The Urantia Book

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5 paragraphs · about 2 minutes · 2 chapters

The paragraphs in the index’s own groups, a chapter to each, in the order the index prints them, and in the order of the book within each. A paragraph read in an earlier chapter is named in one line.

interposing influences and angles of observation introduce error 4 paragraphs

12:4.12The pres­ent re­la­tion­ship of your sun and its as­so­ci­ated plan­ets, while dis­clos­ing many rel­a­tive and ab­so­lute mo­tions in space, tends to con­vey the im­pres­sion to as­tro­nomic ob­servers that you are com­par­a­tively sta­tion­ary in space, and that the sur­round­ing starry clus­ters and streams are en­gaged in out­ward flight at ever-in­creas­ing ve­loc­i­ties as your cal­cu­la­tions pro­ceed out­ward in space. But such is not the case. You fail to rec­og­nize the pres­ent out­ward and uni­form ex­pan­sion of the phys­i­cal cre­ations of all per­vaded space. Your own lo­cal cre­ation (Neb­a­don) par­tic­i­pates in this move­ment of uni­ver­sal out­ward ex­pan­sion. The en­tire seven super­uni­verses par­tic­i­pate in the two-bil­lion-year cy­cles of space res­pi­ra­tion along with the outer re­gions of the mas­ter uni­verse.

12:4.13When the uni­verses ex­pand and con­tract, the ma­te­rial masses in per­vaded space al­ter­nately move against and with the pull of Par­a­dise grav­ity. The work that is done in mov­ing the ma­te­rial en­ergy mass of cre­ation is space work but not power-en­ergy work.

12:4.14Al­though your spec­tro­scopic es­ti­ma­tions of as­tro­nomic ve­loc­i­ties are fairly re­li­able when ap­plied to the starry realms be­long­ing to your super­uni­verse and its as­so­ciate super­uni­verses, such reck­on­ings with ref­er­ence to the realms of outer space are wholly un­re­li­able. Spec­tral lines are dis­placed from the nor­mal to­wards the vi­o­let by an ap­proach­ing star; like­wise these lines are dis­placed to­wards the red by a re­ced­ing star. Many in­flu­ences in­ter­pose to make it ap­pear that the re­ces­sional ve­loc­ity of the ex­ter­nal uni­verses in­creases at the rate of more than one hun­dred miles a sec­ond for ev­ery mil­lion light-years in­crease in dis­tance. By this method of reck­on­ing, sub­se­quent to the per­fec­tion of more pow­er­ful tele­scopes, it will ap­pear that these far-dis­tant sys­tems are in flight from this part of the uni­verse at the un­be­liev­able rate of more than thirty thou­sand miles a sec­ond. But this ap­par­ent speed of re­ces­sion is not real; it re­sults from nu­mer­ous fac­tors of er­ror em­brac­ing an­gles of ob­ser­va­tion and other time-space dis­tor­tions.

12:4.15But the great­est of all such dis­tor­tions arises be­cause the vast uni­verses of outer space, in the realms next to the do­mains of the seven super­uni­verses, seem to be re­volv­ing in a di­rec­tion op­po­site to that of the grand uni­verse. That is, these myr­i­ads of neb­u­lae and their ac­com­pa­ny­ing suns and spheres are at the pres­ent time re­volv­ing clock­wise about the cen­tral cre­ation. The seven super­uni­verses re­volve about Par­a­dise in a coun­ter­clock­wise di­rec­tion. It ap­pears that the sec­ond outer uni­verse of galax­ies, like the seven super­uni­verses, re­volves coun­ter­clock­wise about Par­a­dise. And the as­tro­nomic ob­servers of Uversa think they de­tect ev­i­dence of rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ments in a third outer belt of far-dis­tant space which are be­gin­ning to ex­hibit di­rec­tional ten­den­cies of a clock­wise na­ture.

space respiration is in expansion phase 1 paragraph

11:6.4The cy­cles of space res­pi­ra­tion ex­tend in each phase for a lit­tle more than one bil­lion Uran­tia years. Dur­ing one phase the uni­verses ex­pand; dur­ing the next they con­tract. Per­vaded space is now ap­proach­ing the mid-point of the ex­pand­ing phase, while un­per­vaded space nears the mid-point of the con­tract­ing phase, and we are in­formed that the out­er­most lim­its of both space ex­ten­sions are, the­o­ret­i­cally, now ap­prox­i­mately equidis­tant from Par­a­dise. The un­per­vaded-space reser­voirs now ex­tend ver­ti­cally above up­per Par­a­dise and be­low nether Par­a­dise just as far as the per­vaded space of the uni­verse ex­tends hor­i­zon­tally out­ward from pe­riph­eral Par­a­dise to and even be­yond the fourth outer space level.

Onward

Cited alongside: astronomy, space, velocities