The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
—Baha’u’llah
Traditional Western Christianity originated as, and remains, a religion based on faith in revelation—the good news about the death and miraculous resurrection of the redeemer of all mankind. This Pauline gospel exalted a powerful but only partial truth—the Lordship of Christ—while grafting onto the new religion the ancient idea of blood atonement. The ultimate effect was the subordination of the religion of Jesus—Jesus’s noble teachings about the brotherhood of humankind, the ethics of the Golden Rule, nonresistance to evil, the forgiveness of one’s enemies, the individual’s experience of the presence of God, and the Father’s unconditional love. The New Testament also offered a perplexing description of self and soul that was embedded in a primitive cosmology and a garbled sacred history. Yet the Judeo-Christian mythos, along with its compromised institutions, was potent enough to launch an enduring civilization and prepare humanity for a new dispensation.
Waiting in the wings, of course, were some needed corrections. Europe’s most courageous thinkers would rightfully reject—in the name of reason—the Church’s claims on a monopoly of truth. And what was at first a trickle of dissent and nonconformity eventually became the tsunami we now call modernism. Understandably, because of its epochal struggle with the Church, the modern mind remains deeply skeptical of any claim of supernatural revelation.
Ironically, The Urantia Book—itself purporting to be a supernatural revelation—endorses the modernist critique of the traditional Christian worldview. And it goes on to audaciously present a new version of faith in revelation—the inner disclosures of truth by the Indwelling Spirit to each son or daughter of God.82 While the UB urges us to live a life based on the insights born of faith, its very teaching about faith is framed in the language of philosophic reason—also rather ironically. It is a remarkable fact the Urantia Revelation uses categories borrowed (in part) from modernist thought in order to surpass the limitations of modernism.
Many new readers of the Urantia Revelation are disappointed when they realize that it lacks the visionary, metaphysical, or poetic qualities they are familiar with in other scriptures or prophetic texts, and reads more like a gigantic university course in the philosophy of spiritual living. Its biography of Jesus offers many thrilling narrative passages in the course of providing a revolutionary new depiction of the religion of Jesus—his superb life of faith in the loving presence of God—yet his longer discourses come across in strikingly philosophic language.83 The UB is rich throughout with philosophic syllogisms, and while it resorts to the use of existing philosophic categories, The Urantia Book goes so far as to attempt to rehabilitate philosophic reason. It shocks many readers with the assertion that all previous metaphysics “has proved a failure.” But then the text hardly skips a beat, declaring in the same passage that “revelation authoritatively clarifies the muddle of reason-developed metaphysics on an evolutionary sphere.” [103:6.8] This statement provides yet another challenge for future research into the deeper implications of the Urantia Revelation.
In the traditional Christian mindset, faith in revelation meant holding fast to creeds and doctrines based in part on a series of mythic narratives established by ecclesiastical authority.84 By contrast, the Urantia Revelation urges us to exercise faith in personally revealed truth, while at the same time using for orientation a revelatory reference text framed in philosophic and modern scientific language that offers a futuristic argument for a new cosmic spirituality.
All this is another way of saying that with the advent of The Urantia Book, the possibility of faith in revelation has returned in the postmodern era, but at a much higher level of sophistication. In the words of Jesus from his “Second Discourse on Religion”:
Your religion shall change from the mere intellectual belief in traditional authority to the actual experience of that living faith which is able to grasp the reality of God and all that relates to the divine spirit of the Father. The religion of the mind ties you hopelessly to the past; the religion of the spirit consists in progressive revelation and ever beckons you on toward higher and holier achievements in spiritual ideals and eternal realities. [155:6.4]
If we turn to the Urantia Revelation, we find that our personal spiritual experience is now sovereign. It is no longer subordinated to the authority of the traditions of the past, however benign they may be, nor is it subject to institutional requirements.85
In the final analysis, the teachings of Jesus presented in the UB are about a life of genuinely free religious experience, the joy of soul-making based on our own creative choices, and the thrill of developing a philosophy of living that arises from personal interpretations of the values of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Modernism and Its Discontents
With the authority of scripture and the Church in retreat, many in the educated classes of early modern Europe turned their attention away from the things of faith in favor of scientific reason based on material facts—and this new focus quickly yielded the material blessings of the modern age. In the face of this new materialism, what could now be done to retrieve some notion of an immaterial soul and an afterlife?
According to the leading philosopher of the European Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, philosophic reason and scientific inquiry would never suffice to answer this question. In an effort to save this great ideal, he declared in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) that we should simply assume the reality of the soul’s existence because of its immense moral value to society.
Kant would likely agree with the UB that we are dependent on revelation for true knowledge about the soul and of God. And in his time and immediately thereafter, new claims of revelation began to fill the vacuum; a movement of the modern zeitgeist toward postbiblical revelation began to gather momentum. At first it took the form of the personal revelations of Immanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century and the aspirations of the Idealist philosophers who followed after Kant. Then came the visions of the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, such as William Blake. The trend culminated later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the claims to revelation by movements such as Christian Science, Seventh Day Adventism, New Thought, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy—and in the Islamic world with the revelations of Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith. In our time, revelatory NDEs have inspired a renewed faith in unseen metaphysical realities, and channeled works such the Seth Material, The Law of One, and A Course in Miracles have proliferated.
I believe that the Urantia Revelation tops off this movement with an epochal outpouring of revelatory grace, this time with a special focus on how to integrate science and philosophy with a cosmological vision of the human self and soul. In this chapter I argue that a new cultural paradigm that is generally friendly to such an integrative methodology has arisen that can support the futuristic teachings of the UB. The insights of integral theory are already assisting the Urantia Revelation in making its proper contribution.
Unfortunately, the prevailing cultural memes of our time are unfriendly and even outright hostile toward both of these two metanarratives of integration and synthesis. Under the sway of modernist secularism, human consciousness and selfhood have been reduced to by-products of brain biochemistry, inherited genetics, and the influences of one’s environment. Modernity has made numerous positive contributions, but its often amoral strivings have blighted the planet with war, environmental destruction, and inequality. And while it is true that the secularist revolt freed up energies for economic growth, its attack on the excesses of traditional religion created, in turn, its own excessive reliance on science, technology, political control by technocratic elites, and profit-driven global capitalism.
Arising after World War II with a critique of these growing maladies was the boomer generation, the postmodernists. Theirs was a double revolt—against both the negative effects of modern materialism and the authoritarian religious traditions of the West. But like the modernists, postmodernism was also constructive. The postmodern meme has contributed environmentalism, multiculturalism, sexual frankness, and egalitarianism. Its educators have produced thousands of articulate advocates for cultural pluralism and tolerance for minorities. Especially for our purposes, we can add to this list the postmodern innovations known as New Age spirituality, interfaith dialogue, and the interspirituality movement, each based in part on the desire to reframe and package esoteric ancient wisdom in an updated and popular format. In particular, postmodernists drew from nineteenth-century occultism and spiritualism and from living masters of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism who had migrated to the West.
While this effort to reenchant the world and advocate for social reform has been a gift, postmodernism has also had the effect of propelling global civilization into even more conflict than the earlier division between traditional culture and modernity. The traditionalists upheld the truths of ancient scripture and the modernists celebrated scientific truth, but the postmodernists declared any claim to truth to be suspect. Truth was merely “truthiness” (to quote comedian Stephen Colbert). It was little more than an assertion of the powerful, or a transient interpretation of cultural artifacts by whatever system of thought happened to be in fashion. To launch a new “truth,” said the postmodernists, one needed only to establish a hegemony that allowed one to control the institutions of its expression. The old verities—such as the values of truth, beauty, and goodness—did not exist in some transcendental space waiting to be discovered by noble thinkers; such ideas were an invention by society based on arbitrary rules of language and cultural convention. And the cultural supremacy that resulted was all backed up by naked political power.
When postmoderism came to dominate academia in the 1980s, the tide turned. Professors of the humanities and social sciences taught a generation of students that the interior life is embedded—and in fact, smothered—in contingent cultural assumptions. Individuals, they said, are largely unaware of their conditioning. Every value they hold dear is a product of passing cultural agreement, and almost none of it can be considered transcendent or revelatory.
Politically, this meant that no particular culture or religion could be considered to be superior to any other—because all were fungible, all were a fiction of the moment. Postmodernist deconstruction went so far as to cast doubt on the facts and truth-claims of science, to the dismay of modernists. Even the findings in physics and biology were distorted by hidden political agendas and cultural biases.
The result we now face is today’s all-too-familiar cultural fragmentation, where three primary and divergent worldviews—premodern, modern, and postmodern—coexist uneasily alongside one another and sometimes even fall into open warfare. Each culture believes that it alone has a monopoly on what is real and relevant.
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats foresaw this result in his prophetic 1919 poem “The Second Coming,” which I quote in part:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand . . .
The Coming of the Integral Age
Quietly into this predicament came the Urantia Revelation, now “at hand” (to quote Yeats). To a war-torn world whose “centre cannot hold,” the UB offers the revelation of a divine spark centered in the heart of each person and a loving Creator at the center of the cosmos. It provides an inspiring vision of philosophic coherence, evolutionary synthesis, and universal unity.
In the late twentieth century, the UB has initiated a many-sided mission of correction that is already catalyzing the epochal changes to come. But what has been urgently needed to support its proper utilization has been a comprehensive map of the whole that consolidates the evolution of consciousness up to the present moment—now that we are several generations after the publication of the Urantia Revelation. This is now available in the form of what philosopher Ken Wilber, our chief source in this chapter, calls the Integral Map, which offers a multiperspectival model for all of life and cosmic reality.
Integral culture, by definition, transcends but includes the best features of the three historic cultures we’ve been discussing: traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism. Integral theory provides for a new set of universals, and may set the stage for the reception of a new revelation as prophesied by Yeats.
It is fascinating to note that some of the intellectual objectives of the Urantia Revelation relate directly to the integral movement. As with integral theory, The Urantia Book provides a blend of the best of the enduring values of the three competing cultural paradigms we’ve been discussing. Below I briefly summarize how The Urantia Book harvests and reframes some of the best features of the three competing worldviews that were first distinguished by integralists:
1. Pre-modernism: The crucial premodern concepts of the soul, the Indwelling Spirit, and the intrinsic divinity of selfhood (the imago dei), as well as panentheism and Trinitarian theology, are “recycled” and rehabilitated in the Urantia text, but are now understood in the light of critical philosophy, universal evolution, and a scientific cosmology.
2. Modernism: The UB embraces the best features of modernist thought, including scientific method, physical and biological evolution, human rights, the importance of trade and industry, and democratic government. For example, in Part III, “The History of Urantia,” the opening fifty-page section describes the evolution of life on Earth over the last five billion years and reads like a modern science textbook. It even describes in detail the operation of continental drift (now called plate tectonics), a cardinal feature of today’s geophysics that was not proven until 1969. In addition, three entire papers (70 –72) discuss various features of democratic government, modern industry, and even issues like labor relations.
3. Postmodernism: The UB highlights key ideas associated with this worldview, including pluralism, cultural tolerance, gender equality, social justice, global citizenship, and interfaith dialogue. Various versions of these concepts can be found spread out through the four parts of the text, but especially in the 62 papers of Part III. I believe that a case can be made that certain crucial ideas of postmodernism found their first-ever systematic presentation in the UB.
But the Urantia text is not merely integrative in relation to the cultural ideals of our more immediate past, thereby “transcending and including” the best of these values. While its teaching bridges the three cultures that now compete for influence in the world, it also pushes beyond them into the far-distant future of religion and high civilization, as well as into the far-distant past of prehistory. In doing so, the revelators fill in breathtaking gaps in our understanding. Consider this list of elements:
• The distant future: The Urantia Revelation stuns the reader with its descriptions of the inhabitants of the perfect central universe; and it also offers a glimpse of the perfecting civilizations of other planetary cultures in our galaxy, some of which are millions of years ahead of ours. (“You would instinctively describe such a realm—could you be suddenly transported to a planet in this stage of development—as heaven on earth.” See Paper 54, “The Spheres of Light and Life.”) Notably, the citizens of such advanced worlds are masters of the cosmic spirituality described in this book.
• The distant past: We noted in chapter 6 that UB also propels us very far into the deep past, explaining why our dilemmas—especially the problems of racism, exploitation, and the tendency of humankind to war and polarization—have deep roots in prehistory, from the days of the Lucifer Rebellion more than two hundred thousand years ago. While this topic is beyond the scope of this book, I refer the reader again to these key Papers: 53, 54, and 67.
Given its wide scope, the Urantia Revelation is obviously not reducible to being a species of either premodernism, modernism, or postmodernism, nor can it be assimilated into organized Christianity.86 But the UB does have important affinities with the integral worldview.
Integralism and the Urantia Revelation
Integral thinkers around the world are building an emerging culture based on an understanding of large-scale evolution and cosmic integration that has many characteristics similar to that of the Urantia Revelation. This new integralism has roots in holistic evolutionary philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Alfred North Whitehead, and Sri Aurobindo. But today the field of integral theory and practice is led by Ken Wilber—one of the world’s most inclusive thinkers and its most widely translated philosopher.87
Integralism scales up our understanding of evolution, cosmology, culture, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality in a way that complements the community of inquiry growing up around the UB. While these two systems may disagree about what exactly constitutes the errors and excesses of the previous three worldviews, at a minimum they seem to agree to the idea of adopting a transcultural and integrative stance in relation to all of them.
The UB and integral theory have something to teach the other. One on hand, The Urantia Book’s revelations about psychology, theology, evolution, history, angelology, and cosmology widen the outlook of integralists. Its teaching about the purported real nature of the atman (the Indwelling Spirit of God) and the evolution of an immortal soul is compatible with an integral understanding of selfhood, and can provide new depths to integral psychology.
For its part, integralism provides an advanced template for an updated cosmic spirituality based on today’s latest advances in developmental psychology, integral health and medicine, evolutionary theory, integral philosophic method, and consciousness studies, all of which occurred after the publication of the UB.88 These new disciplines have been embraced by integral theorists, and I believe that Urantia students, if they are to keep current, need to embrace these new developments as well.89 In particular, it would be especially helpful if Urantians made use of the culturally neutral language of today’s developmental psychology, which integral theory very effectively employs in its descriptions of human growth. I attempt to do so in the remainder of this chapter—as one illustration of the benefit of using integral theory to assist in the exegesis of the Urantia Revelation.
Furthermore, just like the UB, the emerging integral worldview is super-interdisciplinary. And in addition to harvesting disciplines almost unknown at the time of the UB revelation, integral theory provides an advanced protocol and methodology for the integration of all of these disciples, which Wilber calls the Integral Operating System (IOS).90 I cover the IOS in a rudimentary way in the next section. For a beginner’s overview of Wilber’s system as it relates to the themes of this book, please see Appendix C.
Ken Wilber’s integralism arose from his own heroic and extensive cross-cultural research that sifted through the entire spectrum of partial truths of the world’s great wisdom traditions and today’s psychospiritual teachings. With the help of scientific psychology, the integral perspective has pruned many errors or limiting perspectives, giving us a model of human development that purports to transcend but include the best elements of them all. This is not unlike the work of the revelators of the Urantia text, who surveyed and analyzed the best human knowledge at the time that the revelation was compiled. They selected the most suitable human ideas and sources and wove entirely new revelatory facts and ideas around this humanly derived conceptual scaffolding.91
“Showing Up” with Multiple Perspectives
What is perhaps most compelling is the fact that Urantians and integralists can find common ground in regard to the basic assumptions of each system. Allow me to offer a brief comparison, beginning with a look at the fundamentals of the integral vision.
At its most basic, integralism entails a willingness to recognize three irreducible perspectives on the real. These are the domains of self, culture, and nature, and the disciplines related to them. To acknowledge and use these perspectives is to “show up”—a simplifying phrase that Wilber coined. These core elements of that which is real can be defined as follows:
• Self: the interior or subjective world of one’s felt experience, the first-person point of view of the “I.”
• Culture: the intersubjective or collective interior domain, the relational second-person perspective of “you” as well as the moral consciousness of the group—the “we.”
• Nature: the exterior or objective world of nature—the material facts and natural systems studied by the sciences; this is the third-person perspective viewpoint of the “it” (or “its”) domain.
According to Wilber, if one wants to “show up” in order to identify with the real, taking all of these perspectives to heart is essential. And if one wants to show up in a more scholarly way, one engages in an interdisciplinary fashion with science, philosophy, and religion—as exemplified, for example, in Wilber’s classic The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1999).
In this connection, recall from chapter 1 that life reviews in NDEs are also multiperspectival, in that they display one’s soul record as seen from the contrasting points of view of the self, significant others (including divine beings), and even the wider society. The heavenly world itself seems to be ratifying the idea that holistic and integrative awareness is essential to soul evolution.
Also in this regard, I find it helpful when Wilber renders the three irreducibles into his “Three Faces of God” concept: (1) God in first person refers to the actual phenomenological encounter with spirit, our own felt experience of mystical or ecstatic states of consciousness; (2) God in second person is traditionally defined as the “I-Thou” relationship; and (3) God in third person is often described as the divine “It,” the “great web-of-life,” or the evolving universe as a whole.
As noted in chapter 4, the Urantia Revelation also recognizes three reality domains as primordial, calling our relationship to them the fundamental forms of our God-given capacity for reality response. We noted that our response to the real is based on three core insights or cosmic intuitions that we are told are inherent in mind itself. “These scientific, moral, and spiritual insights, these cosmic responses, are innate. . . . The experience of living never fails to develop these three cosmic intuitions; they are constitutive in the self-consciousness of reflective thinking.” [192.5])
The UB arranges this same triad in numerous edifying ways, as can be seen in this passage:
There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation. The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy, and truth. Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith—physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality. We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning, and value. [196:3.2]
Urantians can also find common ground with the integralists with respect to another crucial triad—the good, the true, and the beautiful. Wilber calls these the Big Three, while we earlier noted that the UB calls this trio the comprehensible elements of Deity. The UB, in fact, provides more than eighty references to this primal set of values, in what amounts to one of the most replete set of definitions of the Big Three to be found anywhere.92 Here’s one rendition I especially like:
All truth—material, philosophic, or spiritual—is both beautiful and good. All real beauty—material art or spiritual symmetry—is both true and good. All genuine goodness—whether personal morality, social equity, or divine ministry—is equally true and beautiful. Health, sanity, and happiness are integrations of truth, beauty, and goodness as they are blended in human experience. Such levels of efficient living come about through the unification of energy systems, idea systems, and spirit systems. [2:7.11]
Assuming that you can accept this comparison as a general demonstration of an alignment of assumptions in the two systems, let’s move on to the deeper meaning of the idea of showing up.
As a way of schematizing the primary elements of the real, Wilber took a momentous step that began with the publication in 1995 of his groundbreaking Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. The result was integral perspectivism—a methodology now used worldwide by thousands of thinkers and professionals in a myriad of settings. In fact, I have used this approach for two decades to help me better understand the spirituality of the Urantia Revelation.
The basic idea is as follows: We will want to enact each of the three elements of universal reality if we are to truly show up in our world. To facilitate putting this triad into action, Wilber resolves it into four fundamental perspectives on any situation, which have to do with either the inside or the outside of the individual or the collective on any given occasion.93
As we can see in the illustrations below, each of these four points of view subsists in its own domain. By blending these vantage points in our experience and in our research, we fully exercise our relationship to the three irreducible reality domains, thereby enhancing selfhood reality. Wilber’s four primary perspectives are now known as his famous “four quadrants,” shown in Figure 1.
Here is a brief overview of Figure 1. We can perceive phenomena either by looking from the inside out—in a search for intentional experiences based on the felt values of the self (the upper left quadrant)—or by looking from the outside in, as we investigate individual facts with the help of the senses (upper right quadrant). We can take the standpoint of investigating the systems of external facts at hand (lower right quadrant) or else take on the collective aspect of the interior view of shared felt experiences—the perspective of human culture (bottom left quadrant). In short, any given occasion has four perspectives: either the inside or the outside of either the individual or the collective.
In a similar fashion, the UB calls for us to assume an interior and an exterior view on any phenomenon—that is, to distinguish subjective experiences from the objective facts. Of course, when we do so, these observations will greatly diverge, since we are opening to the felt experience of spiritual realities (the interior view) at the same time that we are making an objective assessment of the material world (the “outside looking in” approach). So what does one do with this split? How do we get an integrative grasp of both as one? The revelators tell us that we converge the disparate truths found in each domain. This entails cultivating the crown jewel of a life of meaning, philosophic awareness, which yields true wisdom: “From outward, looking within, the universe may appear to be material; from within, looking out, the same universe appears to be wholly spiritual. Reason grows out of material awareness, faith out of spiritual awareness, but through the mediation of a philosophy strengthened by revelation, logic may confirm both the inward and the outward view, thereby effecting the stabilization of both science and religion.” [103:7.6] My added emphasis points to the fact that revelation adds strength to the difficult work of using philosophic truth-perception to harmonize interior or exterior perspectives.
Surprising as it may sound, the UB depicts Jesus himself as a teacher of such an integrative philosophic awareness to his more advanced disciples. Jesus calls this approach to life “truth-coordination” and “wholeness of righteousness” in this unusual presentation to the apostles and a group of evangelists in Galilee (emphases mine):
In all that you do, become not one-sided and over-specialized. . . . Consider the Greeks, who have a science without religion, while the Jews have a religion without science. And when men become thus misled into accepting a narrow and confused disintegration of truth, their only hope of salvation is to become truth-co-ordinated—converted. Let me emphatically state this eternal truth: If you, by truth co-ordination, learn to exemplify in your lives this beautiful wholeness of righteousness, your fellow men will then seek after you that they may gain what you have so acquired. [155:1.4-5]
Wilber and the UB on “Growing Up”
Things become even more interesting when we realize that each of Wilber’s quadrants themselves show development and evolution. Acknowledging the fact of growth in all domains is essential, of course, because in today’s post-Darwinian world, we know that everything evolves—except, of course, that which is revealed to be transcendent to space and time.
All things, ideas, and relationships “show up” (or “tetra-arise,” as the integralists say) in at least four dimensions or perspectives. But we can also observe that each domain, within its own space of evolving activity, progresses toward higher levels of complexity and consciousness. Especially when applied to individual persons (the upper left quadrant), Wilber and his colleagues call this the process of “growing up.”
It turns out that we’ve already spent time with an example of growth within a single quadrant: the progression through traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism discussed earlier in this chapter. This sequence of stages belongs in the lower left quadrant of the collective interior. But to maintain our focus on personal spirituality, let’s correlate these cultural levels with the evolving stages of growth of individuals in the upper left quadrant, which tracks their felt experience of their own evolution to the highest stages of personal growth.
To illustrate, let’s say you identify yourself as a member of the Baha’i Faith and you live in Tehran. Almost by definition, a typical Baha’i is culturally postmodern, yes? So now the question becomes: where does your cultural identification place you in terms of your personal progress? To answer this, you would look to the upper left quadrant to locate the individual interior correlate to the Baha’i cultural worldview as depicted in the bottom left zone.
Wilber’s culturally neutral and generic terminology helps us out here: as individuals grow in their ability to include wider spheres of humanity in their awareness, they evolve from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. This sequence is a natural progression of consciousness, according to today’s developmental psychologists. (One might also call these stages preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.)
Now, given that you’re a Baha’i, we very likely can’t describe you as an egocentric crime boss who is out for your own enrichment. Nor can we locate you as someone who is dominated by ethnocentric consciousness—for example, exclusively identified with being an ethnic Iranian. The “altitude” of your awareness (to use another Wilberian term) is also likely to be higher and more inclusive than the mentality of even a nationalist. For example, the worldview of a modernist Iranian businessman is probably nationalist, as it likely goes beyond ethnocentrism to embrace minority ethnic groups whom he sees as legitimate members of the nation (or neighboring nations) and equally worthy to do business with.
As a Baha’i, you are aware that your founding prophet, Baha’u’llah, taught his followers to be far more inclusive than mere nationalists. So you are multicultural and worldcentric, or at least you aspire to be. Your individual awareness is pluralistic and tolerant. You are open to the truths of all the cultures and religions of the world and, because of your religious faith, you aim to bring peace and harmony to them all. Your faith even advocates reforming the United Nations to create a democratic world government.
Growing up to such higher levels, it turns out, can occur on its own, with or without explicit beliefs about spirituality. At first, we start out as egocentric children. But if we receive a decent modern education, we naturally progress from ethnocentric to nationalistic to worldcentric as we attain more advanced awareness of the greater realities of cultures around the world. Of course, when we achieve worldcentric status in our thinking, our soul-making will be all the more advanced.
Based on sociological research by other colleagues, Wilber points to a profound modification that usually occurs at the worldcentric stage. Individuals at that stage can suddenly move beyond the assumptions of the postmodern stage to become post-postmodern. The data shows that these people make a great leap to the stage of integral consciousness, which aims to transcend yet include the best values of all previous cultural levels (traditional, modern, and postmodern). Such people no longer see their particular cultural level as the only valid one; they realize that each level of the spiral of cultural progress has activated essential values that contribute something vital for all subsequent levels. The entire spiral of the evolution of consciousness begins to occupy and function within their own being. They honor and learn from all that has come before.
We can add still more advanced stages beyond worldcentric/integral if we include awareness of human life on off-planet cultures.94 If we operate at this even more advanced level, we are universe citizens who practice cosmic spirituality based on universal compassion, just like some of our extraterrestrial counterparts, who are actually described in the UB. (See, for example, Paper 72, “Government on a Neighboring Planet” and especially “The Spheres of Light and Life,” Paper 55.) Expanding our ethical awareness to include the millions of inhabited planets in the local universe (and beyond) was the prophetic stance of the Urantia Revelation decades before the Star Trek series and today’s movement for UFO disclosure. By the way, Wilber makes general reference to universe-centric awareness with his coined term kosmocentric.95
Let’s not forget that there are other perspectives that are pertinent to our example. The lower right quadrant has to do with the social system in which one happens to be embedded. If you are a Baha’i in Iran, where this religion is discouraged and often persecuted, you will have a different growth path than that of a Baha’i living in Chicago, for obvious reasons. In each case, you can locate where the evolutionary level of the social, economic, and political system you are embedded in might fall in a detailed lower right quadrant chart (which can be viewed online). These are the collective exterior elements of your life, and they are also essential. These aspects of social infrastructure don’t determine your attainments in the left quadrants, but they certainly condition your opportunities to evolve and your pace of growth. And finally, we must also have a discussion of the religiocultural components that condition your awareness, which can be mapped in the lower left quadrant.
All that said, we now thank you, Baha’i friend, as we move on to other adventures in integral analysis and the UB. For the question now arises, where might the UB’s depiction of soul evolution fit into this scheme of quadrants that evolve, especially the upper left? This brings us to a brief discussion of the different lines of development and especially to the integral psychograph.
The Lines of Human Development
In chapter 4 I introduced the UB’s seven levels of circle-making, which are also referred to by the slightly daunting phrase “self-perfecting.” You’ll recall that attaining your circles entails progress of the totality of the self as you slowly ascend (in the afterlife as well as in this life) toward the great goal of God Fusion. Much more research is needed here, but let’s make a stab at tracing how this Urantia-based conception of cosmic individuation might fit into Ken Wilber’s map, keeping in mind that I follow up on these issues in Part IV of this book.
You cannot fuse with the divine source of reality if your personal growth and your identifications are less than reality-centric—or lopsided, to put it colloquially. To enter into an irrevocable union with the source of Allness, you need to have engaged with all the elements of selfhood progression and thereby achieve a sublime symmetry in your personal development. In Wilber’s terms, you must have at least shown up as a conscious participant in each of the four perspectives or quadrants, and you will need to have been fully engaged with the Big Three values of truth, beauty, and goodness as you achieve higher levels of consciousness in the upper left quadrant.
In the UB’s simplest terms, you must have grown up with regard to the two great dimensions of soul growth, the quantitative and the qualitative. Doing so prepares you for attaining the highest circle (the first psychic circle), which allows direct and reliable communication with the Indwelling Spirit of God, as you will recall from chapter 4. We noted there that Jesus is depicted in the UB as the ideal model of this sort of growth in all of these respects, having ascended to this status due to his unequaled faith as well as his seasoned wisdom. That’s why the text often describes Jesus as a unified person.
It is altogether possible for every mortal believer to develop a strong and unified personality along the perfected lines of the Jesus personality. The unique feature of the Master’s personality was not so much its perfection as its symmetry, its exquisite and balanced unification. . . . Jesus was the perfectly unified human personality.
The section where this statement can be found, “The Acme of Religious Living” (see 100:7), goes on to provide a long list of his qualities that illustrate his personality unification and unprecedented balance of virtues. I paraphrase some of these here:
Jesus was . . . surcharged with enthusiasm, but never fanatical . . . emotionally active but never flighty . . . imaginative but always practical . . . courageous but never reckless . . . prudent but never cowardly . . . sympathetic but not sentimental . . . unique but not eccentric . . . pious but not sanctimonious . . . generous, but never wasteful . . . candid but always kind . . . courageous but never foolhardy.
With that overview of the evolutionary goal of those who follow Jesus, let’s break these notions down a little more to see what more we can learn about circle-making and soul-making in terms of integral theory.
As a first step, I’ll review the findings of today’s academic research community with regard to human development, leaning, as we go, on Ken Wilber’s summary of this vast subject. During the early decades of work in human development theory, various groups of relatively isolated researchers identified what they believed to be the exclusive indicators of the stages of adult maturation. For example, the pioneering French psychologist Jean Piaget thought that these stages had to do with improved cognition. A contrasting approach measured human development in terms of the growth of faith—that being the life work of James Fowler, the author of Stages of Faith noted earlier. Another important inquiry related to the ascending levels of value identification, an approach that happens to correlate directly to the three stages of cultural evolution that we already located in the lower left quadrant. This trend was led by Claire Graves, and was later refined especially by Don Beck, coauthor with Christopher Cowan of the seminal work Spiral Dynamics (1996 and 2005). And researchers have isolated still other, more particular types of intelligence that undergo growth and maturation. For example, you’ve likely heard of emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman) and moral intelligence (Lawrence Kohlberg). Today we have data on more than a dozen human developmental processes that include kinesthetic, musical, mathematical, and aesthetic lines of intelligence. Figure 2 below depicts a typical selection of key lines in the upper left quadrant.
A further refinement of this chart depicts key lines in terms of our three cultural levels, which in effect maps the upper left (the interior of the individual) to the lower left quadrant (the interior of the collective). Figure 3 is known as an integral psychograph.
Entire books have been written on the lines of development, notably Multiple Intelligences (2006) by Harvard professor Howard Gardner. Fortunately for us, Wilber and his associates have resolved this flowering of research into a few major lines that seem to organize all the others. One of the most prominent of these, it turns out, is the cognitive line—which relates logically to all other lines by its very nature (and not because many people involved with this work are overly cognitive types, as portrayed in the above chart).
Common sense tells us that you must actually be aware of something in order to engage with it along any one of the lines of intelligence. For example, you can’t grow in musical intelligence unless you expand your basic knowledge about things musical by mastering the skill of reading music notation, learning about the various genres, studying the great composers, attending live performances, and so on. As Wilber puts it, “You have to be aware of something in order to act on it, feel it, identify with it, or need it. . . . Cognition delivers the phenomena with which the other lines operate.”96
The UB conception, which precedes this research by half a century, ratifies the centrality of the cognitive line as well. For instance, recall our two key axes of self-perfecting: (1) qualitative growth in the ability to feel values—or the faith-discernment of the presence of God who is the source of all value, and (2) comprehension of meanings—growth in our cognitive understanding of the meaning of our experiences, which in the first place requires that we are paying attention to what is arising in our experience. This second axis, the line of quantitative soul growth, generally maps into Wilber’s cognitive line. Progress on this line requires having numerous life challenges that force us to inquire, reflect, and think.
Two ordinary examples: A person might say to himself, “My wife seems to be acting distant from me this weekend—what can that possibly mean? What am I missing in our relationship?” Another may ask, “My boss insists that I perform tasks for which I have no training—how will I get these things done? And why am I even working for a company that makes such unfair demands?”
Recognizing and then solving such perplexing problems obviously requires the exercise of thought. So, while both of our axes (feeling and thinking) are essential to balanced growth, it turns out that cognition is almost always in the lead. For if we don’t become cognitively aware of the dilemma we are facing in the first place, it’s all moot; and yet, having at least identified the problem cognitively, if we fail to think through the challenge it poses and face it emotionally, we certainly can’t exercise profound feelings of faith in relation to it. How much sense does it make to pray for the divine will if we haven’t taken the time to understand the issues at hand before beginning to pray?97 This distinction may explain an enigmatic statement in the UB that I have puzzled over for decades: “It is your thoughts, not our feelings, that lead you Godward” [101:1.3].
Some of us tend to admire simple-minded people (or politicians) who are oblivious to advanced meanings but who “trust their instincts.” We may even romanticize them—take the figure of Forrest Gump, for example, the simpleton who had his heart in the right place. On the other hand, powerful intellectuals may be utterly lacking in a basic feeling for humanitarian values, such as the men in the Pentagon who cooked up the Vietnam War. Both types miss the mark because they are cognitively deficient. Gump represents the sentimental fantasy that deep reflection, rigorous study, and worldly experience aren’t necessary for success in life. And, war planners and policy wonks may have a imposing grasp of weaponry, military history, battlefield tactics, and power politics, but their compartmentalized thinking prevents any wider understanding of the issues at hand—which if properly identified and reflected upon would be certain to arouse moral feelings and lead to a crisis of faith.
Allow me to illustrate this further with the metaphor of eyesight. By meditating with “one eye single to the glory of God” (a phrase used in the UB), we can develop a rich interior feeling for higher values. But depth of feeling does not directly translate into solutions to the complex problems of daily life; such determinations require far-reaching practical experience and socialization, which yield the ability to think broadly and reflect deeply to solve the problems of the hour in the most practical way. Competent thinking of this sort requires a different kind of vision—the ability to see with the eyes of the mind, followed by the openness required to feel crucial values with the “eyes of the heart.”
But in the final analysis we need to see with both eyes—the eye of feeling as well as the eye of cognition. And while employing such stereoscopic depth-vision, we can exercise a willingness to act that blends them both in soul-making decisions.
Which Line of Growth Is Central in Human Development?
Focusing in this way on the two axes of growth and their harmonious coevolution gives us a good start, but which line, if any, should be our greatest concern? In highlighting the cognitive line, Wilber points out that cognition is necessary but not sufficient to explain and motivate human growth. Researchers need to identify a line, he argues, that is even more universal than cognition, preferably one that does not refer to only one particular human faculty, such as thinking or feeling. And I believe that the revelators would agree with Wilber’s assessment.
Wilber first tackled this issue in his Integral Psychology (2001), where he puts the “self” or “self-sense” line at the center of human development. This line has everything to do with the cultural identifications we earlier discussed, those cherished ideas and feelings that provide, more or less unconsciously, our immediate answer to the core question, Who am I? Infants see themselves as their body; teens identify or merge with their peer group. As we mature, we find that we widen the scope of our consideration and care. We go on to self-identify with our ethnicity, then with our nation, and then with the whole world, as shown in our Baha’i example.
Of course, the process of disidentifying with our previous level of self-awareness is always difficult, which is why so many remain stuck at their current stage of growth. Indeed, if we do find the courage to let go of our previous stage, the transition we face could entail feelings of anguish that some might call an ego death. Yet, in healthy human development, our faith is richly rewarded; we always find that a new “I” emerges on the other side of such a dark night of the soul. In this progression, we are not extinguishing ego-identifications entirely; we are simply engaging with more advanced and inclusive identifications.98
Impressive research has shown that one activity in particular can accelerate progress most effectively along Wilber’s self-line: the noble endeavor of achieving deeper (or higher) states of consciousness, especially through meditation. These experiences are critical because in such altered states we energetically let go of our subjective identifications. What was once an experience felt from the inside out now becomes an object of present awareness that is observed, as it were, from the outside looking in. We now have space around this previous worldview and its many fascinations and are free of its exclusive hold on us. I’ll return in chapter 9 to this crucial idea of waking up to higher states of consciousness.
In his later thought on this issue, Wilber subtly changes his emphasis. He focuses instead on consciousness itself, harvesting the central Buddhist insight that consciousness should be defined as “openness” or “emptiness.” Today Wilber argues that the most inclusive and important line is consciousness alone, because consciousness or awareness is the space in which all identifications and all other lines can arise. Consciousness as such has no content (according to Buddhist psychology at least), so the other lines of development can be observed to rise and fall as consciousness rises and falls—that is, as the clearing or the inner capacity for awareness-in-general opens or closes.
Wilber hasn’t been called “the Einstein of consciousness” for no reason. But if he is not right, if consciousness is not the organizing vehicle for all the other lines of intelligence, what characteristic might play this role to instead?
To get at the UB’s possible answer, let’s revisit the quantitative or cognitive line that I previously defined as the growth of seasoned wisdom through wide-ranging life experience. Growing up to become wise surely necessitates discriminating awareness, but one can agree with Wilber that neither basic cognition nor the refinements of feeling that results from profound thinking is sufficient to answer the question of what constitutes the central line of growth. However, because of the UB’s revelation of the nature of personhood—which is the subject of our next chapter—Urantia Book students are pointed in a different direction from that favored by Wilber.
The Urantia text (as well as common sense) tells us that growing in wisdom also entails doing things—the living experience of making decisions, acting on them, and then coping with the consequences. The UB coins two phrases to refer to this sort of action-oriented decisiveness: “decision-action” and “choice-experience.”
In daily life, we think about and feel into what is relevant and worth acting upon; and we can support our conclusions by drawing on religious faith. But we must also carry out decisions based on such explorations. We must do something. And unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the sake of soul-making), all of this personal reflection—if it is truly sincere—may point to some rather risky choices for action. Engaging in such decision-action will, in turn, lead to the necessity of making follow-up decisions that will require mustering a new round of reflection on thoughts and feelings. And so it goes. Such is the nature of choice-experience. For example, think of Jesus’s decision to rout the moneychangers from of the Temple, after which he dealt with a dramatic aftermath that included his painful night of prayerful deliberation in the Garden of Gethsemane a few days later.
In our personal lives, we not only decide to buy a house or raise a child, we must also muster the fortitude to engage in all of the subsequent decisions and actions that accomplish such serious commitments. In this light, I’d now like to suggest a third line not yet discussed: the willingness to act, or simply, the line of will.
Allow me to illustrate this further with a theological metaphor. In the vertical dimension of our relationship to the divine, our growing faith leads us to increasingly advanced levels of God-consciousness. But we can (and must) also experience a horizontal connection to the divine that is implicit in all of this depth of feeling or thinking. This aspect of our relationship to divine reality involves the willingness to carry out steadfast decision-actions in the material world based on our newfound convictions. And here is the crux: as uniquely revealed in the Urantia Revelation, this line of willing and acting directly measures our relationship to evolutionary Deity. A crucial passage from Paper 110 makes the point:
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. [110:6.17]
We are here on Earth to actualize cosmic potentials through action—not just feel and think our way to self-realization. We were placed here to act on our convictions and thereby perfect the evolving universe, doing so through love, service, and creativity. And so I affirm that it is justifiable to add the faculty of will as a third line.
Does that mean that willingness to act is the central line of cosmic individuation? Should will be our main concern in soul-making and self-perfecting? In a teaching presented near the end of his ministry to his apostles and chief disciples, Jesus declared that “will is the determining factor” in our experience. This statement is listed as one of the “five cardinal features of the gospel of the kingdom” [see 170:4]. On balance, however, I believe that a wider understanding of the UB will arrive at the conclusion that the trio of willing, thinking, and feeling are essential and interdependent components; each is of equal import for personality unification.99
One indicator that brings me to this conclusion is the UB’s description of the first stage of the afterlife, which states that all ascenders will attend “the schools of thinking, the schools of feeling, and the schools of doing.” Also, at higher stages in the ascent, Paradise pilgrims “enter the schools of philosophy, divinity, and pure spirituality.” In regard to the lessons in these schools, the text further admonishes, “Those things which you might have learned on earth, but which you failed to learn, must be acquired under the tutelage of [heavenly teachers]. There are no royal roads, short cuts, or easy paths to Paradise. Irrespective of the individual variations of the route, you master the lessons of one sphere before you proceed to another; at least this is true after you once leave the world of your nativity.” [48:5.6-7]
In this connection, you will recall that circle-making is said to be proportional to personality reality—the equivalent of personality unification. To restate the quote from chapter 4: “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.”
Our level of selfhood reality, in other words, is the yardstick of our cosmic circle achievement, and we also know that such achievement has to do with mobilizing the many powers of the human self to become one balanced and unified power. And so, based on my inaugural research, it seems clear that while willingness to act is a crucial line in the cosmic spirituality of the Urantia Revelation, it is not the central line. Feeling, thinking, and willing are all essential. Indeed, with every corner we turn, these three faculties of the self always rise together. Further, I surmise that our circle-making level cannot rise higher than the level of most deficient line.
Accordingly, I believe that in response to Wilber’s illuminating theory, a UB-based approach would designate the central line as the line of circle attainment—the composite of all the elements of selfhood reality. Figure 4 below depicts a person whose highest line (cognition) is at circle 1, while his lowest line (will) is at circle 3. This person can be no more than a level 3 achiever at this point in development. In other words, all of his or her lines have achieved level 3, whereas their growth beyond that level is uneven. Their personality unification is currently consolidated at the third circle, and more growth in the feeling and will lines will be required for stabilizing as a first circler.
In more practical terms, it’s best not to be an overly pious or sentimental person, a nerdy intellectual, or a hyperactive doer if you intend to attain true maturation according to the Urantia Revelation. Remember: “There are no royal roads, short cuts, or easy paths to Paradise.” If you are unbalanced in any of the virtues, you will have just that much remedial work to do (in the afterlife if not before). You will need to scale up your weak axis to bring the short lines up to par with the others—that is, if you want to “become perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”
In the final analysis, our degree of cosmic individuation depends not on consciousness alone but instead reflects the degree of personality reality that we achieve. And that leads us directly to “The Nature of Personality Reality,” the first chapter of Part IV. Then I return to further consideration of the lines of thinking, feeling, and willing in chapter 9, “The Gift of the Divine Indwelling.”
82 What the Catholic Church calls private revelation is an exception to my statement. This is the charism of personal revelation that helps believers live by the existing precepts of divine revelation—the complete Word of God as found in the Bible and sacred tradition. Such private revelations, while sometimes authentic, can never supersede the content of divine revelation (also known as public revelation). St. Thomas Aquinas taught that all new public revelation ended with the death of John the Apostle.
83 See, for example, his discourses on soul, mind, and science in Paper 133. Other philosophic discourses by Jesus cover these topics: religion, reality, time and space, good and evil, truth and faith, wealth, the family, mercy and justice, forgiveness, and spiritual freedom.
84 Of course, the Bible also contains much factual content that has been verified by archeology and historical research. And strikingly rich wisdom and inspired ethical teachings appear in many books of the New and Old Testaments. The intent of this discussion is to call attention to the stark contrast between the demythologizing thrust of UB and the often mythopoetic quality of the Bible, which is characteristic of its premodern cultural pedigree.
85 There is no official Urantia church or priesthood; students of the UB can interpret its revelatory guidance as they see fit without the pressure of official interpretations handed down by an ecclesiastical hierarchy. UB adherents can (in theory) live “the religion of the spirit” because the text does not purport to be inerrant and its teachings always appeal to philosophic reason.
86 My essay, “The Cultural Dilemma of the UB” (see Evolving-Souls.org/cultural-dilemma), provides my speculations on why the revelation cannot easily find a home in any of the cultural formations on Earth at this time, with the possible exception of the integral worldview. However, the lack of a cultural home for the UB does not mean that individuals can’t in the meantime appropriate the many riches of the text.
87 Among the close colleagues of Wilber’s whose work informs my research for this book are Allan Combs, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Dustin Diperna, and Mark Gafni. Most have been members of Wilber’s Integral Institute.
88 I would also include paranormal studies (such as NDEs) to this list, but to date this field has not been widely embraced by integralists or Urantians.
89 It is worth adding here that the theory of integral politics advocates inclusive solutions of likely interest to Urantia students. Modernism gifted us with markets and the rule of law; postmodernism gave us more advanced arguments for justice, equality, tolerance, and pluralism; and integral politics points us to a dialectic that goes belong left and right factionalism toward a higher synthesis, including the advocacy of world unity through enforceable global law and planetary democracy—which the UB generally teaches as well. The UB goes even further, audaciously putting the advocacy for world federation in the mouth of Jesus (see 134:3), and providing a cosmological and futuristic context for global politics as well as “exopolitics” that integralists can learn from. See also in this connection the book I coauthored, One World Democracy (Origin Press, 2005).
90 For those entirely new to Wilber’s IOS, I recommend The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything (Shambhala, 2007).
91 A case could be even be made that Ken Wilber’s synthesis, plus contributions by his colleagues, fills in some of the vacuum left in our generation’s worldview due to the stalled project of the dissemination of the Urantia Revelation in our time.
92 Rick Warren, “84 Truth, Beauty and Goodness Quotes.” See http://www.integralworld.net/warren1.html. This piece is a rare case of a Urantia student in dialogue with followers of Wilber.
93 We can go from three to four perspectives because the so-called objective exteriors in the right-hand quadrants, i.e., the verifiable facts of a situation, can be either singular or plural. For example, we can start with a singular artifact, such as an individual subway train (an “it”), but if we expand our scope we discover the network of “its” that comprise the subway system.
94 At John 10:16 Jesus said, “I have other sheep, too, in another fold. I must bring them also.” Christians correctly infer that this refers to Gentiles as well as Jews, but the UB makes clear that Jesus is referring to citizens of other planets in the local universe of his own creation. At 165:2.9 the UB offers this restatement by Jesus: “But I have many other sheep not of this fold, and these words are true not only of this world. These other sheep also hear and know my voice, and I have promised the Father that they shall all be brought into one fold, one brotherhood of the sons of God. And then shall you all know the voice of one shepherd, the true shepherd, and shall all acknowledge the fatherhood of God.”
95 This term has also been used by integralists to refer to one’s identification with all of reality or with all sentient beings in all worlds, or the ability to tap into the field of collective consciousness.
96 Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2006), p.65
97 In this connection, see the powerful section in the UB called “Conditions of Effective Prayer” at 91:9. The first two of these “laws of prevailing petitions” are: “1. You must qualify as a potent prayer by sincerely and courageously facing the problems of universe reality. You must possess cosmic stamina.
2. You must have honestly exhausted the human capacity for human adjustment. You must have been industrious.”
98 Carl Jung pointed out that such a progression actually strengthens the ego and prepares it for the unifying and balanced identification with what he called the Self. I should add that engaging in shadow work is also a crucial component of this process of letting go and engaging in more inclusive identifications. It is my great hope that the understanding of psychopathology provided by integrally informed clinicians will become an essential enhancement to the growth path described in the UB. The Urantia Revelation only briefly alludes to such issues.
99 Immanuel Kant worked with the categories of feeling, thought, and will, and esoteric philosopher Rudolph Steiner especially highlighted this triad in his writings and made it central in the pedagogy of his Waldorf Schools. Steiner wrote, “The three fundamental forces of the soul [are] willing, feeling, and thinking. . . . The success anticipated from a right education or fitting instruction is based upon the presumption that a connection between thinking, feeling, and willing, corresponding to human nature, can be established in the pupil.” Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (Anthroposophic Press, 1947), p. 215.