Personalities of the Local Universe

37:10.1Be­sides the se­raphic and mor­tal or­ders, who will be con­sid­ered in later pa­pers, there are nu­mer­ous ad­di­tional be­ings con­cerned in the main­te­nance and per­fect­ing of such a gi­gan­tic or­ga­ni­za­tion as the uni­verse of Neb­a­don, which even now has more than three mil­lion in­hab­ited worlds, with ten mil­lion in prospect. The var­i­ous Neb­a­don types of life are much too nu­mer­ous to be cat­a­logued in this pa­per, but there are two un­usual or­ders that func­tion ex­ten­sively on the 647,591 ar­chi­tec­tural spheres of the lo­cal uni­verse, that may be men­tioned.

37:10.2The Spironga are the spirit off­spring of the Bright and Morn­ing Star and the Fa­ther Mel­chiz­e­dek. They are ex­empt from per­son­al­ity ter­mi­na­tion but are not evo­lu­tion­ary or as­cend­ing be­ings. Nei­ther are they func­tion­ally con­cerned with the evo­lu­tion­ary as­cen­sion regime. They are the spirit helpers of the lo­cal uni­verse, ex­e­cut­ing the rou­tine spirit tasks of Neb­a­don.

37:10.3The Sporna­gia. The ar­chi­tec­tural head­quar­ters worlds of the lo­cal uni­verse are real worlds—phys­i­cal cre­ations. There is much work con­nected with their phys­i­cal up­keep, and herein we have the as­sis­tance of a group of phys­i­cal crea­tures called sporna­gia. They are de­voted to the care and cul­ture of the ma­te­rial phases of these head­quar­ters worlds, from Je­ru­sem to Sal­ving­ton. Sporna­gia are nei­ther spir­its nor per­sons; they are an an­i­mal or­der of ex­is­tence, but if you could see them, you would agree that they seem to be per­fect an­i­mals.

37:10.4The var­i­ous cour­tesy colonies are domi­ciled on Sal­ving­ton and else­where. We es­pe­cially profit from the min­istry of the ce­les­tial ar­ti­sans on the con­stel­la­tions and ben­e­fit from the ac­tiv­i­ties of the re­ver­sion di­rec­tors, who op­er­ate chiefly on the cap­i­tals of the lo­cal sys­tems.

37:10.5Al­ways there is at­tached to the uni­verse ser­vice a corps of as­cend­ing mor­tals, in­clud­ing the glo­ri­fied mid­way crea­tures. These as­cend­ers, af­ter at­tain­ing Sal­ving­ton, are used in an al­most end­less va­ri­ety of ac­tiv­i­ties in the con­duct of uni­verse af­fairs. From each level of achieve­ment these ad­vanc­ing mor­tals reach back and down to ex­tend a help­ing hand to their fel­lows who fol­low them in the up­ward climb. Such mor­tals of tem­po­rary so­journ on Sal­ving­ton are as­signed on req­ui­si­tion to prac­ti­cally all corps of ce­les­tial per­son­al­i­ties as helpers, stu­dents, ob­servers, and teach­ers.

37:10.6There are still other types of in­tel­li­gent life con­cerned with the ad­min­is­tra­tion of a lo­cal uni­verse, but the plan of this nar­ra­tive does not pro­vide for the fur­ther rev­e­la­tion of these or­ders of cre­ation. Enough of the life and ad­min­is­tra­tion of this uni­verse is be­ing here­with por­trayed to af­ford the mor­tal mind a grasp of the re­al­ity and grandeur of the sur­vival ex­is­tence. Fur­ther ex­pe­ri­ence in your ad­vanc­ing ca­reers will in­creas­ingly re­veal these in­ter­est­ing and charm­ing be­ings. This nar­ra­tive can­not be more than a brief out­line of the na­ture and work of the man­i­fold per­son­al­i­ties who throng the uni­verses of space ad­min­is­ter­ing these cre­ations as enor­mous train­ing schools, schools wherein the pil­grims of time ad­vance from life to life and from world to world un­til they are lov­ingly dis­patched from the bor­ders of the uni­verse of their ori­gin to the higher ed­u­ca­tional regime of the super­uni­verse and thence on to the spirit-train­ing worlds of Ha­vona and even­tu­ally to Par­a­dise and the high des­tiny of the fi­nal­i­ters—the eter­nal as­sign­ment on mis­sions not yet re­vealed to the uni­verses of time and space.

37:10.7[Dic­tated by a Bril­liant Evening Star of Neb­a­don, Num­ber 1,146 of the Cre­ated Corps.]