© 2016 Philip Calabrese and Jean Royer
© 2016 Association Francophone des Lecteurs du Livre d'Urantia
| Effectively Revealing the Truth | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 74 — June 2016 | Another Vision of the Universe |
in relation to the resurrection on the 3rd day or the 3rd period
The English word “day” has multiple meanings, although it can most often be translated as day which is even more indeterminate than English.
The word day is found 968 times in the UB and in 872 paragraphs. The word jour is only found in 649 paragraphs. In the plural, days is found 882 times and in 761 paragraphs while jours in the plural is only found in 561 paragraphs. This already means that there is no automatic equivalence.
What interests us here is more precisely the way of interpreting this word in the expression “resurrection on the third day”.
On first reading almost everyone interprets this formula literally as meaning approximately 72 hours.
Why? Because Lazarus was resurrected after three days and Jesus was resurrected on the third day.
Are you so sure about this? I don’t mean about the resurrection, but about the expression?
No one, knowing that he died on Friday evening and rose again on Sunday morning, would say in our time, the third day, but rather two days after his death or the second day after his death. The inclusion has not been practiced for a long time but the expression persists.
Moreover, for the resurrection, the Solitary Messenger who signs booklet 112 uses not the term day but that of period. The period is even more indeterminate than the day.
Many students of The Urantia Book have wondered what the expressions: resurrected “on the third day” or “in the third period” really mean.
Given the velocity of the transport seraphim and the distances separating the worlds of the houses of our planet, it seems difficult to reconcile these statements with current scientific data.
Here is a presentation given by Philip Calabrese in Nashville in 1988 during a scientific conference, translated and commented by Jean Royer in July 2000 and which attempts to provide, if not a definitive answer, at least new insight into this legitimate question.
I do not want to sow confusion or even doubt in your personal beliefs, but simply to make you think about the problems posed by a seemingly simple expression.
To examine this question, I suggest you first read what Philip Calabrese wrote on this subject and what he presented at the first scientific symposium held in Nashville in 1988.
Philip Calabrese is a mathematician, inventor of a system of Boolean fractions resolved in 4 operations. He also developed the theory of conditional events, and even seraphic velocity:
Jean Royer
¶ On seraphic velocity and resurrection on the third day
By Philip Calabrese
SCIENTIFIC SYMPOSIUM 1 (1988)
About three years ago I had the good fortune to see a well-researched article entitled “Seraphic Velocity” by Merrit Horn; he was writing as a faculty member of the Boulder School for students of The Urantia Book. The article appeared in the January, 1984 issue of “Planetary Prints” published by the Urantia Society of the Rocky Mountains of Denver.
More recently, I received from Berkeley Elliott of the Oklahoma Society a copy of Dan Massey’s 1980 letter responding to a question from Jean Royer on the same subject. As Dan succinctly writes:
The book says that some mortals are “repersonalized on the third day after their natural death.” (UB 49:6.9) This repersonalization requires the presence of the seraphim to whom the morontia soul has been entrusted. (UB 112:5.19) The seraphim can travel at three times the speed of light. (UB 23:3.2) Therefore, mansonia No. 1 is at most nine days from Urantia for a being traveling at the speed of light.
In other words, if resurrection on world no. I of mansonia on the third day after natural death is possible, then mansonia nol is at most 9 light days from Urantia.
But this conclusion is hardly compatible with current evolutionary estimates of cosmic distances. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is 4.3 light-years away according to current measurements. In other words, it takes 4.3 light-years to leave our solar system and travel to the nearest star. So how could a seraphim travel even to the next star in nine days, let alone travel from our world, Urantia, at the outer reaches of our star system, to a satellite of Jerusem near the center of this system of about 2,000 stars and worlds?
However, another passage seems to corroborate this incongruity. Solonia, the seraphic “voice of the garden” tells us that Adam and Eve were formally installed on the first day on Urantia and that six days after this event a seraph messenger arrived, bearing the notice of installation of the planetary sovereigns." (832) This suggests that the transit time from Jerusem to Urantia by a seraph is at most 6 days.
It is primarily from these two references that Merrit Horn concludes that it must be possible to travel from Jerusem to Urantia in six days at three times the speed of light (3C). He offers us a speed expansion (and therefore time reduction) formula for faster-than-light travel that takes the seraph from place to place at an “observed” speed of 2754.8 times the speed of light © while simultaneously traveling at an “instantaneous” speed of three times the speed of light. The idea here is to retain the belief in a seraphic transit time of 72 hours between Urantia and Jerusem while traveling at a maximum speed of 3C as implied by the resurrection “on the third day after natural death” and while also believing that the stars are still separated by years when traveling at one-third of 3C.
In a similar vein is the suggestion of Dan Massey who in his letter speaks of the strange properties implied by the current theory of relativity as a possible explanation for the anomaly. But Dan is clearly not satisfied with this answer. We should not, in my opinion, allow these first faintly glimpsed notions of the theory of relativity to make such a distortion of time at superluminal speeds credible. Time is the measure of space and there is no reason why we should believe that time is not uniform in its progression. The planets all revolve around the sun at relatively constant periods. Time is produced by motion and periodic motion is apparently regular.
In the Urantia Book, 3 C is described as approximately 900,000 km per second of our time (UB 23:3.2). By this standard, a seraphim travels three times the distance that light would travel in that period of time. A seraphim uses three superimposed space energies (two of which are still unknown on Urantia) to achieve a “triple velocity.” If it takes a being three days to travel through a given space at the speed of 3C, then that space must be nine light days. So if I accept the “three-day transit hypothesis,” then I must accept that the stars are really nine days apart.
Since commonly accepted cosmic distances are suspect, including many factors of error (UB 12:4.14), I have considered the possibility that the stars are actually much closer than we suppose! Light travels nearly 26 billion miles per day, or about 9,500 billion miles in a year.
Could so many inhabited worlds be within, say, nine light days (230 billion kilometers) of Urantia? By contrast, 4.3 light years is 174 times that at almost 42 trillion kilometers and that’s just to the next star. This seemed hardly conceivable except with a great deal of imagination.
FOR PLEASURE SOME FIGURES
Systemic time, 1 Satania day = 3 Urantia days minus 1 hour 4 minutes 15 seconds.
Local universe time, 1 day of Nebadon = 18 days 6 hours 2 minutes ½ of Urantia, this is the standard time.
A Divine Advisor came from Uversa in 109 days or approximately 900,000 times C.
A Lone Messenger at about 4.5 million times C.
Median creatures: 599,580 km/s.
The seraphim: 899,580 km/s
This mystery immediately piqued my curiosity. I began to think about it at various times as I usually do with other ideas. Although I had analyzed the cosmology of The Urantia Book, this problem had escaped my attention. And now I could not fail to see it.
There may be stars and worlds that are not visible to our optical or radio spectra but could be visible at higher or lower frequencies.
There may be errors in parallax measurements in contemporary science due to the mistaken notion that some stars are in outer space when in fact they are traveling with us.
It was around this time, while I was testing this idea of stars being only a few light days apart, that my good friend Dr. Richard Prince began to inquire whether I was also hearing voices.
A careful reading of the Urantia Book references cited above (many of which are taken from Merrit Horn’s article) did not seem to provide any way out of this dilemma.
No other standard day in The Urantia Book is adequate either. Even the Orvonton day (90 Urantia days) would not allow a seraphim to travel one light-year, which is less than to the nearest star. Only the Paradise day (1000 Urantia years) is more than sufficient; in fact, much too long.
A Divine Counselor of Uversa informs us (UB 23:3.2) that there are “no personalities carrying messages or transiting at speeds intermediate between the instantaneous movements of gravity traverses and the relatively slow speeds of seraphim…except for Solitary Messengers.” At a speed of 849,000,000 miles per second a Solitary Messenger is about a million times faster than a seraphim. This Divine Counselor says that “seraphim and others can traverse space at triple the speed, approximately 550,000 Urantia miles per second” and that “an enseraphimated being has no possibility of exceeding the speed of 550,000 Urantia miles per second of your time.” » Although the deceased mortal is not enseraphed at death, that mortal’s guardian angel must travel to Jerusem with the surviving morontia soul before resurrection takes place. And that angel cannot travel higher than 3C.
Further research with Clyde Bedell’s Concordex showed several significant references to cosmic distances. Perhaps the most interesting and definitive is the “orange analogy.”
“The suns of Nebadon are not unlike those of other universes. The material composition of all suns, dark islands, planets, and satellites, even meteors, is quite identical. These suns have an average diameter of about one million miles, that of your own solar orb being slightly less. The largest star in the universe, the stellar cloud Antares, is four hundred and fifty times the diameter of your sun and is sixty million times its volume. But there is abundant space to accommodate all of these enormous suns. They have just as much comparative elbow room in space as one dozen oranges would have if they were circulating about throughout the interior of Urantia, and were the planet a hollow globe.” (UB 41:3.2)
After several false starts (which the good mathematician always hides) this proportion can easily be put into algebraic form. Let D be the diameter of space whose corresponding sphere would contain on average 12 stars. Then D is in relation to the diameter of the earth as the diameter of the sun (1.6 million km) is in relation to the diameter of an orange (4 inches = approximately 11 cm).
[N.D.T.: to avoid falling into dubious approximations I will give Philip’s calculations in miles and inches, although a calculation in kilometers would have been simpler.]
- D/ 7920 miles = 1,000,000 miles/(4 inches)
- Since 4 inches represents (4/12) x 1/5 280) miles
- D = 7,290 x 1,000,000 x 3 x 5,280 miles
- D = 125 x 1012 miles ]
Thus, D is about 125 trillion miles (= 200 trillion kilometers), which is about 21 light years. Thus, a ball of space of radius 10.5 light years (3.3 parsecs) contains about 12 stars. (A parsec is about 3.26 light years.) This equates to a stellar density of 0.082 stars per cubic parsec, and agrees well with contemporary scientific measurements.
For example, Paul R. Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in his paper on “The Oort Cloud and the Galaxy: Dynamic Interaction” says that “At the distance of the Sun from the Galactic Center the average space between stars is about 1 parsec.”… Weissman also mentions an estimate (of 0.08 stars per cubic parsec) by C. Allen, which is actually the same number as that given by the orange analogy. Similarly, in their paper “Stars within 25 parsecs of the Sun”… Wilhelm Gliese and Hartmut Jahreiss… state that the stellar density in the immediate vicinity of the Sun (within 5 parsecs) is not less than 0.116 stars per cubic parsec according to current observations.
These three estimates differ by almost a factor of 1.4. By contrast, if the local system of about 2,000 stars has a radius of 9 light days, then the stellar density is about 13 billion stars per cubic parsec. This is a factor 100 billion times greater than that implied by the orange analogy and reported by Urantian astronomers. This amounts to shrinking the linear distance by a factor of 4,600.
So the stars must be light years away after all. If that is so, where is the offending proposition? This brings us back to that embarrassing expression “the third day after natural death.” What does “the third day” really mean?
Dan Massey’s letter initially points out that the word “day” “may not refer to a well-defined period of time.” In support of this solution Dan quotes A Solitary Messenger of Orvonton on page 1232:
“If the human individual survives without delay, the Adjuster, so I am instructed, registers at Divinington, proceeds to the Paradise presence of the Universal Father, returns immediately and is embraced by the Personalized Adjusters of the superuniverse and local universe of assignment, receives the recognition of the chief Personalized Monitor of Divinington, and then, at once, passes into the “realization of identity transition,” being summoned therefrom on the third period and on the mansion world in the actual personality form made ready for the reception of the surviving soul of the earth mortal as that form has been projected by the guardian of destiny.” (UB 112:4.13)
The Guardian of Destiny is of course the Seraphic Guardian who traveled to the Mansion World. Dan points out that the “third period” is a very indefinite reference. He offers other somewhat disappointing support for this explanation, but ultimately he is not satisfied with it and seeks another solution.
However, consider that it was a Melchizedek of the Jerusem school of planetary administration who, on page 569, first said:
Throughout the earlier ages of an evolutionary world, few mortals go to judgment on the third day. But as the ages pass, more and more the personal guardians of destiny are assigned to the advancing mortals, and thus increasing numbers of these evolving creatures are repersonalized on the first mansion world on the third day after natural death. On such occasions the return of the Adjuster signalizes the awakening of the human soul, and this is the repersonalization of the dead just as literally as when the en masse roll is called at the end of a dispensation on the evolutionary worlds. (UB 49:6.9)
I believe that the phrase “on the third day after their natural death” was specifically intended here to be taken as intentionally vague. However, the phrase was certainly not taken as such. Nevertheless, according to my edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary the word “day” itself is sometimes quite undefined. Among the definitions are: a period of time; a number of years as in: the best writer of his day.
Perhaps the unnamed contributor to The Urantia Book was instructed not to reveal the exact distance from Jerusem to Urantia. In that case, this Melchizedek would have had to resort to an indefinite expression to indicate the time of travel of a seraphim. Being a member of an order of personality who are not unaware of the possibility of errors of judgment in minor matters, he could have used the expression “on the third day” because it is an expression which is clearly indefinite. However, this expression is now archaic and tends to be taken literally.
Please note that later in The Urantia Book it is a Solitary Messenger (a much higher order of personality than the Melchizedeks) who uses the surely indefinite expression “third period” to describe this same time span. In my opinion, this latter passage was written with the intention of clarifying the earlier passage.
The resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus on the fourth day after his death and the resurrection of Jesus himself a day and a half after the crucifixion have undoubtedly contributed greatly to the tendency to interpret literally the expression “on the third day after their natural death.” But, it must be interpreted as a minimum period of time. These exceptional resurrections took place on the world where death took place and not on some other world as is discussed here.
Please also note that since each world has its own day (period of rotation on its axis) and its own distance from Jerusem, there must be a large number of different days for a Seraphic Guardian to reach Jerusem from the different worlds of human evolution, even assuming that it could be done in days! Thus, the expression “on the third day” appears to be too precise (or perhaps it refers to a longer, unspecified period).
If one were to understand this expression as intentionally undefined, then our best estimates of the minimum time between death and the arrival of the seraphim on mansonia #1 would be in Urantia years. Merrit Horn estimates the distance at 50 light years, plus or minus 20, which represents about 17 years of travel, plus or minus 6 years, at a speed of slightly less than 3 C.
But what about “a seraph messenger arrived, “bearing the certificate of installation” of Adam and Eve?
This event took place only six days after the installation.
While one might think that this passage implies that the seraphim left Jerusem only six days before arriving on Urantia, the language used leaves room for other interpretations. One plausible explanation is that the messenger was sent from Jerusem six days after Adam and Eve left, perhaps in normal transit or in anticipation of settlement. The authorities at Jerusem then contacted the messenger in transit and communicated the message to him. It cannot necessarily be inferred from this passage that Jerusem is within a few light days of Urantia, although one could certainly hastily draw that conclusion.
Other passages can be analyzed to imply that the transit time may be no more than a fraction of a Urantian year. For example, long before the birth of Cain, (and therefore less than a year since the failure of Adam and Eve,) “the Edenic caravan was stopped on the third day of its departure from the Garden by the seraphic transports arriving from Jerusem.” But, again here, seraphic transports are continually traveling between Jerusem and Urantia. The arrival of the seraphic transports with orders regarding the failure does not necessarily imply that these transports made the entire journey in less than a year.
So my answer to the anomaly is that it takes at least 11 years and more likely 20, 50 or more years to “resurrect in the third period” without significant delay. Circumstances must ripen. Many people who died in years past must now be asleep in transit. Twenty years is less than half an hour of a Heaven day!
In this regard, a Solitary Messenger can easily travel from Urantia to Jerusem in less than 15 minutes of our time.
Philip Calabrese
A few years later, Philip Calabrese returned to the subject at the start of a conference entitled:
¶ Heaven and the topology of space: A Theory of Ultimate Matter.
Here is the 2nd paragraph.
At the first scientific symposium in Nashville I went so far as to suggest that an unnamed Melchizedek might have been put on the spot for using the phrase “on the third day after natural death,” which we would like to take literally. Well, today I will recant my apostasy from The Urantia Book; I have thought of a means by which a guardian angel could get to Jerusem in less than three days. The angel does not travel under his own power! He must be translated to Jerusem by some unrevealed universal or paradisiacal technique. A careful reading of The Urantia Book will reveal to you that whenever this journey of the seraphim from Urantia to Jerusem is described, the author never says that he goes there by normal seraphic travel or transportation. Instead, he uses some vague phrase like “goes to Jerusem” to indicate the angel’s mode of transportation. I hope this explanation resolves the anomaly and indicates an unrevealed seraphic phenomenon associated with human death…
Following are Jean Royer’s comments:
I am not convinced by this retraction by Philip and I would be curious to know his current position. I am also not convinced by the positions of JCR who, seeing Paradise as an Absolute, imagines that by participating in Paradise he could go anywhere almost instantly and thinks that the length of the journeys would be a waste of time. Likewise, I am not convinced by the hypotheses of L.P. who proposes space-time corridors or what some cosmologists call “wormholes”. We are here on the border between scientific and science fiction hypotheses and I agree with what Philip has already pointed out: We should not allow these dimly glimpsed notions of theory… to make such a distortion of time credible.
Here are some additional arguments which, personally, seem quite decisive to me.
We are told about resurrection on the third day or third period, but without specifying the time necessary for this resurrection; however, we know that:
- It takes between 10 and 18 days to rematerialize an Adam (UB 51:2.4). On Urantia, Adam and the 100 were rematerialized in 10 days (UB 74:0.1) $743.1)
- On the mansion worlds, it takes around 7 standard days for a morontia transformation (you know, the 570 bodies) or a little more than 127 days (UB 48:2.17)
Question: Is resurrection one of these transformations?
When the revelators want to dispel any ambiguity they do so willingly by using formulas like “in your time” or “in Urantia time” or on the contrary “in standard time”.
When these formulas are not used, they must be supplemented for both years and days (or distances: see the miles of Jerusalem)
For example, (UB 53:2.1) Lucifer… had reigned over Jerusem for more than five hundred thousand years…
Of course he reigned for more than 500,000 years since he sent a message when Andon and Fonta received an Adjuster (UB 62:7.5), that is to say more than 900,000 years ago. The years in question cannot be either Urantian years or Satanic years which are a little less than 300 days, but undoubtedly standard time of Nebadon (UB 33:6.7) or 500,000 x 5 = 2,500,000 years of our planet.
4. The argument that we should not waste time seems to collapse in the face of the adventure of the Solitary Messenger on page 259: 2.
And finally, why would a Divine Advisor only go for about 900,000 times $1 if he had the ability to take a “wormhole”?
If the seraphim had the possibility of “being transported” why would we be told:
“6. Ambassadors and Emissaries of Special Assignment. Local universes situated within the same superuniverse customarily exchange ambassadors selected from their native orders of sonship. But to avoid delay, Solitary Messengers are frequently asked to go as ambassadors from one local creation to another, to represent and interpret one realm to another. For example: When a newly inhabited realm is discovered, it may prove to be so remote in space that a long time will pass before an enseraphimed ambassador can reach this far-distant universe. An enseraphimed being cannot possibly exceed the velocity of 558,840 Urantia miles in one second of your time. Massive stars, crosscurrents, and detours, as well as attraction tangents, will all tend to retard such speed so that on a long journey the velocity will average about 550,000 miles per second.” (UB 23:2.22)
“When it develops that it will require hundreds of years for a native ambassador to reach a far-distant local universe, a Solitary Messenger is often asked to proceed there immediately to act as ambassador ad interim. Solitary Messengers can go in very short order, not independently of time and space as do the Gravity Messengers, but nearly so. They also serve in other circumstances as emissaries of special assignment.” (UB 23:2.23)
[This is a Divine Counselor] Except for the Inspired Spirits of The Trinity, we cannot attain the almost incredible speed of the Solitary Messengers, but we are able to utilize the full range of space transportation, so that from his headquarters world we can reach any point in a superuniverse in less than a year of Urantia time. It took me 109 days of your time to come to Urantia from Uversa.
This Divine Counselor goes very quickly, but yet, this Stationary Son of the Trinity, takes time to come to us. If there was a way to take a faster TGV, wouldn’t he do it?
A final argument could be that of the long, long journey discussed among others on pages 171, 301 and 430.
In conclusion, I’ll see you on Maisonnia NN1 in… come on, about twenty years.
Jean Royer, Le Thor 2009
| Effectively Revealing the Truth | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 74 — June 2016 | Another Vision of the Universe |