To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
–William Blake
Consider the four-dimensional world we typically experience. From where you and I sit in 4D, it may seem that our inner life is a largely private affair. Our phones and computers may be under surveillance, but when it comes to our innermost thoughts and feelings, we assume that we live behind a veil of secrecy. We may believe that in our solitary, off-the-grid moments we can do or think whatever we like without notice or scrutiny. But in reality, at least especially according to NDE experiencers and the Urantia Revelation, we are always “on stage” for those beyond the veil. Beings in higher dimensions discreetly monitor our “live performance” through a cosmic one-way mirror and lovingly minister to us as needed. Plus, our spiritually significant thoughts and actions are in some measure recorded in our evolving souls, far beyond our awareness.
By all accounts, this illusory curtain of privacy disappears when we enter the afterlife. In a manner comparable to NDE stories, the Urantia Revelation explains that a celestial team in full possession of our soul transcript swings into action to enable the unforgettable moment of our reawakening after death and to welcome us. The UB gives a technically specific listing of what transpires next.18 At death, we are told, we enter a resurrection chamber on high.19 Our personality, soul, and Indwelling Spirit are placed in the custody of a celestial resurrection team. On cue, the team reassembles the constituent parts of our inner triad, minus the body-mind subsystem we knew on Earth. Our triad is coupled with a body similar to the previous human form (albeit of a slightly more rarefied substance), plus a supermaterial mind endowment—but unfortunately, no harps are handed out.20 Presto! We emerge into the afterlife on a world at a slightly higher frequency than that of Earth,21 where we continue to learn, love, rest, drink, and eat and enjoy a wider range of vision and sensory experience.
With the exception of those who passed on to the afterlife before adulthood, we begin our new heavenly career sporting a physiognomy and demeanor that approximates our adult self back on Earth. We will have been retrofitted with our old personality, so if you were Rodney Dangerfield back on Earth, you’ll be instantly recognizable on high by your former associates—except that perhaps now you’ll “get some respect.”
Aside from the thrill that accompanies our first moment of awareness in this new realm, our soul evolution does not skip a beat: “You will resume your intellectual training and spiritual development at the exact level whereon they were interrupted by death. . . . You begin over there right where you leave off down here.” [47:3.7]
My sympathies to those of you who have hoped that your karma will be erased by the experience of surviving. Your strictly brain-based memories are gone forever—which is why the nonmaterial record we call the soul is an essential ingredient. On the other hand, don’t think of the higher worlds as being immaterial; they are physical spheres of another type known as architectural worlds, and are artificially constructed, not naturally evolved. “The material universe is always the arena wherein take place all spiritual activities; spirit beings and spirit ascenders live and work on physical spheres of material reality.” [12:8.1]
In the immediate afterlife, we’re not left alone and on our own like a solitary pioneer trekking into unknown parts. Those who were assigned a guardian seraphim on Earth will meet—and literally see—this loyal personal angel, who is one of the first to greet us. This being now becomes our daily companion.22 Otherwise, we are assigned heavenly companions and teachers who are equally apprised of our developmental status. We’re assigned a place to dwell and are given a ten-day “holiday” for looking up deceased friends and relatives. But for many of us, our advent on the first higher world of the afterlife is only brief cameo—we quickly move on.23
NDErs tell us that they are initially shocked at being greeted by deceased relatives who apparently had foreknowledge of our death. They also report their surprise to discover that celestial beings have immediate access to their “soul reel” and are ready for immediate playback and scene-by-scene analysis in their life review. They soon realize that they’ve been like actors on a stage engaged in a performance that was monitored by a heavenly audience who never judged them harshly.
If you will permit me to continue with our movie metaphor, the Urantia Revelation adds much more detail to this picture, explaining that our immediate support crew is a tiny part of much bigger production. Apparently, a mighty celestial team is weaving everyone’s performances into a vast story of cosmic evolution headed toward our collective denoument—the grandest musical of all, with an unheard-of richness of story and song and dance. But while existing NDE accounts of life reviews offer detailed close-ups, the Urantia Revelation offers a wider context—a long, wide shot, if you will—from which we can derive meaning from our contacts with spirit before and after death, and from here to eternity.
A Unified Stream of Guidance and Ministry
With the UB’s depiction in hand, we can now delight in these otherworldly descriptions with less embarrassment before the skeptical gaze of the modern world. I can say this because, at least in my view, the revelation provides for the first time a philosophically coherent and scientifically plausible framework for understanding the celestial realms. Because it frames the universe so widely, the Urantia text goes further than any other previous teaching in identifying the nature and purposes of our unseen friends on high. In its first two parts, comprising 56 Papers, we discover the vast family of affectionate personalities or entities who are sitting just off stage, mercifully ministering to each of us as individuals while nurturing the collective evolution of the whole.24
Not all our ready-at-hand spirit helpers are personal beings. The off-camera crew includes the impersonal divine reality of the God Fragment. Technically, this entity should be considered prepersonal, a term that will be explained later. The revelation of its nature is crucial to our study because, as noted, the Indwelling Spirit cocreates our souls in the highest reaches of our superconscious mind, working in liaison with our meaningful life decisions. It monitors our thoughts and feelings, and subtly adjusts our mental processes in a Godward direction without violating our free will. It patiently guides us, both during and after our life on Earth, to our ultimate destiny in perfection. The UB also calls the God Fragment by the odd names of Thought Adjuster and Mystery Monitor. I will say much more about this crucial divine gift in coming chapters.
When it comes to our personal spiritual practice, the Urantia Revelation invites us to consider that, moment-by-moment, our act is being witnessed, appreciated, and guided by loving beings and Deities. Each of us receives gentle stage direction sufficient for perfecting our role in each scene in our lives, so that we may deposit our best performance reel in the living cosmic archive of universal history.
Speaking in religious terms, our willingness to take direction is the equivalent of doing the will of God: “To do the will of God,” states Jesus in the UB, “is the progressive experience of becoming more and more like God, and God is the source and destiny of all that is good and beautiful and true.” [130:2.7] We know we are engaged with the divine will when we feel love and gratitude toward God, are increasingly inspired to love our fellows, feel an urge for unselfish social service, and when we are moved to choose the good, beautiful, or true option in each life decision.
The Personal Heart of Cosmic Reality
This is my belief: The Urantia Book is a disclosure of ultimate cosmic realities and the divine personalities behind them. At the same time, I realize that a cursory look at the UB’s huge catalog of higher beings can be bewildering. I think it is fair to wonder why the text must go so far with its listings of odd-sounding beings such as Universe Circuit Supervisors, Perfectors of Wisdom, Tertiary Supernaphim, Ministering Spirits of the Central Universe, and Mighty Messengers. I am aware that many inquirers, upon viewing these unwieldy lists, conclude that the UB is another obscure channeled tome destined to be ignored on dusty bookshelves.
But be patient, dear reader—for it all depends on one’s premise.
For some esotericists and New Agers, the supreme organizing principle of the cosmos is energy; for others, unity or nonduality. Mind or consciousness is the key for some, and for others, it’s evolution. But for the Urantia Revelation, the supreme premise is personhood. The centrality of personality is the surprising core of this teaching, to which we now turn. Later chapters, especially chapter 8, offer a more advanced presentation of this issue, building upon the present discussion.
In any situation whatever, human or divine, we learn that the personalities involved are the most precious and crucial factor. “Everything nonspiritual in human experience, excepting personality, is a means to an end. Every true relationship of mortal man with other persons—human or divine—is an end in itself.” [112:2.8] In other words, the reality of the personal—at any level and in any dimension—is the most vital element of the wide cosmos. The personal is the point.
“The universe is mind made and personality managed.” [1:6.7] God in eternity plans and creates all things and beings. Deity personally sets in motion the impersonal laws of nature, and then oversees and manages the outworking of every facet of evolutionary reality through coordinate and subordinate Deity associates. For example, we read that single-celled life is formulated in their laboratories and then planted on newly habitable planets by specialized personal beings known as Life Carriers, who go on to carefully oversee and condition biological evolution over billions of years. (Paper 36 is entirely devoted to their story.) And the lawful physical evolution of stars and galaxies is planned and catalyzed by special supervising personalities—something like cosmic engineers. This über-science-fiction corps of beings are, like the Life Carriers, revealed for the first time in the Urantia Revelation. (See Paper 29, “The Universe Power Directors.”)
Philosophically speaking, energy, mind, consciousness, evolution, and even spirit are subsidiary to that which is personal. They all function in service to the dignity of personality, which is superordinate in relation to all these factors. Thus it would be fair the call the Urantia Revelation a personalist teaching, in line with the contemporary philosophic movement known as personalism.25 You’ll recall that personality, or personhood, is also the central element of the inner triad of our self-system.
So, what is meant in the UB by having the status of personhood? The first point to bear in mind is that Urantia Book’s definition of personality diverges greatly from that of today’s psychology, which regards personality as the pattern of our outward human behavior—the observable set of traits, attitudes, skills, or type of temperament we exhibit. But according to the Urantia text, each of us has a God-given personality that is unchanging. All other factors of self change or grow, but personality does not and cannot. “Throughout all stages of evolutionary growth, there is one part of you that remains absolutely unaltered, and that is personality—permanence in the presence of change.” [112.1]
And yet, as we will see in much more detail later, personality is somehow able to host our living reality and unify the attributes of our subjectivity while also being the very source of will, creativity, and self-consciousness. Our unchanging personality is, paradoxically, the factual foundation of the objective reality of our ever-changing human subjectivity.
To be a person is to enjoy an exclusive and singular perspective on reality that is unique in all universes. Personhood is that attribute of being that lets us exist as sovereigns in our own sphere of self-determination and creativity, allowing us to freely choose experiences, grow in knowledge and virtue, and evolve a personal soul.
Of course, at the same time, each unique human personality is only one of a near-infinite number of other unique persons. Angels and humans share this divine endowment of personality, not as something we attain, but as a sheer gift that remains with us and as us for an eternity. Further, being a person permits us to recognize and love other persons as equals—spontaneously so. Even after our radical transmutation in the resurrection halls of the afterlife, we can instantaneously recognize and be recognized by those we once knew on Earth. Because personality is supreme over all other factors of selfhood, an acquaintance we may run into at a high school reunion or even in the afterlife can intuitively seem like “that someone I knew before”—even if their physical appearance has changed drastically.
To be a person is to be adorable by nature, lovable almost by reason of divine fiat; behold any young child to confirm that truth. And that’s why our Divine Parents cannot help but love each one of us, their children. Likewise, we can’t help but fall in love with other persons once we get to know them over time. The glory of the idiosyncratic uniqueness of a free and living person is what arouses our love and affection for them.
If all this sounds too abstract, consider the lesson of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Recall the scene when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Ebenezer Scrooge a God’s-eye view of the personalities of Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, and the rest of Cratchit’s humble family joyously celebrating Christmas Day with what little they have. Scrooge soon understands them in the way that those on the other side of the veil always do, sees the error of his ways, and falls in love with them. This story is in fact Dickens’s own rendition of an NDE life review.
Personality is both that which knows and loves and that which can be loved and known. Theologically speaking, we can say that Deity personality is, by definition, absolute in its ability to know other persons and infinite in its capacity to love them. The Urantia Revelation (and most Christian theologians) teach that personhood is the central characteristic of God, who is absolute love personified. But the UB goes further in its celebration of the personal: “Personality is not simply an attribute of God. . . . Personality, in the supreme sense, is the revelation of God to the universe of universes.” [1:5.13] As such, the personalness of Deity transcends God’s other core characteristic—that of being pure spirit.
God as Father and Mother is the absolute person and the source and destiny of all personalities, and alone gifts us with personhood. We’ve noted as well that God confers on us a pure-spirit fragment as an additional and essential part of our self-system. But again, the personality portion of our selfhood is antecedent to and independent of our spirit endowment. In other words, for you and me, the component of personality in our self-system has logical (actually, theological) priority over the Indwelling Spirit feature in the inner trinity, especially since our personhood is the source of sovereign free will.
God as Infinite Love Personified and Self-Distributed
If God is infinite love personified, it follows that personality relationships of love and equality must be central to God’s nature. God, the absolute Divine Person, is inherently relational, and yet is One God and One Universal Power. But how can God be unitary, self-determining, and self-subsisting, yet essentially loving and relational?
The UB asserts in its opening pages that all of reality emanates from three primal personalities, the Eternal Trinity—which are nonetheless perfectly one and seamlessly unified in the Father. Again, how can this be?
Divine personality is not self-centered; self-distribution and sharing of personality characterize divine freewill selfhood. Creatures crave association with other personal creatures; Creators are moved to share divinity with their universe children; the personality of the Infinite is disclosed as the Universal Father, who shares reality of being and equality of self with two co-ordinate personalities, the Eternal Son and the [Infinite Spirit]. [10:1.3]
In other words, it is God’s ineluctible sharing of himself—his “fatherly” (or “motherly”) bestowal of selfhood on others—that reveals the primal nature of personality for the ages. “There is inherent in the selfless, loving, and lovable nature of the Universal Father something which causes him to reserve to himself the exercise of only those powers and that authority which he apparently finds it impossible to delegate or to bestow.” [10:1.1]
A community of absolute beings that we call the Eternal Trinity is the result of the Father’s passion for the articulation and self-distribution of infinite love that occurred in the eternity of the past, establishing thereby the pattern for all subsequent communities and families in all domains.
According to the authors of the Urantia text, it was a virtual philosophic miracle that the theologians of the early Christian Church were able to establish—in broad outline—a generally correct doctrine of the Trinity, even in the face of a thousand years of Hebraic monotheism. This was possible because of their proximity to the powerful historic reality of the life of Jesus, whose claim to be the literal Son of God—one in essence with the Father yet distinct from him—was accepted by the early Church against other plausible interpretations of his miraculous career.26
Neither Judaism nor Islam could accept the disruptive notion that the person of Jesus could be in any way the divine equivalent of the Creator Father and also human. Both religions held firm to the idea of God’s indivisibility and oneness—that there can be no coequal Son of God. For example, perhaps Islam’s most important belief about Allah (God) is summed up in the word Tawhid, the pristine notion of Allah’s utter uniqueness. Tawhid signifies that God can have “no partners,” no offspring that are equal in divinity. In Surah 112 of the Qur’an we read, “He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; None is born of Him, nor is He born; And there is none like Him.”
No doubt about it, Muhammad’s clear-cut monotheism offered a distinct advance over the polytheism of his contemporaries. To their credit, his followers have consistently taught and celebrated this great truth of the oneness and unity of a personal God of love and mercy, uplifting and blessing innumerable souls over the centuries.
Trinitarians hold high this same concept of the One God and consider it a great truth, but only one among other essential truths. Speaking to the nondualist mystic as well as to the monistic philosopher and the monotheist theologian, the UB asserts that the scope of the love and versatility of Deity can be even greater than to emanate from a single universal center. And the Urantia revelation stretches us with an equally important truth: the notion of God as parental at all levels. This reality exists even within the Father’s exclusive sphere of eternity, where the phenomenon of fatherhood-and-sonship first appears in the cosmos—but of course, gender is not literal at this level.
Consider: what sort of God would populate a vast universe with human creatures raised by mothers and fathers? Doesn’t it seem likely that such a God would co-parent us, along with other Deity partners? God as Father sets it all in motion, becoming the “first parent” in eternity by uniting with the Son to parent the third Person of the Trinity, the Infinite Spirit—and the three create and love all other living beings. No wonder Native Americans sometimes refer to the high God as “Grandfather.”
In other words, a loving Father who is the ultimate parent of a universal family must have his own “family of equals” that allows a replete expression of God’s regard for other beings—thereby providing the pattern of human parentage and human relationships of love, friendship, and mutual regard. And, more to the point of our inquiry: a loving and parental God would provide for our soul evolution by creating a rich array of divine agencies—some coordinate, and others subordinate—that nurture us from infancy to eventual perfection. The Urantia Revelation explains in detail how the two other coordinate divine personalities, the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, provide additional reality domains that become discrete platforms for specific ministries to us as their beloved creatures. As we will discuss in the next section, the Son and the Spirit are genuinely coequal sources and centers of true realities that are essential factors in soul growth and self-perfection.
The Eternal Trinity and the Origin of Evolution
I imagine that you, dear reader, may be reaching for a stimulant. Instead, let’s slow down and breathe deeply here, because I need to insert a preliminary philosophic step if we are to be intellectually rigorous. We cannot truly embrace a Trinitarian theology unless we first entertain the concept of infinity. So, with another big inhale, let’s give this a try, as we join hands with Alice in Wonderland and leap down the rabbit hole of divinity reality. In this mysterious opening of infinity, we find that things can “eternalize” and “deitize”; that stuff can be both one and three at the same time; and that other paradoxes can abound “six ways before Sunday.” So, to keep you by my side during this demanding section, a bit of humor will lighten up a dense discussion that provides essential background for understanding the method and scope of soul-making and self-perfecting.
God’s first (theoretic) act of self-distribution led to a procession (outside of time) of two coequal divine personalities—as well as the promulgation of universal impersonal forces (as in, “the Force is with you”) and the generation of time-space evolutionary reality (as in, you and me and Alice plus the White Rabbit).
But prior to that, God subsisted as the All—as a static infinite.
In a real sense, God’s status of being nothing-but-infinite was limiting; and this is the great paradox. Consider: God is at first bound on all sides by an all-pervading infinity, subsumed in a “prison” of unqualified absoluteness with no formal distinctions between one thing and another.
Imagine: one could find no Alice, no White Rabbit, and not even the hole down to the center of the Earth, for they were all absorbed in unqualified infinity. To mix our metaphors recklessly, it was like a dark night in which all cows are black.
If there was to be any differentiation of things and beings, there had to be a liberation from what the UB calls the “fetters of infinitude,” since God’s infinity was “diffused” in an undifferentiated manner throughout the potentials of Total Deity. (About now, Alice is passing the marmalade jar.)
Thanks to God, the advent of the Trinity facilitates the Father’s escape from this predicament.
The Paradise Trinity of eternal Deities facilitates the Father’s escape from personality absolutism. The Trinity perfectly associates the limitless expression of God’s infinite personal will with the absoluteness of Deity. The Eternal Son and the various Sons of divine origin, together with the Conjoint Actor [i.e., the Third Person of the Trinity] and his universe children, effectively provide for the Father’s liberation from the limitations otherwise inherent in primacy, perfection, changelessness, eternity, universality, absoluteness, and infinity. [1:0.1]
Imagine now that three great cosmic stages of unfolding are to be revealed as we sail farther down the rabbit role of eternity. In the Father’s first stage of self-articulation, or what might be called his drama of trinitization, he takes a momentous leap so as to liberate himself from unqualified infinitude. He jumps back, so to speak, to unveil his own inherent attribute of absolute personhood. By this act, he eternalizes his Son, the Second Person of Deity.
We have hereupon cracked the undifferentiated cosmic egg and dropped it in the fryer, and a yoke appears in its center. Toast, tea, and marmalade are served.
The Father now fraternizes with his Son. He recognizes his divine equal in perfection of manifestation. God has discovered his attribute of fatherhood, and is now free to create additional sons and daughters. He can bestow personality on other intelligent beings who will dwell at successively lower levels of universe reality. And he can fraternize with them as well.
Prepare yourself now, you will be quizzed later on this further clarifying statement:
By the technique of trinitization the Father divests himself of that unqualified spirit personality which is the Son, but in so doing he constitutes himself the Father of this very Son and thereby possesses himself of unlimited capacity to become the divine Father of all subsequently created, eventuated, or other personalized types of intelligent will creatures. As the absolute and unqualified personality the Father can function only as and with the Son, but as a personal Father he continues to bestow personality upon the diverse hosts of the differing levels of intelligent will creatures, and he forever maintains personal relations of loving association with this vast family of universe children. [10:2.1]
Well said! And now, the second crucial phase is made manifest as we fall deeper, down and down and down.
In constituting himself as the Father of an Eternal Son, the Father has eternalized a coordinate Deity who is the perfect revelation of the Father’s personal nature. As such, the Son is the absolute paragon, the eternal pattern, of all personality reality. In addition, we are told that the Son—who shines in the heart of the heavens like a billion suns—pops up as the infinite source of spiritual energy to the universes. His drawing power as the Absolute Person is known as spiritual gravity.
But stop a moment. In this act of Deity-dualization, a new divinity tension is created. The Son should be described as the personality-absolute. But now an impersonal absolute known as Paradise must eternalize. We are told: “The Father, in eternalizing the Original Son, simultaneously revealed the infinity potential of his nonpersonal self as Paradise.” [11:9.3]
It’s as if the absolute of the personal must be balanced by the absolute of the impersonal. In fact, we are told, this is the case, since the infinite Father encompasses all possible realities, personal and impersonal and anything in between.
Therefore, because of the astounding transaction that led to the differentiation of the Eternal Son, an equally stupendous (but nonpersonal) center of energy, pattern, and power also comes into being in eternity. This center is the absolute source of all that is impersonal, and it steps up as the gravitational center of material reality.
We are falling ever deeper now, and a third great stage is deemed as inevitable: the procession to the Third Person, the Infinite Spirit. This august and magnificent being is sometimes called the Paradise Mother Spirit, so I will refer to her as “she.” Also known as the Conjoint Actor, the Spirit is the personification of the conjoint partnership of the Father and Son. The Spirit is not just their rep—she is their union.
The Urantia Revelation teaches that an eternal central universe resides at the center of all things, with Paradise is its center. As the Third Person now manifests in eternity, we are told that space comes into being, and the central universe eternalizes.
The cycle of trinitization has concluded, and this primal association of the Father and Son, now manifest as the person of the Infinite Spirit, is pregnant with a great plan for even further self-distribution. This blueprint is the great project of the ages, the promulgation of experiential reality and all the things and beings that shall populate these evolving realms of space and time, including rabbits and their rabbit holes. (See “The Grand Project of the Ages” in chapter 11 for details.)
While the Father is love absolute, the Son is unqualified mercy. The Eternal Son is the first being in the universe to experience sonship, which affords him a special feeling of solidarity for all of us, who are also children of parents. And while the Father is perfect love and the Son is divine mercy, the Paradise Mother Spirit is applied love. She now becomes the chief divine administrator, and her portfolio embraces the mission of extending her “love app” to the vast multiplicity of creatures on the habitable worlds of space. All these children want to come forth, but someone has to be their Mother! So the Infinite Mother Spirit steps up. And with this, the Eternal Trinity launches creature life in space and time. As the Tao Te Ching put it, “the One became the three, which became the ten thousand.”
The secret is out: an evolutionary universe of trillions of children was all along in potentia (as Thomas Aquinas might have said) in the Father’s unfathomable infinitude.
Let us get some ice cream and recap: Once the Father had demonstrated the absolute pattern for personality, which was eternally personified as the Eternal Son, then the absolute of nonpersonal reality appeared, and in fact had to materialize for the sake of balance and symmetry. Again, in this eternity-moment, we witness the appearance of the absolute of matter, Paradise. Because Paradise is the singularity at the center of all universes, this principle establishes the fact that matter exists in all dimensions of reality. This means that all worlds, including the most rarefied spheres and even Paradise itself, operate on a physical foundation.27
Recapping further, we’ve seen that the two primal Deities, the Father and Son, have agreed to a conjoint program of universal creation upon this foundation. They decide to create evolving and experiential children in the universes of space and time as a counterpoise to the eternal, nonevolving residents of the central universe (that de facto already exist). Their agreement personalizes as a Deity, often known as the Conjoint Actor, who thereby completes the trinitization party. She is also called the God of Action, the Infinite Spirit, and the Divine Mother. She is the detail-oriented minister for the astonishing plan of self-distribution into the evolutionary realms of creature life and creature ascension to Paradise.
Following the momentum of creation already set in motion by her two Deity partners, the Infinite Mother Spirit carries forward the seven possible permutations (or expressions) of the original Deity threesome. Alice, who loved numbers, would likely have been thrilled because each of these permutations receives it own personalization as a Deity. Collectively they are known as the Seven Master Spirits. These beings are previously unrevealed on our world, but the sacred significance of the number seven has certainly been intuited over the centuries by prophets and numerologists.
This diversification of God into seven Master Deities is why—as exclusively revealed in the Urantia Revelation—seven great inhabitable superuniverses evolve into being in space in an orderly and majestic rendition of the Big Bang. If you are interested in the astrophysics of the seven superuniverses, you may enjoy Appendix A, “Urantia Cosmology and Current Astrophysics,” which details the fact that said superuniverses are actually immense galaxy superclusters, many of which have been identified by our scientists. Our Milky Way is a member of one these great agglomerations, known as the Virgo Supercluster. Further, we are told that these great formations rotate (counterclockwise) around a universal center or Great Attractor (that is, Paradise)—which, as you will recall, is the source of material gravity.
In general, then, by working with her Deity compatriots in the Trinity, the Infinite Spirit now places derivative Deities in charge of seven domains of space-time. Their cosmic charter includes the evolution of humanoid creatures like us. Curioser and curioser, is it not, dear Alice?
A Brief Anatomy of the Universe of Universes
Calling the grand cosmos a “universe of universes” provides an apt description, for the cosmic realities depicted in The Urantia Book are bigger and far older than that described in today’s astrophysics.
Space-time is unbelievably far flung, we learn, but the evolutionary domains are not diffuse and unstructured, despite appearances. The organization of galaxies is not random and inchoate, since they are planned and created by infinite personalities. And, as we have seen, at the center of this cosmic holarchy is the central universe, with Paradise as its heart. This center is stationary; the evolving physical universes comprise its periphery and are always in motion. They rotate in the shape of a stupendous cosmic disk around the central universe in a configuration of five vast rings, each one composed of innumerable galaxy clusters, galaxy superclusters, and even bigger agglomerations that today’s astrophysicists call galaxy filaments. This great disk strikes an image not unlike the Medicine Wheel of Native American cosmology.28
The innermost ring of the five is the only currently inhabited zone of the evolving cosmos; stop to ponder that the four other rings of galaxies are not inhabited at this time. The inhabited inner ring is known as the grand universe. It consists of the seven great galaxy superclusters that we have introduced as superuniverses, each of which consists of one-hundred thousand local universes. Whereas a superuniverse contains up to a trillion inhabited planets, each local universe can evolve up to ten million of them.
And finally, the entirety of cosmic reality, inclusive of the grand universe and the central universe, is referred to as the master universe. The master universe has a center, as we have noted, but if a spaceship were to approach the horizon of this cosmic gravitational center, it would seem to disappear at any one point.29 The eternally existent central universe, we are told, is inhabited by perfect beings and the absolute Creator Deities, who provide the unique patterns for personalities such as us in the perfecting universes. These exalted beings lack one precious thing: the challenge and the thrill of soul-making and self-perfecting described in this book.
The Trinity in Time and Space
Eternity loves the creatures of time; and in a real sense, the eternals need us as we need them. Therefore, eternity makes provision for the sustainable administration of the time domains.
The evolving universes are managed by divine personalities who are designed for the outworking of eternal love in these imperfect realms. In fact, our personal growth is meaningful only if understood in the context of the divine activities of these loving beings, both Deities and angelic beings. (Section 2 in the Special Supplement offers a listing of only a few of these affectionate beings who serve at different levels of the evolving universes, and who also had a hand in authoring Papers in the UB.)
The galaxy superclusters—the great superuniverses—constitute the largest unit of cosmic administration. Managing a universe of thousands of inhabited galaxies requires inconceivably efficient organization, and the UB offers an exclusive glimpse of this apparatus.
But let’s take a few steps down to the local universe level of administration. At this level, we discover the very important beings known as our immediate Creator Parents, who, we are told, are of direct origin from the members of the Trinity.30 The identities of our own two local universe Deities may come as a surprise. They are Christ himself—he who incarnated here as Jesus—and his divine feminine consort, who is known as the local universe Mother Spirit. Christ is often known as Christ Michael, or simply Michael. These two, Michael and Mother, are complemental Creators, roughly akin to the gendered divine couples we find in world mythology such as Isis and Osiris or Shiva and Shakti.
Together as our Creator Parents, Michael and Mother originated our “local” family, which currently includes nearly four million inhabited planets. One of these worlds is Earth—which is known on high by the name “Urantia.” It was the Deity prerogative of Michael and Mother to set in motion the evolution of life on each of these worlds through their various agencies of life origination and evolutionary overcontrol (detailed at length in Part II of the Urantia text, “The Local Universe”).
Christ and Mother create the material infrastructure of the local universe. They also create the angelic host and the planetary celestial government that carefully watch over us, including the seraphim (the direct offspring of the Mother) who are personally assigned to guide us in coordination with our Indwelling Spirit—all in order to grow our souls toward fusion. Germane as well to our evolving soul is the fact that Christ and Mother Spirit maintain personal relationships with every one of their human creatures through their Spirit of Truth (the spirit of Christ) and Holy Spirit (the spirit of the Mother), influences that also guide our decisions and actions. Learn more about them in Appendix B, “The Local Universe Creators: Mother Spirit and Christ Michael.”
The Goal of Perfection in the Afterlife
We begin our ascent from our local universe, with Paradise as the ultimate goal. But all along the way inward and upward to the central universe, we make stops at intermediate destinations. You and I will inhabit many heavenly places in our long career of ascension after death. These worlds constitute an educational regime that is far, far beyond the conception of anything envisioned in any scripture. After a long journey, we will meet and fraternize with perfect beings in the central universe who will teach us the ways of perfection, and we will share with them our discoveries on the enthralling path of experiential achievement—the work of soul evolution.
Simplistic ideas about the soul’s destiny are provided in the Gospel of John, where Jesus teaches that believers will be rewarded with an eternal life in heaven. In fact, those who are “born again” actually gain an eternal life now: “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish” (John 10:28). This offer of an eternal existence now and in an endless afterlife strikes some of us as a great truism. But at the time of Jesus or in the ensuing centuries, almost nothing specific was known about what goes on in the heavenly estate. Before the rise of the NDE phenomenon, modern Western ideas about the afterlife mainly derived from the stark and eccentric images of St. John’s Book of Revelation, a few passages in the Old and New Testaments, and especially from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. As a result, a certain archaic and quaint lore has come down to the modern world.
For example, imagine the typical Christian living in Chicago in the 1930s, such as those who read the original Papers of the Urantia Revelation. (See their story in the Special Supplement.) If they thought of it at all, they might have imagined heaven as a place populated by robed saints and Rubenesque angels—a one-stop haven of happiness where disembodied humans dwelled in adoration of Christ and Mary.
Educated Catholics among them might have drawn from Dante’s vision of heaven in The Divine Comedy. And it is interesting to note that some of Dante’s images poetically foreshadow the Urantia Revelation. Throughout his journey in the Paradiso, Dante has been led upward through the spheres, first by the Roman poet Virgil, then by Beatrice. Upon attaining the Seventh Sphere, Dante views and then climbs the ladder of Jacob (a famous biblical image that appears in Jacob’s dream at Genesis 28:12), which signifies the ascent of the soul to God.
Finally, having ascended to the “sphere of the fixed stars,” Dante is met by St. Bernard, who escorts him to the empyrean, the dimensionless highest heaven, the moral center of the cosmos that both contains and exceeds all time and space. Dante now stands before circular rows of seats reserved for all the souls of the saved. With much help, especially from Mary, the Queen of Heaven, he finally sees the blazing “Point of Light and Love,” which is God. The Source of all things is surrounded by the angelic hierarchies, which appear as nine orders of angels who take the form of nine concentric circles that spin around the brilliant point of God’s light at the very center of the empyrean. An immense circular light emanates from God, and “living light pours round and through” the poet.
Like Paul on the road to Damascus, Dante is overwhelmed by this great light from heaven; also like Paul, he is blinded. But he then is given new sight that bestows the beatific vision. Standing alone before the divine luminosity and gazing at its holy center, he observes that God’s light becomes three concentric circles shining, like a halo, around His countenance.
Within its depthless clarity of substance
I saw the Great Light shine into three circles
In three clear colors bound in one same space.31
It is a pleasure to contemplate this rich imagery. But in a monumental leap beyond such mythic and poetic notions, the UB unveils its stupendous ascension scheme, featuring reams of almost technical detail about the regime of afterlife education, socialization, and consciousness growth. This vast plan of mortal ascension, we are told, is one of three key components of the Father’s Plan of Perfection Attainment [7:4.3].
This plan has built-in equipment. The potential for survival is inherent in God’s bestowal of the Indwelling Spirit and a unique personality. And we’ve already noted how these two elements of the inner triad provide the conditions for the evolution of a personal soul, in concert with our intrinsic body-mind endowment.32
The other two components of the Perfection Plan are the personnel support features: the Plan of Bestowal and the Plan of Mercy Ministry. To recap: In addition to the endowments from the Father, our efforts are also supported by the grace of the downreach of Deity in the form of periodic avatar incarnations and daily angelic ministry. These habiliments of progress explain why willing humans always graduate upward. If and when we do, we sojourn in the afterlife on increasingly higher worlds in the company of our compatriots, who are also self-perfecting mortals from innumerable inhabited planets like ours, real extraterrestrials.
Like Dante, ascenders are led forth by heavenly personal guides (our guardian seraphim and many others) on the slow journey inward to the extradimensional heart of the cosmos, eventually to be taught the truths of eternity on the spheres of the central universe, which is named Havona. Here we meet those superb inhabitants of eternity, beings who dwell in a zone of unimaginable grandeur but who drink in our narratives of the rugged experiential life that we led as we climbed “Jacob’s ladder.”
Our goal is Paradise, the culmination of our heavenly ascension. We complete the journey there, having become perfected beings known as finaliters—exalted and deified persons. Finaliters have by definition finalized their evolution in the afterlife. They have exhausted all cosmic potentials for personal advancement in every dimension of selfhood. They are perfected souls of light, complete in their development of God-consciousness and replete in their range of universe experience and cosmic socialization.
I know that at first glance, this description of the Paradise ascent may sound a little daunting, like the misplaced dream of an uptight perfectionist. But after years of contemplating the details of this path, I feel increasingly relaxed about the journey. For I know that the ladder of divinization was conceived by infinitely loving beings who understand us better than we understand ourselves. They provide more than enough support and structure, and the Deities give us millions of years to relish the experiential riches of our voyage. The ascent is intensively educational, but it is almost leisurely in its pace. It is almost as if God is saying to each of us, “Each moment is sufficient unto itself, for the joys of Paradise are even now within your grasp.”
18 An important topic for further research will be a comparison of the best NDE accounts with The Urantia Book’s description of these resurrection events, which is narrated for us (purportedly) by celestial beings who have direct knowledge of how they are carried out.
19 Some of us “graduate” immediately after death, whereas other, less advanced ascenders resurrect in very large groups at certain prescribed intervals, not unlike the traditional Christian idea of a universal resurrection at the Last Judgment. “There shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust” (Acts 24:15).
20 Joking aside, ascenders do have personal communication devices, and we are told in the UB that these were referred to by the Apostle John as “harps of God” in the Book of Revelation. See 47:10.2.
21 The first seven of the innumerable heavenly spheres upon which we sojourn in the afterlife are called mansion worlds. “The very center of all activities on the first mansion world is the resurrection hall, the enormous temple of personality assembly.” [47:3.2] Life on these spherical worlds is explained in Paper 47, “The Seven Mansion Worlds.” The revelators derived the word “mansion” from John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
22 As explained in more detail in chapter 4, those who achieve the so-called third psychic circle on Earth are assigned a pair of seraphim to follow them throughout the mortal lifetime and on into the afterlife. We are told that one of the pair always functions as the “recorder of the undertaking,” so the UB typically refers only to the one seraphim who is “on duty” as the ministering angel. [See 13:3.9 and the entirety of Paper 113.]
23 Those who need the type of remediation and healing that take place on this first world of the afterlife remain for a longer period of time, but the rest of us continue on to the next mansion world in the sequence of heavenly spheres, known as mansonia number two. (For background see also note 27.)
24 One example from among the dozens of types revealed to us are the “social architect seraphim,” one of my favorite angelic groups: “These seraphim labor to enhance all sincere social contacts and to further the social evolution of universe creatures. . . . Social architects do everything within their province and power to bring together suitable individuals that they may constitute efficient and agreeable working groups on earth; and sometimes such groups have found themselves reassociated on the mansion worlds for continued fruitful service. . . . Two beings are regarded as operating on the mating, complemental, or partnership basis, but when three or more are grouped for service, they constitute a social problem and therefore fall within the jurisdiction of the social architects.” [39:3.4]
25 According to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Personalism always underscores the centrality of the person as the primary locus of investigation for philosophical, theological, and humanistic studies. It is an approach or system of thought which regards or tends to regard the person as the ultimate explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological principle of all reality.”
26 They achieved these theological heights because of the primary intuition of the Church Fathers who held that Jesus was homoousios (one in essence) with the Father and also fully human. Led in particular in the fourth century by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the Council of Nicaea (325) repudiated Arianism (the belief that God the Son is fundamentally inferior to God the Father). Instead, they adopted the view that Jesus as Son was “light from light, true God of true God”—that is, ontologically equal to the Father. In addition, in Constantinople in 381, the Second Council spoke more clearly of the Holy Spirit as equal to the other two Persons, and proclaimed that he should be “worshipped together with the Father and the Son.” (This essential teaching of the equality of the Third Person of the Trinity is affirmed and greatly expanded in The Urantia Book, as discussed shortly.) The UB singles out Athanasius in this passage: “It was a Greek, from Egypt, who so bravely stood up at Nicaea and so fearlessly challenged this assembly that it dared not so obscure the concept of the nature of Jesus that the real truth of his bestowal might have been in danger of being lost to the world. This Greek’s name was Athanasius, and but for the eloquence and the logic of this believer, the persuasions of Arius would have triumphed.” [130:0.18]
27 With regard to these higher worlds, the “denser” portion of their constituent physical elements maps to our atomic chart. But the remainder of their elements consist of materials (which, by the way, are not “pearly”) beyond our range of vision. In these higher-dimensional spheres, the “atomic chart” is inclusive of the one we use on Earth but has double or triple the number of elements. The atomic chart of Paradise has 300 elements, and that of intermediate worlds has 200. “All of these [intermediate] worlds are architectural spheres, and they have just double the number of elements of the evolved planets. Such made-to-order worlds not only abound in the heavy metals and crystals, having one hundred physical elements, but likewise have exactly one hundred forms of a unique energy organization called morontia material.” [48:1.3]
28 We are told in the UB that in addition to the rotation of this great disk, all domains of space are also expanding outward at unbelievable speeds—just as today’s astrophysics describes—but the revelators teach that this vast expanse of the space of the cosmos behaves in an accordion-like manner. It inflates and then contracts in a two-billion year cycle, in a process called space respiration. See 11:2.2.
29 And that’s because, at least according to my own interpretation, the governing geometry of the master universe is toroidal, like so many other systems in nature. Consider the possibility that the universe is one immense torus that contains an endless array of lesser toroidal structures all the way down to the human level. A key characteristic of a torus is that it has a dynamic center. At its core, the entire physical system comes to a point of ultimate balance and stillness—also known as the singularity of the torus. The singularity at the greatest scale, I believe, is Paradise. I further speculate that this unifying force of the transcendent oneness of the universal torus of the cosmos is the cause of the phenomenon of indissoluble wholeness now under discussion in the new theories of evolutionary holism.
30 Deities at this level are differentiated as literally male and female; they are gendered personalities who are coequal as divine partners and cocreators.
31 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Volume III: Paradise, trans. Mark Mussa (Penguin Classics, 1986), 33-115-17.
32 This divine scheme “is the Universal Father’s plan of evolutionary ascension, a program unreservedly accepted by the Eternal Son when he concurred in the Father’s proposal ‘Let us make mortal creatures in our own image.’ This provision for upstepping the creatures of time involves the Father’s bestowal of the Thought Adjusters and the endowing of material creatures with the prerogatives of personality.” [7:7.4]