Supreme and Ultimate—Time and Space

118:9.1Time and space are a con­joined mech­a­nism of the mas­ter uni­verse. They are the de­vices whereby fi­nite crea­tures are en­abled to co­ex­ist in the cos­mos with the In­fi­nite. Fi­nite crea­tures are ef­fec­tively in­su­lated from the ab­so­lute lev­els by time and space. But these in­su­lat­ing me­dia, with­out which no mor­tal could ex­ist, op­er­ate di­rectly to limit the range of fi­nite ac­tion. With­out them no crea­ture could act, but by them the acts of ev­ery crea­ture are def­i­nitely lim­ited.

118:9.2Mech­a­nisms pro­duced by higher minds func­tion to lib­er­ate their cre­ative sources but to some de­gree un­vary­ingly limit the ac­tion of all sub­or­di­nate in­tel­li­gences. To the crea­tures of the uni­verses this lim­i­ta­tion be­comes ap­par­ent as the mech­a­nism of the uni­verses. Man does not have un­fet­tered free will; there are lim­its to his range of choice, but within the ra­dius of this choice his will is rel­a­tively sov­er­eign.

118:9.3The life mech­a­nism of the mor­tal per­son­al­ity, the hu­man body, is the prod­uct of super­mor­tal cre­ative de­sign; there­fore it can never be per­fectly con­trolled by man him­self. Only when as­cend­ing man, in li­ai­son with the fused Ad­juster, self-cre­ates the mech­a­nism for per­son­al­ity ex­pres­sion, will he achieve per­fected con­trol thereof.

118:9.4The grand uni­verse is mech­a­nism as well as or­gan­ism, me­chan­i­cal and liv­ing—a liv­ing mech­a­nism ac­ti­vated by a Su­preme Mind, co-or­di­nat­ing with a Su­preme Spirit, and find­ing ex­pres­sion on max­i­mum lev­els of power and per­son­al­ity uni­fi­ca­tion as the Su­preme Be­ing. But to deny the mech­a­nism of the fi­nite cre­ation is to deny fact and to dis­re­gard re­al­ity.

118:9.5Mech­a­nisms are the prod­ucts of mind, cre­ative mind act­ing on and in cos­mic po­ten­tials. Mech­a­nisms are the fixed crys­tal­liza­tions of Cre­ator thought, and they ever func­tion true to the vo­li­tional con­cept that gave them ori­gin. But the pur­po­sive­ness of any mech­a­nism is in its ori­gin, not in its func­tion.

118:9.6These mech­a­nisms should not be thought of as lim­it­ing the ac­tion of De­ity; rather is it true that in these very me­chan­ics De­ity has achieved one phase of eter­nal ex­pres­sion. The ba­sic uni­verse mech­a­nisms have come into ex­is­tence in re­sponse to the ab­so­lute will of the First Source and Cen­ter, and they will there­fore eter­nally func­tion in per­fect har­mony with the plan of the In­fi­nite; they are, in­deed, the non­vo­li­tional pat­terns of that very plan.

118:9.7We un­der­stand some­thing of how the mech­a­nism of Par­a­dise is cor­re­lated with the per­son­al­ity of the Eter­nal Son; this is the func­tion of the Con­joint Ac­tor. And we have the­o­ries re­gard­ing the op­er­a­tions of the Uni­ver­sal Ab­so­lute with re­spect to the the­o­ret­i­cal mech­a­nisms of the Un­qual­i­fied and the po­ten­tial per­son of the De­ity Ab­so­lute. But in the evolv­ing De­i­ties of Su­preme and Ul­ti­mate we ob­serve that cer­tain im­per­sonal phases are be­ing ac­tu­ally united with their vo­li­tional coun­ter­parts, and thus there is evolv­ing a new re­la­tion­ship be­tween pat­tern and per­son.

118:9.8In the eter­nity of the past the Fa­ther and the Son found union in the unity of the ex­pres­sion of the In­fi­nite Spirit. If, in the eter­nity of the fu­ture, the Cre­ator Sons and the Cre­ative Spir­its of the lo­cal uni­verses of time and space should at­tain cre­ative union in the realms of outer space, what would their unity cre­ate as the com­bined ex­pres­sion of their di­vine na­tures? It may well be that we are to wit­ness a hith­erto un­re­vealed man­i­fes­ta­tion of Ul­ti­mate De­ity, a new type of super­ad­min­is­tra­tor. Such be­ings would em­brace unique pre­rog­a­tives of per­son­al­ity, be­ing the union of per­sonal Cre­ator, im­per­sonal Cre­ative Spirit, mor­tal-crea­ture ex­pe­ri­ence, and pro­gres­sive per­son­al­iza­tion of the Di­vine Min­is­ter. Such be­ings could be ul­ti­mate in that they would em­brace per­sonal and im­per­sonal re­al­ity, while they would com­bine the ex­pe­ri­ences of Cre­ator and crea­ture. What­ever the at­tri­butes of such third per­sons of these pos­tu­lated func­tion­ing trin­i­ties of the cre­ations of outer space, they will sus­tain some­thing of the same re­la­tion to their Cre­ator Fa­thers and their Cre­ative Moth­ers that the In­fi­nite Spirit does to the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther and the Eter­nal Son.

118:9.9God the Su­preme is the per­son­al­iza­tion of all uni­verse ex­pe­ri­ence, the fo­cal­iza­tion of all fi­nite evo­lu­tion, the max­i­ma­tion of all crea­ture re­al­ity, the con­sum­ma­tion of cos­mic wis­dom, the em­bod­i­ment of the har­mo­nious beau­ties of the galax­ies of time, the truth of cos­mic mind mean­ings, and the good­ness of su­preme spirit val­ues. And God the Su­preme will, in the eter­nal fu­ture, syn­the­size these man­i­fold fi­nite di­ver­si­ties into one ex­pe­ri­en­tially mean­ing­ful whole, even as they are now ex­is­ten­tially united on ab­so­lute lev­els in the Par­a­dise Trin­ity.