The Urantia Book presents a helpful, new conceptual paradigm of the composition of a human being. New meanings describe our basic components, how they function together, and why. It offers an alternative conceptual framework for thinking about our experience in new ways, and in the process, enhances our comprehension and appreciation of who we are.
Five basic components comprise the makeup of a human being in our new paradigm. They are: BODY, MIND, SOUL, SPIRIT, and PERSONALITY.
Let’s start with Personality
I have not, nor have I met anyone who has encountered this concept of personality anywhere in the wisdom literature (East or West) except in The Urantia Book. This new concept provides a fresh perspective and clarifies much of the intellectual and metaphysical muddle associated with self-realization, self-actualization, self-mastery, and the like. With this concept of personality, our new model takes the greatest detour from its usual, conventional meanings, such as, A. The combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character or, B. The charming pizzazz of charisma. It is neither of these.
As the meaning applies here, “personality” is a complete, whole and unique something, in and of itself. It is that distinct aspect of us that remains the same no matter what changes we may have experienced in every other part of ourselves. It is permanence in the very presence of change. We don’t develop a personality, it is bestowed upon us directly, as is and already whole, by the infinite, personal creator, God. It separates us from our mammalian cousins and makes possible the potential for eternal life. It elevates us to a cosmic status wherein we may in truth be called, “the children of God.” But as much as we can and do say about personality, it defies definition and remains one of the great mysteries of life. Still, we forge ahead.
Personality is that part of an individual whom we know. The constant feature that allows us to recognize our friend as the same one we have always known, regardless of the passage of time, or the changes in form, or the advances of progress, or any other transformation of body, mind or character. It is wholly unique and distinct, it is the one and only you. The same one you remain throughout, despite the ever changing nature of all four of the other components of one’s self, the Body, Mind, Soul, and Spirit. Again, it is that singularly qualitative attribute of us that always stays the same. It is who we are, who we have been, and who we will always be.
Central to personality is our inherent, but limited, free will, the God given creative ability to choose between good and evil, the freedom to select among moral and ethical alternatives; and the power to co-create our lives in partnership with God. Personality endows us with the capacity to experience self-consciousness, other-consciousness, and God-consciousness.
Personality is not the identity, but it is the unifying element of the human identity. Personality is a strictly qualitative reality, completely lacking in any quantitative measure. It is therefore not a form of universe energy. This qualitative element that is personality imbues, invests and unifies the other four human components, the Body, Mind, Spirit, and Soul. These components are composed of universe energies; the physical, intellectual, spiritual, and morontial.
Morontia is an amalgamation of spiritual and physical energies and represents a vast level of life that lies between the material and the spiritual. We currently physical, mortal beings are to ascend step by step through the morontia levels of increasing spirituality on to the following stage, a wholly spiritual plane of life. The ascent through these morontia levels constitutes our immediate universe career following physical death here on earth.
Again, do not conflate personality with identity. Personality currently has identity in the body-mind-ego identified self. The process of one’s personal, spiritual maturity involves the gradual transfer of the seat of personal identity from this transient body-mind-ego self to the growing, potentially eternal, inner, soul consciousness. This is the soul-self that will transcend death and be invested with your personality, with you, when you awaken on a new and better world, the first of the transition morontia worlds.
The Body
We know best. It is our living, material energy system, a temporary life vehicle specifying our location in time and space. It is our physical presence-mechanism within the material environment, and our means of transit through it. It literally connects us as an integral part of the physical world through our senses and through our biological processes of environmental exchange. In our new paradigm, we humans have an evolutionary origin, mammalian body that has developed over time a highly evolved, human central nervous system. A brain capable of synchronizing with the highest levels of the local, spirit mind circuits, thus enabling us to transcend our strictly mammalian nature.
Now we are capable of choosing our actions. On a scale of ascending universe life, we have now joined the lowest rung of free-will endowed beings who can personally choose to co-create (with God) an endless life of ascending growth and transformation. We are now personally enrolled in the universe ascension career, up through the morontia levels and beyond, becoming increasingly spiritual through a long and rewarding series of progressive steps and stages.
Mind
The Urantia Book paradigm describes personal MIND as the mechanism of consciousness that connects the material and spiritual, the outer and inner, levels of life in personality experience. In the unifying mind, we simultaneously experience physical things, intellectual meanings, and spiritual values. It is the aware, feeling, perceiving, thinking, evaluating component of our makeup, wherein personality exercises its precious, creative power of choice, the power of free will.
Human mind as we know it becomes functional when the higher, faster rhythmic pulsations in the physical, central nervous system sync up, or resonate, with the lower, slower rhythmic vibrations produced by the seven local, spirit mind circuits. The human recipient of such spirit ministry is thereby encircuited into the cosmic arena of consciousness. The lower five of these seven, spirit mind circuits we share with the minds of the higher animals. Since our more evolved human brains also sync up with the next two highest circuits, we intellectually transcend these same animals and are enabled to grasp the meanings of spiritual reality, and to experience self-awareness.
Mind is unifying and it ever seeks to coordinate all experience into a meaningful whole. Mind organizes, arranges, and harmonizes the physical data from the senses, the heart-felt values of the soul, and the intellectual meanings of mind into a progressing personal comprehension of true Reality.
Spirit
The inner SPIRIT in humans is the mysterious God fragment, that spark of divinity that indwells the human mind in its highest region, the superconscious level (consciousness of consciousness). It unceremoniously takes up residence in the personal mind when a child arrives at his very first moral decision. This occurs when the young personality first chooses to override his natural, selfish impulse on behalf of another, typically prior to the sixth birthday. This unselfish act marks the very moment that it becomes spiritually possible for the mind of the child to host the divine God fragment.
This literal, individual parcel of God’s spirit is an active, conscious, purposeful entity of the purest spirit essence. It is your divine and unerring navigator in the journey of life, ever pointing your inner compass Godward, while you personally remain captain of the voyage. You have free will. You may choose to be guided by this inner spirit navigator, or not. And it is important to know that one’s progress toward eternal life depends entirely upon this very choosing. Sincerely seeking, encouraging, and responding positively to the leading of the inner, divine presence is the very essence of the religion of personal, spiritual experience portrayed in The Urantia Book.
God’s spirit is seeking union with you, to incrementally become one with your personality. And with your full cooperation, you are becoming divine in the process. No one can advance spiritually against their will. Spiritual growth is never automatic; always it must be chosen with a full heart.
The process of spiritualization is a mutual venture, a relationship between you and the God fragment that makes your eternal life possible. God is in a continuous effort to spiritualize your thinking and expand your soul, decision by decision. The inner Spirit seeks to gain, to actually become, your personality, even as you seek to become divine, thereby evolving a new, and higher, order of being. One embracing both the human and the divine. You are becoming divine, and the inner, divine spirit is becoming personal. And one day, relatively soon in the universe ascension plan, you are to actually fuse with this spirit of God. Together, you are becoming one.
Soul
We are not born with a SOUL. In our new paradigm, the soul is born with the arrival of the Spirit and it starts to grow, to mature, as the personality of the child begins to yield to the divine promptings of the newly arrived Spirit. Continuing growth of the soul is wholly dependent on the willing participation of the personality with the plans and purposes of the indwelling God fragment. Over time, this soul consciousness grows as it gradually displaces the temporary, body-mind-ego centered, human identity.
The growing soul constitutes the morontia embryo of the life phase that follows our time here on earth. It is the soul that transcends death and provides the living entity wherein the personality (and the inner spirit) may again function, only now as a morontia being with a new morontia life vehicle, and a new morontia mind in the new environment of the first morontia transition world. We have left the mammalian body behind on the planet of our nativity.
That experience which is devoid of spiritual value, having only served temporal and worldly purposes does not survive the transition. Only that which is of spiritual worth has survival value and will thus be remembered of our earth life. Even as now, we normally only remember specific incidents in our history, the greater mass of our mundane, detailed, moment to moment experience ignored by memory as it serves no pertinent value.
But all of the spiritually worthwhile experience of our lives, including our personal relationships, will be translated with us. We will continue to know others and be known, personally, just as we now do. All of the truly valuable intellectual and spiritual comprehension of Reality we have gained here on earth is recorded in our souls, and this too remains our possession when we awaken from the sleep of death. We begin our new morontia life at the exact level of growth and development we acquired during our earth lives.
Personality, Body, Mind, Spirit, & Soul
These five concepts then, PERSONALITY, BODY, MIND, SPIRIT, and SOUL form the basic components of our newly described human paradigm. This little primer, however, can only outline a paltry sketch of the rich, in-depth portrayal of these concepts found in The Urantia Book. Here for example, I have written a mere four paragraphs on the indwelling God fragment, while The Urantia Book devotes a full 48 pages exclusively to an exhaustive discussion of this particular subject.
Each of these concepts and their functional relationships is brilliantly woven into an enlightened portrait of who and what we are; a fascinating story of why we are here, how we got here, where we are going, how things got so screwed up here, and what we can do about it as individual persons, and as the people of earth.
The Urantia Book teaches that, as personalities, each of us, and all of us, currently have all of everything we need, materially, intellectually, and spiritually to advance, to grow and evolve. The whole vast creation of time and space and everything and everybody in it is evolving, is a part of the grand, cosmic sweep forward from a lesser state of development, to a higher level of development. Evolution is Creation in slow motion. And we humans, because we are personalities, get to participate as a living, self-aware part of the colossal undertaking. Eternal life means being fully engaged, personally, in God’s eternal plan, in the unfolding and actualizing of all of divinity that is as yet unexpressed potential.
What a plan! What an opportunity! It’s all available to us in a measure beyond our ability to conceive. The Urantia Book reveals the whole stupendous enterprise and our place in it, in an authoritative and creatively engrossing integration of science, philosophy, and religion.
And all we have to do is choose it!
Bob Ghen Sr.
Ojai, California 93023
Ph: 805 535-0859
ubbobg@gmail.com