© 2001 Jean Royer
© 2001 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 20 — Winter 2000 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 20 — Winter 2000 | Anova (Part Two) |
Like all great texts, The Urantia Book can be interpreted on different levels.
First, there is the level of translation which indicates what the translator believed he understood at a certain moment in his evolution and which is not necessarily what the reader understands at his own level. But there are also many other levels, such as that of knowledge of the moment. Let’s take a simple example: death. At the beginning of the 20th century, death was declared when the individual had stopped breathing (mirror test) and no longer met the reaction criteria such as biting the toe (hence the undertakers), later it was cardiac arrest that served as a criterion and more recently it is the repeated flat encephalogram. But how do you define life?
Urantians have special criteria. What is alive is that which reacts to certain circuits, to the Master Physical Controllers for plants and to the Adjutant Mental Spirits for animals. But this obviously cannot satisfy the scientist.
Based on the knowledge acquired, scientists have researched life based on forms and composition. This is how life was divided into two large classes: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. All current multicellular life forms are eukaryotes. Based on this, the same scientists can trace the origin of terrestrial life back some four billion years.
So we are faced with a dilemma: either the scientists are right or the Urantia Book, which tells us that life was established about 600 million years ago, is right.
This is where our level of interpretation of the book comes in. The first readers naturally took the text literally and estimated that life appeared around minus 600 million. This is the basic fundamentalist position. A second group wanted to see the limits of the revelation and estimated that the revelators could not tell us things unknown at the time the text was dictated. For them this is part of the “manifest errors in the associated cosmologies presented therein.” (UB 101:4.1) or even “these new developments,… [that] we are forbidden to include, in our revelatory expositions, these notions that men have not yet discovered.” (UB 101:4.2). This second group wants to be in agreement with science.
Our Australian friends propose a third hypothesis, that of a different definition of life by the revelators and by the Earth scientists. They note that we are told: “The original life plasma of an evolutionary world must contain in its fullness the potential necessary for all future developmental variations and all subsequent evolutionary changes and modifications” (UB 36:2.17) and also: “During physical life, the material self, the ego-entity of human identity, depends on the continued functioning of the material life vehicle, the continued maintenance of the unstable balance of energies and intellect, which has been given the name of life on Urantia.”. (UB 112:2.20)
These prokaryotes, whose characteristic is not to have isolated DNA in the chromosomes of a cell nucleus, perhaps do not have these potentials and are perhaps not then considered as true life, in the cosmic sense of the term. In this case, we could consider that the revealers have, once again, omitted to tell us things of which we had not the slightest idea at the time of the revelation, but that they have not deliberately “lied” to us. The introduction of this data, at the time, could only have brought confusion, whereas now it forces us to review our position according to the evolution of our knowledge. As for me, I bow before the genius of the revealers.
Jean Royer
| Le Lien Urantien — Issue 20 — Winter 2000 — Contents | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 20 — Winter 2000 | Anova (Part Two) |