Ultimatons and Our Perception of Reality

As we think about the new information flowing out of physics, psychology and philosophy about the evidence for non-physical aspects of reality, we are tempted to reject them as “strange.”

Why would the Urantia Book (UB) mention such literal concepts as “ultimatons” if – as new science is suggesting more and more frequently – matter is just an illusion?

I have some thoughts about this situation that I hope might find a sort of compromise between conventional non-UB discoveries and what the 1934 text of the UB has to say.

I believe the ultimaton is a physical metaphor. There are no little solid spheres, called, "ultimatons." It is simply the smallest measurable energy level in space and time, one quantum.

And do recall that ALL physical phenomena are filtered through (at least in our case) human consciousness. The light you “see” in your brain, when you look at a candle is not light. You're seeing what your brain's interpretation of light is. So, bear in mind that because none of the photons that enter your eye are also entering my eye, what you are “seeing” (based on the reflection, refraction or emission of photonic - electromagnetic - particle/waves) is 100% different from what I'm seeing.

We may agree that what we see is extraordinarily similar, but literally the light showing an object to you is 100% different (particle-wise) than the light showing the "same" object to me. You might want to sit back and think about that for a second.

Because, if this is true, then no human being can ever observe any physical phenomenon objectively.

How can someone see something as it is? She/he would have to see from all human perspectives at once. And this is impossible.

To put it in more detail, light is made of photons. When these photons reach your retina they are transformed into electrochemical signals that are then relayed via chains of neurons to the visual cortex. But these signals are not light.

It is the same situation with sound, touch, smell and taste... None of these things are the same inside your brain as when the indication of their presence outside you entered the senses of your nervous system.

The point here is that nothing can be objectively proven to exist independently of human (and on higher levels, superhuman) consciousness, because it takes that same subjective human consciousness to claim the existence of things in the first place. In order to be provable things must be independently verifiable; recognized as the same by at least two credible, objective and independent observers.

It is for these reasons that the world is not at all as we observe and feel it. We are still learning what is actually taking place outside our bodies as we evolve.

Unfortunately, we can only base anything new that we encounter upon supposedly already-known perception.

Without “revelation” of some sort, new concepts have to be clothed in the (sometimes) dirty worn-out rags of past conceptualization unless these concepts somehow themselves reveal more, or some higher-than-human intelligence reveals them to us. Of course acceptance of that always takes a pure “leap of faith.”

Thus, hard little billiard balls are the way we have had to imagine the UB's ultimatons, and until we can expand that concept into the fractal and metaphoric energy that is really driving the universe, we are stuck with hard little spheres.

I do think that there may be objective things in the universe, but no human has ever been able to see them. Why? Again, because we have to observe and describe things that are completely changed (downstepped) from what we historically have been told to think they are (photons, atoms, ultimatons, etc...) by being filtered in our electrochemical brains.

Therefore, all human perception IS subjective.

Physics, which led the whole scientific community up through (arguably) the decades of 1910's through the 1990's – the sterling example of material truth-seeking, by using scientific method – is now somewhere to the left of the “soft sciences,” like psychology when it comes to rational, conceptual understanding.

Most "New Physicists" now admit that there are probably non-physical aspects to reality. Yet, this causes great confusion for them, because of not being able to measure or quantify their observation of non-physical processes.

Physicists are nearing the end of conceptual theoretical science (that is, science theory based on using only the scientific method). The science of the future will be a kind of metaphysics dealing with the power of consciousness to alter material mechanisms.

The cosmos is infinitely revealable, and we are so very far from ultimate, absonite and absolute levels of reality – combined with our primitive evolutionarily-acquired knowledge – that we observe a world and reality that is surely very different than what it truly is REAL.

The UB uses the concept of a little "sphere" called the ultimaton in the same way a parent gives a child a cartoon or picture-book representation of objects in the "real" world.

When the child finally sees that the moon doesn't have a man's face smiling from it—for example, he/she realizes that the moon presented to him/her earlier in life was not actually the moon. It was good enough to lead the child to a clearer concept of what the moon really is.

If that child grows up and actually goes to the moon, she/he will get an even better idea of what the moon is.

Now, think hypothetically about superhuman beings who may have existed for trillions of years. There is a good chance that they have a pretty good grasp of what reality is.

Yet, still, even they can never exhaust the potential for finding greater and greater truths about that reality. They may have a hundred senses comparable to the material physiology of our five sense. But only beings who would be infinitely sensitive could objectively perceive reality as it truly is.

These are just some thoughts that might allow us to expand our current understanding about the world outside-in us.

Reality is not what we see and feel. That is only our limited personal awareness of one little bit of the overall “picture.”

As we all seek to learn more about reality, whether discovered or revealed, we automatically excavate new conceptual room in our minds in which to store greater and clearer concepts of the reality we are sensing.