Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
— Margaret Mead
The Urantia Revelation greatly expands the definition of what it means to be a person, revealing for the first time new rights, powers, and attributes of personality that are available to us on three levels: first, the prerogatives of personhood that we exercise as we evolve an immortal soul; second, the inherent legal and political rights and duties that belong to each person as a planetary citizen; and, finally, and perhaps most important, the cosmic level of personality expression—the right to an afterlife in which we unfold and perfect our personalities as cosmic citizens on the journey to Paradise.
At the level of the individual, the UB establishes each human personality as infinitely unique and directly sourced from the Father-Infinite, who confers upon each of us the God-like powers of free will and self-awareness. Because all persons are sourced from the Absolute Person, we are each loved unfathomably throughout our journey into eternity. This love manifests through the vehicle of the sublime partnership with our Thought Adjuster, a pure fragment of true God; the angelic ministers who catalyze our soul growth; and the Paradise beings who incarnate, sometimes at the risk of their own lives, to teach us higher truth. Personality is the greatest of all gifts, but these three complemental ministries make the original gift of personhood more meaningful and valuable.
At the planetary level, the UB exalts the supreme value of the individual by calling on us to expand our rights beyond the level of citizenship in a nation. It boldly advocates that humanity adopt a global bill of rights, a representative world legislature elected by the world’s people, and individual accountability before global law.100
At the universe level, the Urantia Revelation enhances the definition of what it means to be person by proclaiming our universal right to an eternal life in the grand cosmos, supported by the provision of vast resources for education, socialization, and personal advancement along the way. Assets are generously supplied that enable us to perfect ourselves in our slow ascension through the superuniverse of our origin. Much later, we traverse the central universe, stand ecstatically in the literal Paradise presence of our Creator, and embark on cosmic adventures even beyond that. Along with such exalted privileges, we are individually accountable to this larger universe. It is our duty at each step to contribute to the growth of evolutionary Deity (the Supreme Being) as cosmic citizens, and ultimately it is our privilege to offer a life of endless service in other universes, as will be discussed in the coming chapters.
The Origin of the Idea of Personality in the West
For the sake of gaining perspective on the UB’s revelations about the nature of personality reality, let’s start this inquiry with brief look at the earliest sources of the idea of personality in the West. At Exodus 3:14 we meet the mysterious Hebrew God who declares himself to Moses in a rather dramatic way. Moses asks for his name, and God answers, “I Am Who I Am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I Am has sent me to you.” Not an easy assignment for old Moses! But it is not an exaggeration to say that his obedience to Jahweh’s commandment made possible our modern ideas of personhood.
Clearly, this newly announced Hebrew God was relational. He displayed unmistakable personal qualities. He took the initiative with Moses. He entered into a give-and-take dialogue and even used a show of fire to get his point across. Further, Jahweh’s phrase “I Am Who I Am” conveyed that he was a self-aware and self-caused being, not a mere abstraction or metaphysical principle. As the Hebrews were soon to learn, this independent and powerful God had feelings and ideas and plans. He had will and intention. He was a living and personal Creator who communicated with his people through his prophets.
If Jahweh was their true God, then who were the Hebrews? They, as God’s own people, could rightly envision themselves as thinking, feeling, and choosing persons—each one a mini I Am. Every one of God’s people was a true individual in God’s eyes; they were the offspring of the original I Am, who made man “in our image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26). And this notion later became a bedrock doctrine of Christianity.
Similar ideas had emerged in other ancient venues, especially in Greek philosophy. In democratic political traditions based on principles that go back to ancient Greece and Rome and that draw from the Old Testament, the status of personhood conferred certain inalienable rights on citizens who could now be described as free and sovereign individuals. Slaves were the exception because they were not defined as persons under ancient law, but Christian thinkers later arrived at a splendid concept of personhood that eventually led to the abolition of slavery. We are all the children of a loving Father, and each one of us is precious—all the more so because God loved us enough to incarnate as one of us. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)
In ancient and medieval times, the dignity of personhood and the rights of citizenship also entailed duties to the state. These rights and duties were clearly spelled out at first in Roman law. They were later codified by modern democracies in their constitutions and elevated to even higher status in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
The Riddle of Personhood—Ancient and Modern
The revolutionary teachings of the UB arrived with barely a whisper in 1955, unknown and unacknowledged in a world swirling in doubt and turmoil about the dignity of personhood.
Communism and fascism had been built upon a critique of individualism and a frontal attack on the classical ideal of the free, sovereign, and rational self that is endowed with inherent rights by God; the state—the collective of all the people—was the locus of genuine rights. Nietzsche and his followers declared that the Western idea of self was a fictional construct, buffeted about by the arbitrary conventions of language and culture—seminal ideas that later became the foundations of postmodernism. Freud and Jung depicted the personal ego, the conscious self, as a small boat on the vast ocean of the unconscious that could capsize as a result of stress or trauma.
A generation later, transpersonal psychologists and New Age thinkers influenced by Eastern religion taught that the belief in a separate self was a sign of “negative ego” and a source of pain and conflict. The impressive findings of neuroscience in the past few decades led scientists and philosophers to deny the ontological or even the psychological reality of the personal self, instead reducing our thoughts, feelings, and choices to mere biochemical operations of the material brain.
Clearly, the idea of personhood is in trouble today—both as a concept and in terms of the protection of human rights on the world stage. But long before the modern turn to the idea of a fragmentary or fictional self, or a “protean self,” the idea of the insubstantiality of selfhood already had a distinguished pedigree in the venerable teachings of classical Buddhism.
The earliest texts of the Theravadan school of Buddhism in particular negate the idea that we are each uniquely personal beings, calling this idea the primary source of dukkha (dissatisfaction and suffering). The current Dalai Lama often restates this classical view, which is that that our belief in an independent self is the root cause of all suffering. He has even embraced the findings of neuroscience to support the Buddhist notion of the emptiness of ego-bound selfhood.
What we believe to be the self, says Buddhist psychology, is merely an aggregation of ever-changing attributes, such as sensations, perceptions, wishes, and shifting states of awareness called skandhas. Such mental events may appear to have unity, but on closer inspection reveal no stable organizing center or enduring continuity of consciousness. This disquieting observation—this idea that the self or soul lacks any cohesive quality—has its own lineage in the modern West, represented, for example, by the writings of the eighteenth-century skeptical Western philosopher David Hume. Hume famously argued in his “bundle theory of personal identity” that if we pay attention to our raw experience, we can readily perceive the lack of unity of selfhood in our ordinary daily life.
Of course, many of us chafe at such radical claims. We insist on our “me-ness” as a matter of common sense, and we prefer to leave it at that. Yet the great mystical traditions persist in asking: just where or how is this sense of “I” or “me” to be located?
The Buddhists had a firm answer. Their disciplined methods of introspection practiced over several thousand years provide no direct evidence of any enduring artifact of selfhood. The Buddhist and other nondual schools teach that a quality of awareness (or self-awareness, as with the so-called witness) does seem to abide behind the typical mental parade of thoughts, feelings, and images. But on even closer inspection, the practitioner discovers that this subjective awareness, when fully deconstructed in deep meditation, is empty and featureless, as we noted in the last chapter.
Ah, but we in the West—we hold out hope for an identity we can do business with in practical life. Most of us no longer believe in traditional Christianity but feel there must be some feature of the self that stands for the biblical “I am,” something familiar that can provide a comfortable feeling of constancy amid the flux. So we’ve come up with answers such as these in modern times: “I am an immaterial thinking self” (René Descartes, eighteenth century). Or “I am my feeling heart!” (Romantic poets, nineteenth century). And “I am a coherent set of electrochemical transactions in my brain” (the materialists of today).
I submit that none of these depictions of the self is stable and reliable across time, not even in one twenty-four-hour cycle—and especially not if we add to the equation our nightly surrender of selfhood to the dark world of dreams and deep, featureless sleep.
Can it be that devoted Buddhist meditation (and other forms of mysticism) has revealed the ultimate truth of the insubstantiality and impermanence of the self?
In the end, even Buddhism does not go there. As it grew in sophistication, later schools concluded that Buddha did not exactly hold to a settled doctrine of the no-self. Further, he did not respond to other crucial questions, such as whether there is an afterlife or if the universe is eternal. He merely denied that such questions could be usefully answered on psychological grounds, if your goal is to end dukkha. These issues are imponderable and indeterminate, he declared. To debate them is beside the point. The Buddha would say: “O monks, do not brood over such views. Such brooding, O monks, is senseless.”101
So, which is true? The adamantine “I am”—the old Christian, Hebraic, and Hellenistic idea that we are unique and independent individuals with singular rights and duties, along with its many secularized renditions in the modern era? Instead, must we overcome any sense of separate selfhood through a quest for impersonal enlightenment, as taught in many mystical schools? Or might there be a third option: Buddha’s teaching that to concern ourselves about this issue would be a distraction from the path to enlightenment, because the essence of personhood is unfathomable?
According to the Urantia Revelation, humans and even divine beings lack the cognitive capacity to penetrate this cosmic riddle. We can make observations about human behavior, but the fundamental nature of personality is unknowable unless and until clues about its reality are somehow revealed to us in a way we can understand or experience. Indeed, epochal revelation from above is required, such as the incarnation of a divine being or a gift like The Urantia Papers. According to Christianity, Jesus was and is the living revelation of authentic selfhood, the very icon of personhood. This traditional Christian understanding of Jesus’s divine personality (the branch of theology called Christology) is greatly clarified in The Urantia Book. And as far as I am aware, the Urantia text also goes beyond any previous conception of personhood in any category of human thought—including theology, philosophy, or psychology—laying out many heretofore unknown aspects of the mystery of personality in Paper 112, “Personality Survival.”102 In addition, the theology and cosmology provided in Parts I and II of the UB include an original philosophic teaching about the divine source and nature of personhood, to which we now turn.
Personality as Host, Unifier, and Systematizer
So what is human personality—even divine personality—to the extent that we can grasp it in this life with the help of revelation? According to the UB, human personhood is gifted by divine fiat upon each individual. This endowment confers powers of reflective awareness, self-determination, creative consciousness, relative free will, and the capacity for cosmic insight.
We also read that personality, in each instance, is both utterly unique as well as an unchanging reality, as declared in these imposing statements:
Throughout all successive ages and stages of evolutionary growth, there is one part of you that remains absolutely unaltered, and that is personality—permanence in the presence of change. [112:0.1]
Personality is that part of any individual which enables us to recognize and positively identify that person as the one we have previously known, no matter how much he may have changed because of the modification of the vehicle of expression and manifestation of his personality. [16:8:4]
Personality is unique, absolutely unique: It is unique in time and space; it is unique in eternity and on Paradise; it is unique when bestowed — there are no duplicates; it is unique during every moment of existence. [112:0.12]
These strong statements seem to confirm our Western bias in favor of the independent and autonomous self, including even the old biblical notion of the “I am” created in the image of God. On closer inspection, however, we find that the UB’s full depiction of personality is much broader and deeper—and also richly paradoxical.
Personhood is stated to be “unique in eternity.” But we soon come across this disconcerting statement, which declares that personality has no identity: “Personality, while devoid of identity, can unify the identity of any living energy system.” [112:0.7]
How can both of these be true? How can something that is utterly unique have no specific identity?
Can it be that personality “holds the space” so that a provisional identity may appear and evolve as we make our freewill choices? Might it also be possible that, in so doing, our unique personality conditions the mode of manifestation of our transient identity in any one moment—doing so behind the scenes but always with a consistency that never changes? And how might this description comport with Ken Wilber’s self-line that we encountered in the last chapter?
Try on this thought experiment: There’s that consistent something about you. Those who feel its presence as something precious and unusual are attracted to it, so they come closer to you. The closer they approach and the more they get to know your unique and unchanging qualities, the more likely that they will come to truly love you. And behold—you now have a spouse or a loyal best friend! But things can now change drastically. As your relationship develops, your psychological identifications are (ideally at least) moving on an upward path. You are growing from ego-centrism toward soul identification, and onward to more advanced levels of personality reality. And so also is your spouse or best friend, we would hope.
But what happens now to that something special about you? I submit that the cosmic task of your personality is to provide an unchanging container, a sacred space, in which your identity can evolve according to your life choices while still remaining recognizable to those who know you today. I hypothesize that your personality can impart a certain unchanging flavor or a consistent look and feel in each edition of your identity that emerges over time. Otherwise, how would your loved ones keep track of you as the wonderful and quirky you they have loved in the past?
Personality may not be the determiner of your identity or your psychological identifications, but it is the unifier of the ingredients that comprise your ever-changing identity. Consider this statement:
But the concept of the personality as the meaning of the whole of the living and functioning creature means much more than the integration of relationships; it signifies the unification of all factors of reality as well as co-ordination of relationships. Relationships exist between two objects, but three or more objects eventuate a system, and such a system is much more than just an enlarged or complex relationship. This distinction is vital, for in a cosmic system the individual members are not connected with each other except in relation to the whole and through the individuality of the whole. [112:1.17]
Personality, it would seem, is a cosmic systemizer. Its essence is transcendent and unchanging, yet it dynamically unifies the constituent parts of the evolving self. It harmonizes the ever-changing elements of the contingent self (that is, our body, mind, and soul) by updating their energetic configurations on the fly. Truly, your personality is your self-system. And it is like an operating system that never needs to be updated. As a divine fractal bestowed from the highest source, it always and without error provides the same superb functionality, even while remaining both unique and self-similar.103
Personality does its level best to bring coherence to our very partial identifications, our many imperfections, and our evolving sense of self; it must do so for small children, harried single mothers, men hailing taxis for the next meeting, or elders reminiscing in rocking chairs. It lets us stand tall as individuals, ready for concerted and single-pointed action in any given moment—despite the fact that we are immature cosmic citizens. Our self-awareness and self-presentation may continually change and our choices may often fall short, but something confers unity and stability on this ever-changing constellation of elements. This unity will also encompass features of the self that are unconscious—what Jung called the personal unconscious as well as the contents of the evolving soul.
I would further speculate that when one of the ingredients in our self-system becomes flawed, the selfhood-systematizing function known as personality will precipitate out this flawed feature. It will spin out clues that show up in our self-presentation. An adept psychologist (or a spouse, good friend, or a judge in court) will be able to pick out this inconsistency, which sometimes will betray itself in a single “frame.” If such a self-systematizer were not in place, this radically out-of-place part might never be revealed against the backdrop of the individuality of the whole person.
I hope these interpretations are helpful, but we must always remain humble before the majesty of personality. Consider yet another revelatory assertion: “The type of personality bestowed upon Urantia mortals has a potentiality of seven dimensions of self-expression or person-realization.” [112:1.9] In this same passage, we learn that only three of these dimensions are finite! These three finite dimensions are direction, depth, and breadth, we are told. And the higher dimensions of personality aren’t even named. The upshot is that personality chiefly operates from outside of space and time. This means that personality quietly carries out most its functions outside of any possibility of human awareness. The nature of this other-than-finite activity, rooted perhaps in God’s absolute personality, must remain a mystery.
Personhood is largely unknowable. Yet, as noted above, it does have a subset of dimensions in the finite realm—enough that we can fall in love with the manifested personalities of other persons. But what about the science of personality? How do we begin to identify and describe the direction, depth, and breadth of personhood in human behavior? I leave that question for the psychologists of the future who are intrigued by the UB’s revelations about personality and its relationship to the inner triad.
More Paradoxes of Human Personality
But now we face another problem. We’ve glimpsed the idea that personality is absolutely unique, so how is it that we are also utterly equal before God, who is “no respecter of persons”—the biblical idea that God shows no partiality toward people according to race, class, gender, or so on? How is it possible that we are nothing special from the perspective of the divine infinitude—a truth that Eastern religions also highlight—yet we are at the same time “unique in eternity”?
It turns out that The Urantia Book finds a way to advocate all three of our possible positions in this regard: uniqueness (the general Western view); selflessness or “nothing-special-ness” (the Eastern understanding that also shows up in the Bible); and imponderability (as in Buddha’s warning to his students). But how can all three be true?
It turns out that we can map these three positions into the fundamental gospel teaching of Jesus as provided in Part IV of the UB: the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man (or, the parenthood of God and the siblinghood of humankind). “The gospel of the kingdom is the fact of the fatherhood of God, coupled with the resultant truth of the sonship—the brotherhood of men.” [190:0.4]
Let’s take a tour of this core UB teaching:
First and most foremost: God is our loving parent, attending to us and our needs as if we were God’s only child. We are uniquely adorable in God’s eyes, and each of us is indwelt by God and specifically guided to carry out a singular life purpose that has been gifted upon us.
On the other hand, any apparent differences between you and me pale in comparison to our enormous cosmic distance from divine perfection. The eternal and infinite God regards us all to be of equal status in the cosmic economy, a truism also found in Bible: “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45). The UB expresses the idea this way: “As . . . different classes of mortals appear before the judgment bar of God, they stand on an equal footing; God is truly no respecter of persons,” says Jesus. [133:0.0] And, as stated more philosophically in Part I of the text: “The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man present the paradox of the part and the whole on the level of personality. God loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. Yet God thus loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons, and the universality of his love brings into being a relationship of the whole, the universal brotherhood.” [12:7.8]
Offering an additional revelatory enhancement of such wisdom, the UB tells us,
Personality . . . is unique in relation to God—he is no respecter of persons, but neither does he add them together, for they are nonaddable—they are associable but nontotalable. [112:0.12]
In other words, two great principles apply to personality, and they are stark opposites that only God’s infinitude can unify: the reality of our individual uniqueness (“they are nonaddable”) and the abiding truth of our utter equality before the divine throne as God’s immature children (“he is no respecter of persons”). In the face of such a paradox, the UB goes on and makes clear that our personhood is also unfathomable—even for a Divine Counselor who wrote the following words, speaking on behalf of his exalted order of being.104
Personality is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universes. We do not fully comprehend the real nature of the personality itself. We clearly perceive the numerous factors which, when put together, constitute the vehicle for human personality, but we do not fully comprehend the nature and significance of such a finite personality. [5:6.2]
Evidently we are falling down a slippery slope toward imponderability, which the Buddha warned us about.
Revisioning Personhood with the Urantia Revelation
Epochal revelation unveils the fact that personality has key features that operate outside of time and space. And, much like the Thought Adjuster, our unique personality is a deeply mysterious extension of infinitude into the realms of the finite. Consider: On the one hand, a portion of the infinite personality of the Father is somehow gifted to animal-origin humans, and this endowment of personhood is truly divine. But the converse is also true: That which is divine is also essentially personal (although it has nonpersonal dimensions as well). And if these two propositions are both true, this means that personality is the primal manifestation of the infinite.
According to this understanding, infinity inherently personalizes as the Father of all. In turn, the Father personalizes as his eternal coordinates (the other persons of the Trinity), and thereafter as his children in the central universe and in the evolving universes. Nonpersonal manifestations of divinity—Paradise, gravity, space, the galaxies, the planets of evolving universes, and so on—all are made available in the service of personality, both eternal and evolutional.
But the UB now goes on to say even more about personality, declaring it to be the very essence of Deity, and God’s chief attribute. These astonishing statements make that clear:
Without God and except for his great and central person, there would be no personality throughout all the vast universe of universes. God is personality. [1:5.7]
Personality, in the supreme sense, is the revelation of God to the universe of universes. [1:5.13]
We noted earlier that the UB is a personalist teaching. Some interpreters even contend that the ontological reality of personality is the central revelation of the Urantia text. The statements above point us in that direction.
The Foreword to The Urantia Book can be notoriously difficult, but a brief encounter would help us understand this point. These opening pages purport to reveal the fundamental definitions and a priori principles of cosmic reality. Right from the outset we learn of the primary division within universal reality—the primeval distinction between realities that are “deified” and those that are not—“undeified realities.” Next we learn that all deified realities are by definition personal, since God is personality. Here again we see the equation of divinity, personality, and reality.
Now, if we limit our purview to the evolving universes, we discover that the primary distinction within the space-time domains is also between personal and nonpersonal realities: “Personality may be material or spiritual, but there either is personality or there is no personality. The other-than-personal never attains the level of the personal except by the direct act of the Paradise Father.” [5:6] In other words, no one can evolve a personality. It is either gifted to a being or it is not.
These are crucial ideas, but they don’t exhaust our subject. While the Urantia Revelation does not and cannot offer a systematic or complete definition of personality, it reveals in Paper 112 a numbered list of fourteen characteristics of personality. I will summarize and expand the central ideas in this chapter by highlighting a selection of ten of these, expressed as aphorisms. My list is paraphrased or otherwise derived from many other statements in the UB in addition to the fourteen attributes, and I have also added a few inferences and speculations:
1. The Infinite Father inserts into evolution the gift of personality—which is changeless—in response to the readiness of his evolving creatures.
Personhood is a direct bestowal from God into the stream of evolution. But personality does not evolve as does the human soul, and it can’t be enhanced (in the sense that the Thought Adjuster can be) by virtual of its experience of indwelling a human mind. Personality is either present or it is not present; it is also changeless, yet paradoxically it also has functions to perform. Personhood is existential and incomputable; it has no measurable units, unlike material and morontial forms of energy. Personality is largely transcendent to time, but the capacity for creatures of time to receive and embody the gift of personality—to become self-aware persons—is an evolutionary attainment. Far back in the story of humankind, slowly evolving hominids achieved a certain evolutionary readiness that triggered the heart of Deity, after which they achieved what the UB calls will dignity through the gift of personhood. (This story is told in Papers 58–63.) Since those far-distant times, all of us have duly received the mysterious grant of personality.
2. All persons are encircuited in the indivisible personhood of the Father.
The Divine Person is One and indivisible, and all of his bestowals participate in this unity.105 Human personality—as a manifestation of this indivisible unity—is inherently encircuited with the Divine Person through the Father’s personality circuit. An exclusive revelation of the Urantia Papers, this circuit enables the Father to maintain simultaneous contact with all persons:
We cannot fully comprehend the methods whereby God is so fully and personally conversant with the details of the universe of universes . . . [but] through the personality circuit the Father is cognizant—has personal knowledge—of all the thoughts and acts of all the beings in all the systems of all the universes of all creation. Though we cannot fully grasp this technique of God’s communion with his children, we can be strengthened in the assurance that the ‘Lord knows his children.’ [32:4.8]
3. The gift of personality confers self-awareness and creative freewill on each individual; when they operate effectively, these powers reflect their divine origin.
Although personality is a universal mystery, we are offered many clues about it. Among these are the revelation that human personality possesses—though in a limited way—two powers that are intrinsic to Deity’s inherent nature: self-awareness and will. “Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive 'margin-top:10.5pt;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom: 0cm;margin-left:0cm;text-align:justify;line-height:normal'>4. We can show gratefulness for our free will by letting go of limiting identifications so that we can choose the will of God—which is true freedom.
The bestowal of personhood naturally evokes a grateful human response. We can respond in kind by letting go of limiting identifications, thereby releasing the divine gift of free will from the mechanical grip of material obsessions and trivial distractions. Continued spiritual growth liberates our will to consistently choose the way of God. Indeed, the divine will becomes self-evident to us when our limiting identifications drop away. A Course in Miracles correctly teaches that, our deepest will is God’s will. By identifying with the impulses of the Thought Adjuster, we move toward Father Fusion, the irrevocable decision to live permanently in the joy and freedom of always choosing God’s will.
5. Personality lets us rise above incoming stimuli; it allows us to be creative and reflective by freeing us from being helplessly reactive to past events.
Personality allows interiority. In connection with our endowment of mind, personality opens an internal space in which we are relatively free from the past. “[Personality] is not wholly subject to the fetters of antecedent causation. It is relatively creative or cocreative.” [112:0.5] In other words, our inner life offers us a province of free choice in which we’re not helplessly reactive to external stimuli, unlike most animals. Only personal beings are self-observing or self-reflective, that is, able through effort and intention to focus their thoughts and feelings and mindfully choose a particular direction of action. Human personalities have, at least in potential, the internal spaciousness and intellectual capacity required to think, plan, evaluate, and choose among options that are soul-making.
6. When human personality operates through the vehicle of spirit, it is always superordinate to other parts of the self and all other forms of energy.
Personality is primal in all universes. The Divine Person is antecedent to and all powerful in relation to all things, including spirit. “Personality is superimposed upon energy.” [0:5.4] Human personality has the potential to control all domains of energy-reality when it operates through the vehicle of spirit, the highest form of energy. Otherwise expressed, personhood has prerogatives that are logically prior to all other attributes and energies of the human self (body, mind, soul, or spirit). “When bestowed upon evolutionary material creatures, personality causes spirit to strive for the mastery of energy-matter through the mediation of mind.” [112:0.6] Personality confers the precious power of freewill choice, allowing the mortal intellect to choose among higher values originating in our spiritual impulses.
7. Personality has no identity but is rather the host of identity; it unifies and systematizes the elements of selfhood around chosen identities.
Personality is a transcendent function that unifies and systematizes selfhood at any level of its identifications, high or low. At the highest level, where persons are spirit-identified, they can achieve the superb personality unification and symmetry of selfhood that we witness in Jesus.106 At lower levels, persons who are confused, misguided, traumatized, or disassociated block the efficient operation of the unifying powers of the personality; these individuals appear untrustworthy and unreliable in their self-presentation to others.107 Their self-system “precipitates” disunity and asymmetry. But unified persons are those who reflect on their life purposes and goals in prayer and introspection in ways that allow the personality to do its primary job: the systematic work of unifying and balancing their living energy system around a chosen identity. The theological basis of this function is the premise that God is unity; God is one in existential perfection. Out of love and regard for us, the eternal God invites us into this divine unity and perfection, which is ours to achieve as a attainment made possible by the intrinsic attributes of personality. God’s gift of personality is able to confer increasing unity and symmetry on such an evolving being. “The purpose of cosmic evolution is to achieve unity of personality.” [112:2.15]
8. We are social creatures who crave to belong; personality is spontaneously sensitive to the presence of other persons.
“Personality responds directly to other-personality presence.” [112.0.13] Our personhood is nonlocal—it’s embedded in a unified field that envelops us as God’s personality circuit. Once we cross the threshold into this nonlocal field of personal selves, we—as persons—find that each individual we encounter is lovable in their own unique way. Each reflects the beauty of the Divine Person—who is the source of all these unique personalities. The participation of every one of us in the unified field of personality makes us inherently sensitive to and appreciative of the personality-presence of others. Especially when we encounter those we care about, we don’t merely observe the details of face, age, body type, dress, demeanor, speech, or behavior; we take in the whole person. We may find that we adore their entire personhood just as it is, intuiting the beauty of the transcendent unity of their unique personal presence. Personality, then, is a like a cosmic version of the law of attraction. When you are near me, I resonate naturally and immediately with you, over against the nonpersonal things or events in the room. This occurs not because you may be useful to me but simply because you are a fellow personality. In moments of prayer, worship, or celebration, you and I may fall even further into this delightful domain of our sacred oneness.
9. Personality is an end in itself; love is the highest expression of the realization of that truth.
Love is the mutual regard of whole personalities. Loving other persons is a recognition of their irreducible and infinite uniqueness, their radiant personal qualities that ultimately point to—and inherently participate in—the Infinite Personality. Persons who love others personalities find their ultimate fulfillment in union with the Original Personality.
In the true meaning of the word, love connotes mutual regard of whole personalities, whether human or divine or human and divine. Parts of the self may function in numerous ways—thinking, feeling, wishing—but only the co-ordinated attributes of the whole personality are focused in intelligent action; and all of these powers are associated with the spiritual endowment of the mortal mind when a human being sincerely and unselfishly loves another being, human or divine. All mortal concepts of reality are based on the assumption of the actuality of human personality; all concepts of superhuman realities are based on the experience of the human personality with and in the cosmic realities of certain associated spiritual entities and divine personalities. Everything nonspiritual in human experience, excepting personality, is a means to an end. Every true relationship of mortal man with other persons — human or divine — is an end in itself. And such fellowship with the personality of Deity is the eternal goal of universe ascension. [UB: 112:2:7–8]
10. Each personality is unique in eternity; the proliferation of unique human persons on billions of worlds provides God with the richest possible access to his evolving creation.
Each personality is absolutely unique. But what can explain the ongoing explosion of unique, experiential beings who increasingly populate Earth and all other inhabited worlds? The singular perspective supplied by each new person must have ultimate value. It must have a transcendental purpose. As I have shared previously, human personhood allows the existential God—an infinite and perfect being who exists outside of space and time—to acquire something impossible to obtain otherwise: a replete experience of the experiences of his evolving creatures. We might say that God desires to have an “all-experience” and therefore brings forth a virtually infinite diversity of experiencing subjects, each of whom provides him with access to their idiosyncratic viewpoint. The Divine Person encompasses and transcends cosmic evolution and all evolutionary beings. We can’t get outside of his circle of eternity, but we can allow God to dwell with us in our evolutionary home of personality expression through God’s gift of personality—as well through as the additional gift of the Thought Adjuster, the subject of the next chapter. And all of this, indeed, is a love supreme.
Nothing in the entire universe can substitute for the fact of experience on nonexistential levels. The infinite God is, as always, replete and complete, infinitely inclusive of all things except evil and creature experience. God cannot do wrong; he is infallible. God cannot experientially know what he has never personally experienced; God’s preknowledge is existential. Therefore does the spirit of the Father descend from Paradise to participate with finite mortals in every bona fide experience of the ascending career; it is only by such a method that the existential God could become in truth and in fact man’s experiential Father. The infinity of the eternal God encompasses the potential for finite experience, which indeed becomes actual in the ministry of the Adjuster fragments that actually share the life vicissitude experiences of human beings. [108:0.2]
100 See Paper 134, section 3: “The Urmia Lectures.”
101 This discussion especially draws from “The Atman and Its Negation: A Conceptual and Chronological Analysis of Early Buddhist Thought” by Alexander Wynne, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (vol. 33, pp. 103–171).
102 This unique Paper, whose rich content is in my opinion worthy of years of study, has no known human sources of the sort that are discussed in the Special Supplement at the end of this book. See Section 3 of the Supplement, “The Human Sources of the UB.”
103 Paradoxes abound here, of course, and it should be made clear that the UB only implies the fractal nature of personality. In fractal theory, if the replication is exactly the same at every scale, it is called a self-similar pattern. I think of personalities as identical in their function in all humans at any stage of life, while at the same time being existentially unique in their pattern of manifestation in each of us, at any scale. But these ideas are merely a speculation that I hope will spur further research.
104 “These Trinity-origin beings are the counsel of Deity to the realms of the seven superuniverses. They are not reflective of the divine counsel of the Trinity; they are that counsel.” [19:3.1]
105 Here and throughout this section I draw special inspiration from George Park, independent philosopher and author of the very helpful essay “Personality and Man,” which first appeared in Urantia Fellowship Herald (2007). See http://urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/herald/. Among his many profound findings, Park’s research has led him to infer from various statements in the UB that personality is bestowed at birth, or possibly at conception.
106 As a reminder, I cite again this statement: “The unique feature of [Jesus’] personality was not so much its perfection as its symmetry, its exquisite and balanced unification.” [100:7.1]
107 In other words, these divided persons are unable or unwilling to integrate their life experiences. This problem likely points to a key purpose of life reviews in the afterlife (as reported by NDEers)—to find the resources required to be able to identify, “own,” and make peace with all of one’s decisions and actions while on Earth.