meal, each reading a passage from the book in UB 179:5.1 and commenting on it while feeling this nostalgia for the evening of Emmaus. Until then our prayers seemed to resonate as in a cave and the echoes heard were only the images of our own voices and thoughts, but that day we understood “that on all these occasions the master is really present” and “when one becomes conscious of the spirit, the Son is really present and his Spirit fraternizes with the fragments of his Father”.
Our life alternates between sowing and harvesting; let us work intensely in our own field and also in the field of our neighbor who is poor and needy in spirit, and if he asks for it, taking into account that a situation of help is only valid if it is discussed and shared between partners, the person being helped should not be in a situation of dependency and the helper should not play the role of saving and satisfying his need to show himself off.*
* (This sentence is borrowed from a correspondence from MG Mayey whose psychological experience we greatly appreciate).
J. Davier
| A short story about personality | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 1 — Summer 1996 | Reflection: They tell us... |