© 1999 François Le Rohellec, Michel Rouanet, Raymonde and Jean Davier, Dominique Ronfet, Christine Baussain, Jeanmarie Chaise, Philippe D'Amore, Sébastien Pavan, Guy Eckstein, Severin Desbuisson, Seppo Karneva
© 1999 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
Journal of the association L'A.F.L.L.U. French-speaking Association of Readers of the URANTIA Book
Member of the I.U.A.
Head office:
48, rue Douy Delcupe
93110 MONTREUIL UNDER WOOD
FRANCE
¶ A Word from the President
At the beginning of this year 2000, I would like to take advantage of this platform to express my warmest thanks to all those who, simply in accordance with their time and their skills but in a very responsible manner, have placed themselves at the service of the fifth revelation and its readership.
It is also with great joy and immense gratitude that I look back on these last years spent within the I.U.A. organization, which have been punctuated by many extraordinary encounters with seemingly ordinary people, enriched by constantly improving teamwork and finally marked by many important and extremely positive developments both at the national and international levels.
It is therefore with great confidence in each of you and in the transformative power of this fifth revelation that I send you my wishes of joy and peace for this new year.
Francois Le Rohellec
President of the A.F.L.L.U.
¶ Summary
- The President’s Word by François Le Rohellec
- Report of the progress of the national meeting in Armeau by Michel Rouanet
- About the Apostle Paul by Raymonde and Jean Davier
- The decision center by Dominique Ronfet
- Message in a bottle by Christine Baussain
- The enigma by Jeanmarie Chaise
- My adjuster and I by Philippe D’Amore
- Testimonials by Sébastien Pavan and by Guy Eckstein
- Questions-Answers
- Gazette section:
- In the footsteps of Scandinavian readers by Severin Desbuisson
- Visit to Israel by Seppo Karneva
❧ 1955 URANTIA Foundation. All rights reserved. These materials from The URANTIA Book are used with permission. Any artistic depiction(s), interpretation(s), opinion(s) or conclusion(s) implied or stated are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of URANTIA Foundation or its affiliates.
Legal deposit: December 1997 — ISSN 1285-1116
Subscription in 1998: 100 FF per year (approximately 4 issues)
¶ Report on the Progress of the National Meeting in Armeau
On November 12, 13 and 14, the second national meeting of the French-speaking Association of Readers of the URANTIA Book was held in 1999. This is in fact the first year that the leaders of the movement have organized two annual meetings (the first took place in June in the south of France, in GOULT) and despite the increase in the number of meetings, it is clear that the number of participants has not decreased (more than twenty). Indeed, whether they are members of the AFLUB or not, the number of readers of the BOOK, eager, often after a first individual reading, to share with others their study and their faith in the riches of the book, continues to grow.
The weekend took place in ARMEAU, a small, peaceful village on the banks of the YONNE. It brought together not only members of the 2 study groups from Paris and the south-east, but also isolated readers from all over France and neighboring French-speaking countries.
The welcome dinner was an opportunity for some to meet up again and for others to meet for the first time. It also allowed us to discover that we had among us a Celtic harpist who enchanted us with her voice and her instrument throughout the meeting.
The first meeting of the weekend was devoted to the traditional presentations where everyone was able to share, sometimes with great emotion, their own journey and their discovery of the BOOK.
The fatigue from the various journeys having disappeared after a restful night, the first sharing meetings could begin.
The topics covered were:
- “Who are Thought Adjusters?”
- “Who is the Man?”
- “The Work of the Adjuster in the Mind of Man”
- “The Problems of the Adjusters”
- “Mistaken Concepts About Adjusters”
The meetings lasted about 1 hour 15 minutes and two types of study group organization were adopted:
- the study of the first 3 subjects of Saturday was done in groups of 8 (it had the merit of allowing everyone to express themselves in the allotted time and to get to know the others better)
- the study of the last 2 subjects of Sunday morning was done with all 24 people (it had the merit of bringing everyone together around a common reflection, sometimes difficult to contain …)
It should be noted that 2 study methods emerged from the different Saturday groups:
- for some, it was a question of taking as a starting point the reading of the passages of the book likely to provide the answer to the problem posed and of commenting on them, possibly making reference to their own experience
- for others, it was a matter of responding to the problem based on their own understandings and experiences and then referring to certain passages from the Book to support their argument.
Some meetings were punctuated by a minute of silence allowing each of the participants to approach the work in a better disposition of listening and respect for both the others and their Adjuster.
The Saturday afternoon walk allowed us to discover the nature of the surroundings while chatting freely with the different people.
Saturday evening was devoted to the presentation of the progress of the 2002 international meeting project and allowed the organizing group to reiterate its appeal to all people of good will likely to contribute to the construction of this enterprise.
Finally, and thanks to the strong arms of an organizer who was not stopped by the Parisian metro, a few books (“A Study of the Master Universe”, “The Veil is Lifted”…) and CDROMs (electronic Urantia Books) were available for sale for those who are impatient with the delays of traditional distribution networks.
Finally, the time of departure arrived; each had to leave, not without having exchanged a few addresses, towards the little world that is his, both sad to separate from those with whom so many things had been shared and happy to return to those he had left for a weekend; in any case fully reassured to feel accompanied by this perfectly devoted inner Being.
May this meeting have brought us closer to HIM and to our human brothers.
Fraternally.
Michel Rouanet
¶ “About” the Apostle Paul
Many works have commented on the work of Paul, the principal founder, with the apostles, of the Christian religion.
Paul was born in Tarsus in Cilicia at the very beginning of the 1st millennium. He was a contemporary of the apostles of Jesus and the disciples of John the Baptist, whom he met and rubbed shoulders with. He belonged to the Jewish community of his hometown and enjoyed Roman citizenship. His family must have belonged to the ruling class, a situation that lent itself to a progressive Romanization expressed by his two names: Saul was his Hebrew name and Paul his Roman-sounding name. His first language was Aramaic, which was suitable for the exercise of Hebrew theology: he was an erudite Pharisee. But it was in Greek that he addressed his letters to the first Christian communities. It would seem that two main influences guided his religious thought: that of Mithraism, the dominant cult in his hometown, and that of Stoicism. He worked as a tentmaker in order to survive during his many and trying travels throughout the Mediterranean basin.
Raymonde and Jean Davier
¶ The Decision Center
The idea for this study came to me following an intervention by our friend Jean Royer on the electronic discussion forum. He pointed out that certain numbers given in the Urantia Book were very surprising. For example, the approximate figure of 187 million ascenders present on Jerusem (UB 53:7.12) at the time of the rebellion. Taking as a ratio 619 inhabited worlds and the number of people who died on Earth in 1990, i.e. 90 million (source: Quid 1990), this number of 187 million may indeed seem insignificant. My aim is not to raise a useless debate on the location and percentage of survivors during their ascension as well as the success rate at fusion.
On the other hand, it seems to me very interesting to question the profound meaning of this crucial decision which is the choice to survive, and this at whatever level in evolution we place this decision.
To illustrate my thoughts, I will of course use extracts from the Urantia Papers, but also from Sufi texts [1] as I discovered them through the writer Idries Shah.
Dominique Ronfet
¶ Bottle in the sea
Reading — of course; studying, of course; but practicing? This is becoming more and more of a need for me, a need that is still quite embarrassing for the moment. Without adding a religion to the catalog, without creating a necessarily artificial ritual from scratch, there must be a way for us to commune with each other in the love of our Father? Do other readers feel concerned by this research? If so, let’s talk about it! Contact me, let’s contact each other, and something beautiful will inevitably happen.
Christine Baussain
¶ The enigma
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
In the first century after the coming of Jesus, Christians were forced to conceal their faith and recognize each other by means of cryptograms such as the one inscribed in the famous magic square above, in which was inscribed in all directions a certain phrase composed of five Latin words:
SATOR — AREPO — TENET — OPERA — ROTAS
The Romans, who had retained a farming mentality from their origins, naturally read the following meaning in this:
The sower — Arepo — carefully holds back — the wheels (of the plow)
While Christians could read the first meaning of Sator there and read:
The Creator — Arepo — maintains — with care — the wheels (of evolution)
It is not known whether Arepo had a meaning or whether this word only represented a need to adjust the magic square, in which case it appears as a proper name attributed to the sower. But for those who were truly initiated, they could see there the double angular inscriptions of the “Alpha” and the “Omega” of this name which were joined in a cross by the four “Epsilons” of the word “tenet” (he holds). Then ignoring four of these vowels (2 “Alpha” and 2 “Omega”, or rather considering them as equivalent to the rest of all the remaining letters of the square, they could compose twice, (once for the “Alpha”, once for the “Omega”), their equivalent.
Question: What is the equivalent of Alpha and Omega? The answer is to be found at the end of this issue of THE URANTIAN LINK. But it would be better if you found the solution for yourselves, for that is the fundamental purpose of your existence.
Jeanmarie Chair
¶ My adjuster and I
Like all readers of the Urantia Book, I am unpretentiously trying to get closer to my thought adjuster, to get in touch with him. For this I have my method. I don’t know if I can do it, but I want to believe in it.
I seek it through love, because love sanctifies life, it lets us glimpse what the sacred is. It puts us on a promontory to consider the world and others with a celestial gaze, it is also the opportunity for a profound spiritual awakening. So when we love, all the usual boundaries fall, dissolve, and suddenly we no longer feel alone in the universe.
Love is our gateway to the divine.
Philippe D’Amore
¶ Testimonials
Testimony of Sébastien Pavan.
The Urantia Book is currently for me a support and an essential point of support for Life as we can lead it. The Life of Jesus helps us and comforts us in each ordeal that we go through, by telling ourselves that it is perhaps a challenge that is thrown at us, a test of our ability to react. This makes us stronger afterwards, we acquire more maturity, even though certain ordeals are sometimes very difficult to bear. This is perhaps not new, because Nietzsche said: “What does not kill me strengthens me”. Here is a little of my perception of the Book, with an expansion of our material vision to a more spiritual vision.
How did I find out about this book? Thanks to my father who introduced me to it when I was around 18 years old. It must be said that from the age of 4 until I was 13, we (my family) were involved in a fraternal association: the School of Essentialism. This group was chaired by a lady called Sundari, an outstanding speaker and author of several books. I was always intrigued and in awe of such a person. One of the conditions was to be vegetarian, a practice that I partially abandoned for convenience. We regularly went to meetings where religious worship singing sessions, talks and individual interviews took place. This brought me a lot until the day my father left this association which leaned towards a certain sectarianism. It was a very close childhood friend interested in spiritual questions who had introduced him and shared his discoveries in terms of reading with him. This is how I read one day “The Life of the Masters”, a disturbing work, leading me directly to the Urantia Book (at the time “The Urantia Cosmogony” in 3 volumes). It is, I think, the most beautiful gift he offered me, because since then, my vision of Life has changed a lot. The questions about Death and the afterlife found their answers to my taste in this book, especially since I had lost my mother at 14 and a need for concrete answers was working on me a lot. I am not saying that we must believe everything that is written, but there is such logic and such discernment that we are invited to believe it. But let us always keep our critical mind, let us not make the Urantia Book “a new fetish book” as Mr. Raymond Barilari affirmed in Link n¹0, and I agree with him on this idea.
It is, it is true, exciting to be able to discuss the elements of this book, to exchange points of view with other people. But we must not fall into this trap which consists of intellectualizing the meetings and forgetting our share of personal experience in terms of applying the ideas and concepts of the book. I have been able to observe this on several occasions in the past as have some others. Isn’t the most important thing, and this is certainly much more difficult, to live the teachings contained in this book? I have no pretension in this sense but I admit to sometimes trying to modify certain attitudes after having read a particular passage as, and I am certain, others do (even without knowing the Book). I would remain at times more fond of the experiences that some go through with the help of the teachings of the Urantia Book. Perhaps this would be the subject of a new section which could be entitled: “Let’s share our experiences”, with a possibility of anonymity for certain cases. But this remains a suggestion.
Testimony, from Guy Eckstein
How I came to know about The Urantia Book
In the early 1970s, I was a student in Strasbourg.
One evening, with a friend, we decided to attend a conference on extraterrestrials given by the Rosicrucians “Max Heindel”. While we expected to be told about flying saucers and UFOs, the speaker told us about spiritual entities!!..
But the seed had been sown, the interest was there, a new opening towards spirituality began to take hold, and at the end of the conference I bought the book “The Cosmogony of the Rosicrucians” by Max Heindel. I found something in it that spoke to me. I remember reading it almost in secret.
A few years later, during a vacation in France (my family and I were living in Africa at the time), during an internship in Montpellier, a speaker gave us a very interesting presentation on the cosmogony of a Bantu ethnic group in West Africa. I have a lasting memory of it.
I was then introduced to Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy, which I was interested in for a good decade.
More than 10 years later, I was working in a bookstore in Strasbourg. My position allowed me access to all areas of the bookstore, including the reception of books. It was there that in 1984 I saw a customer place an order for: “The Cosmogony of Urantia”, in three volumes. It was when I saw the word “cosmogony” that my curiosity was once again aroused. I quickly looked through this work, and without waiting, bought it. To place orders for the work in Paris, I was in contact several times with Mr. Jacques Weiss who was in charge of its distribution for booksellers, and with whom, on the phone, I had a few brief exchanges of ideas on the content of the Book. The first reading was solitary, long and arduous. But since then, each rereading gives me a greater understanding, more pleasure and joy.
Over the years, I have become aware of this slow inner maturation, of this journey where each stage of inner evolution provides great contentment. At the beginning, it was all about staying awake, knowing how to receive and recognize these messages. The word “cosmogony” was the trigger for me. Now I am no longer looking, I feel on the way to this long ascension thanks to voluntary effort, through knowledge and deepening of The Urantia Book.
¶ Questions and Answers
Answer to the “Enigma” article by Jean-Marie Chaise in this “Link”
The remaining letters allow, taking into account the central “N” used twice (once horizontally, and once vertically, to begin the Latin word “Noster”) to find: PATER (N)OSTER which is the “Alpha” and the “Omega”, the Beginning and the End.
Jeanmarie Chair
¶ Gazette section
¶ IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF SCANDINAVIAN READERS…
On November 27, 28 and 29, beyond the cold, snow and wind, the first gathering of readers from Scandinavian countries (except Finland) was held near Gothenburg (the second city of Sweden). The nationalities represented were: Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, Americans and French. And even if, as you can see, not all were Scandinavian, the landscape was very typical of these regions. The meeting took place in the warm setting of a small country house planted in the middle of the woods and absolutely all the conversations took place in English (the natives being all perfectly bilingual)! It was in this authentic and reflective setting that two main themes were discussed: the activities of readers in Sweden; the study of booklet 84 “Marriage and family life”. A little over a day was devoted to the burning issues of the Swedish translation, soon to be completed but unacceptable to the Swedes because it was written in a language that was certainly correct but too academic and had been abandoned by the inhabitants for several decades. Several volunteers offered to help or take over this translation, but the Norwegian and Danish translators recalled the complexity and duration of such an undertaking. Some suggestions and proposals were nevertheless forwarded to the head of translations for the Foundation: Seppo Kanerva. At the end of this first conference, Johan Ahlèn decided to set up the first study group in Sweden and the idea of holding other conferences of this type was also welcomed with success, with some readers even offering their residence for this purpose. A few days later, back in Gothenburg, I happened to meet Johan who told me that a new Swedish reader interested in study groups had just been identified by the Foundation! It was on this note of optimism that my stay in Gothenburg ended; a few days later, on the other side of the Baltic Sea, I found myself in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, for another conference.
A week later, on December 4-5, a seminar entitled “Secrets of the Universe” was held in Tallinn, prepared by the SCO (Successful Children Organization) in collaboration with some readers.
Veikko, a long-time reader, took advantage of the reorganization of this youth movement (similar to Scouting in our country) after the fall of the communist regime to introduce the teachings of The Urantia Book to young people. He hired Helen Anvelt, another reader, and introduced a course called “Secrets of the Universe,” which served as an introduction to the book and was presented to more than 1,000 children in the organization throughout the country. SCO is independent of any religion or political movement and advocates peace of mind, good health, harmony with the environment, the pursuit of goals and ideals, intellectual honesty and high consciousness, and is aimed at children aged 12 to 18. The presentation I attended was the culmination of a series of other lectures on the book and brought together the students most interested in the subject, who came from all over the country and were no less than a hundred! Some local readers, including Peep Sõber, addressed topics such as: “The Cosmic Career”, “Man in the Universe”, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus”, “Origin of the Book and the Urantia Movement in Estonia and in the World” and answered many questions. I also gave a short presentation on the existence of many other young readers worldwide who can be easily contacted via the Internet and I answered a few questions asked directly in English and even in French by children under 15. Despite the terrible financial problems of this organization (given the economic situation, the contributions, like the salaries of the teachers, are reduced to a minimum) we had a nice snack together in a delicious atmosphere before going our separate ways.
Severin Desbuisson
¶ VISIT TO ISRAEL: November 4, 1999
From November 4 to 7, 1999, Seppo Kanerva as President of the Council of National Presidents of the I.U.A., Georges Michelson-Dupont and his wife Marlène, went to Israel.
The purpose of this first visit was to meet the Israeli readership and to consider the possibility of creating an IUA association in Israel.
"We met with 30 to 40 mostly recently naturalized Jewish readers from the former Soviet Union, Ukraine and Russia. The meeting took place in Bat Yam, a district of the large city of Tel Aviv.
We have been informed that there are readers of the Urantia Book throughout Israel but that the largest concentration is in Bat Yam.
Given that the majority of readers are truly recent readers (only 1 or 2 have completed a first reading of the Book), it did not seem wise to us to even suggest the formation of an association in Israel now. It is simply not the time. However, we are convinced that once the current readership has finished reading the Book, a solid association can be created in Israel."
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¶ References
¶ Remarks
Sufism: name given to the teaching of certain ‘mystical’ schools, these are mainly established in countries of Islamic religion. ↩︎