© 2005 Santiago Rodríguez
© 2005 Urantia Association of Spain
| Luz y Vida — No. 2 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 2 — September 2005 — Index | The center of attention |
(This article is the first installment of a series of three)
Many times I have wondered why I have embraced the UB teachings, and many times I have had to remember that the UB is only a medium, a source of information; I have often wondered how everyone is not as enthusiastic about reading and reflecting on its contents as it is with me, little by little the answers are coming…
The reflections and the contents, as I have understood them, come mainly from chapters 102 and 103 of UB.
What was my personal reality before UB?
I was educated in the standard situation of my space-time location, that is, I was baptized and introduced to the Christian and Catholic religious system of Spain in the third third of the 20th century.
During my childhood, instructed in the religion of the fear of God and the Church, I had to do things well, because God always saw you and you should not commit sin. Of course, the list of sins was so extensive that you always did something wrong and could never get rid of the guilty feeling… as a consequence, the fear of divine punishment appeared, which was summed up in what each one interpreted and visualized as Hell.
During my adolescence, the beliefs appropriate to the aforementioned situation were instilled in me, which of course did not eliminate the feeling of guilt, but at that time, knowing and remembering that God always forgave you was very comforting, and produced an initial approach to religion in me. and towards spirituality, (concepts about God and the religious system), but the other pillar of the Catholic Christian religious system became relevant, (there was already a previous justification in Jesus’ own life that they sell us as the supreme sacrifice): * the sacrifice*. They instilled in me that what is good and desirable is almost always associated with a greater or lesser degree of sacrifice, conscious and voluntary resignation many times, others however imposed, but almost always painful.
I firmly believed that the truth could only be reached with sacrifice… sacrifices that were justified because in the end they would save you from Hell.
Although I vaguely remember that the religious system tried to make everything that happened in your life have a religious (not spiritual) overtone, and they constantly repeated to you that God was always present, what I observed was that the fact of leading a secular life disassociated from the religious system, and your only link to God was through the religious “offices” that you attended with a small degree of participation and of course mechanical, very little active, even today (late 2004) it is like that in many communities, only the most modern begin to present some difference in the forms.
On the other hand, if what interested you was a religious life, as it was a privileged situation, a greater sacrifice was necessary, for which you renounced to a certain extent your family, and of course your sexual freedom, freedom of thought and action , to the possibility of having children, etc., that is to say, to everything that the fact of being secular allowed you. The religious institution itself promotes and accentuates secularism, that is, the separation of the religious and the secular, and I believed it.
At the same time, my curiosity about science, technology, nature, was increasing, and I was much more interested in social issues or interpersonal relationships, with which I found more difficulties, because reason and science for me were more mysterious and attractive as well as logical and beautiful in short; If I had been interested or bet more on social issues or interpersonal relationships, we would be at the same point: the dissociation of the spiritual and the material.
With the passage of time the doubts were redirected, and I came to two questions that intrigued me in a special way:
Now I have a logical and coherent answer, credible and desirable and for the moment very satisfactory.
We can call Reality everything that surrounds us, including ourselves, everything that we are capable of perceiving, feeling and even longing for.
We are establishing the limit between the real and the unreal and we are changing it as we evolve, as we progress. Little by little we are passing to the province of reality what we can conceptualize as true, what we observe, what we find logical or coherent with the observation…
Each person gradually awakens to the different aspects of reality, and we do so in a different way in each of them in terms of the moment of life in which it appears in consciousness and the depth and roots of each aspect of reality. reality in each one of us.
It is any interaction between an active and questioning “I” and any other active and external reality. The fact of the experience is found in one’s own consciousness together with the consciousness that other things exist, other minds, other beings,…
It will be through knowledge and experience how our mind (the mind is precisely the system that human beings have to interpret and correlate all these facts) will organize reality for ourselves, which will undoubtedly give it a certain subjective component, that will allow reality itself to be richer and more attractive than it would be if it only included objective components.
And is precisely the total knowledge that each personality has of reality that constitutes the maximum achievement, the maximum aspiration of the being; eagerness that will lead us both personally and as a group to inquire and deepen into all observable or knowable facts that we include in the framework of reality.
Two aspects of reality immediately become apparent:
We could say that we are aware of a plane superior to the energetic-material but not independent of it. This shot, despite its subjectivity, is as real as the previous one. We can even talk about it with other personalities because they have had experiences that we suppose if not similar to ours, yes equivalent; Because being personal experiences, they become subjective in terms of intensity, duration and even in terms of implications in our life after being lived and experienced. We cannot transfer or exchange them with other personalities, but in some way we can communicate them and explain them to our fellow men, who will understand them to a greater or lesser extent depending on their degree of experience with them.
Now, with the awareness of the existence of the two aspects of reality, we are presented with two great options:
A) I conclude that man is an accident of evolution; that is, by chance without any ulterior purpose, natural evolution has led to the creation of the human being. Therefore, for each one of us, the logical and coherent perspective is that the hostile and implacable universe will end not only with our body but also with what in each of us is beautiful, good, elevated and noble. That is, even with our loftiest longings, so that man’s only reward for living and struggling under the temporary sun of mortal existence is the despair of the fact that beyond the grave nothing and no one can take us.
B) The other option is the one that is born in our hearts that screams at us that what is beautiful, good, elevated and noble cannot disappear with death, it is the one that screams at us that the human being is something more, that transcends the material , and that somehow makes us think that what we had previously recognized as a part of reality and that was above the material plane would have to continue, it cannot disappear with death. If we intuit that it transcends matter and energy, it cannot be subject to it.
Within us there is a hunger for perfection and ever higher achievement; Also, from a very young age, altruism and generosity are planned around us, and something in ourselves tells us that this is good, that it is okay and that it is the right path. The sensations of well-being that lead to actions in this sense are not achieved in any other way, so all this is just another part of reality, which we can experience and in fact we all experience throughout our lives.
Religion is nothing but a conception of life that will lead you to a certain way of living, it is the logical and coherent consequence of choosing option B) above. The religious man inevitably appears around an idea - experience. There is a human experience that is the highest proof of the reality and efficacy of religion, as well as being THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF ALL RELIGION: it is the experience suffered by the person who, being fearful by nature and endowed with a strong innate instinct of self-preservation and a strong desire for survival after death, you want to fully TRUST your deepest interests of your present and your future to the protection and direction of that power and person designated by your FAITH as GOD.
In every age and culture, man has always thought of God in terms of the best he knew, his deepest ideas, and his highest ideals. Every intelligent creature grants the name of God to the highest and best that it is capable of mentally conceiving.
Now we have become aware of two sides of total reality, this is the starting point of all religion at any time and in any culture, even the previous concept and with the following concept we will understand all possible religious variants, even at personal level
It could be summed up in that each religion exhibits different beliefs as to what that being, power or person demands from man in exchange for taking care of him and finally saving him.
Our culture is still not fully aware that the two aspects of reality (the energetic-material and the spiritual) are logical, coherent, compatible and complementary, and therefore necessary to have the long-awaited unification of reality, to have a vision unified and that accounts for the two aspects of reality.
We still carry a terrible burden of our evolution, and it is myopic egocentrism, not only of personality, but also of race, of culture, of “religion.” We all tend to be absolutely convinced that our truth is truer than that of other groups, and this in itself would not be bad if we were only aware that our truth is superior but not definitive, that we must continue to progress in knowledge and discernment. Not everything is said and done: in this part of the universe there is still much to discover, experience, understand, etc. In short, each group, each person, each culture, manages to discern, to understand what their mind is capable of generating and harmonizing.
Now we are at the origin and reason for endless discussions: on the one hand, those who wonder if the energetic-material reality is more real; on the other hand, those who give more importance to spiritual reality, those who are convinced that their beliefs are “superior”, or are closer to the truth, than the beliefs of others. But let us think that this is so in the two aspects of reality, the material and the spiritual; In the case of the material aspect, scientific knowledge, as we can investigate and verify more, we are finding the logical guiding thread of nature, although in avant-garde knowledge there can always be discrepancies, and the truth is that, although each Once new challenges and enigmas appear, it is also true that as time goes by the panorama becomes clearer and in one way or another becomes more established.
But what about spiritual reality? How is it progressing? How is it progressing? If we still have doubts about the existence of the spiritual plane (another side of reality), let’s remember that for it to be real, although we cannot measure it (the measurements are appropriate for the energetic-material reality) we can have a religious experience, that surely we have all had it, namely: when any moral being faced with an egotistical impulse chooses to be altruistic; There is also another example of a religious experience that occurs (experiences) at the moment in which our mind, exercising free will, decides, opts for a fair moral judgment.
These two workshops of reality (energetic-material and spiritual) are not the same in their means or in their work tools, nor do they progress with the same arguments, nor with the same way of doing things, which makes them cause for confusion. .
We will make a comparison with the science that is easier for us to know, and with the study of the similarities and differences we will realize that many contradictions and paradoxes. Many questions without an apparent answer are clarified when we take precisely these differences into account, and many of them are caused by ourselves by insisting on using inappropriate tools or by insisting on applying the rules of one aspect of reality to another aspect of reality.
| Energetic-material aspect of reality | Spiritual aspect of reality |
|---|---|
| SCIENCE tells us about him | RELIGION |
| To The Observable Facts of time and space, we apply Reason and it leads us to achieve KNOWLEDGE | The natural impulse of trust in the afterlife, gives us a religious vision that produces in us a spiritual transformation, which leads us to FAITH. |
| It is WISDOM that urges us to let FAITH replace REASON and FACTS in the spiritual aspect of reality | |
| TIME is an invariable and inevitable element in obtaining knowledge | Although it is true that with time there is growth in grace and advancement in the different phases of religious experience, it is also true that his gifts are sometimes IMMEDIATE. |
| The more we know about science, the less sure we will be (the more unknowns will appear to us) | The more religion we have, the safer we will be. Our confidence will grow, which will feed our Faith. |
| The certainties of science come from the intellect and appeal to the understanding of the mind, for its settlement in our “I” | The certainties of religion come not only from the intellect but from the whole personality, so they appeal to the loyalty and devotion of the whole personality, not just to the logical part of reasoning. |
| It does not require definition, its fruits are social, intellectual, moral and spiritual. | |
| It is the fruit of culture, so it is the property of the cultural group that owns it | It is not the fruit of culture; It is the property of the human race. |
| What is subject to the bondage of ignorance and the bondage of superstition, and even the deceptions of sophistication and the illusions of false philosophy, is not religion, but the perception of religion (which is still human). . | |
| Intellectual deficiency hinders high achievement in science | Similarly in religion, intellectual deficiency hinders higher religious attainments. |
| Although the intellectual factors of religion are important, their overdevelopment is sometimes a difficulty. Religion must work under a paradoxical necessity: - It must make effective use of thought. - At the same time it has to rule out the spiritual usefulness of any thought process. This paradox appears due to the absence of experiential connection between the material level and the spiritual level of the universe. |
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We have reached the point of recognizing the existence of two disparate a priori aspects of reality, but since we are capable of perceiving both, it is natural that man seeks a way to unify them, since reality is unique, we cannot conceive it. dissociated.
Here begins the particular path of each individual, of each generation, of each culture, establishing the postulates for each of the aspects of reality, developing to the limit of their understanding of these and establishing the relationships that within a logical and of a coherence allow to understand and develop the personality in constant interaction with the total reality.
(End of the first part)
| Luz y Vida — No. 2 — Presentation | Luz y Vida — No. 2 — September 2005 — Index | The center of attention |