Light the lamp within you.
Knock on yourself as on a door.
—from the Nag Hammadi library
In the last chapter I surveyed some of the influences that shaped Western religious ideas about self, soul, and spirit. But this great tradition was also shaped by its omissions. In this chapter I will survey important ideas that were marginalized or suppressed in premodern times, but which are now worthy of reconsideration in the light of the Urantia Revelation. I’ll review in particular two vivid cases. First, we’ll survey Gnosticism, the early Christ-centered movement that was destroyed by opponents who later claimed the mantle of “Christian orthodoxy.” Then I’ll offer a summary of the neglected mystical teachings of Eastern Christianity, which happens to be the tradition I was brought up in. Both of these historic trends contain notable affinities with important aspects of the cosmic spirituality of the Urantia Revelation.
The ancient Gnostics prefigured, at least in mythopoetic form, the core teaching of Jesus in The Urantia Book about the Indwelling Spirit, not to mention certain aspects of UB cosmology and history. Because of their overlapping doctrines, it is not entirely unfair when fundamentalist Christian critics denounce the Urantia Revelation as being Gnostic. In addition, my findings about Eastern Christianity reported in this chapter indicate that its theological formulations and esoteric spiritual practices clearly incline closer to certain UB teachings about self and soul than can currently be found in Western Christian practices and beliefs. This association leads one to infer that—in addition to the direct impact of Greek philosophy and culture—the Eastern Church must have been influenced by the Gnostic environment of its birth, as well as by some tenets of Asian religions that I briefly cover in the concluding section of this chapter.
Gnosticism and Christian Heterodoxy
A treasure trove of lost Gnostic gospels was accidentally discovered in 1945, the very year that the finishing touches were put on The Urantia Papers. They were discovered among the famed Nag Hammadi texts, thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices found in a large sealed jar by a peasant in Upper Egypt. What we especially learn from these texts is that the ancient Gnostic movement had developed a powerful counternarrative to the emerging orthodox Christian myth.70
Gnosticism offered a wide range of alternative views of the meaning of Christ’s life and teachings. It presented a rather different picture of the role of humankind in history, the nature of the cosmos, the angelic hierarchy, and the ascension in the afterlife. In particular, or at least for our purposes, Gnosticism highlighted the idea of an Indwelling Spirit. The orthodox consensus focused instead on attaining salvation through belief in the fact of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, while at the same time directing its adherents away from the rising belief throughout the Mediterranean world in the reality of a divine indwelling and its implications for spiritual life. This and other widely held Gnostic ideas and practices were stamped out, often with violence—especially after the seminal Christian doctrines we know of today were adopted by the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. As is well known, the convening of this council of bishops from around the Mediterranean was an act of political intervention by the Roman emperor Constantine, who issued the invitations and even funded the travel and the proceedings.
In effect, Constantine legalized a new orthodoxy that gave us today’s versions of Christianity. But what is less understood is that in the previous three centuries, a disorganized Christian heterodoxy was the rule. During these early centuries, crucial teachings about selfhood, human history, and the cosmos circulated widely in the Christian world, only to fall into obscurity after they were suppressed by the politically sanctioned Church. Certain features of these ancient Gnostic ideas resurfaced occasionally in the teachings of secret societies or schismatic sects in later centuries, never again gaining wide acceptance until their emergence in many new forms in postmodern spirituality, esotericism, and New Age thought—of which the Urantia Revelation is but a small part.
Inspired by the story of Jesus, innumerable teachers, visionaries, and prophets who were Gnostic in orientation spontaneously arose throughout the Roman Empire. We’ve known this fact for centuries because of the writings of their orthodox critics, most notably St. Iranaeus of Lyon, whose works not only survived but have ever since been considered almost canonical. Yet the depth, richness, and variety of the heterodox ideas of the Gnostics became much more evident upon the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts.
While we contemplate the newly unearthed facts about Gnosticism, we must also bear in mind that amid this great flowering of creative Christian ideas was a common core that early Christians of all tendencies accepted. From the beginning, the narratives and letters attributed directly to the Apostles or their immediate students were the central texts of the entire community. What later became the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament, plus the epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, were in wide circulation by the first century, so the basics of the gospel story were well known.
But the often-persecuted Christian movement was several centuries away from having an established canon. Extant were other well-regarded texts, many of which were also attributed to Apostles or key figures. The most important among those discovered in Egypt in 1945 include the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.
The Nag Hammadi codices (and several related scrolls independently discovered in the previous two centuries) reveal that the Gnostics were concerned with creating an all-encompassing psychocosmic myth, with Jesus as its central figure. And it is a fact that their historical and cosmological framework comports with certain features of the UB’s teachings on prehistory as well as the Urantian ascension cosmology, inclusive of its teaching about the Indwelling Spirit.71
The Gnostics depicted a multileveled cosmos, with our own world subsisting at its lowest level. Humankind was seen to be isolated at the greatest distance possible from the world of pure spirit, and languishing in a slumbering or unconscious state. Further, at least according to my own interpretation, the Gnostics intuited the deeper meaning of the effects of the so-called Lucifer Rebellion and its aftermath in the Fall of Adam and Eve (prehistoric events covered just below), offering an interpretation that harmonizes better with the UB’s story than the biblical accounts of these events. And it turns out that this alternative understanding of history had significant implications for the Gnostic conceptions of human spirituality.
Although humankind was seen as being “trapped in matter,” the Gnostic vision also had a hopeful aspect. The benign forces of the world of spirit were engaged in a constant effort to awaken and liberate us from our fallen state. If we would only turn toward the divine light within, the pneuma, it would lead us on a step-by-step ascension through increasingly rarified levels of the cosmos all the way back to our true home—which, as in the UB, was conceived by some Gnostics as a “mother universe.”
Among the early Gnostic thinkers who were later declared heretics was Valentinus, who was probably born in Carthage around 100 AD. Valentinus was a poet, teacher, and visionary who must have possessed outstanding leadership abilities. A staunch follower of Apostle Paul (who in some respects was a hero to Gnostics because he had received direct revelation from Christ), Valentinus became a resident of Rome, where he achieved prominence in the Christian community. According to historians, he was so well regarded by his peers that he missed out being elected the bishop of Rome by a narrow margin. In other words, the renowned Gnostic teacher Valentinus almost became the pope! Although this position was far less prestigious and powerful than what it became a few centuries later, we can only wonder how different things might have become if he had won the election.
Gnostics like Valentinus pondered the question of why humanity had arrived at its fallen and apparently hopeless state at the bottom of the celestial hierarchy. Why was the world pervaded by such outrageous suffering, violence, and ignorance? In answer to such questions, the Gnostic masters devised an original myth. This story had as its foundation two key factors, among others: a novel interpretation of the biblical story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and a stark repudiation of the Christian attempt to merge Judaic doctrines with Christian belief, which was spearheaded by Paul and St. Iranaeus.
Gnostic Myth and the UB’s Revealed History
Ancient Judaism attributed the world’s fallen state to the belief that the parents of all humankind had rebelled against the divine order. Such teachings were entrenched in the minds of the early Jewish converts to Christianity. And because Jesus was a teacher and prophet to the Jews, it was only natural that beliefs from his own tradition would make their way into Christian thought. In particular, the biblical story of Adam and Eve became central to emerging Christian thought in the first century because of the outsized influence of Apostle Paul, who reframed the old Genesis story into the radical new doctrine of original sin and the blood atonement of Christ.
But the Gnostics, as a movement, asserted an alternative vision of prehistory. Generally, they taught that intermediate celestial beings—and not the mother and father of humanity—were the cause of our rupture with the higher worlds.
And here is a significant instance in which we find an affinity with the cosmology and spirituality of the Urantia Revelation. The UB also provides an account of a far-distant planetary default, but one of even wider implications than that found in Genesis. It teaches that more than two hundred thousand years ago an intermediate-level angelic being, Lucifer—the chief celestial administrator of our local system of inhabited planets (the UB defines a local system as an aggregation of one thousand worlds), precipitated an extremely rare event in a local universe: a system-wide rebellion. The manifesto of the Lucifer Rebellion denied the very existence in humans of the sacred triad (the evolving soul, personality, and the Indwelling Spirit) and repudiated the reality of the universal plan for ascension to Paradise; amazingly, Lucifer and the millions of angels who followed him denied the very existence of God. The Luciferians took over the angelic administration of Earth, and among other calamities caused the destruction of the mission to our planet of Adam and Eve, which we’re told occurred around 37,000 BC.72
Compare the outlines of the UB’s purported revelatory account of prehistory with the propositions of the old Gnostic myth:
• Our world had somehow been created by an evil, deceptive, and secondary spirit being. (In the UB story, Lucifer was not the literal creator of the planet, but his actions did generate the abhorrent conditions that dominated planetary life up to the time of Jesus.)
• This subsidiary creator, said the Gnostics, was not the high God, but only a “half-maker,” or Demiurge, that had interposed itself on Earth. (In the UB version, Lucifer and Satan were “midlevel” spirits who broke universe protocols by coming here to recruit, with great success, followers of the rebellion from among the angelic administration of Earth.)
• As a result, said the Gnostics, both the world and the human beings in it were in an absurd situation, and the only remedy was gnosis. (We’ve seen that the Urantia Revelation teaches a modern form of gnosis: soul-evolution, self-perfection, and ascension to Paradise.)
And now, here’s the Gnostic punchline: for the most part, this subordinate deity, the Demiurge, revealed itself in the Old Testament as Jahweh, the traditional deity of the Hebrews. Jahweh was depicted by the Gnostics as tyrannical, violent, and heartless. Gnostics were the first in a line of critics who have pointed to the incompatibility of Judaism with the teachings of Jesus.73
Gnosticism had many variations and no central authority that fixed its doctrines. Gnostics were great mythmakers, and they were not shy about creating their own liturgies, rites, symbols, sacraments, and even priesthoods. But Marcion, Valentinus, and other leading teachers such as Simon Magus and Basilides of Alexandria all taught the same radical counter-myth: Adam and Eve’s purported sin against the Hebrew God was not the cause of our suffering and the tragic quality of our life on this world.74
In other words, humanity was not a perpetrator of sin, but rather a cosmic victim. It had not chosen and then inherited some sort of collective guilt because of a “fall.” Consequently, there was no need for God’s only son to be sacrificed to save humanity from its sinful nature. Once again, we find agreement with the Urantia Revelation, which teaches that the doctrine of the atonement through the shedding of Jesus’s blood was entirely erroneous. The UB’s critique of this idea is epitomized in this passage, which is strong medicine:
When once you grasp the idea of God as a true and loving Father, the only concept which Jesus ever taught, you must forthwith, in all consistency, utterly abandon all those primitive notions about God as an offended monarch, a stern and all-powerful ruler whose chief delight is to detect his subjects in wrongdoing and to see that they are adequately punished, unless some being almost equal to himself should volunteer to suffer for them, to die as a substitute and in their stead. The whole idea of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the concept of God as it was taught and exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature. [188:4.8]
The Gnostic story continues: there were intermediate worlds or heavens and at their highest point was an “upper world”—an utterly transcendent source-universe of light, sometimes known as the pleroma, or “fullness.” This was the abode of the high God of transcendent unity, the place from which Jesus himself had come. And this benign force of the highest heaven was engaged in a constant effort to contact us. This true God was trying to rescue us from our imprisonment in a material world where we lived under the aegis of the Demiurge.
This compassionate Deity was trying to reach us in two ways: by dispatching divine teachers from the upper world directly into ours—the chief of whom was Jesus—and also by sending us a gift, a pure and literal part of itself, a pure spirit. And this was a core teaching; Gnostics uniformly taught that each of us is indwelled with a “fallen spark” gifted upon us from the highest cosmic level.
Valentinus in particular, much like the twentieth-century existentialists, taught that the world is absurd—but unlike most of them, he also taught that this life is rendered meaningful by gnosis, or knowledge of the inner spark. One wonders how, with the great currency of Gnosticism in the early centuries, this idea could have been so roundly eclipsed.
In his comprehensive study of Gnosticism, Stephen A. Hoellner summarizes this teaching about the inner light in this way: “[Gnostics believed that] a human being consists of physical and psychic components, which are perishable, as well as a spiritual component, which is a fragment of the divine essence, sometime called the divine spark [emphasis mine].”75 The UB uses similar language, as we’ve seen, also calling the divine gift a fragment. We are also told in the Urantia text that this divine fragment is imprisoned (see chapter 9)—the same metaphor used by the early Gnostics who, according to Hoellner, preached that these “sparks of transcendental holiness slumber in their material and mental prison.” But we are called to awaken to the inner spark.
This view of Gnosticism is complemented by the work of Elaine Pagels, perhaps the world’s leading scholar in this field, in her luminous work Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Pagels details a provocative theory of an open conflict between those who believed in the veracity of the Gospel of John, and those who held that the Gospel of Thomas was a more accurate reflection of Jesus’s life and teachings. Their dispute caused a fatal bifurcation in the early Christian community. This split had the effect of turning Western Christians away from the path of gnosis—or, as the Eastern Christian mystics called it, the way of divinization, or deification—and instead toward a mistaken juridical emphasis on the idea that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)
Eastern Christianity and the Path of Deification
The Gnostic emphasis on the pneuma survived in a sophisticated new form in Eastern Christian thought and practice, which in its mystical theology taught that we could be perfected, or deified, through an inner communion with God. With the notable exception of these deification teachings, the Christian soul was usually not depicted as evolving by one’s own decisions, let alone progressing toward perfection. This omission has long been the case in Western Christianity until quite recently, despite several powerful pronouncements in the Gospels in which Jesus seems to refer to deification.76
We saw how the emerging mainstream Western Church repelled the Gnostic emphasis on an indwelling divine spark. As Christian theology and culture evolved through the line of Paul and Augustine, the point of Christian life—at least outside of the monasteries—became the quest for salvation from sin and a path to heaven by grace, through belief in the Lordship of Christ. If one had professed belief in the Creed and been baptized, salvation could be sustained by penitence, recitation of prayers, taking the sacraments, and by living a life of charity and good works. A Christian was a member of an ethical fellowship of believers in a religion about Jesus—not the practitioner of the self-regenerating experiential religion of Jesus based on a personal relationship with God. The UB makes a big point of this distinction.
In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ. The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road. The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and to a portrayal of his personal religious convictions. The only notable exceptions to this statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only once reverted to the personal religious life of his Master. The New Testament is a superb Christian document, but it is only meagerly Jesusonian.” [196:2.1]
Philosophic confusion resulted from this overemphasis on the person of Jesus as the only path to salvation, not to mention the theological contrivances of Paul. The possibility of a clear distinction between soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma) soon fell away. The underdeveloped concept of the human soul that remained in the West became conflated with basic capacities of the intellect such as reason, reflection, and will—as we earlier noted in St. Augustine’s writings. It was not a far distance from here to the dualism of Descartes, which conflated mind and soul into an otherworldly entity that stands above and apart from the body.
What’s more, the human will is helpless without the grace of the sacraments, according to the pessimistic Western Christian position—at least that was the juridical Pauline and Augustinian view that later came to dominate Catholic doctrine and was greatly reaffirmed by Luther and the Protestant reformers. Through our faith in the glorified Christ who “died for our sins,” a measure of grace was released that freed the depraved the will from original sin. This formula contributed to the cathartic or “silver bullet” form of salvation later promoted worldwide by evangelical Protestants, with its singular emphasis on being “born again.”
By contrast, the Eastern Church saw salvation, much as The Urantia Book does, as a continual growth in grace by choosing the will of God again and again. According to the UB, Jesus taught his followers to engage in a “glorious progression, to become perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” [142:7.13]
In part due to the Greek and Gnostic matrix out of which it was born in the Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Orthodox Christianity did not hold to the view of a broken and utterly dependent human will. The Byzantines adopted the more optimistic idea that, although the human will is weak, it can still be a reliable partner with God’s will. According the great Eastern theologian St. Maximus, “Our salvation finally depends on our own will.”
Passages that hint at the potential for divinization are sprinkled throughout the New Testament, but all of them are cryptic. The Eastern theologians picked up on these powerful epigrammatic statements that were often ignored in the West and slowly developed the doctrine, building especially upon the monastic experience of the Desert Fathers that first sprang up in Egypt beginning in the third century. Favored passages included Jesus’s teachings in Luke 17:21, “The kingdom of God is within you”; “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, you are gods?’” (John 10:34); Peter’s statement “so that . . . you may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4); and Paul in Romans 8:16, “It is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” The result in the Eastern Church was the claim that the ultimate aim and purpose of human life was theosis, a Greek word that is translatable as “deification” or “divinization.” In a definitive scholarly study of this theme in contemporary Christianity, Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov conclude that “the Eastern Orthodox Church has retained theosis as a concept for theological reflection, while the Western churches . . . have dropped it.” They call this doctrinal omission in the West a “serious loss for Christian thought and hope.”77
The survival into modern times of the Eastern Church’s deification doctrine offers an important bridge to the UB’s teaching about levels of circle-making that lead to God Fusion. The teachings of the great Eastern practitioners, especially as collected in the Philokalia (a five-volume compendium of monastic writings compiled over many centuries), speak of a progression from “purification of the body” (ascetic practices, including stillness of the body and mind) to “illumination” (perception of the presence of Christ through prayer of the heart), and finally to “union” (formless oneness with the “energies” of God).
Through the centuries, the goal of deification through union has always been described in the East in apophatic terms. Apophatic theology is the mystical way of the negation of all concepts—and even non-concepts—of God, because God is absolutely transcendent to all possible qualifiers. God is not simply One as opposed to the many; not simply Being as opposed to nonbeing; not even Spirit as opposed to nature. The essence of God cannot be appropriated through specific techniques that involve ideas, feelings, movements, images, or even the human will. Such things were seen as subtle idolatry.
The Eastern Christian mystics arrived instead at the stance that it was necessary for the entire person to present himself to God. There was no royal road to union through any one of the human faculties. The whole self would be nakedly disclosed to God in the “divine darkness.” Partaking in the sacraments, singing hymns, reciting the name of Jesus, and heart-centered breathing could focus the mind to prepare the practitioner. But all this was preliminary. The point was to surrender into contemplation, taking a leap beyond all doing and into a state of resting in the unknowable divine presence in utter stillness (known by the Greek term hesychia). This mobilization of the entire self toward a formless but ceaseless worship beyond thought (or even beyond non-thought) is not unlike the UB’s idea of faith—if such a state of faith-filled awareness is seen as an existential liberation of the whole person into transconceptual spiritual receptivity.
Hesychastic heart-spirituality did not pose a dichotomy between the body and the spirit as developed later in the West. The Eastern mystics did not privilege any aspect of the human organism as being closer to the divine than any other. Instead, they depicted all elements of the human person as equally fallen in the face of God’s utter transcendence and incomprehensibility, and thereby all parts of the self—compositely represented as “the heart”—could equally benefit from the gifts of grace conferred upon the believer practicing hesychia.
But even in states of union, the contemplative never contacts the essence of God. The hesychast was only able to participate in the “uncreated” energies of God, as the great fourteenth-century Byzantine theologian St. Gregory Palamas explained when challenged by Western theologians. At best, we would be granted a vision of the “uncreated light” of God, much as the Apostles Peter, James, and John were granted during the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. (Such was the teaching of St. Symeon the New Theologian in the tenth century.78) And even this notion comports with the Urantia Revelation, which states that we increasingly participate in divine glory but do not contact the essence of God until far, far into the ascent—only on Paradise. “Though you cannot find God by searching, if you will submit to the leading of the Indwelling Spirit, you will be unerringly guided, step by step, life by life, through universe upon universe, and age by age, until you finally stand in the presence of the Paradise personality of the Universal Father.” [2:5.5]
Thus, according to Palamas, God energetically descends to minister to humanity in response to our aspiration and need, especially in the person of Jesus, but this Palamite teaching does not mean that God shares with us the fullness of his divine essence. Through this distinction, Eastern Christian theology believed it preserved the ineffable transcendence of the Father.
As a final note, it should be remembered in this connection that St. Athanasius of Alexandria’s central argument, which convinced the Council of Nicaea to adopt the creedal formulation of the doctrine of the Incarnation, provided a philosophic basis for the later teaching of theosis (perhaps unwittingly, given Athanasius’ forceful opposition to Gnosticism). The great theologian declared that if Jesus is not both fully God and fully man, then we cannot logically share in the divine nature. His famous line about the Incarnation epitomizes the Orthodox concept of theosis: “He became man so that man might become God.”79
Asian Ideas of Self and Soul
As we complete our global survey of the wisdom traditions, let us turn for a moment to Asia to trace some of its unique ideas about soul, spirit, and personhood. Hinduism and Buddhism do have some mild affinities with Gnosticism and Greek Christianity, so we conclude this chapter with an all-too-brief survey of their views on these matters.
It is fair to say that the ancient Vedanta adepts penetrated to inner depths unprecedented at that time in humanity’s religious history. Doing so meant casting aside the symbolism and ceremonialism of the Brahmin priests, then plunging into a devoted effort to directly experience the hidden truth that lies beneath the world of flux. Deep within every person, these sages concluded, exists an eternal, incorporeal, and impersonal Self. This entity alone, it was said, is ontologically real, while the contingent personal self, the struggling human ego, is ultimately illusory. The esoteric branches of Hinduism have ever since taught that the Indwelling Spirit-entity constitutes the existential presence of a nonpersonal Deity, while the particular bearer of the Self (the living and embodied personality) is caught in a dream of existence. This idea resolved itself into the concept of the indwelling atman—the microcosmic Self that corresponds to Brahman, the macrocosmic essence of the Absolute. “A liberated person sees no difference between his own atman and Brahman, and between Brahman and the universe” (Adhyatma Upanisad).
On the surface, this conception is not unlike the UB’s notion of the Indwelling Spirit, which we’ve defined as a prepersonal fragment of the Universal Father. But one’s cosmological and theological assumptions make all the difference. Unlike the idea of the God Fragment, the Hindu atman was not the gift of a loving Divine Parent. The Self had no interest in guiding or conserving human experience, or in cocreating and then perfecting a human soul. “Atman can be defined only through negating any personal attributes. Although it constitutes the existential substrata of human existence, atman cannot be the carrier of one’s ‘spiritual progress,’ because it cannot record any data produced in the illusory domain of psycho-mental existence.”80
In other words, the absolute was not interested in human progress. The Vedanta cosmos was static and impersonal; concepts of evolution would not penetrate Hindu thought until the twentieth century, when it arose especially in the work of Sri Aurobindo, a contemporary of the revelators who authored The Urantia Book.
Yet there was a conception of a metaphysical record of sorts that kept track of human behavior. Somehow attached to the Self was a subtle body that kept the atman in bondage to the law of karma—and from which the atman had to free itself through the practice of yoga. Karmas and life impressions (samskaras) were deposited in the subtle-body reservoir, but this repository was not a uniquely personal and experiential soul; it was not an immortal asset of the evolving universe as conceived in the synthesis hypothesis. One’s deposit of karmic debt (as a result of choices and behavior in the world) merely contributed to the operation of a mysterious, impersonal mechanism—the inexorable law of karma. Its function was to generate the characteristics of one’s next incarnation through the impersonal operation of cause and effect.81
In classic Vedanta, no unique and sacred personhood was present in the human incarnation, exercising its free will. Only the atman was truly real; the illusory personal ego would dissolve upon the achievement of liberation from bodily existence, when the aspirant “got off the wheel”—the ultimate return of the atman to Brahman, likened to a drop of water returning to the ocean. This was enlightenment, or moksha, according to the Upanishads. The practitioner was now liberated from suffering and reincarnation, but this freedom entailed the extinguishment of selfhood. Sadly, this result is not unlike the UB’s depiction of the return of both the God-given personality and the remnant of the human soul to the Supreme Being that occurs when a person rejects eternal life—the ultimate failure of the conscious self.
Thus, in traditional Vedanta teaching, the virtuous effort of an aspirant did not yield any new value in an evolving universe. It did not generate a personal soul that contributes to cosmic evolution while at the same time immortalizing the spiritually significant choices of a unique personality (according to our synthesis hypothesis).
It is worth pointing out that these teachings also differed from classical Platonism, which asserted the preexistence of an immortal soul in a celestial world and its fall into a human body. Plato never conceived of a “subtle self” containing traces of one’s previous life that would determine the conditions of the next incarnation or a heavenly ascension.
For his part, the Buddha added what he considered to be a profound corrective to Vedanta concepts of the atman: he did not deny the existence of the moral, intellectual, or volitional aspects of this entity, but he stumbled at the notion of an eternal, unchanging atman; for him there was a functional self, yes, but not an ontological soul or spirit (or Self). The attributes of the atman might be immaterial, but immateriality in no sense meant permanence; all possible attributes of this atman were to be considered ephemeral. Buddha believed that his predecessors had harbored a psychological delusion, a subtle attachment to a reified “it” of selfhood that obscured the prospects of a deeper penetration into pure consciousness.
But it is important to note that the later Buddhist doctrines of an indwelling Buddha-nature may have marked the return of the classical atman in a new and much improved form. And we should note well that the Urantia Revelation praises this very concept (see 94:11) as one that closely approximates its own teaching about the spirit-self, an indwelling gift of God that is not exactly impersonal but will one day gain personalness through its dramatic fusion with both the soul and the personality. We return to this important feature of Buddhism in chapter 9.
Allowance was made within classic Buddhism for the transmigration of moral characteristics into the next life—actions lead to consequences—but there is no ultimate actor. Of course, in Buddhism, atman is not identical with Brahman—Buddha found no evidence that either was ontologically real. To believe in an eternal Self or Godhead, he taught, is to hold to an artificial and ignorant construct.
Not unlike in the West, the great traditions of origin in India resolved themselves on the one hand into a substance dualism (the atman versus the illusory ego-self), and on the other to various renditions of a Buddhist monism—which shares characteristics of Aristotle’s monism.
In chapter 7, I’ll trace how Ken Wilber and his colleagues in the integral movement have created an impressive philosophic edifice that highlights essential truths of the world’s wisdom traditions that we have surveyed so far, and then goes on to correlate these ideas with the findings of modern thought. A great convergence of integralism with important teachings of the Urantia Revelation is one of the results of this heroic effort.
70 This discussion especially follows the argument of Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing (Quest Books: 2002), by Stephan A. Hoeller, PhD, who is described by Robert Elwood, emeritus professor of religion at University of Southern California, as “the preeminent exponent today of Gnosticism as a living religious practice.” Elwood calls this book a “splendid interpretation.”
71 But of course these ancient teachings could never have envisioned the modern idea of cosmic evolution that makes possible the ancillary idea of an evolving soul.
72 I realize that at first glance the UB’s story of Lucifer itself sounds like an ancient Gnostic myth. Nevertheless, here’s a full outline: In the UB we read that Lucifer, along with his lieutenant, one named Satan, launched an angelic rebellion that negated the very idea of the existence of a Creator Father. They denied the reality of the evolving soul and the Father’s gifts of personality and the Indwelling Spirit. They propounded the so-called Doctrine of the Liberty of self-will and self-assertion as their creed, rather than the divine way of love, forgiveness, and compassion. A total of 37 local planets supported the rebellion, and our chief celestial planetary administrator, named Caligastia, himself became a fervent Luciferian. The majority of the angelic host of our world followed him into perdition. (See Paper 53, “The Lucifer Rebellion”; Paper 54, “Problems of the Lucifer Rebellion”; and Paper 67, “The Planetary Rebellion.”) The deeds of Lucifer and Satan (who are conflated into one being in Abrahamic scripture) are alluded to in the Bible and the Qur’an in a few cryptic passages, but the UB account offers about twenty pages of lucid material. We read there that Lucifer’s followers on Earth usurped the benign celestial governance of our world. They precipitated the unwitting default of Adam and Eve—who we are told were real beings with a mission to upstep human biology. And the rebels wrecked other divine missions. As a result, they plunged our world into darkness and quarantine.
These misguided beings dominated the celestial administration of Earth until they were deposed by Jesus while he was present on Earth. The UB indicates that Caligastia was not technically removed by Jesus, but only shorn of his powers pending his adjudication in the highest heavenly court. However, the angels on our world who followed Caligastia into rebellion were removed from the planet on the occasion of Pentecost. The UB clearly states that Caligastia remained relatively free up until the appearance of the Urantia Revelation and afterwards, and has been available to conspire with followers on Earth who desired his presence. I accept the Urantian account of these events because it is embedded in an otherwise intellectually plausible and scientifically sound evolutionary cosmological worldview. Incidentally, in the Special Supplement near the end of the book, I summarize the evidence of archeological support for the UB’s story of Adam and Eve.
73 Perhaps chief among these critics was Marcion, a leading early teacher whose influence is said to have matched that of Valentinus. Although once a bishop and a famous Christian preacher in Rome (ca. 150 AD), Marcion split with the emerging mainstream Church and formed a breakaway sect of his own, developing a network of churches throughout the Roman world, many of which lasted into the fifth century. His chief contribution was a critique of the canonical Gospels as being impure, claiming that various sections were fabrications (as is now believed by some biblical scholars). It was especially his view that the Hebrew God was not the loving Father of all and not the God that had been proclaimed by Jesus. Jahweh was the God of the Law, who mingled with matter to create our fallen world. At his best, said Marcion, Jahweh was a God of justice—but he could in no way be seen as allied with the high Father, the Good God taught by Jesus.
74 They taught that instead, Adam and Eve had hoped to recover their divinity, their imago dei, by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. This act had angered Jahweh, who cast them out of the Garden of Eden. And further, according to the Gnostics, the original Garden was not a paradise. The world was not first created pristine and perfect, after which there was a great fall into sin that must now be passed on to each generation. Instead, the world was radically fallen from the beginning. It must be remembered that they believed that our world had been created by a lesser God, an impostor, in its own flawed image. The universe we see was impaired from the start and designed to deceive. The material world was a “matrix” in which we were caught.
75 Hoeller, p. 18.
76 Of course, there were many exceptions among the Western mystics. Some of the medieval Catholic mystics allude to stages of unfolding, notably St. John of the Cross and especially St. Teresa of Avila, who walks her readers through the “mansions” of our inner being, which she called “the Interior Castle.” In addition, the sixteenth-century founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, taught in his Spiritual Exercises that one must “conquer oneself and regulate one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment.” The Jesuit aspirant was taught to train his mind—with the help of prayer and self-examination—to be free from his own likes and dislikes, in order to better discern God’s will. This training was eventually extended to the laity and has become popular in certain Catholic circles today.
77 Stephen Finlan and Vladimir Kharlamov, Theosis: Deification in Christian Theology, vol. 1 (Wipf & Stock, 2006), p. 8.
78 According to the great Russian theologian Vladimir Lossky, St. Symeon represents the apex of Eastern Christian mysticism. Lossky’s writings were a crucial guide for writing this section.
79 For much more on this subject, see my essay “Eastern Orthodox Christianity: Hesychia, Theosis, and The Urantia Book” at: http://urantia-book.org/archive/sfj/orthodox_christianity_urantia.htm.
80 See http://www.comparativereligion.com/reincarnation.html.
81 “As a necessary aid in explaining the reincarnation mechanism, Vedanta adopted the concept of a subtle body (sukshma-sharira) which is attached to atman as long as its bondage lasts. This is the actual carrier of karmic debts. However, this ‘subtle body’ cannot be a form of preserving one’s personal attributes, i.e., of any element of one’s present conscious psycho-mental life. The facts recorded by the subtle body are a sum of hidden tendencies or impressions (samskara) imprinted by karma as seeds that will generate future behavior and personal character. . . The reservoir of karmas is called karmashaya . . . This deposit of karma merely serves as a mechanism for adjusting the effects of karma in one’s life. It dictates in an impersonal and mechanical manner the new birth (jati), the length of life (ayu) and the experiences that must accompany it (bhoga).” Ibid.