My Friend:

In this letter I would like to introduce you to the centerpiece of multilevelate reality, the triate. I would also like to communicate to you some of the larger significance of triates by sharing some of the thinking that led to my discovery of triates.

Informational Analysis

If you and I are to explore the variegated conceptual terrain of multilevelate reality, we must become intimately aware of the nature of information itself. We can categorize the information in The URANTIA Book into different informational types, which we shall designate by numbers.

Type one information is information that is completely understandable in terms of today's knowledge. An example of type one information is the teaching that seven superuniverses populate the superuniverse space level (164:4-165:5).

Type two information is logical in a sense but in some aspect or another lies outside of common human experience. This category of information can appreciatively be visualized only by indirect means--for example, by analogy. An occurrence of type two information in The URANTIA Book is the teaching that the emanations of Paradise undergo progressive downstepping from the status of potency to force to energy to substance (468:3-4; 469:1-470:5). This particular type two information can understandingly be visualized by picturing a progressive precipitation from gas to mist to liquid to solid.

Before mentioning type three information, let me briefly describe a syllogism, an ideational mechanism used in deductive reasoning. (Deductive reasoning is the process of extracting specific information from that which is general).

A syllogism has three parts: 1) a major premise, 2) a minor premise, and 3) a conclusion. A major premise is a generalized conditional assertion. A common form of major premise is a statement to the effect: if this, then that. An example of this sort of major premise is the following: if a person wears red clothes, then that person is happy. A major premise need not be a simple statement; it can comprise a complex conceptual model.

A minor premise states that a particular fact is so. For example: this person is wearing red clothes. A conclusion is a derivative fact reached by linking together a major and minor premise. The conclusion reached by combining the major and minor premise above is: this person is therefore happy.

The third category of information in The URANTIA Book, type three information, I would describe as an unfounded syllogism. It has both a minor premise and a corresponding conclusion but no identifiable or commonly accepted major premise. An example of an unfounded syllogism is the statement: the pen is on the desk; therefore, it is out of ink. No major premise is advanced, or assumed to be known to the recipient, which links together the pen being on the desk and the pen being out of ink.

Implied Mechanisms

In some instances, the writers of The URANTIA Book present type three information in the form of one or another comprehensive collection of internally consistent information which, in its manner of presentation and also in its interrelationships, strongly suggests the existence of some underlying major premise. Their manner of presenting type three information often seems to imply that we, the readers, are privy to knowledge about this major premise, even though they know that we are not. Sometimes in The URANTIA Book a type three information set appears to offer glimpses of the underlying major premise, which frequently appears to be some cosmological mechanism. The unrevealed, but broadly implied, informational details about such an implied major premise, or mechanism, I call type 3.5 information, which itself constitutes a conceptual mechanism.

Hypothetical information which persons develop from type three information, I call type 3.75 information. Specific type 3.75 information can never be proven to constitute the type 3.5 information which is hidden in type three information; that is, one cannot prove the unstated, or incompletely stated, intention of the URANTIA Book writers. But, depending upon its specifics, type 3.75 information can be consistent with types one, two, three, and 3.5 information and also can be logical, internally consistent, and an accurate descriptor of reality. Type 3.75 mechanisms are derived through inductive reasoning: that is, proceeding from the specific to the general--the opposite of deductive reasoning.

The term, multilevelate reality, can designate either the reality or the study of the reality; i.e., the field of knowledge about the reality. Certain aspects of multilevelate reality are, with reference to The URANTIA Book, type 3.75 data. Multilevelate reality, however, stands on its own outside the framework of The URANTIA Book and does not depend on The URANTIA Book for its derivation, development, or significance.

One example of type three information consists of the collection of references in The URANTIA Book to an embrace, in which a higher being embraces a lower being, thereby altering the reality status of the lower being. The embrace of a Mother Spirit transmutes cherubim into Mansion World Teachers (423:6) and, applied again, converts the Mansion World Teachers into seraphim (423:7). The embrace of the Paradise Trinity endows finaliters with high spirit attributes (454:2). Embrace-related information in The URANTIA Book is always an adjunct to some other topic and never an explicit and systematic description of the embrace itself. The corresponding type 3.5 information regarding the embrace consists of the unstated description of the mechanism of the embrace. Corresponding type 3.75 information is what various persons glean from the type three information. One must always recognize that type 3.75 information is not type 3.5 information.

At first one might wonder why the writers of The URANTIA Book developed such vast and intricate cosmological descriptions around unstated major premises. But thought reveals numerous reasons why this must be so. Though it is not the subject of this letter, I might mention the following in passing:

1) Some information-type-unspecified proscriptions (unqualified proscriptions) were placed on the writers against presenting certain data (148:6-149:3; 351:4; 1109:3-4; 1234:1; 1258:5; 1315:6; 1317:2). Other proscriptions were imposed against presenting certain data as type two information unless no human concepts existed which would allow the data to be presented as type one information (16:8-17:2; 1343:1-3). Additionally, type one-and-two proscriptions were probably imposed against presenting certain data as either type one or type two information because, for example, prerequisite social, spiritual, or intellectual developments had not occurred or the intended recipients were unprepared in other ways. Finally, observations by the writers that certain information is inherently impossible to communicate to us at all (144:2-147:5; 269:7; 391:7; 544:4; 554:6-555:1; 1233:8; 1236:1) or is communicable to us only as type two data (469:1-2; 499:2-507:5; 507:2) or type three data (1343:1-3) amount to recognition of inherent proscriptions.

It may have been permissible and possible for the writers of The URANTIA Book to present certain or all of all the data under all kinds of proscription as type 3.5 information. To do so would ensure that the potential type 3.75 information would lie dormant, emerging only after specific ennabling events should occur. Such an approach requires, and even stimulates, specific growth in the recipient. Even totally incommunicable data, state the writers of The URANTIA Book, can have the fact of the reality of its existence communicated (17:2; 499:2-3; 507:2).

The truth content of type 3.5 information, being a reality, is imbued with power, endurance, and adaptatility, even in the face of distortion of its corresponding type three information. This fact lends insight concerning parables, folk lore, teachers, writers, traditions, religious myth, and mysticism. Thus the URANTIA Book description of Christianity as a cocoon in which the teachings of Jesus lie dormant and from which, since they are eternal in nature, they will sometime emerge (1866:4), is a straightforward observation based on a higher science of information.

2) One cannot communicate a specific reality to a person who is literally and figuratively far from that reality. Picture yourself attempting to describe a simple day in your life to a stone-age person. Imagine the incompletness and distortion that would characterize your narrative. Consider the endless questions that would arise in the mind of your hearer.

For many years I puzzled over a particular kind of type three URANTIA Book information. This difficult area involved the mechanism-relationship between any given overreality, or overbeing, and its associated underrealities, or underbeings, through a gravity circuit. Each Paradise Source and Center, though centrally located (7:10; 118:1-119:2), pervades its own creation by means of its individual gravity circuit (131:5-10; 176:6-177:1). Similarly, our Master Spirit, though centrally located (150:2-3; 184:12), is somehow over all of us of his superuniverse (190:11; 275:4). And our Creator Son and also our Mother Spirit, discretely located in their joint local universe (237:2; 377:2; 378:2), pervade it diffusely (241:5; 375:2; 376:7; 377:5; 377:10; 378:2; 455:1). We learn about this in The URANTIA Book but are not told the details of the overreality/gravity/underreality mechanism.

And yet the URANTIA Book cosmology rests on this mechanism.

I had felt all along that the secret to this type 3.5 information was wrapped up in an apparent paradox in the URANTIA Book teachings. We are explicitly told that our Creator Son, Michael, is a person, a discrete presence, and can only be in one place at a time (377:2). But we are also told that this same Michael Son is an impersonal, diffuse presence, known as the Spirit of Truth, which overspreads the entire local universe (237:2; 241:5; 377:10).

I had long believed that paradoxes are simply situations described in frames of reference which are too low or too limited or otherwise inadequate. I believed that this must also be the case with the Michael Presence Paradox.

To Transcend a Reference Frame

Let us assume that you are a Martian. You live on the planet Mars. Earth and Mars have never made contact. One day, someone on Earth contacts you by radio. You know nothing about Earth. Your Earth contact knows nothing about Mars.

Somehow the two of you begin a communication. Five things are told to you about life on Earth, but you do not understand the details of their meaning:

1) On Earth there are animals.
2) Some animals have wings.
3) Only animals with short necks have wings.
4) A giraffe is an animal.
5) A giraffe has a long neck.

You don't know what animals are. Or necks. But you do know that a giraffe is the former. And that one of the former with a short one of the latter has wings, whatever wings are.

As if to test you, your Earth contact then asks:

Does a giraffe have wings?

Think about this question. Can you answer it from the five statements that have been given to you, without drawing upon your actual Earth knowledge? Can you leave behind your Earth frame of reference for a time, for the purposes of this example?

Do not read on until you have contemplated this.

Years ago, I was asked that question. My reply was:

"Does a giraffe have a short neck?"

After all, that's the stated requirement which must be satisfied in order for an animal to have wings.

"Yes," you might say, "but a giraffe has a long neck."

We don't care if it has a long neck. Or a white neck. Or a pink foot (whatever a foot is).

Does it have a short neck?

You see, if you think that a giraffe can't have a short neck just because it has a long neck, it's because you are drawing on your Earth knowledge that animals have only one neck. A Martian wouldn't know that necks do not come in pairs.

And so, too, with the paradox concerning Michael's presence. Why do we require that the two possibilities of the nature of his presence be mutually exclusive? Why do we indiscriminately seek to place upon our divine Creator our fleshly limitation of being able to possess but a single presence? But the reason is obvious. We are bound by limitations of creative imagination imposed by limitations of experience--limited frames of reference.

Michael manifests as at least two presences: 1) as his discrete personal presence, which is localized and can be in only one place at a time; and 2) as his diffuse impersonal presence, which is everywhere over the entire local universe--at least in those places where the Spirit of Truth has been enlodged.

After discovering this concept of the dichotomy of presence of creators and sources and centers, I discovered a model, called a triate, based on this feature. The triate model, comprising type 3.75 information, is compatible, in all points of which I am aware, with the types one, two, and three information of The URANTIA Book and with observed reality. After perceiving the triate model, I began recognizing triates everywhere.

A triate is a universal reality-organizing mechanism.

Before describing triates, I shall acquaint you with a few terms which can be useful for considering multilevelate reality. A reality of any kind, whether it is a baseball, a thought, a value, or a person, is a structurate. A levelate is a degree of enstructuration for example: at a particular levelate, electrons and protons exist. At a levelate which is finalateward, or overateward, from them, these same realities exist only in combination--as their overates, or finalates, which are called atoms. In the opposite direction--that is, primalateward, or partateward--these same electrons (and presumably protons) are their partates, or primalates, the ultimatons (476:8).

Thus, any reality exists at each of three levelates: the levelate of its parts, the levelate of its individual self, and the levelate of that overreality of which it is only a part. A flower has partates which are petals existing at a partateward levelate from it. The flower is the overate of the petals and exists overateward from them. The flower is a partate of its overate, a garden, which exists at the next overateward levelate from it.

Triates

A triate is a structurate possessing three partates: a focalate, a diffluate, and a multiate. The focalate is a discreet reality of central location. The multiate is a collection of multiple realities, called multiatons, peripheral to the focalate. The diffluate is a diffuse influence which impresses patterns in the focalate upon the multiate by influencing each multiaton.

An example of a triate is a solar system. In a solar system triate, the sun is the focalate. Planets, asteroids, and the other members of the solar family are the multiate. Gravity is the diffluate. The influence conveyed by the diffluate is monodirectional: from the focalate to the multiate. Since the diffluate impresses the pattern of the focalate upon the multiate, the multiate perceives the focalate as a twofold presence: as a discrete presence in the form of the focalate and as a diffuse presence in the form of the diffluate.

Another example of a triate is an atom, consisting of a focalatic nucleus, diffluatic atomic forces, and multiatic electrons. Or a nation, comprised of a presidential focalate, constitutional diffluate, and citizenry multiate.

By controlling the position of every multiaton, the focalate creates the structurate that is the multiate and endows it with its properties. Consider a hypothetical triate consisting of a marching band multiate, a centrally located bandmaster focalate, and a radio-link diffluate which connects a microphone, held by the bandmaster, to headphones worn by each marcher. On receiving the appropriate command, via the radio link, from the bandmaster, each marcher-multiaton simultaneously alters his or her instantaneous position, hence motion. Their overate pattern then becomes a white ship plying through tossing blue waves--or a covered wagon rolling across a grassy prairie on spinning, spoked wheels.

Another triate example consists of Michael as focalate, the Mother Spirit as diffluate, and the overate of the mortal minds of the local universe (excluding non-bestowal planets) as multiate. But we shall go into URANTIA Book triates at a later time. As we will see then, there is more to triates than is so far apparent.

To express the significance of triates in the finalating ladder of enstructurated universe reality, I have formulated the law of triate identity:

Every individual reality has its existence upheld in a triate known as its triate of identity, in which it is the multiate.

The focalate in a structurate's triate of identity is the pattern that brings that structurate forth as a reality. The structurate itself can be a full multiate or a portion of a multiate--a submultiate. The sun is the focalate in the triate of identity of the asteroid belt, which is the overate object composed of the asteroids--multiatons. The asteroid belt is a subset of the solar family multiate but is the full multiate in a triate consisting of sun, gravity, and asteroids only. Such a triate, whose multiate is a part of a greater multiate, is called a lateral triate and its multiate a lateral multiate, in contrast to a central triate, whose multiate, called a central multiate, is not a part of any greater multiate. Focalate, multiate, and diffluate are triatons.

There are two views of triates: the homolevelate triate perspective and the heterolevelate triate perspective. The first is a simplification--a single-levelate perspective. The second is a multi-levelate perspective. Remember that we are investigating enstructuration--the levelate ladder of all reality. What we have explored here is only the homolevelate view of the triate. It merely hints at the greater reality which is described in the heterolevelate perspective of the triate. That we shall explore at another time.

Until my next letter to you, I would like for you to start becoming triate conscious. Become aware of the laws of enstructuration around and within you. See focalates patterning their multiates through their associated diffluates. Contemplate these things and their implications.