Every moment and every event of every
man’s life plants something in his soul.
—Thomas Merton
The soul’s center is God.
—St. John of the Cross
The long road to Paradise begins with our soul-making decisions on the humble soil of Earth. As we have seen, we make decisions of spiritual import along the way, literally synthesizing a new reality in the universe—an immortal substance called the soul, a peculiar material that was perhaps alluded to in a well-known biblical statement by Paul the Apostle: “Ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance” (Hebrews 10:34).
The Urantia Revelation makes clear that, to the extent that we exercise a form of self-reflective and truth-discerning awareness called faith, our daily choices lend themselves to the further accumulation of this mysterious soul-substance—and eventually to God-realization. That is the synthesis hypothesis I offer for your consideration in this chapter.
Growing a soul is a highly personal enterprise with profound consequences. This slowly evolving entity becomes the living embryo of our emerging identity, now and into eternity. It represents our truest self as seen from the standpoint of the Indwelling Spirit, the cocreator of the soul along with the human mind.
At first, our soul’s immortality is provisional. In a sense, the soul is “on loan” to us. And the great question we all must one day face is: will we eternalize our soul to make it our permanent possession? In other words, will we irreversibly opt in to the Paradise ascent after death? We are taught in the UB that in the early phases of the afterlife, we are confronted with the greatest decision one can ever make: do we wish to continue on into an eternal life of service? Even now we can affirm this choice. But in the exalted moment when we make this choice irrevocably, our soul fuses with our Indwelling Spirit. True immortality factualizes because the seat of our identity becomes the inner spirit itself. This level of attainment is so profound that, if achieved while on Earth, the physical body is consumed in that moment and the person translates directly to the afterlife.33
On the other hand, if we opt out of ascension, the soul’s substance continues on, but not as a part of our personal identity. The UB explains that while the soul is a very distinct substance, it is always technically in the custody of the Indwelling Spirit, its coauthor. If we decide against serving and loving God in eternity, the soul “divorces” itself from our personhood, and now becomes the exclusive possession of the Thought Adjuster. Thereupon, the soul’s previous achievements contribute to the Indwelling Spirit’s future career as the indweller of another person, if such an assignment is made.34
While on Earth, the average person’s soul evolves largely outside of their awareness. And this better self within us has its own growth trajectory. As it matures, it slowly diverges from that scrappy character that constitutes our limited self-sense—our so-called ego. This differentiation of soul and ego happens because most of us are taught to identify with our strictly material self—our body, appearance, family, nationality, race, education, occupation, and so on.
But such is not the case so when we become citizens of the Kingdom of God, if I may use the old biblical metaphor. Now we become aware—dimly at first and “through a glass, darkly”—that a more exalted selfhood is surfacing. We are now citizens of another and higher world, and this newly chosen identity eventually supersedes all lesser identifications.35 This new status was explained by Jesus in his ordination sermon to the Apostles, as restated in the Urantia Revelation.
“Now that you are ambassadors of my Father’s kingdom, you have thereby become a class of men separate and distinct from all other men on earth. You are not now as men among men but as the enlightened citizens of another and heavenly country among the ignorant creatures of this dark world. It is not enough that you live as you were before this hour, but henceforth must you live as those who have tasted the glories of a better life and have been sent back to earth as ambassadors of the Sovereign of that new and better world.” [140:3.1]
The Human Soul: An Alchemical Synthesis
When we become citizens of this “heavenly country” that Jesus spoke of, we increasingly allow the Indwelling Spirit to stamp its vibrational signature on our life experiences. Here’s how the Urantia text summarizes this special transaction: “[Your] memory of human experience on the material worlds of origin survives death in the flesh because the [Indwelling Spirit] has acquired a spirit counterpart, or transcript, of those events of human life which were of spiritual significance.” [40:9.4–5]
Each day, our Thought Adjuster creates a new set of transcripts of our worthy life experiences. Allow me to emphasize again that each soul memory is an imperishable record—and it is literally deposited within us after each soul-making choice.
The inner spirit also values our clear thinking, making energetic copies of our concepts: “Adjusters work in the spheres of the higher levels of the human mind, unceasingly seeking to produce . . . duplicates of every concept of the mortal intellect.” [110:2.4]
With each such instance of “spiritual counterparting,” a novel substance is created within us that remains eternally in the safekeeping of the Indwelling Spirit. And this growing entity is energetically distinct from either the human mind or the inner spirit, who are the parents of this new reality. The UB compares the soul to a loom: the warp of the loom is spiritual energy, while the woof is derived from the material energies of the mind. In each moment of soul-making, the loom generates a unique and original bit of fabric. It is spun and threaded like metaphysical silk in the subtle domains that abide within the human heart.
Allow me to offer another metaphor. The evolving structure we call the soul can be compared to an alchemical synthesis, a concoction of “chemical” constituents contributed by the choosing mortal mind and the approving inner spirit. With each event of counterparting that occurs, the “solution” in which these constituent elements are dissolved precipitates out a new transcript, which then gets deposited as a tiny crystal of soul memory. Such memories are of a different species from the short-term or long-term material memories lodged in the hippocampus, all of which vanish at death.
[After death] those mental associations that were purely animalistic and wholly material naturally perished with the physical brain, but everything in your mental life which was worthwhile, and which had survival value, was counterparted by the Adjuster and is retained as a part of personal memory all the way through the ascendant career. You will be conscious of all your worthwhile experiences as you advance from one section of the universe to another—even to Paradise. [47:4.5]
Bear in mind that the third member of the sacred triad, our unique personality, is also active in soul-making. It provides the precious faculty of volition to this complex process. The human will can only manifest—at first—through the vehicle of the material mind, bound up as the mind is with the brain. As I will discuss in detail in chapters 8 and 9, the locus of this crucial faculty will one day transfer its seat to the soul—exactly to the extent of our consecrated identification with the things of the spirit. Obviously, this step precedes the much more advanced transfer of personal identity from the soul to the Indwelling Spirit.
The cocreated energetic substance that comprises the soul is so unusual that a special word had to be coined to describe it, so the revelators invented an odd new term—morontia.36 “As a mortal creature chooses to ‘do the will of the Father in heaven,’ so the Indwelling Spirit becomes the father of a new reality in human experience. The mortal and material mind is the mother of this same emerging reality. The substance of this new reality is neither material nor spiritual—it is morontial. This is the emerging and immortal soul which is destined to survive mortal death and begin the Paradise ascension.” [0:5.10]
Soul Evolution as a Faith Adventure
Paper 111, entitled “The Adjuster and the Soul,” provides the UB’s core discussion of the morontia soul. In one of the text’s inimitable breathless sentences, the revelators summarize the chief function of the soul in the following way: “The soul partakes of the qualities of both the human mind and the divine spirit but persistently evolves toward augmentation of spirit control through the fostering of a mind function whose meanings seek to coordinate with true spirit value.”
The “mind function” fostered by the soul, as technical as that phrase may sound, is the beautiful phenomenon of human faith. Our soul-making depends in large part on the proper function of faith, an oft-misused word that gets redefined and rehabilitated in the Urantia Revelation.
Think of faith as truth-seeking and truth-finding awareness. Faith pursues its purposes in deep reflection. It searches out the imponderables of experience through mindfulness, prayer, and insight. The explorations sponsored by faith lead to firmly held convictions that are known through what might be called sublime thinking—true soul consciousness. Such persuasions reach the status of genuine faith when they become so compelling that they inform all of our decisions and actions.
But faith is much more than belief; mere belief is secondary and can even be beside the point. “Belief is binding, but faith liberates,” teaches the Urantia Revelation in an especially profound discourse.37 Faith liberates spiritual energy so that we can carry out the great work. Mere belief in a series of intellectual propositions about God or the soul will not suffice to energetically transform the self. Only a robust faith—a profound and unshakeable consecration of the whole self to a great ideal born of deep reflection—can mobilize the entire personality in service to higher values.
Of course, the passionately held conclusions of faithful awareness may ultimately be wrong. But its certainties are heuristic—that is, they give us an essential framework for growth and learning. It is better that a child has sincere faith in some childish idea of God learned in Sunday school than have no faith at all; it is beneficial when warring tribes drop their weapons and unite around a common faith in a mythic religion, as did the ancient Hebrews. Primitive faith is better than having no beliefs because it provides a baseline for the further evolution of individual souls as well as whole societies.38
Sincere faith inspires and refreshes awareness. A person with strong faith exercises a “mind function” that sweeps aside frivolity, worry, and fixations, allowing them to be more receptive to the higher impulses of the Indwelling Spirit. “Faith acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark, the immortal germ, that lives within the mind.” [132:3.6] This sort of faith guided Joan of Arc, a teenager of peasant origin, to become the unlikely leader of the French nation; it led Martin Luther King to transform race relations in America and go on to powerfully condemn the immorality of the Vietnam War. Both became martyrs because of their convictions. Faith may not always be prudent or wise, but it always acts, and these actions are soul-making events that can sometimes transform nations.
While faith consorts with certainties felt in the soul, human reason works with probabilities calculated in the mind. “Science appeals to the understanding of the mind; religion appeals to the loyalty and devotion of the body, mind, and spirit, even to the whole personality.” [102:1.4]
Rational thought uses the human senses and logic to build new knowledge from verifiable material facts. Intellectual doubt must always remain if science is to evolve. By contrast, the approach of religious faith is to expand consciousness through prayer, wonder, and imagination—or any helpful technique of deep personal immersion in meanings and values. Based on repeated instances of such communion, faithful persons develop a confidence that dominates their mode of living. But not unlike science, enlightened faith allows its assurances to evolve and become more refined through never-ending spiritual exploration. And a healthy faith has an enthusiastic respect for the results of scientific method.
The great revelations to humankind are designed to enhance our faithfulness to higher values. They assure us that we live in a friendly universe that supports our ongoing search for truth, beauty, and goodness. They depict the Creator as a divine parent who cares for the daily needs of his children, who forgives them and calls them home when they go astray. When we perceive the signs of such divine solicitude, we are inspired to care for our fellow siblings in this universal family of God. We are stirred to a lifetime of loving action based on faith.
Religious experience is the realization of the consciousness of having found God. And when a human being does find God, there is experienced within the soul of that being such an indescribable restlessness of triumph in discovery that he is impelled to seek loving service-contact with his less illuminated fellows, not to disclose that he has found God, but rather to allow the overflow of the welling-up of eternal goodness within his own soul to refresh and ennoble his fellows. Real religion leads to increased social service. [102:3.4]
Pope Francis referred to this kind of faith in a homily he gave after celebrating Mass in early 2017 at the Vatican. The pope described Christianity as a religion of loving service, not a “religion of talk.” He complained about “fake” Christians who treat the faith as though it were window dressing rather than as a call to service, especially to the needy. “To be a Christian means to do—to do the will of God,” said Francis. “And on the Last Day—because all of us will have one—what shall the Lord ask us? Will He say: ‘What have you said about me?’ No. He shall ask us about the things we did.”39
The Urantia Revelation also insists on the centrality of “doing unto others” in religious life. But according to the UB, the Lord not only asks “on the Last Day” what we have done; the divine spark asks us every day, “What actions of yours are worth immortalizing in and as your soul?” Our answer each day of our lives is the sum and substance of our soul evolution.
In practical terms, the cosmic spirituality of the UB is about doing the right thing according to the law of reciprocity of the Golden Rule. Faith assures us that such a life of giving and receiving is realistic and sustainable. Faith says: the resources required to love both self and others are abundantly available. But with greater faith, we can go even further. We can love others as we imagine God would love them. In a response to a question by Nathaniel—whom the UB calls the “philosophic apostle”—we are told that Jesus astonished his apostles by distinguishing six levels of the Golden Rule, describing the sixth as “the divine command to treat all men as we conceive God would treat them. That is the universe ideal of human relationships.” [147:4.9]
This philosophic teaching about ethics, which occurred on the occasion of a visit to the home of Lazarus in Bethany, illustrates that doing the right thing is also matter of deep thinking. Clarity of thought, supported by wholehearted faith, attunes us to cosmic reality. “Truth, beauty, and goodness [are] man’s intellectual approach to the universe of matter, mind, and spirit.” [56:10.11] Living courageously according to such core values is the thinking person’s gateway to cosmic spirituality. “Spirituality enhances the ability to discover beauty in things, recognize truth in meanings, and discover goodness in values.” [100:2.4]
In order to exercise my own personal faith while in prayer or meditation, I relax my body, still my mind, and focus my awareness within. I ask for what is true, beautiful, or good in the matters at hand. I wait and listen. Then I direct my attention to the images, ideas, and impulses that emanate from the Indwelling Spirit. Experience has taught me that what I can receive in these moments depends on my level of faith. “Truth can never become man’s possession without the exercise of faith. This is true because man’s thoughts, wisdom, ethics, and ideals will never rise higher than his faith, his sublime hope.” [132:3.5]
Faith Marries Potentials to Actuals
When it comes to faith, our predicament can be summed up, metaphorically, with one question: Is the sun rising or is it setting? Pure faith answers: the sun is always rising, regardless of the time of day.
Faith wakes us up to the bright light of cosmic reality. Living faith, born of trust in a friendly universe, opens the aperture of the mind to the light of a deeper awakening.
From one point of view, the exercise of faith involves mindfulness—an improved attention to one’s experience. Faith in this sense is the act of mobilizing a single-pointed focus on the needs of the moment. “Man’s sole contribution to growth is the mobilization of the total powers of his personality—living faith.” [103.7] But faith has other tenses. Faithfulness refers to the future as well: we are evolving beings, but we have the potential to perfect ourselves. Genuine faith believes in the sacred promise of such God-given potential.
In the UB we are told that the design of cosmic reality in the evolving realms involves the translation of potentials into actuals. “In the time universes, potential is always supreme over the actual. In the evolving cosmos the potential is what is to be, and what is to be is the unfolding of the purposive mandates of Deity.” The Urantia Revelation calls this the supremacy of purposive potential. (See 102:5.1.) There is no limit to the cosmic potential for our growth in the eternity of the future, because the prospect of our unending progress is God’s purpose and God’s delight.
We can sense how this cosmic design applies to our children. Many parents are struck with an almost overwhelming awareness of their child’s unrealized potential, especially when contrasted with the apparent insignificance of their progeny’s current preoccupations. The best parents inspire their child’s growth in the light of their unlimited potential but never exert undue pressure for performance or unwisely manipulate the youth’s available choices. And the Deities treat the growth of us adults with the same consideration. The best forms of personal growth are joyous, creative, and spontaneous.
A robust faith harnesses “the power of now” while maintaining an abiding awareness of the unfolding potentials of the future. We are progressing beings; therefore, faith must translate the prospect of better things into present awareness. Stated otherwise, hope reflects the hoped-for future into the present, allowing us to freely translate these potentials into personal growth. But our bouts of anxiety short-circuit the faithfulness that supports the patient and orderly unfolding of our potentials.
During the period of Jesus’s so-called lost years, we are told in the UB that in his late twenties he traveled around the Roman world as an assistant to a wealthy Indian merchant, which included tutoring the merchant’s teenage son. After months of observing how adept Jesus was as a teacher, one day the boy asked Jesus why he did not begin immediately begin his public ministry. This was the reply of Jesus:
My son, everything must await the coming of its time. You are born into the world, but no amount of anxiety and no manifestation of impatience will help you to grow up. You must, in all such matters, wait upon time. Time alone will ripen the green fruit upon the tree. Season follows season and sundown follows sunrise only with the passing of time. I am now on the way to Rome with you and your father, and that is sufficient for today. My tomorrow is wholly in the hands of my Father in heaven. [130:5.3]
Even Jesus was infused with wise and hopeful patience in the face of his unrealized divine potentials. His faith made him effective at transferring potentials into actuals sufficient for the day—every day.
The theological basis of this translation from potentials to actuals grows out of the nature of the Third Person of the Trinity. As noted in chapter 2, she carries out the integration of the far-flung bifurcation of energy and spirit through the agency of mind—her Absolute Mind. She is the source of all minds, and it is the purpose of mind to correlate the divergence of energy and spirit. This labor of consciousness is the secret of evolution in time and space, and the theological foundation of soul synthesis. And this characteristic action of mind is the divine source of that mind function we call faith.40
Exploring the God of Experience
To further understand soul-synthesis, we must remember to separate God’s existence in the perfect (eternal) universe from God’s experience of our experiences in the perfecting universes. The synthesis hypothesis is built in part on a great reformation of theology that allows a perfect God to cocreate a perfected universe in partnership with his imperfect creatures. But this sort of cosmic transaction was inconceivable in traditional theology.
Classical theology in the Abrahamic tradition (inclusive of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) suffers from an authoritarian premise that does not countenance a cooperative relationship between God and his creatures. The Creator-creature relationship goes only one way. The traditional God is absolute, complete, perfect, eternal, and self-sufficient, needing nothing from his creation. God’s creativity lets him populate his universe with evolving life, but his creatures lack a corresponding creative power of their own. Humans may grow up to be wise and loving, and even build great civilizations, but in so doing they contribute nothing of cosmic significance to their Creator.
In the traditional conception of Deity, God as King receives our love and is aware of our needs, and can send us divine grace and gifts in many forms. We can offer faith and homage, but it is not within our ability to make a difference to God. Being “saved” qualifies us for membership in God’s Kingdom, but not for participation in God’s divine enterprise as an essential partner in the cosmic evolution that God originally set in motion. This idea of a far-distant and transcendent Creator God is especially stark in Islam, but it predominates in all forms of Western theology and much of Hindu thought as well, even when they speak of a loving Deity—such as Jesus or Krishna—who incarnates to fraternize with and teach his creatures. Among Hindu thinkers, only Sri Aurobindo made a distinct breakthrough to a cocreative form of evolutionary panentheism.
The singular achievement of the UB’s version of evolutionary theology is that it rejoins the majesty of the concept of an utterly transcendent personal God with an original concept of a finite God of evolution who depends on human decisions. In this equation, the God of Experience is constituted by human activity, while the Eternal God is an inexhaustible singularity of endless love and infinite energy who wishes to explore his own divinity through sharing it with finite beings upon whom he confers free will and spiritual potential. Such an overarching panentheistic structure is at the heart of our synthesis hypothesis. And there are even phases of the universal unfolding of God’s purposes that can be called postevolutional.41
We are fortunate that a major new philosophic movement has arrived just in time to help us better understand this idea of a dynamic God of evolution within the context of belief in a transcendent Deity. Early in the twentieth century, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, followed by theologians such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Ray Griffin, offered a way to undo the disempowering features of classical theism. Their work allows us to better conceive of a cocreative process of soul-synthesis while building on the findings of evolutionary holism. It’s known as process theology, and it amounts to what might be called an exalted theory of God in time. Building upon the ideas of earlier evolutionary philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel and Henri Bergson, Whitehead argued that God and humanity are always intrinsically related in and through the process of cosmic evolution. In fact, the two behave like one coevolving being. With God in the lead as primordial, God and humans are involved in cocreative acts that generate an evolving universe.
Only God sees the big picture of evolution, so God becomes the prime mover of the universal process. God’s role is to initiate the action. But because man’s free will is sacrosanct, the God of process theology has no other option but to lead by means of love, persuasion, and inspirational appeals.
God especially works through the medium of primary values. He ensures, for example, that beauty is clearly visible in our immediate environment. Because of the unmistakable presence of that which is attractive, God’s human partners are aroused and awakened. For example, the aura of a lovely woman motivates ordinary men to unselfish and courageous behavior far beyond expectations; likewise, the presence of an appealing man inspires a woman to amazing feats of love and devotion. The same can be said for the presence of the innocence of a child, the wonder of gazing at a starry sky, or the awe of viewing a living cell under a high-powered microscope. And these vivid experiences may lead us to seek out other and less obvious values.
Whitehead’s God leads us forward with compassionate patience by offering us the lure of such inspiring values. Philosophers all seem to agree that these can be summarized as truth, beauty, and goodness. Humans are indispensable partners with God in this creative process, since only we can choose to activate those values that serve to move things forward. If we miss the mark, God gently and faithfully returns with yet another attempt to entice us to higher ground. Our spiritual practice is to cultivate an ever-deeper receptivity to the presence of these clues in our daily lives.
In process philosophy, the divine may initiate the action, but thereafter God and humankind are engaged in a mutually reinforced progressive pursuit of the values of truth, beauty, and goodness. We’ve noted that humans are acting at their cognitive limit when they recognize these primary values. Truth, beauty, and goodness, according to the UB, are the “comprehensible elements of Deity,”42 and to act upon them is to do the will of God.
As cocreators with God, we are always able to reinvent ourselves, our families, and our societies as we follow the cues of this Great Attractor who is always just out ahead of us; both the process thinkers and the Urantia Book-informed philosophers will agree on this proposition as far as it goes. But the process God, while retaining some of the attributes of traditional Godhood, is not an infinite being endowed with personal qualities of love and self-awareness who can endow us with transcendent factors such as a God Fragment and a unique personality.
All that said, much more research is needed in comparing these two postmodern theological systems.
The Drama of the Evolving Soul
According to the Urantia Revelation, the Divine Heart is unfathomable in its willingness to share life, love, and light. The Father consents to indwell our mortal minds, patiently residing in the deepest recesses of our psyches. The Thought Adjuster acts as our pilot without violating our will, faithfully creating an immortal counterpart of our personal decisions. Process theologians evoke the beauty of the cocreative qualities of this relationship, but revelation is needed to teach us that something eternal is in the making through this unlikely partnership.
This, then, is the drama of soul-making: the all-loving, all-knowing, all-pervading Creator fractalizes as each of us. A spark of the absolute gets placed, unnoticed, within us. The God Fragment is devoted entirely to our watchcare, however lost or lowly we may be, and subjects itself to our decisions. It patiently waits for us to wake up and grow up. It remains loyal through our failures, always exuding forgiveness and guidance. What a tragic waste that so many folks squander this opportunity to interact with a gentle and pure spirit while residing in a dense physical body. The God of universes who bears the highest possible signature of energy and spirit is utterly at our service, even if we sit in relative oblivion on the other end of the energetic spectrum, foolish, confused, and self-centered.
But the indwelt child starts out as an innocent. Even a kid who goes astray and becomes a soldier for the Islamic State begins life as a noncombatant. The child has been thrown into life by some inscrutable force, according to the vivid description of the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. The “throwness” refers to the arbitrary and apparently random influences it must bear: the infant gets a certain set of parents with all their faults and strengths, inheriting a randomized mix of their DNA. And even if the child’s soul somehow chose these parents before its conception in order to learn life lessons, the infant has no idea of that, and the adult most likely will never know of a possible previous life. So the upstart babe has no choice but to improvise from day one. The growing child must respond somehow to quirky parents and sibling rivalries. Without knowing why, it must take up strange duties such as learning to walk on the hard ground, speak the local tongue, and do mindless chores like cutting the grass on a hot day in August.
But even if the growing boy or girl rebels against these impositions, the rudiments of soul-making begin to accrue as soon as the Thought Adjuster arrives. The God Fragment, hailing from the center of infinity, has the power and the prerogative to make the most of each life, even a life that is incoherent and misguided. This even holds true in the case of Erik Medhus, the hapless boy we met in chapter 1 who committed suicide at a young age. If you can buy it, his account assures us that some spiritual agency made a proper record of his life and painstakingly preserved it for playback after his death. Even in the case of Erik’s harebrained antics, those decisions that displayed the rudiments of soul-making were held sacrosanct.
Each of us is a budding hero in God’s eyes, and every moment of our life is lovingly attended and recorded. The divine indweller remains unconditionally steadfast. Imperfect decisions are not spurned, as they represent the precious reality of the child’s singular gropings in a vast universe. Just as a human father or mother loves their child despite its gross errors or mediocre choices, our Divine Parents cherish and even memorialize these all-too-human choices in the photo album of our soul. Each significant life event is worthy of review later on.
But to what end can all this be?
We are told that the Infinite Oneness of the I Am is existentially self-sufficient in its exclusive sphere of eternity. But now it initiates an adventure of self-discovery in time by creating a universe of experiential children. Because God’s myriads of finite children are free to make their own lives, they release God from infinitude, providing a vehicle for their Divine Parent to gain self-knowledge as their choices unfold. God wants to know all possible points of view, so God’s Mystery Monitor provides a window on the concrete particulars of life experience as seen through the eyes of the trillions of creatures of time. God weaves these perspectives into one unified field of cosmic experience known as the Supreme. The Father overcomes existential Oneness by bringing into being a new modality of experiential Oneness, a unity-in-diversity achieved through the eventual attainment of completion and perfection by all of his creatures over eons of time.
Indeed, we are not only one pair of eyes through which the Creator learns of his creation, but are also his ears, hands, and feet. We are the intrepid explorers and the experiencers who traverse the vast and unknown expanses of space to become an integral part of the whole equation of universe reality. We become one of trillions of unique answers that complete the Creator’s initial question: “Who Am I in time and space?”
And thus began God’s great poetry-factory of soul-making and self-perfecting. Humans engage in adventures and write their story, and the Thought Adjuster takes on our life story, especially the story of our personal relationships—in particular, those connections that were powerful and reciprocal. As noted earlier, the UB reveals that our soul contains the totality of our significant experiences, but it makes clear that only divinity itself is competent to know the criteria for such significance.
Strictly speaking, you and I are not the authors of our stories. The soul portrays our lives as God perceives them. God immortalizes the divine perspective on how we live by selecting worthy events from the raw material of our experiences. This means that soul-making can occur even, for example, in times when we harbor painful illusions that we conveniently omit or suppress from memory. Let’s say that as a college sophomore you became a Marxist organizer. This experience was vividly real when it occurred. But now you run a hedge fund in Manhattan, and you’d rather delete that whole year from memory. The God Fragment retains the poignance of this audacious college adventure in your soul. It honors those times when you fought for what you thought was right and true in your heart, regardless of the futile, or even delusionary, nature of your effort.
When all is said and done, the finished film of our soul’s evolution is a masterful edit of the uncut footage that we provided through our decisions and actions, now set aside for download and viewing. It’s God’s own visual anthropology, cocreated with the assent of the natives on the ground, who lack critical insight into the meanings of their tribal activities.
To pursue the metaphor a bit further: the intellectual property rights to our story don’t belong to us at first. We are technically the coauthor of our soul, but the story is held in trust by the Father Fragment until we fully claim it. If we reject survival after death, our personal presence in the universe comes to an end, but as we noted, the soul transcripts held by the Thought Adjuster remain with it eternally. We may give up on eternal life in total defeat, but our story of failure has a valued place in the library of universal evolution.
And this may be one reason why NDE life reviews are multiperspectival. Our life story is more than a first-person narration. Many others are also protagonists whose lives intersect with ours in strategic ways. How did our love, or our lack of love, affect their soul’s trajectory, and vice versa? We can’t know the full story locked inside the heart of those persons who were closest to us. But their experiences are crucial in the bigger scheme of things. So, God’s heavenly recording service captures their hidden thoughts and feelings, like an omniscient narrator of a nineteenth-century Russian novel. God divinely witnesses the vicissitudes of our noblest successes and our most foolish shenanigans, seeing our choices in terms of their ripple effect on his children throughout his domains. God knows our whole lives in totality, and from his absolute position of love and wisdom, determines what crosses the threshold of spiritual significance to become immortal in our souls and in the universe.
God Fusion: The Ultimate Destiny of the Soul
Finally, let us turn to the “augmentation of spirit control” alluded to in a previous quote. We’ve noted that the Indwelling Spirit is classified as prepersonal—technically devoid of personhood—yet we are told that it carries within itself a transcendent agenda.
While not a true personality, the God Fragment is an active agent of change: it radiates a superb affection for us, adjusts our thinking in a Godward direction, catalyzes our soul-making choices, and even operates during our dream life. The indwelling God is, after all, the “spirit nucleus” of the human soul and the very secret of our soul evolution. Its manifold activities are a tip-off that it possesses volition of some sort, or what the revelators call prewill. Yet we are told that its choices are always subservient to our will, as hard as that may be to fathom. We are in the presence of a great and universal mystery—the inscrutable fact that God’s love for his creatures leads him to make a pure part of himself subject to our imperfect and sometimes catastrophic decisions.43
In other words, personality is always superordinate in relation to all other elements of universal reality, as we’ve already noted. Hopefully, our decisions will become increasingly conformed to the Thought Adjuster’s spiritual agenda, but our personality will always call the final shots.
You as a personal creature have mind and will. The Adjuster as a prepersonal creature has premind and prewill. If you so fully conform to the Adjuster’s mind that you see eye to eye, then your minds become one, and you receive the reinforcement of the Adjuster’s mind. Subsequently, if your will orders and enforces the execution of the decisions of this new or combined mind, the Adjuster’s prepersonal will attains to personality expression through your decision, and as far as that particular project is concerned, you and the Adjuster are one. Your mind has attained to divinity attunement, and the Adjuster’s will has achieved personality expression. [110:2.5]
Our spirit-self is a driver; it has a grand goal. This intrepid God-entity has romance and marriage in mind. It stands at the door and patiently knocks, holding a fresh bouquet of divine roses and the very finest chocolate.44 It aims to achieve the one thing it lacks: personalness. And this is only possible through an eternal union with the host of its indwelling, consummated in a dramatic wedding of energies, values, and meanings. Our spirit-suitor has been guiding its human subject all along through our circles of growth with this very purpose in mind. The technical designation of this event is Thought Adjuster fusion, and we are taught in the UB that such a union is an irrevocable marriage of the God Fragment with the personality and its associated human soul, wherein they become one—forever, into all future eternity.
We know that God’s other high gift to human selves, according to Urantia cosmology, is unique personality. We also have noted that intrinsic to unique personhood are the prerogatives of free-will choice—the ability to enact decisions through the vehicle of a human intellect housed (for now) in an animal-origin physical body. Attaining personhood is the goal of the Father Fragment because personality houses the precious attribute of sovereign free will and the capacity for reflection and self-awareness.
This marriage of the indwelling God and an evolving human is a two-way street. The Indwelling Spirit ennobles its human partner by providing us with a direct window onto pure divinity; but it also affords God with a first-person perspective on the drama of a human ascender. The sacred reciprocity of this relationship is encapsulated in this eloquent statement: “Morontia evolution is inherent in the two universal urges of mind, the impulse of the finite mind of the creature to know God and attain the divinity of the Creator, and the impulse of the infinite mind of the Creator to know man and attain the experience of the creature.” [111:2.2]
We are synthesizing an immortal soul destined to unite with the indwelling God, after which the fused partners enter into an even greater adventure: the effort to find perfection in an eternal afterlife. This effort to achieve fusion is, then, the telos or destiny of our personal human evolution. Soul-making and self-perfecting dynamics lead inexorably to the soul’s own completion and fulfillment—not in the blissful passivity of nondual realization but ultimately as a union of our evolving soul with the Indwelling Spirit entity that reorganizes the personality for an eternal life of service.
The Urantia Book depicts such fusion events as routine during the soul’s ascent in the afterlife in the higher worlds. Such a fusion can occur during bodily existence on the more advanced material planets. But it is extremely rare on our planet. It may possibly be evidenced by the so-called rainbow body phenomenon of Tibetan masters. It is also alluded to in the biblical records of the sudden ascent of Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) and of Enoch (Genesis 5:19); and it is perhaps symbolized in the Catholic dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary to heaven. The UB affirms that Elijah and Enoch of old are the only cases of fusion while in the flesh on our world.45
Our model of the soul relies especially on the crucial distinction between the soul as an evolutionary, experiential reality and the Indwelling Spirit as a self-acting, existential reality impinging on and guiding human consciousness. Equally crucial is that all of this transformative activity occurs in an environment of existential and unchanging personhood endowed with relative free will. Our “sacred trinity” houses human endowments that have substantive reality and exist in separate but intimately related domains that each contribute to the ultimate fusion event. In the next chapter we explore in more detail how we can proceed on our personal spiritual path to this marvelous goal. For now I leave you with this profound summary:
Fusion with a fragment of the Universal Father is equivalent to a divine validation of eventual Paradise attainment, and such Adjuster-fused mortals are the only class of human beings who all traverse the Havona circuits and find God on Paradise. To the Adjuster-fused mortal the career of universal service is wide open. What dignity of destiny and glory of attainment await every one of you! Do you fully appreciate what has been done for you? Do you comprehend the grandeur of the heights of eternal achievement which are spread out before you?—even you who now trudge on in the lowly path of life through your so-called “vale of tears”? [40:7.5]
33 I return to the theme of God Fusion in detail in the last section of this chapter. Bear in mind that getting to this point of attainment requires a profound enlightenment beyond anything we have witnessed on Earth in recorded history, with the few exceptions that we will examine in that section. In later chapters I explain the conditions required for fusion in terms of human development theory.
34 But this event is not the same thing as reincarnation in the conventional sense—as explained in more detail at the close of chapter 10. If we opt out of survival, our inner triad gets broken up: our personhood (our unique self with its power of will and self-consciousness) gets absorbed into the cosmic oversoul, and our soul becomes the ward of the Thought Adjuster: “If mortal man fails to survive natural death, the real spiritual values of his human experience survive as a part of the continuing experience of the Thought Adjuster. The personality values of such a nonsurvivor persist as a factor in the personality of the actualizing Supreme Being. Such persisting qualities of personality are deprived of identity but not of experiential values accumulated during the mortal life in the flesh. The survival of identity is dependent on the survival of the immortal soul of morontia status and increasingly divine value. Personality identity survives in and by the survival of the soul.” [16:9.3]
35 It may be more precise to say that the soul transcends and includes the results of these lesser activities. Our compromised efforts to adapt to our life conditions can grow the soul quantitatively, but may fall short in achieving the refined qualities of a noble soul whose chief pursuit was faith and truth-discernment. This issue is a chief concern of chapter 4.
36 The term “morontia” has more meanings beyond the scope of the present discussion. It can also designate the subtle realm between the material and the spiritual. “Morontia is a term designating a vast level intervening between the material and the spiritual. It may designate personal or impersonal realities, living or nonliving energies. The warp of morontia is spiritual; its woof is physical.” [0:5.12] Further, “morontia” also is used to refer to those higher worlds that bridge the gulf between mortal origin and the more advanced spiritual status: “Much of the reality of the spiritual worlds is of the morontia order, a phase of universe reality wholly unknown on Urantia. The goal of personality existence is spiritual, but the morontia creations always intervene, bridging the gulf between the material realms of mortal origin and the superuniverse spheres of advancing spiritual status.” [16:4.6]
37 “Belief has attained the level of faith when it motivates life and shapes the mode of living. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere belief. Neither is certainty nor conviction faith. A state of mind attains to faith levels only when it actually dominates the mode of living. Faith is a living attribute of genuine personal religious experience. One believes truth, admires beauty, and reverences goodness, but does not worship them; such an attitude of saving faith is centered on God alone, who is all of these personified and infinitely more. Belief is always limiting and binding; faith is expanding and releasing. Belief fixates, faith liberates. But living religious faith is more than the association of noble beliefs; it is more than an exalted system of philosophy; it is a living experience concerned with spiritual meanings, divine ideals, and supreme values.” [101:8.2]
38 Albeit there may be exceptions when toxic doctrines are forced on youthful souls, which can lead to the arrest of any further development of faith. The point here is not so much the intellectual content of the belief system but rather the psychological experience of a consecrated personal commitment to a perceived truth. I have in mind here especially the UB section entitled “The Supremacy of Purposive Potential” at 102:5.
39 “Pope Francis: God is real, too many Christians are fake,” Vatican Radio, February 23, 2016. Urantia Book students have observed that numerous statements by the pope seem to harmonize with the UB. It is also known that a circle of Catholic priests in Argentina had been studying El Libro de Urantia, and it is possible that that their superior at the time, Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio—now Pope Francis—might have known about their interest in the revelation. The Spanish-speaking world in general may be more aware of the existence of the Urantia Revelation than even the U.S. population, because of a novelization of Part IV of the UB entitled Caballo de Troya, by bestselling Spanish author J. J. Benitez, has sold more than three million copies in twenty-eight editions. The series of eight books that followed has sold another two million. The Spanish translation of The Urantia Book has sold over 250,000 copies, in part because of the influence of Benitez.
40 As I will explore later in the book, the chief faculties of the human mind are willing, thinking, and feeling. And it is with mind alone that we carry out our soul-making decisions, ideally by harmonizing the use of all three of these constitutive faculties. And if these choices are deemed by our Indwelling Spirit to be soul-worthy, they dynamically link our material life with the high values of the realm of spirit. But always remember that personality is ontologically prior—ancestral—even to all of these factors. The personal is causal in relation to the spiritual and the mindal. Our personality is the source of our free-will capacity that operates through our mind endowment to bring us home to Paradise. If faith is “the supreme assertion of human thought” [3:5.4], this faith is ultimately a free expression of unique personality.
41 We are told in the UB to view the eternal God as the First Personality, the First Source of all things; and we can best think of the God of Experience as the Last Personality, the unifier on Deity levels of the meanings and values of all soul-making and self-perfecting experience. The final chapter of this book explains how the personhood of God as Supreme emerges as this Last Person at the culmination of space-time evolution. (Beyond the scope of this book is the UB’s revelation that new personalizations of Deity will occur in the far distant future when the billions of galaxies in deep space become inhabited and then completed in their development, thereby bringing into being God the Ultimate and God the Absolute.)
42 In reference to higher stages of evolution on advanced planets, the Urantia text states, “Throughout this glorious age the chief pursuit of the ever-advancing mortals is the quest for a better understanding and a fuller realization of the comprehensible elements of Deity—truth, beauty, and goodness. This represents man’s effort to discern God in mind, matter, and spirit. And as the mortal pursues this quest, he finds himself increasingly absorbed in the experiential study of philosophy, cosmology, and divinity. . . .The worlds settled in light and life are so fully concerned with the comprehension of truth, beauty, and goodness because these quality values embrace the revelation of Deity to the realms of time and space.” [See 56:10.]
43 “Human will functions on the personality level of universe reality, and throughout the cosmos the impersonal—the nonpersonal, the subpersonal, and the prepersonal—is ever responsive to the will and acts of existent personality.” [107:7:14]
44 In ancient mythology, the phrase hieros gamos refers to the ritual marriage of a god and a goddess; in a real sense, the great fusion we are speaking of is comparable to a hieros gamos where one of the parties is prepersonal but achieves personhood because of the union.
45 In this connection, the Reverend Dr. Rob Crickett, a veteran Urantia Book student, has just announced the formation of the St. Enoch and St. Elijah Society for the Father Fusion of Jesus Monastery. See: http://www.rcim.org/sffj.org/Welcome.html. Rob is also the autahor of a series of books on Father Fusion.