© 2021 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
For a long time I wanted to participate in a course within the framework of the U.B.I.S., this school of the URANTIA Book on the internet. Its pedagogy, based on the maieutics so dear to Socrates and its principle of operation on a 10-week cycle alternating questions and answers followed by sharing was a formula that suited me perfectly, being able to participate when I had time in the course in question.
So, in September I took the plunge and registered for a session. Among the three proposed themes I chose “Religion and Faith in the Human Experience” based on booklets 99,100 through 103.
From the first series of questions and answers, one word constantly came up in the discussions: difference. The difference between humans, between religions, between ideas and motivations and between experiences. In short, difference was the idea linking the discussions and provoking creative exchanges and bringing progress in understanding.
Looking more closely, difference has something paradoxical at first glance. It is both what makes us unique compared to others and what unites us with others from the birth of the first couple Andon and Fonta to our civilizations, passing through the tribe, the city, the nation or even this course in which I participate. The progress that we make is the consequence of our relationships with others and with others. Others are essential to our personal growth because difference acts as a dynamic process of action and reaction constantly pushing beings to harmonize, ideas to agree or things to balance. This “difference” creates a “tension” which never ceases before being resolved.
It has been this way since eternity, since the I AM differentiated the personal from the personal name, the potential from the actual, the divine from the non-divine. This difference created the first tension which, at the eternal level, produced the first reaction of Divinity: on one side Paradise then Havona, on the other.
They say “birds of a feather flock together”. Difference brings us together because it is at the origin of all energies, whether physical, intellectual, spiritual or even and especially personal.
It is also the source of potentials allowing their actualization through the tension it establishes between two states of being.
She is also the source of all kinds of time and all forms of space past, present and future. (G.M-D)
One of the most eventful of all the evening conferences at Amathus was the session having to do with the discussion of spiritual unity. James Zebedee had asked, “Master, how shall we learn to see alike and thereby enjoy more harmony among ourselves?” When Jesus heard this question, he was stirred within his spirit, so much so that he replied: “James, James, when did I teach you that you should all see alike? I have come into the world to proclaim spiritual liberty to the end that mortals may be empowered to live individual lives of originality and freedom before God. I do not desire that social harmony and fraternal peace shall be purchased by the sacrifice of free personality and spiritual originality. What I require of you, my apostles, is *spirit unity—*and that you can experience in the joy of your united dedication to the wholehearted doing of the will of my Father in heaven. You do not have to see alike or feel alike or even think alike in order spiritually to be alike. Spiritual unity is derived from the consciousness that each of you is indwelt, and increasingly dominated, by the spirit gift of the heavenly Father. Your apostolic harmony must grow out of the fact that the spirit hope of each of you is identical in origin, nature, and destiny. (UB 141:5.1)