By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him.
—Hebrews 11:5 KJV
Seeds of the good, the true, and the beautiful are sprouting everywhere in the space-time universes. The grace and love of God guarantees that experiences of these divine values will always be plentiful for us all. This all-pervading presence of divinity catalyzes soul-synthesis and motivates our journey to God Fusion as pilgrims on the trail first blazed by Enoch.
By Creator design, our souls naturally evolve in response to the budding presence of genuine values in daily life. Soul evolution doesn’t require that we pursue a highly conscious path. Natural beauty especially attracts our full attention—while requiring a minimum of conscious effort. Tourists gasp in awe the first time they peer over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Dads cry for joy when they witness the birth of a son or daughter. Such exquisite experiences can generate higher feeling-states of consciousness—even if our usual energetic center of gravity is somewhat lower. We didn’t have to admire that adorable infant, but the choice to do so was obvious and easy. I cite these examples to illustrate how elementary soul-making decisions can bring about modest progress in the feeling line of consciousness development.
For some of us, even these small steps loom large in the soul. Recall the NDEr in chapter 1 whose simple experience of cupping a small flower in her hands was revealed during her life review to be the greatest single event of her life. Although the encounter happened by chance, her choice in that moment for a pure and undiluted experience of beauty was indeed a soul-making event. Her sidewalk epiphany advanced her ability to feel the presence of divinity. But imagine how this same woman might have evolved and how much richer her life review might have been had she spent her life consciously cultivating such peak-state experiences, as well as pursuing excellence in her other lines of development.
The Path and Fruition of Disciplined Meditation
Author and researcher Dustin Diperna makes especially clear in his work how such cultivation of higher states of consciousness is vital to spiritual progress. Diperna’s findings follow closely in the footsteps of his mentors Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown.114
Practitioners on almost any path understand that we can consciously engage in disciplines that produce higher states. But according to Brown’s schema as built upon by Wilber and explicated by Diperna, when such awareness practices are repeated often enough and carried out with devotion and intention, we can turn these passing states into established vantage points. These plateaus of awareness, once stabilized through persistent cultivation, become our new self-sense; they constitute the felt awareness that infuses our experiences of our world.
For example, with enough mind training, our subjective center of gravity can move upward from a gross to a subtle vantage point. Once we have achieved an unwavering consciousness at this new level of subtle-realm awareness, that higher position becomes like a stepping-stone that we linger over before moving on to more inclusive vantage points. As we arrive and stabilize at each stone in the progression, that new platform becomes our state identity, or state-stage, as Wilber calls it.
We can see in this analysis how decades of cross-cultural, faith-neutral research into states of awareness have been fruitful. Most researchers now agree with Brown (and many others) that at the baseline of consciousness, our thoughts and feelings are fused with our awareness. In other words, we are so identified with our mental chatter that we are unable to distinguish it from the general field of our experience—that is, we can’t distinguish the forest of awareness from the trees of thought, so to speak. It is this confused and egocentric state that Wilber designates the gross level of consciousness, following the long-established stage theory inherited from Vedanta and Buddhist adepts as well as the descriptions of some Western mystics.
If the gross stage is our vantage point, our primary spiritual task becomes disidentifying with the flow of our thoughts and feelings, allowing us to untangle their incestuous relationship with awareness. Awareness is, by definition, inclusive of all cognizable mental events. Through intention, we can cultivate a higher state of consciousness that renders this flow of events as objects within awareness. Awareness itself now moves to the foreground and thoughts fall to the background; pure awareness as such becomes the seat of our subjectivity. This state (which Brown simply calls awareness) now becomes our new vantage point; Wilber and Diperna call it subtle-state awareness, as indicated above in our example.
Of course, we can progress further. While it is true that our flow of thoughts (ideas, images, sensations, and feelings) at this stage is now understood as merely the transient arising and passing of objects of awareness, it’s now time for a new stepping-stone: the realization that awareness itself has hidden characteristics that color our perception. So the next step is to deconstruct the prejudices, opinions, and desires that color our awareness; we make them the objects of observation, surveying these forms of bias from an even higher place in awareness that Wilber calls the causal state. Of course, this activity can take many forms depending on one’s religious tradition.
And on we go from there to more advanced stepping-stones.
Next, according to Diperna, the mystic will dismantle the assumption of a time-space continuum (Brown’s phrase) that underlies awareness, thereby achieving a new vantage point beyond time and space. (Easier said than done, I might add.) The general result is that we dwell in the “eternal now” despite the outward appearance of flux. This level Wilber calls the witness.
But it turns out that the witness itself must also be deconstructed. Attaining the witnessing vantage point may place the practitioner above the fray in a state of serenity, but it still harbors an unnecessary duality. “The field of experience [still] appears to be other than the point of observation,” writes Diperna, referring to the fact that the experiencer is still distinct from his or her experience. “The first step at this stage is to employ practices that see through this unnecessary duality.” Diperna is referring here, of course, to the need to deconstruct the very distinction between subject and object in human consciousness.
Continuing along this line—if understood now in UB terms—the practitioner increasingly experiences a direct encounter with the Indwelling Spirit at the heart of consciousness. We progress toward a final identification with its vantage point—which, of course, is absolute. Diperna and hi colleagues call this stage nondual realization.
In a breakthrough interpretation, UB scholar Robert Kezer has mapped onto this Diperna/Brown/Wilber model his understanding of Jesus’s growth to perfection as narrated in the Urantia text. In this passage, Kezer especially links the UB’s discussion to the state-stages of Wilber’s Integral Map.
According the Urantia Revelation, Christ achieved permanent nondual realization in his thirty-first year when he went into isolation for six weeks on the slopes of Mt. Hermon for the purpose of completing the work of mastering his human mind. During this period, he finished his “mortal task of achieving the circles of mind-understanding and personality control.” [134:7.6–7] In effect, this terminated the period of his mortal bestowal—the period of being known as the “son of man”—and in doing so he met God’s requirement of fully experiencing life as a mortal [and demonstrated] the qualities of a unified personality.115
Soon after, Kezer continues, Jesus presented himself to John the Baptist on the shores of the Jordan. He is now “a mortal of the realm who had attained the pinnacle of human evolutionary ascension. . . . Perfect synchrony and full communication had become established between the mortal mind of Jesus and the Indwelling Spirit Adjuster.” [136:2.2]
However, Jesus stopped just short of fusion at the moment of his baptism. He had a more far more important purpose: to serve humankind in his eventful public ministry. Fusion would have meant his complete and eternal identification with the vantage point of God—which, we have noted, is inconsistent with bodily existence on Earth, as Enoch first discovered.
God-Consciousness and Intellectual Self-Mastery
We know from our earlier discussions that the foregoing picture may be incomplete. Yes, of course, Jesus had fully immersed himself in God-consciousness like many other saints and mystics over the ages. But he was far more than a mystic adept, an otherworldly monastic, a fool for God, or a cultish zealot; he was a perfectly unified personality who had achieved his circles and was ready for Father Fusion. He had not only realized a superbly refined level of awareness along the axis of faith and feeling; he had also attained “quantitative soul growth through seasoned wisdom”—that being the other of the two axes of soul growth.
According to the Integral Map presented in chapter 7, the line of quantitative soul growth described in the UB corresponds more or less to the cognitive line highlighted by Wilber. We can also call it intellectual self-mastery. Jesus had “grown up” to gain mastery on this line because of his wide-ranging socialization, which included raising and supporting a large family, an extensive education that included world travel and the mastery of three languages, and his acquirement of advanced skills too numerous to mention. As a result, his level of cognitive attainment extended to worldcentric and beyond, whereas most of his contemporaries were little more than ethnocentric.116
But rather than explicate this aspect of Jesus’s self-mastery with more theoretical analysis, allow me instead to illustrate it with two stories from his life. I earlier noted that during his “lost years,” Jesus had visited Rome while working as a translator and tutor for a wealthy Indian merchant and his son who were traveling around the Mediterranean on business. We read that because the merchant carried with him special greetings from “the princes of India,” the three were given an official audience with the Roman emperor, Tiberius. We pick up the UB’s narration here:
The morose emperor was unusually cheerful on this day and chatted long with the trio. And when they had gone from his presence, the emperor, referring to Jesus, remarked to the aide standing on his right, “If I had that fellow’s kingly bearing and gracious manner, I would be a real emperor, eh?” [130:0.1]
Tiberius had been one of Rome’s greatest generals, having penetrated far into the frontier to establish the empire’s northern boundary in the lands of “Germania.” He was a cosmopolitan man who was the head of state for the world’s great empire. Yet, next to him, Jesus stood out as kingly, even in the eyes of the emperor himself.
Something similar occurred in Jesus’s encounter with Annas on the fateful night before his crucifixion. Annas was the high priest emeritus of Jerusalem, described in the Urantia text as “the most powerful single individual in all Jewry.” (See the full account at 184:1, “Examination by Annas.”)
It is not implausible that Annas or others among his contemporaries in the Sanhedrin had achieved high degrees of intellectual prowess and worldly wisdom. But the brief biblical account of this meeting—and more especially the UB’s detailed narration of it—shows just how Jesus far outranked Annas in faith attainment and intellectual self-mastery.
As we read the poignant description of their meeting, we realize that facing off with a man of far superior character proves too much for Annas to bear. Jesus outwits him with towering clarity and simplicity at each turn of the exchange—much as he had routed or refuted other challengers sent by the Sanhedrin to derail him with trick questions while he taught the common people.
Jesus’s demeanor in the chambers of Annas at first startles the high priest. “Jesus was even more majestic and well poised than Annas remembered him,” we read. As the examination proceeds, Jesus is undaunted and even “kindly” in the face of Annas’s emotional abuse and vicious threats. By the end of the proceedings, the contrast of their two characters lays bare Annas’s spiritual bankruptcy. Losing his equilibrium, Annas bolts from the room at the high point of their discussion. Clearly, he knows better than to condemn Jesus to death. But Annas is unable to face his own defective thinking and moral depravity, which are now all the more evident in the light of Jesus’s regal demeanor. Ultimately, the high priest chooses self-enrichment and political expediency over “the light of God” that Jesus offers him. Annas would rather destroy Jesus than climb the difficult ladder of self-mastery that Jesus represents.
Divine Will Is Yoked to Human Will
The iconic example of Jesus helps us to better understand the developmental lines and levels of feeling and thinking in their relationship with the Divine Indweller. Indeed, the UB exhorts us on its final page to follow his example of balanced growth, saying, “Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.” [196:1.3] In this light, let’s now turn to willing, the third of the trio of human faculties that encompass the circle-making enterprise of cosmic individuation.
Think of the faculty of will as the capacity for “decision-action” or “choice-experience”—shorthand phrases we met earlier that convey the import of being willing to act. Willingness in this sense can be defined as the resolve to engage in three fundamental steps of decision-making: (1) select a course of action from a set of options, (2) carry out this decision-action with sober and firm intention, and (3) face the wider consequences of this choice-experience by handling its outcomes with equivalent resolve.
Of course, there can be no doubt that clarity of thought and quality of faith are essential cofactors in the effective exercise of our human will. After all, our level of intellectual and emotional maturity governs what options have any chance of becoming available to us in the first place. For example, without Dr. Martin Luther King’s advanced education and superb development of faith, he would have never been in a position to exercise those decision-actions that changed American history.
The story of Jesus’s meeting with Annas illustrates Jesus’s effective use of will in a manner that is commensurate with his other lines of development. His composure in the face of his accuser portrays a striking symmetry of self. In the final hours of his life, Jesus was at one and the same time the picture of deep thinking, superb faith, and wholehearted choosing of the divine will. This fact may not be clear to readers of the biblical accounts, but it is graphically portrayed in the UB’s narrative.
During the previous week, Jesus had faithfully marched through the outworking of a series of decision-actions that inexorably led him to the crucial encounter in the palace of Annas. This had included his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his heroic decision to drive commercial trade from the Temple, his eloquent teaching to the throngs in the Temple, his daring public denunciation of the Jewish leaders, and his strategic withdrawal with the apostles for rest and their final meeting together—the Last Supper.117 By now, Jesus knew he would be arrested by cowardly and unjust men. And then, while immersed in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus discovered that it was the Father’s will that he continue to experience the natural consequences of the decisions he had previously made in these matters—much as would any other teacher of truth in the face of corrupt power, such as Socrates or Martin Luther King. There and then Jesus chose to further align his will with the divine will, which meant facing an appalling death at the hands of his enemies.118 (See “Alone in Gethsemane” at 182:3.)
The Father’s will, in this sense, is scalable—it adapts to a person’s circle achievement as well as to the demands of the moment. High-quality thinking and feeling are crucial, but in the final analysis God needs willing and courageous workers. The divine will scales up as we become more willing to serve fearlessly in whatever circumstances challenge us. If we have the maturity to handle what may be needed for transforming a situation, the Father’s requirements can potentially take us far out of any conceivable comfort zone. The Indwelling Spirit can and will stretch us to our limit, but if we decide to not “drink the cup” (I allude here to Jesus’s statement on Gethsemane, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.” See Luke 22: 39.), the assignment will be transferred to others who are willing and who can be counted on to follow through with steadfast intent.
The Indweller’s job, therefore, is the spiritualization of the human will so that we can “drink more cups” for cosmic evolution. Upon gifting itself to us when we were young children, the inner Spirit of God faithfully monitors, adjusts, and inspires our willingness until we freely choose the divine will at the greatest scale possible for our native talents. To amplify this point, let’s review four key qualities that the Indweller brings to this process: persistence, infallibility, respect, and love.
First of all, the Mystery Monitor never falters in its work. As a fragment of the absolute, it has unlimited energy to engage in this unique endeavor. “Thought Adjusters do not require energy intake; they are energy, energy of the highest and most divine order.” [107:6.6] They unceasingly labor to reach us, even in our dream life.119
Second, the Indweller never makes mistakes: “The Adjuster is man’s infallible cosmic compass, always and unerringly pointing the soul Godward.” [107:0.6] Later we read: “Adjusters never fail; they are of the divine essence, and they always emerge triumphant in each of their undertakings.” [110:3.3] In other words, our failure to survive in the afterlife can only be attributed to human error.
Truly, this divine “groom for our soul” possesses astonishing talents, skills, and assets that infinitely transcend those of the bride, the indwelled human. But upon closer inspection we find that the divine suitor comports itself with an amazing humility. And this is the third quality of his work within: though he displays an unwavering commitment to his flawless pursuit of the bride, he is wholly subservient to her will, as we have previously discussed. The Indwelling Spirit is constitutionally unable to coerce or cajole her into doing something she doesn’t choose to do. He gives her all possible respect; accepting his love and guidance must be her idea.
In the final analysis, whatever the Adjuster has succeeded in doing for you, the records will show that the transformation has been accomplished with your co-operative consent; you will have been a willing partner with the Adjuster in the attainment of every step of the tremendous transformation of the ascension career. [110:2.2]
Fourth, the Adjuster naturally exudes a flavor of love, as already noted. Indeed, he inherently represents the divine will at any given moment, which always aims for and expresses love. The Indwelling Spirit is, after all, our divine GPS. He telegraphs the more loving and evolutional path to us through hunches, prompts, intuitions, symbols, dreams, and even via synchronicities arranged with angelic assistance. We are told that such offerings, if unheeded in the mind, can still enrich the soul superconsciously. But they become experientially available only to the degree that we are willing to receive, believe, and act on this guidance to serve—that is, to meet others right where they are and lovingly minister to their deepest needs. “Love is the desire to do good to others.” [56:10.2]
When I survey my own life today, I sense that I am a willing agent of God’s evolutionary love. And to become even more willing and available, I resolve to let pure and free awareness enter into the equation. I invite it to come to the foreground, and I let anxious thoughts recede into the background. I do my best to prepare myself so that the divine will can be conveyed to a still and pliable mind. Then I wait and watch; I hold fast to a vigil for spiritual input. The subtle influences of the God Fragment become more recognizable to me against the backdrop of this open field of receptive awareness.120
On the other hand, I know that many folks may prefer a more relational approach to discerning the divine will, as described in this important passage.
The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God—with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning-value possible. Sharing is Godlike—divine. God shares all with the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, while they, in turn, share all things with the divine Sons and spirit Daughters of the universes. [111:5.1]
Communicating with our Divine Parent goes both ways, of course. I have found that when I am willing to share my needs and desires in prayer, the Indweller is willing to share its response to my listening mind—and this response is the will of God for me in that moment. This approach to seeking the divine will brings forward the more traditional I-Thou relationship in which God is understood in the second person as a loving and attentive Father and Mother. Along this line, the UB depicts the young Jesus as insisting on having “just a little talk with my Father in heaven” as a supplement to the rote bedtime prayers he had been taught by his parents. (See 123:7.3.)
Prayer, especially when it expresses gratefulness to God, has always been a healing and inspiring practice for me. Those who never share their lives in prayer may face a danger I call solipsistic rumination. Without an imagined “other” to converse with, their thoughts can spiral in on themselves, leading to fear, worry, obsession, or even addiction. To fill the vacuum, they insert their own self-derived notions without the benefit of peer review. They load useless speculation into the space in which prayerful sharing might have taken place. The better psychological choice for such folks is prayerful converse with a “near-by alter ego.” And this ostensibly imaginary companion is no mere fiction, because it is the Divine Indweller who is being directly addressed.
Enlightened prayer must recognize not only an external and personal God but also an internal and impersonal Divinity, the indwelling Adjuster. It is altogether fitting that man, when he prays, should strive to grasp the concept of the Universal Father on Paradise; but the more effective technique for most practical purposes will be to revert to the concept of a near-by alter ego, just as the primitive mind was wont to do, and then to recognize that the idea of this alter ego has evolved from a mere fiction to the truth of God’s indwelling mortal man in the factual presence of the Adjuster so that man can talk face to face, as it were, with a real and genuine and divine alter ego that indwells him and is the very presence and essence of the living God, the Universal Father. [91:3.7]
So now we have come full circle. According to the argument of this book, cosmic individuation requires the balanced activation of the intrinsic faculties of the self as we move toward complete identification with spirit. The result is circle-making progress—the ultimate expression of our sacred triad with its God-given elements. But there is one final element that crowns the whole process: our God-given purpose.
The Inner Discovery of Life Purpose
We’ve noted that the Thought Adjuster works within to actuate our model careers. And that’s because the Indweller is the literal seed-bearer of our ideal lives. Adjusters guide their human hosts throughout each day, but they also harbor a specific agenda—and they make every effort to impart this life plan to us over the course of our lives.
They arrive on the Day of Betrothal with a divine blueprint adapted to our genetic inheritance and the familial and social conditions we will encounter, we are told. The God Fragments operate within these parameters, perhaps in the same way that a human father might gently guide his child into an ideal profession because of his knowledge of the child’s natural strengths and how they match the current marketplace. Such a well-meaning human father may be wrong about what is best for his kid, but the Father Fragment actually knows what is ideal. The plan it carries in its bosom is our transcendental life purpose. Because this plan has been designed and projected by perfect beings who minister to us from the eternal central universe, it is of great import for soul-making and self-perfecting. Nevertheless, we are not obliged to choose this model career.
When Thought Adjusters indwell human minds, they bring with them the model careers, the ideal lives, as determined and foreordained by themselves and [others]. Thus they begin work with a definite and predetermined plan for the intellectual and spiritual development of their human subjects, but it is not incumbent upon any human being to accept this plan. It is their mission to effect such mind changes and to make such spiritual adjustments as you may willingly and intelligently authorize, to the end that they may gain more influence over the personality directionization. [110:2.1]
Every single living person, proclaims the UB, has an ideal self in potential. Realizing this promise is the purpose of our soul-making and self-perfecting. Developing a unified and balanced personality is the royal road to that ultimate goal.
The Urantia Revelation clarifies for us that the soul does not provide this model career—the Indwelling Spirit alone conveys this life purpose.121 And much is at stake in this distinction. True soul work entails the recognition, not the invention, of this unique aim of life. For most of us, our Thought Adjuster whispers news of our ideal career in childhood and adolescence. After a long series of increasingly accurate approximations, the model career may lodge itself in our soul. But if we conflate our idea of the evolving soul with the concept of the inner spirit, difficulties arise in our understanding of this crucial process.
Reincarnation on Earth Versus Purposeful Ascension
I am aware that many of my contemporaries, including some distinguished scientists, regard this matter differently. They believe that after we die our soul returns to Earth after having devised a life plan for its next incarnation. Many believe that the individual soul directs the action, along with input from other beings, perhaps after a review of the previous life. This evolving human soul chooses a new set of parents, a geographical location, and a new life mission—and then decides to reincarnate on Earth to learn new lessons and eliminate any karma debt created in its previous life or lives. But if the Urantia Revelation is right about the functions of the inner triad, this depiction of reincarnation can’t be literally correct. In particular, the idea that a relatively inexperienced evolving soul chooses its own model career—its true life purpose—may be a serious fallacy.
In this book I have explicated the idea that the evolving soul is a unique synthesis of the energies of our imperfect material mind and the perfect Thought Adjuster. As such, the soul is energetically and ontologically distinct from the spirit and very different indeed from the unique personality. So let’s bring these newly revealed ideas to bear in analyzing the ancient claim of reincarnation.
The UB teaches that the far-seeing Divine Indweller enters the budding mind of a newborn child with a special life plan that was formulated in eternity. This plan is the gift of the omniscient Father, who sorts and sifts the “personnel needs” of an evolving planet with the help of other divine agencies. The soul can never operate on its own in such matters, which are solely in the purview of the all-seeing infinite Creator and his coordinate Deities.
The picture of the overall role of the inner triad that we get from the UB is also far more intricate than the vague and varied descriptions we find in the lore of reincarnation. For example, the Indweller’s decision to enter the mind of a particular child occurs long after the Father confers the gift of unique personality. And remember that the Divine Fragment is seeking union with the personality and the growing soul at the same time that it attempts to mold the indwelled child into a mature man or woman who embodies their unique life purpose.
For clarity, allow me to restate this complex issue in another way.
According to the account of “selfhood design” I offer in this book, all souls begin down here as virgin entities. The personality (which is also unique and new) operates during our life on Earth through the vehicle of the material mind and helps generate a fresh human soul in cooperation with the Divine Fragment. After death, none of these members of our inner triad return to the world of their first appearance. (But there is a big exception, explained below.) Indeed, there is no compelling reason for returning to the kindergarten of Earth; a vast multiverse is out there to be explored, and our benefactors are eager for us to advance to the first grade.
Remember that a magnificent ascension regime has been organized on our behalf. Our survival into the afterlife is like a matriculation into a gigantic cosmic university of ascension to Paradise. The educational charter of this universal school is to graduate self-perfected, God-identified souls. Our intense life on Earth is worthy of very careful review after our death, and the harsh lessons learned here will inform our personalized afterlife curriculum. The new lesson plan developed for us will require, in the first place, that we address our basic deficits in feeling, thinking, and willing. But the key point here is that the universe is progressive and evolutionary—we simply must move on. The principal of the elementary school of the grand cosmos doesn’t need to keep recycling our souls back to a dangerous kindergarten on a lowly, crime-ridden, war-torn material planet.
As we go forward into the afterlife, we are given both individualized and group instruction. We meet other ascenders from millions of other worlds that have amazingly diverse forms of life and culture; later we can meet ascenders from other galaxies and even other superuniverses. Then we progress to the unspeakable grandeur of the central universe. As we socialize and ascend, our horizons grow immensely. We spend ages with beings of other orders who teach us and minister to us according to a course of learning unfathomable to educators on Earth.
All of this illustrates why cosmology is so crucial in this equation of soul evolution. Contemporary beliefs in reincarnation are almost all rooted in indigenous or pre-Copernican cosmologies that were cyclical rather than evolutionary. Most of these systems lack the theological sophistication and philosophic correction required to be serviceable in the integral age.
All that said, at least three factors listed in the Urantia text may explain why so many people, and in fact entire cultures, have come to believe that souls reincarnate:
1. Souls are nonlocal and thus are contactable. Research has established that human minds are capable of nonlocal activities such as clairvoyance, telepathy, remote viewing, distance healing, and many other psychic capacities. Accordingly, human souls are nonlocal as well. And if that is the case, I believe that it is a relatively simple matter for one’s soul to resonate with another soul in the “field of all souls” called the Supreme Being. As Carl Jung clearly showed, the collective unconscious is constituted by the archetypal affinities among all the souls of the past. Childhood and adult experiences, and especially the dramas and traumas of life, may cause us to resonate with preexisting souls in the nonlocal field who have had similar or related experiences. After the surprising experience of feeling a psychic resonance with another soul, we may project onto this experience the idea that this other soul is our own soul from a previous life, simply because of a personal religious predisposition based on an outdated cosmology.
2. All human minds are derived from the cosmic mind. I’ve explained several times that mind is sourced from the unitary Absolute Mind of the Infinite Spirit, which in turn is the source of the cosmic mind that self-distributes segmentations of mind to all humans in space-time. We read in the following statement that as a result, minds can have uncanny affinities to other minds, which may also help explain how we gravitate to the souls of others: “The fact of the cosmic mind explains the kinship of various types of human and superhuman minds. Not only are kindred spirits attracted to each other, but kindred minds are also very fraternal and inclined toward cooperation the one with the other. Human minds are sometimes observed to be running in channels of astonishing similarity and inexplicable agreement.” [16:6]
3. Some Thought Adjusters have indwelled other humans previous to the current indwelling. Although the UB teaches that neither the entity known as unique personality nor its associated soul can return to the Earth plane, it turns out that the Thought Adjuster can “reincarnate”—and this fact likely causes at least some of the confusion around the issue. The Adjuster is available to indwell another individual if the person formerly inhabited did not choose to survive to ascend in the afterlife. In addition, we are told that the soul and the personality of the nonsurvivor forever lose their associations with individualized consciousness; they become absorbed into the Supreme (the subject of the next chapter) as a contribution toward its evolution.
Thus, the Thought Adjuster of the nonsurvivor becomes a free agent who can indwell another person—but always on a different planet than that of the original indwelling. In other words, all personalities and all souls present on Earth are virgin, but this is not true of the God Fragments, who may have already inhabited a number of nonsurviving individuals. And I would not be surprised if many of you reading this book have been blessed with a spark of God that has already indwelled humans on other planets. These experienced Adjusters contain within themselves all the soul memories of the previous indwellee(s), and those records remain the eternal possession of that Adjuster. Such Adjusters do a better job in subsequent assignments because of their previous experience of inhabiting and adjusting other animal-origin human minds. If you are fortunate enough to possess such a veteran Indweller, it is plausible that if you received some intimation of a previous life (or lives), you could mistake it for a previous lifetime of your own. In other words, it is easy to confuse a past life on Earth with the actual life of some other personality on another inhabited planet.
Because so much is at stake, more research is needed beyond this rudimentary examination of the issue. And if we remember that the Indweller brings to us our ideal life plan, settling these questions becomes all the more important. That’s especially because the Urantia Revelation makes it clear that we are all subjects of “predestination”—that is, a predetermined blueprint of a model career—if we are willing to actualize this unique life purpose. The opportunity is superb, but the choice is always ours.
You are all subjects of predestination, but it is not foreordained that you must accept this divine predestination; you are at full liberty to reject any part or all of the Thought Adjusters’ program. [110:2.1]
114 See Diperna’s Streams of Wisdom: An Advanced Guide to Integral Spiritual Development (Integral Publishing House, 2014). His mentor, Daniel Brown, PhD, is an associate clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and is the author of fourteen books, including Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition (Wisdom Publications, 2006). Brown is also a translator of Tibetan texts who has maintained close relations with teachers of the Tibetan major lineages for more than thirty-five years. Pointing Out the Great Way has been called “a valuable synthesis of more than a thousand years of meditation instructions filtered through the author’s understanding of Tibetan and Western ways of describing the mind.”
115 “Integral Christ: Exploring the Kosmic Address of the Christ of the Urantia Revelation,” by Robert Kezer, Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, vol. 5, no. 3, p. 168.
116 This point of comparison holds true for most world-class mystics down through the centuries. The great Indian sage Ramakrishna had most likely achieved first-circle status and, to his great credit, even endeavored to break out of ethnocentric Hindiusm. But his quantitative soul growth as a monastic renunciant could not have been comparable to that of Jesus.
117 For those new to the UB, its narration provides vastly more information than the New Testament about the events of the final week of Jesus’s life. The story that begins with his entry into Jerusalem and ends with his death fills sixteen papers and is 145 pages long (in the original edition of The Urantia Book).
118 “The Father in heaven desired the bestowal Son to finish his earth career naturally, just as all mortals must finish up their lives on earth and in the flesh. Ordinary men and women cannot expect to have their last hours on earth and the supervening episode of death made easy by a special dispensation. Accordingly, Jesus elected to lay down his life in the flesh in the manner which was in keeping with the outworking of natural events, and he steadfastly refused to extricate himself from the cruel clutches of a wicked conspiracy of inhuman events which swept on with horrible certainty toward his unbelievable humiliation and ignominious death.” [183:1.2]
119 “During the slumber season the Adjuster attempts to achieve only that which the will of the indwelt personality has previously fully approved by the decisions and choosings which were made during times of fully wakeful consciousness, and which have thereby become lodged in the realms of the supermind, the liaison domain of human and divine interrelationship. While their mortal hosts are asleep, the Adjusters try to register their creations in the higher levels of the material mind . . . . [But] it is extremely dangerous to postulate as to the Adjuster content of the dream life. The Adjusters do work during sleep, but your ordinary dream experiences are purely physiologic and psychologic phenomena.” [110:3.5]
120 Meditation lets the gross currents of the material mind drop away. Ideas based on fear, envy, anger, and other negative emotions drown out the input of the spirit-self, whose impulses often transcend ordinary ideation: “The realization of the recognition of spiritual values is an experience which is superideational. There is no word in any human language which can be employed to designate this ‘sense,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘intuition,’ or ‘experience’ which we have elected to call God-consciousness.” [103:1.6]
121 Possibly ratifying this idea is The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling (Grand Central Publishing, 1997) by renowned post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman. In this important book, Hillman proposes what he calls the “acorn theory,” according to which an individual’s “life code” enters the child very early in life—which is not unlike the UB’s concept of predestination. The analogue, Hillman says, is that the oak tree is inside an acorn. The acorn will grow into an oak as long as it is able to grow. If it is not specifically thwarted, it will inevitably become an oak and not some other tree species. Hillman offers numerous examples to show how many people come in with “acorn-like” gifts that have no other explanation, because their talent manifests against all odds. His most vivid example is Judy Garland, but he cites innumerable other examples such as Charles Darwin, Henry Ford, Billy Graham, and Kurt Cobain. “I believe we have been robbed of our true biography,” writes Hillman. “[It’s our true] destiny that’s written into the acorn—and we go to therapy to recover it. That innate image can’t be found, however, until we have a psychological theory that grants primary psychological reality to the call of fate. . . . Repression, the key to personality structure in all therapy schools, is not of the past but of the acorn and the past mistakes we have made in our relation to it.” I submit that the Urantia Revelation offers the kind of psychological theory that supports Hillman’s discovery.