Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
—Matthew 5:48
From the Universal Father who inhabits eternity there has gone forth the supreme mandate, “Be you perfect, even as I am perfect.”
—The Urantia Book 1:0.3
The eons-long process of self-perfecting, which begins with the soul’s first emergence, entails what the UB calls cosmic circles attainment—the subject of this chapter. The revelators designate this progression with various other coined phrases, including “psychic circles of cosmic growth,” “levels of cosmic evolution,” “personality unification,” or “circles of human achievement.” I especially favor their phrase “cosmic individuation,” and I will sometimes designate the idea as circle-making, a phrase I have coined. Some of this language may sound like jargon, but these new terms permit us to make important distinctions about the attainment of spiritual perfection.
The Urantia Revelation states that there are seven levels of cosmic circles attainment. Moving through these circles entails balanced progress toward God Fusion, and it is accomplished through the same process of soul-making and personality unification that Jesus mastered while on Earth, as depicted in Part IV of The Urantia Book. The UB’s greatly expanded narrative shows how Jesus engaged in circle-making throughout his life, including the so-called missing years. Later in this chapter I focus on two crucial dimensions of personal growth toward perfection, the qualitative and the quantitative aspects, and conclude with a look at how this distinction might be applied to the life of Jesus in the UB’s revelatory account, providing us with a pattern that we can emulate throughout our own lives.
The circles are all-encompassing levels that we traverse via the practice of cosmic spirituality. They are more inclusive than the faith of a Catholic saint or the higher levels of consciousness of a Hindu yogi. The revelators give the name “circles” to these stages of progress because they encircle all the elements of human selfhood: physical health, cognitive development, emotional intelligence, interpersonal facility, psychosexual maturity, cultural sophistication, and spiritual faith—or what development theorists call states of consciousness and the levels and lines of human development. In the course of circles attainment, we use the leverage of faith to experience ever-higher stages of consciousness, leading up through subtle-realm awareness (that is, the direct perception of the morontial soul), and finally toward nondual union with the Indwelling Spirit.
Two examples of contemporary personal growth disciplines that approach the depth and breadth of circle-making as it is described in the UB include Integral Transformative Practice and Integral Life Practice.46 We may also say, along with depth psychologist Carl Jung, that the circles refer to levels of individuation—the balanced and harmonious growth of all the powers of the self. The theory and practice of circle-making are broached in this chapter, then picked up again in chapter 7 in greater detail.
Circle-making is not only about our life here; it also refers to the quest to become a high-functioning and deeply self-realizing cosmic citizen in the afterlife. For circle-makers, achieving higher states of being and doing great works in this world and on higher worlds are equally essential. These people increasingly wake up to embody the key virtues of mindfulness, sincerity, faith, hope, charity, and love; and they also grow up by getting into action to improve life conditions in society through their chosen work in the world.47
Cosmic citizens, while on Earth, contribute with increasing effectiveness to social and cultural evolution as mature and responsible adults who build sustainable and thriving families, communities, schools, businesses, industries, charitable organizations, governmental institutions, and entire civilizations. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King are outstanding exemplars of circle achievers because they were individuals of strong faith, extraordinary courage, and high ethical awareness who also helped advance the collective evolution of humanity in practical ways, and in the face of great opposition. But we can also find women and men in the most ordinary of occupations quietly, and even profoundly, achieving their circles through balanced personal growth and consecrated devotion to their life purpose.
And all this progress in cosmic individuation occurs because the universe itself is in the process of completion through universal evolution. To become good universe citizens, we must allow this grand process, the great Tao if you will, to carry us forward on the inexorable current of progress toward perfection in the space-time cosmos.
Ideal Conditions for Cosmic Individuation
Our God Fragment is the lead partner in the endeavor of circle attainment: “The indwelling Thought Adjuster unfailingly arouses in man’s soul a true and searching hunger for perfection together with a far-reaching curiosity which can be adequately satisfied only by communion with God, the divine source of that Adjuster.” [102:1.6] The Indwelling Spirit always points home—to God, to the promise of perfection, to the source of those potentials that are turned into actuals through steadfast faith.
Technically speaking, our inner spirit points to itself, a pure fragment of divinity, which represents, or rather is, the will of God revealing itself to our consciousness in any given moment—always gently and in deference to our free will.
The will of God will always be our most creative choice in any moment. But to perceive God’s will, we need to drop our compulsive habits and liberate our minds from “the slavery of antecedent causation,” as the UB calls it. In fact, true moral freedom and the capacity for spontaneous creativity are inherent in the divine gift of personhood, that most mysterious member of our inner trio.48
To clear the way for the freedom to choose what is most real, it is essential to arrest the gross material currents of the discursive mind that so often carry us downstream in the wrong direction toward distractions, negative fantasies, or anxieties. We must somehow purify the mind and remove clutter, thereby opening a space in awareness so that the more subtle frequencies of the Indwelling Spirit can interpose themselves and communicate the tone and flavor of the better way forward. For most of us, achieving this state of consciousness requires the regular practice of deep relaxation or stillness combined with focused meditation, prayer, and communion. Higher-quality discriminations and a greater quantity of useful decisions result when we respond in faith to the sublime overtures of the inner spirit, whose impulses are coordinated with—and are in fact largely indistinguishable from—other influences such as angelic ministry and the presence of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Truth. But we must prepare a royal road in our mortal minds to receive this higher input.
To further accelerate our cosmic individuation, we can consciously align our will throughout the day with the divine will that is already self-manifesting within us. A firm intention clears the way—provided that our field of view is not warped by unhealed psychological wounds or obstructed by negative emotions such as envy, intolerance, slothfulness, or anxiety, or simple lack of discipline.
Our God Fragment is, by definition, our inerrant source of truth. And if the “truth is the whole,” as Hegel once famously said, then our spirit always offers to our human will those choices that point us toward balanced development, physical wellness, and psychological wholeness. The spirit-self intrinsically aims us toward a wholeness that arises from the proportionate and symmetrical growth of the physical and nonphysical factors of self. Such is the nature of genuine circle-making. But as Carl Jung made clear in his writings, this inner drive toward wholeness and integration naturally shows up in our psychic life unless it is obstructed by our willful ignorance, selfish motives, or by complexes that develop as a result of childhood or adult trauma.
Understood in this way, our circle-making entails balanced personal growth, and circle-makers are men and women who by definition become poised, elegant, and unified personalities:
[Circle attainment] has to do with personality status, mind attainment, soul growth, and Adjuster attunement. The successful traversal of these levels demands the harmonious functioning of the entire personality, not merely of some one phase thereof. The growth of the parts does not equal the true maturation of the whole; the parts really grow in proportion to the expansion of the entire self—the whole self— material, intellectual, and spiritual. [110:6.1]
The more sane and balanced we are as persons, the more we can reliably and safely receive the influence of the divine spirit, expand our selfhood, and achieve our circles.
Circle-Making and the Quest for Selfhood Reality
In the last chapter I noted that the God Fragment brings with it something specific and highly personal: a blueprint of our model career and ideal life. (See 110:2.1.) We can best realize this divinely appointed destiny through many-sided self-development: “Circle by circle your intellectual decisions, moral choosings, and spiritual development add to the ability of the Adjuster to . . . register his picturizations of destiny with augmenting vividness and conviction.” [110:6.2]
Practically speaking, this quote tells us that if a young person’s growth is balanced intellectually, morally, and spiritually, then his or her ideal lifework will naturally emerge into view. If the child’s family or social environment is not oppressive or especially deprived, the impulses of the inner spirit will gently point the youth toward God-given aptitudes. Stated another way, a reasonable self-appraisal spontaneously arises within the average person unless specifically thwarted. And much of this unconscious growth is the unacknowledged influence of the God Fragment, which is slowly building an enduring identity in and as the evolving soul.
Discovering our unique mission and actualizing this model career is the essence of cosmic individuation. Every significant choice we make hinders or facilitates our progress in circle-realization in the light of our true purpose, we are told in the UB.
But always bear in mind our original unity-in-diversity premise from chapter 2: divinity is not monochromatic, nor is the self or its model career. Our selfhood comprises an inner triad that is rich and multifaceted, just as Deity self-manifests as a unified Trinity of divine personalities.
The following passage (quoted from 110:6.11) defines circle achievement from the standpoint of each member of our sacred inner trio:
1. Adjuster attunement. The spiritizing mind nears the Adjuster presence proportional to circle attainment.
2. Soul evolution. The emergence of the morontia soul indicates the extent and depth of circle mastery.
3. Personality reality. The degree of selfhood reality is directly determined by circle conquest. Persons become more real as they ascend from the seventh to the first level of mortal existence.
As we spiritize our minds and evolve our souls on this Earth and in the afterlife, we achieve selfhood reality—true personality realization. Circle-makers base their lives upon that which is cosmically real as they pursue their quest for self-perfection. And, if “the good is the real,”49 then those who perpetrate sin or iniquity become, so to speak, cosmic deviants. (Note in the quotation below the UB’s unique distinctions between evil, sin, and iniquity.) They stray from cosmic reality as well as from their own personality reality. In the single-minded pursuit of selfish ends at all costs, they stifle their own soul growth, immobilize their circle-making, and slow down the pace evolution for the rest of us.
There are many ways of looking at sin, but from the universe philosophic viewpoint sin is the attitude of a personality who is knowingly resisting cosmic reality. Error might be regarded as a misconception or distortion of reality. Evil is a partial realization of, or maladjustment to, universe realities. But sin is a purposeful resistance to divine reality—a conscious choosing to oppose spiritual progress—while iniquity consists in an open and persistent defiance of recognized reality and signifies such a degree of personality disintegration as to border on cosmic insanity. (Emphasis added.) [67:1.4]
By contrast, circle makers are reality-centric. They identify with the substance of cosmic reality, which we are told presents itself to us as three primary reality domains: the physical world of matter-energy, the intermediate realm of mind or soul, and the higher realm of spirit. Each of these is of origin from the Eternal Trinity, as we saw in chapter 2 (and all three are “hosted” and unified by personality). We gain mastery of these realms through the human endeavors we call science, moral philosophy, and the faith of religious experience. Circle mastery correlates with and eventually harmonizes our manifold life experiences in and through these three domains of action.
Because our minds are crafted by divine beings, we inherently possess the intellectual tools required to recognize, interact with, and identify with these three manifestations of the real. As broached earlier, the Infinite Spirit is Universal Mind, and human mind as it functions in the evolving universes is sourced from the seven Deity manifestations of the Trinity, which are a subabsolute derivative of Universal Mind, according to an important section in Paper 16.50 In these revelatory passages, the UB makes it clear that, by Creator design, the human mind is inherently endowed with three cosmic intuitions that make it possible for sincere persons to penetrate the many-sided realities of the evolving universes in the form of energy, mind, or spirit. Reality recognition is only possible because these three “scientific, moral, and spiritual insights, these cosmic responses . . . are innate.” [16:6.9]
These specialized responses, we are told in this passage, are the fundamental cosmic discriminations that underlie circles attainment. They are the very architecture of reality-based thinking, allowing us to (1) differentiate the factual from the nonfactual through the discernment of causation using the physical senses; (2) recognize relative right and wrong by the perception of our moral duty; and (3) recognize spirit values through faith and reflective meditation, which the text calls “the reverential and worshipful form of the cosmic discrimination.” Practicing and coordinating all three modes of awareness offers the best route to balanced living, integral consciousness, and eventual God Fusion.
We exercise these three cosmic insights by acquiring a liberal education in the broadest sense, inclusive of the passionate pursuit of the facts of science, the reason of philosophic inquiry, and the spiritual values of faith. These foundational insights comprise what the UB calls reality responsiveness, and they naturally emerge and function in the reflective thinking of any self-realizing person.51
Traversing the Seven Circles
While today’s developmental psychologists have attempted to define in detail the consecutive stages of human maturation, the revelators decline to be so specific, citing the wide variations in personality endowment. Yet the UB’s authors do point to crucial signposts, to which we now turn.
The text identifies three key stages of circle realization: the seventh, the third, and the first (in ascending order), while skipping a full discussion of the other four. These three are singled out because of the key spiritual influences that are brought to bear at each level. These transitions of the self can be thought of as supernatural initiations.
The seventh circle is described as the first step in cosmic individuation. According to the Urantia Revelation—and contrary to many contemporary teachings and beliefs—a personal soul is not present at birth. The soul’s birth occurs in early childhood, we learn, coming into being on the occasion of the child’s first autonomous moral decision. This highly significant event signals the activation of moral intuition, one of the three innate reality responses noted above.
This is the great moment when the infinite enters into the finite mind, there to begin an eternal partnership of soul-making and self-perfecting. Apparently, the first function of genuine moral sensitivity in the child’s mind sends out a vital signal that is noted on high. In response, we’re told, the child receives a God Fragment that is directly bestowed from the eternal central-universe headquarters of these exalted entities. No wonder the Urantia Revelation calls us cosmic citizens as well as sons and daughters of God!
The literal birth of the soul (technically speaking) is the next transaction that occurs.52 At the first sign of moral awareness, a pure spirit-spark emanates “downward” from the newly arrived God Fragment in recognition of the activation. In this meeting, spark meets thought, and a fiery new immortal entity is born. A luminous bit of soul-substance results from this sacred rendezvous.
For better illustration, allow me to offer a contrasting metaphor.
A sudden sprouting of eternalized thought appears in the Petri dish of the child’s embryonic soul. A “culture” of immortal selfhood now begins to grow in this medium. In balanced psychological development, the God Fragment deposits “spores” into the child’s Petri dish each time a soul-making event occurs. If the child is healthy, these deposits are evenly distributed in the dish—they cover all the psychological bases, so to speak. But if the child’s early development is asymmetrical, patchy holes and gaps begin to show up in the soul’s culture. The Petri dish, we might say, displays a disordered array of sprouts. Some areas are filled in, but other equally important portions are blank or may look diseased.
For example, imagine a young boy who suffers from an overdeveloped altruistic drive because of the influence of a psychologically unbalanced parent. His one-sided choices will favor the demands of others over his own legitimate needs. The boy’s “unselfish” choices are valued, and technically they are soul-making, but when the soul’s disposition is dominated by any one virtue, an otherwise noble impulse can actually become a liability. The net result may be distorted soul growth, or what secular psychology would call a budding personal neurosis.
If left unchecked, our overly altruistic boy may grow up to identify so earnestly with his pet virtue that he develops a psychological complex. His basic life orientation lacks the essential balancing quality of self-care.53 Such a condition may cause no end to problems in adult life. And this is why Plato and so many other philosophers have called for the balanced and unified development of the moral virtues. A therapist could correct this tendency by encouraging the child to make wholesome choices based on the rights of the self as conceived in proper proportion to the rights of others. We call this sensitivity to interpersonal reciprocity the Golden Rule, as noted earlier.
We might wisely conclude from this that all of us need to develop a broad set of virtues in order to be cosmically individuated, starting from the earliest arrival of the Mystery Monitor in our mind in early childhood. And young people need role models who exhibit psychological balance—or what the UB calls personality unification—if they hope to advance in circle-making.
In his masterwork on the philosophy of living, Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, philosopher Jeff Wattles explains that the classic moral philosophers of the West highlighted a core set of virtues that they deemed sufficient to develop a noble and balanced character, but often elevated one or another virtue to the head of the group. Plato regarded “self-mastery regarding pleasure, courage, justice, and wisdom” as sufficient. Aristotle supplied a list of moral virtues but argued that these were unified by the crowning virtue of practical wisdom. Thomas Aquinas added faith, hope, and love to Aristotle’s list, declaring love to be the greatest of virtues.
Wattles believes that any cultivation of the virtues is helpful, but argues that the better path to a unified and strong character is through “wholehearted commitment to the will and way of God,” and declares that “a total engagement of the divine way is the core of greatness of character.” In other words, through a consecrated attitude of receptivity to the divine presence through faith, prayer, and worship, the Indwelling Spirit communicates the core virtues directly to the soul in a way that unifies and balances selfhood. As a result, “other qualities continue to develop naturally around that ever-growing core.”54 Thus we can see the crucial importance of early religious training (in the context of broad education and healthy socialization) to the development of a noble character in a growing child.
The revelators largely skip through the sixth, fifth, and fourth levels to describe the third circle of attainment. We are told that when we achieve this cosmic level—normally far into adulthood, if at all in our lifetime on Earth—we are assigned a personal angel, or what is technically called a seraphim guardian of destiny.55 Thereupon, this loving celestial being extends toward us “continuous ministry and unceasing watchcare.” [113:1.5]
Having a personal angelic attendant markedly accelerates our growth. Indeed, these ministers are charged with becoming powerful agents of soul evolution.
Seraphim are mind stimulators; they continually seek to promote circle-making decisions in human mind. They do this, not as does the Adjuster, operating from within and through the soul, but rather from the outside inward, working through the social, ethical, and moral environment of human beings. . . . Seraphim function as teachers of men by guiding the footsteps of the human personality into paths of new and progressive experiences. To accept the guidance of a seraphim rarely means attaining a life of ease. In following this leading you are sure to encounter, and if you have the courage, to traverse, the rugged hills of moral choosing and spiritual progress. [113:4.1]
In other words, seraphim (and other orders of angels) stimulate our circle growth by bringing about relationships that stretch us as we are confronted with challenging new opportunities for moral decisions.
In chapter 2 we discussed in this connection the Plan of Mercy Ministry. This vast project of angelic ministry to mortals is an exclusive function of the divine personalities of origin in the Third Person of the Trinity—that is, the Infinite Mother Spirit and her derivative daughters, the Mother Spirits of the local universes.56 Recall also that the Second Person of the Trinity (the Eternal Son) directs the Plan of Bestowal, the splendid project of the successive divine incarnations on evolving planets, such as that of Jesus. Both of these divine ministries to the inhabited worlds operate from the outside in, via the social and interpersonal environment of evolving human civilization, and as such are designed to supplement the influence of the Father Fragment, which operates only from the inside out—once again illustrating the wisdom of trinitization. This arrangement creates diverse avenues through which Deity fosters progressive evolution.57
All of these influences serve to move us toward the final goal of terrestrial evolution: achieving the first circle of cosmic individuation. But here’s a key point: because these Deity initiatives shape us both from the outside in and the inside out, they are more likely to induce the symmetrical growth of the self. And the result of such balanced personal development is that first circlers actually attain direct God-contact :
The Adjuster cannot, ordinarily, speak directly and immediately with you until you attain the first and final circle of progressive mortal achievement. This level represents the highest possible realization of mind-Adjuster relationship in the human experience prior to the liberation of the evolving morontia soul from the habiliments of the material body. [110:6.15]
First circlers have not only become profoundly God-conscious individuals, they’ve also reached the highest levels of maturity in their emotional, intellectual, and social lives. They show up as creative world citizens whose work makes a difference on the planet. Their noble characters display a variety of virtues organized around a singular devotion to love and service. And now the God Fragment can “speak” to them or even through them directly. What’s more, their inner spirit can contact them reliably and safely.
Does this actually mean that premature contact with one’s Indwelling Spirit can be dangerous? It certainly does, and life experience bears this out for most of us. The revelators sternly warn that things can go awry if a God-conscious person’s maturation is not replete.
[When Adjusters] find it possible to flash a gleam of new truth to the evolving mortal soul, this spiritual revelation often so blinds the creature as to precipitate a convulsion of fanaticism or to initiate some other intellectual upheaval which results disastrously. Many a new religion and strange “ism” has arisen from the aborted, imperfect, misunderstood, and garbled communications of the Thought Adjusters. [110:4.5]
I translate this important statement to mean that first circlers will never show up as power-hungry cult leaders or stubborn fanatics who create schismatic religious sects. Instead, those abiding at the first circle can be trusted to handle direct flashes of divine truth. By definition, these individuals will have attained profound psychological integration. They are sane and stable enough to accurately perceive the voice of the spirit within—as described in this passage:
[Thought Adjusters are] the founts of everlasting progression. And how they do enjoy communicating with their subjects in more or less direct channels! How they rejoice when they can dispense with symbols and other methods of indirection and flash their messages straight to the intellects of their human partners! [108:6.7]
The founders of the world’s enduring religions of peace and enlightenment, such as Gautama Buddha, must have enjoyed this sort of contact. And Jesus, especially as he is depicted in the UB, is the paragon of such wholesome integration at the first circle of cosmic individuation.
Jesus and the Two Axes of Self-Perfecting
We are just getting started in this discussion. Circle-making is a vast subject that will require much more research in the interdisciplinary interpretation of the UB, along with immersion in today’s sophisticated theories of human developmental and transpersonal psychology. In this section we turn to another aspect of circle-making that may bring more clarity, one that has echoes in contemporary theories of psychospiritual development that we further discuss in chapter 7.
To help us better understand the seven levels of cosmic circle attainment, the UB suggests what appear to be two key axes of integrated growth. These are alluded to in the text as the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of soul evolution:
The mastery of the cosmic circles is related to the quantitative growth of the soul, the comprehension of supreme meanings. But the qualitative status of this immortal soul is wholly dependent on the grasp of living faith. [110:6.1]
I have found it helpful to chart these facets of adult maturity on a Cartesian grid of sorts, illustrating the fact that the two axes of growth have a reciprocal relationship. In general, the vertical axis represents growth in the quality of consciousness as it ascends the “stages of faith.”58 The horizontal axis corresponds to quantitative expansion through the realization of new depths of meaning as a result of wide-ranging life experiences—especially situations that require one to apply all three of the innate cosmic intuitions to solving the practical problems of living (the factual, moral, and reverential insights discussed earlier).
For example, seventh circlers can, at least in theory, attain the highest states of spiritual achievement and energetic awareness; they can truly feel what has value. So, their faith-realization can match the quality of consciousness achieved by a first circler who directly receives the guidance of their God Fragment. But these people are one-dimensional. They may turn out to be otherworldly mystics or “fools for God”—but they may also become self-deceived cult leaders.
First circlers have acquired more depth and dimensionality of character; they have actualized the entire grid in its vertical and horizontal dimensions. They are inclusive in their outlook and behavior. In addition to having a high-pitched awareness of the value of love, they have also learned to love others skillfully and wisely. Simply put, these two reciprocal factors of personal growth involve:
1. Growth in value consciousness—the increasing grasp of living faith achieved in contemplative states of feeling the presence of the energies of God, the source of all value; a growing awakening to the centrality of love—that is, the qualitative depths of feeling the truth of the infinite value of personality. The UB puts this feeling capacity succinctly: “Quality—values—is felt.” [111:3.6]
2. Comprehension of meanings—the growth of wisdom through the achievement of discriminating awareness of facts, moral clarity in personal and professional life, advanced skills in social intercourse, and “well-traveled” cultural sophistication—through the frequent exercise of the three cosmic intuitions.
Awareness of value is a matter of feeling and faith, but meanings are understood in the mind and realized in action. A life of increasing meaning is a life of wisdom that is achieved only through practical life experience and engagement in diverse personal and professional relationships that ultimately contribute to evolutionary Deity.
A seventh or sixth circler can be almost as truly God-knowing—sonship conscious—as a second or first circler, but such lower circle beings are far less conscious of experiential relation to the Supreme Being, universe citizenship. . . . The motivation of faith makes experiential the full realization of man’s sonship with God, but action, completion of decisions, is essential to the evolutionary attainment of consciousness of progressive kinship with the cosmic actuality of the Supreme Being. Faith transmutes potentials to actuals in the spiritual world, but potentials become actuals in the finite realms of the Supreme only by and through the realization of choice-experience. [110:6.16-17]
Perhaps the most fruitful direction for research into these distinctions is to study the life of Jesus, who is depicted in the UB as the ideal of self-perfecting. In this summary passage in particular, Jesus is described as adept at balancing the values of extraordinary faith with the meanings of seasoned wisdom—in other words, he was able to coordinate the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of his soul growth in order to avoid a fanatical overreaction to his gift of religious genius.
In a religious genius, strong spiritual faith so many times leads directly to disastrous fanaticism, to exaggeration of the religious ego, but it was not so with Jesus. He was not unfavorably affected in his practical life by his extraordinary faith and spirit attainment. . . . The all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual judgments concerning the proportional values of practical and commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son of Man was a splendidly unified human personality. . . . Always did the Master co-ordinate the faith of the soul with the wisdom-appraisals of seasoned experience. [196:0.6]
With this depiction of the character of Jesus in mind, let’s delve a bit deeper into the two axes of cosmic individuation.
The Vertical Growth of Value-Consciousness
The vertical axis relates to achieving ever-deeper states of awareness of the presence of God. Such refined states are energetic and metacognitive. They go far beyond pious belief in a religious doctrine. Vertical growth of value-consciousness refers to the existential stance of the whole person in relation to their actual experience in the present moment—in a word, their faith.
Faith in this sense is a question of feeling. As they go about their day, true mystics feel the reality of values—such as beauty or truth or love—as these present themselves in ordinary life situations, even to the point of bursting into momentary experiences of bliss and rapture. Think of the little girl back in chapter 1 who spotted a small flower growing out of a crack in the sidewalk and gave it her fullest attention. In her life review, she discovered that this event was memorialized in her soul as one of the most important experiences of her life.
I also believe that an additional human faculty always comes into play in the exercise of faith: the power of imagination. Our faith cannot rise much higher than our level of willingness to imagine how much we are divinely loved; and we can derive inspiration from such visualizations of how God’s grace is or may be showing up in our lives. “Faith is the inspiration of the spiritized imagination.” [132:3.6]
For example, genuine faith inspires a young man and woman to agree to marry. It helps them envisage the value of the superb experiences they will enjoy together. They are on fire with the imagination of their future state of bliss. So the couple resolves to actualize their value-consciousness in relation to marriage, including the value of having children. Their faith tells them that living according to the particular set of family values that they share is more important than the immediate pleasures of a sexual life and the comforts of couplehood without a life commitment.
We saw earlier that the highest possible cognition that humans can have is the conceptual grasp of truth, beauty, and goodness as supreme values. But faith aims even higher. Here again I refer to an existential state of transconceptual awareness during which the whole person approaches the divine source of higher values. This source is God, who also appears as a whole person—as God as our Father or Mother, even God who incarnates for us. Our worshipful communion with this God is the ultimate religious experience, and the sublime feelings of trust and reassurance made possible in such an experience are what makes possible courageous living—a life infused with hope, inspiration, and love. Practically speaking, this experience leads one to choose to be like the Divine Person—to fully identify with God’s qualities as we understand them. And this would naturally lead us to strive to do what God would do in every life situation, as did Jesus.
The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as the “will of the Father in heaven.” . . . Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one mortal, did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth. [196:02.3]
Quantitative Soul Growth through Seasoned Experience
We noted earlier that Jesus attained the highest circle because he was able to coordinate his sublime faith with worldly wisdom. And we are told that Jesus lived a perfect life on earth because he mastered the art of the symmetrical development of the fullness of his human capacities, both qualitative and quantitative.
For those who accept the Urantia Revelation, Jesus is our model of proportional growth in the two dimensions of soul evolution and self-perfecting. We already know—even from the New Testament account—how Jesus became a master in the qualitative domains of faith and spiritual experience. So instead let’s focus our concluding discussion in this chapter on his quantitative achievement of seasoned wisdom, which is far less understood because most of this singular accomplishment is revealed only in the Urantia Revelation.
Quantitative soul growth requires wide exposure to and intimate contact with all kinds of people, the mastery of many useful skills, the development of self-confidence in the face of numerous harsh challenges, and the experience of problem solving in the face of every sort of predicament.59 This list of experiences fits well the description of Jesus provided in Part IV of the UB, where we learn that he was so well grounded and so highly effective in his public teaching career because of his formidable experiences in his earlier private life.
Jesus did not want simply to produce a religious man, a mortal wholly occupied with religious feelings and actuated only by spiritual impulses. Could you have had but one look at him, you would have known that Jesus was a real man of great experience in the things of this world. The teachings of Jesus in this respect have been grossly perverted and much misrepresented all down through the centuries of the Christian era; you have also held perverted ideas about the Master’s meekness and humility. What he aimed at in his life appears to have been a superb self-respect. [140:8.20]
Please bear this statement in mind as I briefly tell the story of Jesus’s heretofore unknown life on Earth, narrated for you with special reference to this quantitative aspect of his development.
Jesus was a normal and healthy Jewish child of his time, but was known to be highly inquisitive. He very early learned numerous practical skills from his mother, including care for animals and horticulture. From his father he learned to read and write in two languages (Aramaic and Greek) before entering the synagogue school, where he was taught Hebrew. He later traveled throughout the Roman world as a master linguist and translator.
Joseph taught Jesus carpentry, and the boy became a master carpenter at an early age. He later became adept at leatherwork and the skills of a smith, and his two uncles taught the young lad how to farm and fish. The location of the family’s carpentry shop just outside of Nazareth—at a stop on a major route of commerce in those days—provided innumerable opportunities for Jesus to meet people traveling by caravan from all over the Mediterranean world and the lands of the Near East. Jesus learned the news of the larger world while making repairs for the travelers. Joseph also took Jesus with him on business trips, providing more occasions for learning about the world beyond Nazareth;
At this point, we depart entirely from the biblical account of Jesus’s life as we read the revelators’ account of the “lost years.” The first great event of this period is the death of Joseph in a construction accident when Jesus was barely fourteen years old. As the eldest son of the family, Jesus suddenly became the head of a large household of eight siblings, with another child on the way. He now assumed responsibility for his pregnant mother and his brothers and sisters, ages one through ten. Jesus became a “father-brother” to his siblings, dedicating himself to their care and upbringing. He saw to their education, and even home schooled his four sisters at a time when females were not permitted an education. But the family slowly slipped into poverty after Joseph’s land holdings were sold off to meet the family’s basic needs. In this difficult situation, young Jesus was the sole provider for the destitute family until he could train his eldest brother James to assist in the shop.
While certain channeled accounts of the lost years depict Jesus as a wandering mystic who attended mystery schools and traveled to monasteries in Tibet, the Urantia account depicts a man who is developing “seasoned experience” in all aspects of living an ordinary life on Earth, facing many more practical problems and adversities than the average person of his era or any other. Throughout a dozen years of labor as the head of his family, he not only supported their immediate needs and educated the children, but also was able to buy the full ownership rights to the family’s shop, and even set aside enough money to later fund the purchase of a second home. As the chief breadwinner for a large family from the time he was an early teen, he was afforded a full opportunity to experience the difficulties faced by even the most challenged earthly parent of his time or anytime since.
As a divine incarnation, Jesus was not in a position to marry, but he attracted the attention of all the eligible women in his town, befriended many, and even turned down one proposal of marriage. He was considered the natural leader of the more advanced youth of Nazareth, but turned away offers of a political position as he awaited the call to his spiritual mission.
Finally, at age twenty-six, when the youngest child in the family was twelve and the older siblings were able to take over the household thanks to the training Jesus had provided, he left home for good. After departing Nazareth, Jesus worked at building boats beside the Sea of Galilee, even creating a novel method of boat construction. From there, Jesus embarked on a two-year trip to Rome as an interpreter for a wealthy businessman from India and a tutor for his seventeen-year-old son. This trip began a long period of personal ministry work, during which he gained an intimate understanding of all races and classes of people in the Roman world, once even meeting Emperor Tiberius while acting—at the royal court—as a lay advocate for a friend. While sojourning in Rome with his Indian client, Jesus had occasion to meet and teach every leading religious teacher based in the imperial city.
Upon his return from Rome, another opportunity for travel presented itself when Jesus became the conductor of a large caravan, traveling as far as present-day Iran and back again to Palestine. The UB account clarifies the fact that Jesus never visited the Far East, but he no doubt met people from these lands and from Africa in the family’s carpentry shop and on his lengthy travels. Soon after this period, Jesus began his public ministry, about which there is more information in the biblical account, as well as in the UB.
This summary illustrates that Jesus truly achieved personal growth in the worldly wisdom dimension, without which he could never have achieved the kind of balanced and majestic personality that was able to change our world forever. Jesus was not a gentle and kindly mystic, or a “man of sorrows,” as sometimes depicted in traditional accounts. He was a highly dynamic and perfectly self-actualized man among men whose enemies both feared and respected him.
The UB explains that he traversed his circles and would have achieved God Fusion at the age of thirty-two—which would have resulted in his immediate ascension without physical death. But he elected to remain on Earth to inaugurate a new era as a fully self-realized divine incarnation, teaching with full authority the truths of soul evolution and cosmic individuation. In the final four years of his life, Jesus, both God and man in one person, inspired humanity with the revelation that our soul’s destiny is an eternal life during which we will become perfect, “even as our Father in heaven is perfect.”
46 Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), developed by human potential pioneers George Leonard and Michael Murphy, offers what it calls “cross-training for the body, mind, heart, and soul.” Integral Life Practice, developed by Ken Wilber and his associates, builds on ITP and other integrated practice systems. Both approaches hearken back to the practice of integral yoga advocated by Indian master Sri Aurobindo.
47 The terminology of “waking up” and “growing up” is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality (2006), an important inspiration for this chapter, which we examine more closely in chapter 7. Other important elements of Wilber’s personal growth system include “cleaning up” (or shadow work) and “showing up.”
48 “The bestowal of creature personality confers relative liberation from slavish response to antecedent causation, and the personalities of all such moral beings, evolutionary or otherwise, are centered in the personality of the Universal Father. They are ever drawn towards his Paradise presence by that kinship of being which constitutes the vast and universal family circle and fraternal circuit of the eternal God. There is a kinship of divine spontaneity in all personality.” [5:6.9]
49 “The eternal real is the good of the universe and not the time illusions of space evil. In the spiritual experience of all personalities, always is it true that the real is the good and the good is the real.” [102:3.15]
50 This intricate structure is beyond the scope of this introductory book, but suffice it to say that the mind of the Infinite Spirit unfolds as the seven possible permutations of the Eternal Trinity, generating the so-called cosmic mind, which is “the intellectual potential of the grand universe.” [16:6.1] See also the discussion of the Seven Master Spirits in the Special Supplement, Section B.
51 “There exists in all personality associations of the cosmic mind a quality which might be denominated the ‘reality response.’ It is this universal cosmic endowment of will creatures which saves them from becoming helpless victims of the implied a priori assumptions of science, philosophy, and religion. This reality sensitivity of the cosmic mind responds to certain phases of reality just as energy-material responds to gravity. It would be still more correct to say that these supermaterial realities so respond to the mind of the cosmos. The cosmic mind unfailingly responds (recognizes response) on three levels of universe reality. These responses are self-evident to clear-reasoning and deep-thinking minds.” [16:6.4-5]
52 We are not told the exact sequence of events—or even whether this process follows a strict linear progression; so I offer here a step-by-step model for the sake of simplicity.
53 Carl Jung showed that such complexes generate archetypal images that represent these distortions in our dreams and fantasies, thereby pointing toward the need for balance and compensation.
54 See Jeff Wattles, Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness: Values and Virtues (Wipf and Stock, 2016), pp. 197–202.
55 “Human beings in the initial or seventh circle have one guardian angel . . . assigned to the watchcare and custody of one thousand mortals. In the sixth circle, a seraphic pair . . . is assigned to guide these ascending mortals in groups of five hundred. When the fifth circle is attained, human beings are grouped in companies of approximately one hundred . . . Upon attainment of the fourth circle, mortal beings are assembled in groups of ten.” [113:1.7]
56 Their divine consorts, the local universe Creators known as Michael Sons—in our case, Christ Michael, who incarnated as Jesus—create other orders of celestial beings that do not function as direct angelic ministers to mortals.
57 We’ve noted that all three operations are called the Father’s Plan of Perfection Attainment. Seen from the widest perspective, these differential influences emanate from the existential Trinity, which acts as one power, and then diverges into particular ministries as they are applied to meet specific human needs in the space-time universes. But in the far-distant future they will be experientially unified as the self-perfecting activities of the evolving worlds find their completion. I should point out also that these angelic and incarnation ministries of the Eternal Son and the Infinite Mother Spirit are illustrative of the principle of personhood in the universes. For those religions that lack a personal God of love, no such personal influences can be theologically possible.
58 I have in mind here James Fowler’s classic book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (1981), and in particular his last two stages: “conjunctive” faith, which acknowledges paradox and the multidimensionality of truth, and “universalizing” faith, which leads one to treat all others as members of a global or cosmic community, in accord with universal principles of love and justice.
59 It is interesting to note that male heroes in film and literature are often depicted as displaying such worldly wisdom and cleverness—abilities that, in the light of the argument I provide here, are necessary but not sufficient for human fulfillment. Heroines, by contrast, display a higher quality of moral and spiritual consciousness but will be dependent on the man to rescue them from worldly dilemmas. But we are speaking here of a blending of these capabilities in one person. I recently published a book that explores this distinction in terms of brain hemispheres, entitled How Whole Brain Thinking Can Save the Future (Origin Press, 2017) by James Olson.