Common Knowledge

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCkfEzGkYrw&feature=related[/youtube]

The light traveler “Prot,” (rhymes with moat) hailing from the planet K-Pax in the Lyra system, presumes that everyone on earth knows that we are the third planet out, orbiting a pale yellow star we call the sun. That it’s “common knowledge.”   But Prot would presume too much to think we know much more than that. Simple factoids like everyone on earth knows the truth regarding how our planet formed;  where in space it actually is; or even it’s name.  Truth is, most of us are abysmally ignorant when it comes to the cosmological understanding of our own home sphere and the vast universe in which we find ourselves.

Prot got tossed into a professionally-run loony bin because a workaday police officer couldn’t imagine a traveler from another world might look just like us.  Several of the inmates at the funny farm, however, are more than curious about Prot’s world, K-Pax, exhibiting a healthy and vital sense of curiosity— an attribute of mind often devoid in a great many of us on this side of the locked rubber-room doors.

Urantia Book readers also exhibit a healthy sense of curiosity, often even evincing a hunger for truth;  after all, they managed to find and read the one book that authoritatively answers the numerous blank spots in our world’s “common knowledge.”

Recall that Prot was really just visiting our world on vacation;  he really liked our produce.  But unlike Prot, we can’t just zip outa here on a beam of light.  No.  We get to stay behind and seed the uncommon knowledge of The Urantia Book into the slowly warming soil of world philosophical thought.  Like Christ’s enigmatic parable of the sower, not every seed will find the right conditions for healthy growth, but many will.  And someday in the distant future, you can rest assured— it will all simply be— common knowledge.

Way out on the rim of the galaxy
The gifts of the Lord lie torn
Into whose charge the gifts were given
Have made it a curse for so many to be born
This is my trouble —
These were my fathers
So how am I supposed to feel?
Way out on the rim of the broken wheel

Water of life is going to flow again
Changed from the blood of heroes and knaves
The word mercy’s going to have a new meaning
When we are judged by the children of our slaves
No adult of sound mind
Can be an innocent bystander
Trial comes before truth’s revealed
Out here on the rim of the broken wheel

You and me — we are the break in the broken wheel
Bleeding wound that will not heal

Lord, spit on our eyes so we can see
How to wake up from this tragedy

—From Broken Wheel •  Bruce Cockburn

Love of adventure, curiosity, and dread of monotony— these traits inherent in evolving human nature were not put there just to aggravate and annoy you during your short sojourn on earth, but rather to suggest to you that death is only the beginning of an endless career of adventure, an everlasting life of anticipation, an eternal voyage of discovery.
—The Urantia Book