What a mistake to dream of God far off in the skies when the spirit of the Universal Father lives within your own mind!
—The Urantia Book 5:2.3
The Father Fragment is a charter member of the inner triad that we have discussed many times before. In the next two chapters, I introduce more advanced ideas concerning this priceless gift, our eternal partner in soul evolution and self-perfection. Throughout this discussion, what we discover again and again is that the scope and purpose of the divine indwelling is simply staggering.
Papers 107–111 describe in unprecedented detail the reality of this divine presence within us. The more I plumb these writings, the more I agree with other veteran students of the Urantia text that this section may be its most magnificent revelation.108 In particular, Paper 110 (“Relation of Adjusters to Individual Mortals”) explains the levels of self-perfecting, and Paper 111 (“The Adjuster and the Soul”) offers a full presentation of the dynamics of soul-making; these revelations form the basis of the core argument of Your Evolving Soul. Because of their central importance, I’ll quote extensively from these Papers.
The UB describes at least four types of high endowments, each corresponding to a reality domain of one of the personalities of the Trinity. (These were first described in chapter 2, and are summarized in an essay at my website entitled, “The Four Primary Gifts to Humankind.”) In this chapter we dive more deeply into the most important of these divine offerings to humanity.
All of the gifts and influences we have discussed so far are synergetic, and our personhood is their unifier, but the Divine Indweller orchestrates this sublime harmony of influences because of its unique capacity to act as the “center within”—as a Deity fragment that lives in the heart of the human mind: “Mortal man has a spirit nucleus. The mind is a personal-energy system existing around a divine spirit nucleus and functioning in a material environment.” [12.9.6]
This gift of a literal portion of Deity that indwells our mind comes directly from God as Primal Father. And it is worthy of note that the Father and the Eternal Son sharply differ in their ability to self-distribute through this mystery of fragmentation: “The Eternal Son is not thus fragmentable; the spirit of the Original Son is either diffuse or discretely personal.” [107:1.7] The Second Person of the Trinity primarily ministers to us through dramatic incarnations, so his influence on our spiritual life comes from the “outside.”109 But the Father reserves to himself the prerogative of entering directly into the interior viewpoint of the creature, eventually to become the creature’s subjective viewpoint on the universe after the event of fusion.
Even though the spirit of a Son be poured out upon all flesh, even though a Son once dwelt with you in the likeness of mortal flesh, even though the seraphim personally guard and guide you, how can any of these divine beings of the Second and Third Centers ever hope to come as near to you or to understand you as fully as the Father, who has given a part of himself to be in you, to be your real and divine, even your eternal, self? [12:7.14]
Because the indwelling God Fragment is more intimate than any other influence, the effort of receiving and feeling its guidance is our most powerful spiritual practice. Attunement with this divine entity is also our “great challenge” and “greatest adventure,” we are told [196:3.34].110 The degree of our receptivity to the leadings of the Divine Indweller determines the course of our soul evolution and conditions the degree of our cosmic individuation.
A Grand Meeting of Opposites
Let’s revisit the integral view of the self that I presented earlier. On the one hand, the objective view of the self-system reveals the variegated parts of the self (the sacred triad) and their many vital functions. A replete discussion of these features from “the outside looking in” is a chief preoccupation of the Urantia Revelation, simply because these metaphysical realities are unknowable in their essence unless divinely revealed to us. On the other hand, the inside-out viewpoint reveals a subjective awareness that measurably “wakes up” and “grows up” but does not display easily identifiable metaphysical components. We can turn to the mystics and masters of all human wisdom traditions if our aim is to understand such phenomenological realities as reported from the first-person point of view—depicted, for example, in the lyric poems of Shamseddin Hafiz, the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, or in the Confessions of St. Augustine. These descriptions offer no pretense of being objective or revelatory.
But what a majestic meeting of opposites is involved in the divine indwelling—regardless of the perspective we may adopt on the self. This spirit-entity is described as “the gift of the absolute God to those creatures whose destiny encompasses the possibility of the attainment of God as absolute.” [107:1.6] In other words, our Creator traverses a vast cosmic distance to partner with us lowly creatures of the material worlds, for sole the purpose of empowering us to achieve the absolute.
“It is indeed a marvel of divine condescension for the exalted and perfect Adjusters to offer themselves for actual existence in the minds of material creatures, such as the mortals of Urantia, really to consummate a probationary union with the animal-origin beings of earth.” [108:6.1] Over the course of several billion years of evolution of life on Earth, primitive bacteria evolved to bring forth hominids approximately a million years ago, who slowly mutated into the befuddled humans we are today. And yet, we somehow qualify to receive not only unique personalities but also a portion of the perfect divine light that descends from eternal Paradise.
Although the Universal Father is personally resident on Paradise, at the very center of the universes, he is also actually present on the worlds of space in the minds of his countless children of time. . . . The eternal Father is at one and the same time farthest removed from, and most intimately associated with, his planetary mortal sons. [107:0.1]
This free offer of a spirit of God comprises, as New Agers might say, our higher self, in contrast with our lower self or ego. And as a lover of philosophic beauty might put it, this intimate association is the most dramatic encounter possible of that which is highest with that which is lowest.
The [Indwelling Spirits] are the actuality of the Father’s love incarnate in the souls of men; they are the veritable promise of man’s eternal career imprisoned within the mortal mind; they are the essence of man’s [perfected] personality, which he can foretaste in time as he progressively masters the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will, step by step, through the ascension of universe upon universe until he actually attains the divine presence. [107:0.1]
The world’s great religious teachers have always been intuitively aware of the grandness of the meeting of opposites implied by our endowment with such a heavenly gift. For example, ancient Chinese philosophy envisioned a convergence of “heaven, earth, and man,” and Confucius especially taught that our effort to harmonize these tremendous opposites becomes the source of health, good fortune, and happiness. The ancient Gnostics taught that the high Gods looked down upon us, saw that we were trapped in the prison of the Demiurge at the lowest level of universal existence, and in mercy bestowed on us a “divine spark” so we could find our way back safely to Paradise. And Carl Jung celebrated this great meeting of dust and spirit as the coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites)—the primal encounter of creature and Creator.
The fact that we act as the host for such a tremendous meeting of opposites allows us to achieve the dialectical synthesis that yields evolutionary progress—as the philosopher Hegel famously put it. And this is the very same process that I have called soul-synthesis.
This gift of infinity to humankind, conferred in love on the finite mortal mind, keeps on giving its riches—unto the zenith of our attainments in eternity.
Naming and Describing the Inner Divinity
While many truth revealers of the past have left us with cryptic teachings about an abiding inner light, the UB offers us more specific descriptions than we have ever enjoyed, while also providing new names for the Indwelling Spirit that seem more serviceable in the postmodern era. Consider these unambiguous portrayals of the divinity within:
To say that a Thought Adjuster is divine is merely to recognize the nature of origin. It is highly probable that such purity of divinity embraces the essence of the potential of all attributes of Deity which can be contained within such a fragment of the absolute essence of the Universal presence of the eternal and infinite Paradise Father.[107:4.1]
They are fragmentized entities constituting the factual presence of the infinite God. [They] are undiluted and unmixed divinity, unqualified and unattenuated parts of Deity; they are of God, and as far as we are able to discern, they are God. [107:1.2]
These are radical and stark pronouncements. But again, we’ve seen that such notions are not unfamiliar if we search the scriptures of our traditions. In Asian thought, the idea of a pristine spirit-self can be found in the concepts of the atman or Buddha-nature. We’ve also seen that the divine presence within was envisioned in the deification teachings of Eastern Christianity, which built upon the Greek philosophic legacy that goes back to Socrates, who often spoke of the daimon—the inner divine presence that told Socrates what not to do.
In the centuries after the Axial Age (more than twenty-five hundred years ago), the world’s leading religions reached a plateau of understanding regarding a divine spark within. Their conceptions rose to greatest clarity in monastic or mystical enclaves in which, typically, elite groups of males were initiated into this truth in some form and then trained under the tutelage of a religious or cultic hierarchy.
Because the reality of an indwelling entity had been inferred through immense effort, humanity had surely earned an expansion of understanding. Wherefore the UB’s revelators stepped forward to make the concept of the inner divinity democratically available to all of humankind in the form of a printed book with no human author. Such an approach to providing revelatory information is not so easily controlled by a religion, a sect, or a cult leader.111
I believe that the UB’s revelations about the divine indwelling are designed to supersede our humanly evolved nomenclatures and religious structures, tied up as these are with the political and cultural baggage of centuries of tradition. And while the historic consensus about an inner divine presence is notable, we saw in Part III of this book how the world’s wisdom traditions diverge on many crucial technical points regarding the nature and function of our psychospiritual endowments, with each of these issues needing philosophic resolution. On that basis, let’s proceed to examine the UB’s teachings on these questions that, I believe, can lead us into a new era of understanding.
In this passage, the revelator—a high being of direct origin from the Infinite Spirit—almost laments about the difficulty of finding an appropriate name for the indwelling spark of God:
I doubt that I am able to explain to you just what the Adjusters do in your minds and for your souls. I do not know that I am fully cognizant of what is really going on in the cosmic association of a divine Monitor and a human mind. It is all somewhat of a mystery to us, not as to the plan and purpose but as to the actual mode of accomplishment. And this is just why we are confronted with such difficulty in finding an appropriate name for these supernal gifts to mortal men. [108:5.7]
The phrase “Father Fragment” was coined to vividly convey the idea that a factual portion of “God-ness” indwells us. The word “fragment” is meant literally and not as a metaphor. But in the descriptions we are given, we learn that a piece of something that is absolute remains but a portion of the Father’s absoluteness, paradoxical as that sounds; for the God Fragment is not the allness of Deity in its fullness. You and I are not the Creator God who resides at the center of all things and pervades all universes (although many cult leaders do arrive at such conclusions). Nevertheless, the Spirit Fragment within us is absolute in its divinity nature. We read that “in extensiveness [the God Fragments] are limited, but in intensiveness of meaning, value, and fact they are absolute.” [107:4.2]
Further, because it is factually absolute and of origin in the Primal Father, the God Fragment is by definition pure spirit and pure energy. That’s because, as described earlier, God as First Source and Center is ancestral to the divergence of spirit and energy that characterizes the evolutionary realms.
We know that Thought Adjusters are spirits, pure spirits, presumably absolute spirits. But the Adjuster must also be something more than exclusive spirit reality. In addition to conjectured mindedness, factors of pure energy are also present. If you will remember that God is the source of pure energy and of pure spirit, it will not be so difficult to perceive that his fragments would be both. [107:6.4]
In other words, if God as Father is understood as the existential One, then spirit and energy must be understood as one in undifferentiated unity in the domains of eternity. But in the galaxies of space, the two diverge until they are “synthesized” through the ministry of mind and by the techniques of evolution ordained by the God of Mind, the Infinite Spirit—the divine minister of love and mercy applied in time and space. And such a voyage to unification is possible because humans already have within them a fragment of unified spirit-energy that is lighting the way. The God Fragment’s overlighting function guarantees that, if we desire to make the trip, we shall return to the very origin of energy and spirit that first descended to indwell us while “trailing clouds of glory,” as the poet Wordsworth once put it:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.112
The odd phrase Mystery Monitor points to a different aspect of the Divine Indweller’s work. With the most benign intent possible, the Monitor searches for impulses and ideas that are soul-making, tracking by some mysterious technique all of our activities at all times and without interruption. The Monitor maintains an observer position until the “indwellee” becomes adequately responsive to his gentle leadings. Then he “resigns” from this role to become our private tutor, offering a never-ending stream of insights and guidance. If he could speak, he might say something like this:
I dwell within you and partake of your every living moment—either as a mere observer or as a more involved partner. You are the one who decides which level you take our relationship to as I patiently wait for you to initiate each step. As I witness your touching efforts to include me in your life, I come out of what is perceived by you to be my hiding place—my aloofness. But I am not the one who is elusive, for I am totally committed to bringing you back with me to the glory of Paradise.
But the most important term in the Indwelling Spirit lexicon is Thought Adjuster. The Indweller adjusts our ideas and feelings toward the highest possible value-choices, fine-tuning our thoughts so that we engage in soul-making activities. The “TA” does this through a variety of unknown techniques that it quietly employs in the superconscious mind. These exquisite but largely unknown operations are described with affection in this well-known passage by the celestial author of Paper 110:
I wish it were possible for me to help evolving mortals to achieve a better understanding and attain a fuller appreciation of the unselfish and superb work of the Adjusters living within them, who are so devoutly faithful to the task of fostering man’s spiritual welfare. These Monitors are efficient ministers to the higher phases of men’s minds; they are wise and experienced manipulators of the spiritual potential of the human intellect. These heavenly helpers are dedicated to the stupendous task of guiding you safely inward and upward to the celestial haven of happiness. These tireless toilers are consecrated to the future personification of the triumph of divine truth in your life everlasting. . . . They are the careful custodians of the sublime values of creature character. I wish you could love them more, co-operate with them more fully, and cherish them more affectionately. [110:1.2]
The Inner Betrothal Day
You may ask, when does our engagement with such heavenly helpers begin? I’ve already shared in chapter 4 that the Thought Adjuster is bestowed on each normal child around the age of six. You’ll recall that this moment initiates the child into the seventh psychic circle, the first of the circles of cosmic individuation. Significantly, the Indwelling Spirit arrives at this juncture because of a decision to do something—not as a result of a mere thought or feeling.
[Adjusters] are not actually assigned until the human subjects make their first moral personality decision. . . . Adjusters reach their human subjects on Urantia, on the average, just prior to the sixth birthday. In the present generation it is running five years, ten months, and four days; that is, on the 2,134th day of terrestrial life. [108:2.1]
The unsuspecting child directly triggers a cosmic response because of a simple but life-changing decision. We read further:
When such a moral decision has been made, this spirit helper assumes jurisdiction. . . . There are no intermediaries or other intervening authorities or powers functioning between the divine Adjusters and their human subjects; God and man are directly related. [108:2.4]
We’re told later in this section that the child’s first moral choice is “automatically indicated [and] registers instantly” in the central universe headquarters of Thought Adjusters. The child’s gift of personality has already been conferred from outside of space-time, arriving without fanfare, just as does the God Fragment. These important statements tell us, very touchingly, that all children on all worlds are lovingly monitored from the heart of the cosmos.
With a bit of skepticism, I have heard reports from some Urantia students that they can recall this delicate event in their childhood. But here is one case I found compelling.
I was about five years old and I was playing alone in the hallway of our family’s new home. Sometime during the prior week, feeling excited because my brothers and I had just been watching Zorro on TV, I had scrawled several Zs on the baseboard of the new wall cabinets, in imitation of my hero carving his initial everywhere with his sword. But my mother was not at all pleased with my crayon work, and she scolded me for it. As I sat playing in front of those cabinets again and saw the marks I had made, I remembered what she had said. I realized that it would be kind to my mother if I did what she asked, so I decided I wouldn’t write on the baseboards again. Suddenly, distinctly, I felt the presence of God coming upon me. I remember saying to myself, “This must be the same thing as when my parents and the people in church talk to God.”
We are told in the UB that the vast majority of cases, the reception of the Thought Adusters by youngsters is unconscious. Regardless, our very first moral choice elicits a very conscious response from on high. But in line with the interpretations I offered in chapter 3, such a decision doesn’t have to be the “correct” one. A child’s first decision doesn’t have to be “right” or “wrong” as an adult might see it; the point is that the youth is now capable of moral discrimination—the elementary ability to identify a set of options, evaluate them, and select one course of action. The Thought Adjuster is primarily interested in evidence of independent decision-making. The human soul is an immortal record of our lifelong trial and error learning process, and the impulse to experiment with and explore new realities is, after all, the essence of cosmic evolution. The evolving soul attests to our oftentimes awkward but sincere efforts to “learn the steps” as we dance with complex universe realities.
The first receipt of the Divine Monitor is the child’s Inner Betrothal Day, so to speak. It initiates an auspicious but highly uneven friendship, one between a perfect entity and a very imperfect child. And that’s why a transforming love is essential to arouse and inspire a child’s virgin mind to take the first baby steps of soul-making.
As far as I am conversant with the affairs of a universe, I regard the love and devotion of a Thought Adjuster as the most truly divine affection in all creation. . . . The Paradise Father has apparently reserved this form of personal contact with his individual creatures as an exclusive Creator prerogative. And there is nothing in all the universe of Universes exactly comparable to the marvelous ministry of these impersonal entities that so fascinatingly indwell the children of the evolutionary planets. [110:0.1]
The Monitor has taken up residence at the nucleus of the child’s mind and a devotional relationship of the sort celebrated by poets like Rumi has now begun. This interior lover’s only object, its “marvelous ministry,” is to motivate the growth toward perfection of the beloved. “The indwelling Adjuster individualizes the love of God to each human soul.” [2:5.10]
To illustrate this liaison of love, I’ve adapted the story of Cupid to help describe how the child’s receipt of an Adjuster initiates a relationship like no other. Perhaps you’ll remember how the old myth goes. When Cupid spots a candidate who feels a new affection for someone, he shoots this person with an arrow of love that arouses a fiery desire for the beloved. Compare this to the reception of the Thought Adjuster. God spots a precious child who is a newly emergent “moral agent” desires to arouse ever-more responsive love in this innocent youngster, so he picks an arrow of pure spirit from his quiver, pulls back his bow, and fires into the child’s heart a shaft of pure spirit sent directly from the infinite source of love.
This is a grand initiation, because the reception of this God Fragment also activates the child’s evolving soul. The initiated child can now—on its own—assume the role of Cupid. In the story, Cupid shoots himself with the arrow because he adores Psyche, whose name in ancient Greek literally means “soul.” The upshot, in our story, is that the child self-initiates its soul journey. This youngster—already a bearer of freewill personhood—is potentially an agent of evolutionary love in the space-time cosmos. “The urges of social service and the idealism of altruism,” we read, “are derived from the direct impulse of the divine spirit indwelling the human mind.” [103:5.1]
But what if, for whatever reason, the decisions being made by the growing youth fall far short of the ideal of serving others? The Heavenly Guide remains steadfast, regardless: “The endowment of imperfect beings with freedom entails inevitable tragedy, and it is the nature of the perfect ancestral Deity to universally and affectionately share these sufferings in loving companionship.” [110:0.1]
This kind of unconditional affection is all the more poignant when we consider that the effort of a troubled young person to emerge from dire circumstances can yield an especially rich harvest of soul-making. That’s because the tireless toiler is always cheerleading, even for the worst of the worst offenders. And it almost always succeeds. Once the two beings are betrothed, their long engagement is likely to be consummated, regardless of the possibility of severe challenges along the way. This inner marriage is the great goal of the fusion of the soul and personality with the Adjuster—the achievement of irrevocable immortality.
We saw in chapters 4 and 7 that the long path to fusion requires the harmonious mobilization of the powers of the totality of selfhood. We noted that the self’s abilities are many, but that they can be broken out into three primary governing faculties: feeling, thinking, and willing (or doing). In the rest of this chapter and the next, I’ll revisit these three lines of development in terms of our attunement to our ultimate spouse, the Thought Adjuster. Let’s start with the line of feeling.
The Felt Experience of the Inner Light
“Be a lamp unto yourselves,” declared Sakyamuni Buddha to his disciples as he lay dying. “Seek no external refuge; let the dharma be your island and your only refuge.” According to the Urantia Revelation, our God Fragment is this inner lamp and our true refuge. Its light provides the luminosity that “lights every man who comes into the world” (John 1:9). As we allow it to light us from within, we progress along the qualitative, or feeling, line of soul evolution.
But the Buddha was ruthless about epistemology—the question of what we can really know about the lamp. As we saw earlier, he felt that his Hindu predecessors had harbored religious delusions in their teachings. In particular, they were dogmatically attached to a reification, a reduction of raw spiritual experience down to a lifeless “it” that they called the atman—the inner counterpart to the transcendent abstraction they called Brahman. Because Buddha wanted to free his students from all such doctrinal presumption, he exhorted his followers to achieve ever-deeper and ineffable experiences of the dharma beyond the limits of any humanly derived ideas about this inner reality.
In this regard, Buddha was a prophet for our time. We can have theories derived from a revelatory text such as The Urantia Book, but these ideas are quite secondary to our actual experiences of the inner lamp. Settled theological beliefs may or may not point us in the right direction. We can easily become blind to the felt reality of God-consciousness if our interior experience is dominated by incorrect theories, unexamined assumptions, fixed ideas—or in fact any form of discursive thought.
Esoteric Buddhist teachings, especially in the Zen and Dzogchen traditions, teach that what we can feel in our spiritual experience cannot be captured in words and concepts. Along the same line, in his masterwork The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James proclaims, “I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.”113
For its own part, the UB incessantly speaks of the centrality of personal spiritual experience—the imperative of feeling the divine presence. Here are just a few typical statements sprinkled throughout the text:
Quality—values—is felt. [111:3.6]
The world needs more firsthand religion . . . the experience of knowing the presence of God. [195:9.8]
Many of your brethren have minds that accept the theory of God while they spiritually fail to realize the presence of God. [155:6.4]
The secret of [Jesus’s] unparalleled religious life was [his] consciousness of the presence of God. [196:0.1]
It is not so important that you should know about the fact of God as that you should increasingly grow in the ability to feel the presence of God. [155:6.13]
The indwelling Thought Adjuster attaches the feeling of reality to man’s spiritual insight into the cosmos. [102:3.12]
Similarly, early Buddhism taught “transconceptual” experience with a minimum of doctrine. This emphasis fostered a vital stream of firsthand religion in Asia that was enhanced by its early contact with esoteric Taoism in China. The later-appearing doctrine of an indwelling Buddha-nature marked a return to the classical doctrine of the atman, but in the much more subtle and paradoxical form of understanding. The Urantia Revelation praises this evolutionary achievement in a memorable passage: “[Later Buddhist] philosophy also held that the Buddha (divine) nature resided in all men; that man, through his own endeavors, could attain to the realization of this inner divinity. And this teaching is one of the clearest presentations of the truth of the indwelling Adjusters ever to be made by a Urantian religion.” [94:11.4]
Realizing this inner divinity requires a still mind, or so taught the Buddha. Buddhist meditation entails the conscious cultivation of a focused state of mindful and relaxed alertness, a practice that remains so potent that mindfulness techniques are becoming a staple in corporations and even some hospitals. In Buddhist religious settings, practitioners are supported by the sangha (the community of practice), and claims of enlightenment require scrutiny by “a community of the adequate”—elders who have mastered higher states and levels of consciousness and have conformed to the other practices of the Eightfold Path (right views, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration).
In a comparable way, believers and monastics who practiced hesychia—noetic stillness and prayer of the heart—were given priority of place in the Eastern Christian traditions. We’ve already noted that Eastern Orthodox theology is based to a greater extent than Latin theology is on the spiritual experiences of the mystics of the Church, in strong contrast to the more rationalistic emphasis of the West. As I also noted in chapter 6, the mystical theology of the Eastern Church was apophatic, not unlike the Buddhist emphasis on transconceptual experience.
To better understand the prominence of meditative worship and prayerful reflection in all esoteric traditions, consider this metaphor: Our minds can be compared with a container of water that, when turbulent, reflects and refracts the sun’s light in many directions. But when stilled by devoted meditation, the water (a symbol for our minds) transmits the pure light of God (symbolized by the sun) to consciousness.
According to the UB, Jesus himself used various meditation techniques in his practice of the presence of God. We learn about this from Rodan, a Greek philosopher from Alexandria who met with and came to believe in Jesus. As exclusively revealed in the UB, Rodan depicts Jesus as a man fully devoted to a “habit” of “worshipful meditation.” In this important passage, Rodan is in conversation with the apostles Nathaniel and Thomas.
The greatest of all methods of problem solving I have learned from Jesus, your Master. I refer to that which he so consistently practices, and which he has so faithfully taught you, the isolation of worshipful meditation. In this habit of Jesus’ going off so frequently by himself to commune with the Father in heaven is to be found the technique, not only of gathering strength and wisdom for the ordinary conflicts of living, but also of appropriating the energy for the solution of the higher problems of a moral and spiritual nature. . . . I am deeply impressed with the custom of Jesus in going apart by himself to engage in these seasons of solitary survey of the problems of living; to seek for new stores of wisdom and energy for meeting the manifold demands of social service; to quicken and deepen the supreme purpose of living by actually subjecting the total personality to the consciousness of contacting with divinity. [160:1.10]
Later in this passage, Rodan explains that this practice involves a bodily and mental discipline: “[Jesus meditates] with an eye single to the glory of God” and “breathe[s] in sincerity [his] favorite prayer, ‘Not my will, but yours, be done.’” (See 160:1.11.) Of course, an emphasis on breathing (“breathe in sincerity”) and mental concentration (“an eye single”) can also be found throughout the world’s meditative traditions. Further, such practices also yield a profound relaxation, as today’s scientific research proves. “This worshipful practice of your Master brings that relaxation which renews the mind. . . . The relaxation of worship, or spiritual communion as practiced by the Master, relieves tension, removes conflicts, and mightily augments the total resources of the personality.” [160:1.12] I might add that this relaxation confers improved health on the body as well.
Such results are possible because, as the UB reveals, the “lamp of God” actually shines on us from within the center of the mind. The tranquil and devoted mind—the purified and transparent consciousness—opens an inner portal to the God Fragment. Once it is made receptive, our mind becomes congruent with the energies of divinity, as does our body. We overflow with the desire to love, and that’s why the true mystic regards others as God sees them, resolving to treat them with an agape love that asks nothing in return.
Let’s continue to follow this fruitful metaphor of light.
It is helpful to regard the qualities comprising love as being derived from the coherence of divine light. We know, for example, that natural white light refracts into the full spectrum of colors. More specifically, when the three primary colors (blue, yellow, and red) are combined in various ways, they produce the entire array of visible colors. In the same way, philosophers have pointed out that the light of God “refracts” into a set of three primary values—truth, beauty, and goodness.
A very helpful evocation of these “intrinsic values of evolution” is provided in Steve McIntosh’s book The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness (2015), where he explains how the value-triad of truth, beauty, and goodness are like rays emanating from the radiance of the Infinite. As we metabolize these values through reflective practices and appreciative relationships, we achieve ever-more refined states of awareness, writes McIntosh, thereby accelerating the evolution of consciousness and culture.
Wilber’s theory of integral spirituality systematizes the idea that our being evolves upward through such felt experiences. We ascend from gross to subtle to causal to nondual stages of consciousness as we stabilize ourselves in increasingly more refined states of awareness.
Following the lead of the UB, I have labeled this “the feeling line,” and in chapter 7 I distinguished it from thinking and willing. It’s now time to launch into a deeper look at the latter two developmental lines. Our hypothesis remains: circle-making comprises all three lines as we head toward the perfection and unification of the totality of self.
108 Decades of searching have turned up no human sources for this series of papers other than one insignificant source at 111:4. See http://urantiabooksources.com/index.php/part-iii/.
109 As already noted, the Eternal Son also ministers to us through the universal diffusion of what is known as spiritual gravity, which operates via the spirit-gravity circuit to control the energetic realms of spiritual values (see 7:1). This influence is supplemental to the ambient presence of the Spirit of Truth, and both of them influence our thoughts and feelings from the outside working in, as also do the incarnations of “Sons of the Eternal Son” such as that of Jesus.
110 “The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind. Man’s greatest adventure in the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of spirit-consciousness—contact with the divine presence.”
111 An exception that perhaps proves the rule has been the Quakers, who in their meetings for over three centuries have practiced a meditative stillness that enables them to feel the presence of the divine spark. Their practice is unmediated by a hierarchical priesthood and is open to all.
112 Excerpted from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Like his contemporaries, Wordsworth does not clearly distinguish spirit from soul, but we can allow him poetic license, a favor we can’t extend to philosophers.
113 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature (Random House, 1902), p. 422.