By Dr Chris Halvorson
Excerpts from Symmetry of Soul, Broadcast September 1, 2010
I thought we might begin the show today by asking the basic question; how do the authors of the Urantia Book approach scientific issues? Initially it’s hard for people to comprehend that there could be a book that spans all of human nature, and interests, and beyond, but that’s what the Urantia Book is. Many initially engage it in a very narrow spiritual or religious sense, but it goes vastly beyond that. They tell you right in the book, the authors say that the purpose is to reveal truth and coordinate essential knowledge in order to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception. So you definitely have the spiritual perception part but notice right in that last contrast.
What is the difference between cosmic consciousness and spiritual consciousness? They are basically begging the question with that statement. And you'll notice it doesn't just say merely spiritual truth they mean all truth. You can initially get that sense just by the fact that they also say, “…and coordinate essential knowledge.”The word science literally means “knowledge”. What they're trying to do is to pick up at the beginning point that was initiated 2000 years ago with the Fourth Epochal Revelation which was meant to awaken our spiritual consciousness into a much fuller way than mankind had ever engaged it. And now having that spiritual eye open (we’re all born having to have our material eye open to some degree; we live in a material domain… it’s pretty hard not to recognize that in some fashion, so that you don't stub your toe endlessly on the matter all about you). They want you to get both those eyes wide open to begin to get a three-dimensional depth perception in your view of reality. Cosmic consciousness is the awareness that you have when you have both eyes open, and you've begun to blend those together into a harmony.
And in regard to truth, it is fundamentally the flow that relates facts and goodness, either from facts–to–goodness or from goodness–to– facts, in order to reveal the actual truth. In the context of having an awakening of goodness, having that spiritual eye open, you need a solid connection to facts because you can't connect goodness to figment and have truth. So the revelation also spends a lot of time coordinating essential knowledge. They are trying to establish a true science so that we can combine that with a true religion. They are also encouraging us to go beyond where we have been in establishing true religion in our minds, and then to bring those together into a true philosophy so that we have a full three faceted cosmic perspective of science philosophy and religion.
As I said in the introduction, the purpose of the book is to reveal truth, not to reveal facts. And one can note that if you're aware of science at all there are lots and lots of facts in science. Now you always need more facts to keep expanding science, but the biggest issue in play in current science is not a lack of facts to think about, the problem is truth. Fact versus truth; what's the difference? First of all I would say, you can obey truth, you can't obey a fact. The truth is that cosmic-flow through those facts that you're trying to discover. You're trying to discover how a given fact that you come up against fits into the big picture because it does so in a dynamic fashion. The universe is not a static equilibrium it’s a dynamic equilibrium; there is the flow through that fact that connects it to everything else and you can follow that flow, you can obey that truth.
So the big issue that's been in play in science especially for the last hundred years is a progressive, or retrogressive, movement away from truth. You find that when you discover these facts you can always connect the dots; you can always create an “understanding”; you can associate those fact-points by rationalizing those facts to connect the dots. But how do you know if that particular way of connecting the dots is true? There are many ways that you can connect the dots. You can rationalize anything. You can always connect dots. You can always connect them in a lot of ways. How do you know what the correct way is? How do you know which understanding is a true understanding? Which understanding conforms to the cosmos?
I should mention in that context that the Revelators are trying to get us to rediscover the true meaning of the word cosmos that the Greeks coined. Why did they coin a word that means both harmony and universe equally? Intensively it means universal harmony and extensively it means harmonious universe. The word cosmos means much more than just universe, especially in the sense that we use the word today in such a simplistic way. The Greeks were making the audacious assumption that there was a universal harmony that they could attempt to discover and strike step with; it’s not just a collection of atoms that you might simplistically call the universe in the modern sense of the word. It's more in the true sense of the word. The word “universe” means, “as one turning.” It means a universe of dynamic flow about a central nucleus of truth.
So this unraveling that's been occurring for over 100 years in science needs some assistance and that's why the Revelators spend as much time as they do trying to give is what we need to bring a true understanding of science back to scientific facts. You need that and not just for the sake of science, you need it for the sake of religion and science and everything else. It’s impossible to have a true religion without a true science and vice versa. You need something that's in full conformity to the cosmos that reflects its full character.
Visualize where mankind is today. Man for pretty much of all of history has been on a horizontal plane and their viewpoint has been fundamentally two-dimensional. But there's an endless argument that goes on. There is a circle in that plane and we argue which is the correct direction to go around that circle. Is it the way a lot of analytic minded individuals (who often become scientists) argue, that is that you rationalize first and believe your rationalization so that you go that way around the circle, or is it the other way around? Those who aren't so analytically bent have argued for millennia that first you believe and then you rationalize your beliefs. And the revelation is here to say that neither is correct. They tell us to lift ourselves up out of that tail chasing state of going around that circle. No matter which way you go around the circle in the plane you are a flatlander. You are a two-dimensional phenomenon in the cosmos and hence you're not real. You need to strike step with the three-dimensional cosmic character of the cosmos. You need to elevate a mere rationalization up to a logical conformity to the cosmos. Things have to be more than reasoned they need to be correctly reasoned. We need to lift mere belief up into conformity with the cosmos.
You want to have true faith, a faith that reflects a personal recognition that “the universe is mind made and personality managed” that is what anchors conformity with the cosmos, so that your beliefs are informed by your faith and your rational thought is informed by a logical pretext.
Let me just throw in what fundamentally distinguishes what is merely rational from something that is logical in the true sense of that word; you want to really tease the definition of those two words apart. Most fundamentally if you have any intelligence at all you can start at a given initial assumption and rationally step forward, A implies B implies C and you won't mess up any of those deductive steps. You know that 2+2 is 4 not 5 so you don't make those mistakes in some deductive reasoning chain. But the question that remains unanswered, no matter how perfect you are at making that perfect rationalization is: How do you know what the correct initial assumption is? How do you know where to start? How do you know what assumption conforms to the cosmos? And fundamentally The Revelation is here to give us a better set of initial assumptions so that we aren't stuck in this mode where, at best, we start by taking some assumption, try it for a few centuries till we finally decide it comes up inadequate and then finally convince ourselves to stop intensely believing it, no matter how long we've been believing it, and start over again with a whole new set of initial assumptions. It's a very tedious wasteful process that the Revelators are trying to help us with. They’re saying, “Try these assumptions; see if they work better for you”?
And certainly one of the main reasons that I recognize that the Revelation is what it claims to be, a Revelation, is because when you try the initial assumptions that they suggest, you find that they work so much better that any initial assumptions that anyone has ever thought of. They allow you to answer questions that mankind long ago decided were unanswerable, because they had tried endless initial assumptions and couldn't get anywhere. Not only are some of those fundamental questions answerable, but they’re trivially answerable. Once you start with the correct perspective, establish a truer relationship to reality, to the cosmos, they are self evident!
Those are the three objective domains that you need to engage. You have a threefold functional actuality to reality that you need to be able to engage. If all we had was mere subjective mind it would be impossible to engage the universe objectively, especially with threefold objectivity. So because that cannot occur with mere subjective mind, we are given by grace alone a gift; a gift that allows us to engage that threefold objective actuality of reality. There are three cosmic intuitions that are the fundamental core of a ministry that we are given by the Holy Spirit. Those three cosmic intuitions are logical acumen, moral discrimination, and spiritual insight. And it's in those three domains that you're speaking of, where they introduce the cosmic intuitions there in paper 16:6. Those gifts allow you to have a reality response to this threefold nature so that if you're exposed to an initial assumption that conforms to the cosmos, you'll get a reality response relative to it. It will ring real in your mind.
For instance, that first intuition, logical acumen, is what allows us to distinguish facts from figments. They both take on a certain type of form in the mind, a thing-like form, and subjectively you cannot tell them apart. For instance in your dreams there are all kinds of figment form that seem completely viable in that subjective domain of your dream, but objectively you go “no, that’s not a part of reality, that’s not actually a fact, that’s a figment." How can you do that? Your subjective mind can’t distinguish but by accessing that first cosmic intuition, you can distinguish the difference. We are all given an initial relationship with these three cosmic intuitions, especially the first one; it’s what we call common sense. But have you taken delight in expanding your relationship with those?
It’s very very difficult. Let me just point out the state in which we exist here on this benighted sphere. Right after they introduced these intuitions, and they tell you how natural they are to anyone who has engaged collective consciousness at all, then they conclude with the statement, “but it is sad to record that so few persons on Urantia take delight in cultivating this courageous, and independent cosmic thinking.” It’s sad to record. Few things sum up the state of the world more pithily than that sentence. Like you were saying, so often when you engage someone, you find that they are functioning in this elaborate “rationalization domain” that has very little connection to the objective cosmos, I mean, unless they are psychologically insane, it is a fully rational domain, and if you jump in, you can follow all the lines in it, all the dots are connected, but it's not a correct reasoning, it's not true, it does not conform to the cosmos! And it's sad to record that so few people have even that smallest measure of objectivity that allows them to step back from that little rationalization scheme that they created.
Using the first cosmic intuition, you might say, “Okay it's associative; it's rational, but it's not causal and it's obvious to me." And someone says, “How is it not obvious”? And you say," Well it's self-evident"! Why do we have the word self-evident? Is that delusional? Do we just wish some things to be self-evident and because they’re our favorite thoughts we simply declare them to be self-evident and if others can't see it they’re stupid? Or is there a truth behind the coinage of that word? Is it true that some things are just self-evident, commonly self-evident! If each of us took delight in cultivating having both eyes open and having a truer view of the cosmos, we would be more on the same page. We wouldn't have to argue back and forth about something. I'd go, “That’s self-evident isn't it” and the other would go, “yeah”!
Think about how Jesus when he was walking along; recall those vignettes where he just passes by a person without engaging them. Why? Fundamentally it's because the essentials are not self-evident to that individual yet. They're really not a person yet. They're not functioning as a person yet. They're still playing around in those lower animal origin roots of their mind. They haven't engaged that measure of God likeness in their personality that will allow them to see through these windows of the three cosmic intuitions that allows things to be self-evident. If it isn't trivially self evident to you that there's a God, what am I going to say? Of all the things in reality nothing is more trivially self-evident then the fact of God! And if that's not obvious, what am I going to say to you that would possibly get you to see?
Well the atom is a microcosmic world that is a lot like a eukaryotic cell. Both of those are microscopic domains that, not that many years ago, we had utterly no concept of. Go back 150 years. We had utterly no concept. If you zoom in on a cell or zoom in on a material structure, there's a whole universe down in there, which was initially invisible. Like for instance in terms of causality; if you think of a living thing as composed of just little sacks of goo, you know some little sacks with just maybe some sort of organic goo in them, okay maybe you could just kind of close your eyes mostly and imagine that it all just happened accidentally somehow. But when you actually zoom in and look at what's really there it's trivially self-evident that it's not an accident. You know it is so incredibly complex and obviously engineered.
No one walks up to a couch in the living room and says," Wow, I wonder what weird accident of nature created this. Hey, it sure was a lucky thing the way the seams came together like they did and stuff… and you know it has the integrity that I can sit on it”! No one thinks that! It's obviously engineered and built! But we take something 1 trillion times more complex and we’re supposed to believe that it just happened by random accident. Like I often point out, that old analogy, you know, saying that a tornado went through a junkyard and left a washing machine behind. It's so much worse than that. They not only left a washing machine behind; they went through a junkyard and left the entire Maytag factory behind… functioning! Is that self evident-ly not possible?! Is that not the same as with the atom? The more you zoom in on the microcosm of just what appears to be merely material, set living things aside, you know it's incredibly precise and complex and in many ways inscrutable. If you have any cosmic consciousness at all, just the mere fact that when you zoom in and discover such order and symmetry and pattern that it makes you want to use the word “beautiful” should give you pause. There is no beauty without personality. If you see beauty, way down in the depths of some material structure then a personal hand has touched that! The universe is mind made and personality managed. Period!
The Revelators have some very tight revelatory restraints related to facts. They can't give us unearned knowledge about things that we can get our hands on with a minimum of difficulty, things that will occur in the not too distant future, even in the midst of all of our ignorance. They can't just by fiat give us those things and short circuit the normal evolutionary process. But never under estimate the brilliance of the authors in pushing the revelatory mandate to its utmost limits and giving us as much as they can without violating some of these basic restraints. For instance, if they had wanted to help us overcome some of these distortions of our perspective in astronomy, they could have done so by working within the constraints of our limited knowledge say back in the 20’s, but they didn't attempt to create The Fifth Epochal Revelation, until we had a minimum set of facts in play that they could work with. It would've been impossible for them to create The Revelation under the revelatory restraints in the revelatory mandate even 50 years prior to when they did.
You'll notice that coincidently a whole number of things that were essential to being able to do what they did came together just as they did it, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg? But that question aside, they want you, like I said, to be able to see the picture more objectively. And so sometimes they will use a particular number that we had for a given fact at that time, even if it isn't the precise number, the number is not the point (the purpose is not to reveal facts), and they'll use that number in juxtaposition with something else and, if you put the two together, you have something that we even currently don't have. They have the wisdom and the intellect to not let the facts limit them in their effort to reveal truth. They often reveal the truth in spite of the limitations of our knowledge. You want to always keep that very much in mind.
If you go in as a fact finder you will quickly become an error seeker and an error finder. They tell you right in the beginning that if you approach this from an improper perspective it's going to have more or less distortion of meaning. It's right there in the beginning of the forward.
If you’ll look carefully you'll notice that the point that they make is that there are only 100 elements in the periodic table that have any inherent stability. We can make bigger things but they don't have inherent stability. You have to understand it in a way that appreciates that there is a fact in play that even current nuclear physicists don't appreciate. There is a fundamental attribute of potential stability that you can observe relative to a nucleus. If you create one, is it stable or does it beta decay to a stable and nucleus? That beta decay is a process that is gently reforming that nucleus down to a stable shape, but it indicates that there is some potential stability. It's like," Well okay this is close but we just need to rework it a little bit, okay now its stable. If there's no beta decay observable relative to a nucleus, it's indicating that it's just fundamentally unstable.
And if you look at the isotope chart, the chart of the nuclei dealing with the actual physics of the nucleus as opposed to the chemistry of the electrons which is the actual periodic table, you'll notice that beta decay disappears when you pass element 100. Element 100 is the last element that has any fundamental stability. Like they say in the revelation, if you go to the quietest place in the super universes, nothing bigger than that one is stable; it will get broken apart by the environment, even in the quietest of settings. Now in the noisy noisiness of our local setting here on earth, element number 83 is the last one where there is a stable nucleus, a stable isotope. Beyond that the environment is too noisy and it breaks it apart.
That whole picture that I just laid out is revelatory. It's nonexistent in current physics understanding. But it reforms the picture into something that is directly understandable. I could literally go on for tens of hours with just very basic points that the Revelation allows us to completely begin anew and re-understand the current facts, understand them truthfully, and have a true understanding of those scientific facts.
It's a challenge that is daunting for most individuals who are involved in science, because most of their self worth is tied to a particular rationalization scheme that they've dedicated their lives to, not unlike so many a so-called religionists, and it's very difficult for someone to have the courageous and independent thinking that will allow them to let go of that inadequate rationalization scheme and grab a hold of the new one. You will not lose any truth in the process but you do have to let go of the false edifices that humans have constructed upon their observations and the facts at hand.
Dr Chris Halvorson has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has worked as a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder since 1987. He discovered The Urantia Book in 1990 and has been a student of its revelation of truth ever since. Since 1995, Chris has led a weekly study group that is devoted to expanding readers' understanding of The Urantia Book. Many video and audio classes from this study group and his writings are available at Perfecting Horizons.