Physical Aspects of the Local Universe

41:0.1The char­ac­ter­is­tic space phe­nom­e­non which sets off each lo­cal cre­ation from all oth­ers is the pres­ence of the Cre­ative Spirit. All Neb­a­don is cer­tainly per­vaded by the space pres­ence of the Di­vine Min­is­ter of Sal­ving­ton, and such pres­ence just as cer­tainly ter­mi­nates at the outer bor­ders of our lo­cal uni­verse. That which is per­vaded by our lo­cal uni­verse Mother Spirit is Neb­a­don; that which ex­tends be­yond her space pres­ence is out­side Neb­a­don, be­ing the ex­tra-Neb­a­don space re­gions of the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton—other lo­cal uni­verses.

41:0.2While the ad­min­is­tra­tive or­ga­ni­za­tion of the grand uni­verse dis­closes a clear-cut di­vi­sion be­tween the gov­ern­ments of the cen­tral, su­per-, and lo­cal uni­verses, and while these di­vi­sions are as­tro­nom­i­cally par­al­leled in the space sep­a­ra­tion of Ha­vona and the seven super­uni­verses, no such clear lines of phys­i­cal de­mar­ca­tion set off the lo­cal cre­ations. Even the ma­jor and mi­nor sec­tors of Or­von­ton are (to us) clearly dis­tin­guish­able, but it is not so easy to iden­tify the phys­i­cal bound­aries of the lo­cal uni­verses. This is be­cause these lo­cal cre­ations are ad­min­is­tra­tively or­ga­nized in ac­cor­dance with cer­tain cre­ative prin­ci­ples gov­ern­ing the seg­men­ta­tion of the to­tal en­ergy charge of a super­uni­verse, whereas their phys­i­cal com­po­nents, the spheres of space—suns, dark is­lands, plan­ets, etc.—take ori­gin pri­mar­ily from neb­u­lae, and these make their as­tro­nom­i­cal ap­pear­ance in ac­cor­dance with cer­tain precre­ative (tran­scen­den­tal) plans of the Ar­chi­tects of the Mas­ter Uni­verse.

41:0.3One or more—even many—such neb­u­lae may be en­com­passed within the do­main of a sin­gle lo­cal uni­verse even as Neb­a­don was phys­i­cally as­sem­bled out of the stel­lar and plan­e­tary progeny of And­ro­no­ver and other neb­u­lae. The spheres of Neb­a­don are of di­verse neb­u­lar an­ces­try, but they all had a cer­tain min­i­mum com­mon­ness of space mo­tion which was so ad­justed by the in­tel­li­gent ef­forts of the power di­rec­tors as to pro­duce our pres­ent ag­gre­ga­tion of space bod­ies, which travel along to­gether as a con­tigu­ous unit over the or­bits of the super­uni­verse.

41:0.4Such is the con­sti­tu­tion of the lo­cal star cloud of Neb­a­don, which to­day swings in an in­creas­ingly set­tled or­bit about the Sagit­tar­ius cen­ter of that mi­nor sec­tor of Or­von­ton to which our lo­cal cre­ation be­longs.