Universal Unity-Paper 56

From Nordan Symposia
Jump to navigationJump to search

Lighterstill.jpg

The eye of all ur 80px.jpg

UNIVERSAL UNITY – Paper 56: A Study

  • by Bill Sadler, November 19, 1955

Presentation

I would like to spend a little time in pointing out the basic simplicity of this paper, because it is a confluence paper into which much flows. It is also like the Spheres of Light and Life, a secondary paper. It assumes a knowledge of that which has gone before. In the Spheres of Light and Life when they tell you what happens to the constellation or local universe government, they do not have anything to say about what it now is.

This paper attempts to summarize what has gone on before. I think it concludes Part II because Part II, in a sense, was background material from a super-planetary standpoint, except for some little gems that are pushed along down into Part III. I have always thought that they put the eschatology of these papers and the story of the Supreme Being in Part III simply to keep from scaring Christians off too badly, because they are very non-Christian concepts, and I think they would have unduly complicated the simple presentation of the Father, Son, Spirit, and Trinity. It represents their bid to the personal approach to the story of Deity, and it represents their bid to gain Christian sympathy. Jesus didn’t go out of His way to antagonize the teachings of the Jewish sacred scriptures. He did everything he could to latch on to the moral and spiritual impetus of Judaism and I think the Urantia papers sustain a very analogous relationship to the Christian religion. Jesus started out with Yahweh and bolted into the concept of Aba, or Father, and I think these papers start out with a Christian vehicle and seek to gain all of the sociological and theological momentum that they can. This paper is a summary of what has gone before. It tries to show you that despite all of this diversity, there is a basic unification of all reality, all functions, all qualities, all meanings, and all values.

They start talking about physical coordination and what they are referring to actually in this section, is a very simple fact. There is no functional difference between Paradise Spirit and Paradise Monota. You will recall that the word Manota is a word which they give, and it means the “non-spiritual energy of the physical Isle of Paradise; and that if you were to set-up a laboratory will all kinds of meters to measure such things; and you were to subject Paradise Spirit to your qualitative and quantitative analysis; and then you were to subject Paradise Manota to the same qualitative and quantitative analysis, you would deduce that you were dealing with the same reality. There would be no measurable difference. You would recognize a genetic difference; and you would say that which comes from Paradise Deity is Paradise Spirit; and that which is identified with the stuff of the Paradise Isle – Absolutum – is Manota; and that the only way you could tell these two realities apart would be by arbitrarily naming them different names. These would be structurally the same too. These would be differentiatable by name. Because the papers say, “How can we explain to you the difference when the only difference is the name?” Now that is what they mean here when they speak about the Father’s dominating pure energy. This is a very important concept, because you are dealing now, with a condition in reality which is pre-mind, as we understand mind. You don’t have the antagonism between Paradise Spirit and Paradise Manota – they are homogenous. It is merely the creature, the analyst, that says they are different. They want different names. Paradise itself is not Deity, and therefore we hesitate to say that it has a spiritual emanation – no it doesn’t. It has a pure energy emanation called Monota, which is absolutely indistinguishable from a pure spirit emanation called Paradise Spirit.

The spiritual energy of Paradise Deity and the material energy of the Paradise Isle are the same. The only difference is the name. The center of the emanation of Paradise Spirit would be the Eternal Son, not the Universal Father. The Son is the center of the spiritual universe. He is that because God so made Him. Paradise is the center of the material universe. The spirit of the Son and the spirit of the Isle, or the energy of the Son (spiritual energy of the Son), and the material energy of the Paradise Isle are just exactly the same. They define them, both, as the reality of the Universal Father who is the source of Paradise in the same way that he is Father of the Eternal Son. That is what they mean when they speak of pure energy, and when you consider the unfathomability of the I AM, pause to consider that the Isle of Paradise is just as valid a revelation of the First Source and Center as is the Eternal Son; but the Isle of Paradise has neither the meaning nor the value to a human being. Paradise is just as real as the Son, but we do not approach the First Source and Center through Paradise – We do approach Him through the Eternal Son. An atom is related to the First Source and Center through Paradise in material gravity. A person is related to the First Source and Center through the Absolute Person – The Eternal Son, just as the atom is related to Him through the Absolute machine. If you will think of sources of pure energy as being respectively Paradise and the Eternal Son, then you will see how the Father dominates pure energy, because He is the source of these two absolute sources.

You have a clear picture there – the two prime sources of pure energy and they are related to each other. There is nothing more opposite than the Eternal Son and the Isle of Paradise. They are antipodal revelations of the First Source and Center. Manota emanates from Paradise and Spirit from the Son, but you can’t tell them apart.

We will have a topic in Part III of this study entitled “The Four Realities”, and we will consider what the book has to say about the three energies, none of them are personalities. There are four realities that the papers describe.

Dialogue

Question: How do you think the Eternal Son feels toward Paradise?

Answer: Paradise is everything that the Son is not. If you want to partially see in what way the First Source and Center differs from the Second Source and Center, simply visualize the Isle of Paradise in the revelation of that difference. The Son is a purely spiritual personality. Paradise is a wholly non-spiritual physical absolute reality. There are parallels though. Paradise is the absolute of patterns, but produces no patterns. The Son is the absolute of persons, but Himself alone creates no personalities.

There is a relationship, it is believed – rather it is taught – that the Son engages in a creative expression of Himself on the super-personal level every Paradise cycle, and that results in an increase in the population of the intermediate group of Paradise satellites – the Worlds of the Son, where personalities do not dwell. And, a Paradise cycle is every 2 billion years. That is exactly the cycle of a space respiration. So the Son and Paradise are related to each other in the sense that both are antipodal expressions of a common ancestor. In the Son, God concentrated everything of His nature that was personal and spiritual. In Paradise he concentrated everything of His nature that was other than personal; other than spiritual. Since He is the cause of both, it becomes apparent He dominates all of pure energy, because He is the Father of the two original sources of energy; Father of the Son and Source of Paradise. (You could hardly speak of Him as Father of Paradise, except very loosely.)

The papers carefully point out that you don’t have to add mind to spirit; but spirit is always knowing, because at this point in our consideration, there is no mind touched upon by the Third Source and Center. Neither is there ever any possibility for this mediational function of mind. There is nothing to mediate between Paradise Spirit and Paradise Manota. How can you mediate when you have absolute homogeneity? There is no room for mind. That is symbolized in their statement concerning the shining of the spiritual worlds of the Infinite Spirit encircling Paradise. They illuminate all Havona, but not Paradise. It’s a symbolic portraiture of that truth. The Worlds of the Father and Son illuminate Paradise, but the Worlds of the Spirit do not; they illuminate only Paradise.(? see 13:0) They shine outward, but not inward.

The paper goes on to point out in the second section, that the minute you leave this rarified level of Paradise spiritual energy and Paradise material energy, (or cosmic energy), you must have mind, because you have divergence. And they point out that as these two energies diverge, there is an increasing function for mind; and that all mind coheres in the person of the Third Source and Center. Cosmic mind in the Master Spirits, Absolute Mind in the Infinite Spirit, and the Mind of Experiential Deity, the mind of the Supreme as an intermediate level between.

Then they discuss spiritual unification. They have already discussed spirit in the first section, in their discussion of pure energy; but they point out here, that the spiritual universe coheres in the Eternal Son, from a practical standpoint, as we live with the Creative Associates of Michael. Then, they discuss the fact that there are three spirits: The spirit of the Son, the spiritual expression of the Infinite Spirit, and also the spirit of the Father, which is coordinate with that of the Son. Visualize these two energies as one on Paradise, and joined by a third and mediating energy as you leave Paradise, until you get out here in time and space. Then you have a better and better understanding of one of the key statements that is made in these papers; where it says; on Paradise, energy and spirit are identical. Out here in time and space, energy-matter is dominant except in personality; where spirit through the mediation of mind, is striving for the mastery. (P. 140 and P. 1275) That statement is made at least twice in these papers, and to me, it is the key statement explaining the whole basic fundamental principle of everything that is going on out here in the seven super-universes. Especially on the human level.

You can see if you pause to think, why it is that such a rarified spiritual entity as a Thought Adjuster causally rides the material gravity circuits of Paradise. He is a fragment of that which is just as ancestral to Paradise as it is to the Eternal Son. The Thought Adjuster does not ride the spirit circuits of the Son. It is evidently more convenient to ride the material gravity circuits of Paradise, as he flashes instantaneously, to and fro, in the universe.

You see, the Father is nonetheless spiritual for having produced a spiritual expression of Himself in the Son. He is nonetheless the Master of Universes, for having built an absolute machine to act as a gravity governor of such universes. The Infinite Spirit is nonetheless spiritual for having been projected as the God of Mind. You will recall there is an interesting parallel in their phraseology: “As God fragments pre-personal Spirit, so does the Third Source and Center fragment His pre-mind’s Spirit.” The roots of the Third Source and Center are spiritual. The expression is also intellectual. And, here you have the origin of mind. Stop to think that both the Father and the Son, and for that matter, the Isle of Paradise, think. But they think with something other than mind. Their thinking equipment is that which is ancestral to mind. There is no mind back of the Third Source and Center, but there is knowingness; there is a consciousness of pre-mind.

Question: Going back to “God is nonetheless spiritual”, in this process, would you want to rephrase that; that he loses nothing in the process?

Answer: He accepts some limitations to gain certain liberations.

Example: He can never again function as the Absolute Person alone, but the Father/Son can. The Father now can do that which the Absolute Person cannot do.

Question: But he still is no less personal?

Answer: That is right. It is Father personality instead of Absolute Personality. You get your best discussion of that particular phase in the first section of Paper 10, where it speaks of the self-distribution of the First Source and Center. The Son and the Father are each nonetheless spiritual, or personal, for having projected the Conjoint executive. The Infinite Spirit does not have, you might say, the Absolute sovereignty of the Father and the Son. He acknowledges that He is dependent on them, and He is the most versatile of the three. No one of the three can fill the whole of Deity by Himself, but as the Trinity, they can. This is a technique that comes very close to having one’s cake and eating it too. Very close. And, in the Trinity, that is true. Yes it is. They can meet as a Triunity as well as a Trinity.

Then, they discuss personality unification. How is the fourth reality related to the other three? There is quite a difference here, because the first three realities which we have been talking about; matter, mind, and spirit, are quantitative as well as qualitative realities. Personality has no meaning in terms of quantity, only quality. You will recall I Paper 12, when they discussed their very interesting computations about gravity output and point out that most of Paradise gravity is at work outside of the seven super-universes. That apparently none of spiritual gravity is, and about 15% of mind gravity is. They make a cryptic statement that personality gravity is non-computing. You get qualitative response, but no quantitative. Here is “something” which coheres directly in God, not through anything. This is the Father’s personal circuit. This is something He didn’t give away. He gave away the control of the three energies to Paradise, the Son, and the Conjoint Actor. He retained control of personality all by Himself. Albeit in the Third Source and Center, there is a reflection of this. There are Third Source personalities that sustain personality relationships to the Third Source and Center, but they are not in the Father’s personality circuit.(?) As you think, say to yourself, in many respects, while the Eternal Son is the personal revelation of the Universal Father, the Third Source and Center is more like the First Source and Center than either are like the Second Source and Center. The First and Third Sources and Centers work all over creation; the First Source and Center, because he is the source of all reality, and the Third Source and Center, because he was designed to have that versatility.

Personality unification ties a person directly into God. Wherever personality is, it seeks to unify these other energies as they may be associated in a living system. You can have personality associated with pure spirit; you can have personality associated with a spiritual being who has mind; you can have personality associated with a being who is primarily intellectual and only incidentally spiritual, such as Majeston. You can also have personality associated with an intelligent material creature who has absolutely no spiritual association. (Quoting from Paper 30 on Personalities of the Grand Universe). You cannot, however, associate personality with living matter which is not minded. But you can have personality associated with a material minded being who is totally non-spiritual, and they are in the Father’s circuit. I know of no such beings portrayed in these papers, but we are told they exist. Here is, as I view it, the ultimate unifying catalyzer, just as spirit is the ultimately unifying force. Spirit is the energy that ultimately unifies, but personality provides the volitional fulcrum of the spiritual lever. That statement is true I the super-universes, but I doubt it would hold true on Havona and on Paradise. That is a statement I think of as relative truth. (Comment: Growth in a spiritual direction.) You cannot define it. Even a Divine Counselor won’t define it.

The full-dress discussion of personality is in the introduction to the paper on personality survival, where I believe they recite 14 functions of personality. They make no effort to define personality, but here are 14 things which personality does: Personality doesn’t change. The Deity nature of the Thought Adjuster and the personality are the two things about an ascending mortal that do not change. Everything else does change. And if the personality changed, it wouldn’t be the same creature; permanence in the presence of change.

They they talk about Deity unity, which is a short summation of the meaning of the Trinity. Energy is unified, mind is unified, spirit is unified, personality is unified, Deity is unified.

Then they go on to talk about the unification of evolutionary Deity. They make quite a contrast here. They point out that while Trinity unity of Deity is an absolute fact, all other Deity unifications, however inevitable they may be, represent bonafide experiential evolutionary achievements. The Son is an absolutely unified personality. I should say “self”, but when a human being achieves self unification and it will be something that will probably take place after this life, it will be an earned achievement on his part.

Then they talk about what happens as a result of evolution. The seventh section of this paper is to the Spheres of Light and Life, what the problems of the Lucifer Rebellion are to the story of the Lucifer Rebellion. This is the philosophical discussion of Paper 55. What gives? What does all of this progress mean? They talk about the gradual expansion of the comprehension of Deity in the successive stages of Light and Life. They are discussing the first four levels of God the Sevenfold, and pointing out that the last three, Father, Son, and Spirit, are expansile in that sense. They speculate about the future of God the Sevenfold, and particularly about the Creator Sons, and Creative Spirits. Up to this point, they have been talking about how everything was tied together. Now, they are talking about how are things going to spread out farther. Then, they come back again to the Supreme being as the Unifier of this, which is in process of explosive expansion. And then, they go way back behind the scenes in Section 9 and show that the whole thing is really tied together, regardless. They skipped over a section they might have written here. They haven’t talked about transcendental unification. They glossed over the Architects of the Master Universe, and the functions of the Ultimate and went right from the Supreme as the unifier of all finite experience to the Absolutes as the final unifiers of all Reality. There is a fascinating discussion here. In a sense, this is an extension of the Section in the Forward dealing with the Three Absolutes. It is very interesting to read what the Forward has to say about the Absolutes, and then to read Section 9, here.

They toy with the idea that the Absolutes might have been ancestral to the Trinity and then point out that this is impossible, because the Father, if anything is going to be ancestral, it will be the volitional aspect of Deity which we know as the Universal Father.

There is a marvelous paragraph at the bottom of Page 645: “The ceaseless and expanding march of the Paradise creative forces through space seems to presage the ever-extending domain of the gravity grasp of the Universal Father and the never-ending multiplication of varied types of intelligent creatures who are able to love God and be loved by Him, and who, by thus becoming God-knowing, may choose to be like Him; may select to attain Paradise and find God.”

That verbiage, “The ceaseless and expanding march of the Paradise creative forces through space”. That is an invasion that is going on from the beachhead of Havona. They are moving out in all directions, establishing new beachheads; consolidating their gains and in a different way, by other than Havona techniques, are reproducing that which God set as a pattern in Havona.

Section 10 in a sense, also, is a continuation of Paper 55. They are talking about what is it that these worlds in Light and Life gain? What they gain is a better understanding of Divinity. Elsewhere in these papers, we have been told that truth, beauty, and goodness are the comprehensible elements of Divinity to finite minds. And as this whole section closes with a discussion of truth, beauty, and goodness, particularly with an expansion of our concept of beauty. You see how this paper on Universal Unity is like an intellectual drawstring which has been threaded through many, many stories. They are attempting to bring them together to give us a feeling of the unity of the whole. They touch upon it in terms of the four basic Realities, then of Deity, then of experiential Deity, and then of the complications which evolution introduces by producing change; and how that change, in turn, is reunified by the Supreme Being. Then they lift up the curtain and say: “But look way back there. Way beyond that is real unity; unchanging unity of the Three Absolutes. Then they come back and say: “What are you driving for? To understand Deity, Divinity, and that means an understanding of truth, beauty, and goodness.”

That is the unification of Deity in the human mind.

If you know the rest of the papers, this is very easy and when you don’t know them, this is very complicated, because you are dealing with terms which they don’t pause to define.

Isn’t that a wonderful closing sentence? “Love is the desire to do good to others.”

The first section ends: “And as we view this sublime spectacle, we all say what a glorious destiny for the animal origin children of time, and the material sons of space.”