© 2023 Sophie Malicot
© 2023 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| Will We Be Eternally Subject to Material Gravity? | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 104 — December 2023 | The Flask |
Summary of a conference on the Urantia Quebec Site on 10/22/2023
Sophie Malicot
Time is simultaneously an everyday reality and a difficult concept to understand, probably more difficult than space. At our level, time is constructed thanks to space: to go from point A to point B, it takes so much time. Thus time is included in space. The Urantia Book offers us an inversion: constructing space from time, space becoming a necessary extension where a temporal unfolding takes place. In other words, time “throws” space in which it will be able to deploy its scrolls in the form of sequences. Thus can take place the phenomenon of evolution, so important to the UB.
“There are three different levels of time cognizance:”
- Mind-perceived time—consciousness of sequence, motion, and a sense of duration.
- Spirit-perceived time—insight into motion Godward and the awareness of the motion of ascent to levels of increasing divinity.
- Personality creates a unique time sense out of insight into Reality plus a consciousness of presence and an awareness of duration. (UB 12:5.6-9)
1. Time perceived by the mind — awareness of sequence, movement and sense of duration.
This time perceived by the mind is simple: it is that of our everyday lives. The basis of its standard is that of human existence, circumscribed between birth and death. It gives the first notion of sequence, according to which we construct other sequences. Each sequence teems with actions - our movements - that we sort, order and classify in relation to each other, in an inclusive, nested, juxtaposed and coordinated way. Thus is
“…the current of the flow of temporal events consciously perceived by creatures. Time is a name given to the arrangement in succession of events, which allows them to be recognized and separated.”
Then the mind takes other references to measure its actions and construct a sense of duration. These original references are the cycles of nature, subsequently leading to our most precise watches and chronometers. From the fastest to the most extensive, intelligence expands this perception of time as much as possible and applies it to the cosmos. But it is always the same process. The intrinsic evolution is not that of space in itself but that of oneself in space, linked to the work of men.
Thus time is constructed by analysis in a space which synthesizes actions and classifies them into sequences. Things are done one after the other, including our thoughts, our words, which follow one another in a continual procession. This time is neutral; it has no destiny or values of its own, only carries the fashionable beliefs with which we clothe it over the ages.
This mental knowledge of time opens up a paradox: the more we belong to time, the more we conceive of it as independent of us, as an objectivity. If time is extracted from the human, at this level, the human is totally contained in it. Here there is no need for God to live or think about time; all creation is contained in this linear process. We could call it “common time”.
2. Time perceived by the mind—the perception of movement toward God and the awareness of upward movement toward levels of increasing divinity.
This new knowledge of time is brought by the Thought Adjuster. He opens us to a more divine conception of time, by his own divine nature. The first term used is that of perception. In fact we know that at the morontia level we will be endowed with 70 perceptive senses. The NDEs (Near Death Experiences) are the only ones who can detail here below an overview of these new capacities of the ascenders. Here are some areas where these new increased perceptions will be exercised:
| ⇒ Space | ⇒ Time |
| ⇒ Interpersonal relationships | ⇒ Intrapersonal relationships |
| ⇒ Nature | ⇒ Memory |
| ⇒ Consciousness | ⇒ Values |
| ⇒ Thought/philosophy | ⇒ Language |
| ⇒ Numbers/mathematics | ⇒ Music |
| ⇒ Colors | ⇒ Light |
| ⇒ Temperatures | ⇒ Displacements / Movement |
| ⇒ Architecture | ⇒ Harmony |
| ⇒ History | ⇒ Touch? Cf “Don’t touch me Marie” |
| ⇒ There are a lot missing… |
The sequences are always present, captured in their entirety like paintings, in a glance, an instant. Placed next to each other, they juxtapose, pile up on top of each other. Thus the global perception of the sequences and their juxtaposition “bend” the linear consciousness of events into a cyclical vision. If we compare with a film, in linear time (our current existence) the film unfolds image after image, whereas at the morontia level, the entirety of the film is seen instantaneously, all the images together. In this curvature, time is no longer an analysis but perceived as a synthesis of which the ascender is witness, extracts himself while having participated in the previous sequences. Syntheses of cycles perceived as extensions, protuberances birth-unfolding-end. Unlike the linear time of the mind, where the being disappears from the theater of time at the moment of his death while the time process continues, here the ascender continues his adventure through successive sequences, the end of each of which does not determine the end of the ascender. The present is no longer a sum of actions set between past and future, but the much larger one containing the past-present-future of different interior cycles, “inferior”, completed, current or to come.
This cyclical vision removes the notion of fracture and temporal discontinuity. Existence becomes a global extension contained in a larger present.
In terms of movement, there is a suction of the ascender in an oblique upward direction, without directional choice. This is an ascent and not a descent.
This knowledge of the time of the spirit carries “the levels of increasing divinity”. Contrary to the neutrality of mental time, the spirit opens to the high values of divinity: indescribable beauty, unconditional love, compassion, non-judgment, truth. Values more than moral; spiritual values beyond all dogma. This allows on the one hand the ascender to weigh the value of his acts according to absolute standards of measurement. On the other hand, morontia progression becomes that of spiritual maturity: the ascender passes to a higher level when he has acquired the maturity of the lower level. In other words, the person progresses when he is ready to pass to another quality of being, of relationships, of choices, of responsibilities.
In this progression, time widens, broadens its vision until it encompasses the past and the future in a continuum united with the present, all three taken in the same movement without beginning or end. Time is transcended; it becomes a game with which the Father activates perfection in the eternal course of coming to pass. Thus time is a means to grow in the direction of the Father’s will for perfection. When the Father proposes to the Son “Let us make man in our image”, the verb is in the present tense. This term “let us make” implies a dynamic process that is not completed, in the process of being realized. The present is an eternal present, that is to say that this man is always in the process of being formed in the image of God, never completed, never having reached the end of the resemblance.
3. Personality creates a unique sense of time through its penetration of Reality, plus an awareness of presence and a perception of duration.
Personality is a gift from the Father. Its divine nature gives the guiding sense of spiritual domination. It carries within it a natural aspiration to move towards God, its own source. Its goal is to respond to the Father’s command of perfection: “Be perfect as I am perfect.” To do this, it makes the high divine values perceptible (truth, beauty, goodness, equity, mercy, justice, etc.). The integration of these values gradually returns the inner forces to move from service to fraternal service.
The drama of the personality is that it stretches between the maximum of possible divergences: the creative world from which it originates, and the created world where it begins to reveal itself. So it never ceases to crack the chrysalises that enclose it. It shakes up, overturns, flares up the habits and customs in place, the fashions that it detests, the false ideas and traditions that block the road to progression.
Its greatest asset is its creative power. It is always looking for a way to break through into something new in the concrete avenues of certainties. Whether these are scientific, intellectual, philosophical or (the hardest to crack!) spiritual. Each breakthrough is irremediable, on an individual as well as humanitarian level. There is no going back; the world is moving forward. Thus the more it develops, the more it grows in fullness.
Her valiant ambition is to attain true freedom — the fruit of divine love whose first fruits she tastes with each new expansion. This freedom is at the heart of the paradox of personality. How is it increasingly free when progression increasingly recognizes allegiance to the Universe, the requirement of infinite cosmic relationships, and fraternal obligations?
In this progressive “penetration of Reality” linked to time, it has two allies:
- An “awareness of presence”. Because progress is of the order of being. Divinity is not a thing – but presences of beings, and Presence of being to being. Relationships are woven from being to being.
- The second ally concerns a “perception of duration”. This perception of duration therefore refers to experience. Experience no longer measuring internal movements but an external view of the sequences, collected, analyzed, understood, synthesized in order to create coherence, the loving intelligence of the evolution of the person.
Gradually the personality stretches a red thread of coherence of life, where all experiences converge in a unique personal unity, meaningful and ascending in divinity. Including the meanders of human wanderings.
Also her wisdom is the respect of the unfolding of time. Not to short-circuit the process in order to respect the synergy of the whole in a harmonious balance because it takes into account the level of development. She uses her creativity to push forward certain levers of progression while slowing down others, thus preserving the overall balance. At the individual level, this synergy of the whole requires so much ingenuity unique to each that we can truly say that it creates a unique sense of time through its penetration of Reality.
Thus the promised inversion is made: from the human set in the scrolls of time, the personality, by its invariance, plays on the expansions of time as agents of creation to converge level after level the human and the divine. From the idea to the ideal, the personality goes to the realization of the divine and the consciousness of reality of the personality of the Father… Thanks to time.
4. Summary We can now access this diverse knowledge of time, through the three levels of choice that we are faced with:
- The choices of linear time concern the facts of our existence. They are the choices of the common. They include our hopes, our human ambitions, our achievements, our failures; all the things we do and the way we do them. They are totally reversible.
- The choices of the mind’s time concern the meaning—directional and intentional—that we give to our existence. These are the choices of beliefs. They cover our ideals and call our existence as a transcendent being.
- The choices of the personality’s time concern the values taken as the foundation and goal of our existence, in connection with the divine Presence. These are the choices of faith. They are totally irreversible.
Thus we experience time on three levels simultaneously. Their interweaving gives direction, meaning and value to our life.
| Will We Be Eternally Subject to Material Gravity? | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 104 — December 2023 | The Flask |