It is the scorched shoulder blade of a hare
or a beaver;
the cracks made by the fire are like
palm prints
over the surface of the bone
pointing the way to tomorrow's hunting;
a charred cluster of lines
marks a rockfall up country and a
herd of caribou,
--things to be seen on the morrow
inscribed
here by the fire.
This cosmos of a little band of hunting
Indians
has meaning.
Every rock, every stream, every animal
is accounted
for
and the deep
underlying
rhythm of
things
can inscribe the message of the forest
on the cracked bone of
a hare.
It is true that instructions for
getting one's food,
for hunting,
might seem the sole issue here;
but the shaman's reading
extrapolated
becomes mathematics and systems analysis
in the modern state.
I envy this man sitting by his fire.
His magic is not small, he is reading
something permanently bound into
his universe
that he can decipher,
a code that can be read
by the informed seer,
a voice from the universe reassuring
for man,
hungry, enfeebled,
but knowing
there is a message to be read and
one can find it
any time in the fire.
The world is held together
and man has
his place:
that is the message; the food comes
after and is acceptable.
Passing beyond the asteroids toward
Saturn,
watched by radio telescopes and directed
by the earth's great computers,
doomed to leave the solar
system
and wander the far void
of the galaxy,
our latest space probe whispers its
messages among the stars.
A great triumph of the intellect,
surely, but the whispers are only of our own devising.
They are lost
in infinitude
and vanish
leaving us no equivalent of what
the shaman
quietly accepts by the
fire,
aiding himself, perhaps, in understanding
by a small song and the
tapping of a skin drum.
He knows about the daily renewing
of a pact with man;
we hear nothing
except the
electrons beamed back to us
by our fragile probe.
Quite frankly, I do not know how to judge this matter,
sitting here in my study with my
books and my computer,
but I believe I envy him,
the wrinkled old shaman
summoning his inner one for guidance,
with a little offering of tobacco
leaves.
In a manner similar to that of the
shaman with his piece of bone, we read text on the pages of a book, seeking
some clue to our role in the cosmos, insight into the tasks of our lives,
guidance for the establishment of a more cosmically meaningful order in
our affairs.
As human beings living in a material
world, we spend most of our waking hours processing symbols and extracting
meaning from our experience in our environment. We are navigators in a sea
of information which is mediated to us through various texts, images, icons,
and a variety of machines.
For tens of thousands of years our
ancestors ordered their lives around what they read in the rocks, the trees,
footprints on streambeds, the movement of clouds, and the mysteries concealed
in the nighttime sky. Information of a cultural or historical nature was
passed from generation to generation by story tellers.
But over the past three thousand or so years human civilization has been going
through what may be the most significant transition it has so far experienced
in its history -- the transition from oral traditions to mass literacy.
The ability of people to read and manipulate symbols that they create themselves
and to pass on to future generations the information thus encoded has not
only transformed society, but it has greatly accelerated the evolution of
all aspects of human civilization.
So significant has been this transition that the planetary supervisors have
seen fit to reinforce it with the spiritual power of three epochal revelations.
In 2000 BC Melchizedek revitalized the fundamental spiritual content of the
oral tradition. His training center and the missionaries he sent forth worked
entirely within the oral tradition. The oldest written narratives in the
Hebrew canon post-date Melchizedek by centuries.
Jesus came during a time when the transition from oral to literate was well
underway in both the Hebraic and the Greco-Roman worlds. By that time, the
Hebrews had become known as "the people of the book."
But within that culture, the traditions
of the earlier oral period dominated. Written texts were used as mnemonic
devices to aid the recall of memorized passages. The rabbis taught by word
of mouth and the unique articulation and linguistic nuances of their sentences
were handed down from generation to generation. Literacy, in this culture,
meant the ability to enunciate or chant the written words in the ordained
manner.
The word "Talmud" literally means "learnt by heart." The
word "Koran" implies a recitation of scripture. The word "Bible"
implies a collection of books and letters.
In the first century it was the attempt to spread Jesus' teachings and the
precepts of the Hebrew religion into Greco-Roman culture which stimulated
the writing of the Gospels. The Urantia Book mentions two great teachers
of this period, each of whom was highly literate -- Paul of Tarsus, whose
writing occupies a substantial portion of the New Testament, and Philo of
Alexandria -- an outstanding scholar of his day.
Even today, the oral tradition is strong. If you visited an Islamic school
you would likely find students sitting and repeating together, in high, rhythmic
voices, verse after verse of the Koran. It is the same in the traditional
Talmudic schools.
Jesus' parables are wonderfully adapted
to both literate and oral contexts. The original rendering of the Sermon
on the Mount is written in a rhythmic structure which facilitates memorization.
The Urantia Book came at a time of increasing global literacy. According
to the World Bank Development Fund, in the world today more than 70% of adult
men and women have a basic level of functional literacy. Programs for increasing
literacy and levels of educational attainment are being aggressively pursued
by governments and international agencies around the world.
Some Comments on Literacy
But what do we really mean by the term
"literacy?" As Alan Purves comments, for some it means the ability
to sign one's name on legal documents. For others it is the ability to read
a particular text such as the Koran and answer a teacher's questions. To
a group of women in Bombay it may mean knowing whether a vendor in the marketplace
is asking a fair price for a kilo of lentils.
The one thing these definitions have in common is they assume there is a group
or communal aspect to being literate. Reading and writing are not merely
skills related to figuring out print or writing a sentence; they involve a
number of social activities as well. People become members of particular
literate communities with specialized vocabularies and ways of relating linguistically.
Literacy, then, is considered to be
the ability to understand and use the intellectual resources provided by a
particular literate community or tradition.
Literacy is at heart a social process and does not really exist outside of
a social context. In the case of religious or sacred texts the social interaction
around the texts may become very complex or, in some cases, ritualized.
We'll visit this issue of social activities
constructed around manuscripts in a few minutes when we look at the process
by which books become sacred texts.
A History of Reading
Any history of reading must begin with
an acknowledgement of the role which the oral tradition has played throughout
human history. Mass literacy is a very new phenomena in the world, a phenomena
which has been present for less than one tenth of one percent of human history.
The earliest texts made no pretension to be representations of reality --
they existed to help the storyteller remember. True knowledge was understood
to exist only in memory; writing was mnemonic -- a reminder. Not until the
late Middle Ages did texts come to be used as archival representations of
the facts of the world.
In the construction of these early texts, the concept of the author, orginator,
or creator of the material was separate from the writer. Writers were the
people who inscribed the texts from other sources or transcribed other's words.
They were the scribes, the scriptors, the copyists.
The author, by contrast, had a voice, not a pen. We know the names of some
early authors -- Hammurabi, David, Homer, a pharaoh or two, Amos. We know
the names of only a very few early scribes.
The classic sacred texts of our world today -- the Bible, the Talmud, the
Koran, the Mahabarata, the Upanishads -- the texts which provide the conceptual
foundations for Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto,
Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism -- all of these texts are collections
of the most highly valued insights, revelations, and stories from the earlier
oral tradition. They have been carried over into this new medium -- committed
to writing -- so that the words of the ancient prophets and seers might continue
to provide humanity with spiritual guidance in this bold new age of literacy.
Pre-Homeric Greeks
As beings whose daily lives are dominated
by the exchange of linguistic symbols it should be easy to appreciate that
this transition from an oral to a literate culture would have profound effects
on human consciousness as well as every aspect of human culture.
Some scholars believe that one of the
repercussions of this transition was the discovery, by the Greeks, of the
human mind itself. This discovery is believed to have occurred sometime between
the time of Homer and the time of the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle -- sometime between the eighth and and fourth centuries BC.
To the Homeric Greeks, feelings and emotions were understood to be bodily
functions; but complex perceptions of reality were thought to come from outside
of the organism itself -- from some other-than-human source. In Homer's works,
no one decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything in his psyche.
Making a decision was understood as following instructions received from outside
of oneself. The pre-Homeric Greeks "had to" act rather than "decide
to" act.
Only in the later Classical period is the psyche recognized as a part of the
body -- a mental organ residing in the head. These Greeks came to understand
thought as originating in the human organism and therefore a phenomena which
could be developed and managed by the will of a responsible self.
Representing one's thoughts and actions as originating other than in the self
implies a limited notion of personal responsibility, deliberateness,and intentionality.
Seeing actions as the expression of one's own thoughts is what allows them
to be seen as subject to moral and ethical control, thereby providing a foundation
for personal spiritual life.
Surprisingly, the critical element
in this process turns out to have been the act of writing. Writing makes
us conscious of speech and subjects the expression of our ideas to a degree
of scrutiny and refinement not possible in a purely oral context or even in
reading.
The early storytellers did not accept personal responsibility for their own
thoughts either. In the oral tradition the storyteller or the prophet was
only the spokesperson for the muse or the deity -- the words were the muse's,
the voice was the storyteller's.
It is interesting to note that even
in our day we have not fully resolved this matter of understanding which phenomenon
originate within our own psychic processes and which phenomenon originate
from an external source.
Francis Bacon made the comment, "God
forbid that we should take a dream of the imagination for a pattern in the
world."
Prior to the Middle Ages
One of the biggest problems in literacy
is interpreting the meaning of a particular text, and in some respects the
history of reading could be studied as the history of interpretation.
The Stoics had resorted to allegorical
interpretation so that ancient texts, such as those of Homer, could be read
in a manner that would explain away unacceptable features and allow the "reading
in" of acceptable philosophical and ethical ideas.
The early Christian scholar, Origen, argued that all biblical texts could
have more than one meaning. Some texts, he concluded, since their straight
forward meaning did not agree with standard theology or ethics, had no literal
meaning and the reader was admonished to seek only the secondary spiritual
or symbolic meaning of the passage.
But the purpose of reading during this period was not to get information,
but to see beyond the physical written text and grasp the spirit of the text.
The graphical images in illuminated texts were intended to facilitate this
process of perceiving the spirit believed to be accessed through the medium
of the text.
The text was seen as only a starting point for pious meditations -- an entry
point to the spiritual cosmos.
The Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages there were substantial
changes in the way people read texts. At the beginning of this period, texts
were seen as a boundless resource from which one could take an inexhaustible
supply of meanings. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, the meaning
of a text was austerely anchored in the literal construction of its sentences.
Scholars in the late Middle Ages held that there were four ways of reading:
the literal, the allegorical, the moral or ethical, and the heavenly or prophetic
meaning. As an example, consider
the following passage:
"When Israel went out of Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary,
Israel his dominion."
Now here is a commentary by Dante on that passage:
"If we look at the letter alone,
what this passage means is the departure of the sons of Israel from Egypt
during the time of Moses; if at the allegory, it means our redemption through
Christ; if at the moral sense, it means the conversion of the soul from
the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace; if at the prophetic
level it means the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the
corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory." (This
makes the Foreword to The Urantia Book look like a piece of cake...)
As you might imagine, this led to a
plethora of interpretations. In the oral tradition there was always a storyteller
to clarify the meaning of a story. But such clarification was not as easy
with written texts. Every monastery had its own interpretation of its texts,
its own oral tradition running parallel to the written word -- and this oral
tradition carried far more authority than the words in the books.
Disputes about the meaning of a text arose in the course of writing commentaries
on them. The Jewish tradition allowed some latitude for interpretation --
here it was the correct oral reproduction of the verbal form of the word that
mattered most -- the correct rythm and melodic intonation of the words and
phrases.
The Christians were far more dogmatic and required that "correct"
interpretations be distinguished from "incorrect" ones.
Plato made the comment in Phaedrus,
"You attribute to letters a fortune that they cannot possess."
At the end of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas provided a solution to the interpretive
problem by saying that the "literal meaning" of a text is that meaning
intended by the writer. The influence of Aquinas was such that his view prevailed;
the understanding of reading changed from that of seeking "epiphanies"
or revelations to the attempt to determine the author's intentions.
But Aquinas did not abandon the notion that there may be a spiritual interpretation
of the Biblical text in addition to a literal one. He was fully medieval
in his outlook in that he continued to insist that the deeper meanings and
higher truths were available only as a gift from God.
It is important to remember that within pre-reformation Christianity, authority
in determining meaning still resided with the spoken word rather than in the
text. The church taught that only trained clergy were able to accurately
interpret the meaning of scripture and the common people were discouraged
from reading the Bible lest they become confused.
Maps
I'd like to talk for a few minutes
about maps. There are some issues related to the making and reading of maps
which have interesting parallels to some of the ways in which we read our
sacred texts.
As the Renaissance gave way to the
Enlightenment, voyages of discovery were being made across the great oceans
of the planet. New lands were being discovered by European adventurers and
a profoundly new world view was coming into existence.
Until the second half of the fifteenth
century, maps of the habitable world showed a circular disc surrounded by
the ocean, with Jerusalem at the center and Paradise at the top.
One of the most important intellectual developments of this period was the
refinement of map making and the ability to create maps which could be useful
for navigation as well as representing an accurate view of the planet. Navigation
was relatively easy as long as land was in sight. More daring voyages relied
on celestial navigation. But once the south-bound voyager saw the north star
sink below the horizon, all means of orientation were lost.
The problem was partially solved by the development of the technology for
printing maps and the invention of the mechanical clock. But the real achievement
of this period was the invention of the system of latitude and longitude --
a common mathematical frame of reference which would permit the integration
of information being accumulated on the voyages of discovery into a coherent
understanding of the physical world.
Ptolemy, in the third century, knew that the earth was a sphere. But it wasn't
until the Reniassance that cartographers realized that they could exploit
the mathematical properties of a sphere to create a system which would enable
them to accurately represent any point on the surface of the planet and its
relationship to other points.
This abstract grid was what allowed the integration of detailed geographical
knowledge, gathered from diverse sources, into a world picture which could
be understood by anyone who could read a map.
I've thought that The Urantia Book is something like this abstract grid.
At a time when philosophers have abandoned the idea that a description of
a coherent and integrated cosmology is even possible, the book provides a
frame of reference -- of orientation -- enabling us to create a productive
order out of our knowledge and our experience.
Psychologist William Sheldon once commented that, "Continued observations
in clinical psychological practice lead almost inevitably to the conclusion
that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for
social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still
more generalized and more universal craving in the human makeup. It is the
craving for knowledge of the right direction -- for orientation."
Magellan, his predecessors, and his contemporaries of the sixteenth century,
are considered to have made "voyages of discovery" -- they brought
back the information necessary to construct increasingly accurate maps. In
contrast, the eighteenth century voyages of Captain Cook are considered to
have been "voyages of exploration" -- Captain Cook was able to study
maps created over the previous two centuries which served as a theoretical
model for his thinking.
Magellan contributed to the body of knowledge which led to vast improvements
in maps. His discoveries were made on the basis of his careful observations
of the world.
Captain Cook's explorations were made on the basis of abstract representations
of the world which existed on paper.
We have a representation of the cosmos
in a written text. The discoveries and observations of the source authors
have been organized into a document which invites exploration of the cosmos.
But this is not without its particular dangers. The compilers of The Urantia
Book tell us that, "Religion must continually labor under a paradoxical
necessity: the necessity of making effective use of thought while at the same
time discounting the spiritual serviceableness of all thinking."
We live much of our lives relative to abstract representations of reality.
We read instruction manuals, diagrams, cook books, travel guides, maps, financial
reports -- documents which we believe to be direct representations of reality.
All of this reading activity causes us to develop particular attitudes toward
the process of extracting meaning from what we read. We make decisions and
engage in actions based on these abstractions.
Many people come to unconsciously assume that their sacred text is a direct
representation of reality in the same way that the owner's manual for their
car describes its construction, use, and maintenance procedures.
Most of us would consider a road map
to be a literal and accurate representation of reality. But we would not
become confused or disillusioned if we noticed that the road on which we were
driving was not the same color as the representation of the road on the map.
Yet we've all heard discussions of a religious nature in which someone was
insisting that a passage in a sacred text bore just such a one-to-one correspondence
to reality.
The danger here is that we fall into the trap of living our lives relative
to abstract representations of reality rather than relative to reality itself.
This danger is particularly acute in the developed world where a great deal
of our daily lives are lived relative to abstractions mediated by the mass
media -- radio, television, newspapers, magazines, books, and various computer-based
resources.
Although The Urantia Book encourages us to grow intellectually and philosophically,
it directs us to the activities of worship and service -- activities which
require us to engage in the world-as-it-is rather than in abstract representations
of the world.
If our primary orientation in life
is the service of abstractions we are guilty of nothing less than idolatry
-- devoting our lives to representations of reality rather than to reality
itself. The Urantia Book exhorts us to serve our fellows, not the abstractions
by which they live their lives. We must remember that a printed text can
be just as much a graven image as a god carved from a piece of wood or stone.
The Protestant Reformation
The development of changable type and
the printing press changed the way texts were produced and made them identical
to one another across thousands of copies, and thereafter the idea of the
authority of the text rather than the authority of a person began to dominate
the thinking of many.
Martin Luther considered the true meaning of scripture to be the literal meaning
-- the meaning that would be available for all to see if they read carefully.
This was a significant change because prior to this, people who read did so
in the hopes of finding some esoteric revelation hidden between the lines.
Luther insisted that the true meaning was to be found on the lines
rather than in epiphanies which might be discovered between them.
But Luther was not a fundamentalist. He read the texts in their original
languages and essentially interpreted them in their original context. He
set the course for much of subsequent Protestant scholarship which embraced
the insight that understanding the context in which a text was written was
an essential step to understanding its meaning.
The Jewish scholar Maimonides was very influential in this transition to valuing
context -- he maintained that only if one studied the text in the context
in which it was written would the reader understand why the writers had spoken
or written as they did.
Luther's conception of the literal
meaning of scripture was sufficiently robust to allow him to claim that the
levels of meaning which previous writers had seen as "in the text"
were simply projections, fantasies, dreams, extrapolations, and interpolations,
constructed to sustain the "dogmas of the church." Luther assumed
that everyone who could read could consult the text for themselves and thereby
use the text as evidence to judge the validity of any interpretation they
might hear from someone else.
It is now widely thought that Luther
was wrong. The meaning of texts, especially texts created in one culture
and read in another, are never clearly evident. Nevertheless, Luther's new
way of reading was a key element in the Protestant Reformation.
But by the seventeenth century writers
and scholars had become painfully aware of the unmanageably diverse ways in
which a given text could be interpreted.
We can get a better understanding of this seventeenth century consciousness
by appreciating the evolution of symbolic representation which had been evolving
in other domains: representational paintings of the Dutch masters, the representation
of the world in maps, representation of physical motion in mathematical notations,
the representation of botanical species in herbals, and the representation
of imaginative events in fiction. Again, the type of logic represented in
these publications had an effect on the way people read scripture.
The early Protestant teachers seemed to distrust the mind, the memory, and
to some extent even the scriptural ceremony, and they placed their trust in
the external text, which they saw as the map to lead the soul of the reader
to God. And from this view came the idea that the scripture is the sole authority
of doctrine and faith.
The corollary to this is the idea that anyone can read the scripture and understand
its true meaning without any outside assistance. To hold such a belief is
also to hold a view of the text that it is not a metaphor or an icon, but
an exact picture, that it is to God and God's plan as the periodic table is
to chemical elements.
During this period navigational maps changed from being general depictions
of the outlines of a land mass to precise charts of water depths and shoals.
Similarly, scientific writing began to take on precision, and with the work
of various anatomists, a map of the human body could be used as a guide to
those who would trace various bodily functions. Cookbooks began to appear
which included precise measurements and sequences of directions. Timetables
for trains and carriages were consulted regularly by an increasingly literate
urban population.
So the literal reading became the central one by which knowledge was accrued.
Metaphorical or symbolic meanings were looked upon with disdain. And today,
it should not suprise us to find that a large number of people who hold to
a strict literal view of the Bible are technicians and people from other professions
whose daily lives are spent following instructions in books and manuals.
The spread of mass literacy was not simply a product of the development of
the printing press and movable type. The truly mass media required the development
of the steam press, cheap paper, and an avid reading public -- all of which
took time to develop. For this reason we do not find a true mass literacy
or mass media until the middle of the nineteenth century. By this time people
around the world were able to read particular authors or literate journals.
And it did not take the planetary supervisors long to exploit this development
with the compilation of the fifth epochal revelation and its presentation
as a text.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, concommitant with the growing interest in psychology, literary
critics began focusing on the reader as the source of meaning in any act of
reading. This view says that it is the existing ideas, feelings, and psychological
trends within the mind of the reader which yield meanings when the text is
read. In this view the text has no meaning whatsoever outside of the subjective
interpretation of the individual.
In spite of this post-modern view of literature, of subjectivity as an absolute,
and of religious stories as psychological myths, I am inclined to view the
ability to abstract reality and represent it in symbolic forms which can be
shared, stored, transmitted, and studied as a major achievement of the human
race, perhaps second only to the development of language itself.
An abstraction? Yes -- but critically valuable in the same way as the abstract
system of latitude and longitude made possible the great voyages of exploration.
In paper 195 The Urantia Book says,
"In language, an alphabet represents
the mechanism of materialism, while the words expressive of the meaning
of a thousand thoughts, grand ideas, and noble ideals--of love and hate,
of cowardice and courage--represent the performances of mind within the
scope defined by both material and spiritual law, directed by the assertion
of the will of personality, and limited by the inherent situational endowment."
So there are elements of Urantia Book
ontology which need to be understood if we are to fully understand the mechanism
by which meanings are communicated -- but that is a topic for another day.
Reading Today
Obviously we relate to a text such
as The Urantia Book in a very different manner than the block of text on our
toothpaste tube. But the way we relate to the book is also very different
from the way in which we relate to most other books.
I doubt that many of us have other books which we have read continuously for
10, 15, 20 or more years. It's not that we read it front to back, then start
over and read it again. We have favorite sections that we read more than
others; sections which are still too difficult to really understand, places
we go when we are troubled or are seeking direction for our lives.
Some of us put notes in the margins of our books creating cross references
between various paragraphs and sections. Sometimes we engage in topical studies,
using some of the wonderful tools created over the years by dedicated readers
such as Clyde's Concordance, Harry's index, Duane's Paramony, or Kristen's
Folios program.
The way in which we use this book closely resembles the way we use the Internet
-- on the Internet we seldom read an entire text or even a page. We read
fragments and jump from one page to another, from one text to another, using
hyperlinks.
In light of the source work which has
been done we can view The Urantia Book itself as a hypertext document. When
we read it we are actually surfing through the gems of our world's theological
ideation as these have been collected and arranged by some enigmatic intelligence
-- apparently to provide enhanced access to universe meanings and values.
But this hypertext usage is not unique to The Urantia Book. It is a feature
of virtually all of the world's sacred texts.
The Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads,
the Mahabarata, and the Talmud are all used in this way, as are some of their
accompanying texts such as the Catholic Breviary, or the Episcopalian Book
of Common Prayer. The point is that these seminal texts are not read in the
straight-through fashion that we read novels and stories. The text themselves
are compendia, collections which can be read in a variety of configurations
depending on the reader and the situation.
Consider the following description of a church service provided by literary
critic Alan Purves in his book, The Web of Text.
"One day, visiting a chapel
in Wales, I noticed that our leader in Evening Prayer, a rather short and
simple service, had in front of him not only the prayer book but also a
couple of sheets that indicated the appropriate readings for the day, two
Bibles (each a different translation), and a second book of prayer with
both a Welsh and an English version.
"Five books and pamphlets for a half-hour service, the order of which
most of the attendees knew by heart, as they knew many of the prayers, but
each of the texts was used and manipulated in proper sequence. Some of
the items were read aloud by one person, some by the whole group, and some
antiphonally with the two sides of the chapel alternately reading sections
of a psalm.
"We skipped around in the books, reading none of them for more than
a page. The texts were often marked with regular and bold-faced type to
indicate who was to read what, and there were italics that served as stage
directions, telling us to sit, stand, or kneel, read, talk, or keep silent.
All of these texts together formed the worship, and the worship was smooth,
without interruption, and it was a time in which most of us felt very close
to God."
The Christian testaments are designed
so that the New Testament refers to the old and is often set up in a three-column
format with the middle column containing the references from the present
text space to others before or after. The actual verses and images refer
outward to other verses and images so that the New Testament presents a
reworking and a re-contextualizing of earlier books, songs and prophecies.
The final book in the Bible, the book of Revelation, is a kaleidoscope of
images that are understood to reference various parts of the entire preceeding
collection of books.
It seems clear that the highly sophisticated
construction of The Urantia Book forever elevates it far above the channeled
new age context which the early stories about its origin forced it into during
its early years of distribution. Far better that we have this emerging context
of the source authors and their theological advances and spiritual discoveries,
rather than stories about a somnambulent stock broker.
Interpretative Communities
There are a number of contemporary
theologians who have come to view the authority for interpretation as residing
not in the text or the individual, but in the community which shares an interest
in the text.
It should be obvious that the meaning of the Torah today is not identical
to the meaning which Hillel or St. Paul derived from reading it. The Gospels
do not mean the same thing to us today as they meant to Augustin or Aquinas.
In one sense the text persists through time; the marks and spaces remain;
in another sense it changes as the community reading it changes. As the reading
of the text becomes integrated with acts of worship it increasingly takes
on qualities of scripture.
The critical element in a productive interpretive community is a shared frame
of reference -- a shared "universe frame". The major world's religions
devote tremendous resources to the creation and maintenance of a common frame
of reference -- schools, seminaries, retreats, art, sermons, written commentaries
-- all of these are elements which support the frame of reference within which
the community interprets its central text.
Transition from Book to Sacred Text
What is the difference between a book
and a sacred text -- the difference between text and scripture? The hypertext
nature of its usage by an interpretive community has already been mentioned.
But there is more.
The transformation from simple text to sacred or holy scripture is fairly
complex. To a great degree it is largely an unconscious process which takes
place within a social group.
One step involves the members of the group believing that the text is a transcription
of the actual word of God or of a divinely inspired person. Another step
is the incorporation of the text into the worship life of a community. Sometimes
the words of the text are believed to be the actual words of God.
In our community of Urantia Book readers there seems at times to have been
an obsession with avoiding the establishment of anything which resembled a
religion -- almost to the point of making this avoidance into the central
goal of a new religion!
But in spite of this reluctance, The
Urantia Book is well on its way to being what is classically considered a
sacred text.
The primary factor in this transition is the appearance of social activities
centered around the text. Reading aloud in a study group, reading a passage
before a General Council meeting, participating in discussions about the meaning
of a passage, recalling stories about Jesus during a remembrance supper --
each of these is a social activity centered on the text. In our study groups
and conferences, the printed text is only a part of the total experience.
And as these social activities are repeated over time, they become the core
rituals and ceremonies of the community.
We engage in the ceremony of social
reading. We use the text as an entry point to seek understanding of the divine,
as a means of engaging ourselves and each other in questions about meaning
and spirituality.
In this context, religious community may be the family sitting around the
dinner table, it may be a study group, a phone conversation, a conference
workshop, or one of many other social settings characterized by intimacy,
communication between individuals, and the quest for truth.
As we read within a community and re-construct the sequence of paragraphs
to make the text relevant to specific needs and interests, as we read the
text as the central activity of a social gathering, we are slowly but surely
transforming The Urantia Book into a sacred scripture.
Conclusion
I hope this overview of literacy and
sacred texts has been helpful in expanding the context in which you think
about The Urantia Book. My deepest hope is that it will stimulate you to
become more actively involved in its propagation.
I don't think we can fully comprehend the significance for planetary advancement
that the transition to mass literacy offers. The revelators comment that,
"You who today enjoy the advantages
of the art of printing little understand how difficult it was to perpetuate
truth during these earlier times; how easy it was to lose sight of a new doctrine
from one generation to another."
With the transition to global mass
literacy and an epochal revelation in print, tremendous potentials for reducing
human confusion and suffering are within reach. We should be doing everything
possible to exploit this opportunity.
It is an opportunity for universe service
utterly beyond the comprehension of the shaman reading lines in bones by
his fire.
Eiseley, Loren, The Innocent Assassins:
Poems by Loren Eiseley, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1973.
Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Meaning of Revelation, Collier Books, New York, 1941.
Olson, David, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications
of Writing and Reading, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
Purves, Alan, The Web of Text and the Web of God, The Guilford Press,
London, 1998.
Smith, Huston, Beyond the Post-Modern
Mind, The Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, 1982.
_____________, The Urantia Book, Uversa
Press, Chicago, 1996.