© 2023 Jean Lapierre
© 2023 Urantia Association of Quebec
Jean Lapierre
Bromont
Claude Flibotte
Sainte-Julie
(Jean Lapierre) Hello everyone,
On a few occasions in my communications with you all I have referred to Section 8 of Paper 118. I must say that I am still in the dark as to your own meanings of it.
Here it is:
8. Control and supercontrol
In the time-space creations, free will is hedged about with restraints, with limitations. Material-life evolution is first mechanical, then mind activated, and (after the bestowal of personality) it may become spirit directed. Organic evolution on the inhabited worlds is physically limited by the potentials of the original physical-life implantations of the Life Carriers.
Mortal man is a machine, a living mechanism; his roots are truly in the physical world of energy. Many human reactions are mechanical in nature; much of life is machinelike. But man, a mechanism, is much more than a machine; he is mind endowed and spirit indwelt; and though he can never throughout his material life escape the chemical and electrical mechanics of his existence, he can increasingly learn how to subordinate this physical-life machine to the directive wisdom of experience by the process of consecrating the human mind to the execution of the spiritual urges of the indwelling Thought Adjuster.
The spirit liberates, and the mechanism limits, the function of will. Imperfect choice, uncontrolled by mechanism, unidentified with spirit, is dangerous and unstable. Mechanical dominance insures stability at the expense of progress; spirit alliance liberates choice from the physical level and at the same time assures the divine stability produced by augmented universe insight and increased cosmic comprehension.
The great danger that besets the creature is that, in achieving liberation from the fetters of the life mechanism, he will fail to compensate this loss of stability by effecting a harmonious working liaison with spirit. Creature choice, when relatively liberated from mechanical stability, may attempt further self-liberation independent of greater spirit identification.
The whole principle of biologic evolution makes it impossible for primitive man to appear on the inhabited worlds with any large endowment of self-restraint. Therefore does the same creative design which purposed evolution likewise provide those external restraints of time and space, hunger and fear, which effectively circumscribe the subspiritual choice range of such uncultured creatures. As man’s mind successfully overstrides increasingly difficult barriers, this same creative design has also provided for the slow accumulation of the racial heritage of painfully garnered experiential wisdom—in other words, for the maintenance of a balance between the diminishing external restraints and the augmenting internal restraints.
The slowness of evolution, of human cultural progress, testifies to the effectiveness of that brake—material inertia—which so efficiently operates to retard dangerous velocities of progress. Thus does time itself cushion and distribute the otherwise lethal results of premature escape from the next-encompassing barriers to human action. For when culture advances overfast, when material achievement outruns the evolution of worship-wisdom, then does civilization contain within itself the seeds of retrogression; and unless buttressed by the swift augmentation of experiential wisdom, such human societies will recede from high but premature levels of attainment, and the “dark ages” of the interregnum of wisdom will bear witness to the inexorable restoration of the imbalance between self-liberty and self-control.
The iniquity of Caligastia was the by-passing of the time governor of progressive human liberation—the gratuitous destruction of restraining barriers, barriers which the mortal minds of those times had not experientially overridden.
That mind which can effect a partial abridgment of time and space, by this very act proves itself possessed of the seeds of wisdom which can effectively serve in lieu of the transcended barrier of restraint.
Lucifer similarly sought to disrupt the time governor operating in restraint of the premature attainment of certain liberties in the local system. A local system settled in light and life has experientially achieved those viewpoints and insights which make feasible the operation of many techniques that would be disruptive and destructive in the presettled eras of that very realm.
As man shakes off the shackles of fear, as he bridges continents and oceans with his machines, generations and centuries with his records, he must substitute for each transcended restraint a new and voluntarily assumed restraint in accordance with the moral dictates of expanding human wisdom. These self-imposed restraints are at once the most powerful and the most tenuous of all the factors of human civilization—concepts of justice and ideals of brotherhood. Man even qualifies himself for the restraining garments of mercy when he dares to love his fellow men, while he achieves the beginnings of spiritual brotherhood when he elects to mete out to them that treatment which he himself would be accorded, even that treatment which he conceives that God would accord them.
An automatic universe reaction is stable and, in some form, continuing in the cosmos. A personality who knows God and desires to do his will, who has spirit insight, is divinely stable and eternally existent. Man’s great universe adventure consists in the transit of his mortal mind from the stability of mechanical statics to the divinity of spiritual dynamics, and he achieves this transformation by the force and constancy of his own personality decisions, in each of life’s situations declaring, “It is my will that your will be done.” (UB 118:8.1-11)
This excerpt comes almost at the end of what was intended to be the 5th revelation, that is to say without the 4th part dealing with the life and teachings of Jesus. I would like to read you concerning your understanding of this section 8 which is extremely important in my opinion.
Looking forward to hearing from you eventually.
Jeans
(Claude Flibotte) Hello, Jean, and all of you,
Here is my understanding of this section.
UB 118:8.1 and 2 say in summary that the material animal life is mechanical (repetitive, conscious of and responsive to its environment), and endowed with the potentials included in the vital plasma of the life implantations of the Life Carriers. When personality is present (consciousness of being conscious), there is the possibility according to the free will of the person to be guided by the Holy Spirit, the Adjuster, and the Spirit of Truth.
UB 118:8.3 and 4 say otherwise, basically this, stability and security are ensured by the two ends of evolution, either that of primitive man or that of the spiritualized being as a finaliter. Let me explain! A primitive man has no chance of producing the atomic bomb to destroy his fellow men and his planet. A finaliter has no interest in doing the same!
UB 118:8.5 and 6 say that the divine plan of evolution has provided reasonable limits in the free choice of man between his primitive existence and his final destiny. The more man becomes spiritualized, the more he becomes a reality in the universe and the more he is free to act with divine wisdom without constraints. Today, humanity has made a great step forward in technology and industrialization. However, spiritual progress has not followed. So, we have individuals who exploit others, senseless wars, exploitation of resources that pollutes and kills people including the exploiters. In the event of a total war, the world would return to the conditions of survival of primitive men, unenviable prospects!
UB 118:8.7 Caligastia’s mistake was to give unprepared primitive men the freedom to govern themselves without regard to the rest of the tribe or clan. The result was inordinate ambition, control and power over others, selfishness, and unbridled pleasure-seeking.
UB 118:8.8 Human intelligence demonstrates that he can transcend the natural limitations of the material condition to invent ways of sweetening his life and freeing his mind for the pursuit of higher values, if he so chooses.
UB 118:8.9 The Lucifer revolution would have produced in the Satania system the same devastation that occurred on Urantia had he won. A local system anchored in light and life through the acquisition of divine wisdom according to our Father’s evolutionary plan is a guarantee of success, peace, and limitless progress.
UB 118:8.10 and 11 The more humanity evolves, the more it will free itself from the constraints initially imposed by its material condition, then by those imposed by the development of civilization (laws, customs, government, police, military organizations, etc.) to arrive after several millennia at the age of light and life where many of these scaffolds will no longer be necessary since this civilization will live according to the highest values of divinity perceived. This is the progression from the mechanical statics of primitive man to the dynamic divinity of man in the age of light and life.
My dear Jean, I hope that this summary of mine meets your expectations! Looking forward to expanding further on the subject one of these days!
Friendships!
(Jean Lapierre) Thank you, Claude,
I can see quite clearly that you have roughly the same meanings as me on 118:8.
- A primitive being with personality acts mainly like a machine. It follows that it is stable.
- At the other end of the spectrum, the spiritualized man is also stable because he does the will of God and in his actions the divine qualities of beauty, truth and goodness appear.
- Between these two situations of stability, according to evolution, there is danger when the material plane evolves much more quickly than the spiritual plane. And when this gap becomes too great, to eliminate this danger of instability, it is necessary to compensate either by making important steps of progress towards spirituality or it is necessary to descend towards the ages of darkness (a lesser evil).
- The reading that I currently make of our situation on our planet is that of a very great instability due to the fact that our spirituality has not followed the progress of our material advances. On the contrary, I perceive that the gap will widen even further. Let us think of artificial intelligence only, we are at a crossroads.
Personally, I do not believe that we will descend into the dark ages for the following reasons:
- Our planetary Prince is Michael of Nebadon
- We received as compensation the revelations of the Urantia Book (remember that Emmanuel had recommended him to give us compensation)
- Everything is now in place for the teachings of the book to be deployed (we are in the digital age and the book is translated into 28 languages)
Now I am sending you again some excerpts that I had already sent you:
Sooner or later another and greater John the Baptist is due to arise proclaiming “the kingdom of God is at hand”—meaning a return to the high spiritual concept of Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom is the will of his heavenly Father dominant and transcendent in the heart of the believer—and doing all this without in any way referring either to the visible church on earth or to the anticipated second coming of Christ. There must come a revival of the actual teachings of Jesus, such a restatement as will undo the work of his early followers who went about to create a sociophilosophical system of belief regarding the fact of Michael’s sojourn on earth. In a short time the teaching of this story about Jesus nearly supplanted the preaching of Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom. In this way a historical religion displaced that teaching in which Jesus had blended man’s highest moral ideas and spiritual ideals with man’s most sublime hope for the future—eternal life. And that was the gospel of the kingdom.
It is just because the gospel of Jesus was so many-sided that within a few centuries students of the records of his teachings became divided up into so many cults and sects. This pitiful subdivision of Christian believers results from failure to discern in the Master’s manifold teachings the divine oneness of his matchless life. But someday the true believers in Jesus will not be thus spiritually divided in their attitude before unbelievers. Always we may have diversity of intellectual comprehension and interpretation, even varying degrees of socialization, but lack of spiritual brotherhood is both inexcusable and reprehensible.
Mistake not! there is in the teachings of Jesus an eternal nature which will not permit them forever to remain unfruitful in the hearts of thinking men. The kingdom as Jesus conceived it has to a large extent failed on earth; for the time being, an outward church has taken its place; but you should comprehend that this church is only the larval stage of the thwarted spiritual kingdom, which will carry it through this material age and over into a more spiritual dispensation where the Master’s teachings may enjoy a fuller opportunity for development. Thus does the so-called Christian church become the cocoon in which the kingdom of Jesus’ concept now slumbers. The kingdom of the divine brotherhood is still alive and will eventually and certainly come forth from this long submergence, just as surely as the butterfly eventually emerges as the beautiful unfolding of its less attractive creature of metamorphic development. (UB 170:5.19-21)
(Jean Lapierre) Hello everyone,
In this email you will find the reasons which justify my response to Claude Flibotte following his own response for 118:8 and in particular why I believe that we will not fall into dark ages but that we will rather fill the enormous current gap which has opened up between our scientific development and that of the spiritual.
First, I give below some extracts from the UB on which I relied (my personal comments are in parentheses):
- UB 120:2.3 “3. When you have succeeded in ending the secession of Urantia—and you undoubtedly will—I advise you to accept Gabriel’s conferring upon you the title ”Planetary Prince of Urantia" as a sign of your universe’s eternal recognition of your final bestowal experience and then to take all steps consistent with the meaning of your bestowal to compensate for the affliction and confusion brought upon Urantia by Caligastia’s betrayal and subsequent Adamic default. (Emmanuel advises Michael to take steps to compensate for what has happened on Urantia. I believe these compensations were the teachings of The Urantia Book.)
- UB 176:2.3 Continuing to answer Peter’s question, Jesus said: "Why do you still suppose that the Son of Man is going to sit on the throne of David, and hope that the material dreams of the Jews will be fulfilled? Have I not told you all these years that my kingdom is not of this world? The state of things which you now look down upon is coming to an end, but that end will constitute a new beginning, from which the gospel of the kingdom will spread throughout the world and salvation will be extended to all peoples. When the kingdom has reached its full maturity, be assured that the Father in heaven will not fail to bring you an enlarged revelation of truth and an increased demonstration of righteousness. He has already bestowed upon this world the one who became the prince of darkness, then Adam, followed by Melchizedek, and now the Son of Man. This is how my Father will continue to show his mercy and express his love, even to this dark and evil world. After the Father has invested me with all power and authority, I too will continue to follow your fate and guide you in the affairs of the kingdom by the presence of my spirit which will soon be poured out on all flesh. Not only will I thus be present with you in spirit, but I also promise that I will one day return to this world, where I have lived my life in the flesh and accomplished the dual simultaneous experience of revealing God to men and leading men to God. I must leave you very soon and resume the work that the Father has entrusted to me, but take courage, for I will one day return. In the meantime, my Spirit of the Truth of a universe will comfort and guide you. (In this excerpt I see several important points: 1) The teachings of Jesus will spread throughout the whole world and to all peoples; 2) When these teachings have reached their full maturity, the Universal Father will not fail to bring a new revelation; 3) This new revelation referred to here cannot be The Urantia Book because the teachings of the fourth revelation have not yet reached their full maturity; 4) This is the reason why I believe that The Urantia Book is this compensation and has been given to us for a millennium; 5) The Urantia Book, although it is qualified as an epochal revelation, is not the one that Jesus mentioned in this excerpt 2; 6) This is also why I attach so much importance to the coming of a new John the Baptist who will be the catalyst for the deployment of the teachings of Jesus.
Thank you, Jean Lapierre! Interesting deduction about the appearance of the Urantia Book as compensation while waiting for the new revelation to come.
Good day !
Claude Flibotte