© 1999 Peep Söber
© 1999 Urantia Association International (IUA)
Peep Sober
Tallinn, Estonia
Urantia Book Readers’ Conference in Estonia, Karepa, August 12, 1998
Anxieties about the future are difficult and emotional. Uncertainties about the future often originate in fear-based emotions associated, as they are, with the reality of the unknown. In another sense, we live with faith and hope, as well as expectations of pleasant things, which we perceive as the known reality.
These expectations are rooted in our personal beliefs. For example, we might think that we are “the chosen ones” and that the “bad guys” will soon disappear. We should then be elevated to a pleasant place. We might believe that after physical death we should wake up in heaven, or something similar. Even these beliefs are based on revelations. Now, beliefs are always the product of our distortions of personal or collective revelations. They are not necessarily based on perceived truth, but rather on pleasant expectations. We all lean toward believing in things that seem pleasant and ignore all those messages that are not pleasant to us.
If we were able to remove fear and naivety from faith, we would be able to relate to the future more seriously. In the words of an Arab proverb, that man is the bravest, as long as he is not afraid to look into the future. True courage can only come from trust in a loving Father and from being attuned to his fragments, the divine spirit in our minds.
Man’s way of looking into the future may seem somewhat primitive. If we wanted to move from a starting point A to a point B (“known” reality), we could also move to a point C (“unknown” reality). For example, when our foreign friends started their journeys from their homelands (point A) expecting to reach point B (a country they assumed was Estonia), they were probably taken a bit by surprise when they reached point C (the real Estonia — more or less different from their preconceptions of Estonia).
We can discern this same phenomenon with regard to predictions about the future. We inevitably land at point C. Occasionally, C might be identical with B (prediction), but it could also be extremely different.
In The Urantia Book this problem is explained in the following words: In the more advanced planetary ages these seraphim [the Spirits of Confidence] enhance man’s appreciation of the truth that uncertainty is the secret of contented continuity. They help the mortal philosophers to realize that, when ignorance is essential to success, it would be a colossal blunder for the creature to know the future. They heighten man’s taste for the sweetness of uncertainty, for the romance and charm of the indefinite and unknown future. [UB 39:5.9]
And just two pages later, in section 7, we read — Seraphim of the Future: These seraphim do function in connection with the ascendant-mortal career but minister almost exclusively to those mortals who survive by some one of the modified orders of ascension. Inasmuch as these angels are not now directly concerned with either Urantia or Urantians, it is deemed best to withhold the description of their fascinating activities. [UB 39:7.1-2]
These paragraphs explain the almost complete absence of predictions about the future of our planet in The Urantia Book.
It was not merely out of curiosity that the ancients sought to know the future; they wanted to dodge ill luck. Divination was simply an attempt to avoid trouble. [UB 87:5.14]. Fortunately, we are not thinking that way, but questions and queries regarding the future still remain.
Jesus told his disciples that he would return to Earth, but that it would not happen in the next 2000 years, such a kind of announcement could hardly have encouraged them and all the next generations. In another aspect, Jesus occasionally spoke something about the future. Chapter 176 reports, for example, that he did this in his desire to save the apostles from the destruction of Jerusalem. We might conclude: knowledge of the future could be detrimental, if we were not ready for it. However, in other cases such knowledge can be a help. Our attitude towards knowledge of the future should not be one’s facet.
The revelators have made one exception, however: the instruction given by superhumans to the contact commission and the forum included a number of predictions concerning the dissemination of The Urantia Book. In regard to these matters I have a few comments to make later.
The Urantia Book explains the destiny of our planet and of ourselves. But it is virtually silent on how this will occur. The instructions given to the revelators probably imposed some restrictions on such information. Evidently, many potential readers would not be ready to receive such information anyway. Point B (known “reality”) continues to attract many.
Hopefully, there are people in the Urantia movement who would be ready to contemplate and discuss these issues. Why is it important? The closer our point B comes to point C, the fewer unpleasantries we will experience and the more effective our lives will be. We should begin to live more real and creative lives, because then we will be able to discover possibilities that we could not have even dreamed of in the past. Otherwise we will be wasting our energies in futile attempts to reach point B.
Our mortal minds and the logic of science assert that the past and present are real, while the future is not — it will just become real. Because of this constant unreality, we are not able to see the future. We can only see real things. So, we cannot see all real things either. We cannot, for example, see angels or electromagnetic waves. Our beliefs about free choice also correlate with future events not being as real as they could be; they will evolve from our present decisions. Consequently, it is easy to say that predicting the future is superstition, even if our own experiences are sometimes telling us otherwise.
Furthermore, our very concept of futurity may be a superstition, deriving from our almost primitive conception of time-space and the interpretations our mortal minds make of it. Many things may seem real in our scheme, just as they may appear to be an illusory concept and a lack of understanding.
Today, we have enough facts that verify the possibility that mortals can truly see future events. For example, in the 16th century Nostradamus saw the rise and fall of the Soviet Union; he even predicted his age — 73 years 7 months. Not all of these facts originated with Nostradamus. We have, of course, even more cases of prophets failing in their prophecies; they are false prophets. I am referring only to real prophets.
If our theory conflicts with the facts, the theory has to be revised and refined. It is better to say that our conceptualization of time and space is only relatively valid in our specific condition of three-dimensional space.
We read that the Thought Adjuster is aware of time in a unique manner. The Adjuster’s perceptions and concepts of time-space are entirely different from our own. We may believe that an Adjuster is able to see future events and may sometimes give us certain insights into them. False prophets will arise if humans distort the messages of the Adjusters. The source of many false prophecies lies in the imagination of the prophet.
Since there are Seraphim of the Future, it is justified to believe that they are also able to see the future; and therefore are many other orders of supreme celestial beings.
But where is our free will? Does our logic appear too primitive? We may claim to have created our own faith, but God is the ultimate arbiter. We give a reason and God gives the result according to our destiny. Freedom does not imply complete freedom to do what we want. There are various laws which do restrict us. A God of final value must, himself, be the arbiter of fate and the creator of destiny [UB 98:1.3]
The morontia stage may not come with similar contradictions. If anything, we should expect higher beings to be able to predict how we mortals will use our free will in the future. If we see someone running and falling, and we tell others about it, the runner still retains his freedom of action to behave like that.
But let’s take a look at what the revealers have for us about space and time:
Relationships to time do not exist without motion in space, but consciousness of time does. Sequentiality can consciousize time even in the absence of motion. Man’s mind is less time-bound than space-bound because of the inherent nature of mind. Even during the days of the earth life in the flesh, though man’s mind is rigidly space-bound, the creative human imagination is comparatively time free. But time itself is not genetically a quality of mind.There are three different levels of time cognizance:
1. Mind-perceived time—consciousness of sequence, motion, and a sense of duration.
2. Spirit-perceived time—insight into motion Godward and the awareness of the motion of ascent to levels of increasing divinity.
3. Personality creates a unique time sense out of insight into Reality plus a consciousness of presence and an awareness of duration.Unspiritual animals know only the past and live in the present._Spirit-indwelt man has powers of prevision (insight); he may visualize the future. Only forward-looking and progressive attitudes are personally real. Static ethics and traditional morality are just slightly superanimal. Nor is stoicism a high order of self-realization. Ethics and morals become truly human when they are dynamic and progressive, alive with universe reality.
The human personality is not merely a concomitant of time-and-space events; the human personality can also act as the cosmic cause of such events. [UB 12:5.5-11]
We can see from the above how valuable our views on the future could be.
We are not wholly certain as to whether or not God chooses to foreknow events of sin. But even if God should foreknow the freewill acts of his children, such foreknowledge does not in the least abrogate their freedom. One thing is certain: God is never subjected to surprise. [UB 3:3.4]
These are the projection angels, who forecast a future age and plan for the realization of the better things of a new and advancing dispensation; they are the architects of the successive eras. The group now on the planet has thus functioned since the beginning of the current dispensation. [UB 114:6.10]
Our way of dividing time into past-present-future is only a relative truth. In the evolutionary universes eternity is temporal everlastingness—the everlasting now. [UB 118:1.1]
But how could we attempt a perception of eternity? There is a simple technique for this: Deciding to do the Father’s will. This means that the purpose of the creature has become fixed as regards the succession of moments; in other words, the succession of moments will not witness any change in the purpose of the creature. [UB 118:1.2]
At the present time, the perception of the units of time by each of us is not of equal duration. There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence. [UB 118:1.3]
Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent. [UB 118:1.4]
Patience is exercised by those mortals whose time units are short; true maturity transcends patience by a forbearance born of real understanding. [UB 118:1.6]
To become mature is to live more intensely in the present, at the same time escaping from the limitations of the present. The plans of maturity, founded on past experience, are coming into being in the present in such manner as to enhance the values of the future. [UB 118:1.7]
The time unit of immaturity concentrates meaning-value into the present moment in such a way as to divorce the present of its true relationship to the not-present—the past-future. The time unit of maturity is proportioned so to reveal the co-ordinate relationship of past-present-future that the self begins to gain insight into the wholeness of events, begins to view the landscape of time from the panoramic perspective of broadened horizons, begins perhaps to suspect the nonbeginning, nonending eternal continuum, the fragments of which are called time. [UB 118:1.8]
We should therefore choose to live with a broader awareness of time, and the above paragraphs are extremely important to understand. Sometimes the present moment brings something wonderful to us: a true vision of the future! We feel happy in these rare moments when we perceive our existence in a broader perspective of time. The opposite fact is that we will never feel truly happy if we are afraid that the happy moment will only be momentary and will vanish in the next minute.
In conclusion: A higher consciousness of reality does not involve a rigid division of time into past, present and future. The question surrounding it all concerns the accuracy and measurement of one’s time units. We have grown accustomed to perceiving the present as an extremely small window in time. We may be sure that the future holds many surprises for us in this regard. So-called mystical experiences are only a prelude to those chapters of our eternal career. But this whole broader conception of time would have real value for us if only we were not negligent in our present duties and recognized the illusory nature of point B.
In the interest of not being overly theoretical, let us conduct a little experiment with time.
It is obvious that we live in a three-dimensional space and that we can change the coordinates of our location, that is, move from one place to another. But not so much with respect to time; we cannot change, in time, our dimensions or coordinates; time is automatically changing by itself. We cannot travel in time. But let us imagine that we could change our coordinates in time by minus 50 years, and that we could not change our spatial coordinates. We would still be in the same room at Karepa, in fact holding our conference on August 12, 1948:
There are practically no foreign tourists in Estonia and, as a rule, foreigners are not allowed to leave the capital Tallinn. Our team of cooks are local people from the time of Stalinist terror. Very soon we will be informed that we are in a “border zone”, where locals still need to carry a special permit. But, we do not care; we continue with our lecture. We feel empathy with the people of that time, of course we cannot do anything to improve them except to make a prophetic prediction. Our prediction is that this time will pass soon, and that Estonia too, one day, will regain its freedom. Our message should inspire them to be more optimistic; it should raise their hopes for a better future. But they find it impossible to believe us. It sounds too good and so unreal that it is still very difficult for them to imagine it.
Yet they ask, “When is this supposed to happen?” We answer, “Not too far in the future.” We know that if we were to divulge the exact timing of crucial events it might not have a positive effect on them.
After lunch we feel like going for a walk by the sea. A barbed wire fence catches our attention. Soon we spot a small hole through which we can cross to the other side. Now we see a wide sandy area, similar to a potato field. We walk through this area and look back to see our footprints in the sand. Only after a few minutes we meet armed border guards who speak to us in Russian and escort us to their cordon. They tell us that we are all under arrest. Our foreign guests are accused of being CIA agents and that our Estonian friends are “clearly enemies of the working class.” We experience a trip to Siberia. And all this happened only because we changed our time coordinates by 50 years! Having spent one day in Siberia we have had enough and decide to return to the present. What a strange experience!
Now what we want to do is something much more fascinating, we want to advance in the time dimension 50 years beyond the present, but we are still located here in Karepa. Now we could continue to tell our experiences. One thing is certain: compared to our present situation these experiences are simply incredible, perhaps even more so than our predictions to those people in 1948. We could come to two conclusions:
We are also free to experiment on these issues privately. We might, for example, fantasize about what it was like 10 or 25 years ago, or how different we might be in 10 or 25 years. We might still sense something about our personalities, the element that will forever remain the “unchanging reality.”
If we believed that it was impossible to perceive anything of the future, we would be confining ourselves in a very small box, the name of which would be “the present moment.” We limit our opportunities to the present moment itself; we are not able to gain insight into the totality of events. It seems to me that in this way, we are still like babies trying to take our first steps.
The Urantia Book instructs us, teaching us that time is the greatest gift ever offered to us. The more effectively and creatively we use this path, the happier we will be in time. If we imagined living in eternity but wasting our time among trivialities and banalities, it would result in inconveniences, accidents, and various sufferings.
On the levels of the infinite and the absolute, the present moment contains all of the past, as well as all of the future. [UB 117:7.7]
End of Part I. Part II will be published in the next volume of the Journal.