© 2001 Jean Royer
© 2001 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 | The role of emotions in spiritual research |
A discussion about the mind that has just taken place on the web (internet) leads me to ask myself once again the question of the bases of our understanding.
It is obviously not a question of analyzing here what the mind is in The Urantia Book, it is too complex an undertaking for a term which is used 1744 times (at least in its English form of “mind”); I would simply like to make a few remarks on the first definition of the word and even more precisely on the first sentence:
2. Mind. The thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism of the human organism. The total conscious and unconscious experience. The intelligence associated with the emotional life reaching upward through worship and wisdom to the spirit level. (UB 0:5.8)
Misleading definition, because what could a thinking mechanism be? Everyone, when they see the word mechanism, first thinks of the cogs of a machine; the most philosophical see Descartes saying: “man is a machine.” Moreover, to drive the point home, the first French translation was not the mental but the organ of thought. It is not surprising that the reader did not imagine, and sometimes still does not imagine, that we are talking about the brain. However, that is not it. The word mechanism translates the English “mechanism” whose first meaning is indeed the same as that of the French from which it is borrowed, but meaning 2 tells us that it is a system or a process. It is indeed the meaning of system that must be taken. Do you want a justification? The mind is a system of personal energy existing around a divine core of spirit and functioning in a material environment. UB 12:9.6 or even:
The mortal mind is a temporary intellectual system loaned to human beings for the duration of a material life. UB 111:1.5
Furthermore, the word mechanism, in the usual sense this time, is found in: Without help, the mind is powerless to influence anything material, except its own physical mechanism to which it is inexorably linked. UB 111:6.5
If the mind is linked to a physical mechanism, is this not further proof that it is not itself this physical mechanism?
Another time perhaps, we will see that the mind should not be confused with the intellect, but that’s another story…
Jean Royer
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 18 — Summer 2001 | The role of emotions in spiritual research |