The Eternal Isle of Paradise

11:2.1Since you are be­gin­ning to glimpse the enor­mous­ness of the ma­te­rial uni­verse dis­cern­i­ble even from your as­tro­nom­i­cal lo­ca­tion, your space po­si­tion in the starry sys­tems, it should be­come ev­i­dent to you that such a tremen­dous ma­te­rial uni­verse must have an ad­e­quate and wor­thy cap­i­tal, a head­quar­ters com­men­su­rate with the dig­nity and in­fini­tude of the uni­ver­sal Ruler of all this vast and far-flung cre­ation of ma­te­rial realms and liv­ing be­ings.

11:2.2In form Par­a­dise dif­fers from the in­hab­ited space bod­ies: it is not spher­i­cal. It is def­i­nitely el­lip­soid, be­ing one-sixth longer in the north-south di­am­e­ter than in the east-west di­am­e­ter. The cen­tral Isle is es­sen­tially flat, and the dis­tance from the up­per sur­face to the nether sur­face is one tenth that of the east-west di­am­e­ter.

11:2.3These dif­fer­ences in di­men­sions, taken in con­nec­tion with its sta­tion­ary sta­tus and the greater out-pres­sure of force-en­ergy at the north end of the Isle, make it pos­si­ble to es­tab­lish ab­so­lute di­rec­tion in the mas­ter uni­verse.

11:2.4The cen­tral Isle is ge­o­graph­i­cally di­vided into three do­mains of ac­tiv­ity:

11:2.51. Up­per Par­a­dise.

11:2.62. Pe­riph­eral Par­a­dise.

11:2.73. Nether Par­a­dise.

11:2.8We speak of that sur­face of Par­a­dise which is oc­cu­pied with per­son­al­ity ac­tiv­i­ties as the up­per side, and the op­po­site sur­face as the nether side. The pe­riph­ery of Par­a­dise pro­vides for ac­tiv­i­ties that are not strictly per­sonal or non­per­sonal. The Trin­ity seems to dom­i­nate the per­sonal or up­per plane, the Un­qual­i­fied Ab­so­lute the nether or im­per­sonal plane. We hardly con­ceive of the Un­qual­i­fied Ab­so­lute as a per­son, but we do think of the func­tional space pres­ence of this Ab­so­lute as fo­cal­ized on nether Par­a­dise.

11:2.9The eter­nal Isle is com­posed of a sin­gle form of ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion—sta­tion­ary sys­tems of re­al­ity. This lit­eral sub­stance of Par­a­dise is a ho­mo­ge­neous or­ga­ni­za­tion of space po­tency not to be found else­where in all the wide uni­verse of uni­verses. It has re­ceived many names in dif­fer­ent uni­verses, and the Mel­chiz­e­deks of Neb­a­don long since named it ab­so­lu­tum. This Par­a­dise source ma­te­rial is nei­ther dead nor alive; it is the orig­i­nal non­spir­i­tual ex­pres­sion of the First Source and Cen­ter; it is Par­a­dise, and Par­a­dise is with­out du­pli­cate.

11:2.10It ap­pears to us that the First Source and Cen­ter has con­cen­trated all ab­so­lute po­ten­tial for cos­mic re­al­ity in Par­a­dise as a part of his tech­nique of self-lib­er­a­tion from in­fin­ity lim­i­ta­tions, as a means of mak­ing pos­si­ble subin­fi­nite, even time-space, cre­ation. But it does not fol­low that Par­a­dise is time-space lim­ited just be­cause the uni­verse of uni­verses dis­closes these qual­i­ties. Par­a­dise ex­ists with­out time and has no lo­ca­tion in space.

11:2.11Roughly: space seem­ingly orig­i­nates just be­low nether Par­a­dise; time just above up­per Par­a­dise. Time, as you un­der­stand it, is not a fea­ture of Par­a­dise ex­is­tence, though the cit­i­zens of the cen­tral Isle are fully con­scious of non­time se­quence of events. Mo­tion is not in­her­ent on Par­a­dise; it is vo­li­tional. But the con­cept of dis­tance, even ab­so­lute dis­tance, has very much mean­ing as it may be ap­plied to rel­a­tive lo­ca­tions on Par­a­dise. Par­a­dise is non­spa­tial; hence its ar­eas are ab­so­lute and there­fore ser­vice­able in many ways be­yond the con­cept of mor­tal mind.