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I don’t think the subconscious is the ultimate repository for all memory. Mind can be trained to store up memories of worthwhile episodes of our lives. These memories cannot have the subconscious as their ultimate destination because the subconscious dies with the physical brain. It is a part of the mind that is only temporarily lent to us while we are utilizing a physical vehicle for life. Also, the quote below says that these worthwhile memories can be recalled at will, meaning no trance or other hijinks need be done to dig these memories up out from their mirky depths.
(1779.4) 160:4.12 Train your memory to hold in sacred trust the strength-giving and worth-while episodes of life, which you can recall at will for your pleasure and edification. Thus build up for yourself and in yourself reserve galleries of beauty, goodness, and artistic grandeur. But the noblest of all memories are the treasured recollections of the great moments of a superb friendship. And all of these memory treasures radiate their most precious and exalting influences under the releasing touch of spiritual worship.
I’m fairly certain, but not absolutely sure, that the subconscious is a repository for those mental experiences which have not been thoroughly processed, meaning they have not yet found a proper place within the conscious thought scaffolding. Some of the stuff swirling around in the subconscious is not worthy to be part of a conscious thought scaffold, judged probably by the individual’s own conscience. I think the conscience is a gatekeeper to some of the nonsense that resides there, preventing it from being expressed. But the conscience may be only partially successful because sometimes the nonsense breaks through, either in covert sublimated ways or all the way into overt consciousness, which is what happened to Judas.
Why don’t all thoughts get processed, sorted, labeled and snuggly fit into our working thought structure? Some of them may be taboo, some of them may be so partial and incomplete they can’t be processed, others may not have gained enough significance to the individual for the conscience mind to consider and others are so foreign they have to wait until a place is created for them. There are probably plenty of things we experience everyday that we don’t process. For instance, does anyone know the color of the walls in your local supermarket, or workplace lunch room, or other place you frequent regularly? Most people couldn’t say unless they made a particular effort to remember it. Stuff like that is seen by the mind and relegated to useless information, unworthy of processing. But we are told that we can train the mind to process, memorize and store that which is worthy. So the bottom line is probably determining what is worthwhile and working to get it into the active memory stream.
I know a little about this because I’m brain damaged. Don’t laugh, but I had to go to school to learn how to remember things. I used to enter a supermarket, stand there wondering where I was, how I got there and why I came. It would eventually dawn on me that I was in the Shop Rite and not the Acme or Whole Foods. And of course I knew you usually go to those kinds of places to buy food . . . but what food? I’d write lists and leave them home, leave them in the car, put them in my pocket and forget I put them there, or find them and not remember why I wrote them, then go off script. There were even times I would be holding the list in one hand while desperately looking for it in my purse with the other hand. Crazy stuff. So then I’d buy a bunch of things for whatever reason, bag it up, put it in the car and go home. Hours later I’d say to myself, dang I need to buy cheese. Out I’d go and repeat the process only to find, days later, bags of rotting food left in the car along with several blocks of cheese. So yeah, I did a lot of memory training for many years – hence the artfully integrated computer crutch. You people think I’m a TUB quote Frandalank, but it’s really all done with smoke and mirrors.
I don’t know if its dream related….but I’ve often gone to sleep with a vexing problem, conundrum, or paradox of confusion, consternation, and perplexion which seems to find resolution or solution in the morning. The mind seems able to consider problems and develop perspective while unconscious….how is that related?
This sounds like the quote below in that your conscious mind must have engaged the spirits of worship and wisdom in order to push your problems up into the supermind (soul), where the Adjuster adjusted your thoughts while you slept.
110:5.3 During the slumber season the Adjuster attempts to achieve only that which the will of the indwelt personality has previously fully approved by the decisions and choosings which were made during times of fully wakeful consciousness, and which have thereby become lodged in the realms of the supermind, the liaison domain of human and divine interrelationship.
How does intuition enter our minds? Is insight and intuition related?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. Are you wondering how the spirit of intuition ministers to the mind? How are you defining intuition? I’m also wondering how you’re defining insight. If you could more strictly define each to spiritual intuition and spiritual insight, then perhaps it would be easier to discuss?
While the two words are synonyms of one another, their definitions are also distinct. Intuition is the knowing of something without the understanding of it by hunch/feeling/impression/instinct or other form of perception that is not based on logic or knowledge; and insight is the discernment/understanding and comprehension/cognition of something or the reasoned result of reflection and consideration – insight puts pieces or concepts together into an integration or aggregation of greater meaning than the parts I think, while intuition is an instinctual knowing or reaction that does not require cognitive thinking.
Here’s a link to the keyword search for “intuition OR instinct”:
I also did some research on “subconscious” and discovered the term fell out of scientific/academic/medical usage in the early 20th century due to its imprecision and misuse by psychics, hypnotists, and others. It regained use mid-century by the self help and new age guru types. The scientific term for that which is not conscious is unconscious. While the UB uses subconscious very little, it speaks of the unconscious a great deal. Keyword search results for “unconscious”:
I’m fairly certain, but not absolutely sure, that the subconscious is a repository for those mental experiences which have not been thoroughly processed, meaning they have not yet found a proper place within the conscious thought scaffolding. Some of the stuff swirling around in the subconscious is not worthy to be part of a conscious thought scaffold, judged probably by the individual’s own conscience. I think the conscience is a gatekeeper to some of the nonsense that resides there, preventing it from being expressed. But the conscience may be only partially successful because sometimes the nonsense breaks through, either in covert sublimated ways or all the way into overt consciousness, which is what happened to Judas.
Why don’t all thoughts get processed, sorted, labeled and snuggly fit into our working thought structure? Some of them may be taboo, some of them may be so partial and incomplete they can’t be processed, others may not have gained enough significance to the individual for the conscience mind to consider and others are so foreign they have to wait until a place is created for them. There are probably plenty of things we experience everyday that we don’t process. For instance, does anyone know the color of the walls in your local supermarket, or workplace lunch room, or other place you frequent regularly? Most people couldn’t say unless they made a particular effort to remember it. Stuff like that is seen by the mind and relegated to useless information, unworthy of processing. But we are told that we can train the mind to process, memorize and store that which is worthy. So the bottom line is probably determining what is worthwhile and working to get it into the active memory stream.
Thanks for this…makes perfect sense! I have seen loved ones retrain motor skills after stroke…but your triumph in rewiring the brain into a cognitive and problem solving and memory processor is quite amazing! I cannot imagine the will and effort and tenacity to overcome such a challenge. I’ve always thought myself as one of the least of agondonters…a free white male in N. America in the 20th century from a loving family and tribe…what do I know of suffering and strife? Nothing compared to so many others!
But I have learned to be inspired and gain insight by those who overcome giant obstacles – personal, tribal, social – to shine as examples of human potential and greatness by their struggles. Thanks for sharing some of your story….and thanks for sharing your skills of cognition and your insights of understanding the Revelation and your experiential wisdom by the embrace of its teachings…to all of us here.
You shine Bonita! It’s a real pleasure to have you for a study-mate!
Does the subconscious work to serve this ministry in some way? The superconscious is where we do our highest and spiritualized thinking, but is that the actual arena for TA communication? Or is the superconscious the avenue for prayer, worship, and communion?
This is a bit simplistic, but think of the consciousness of the individual mind as slightly overlapping layers, maybe like different kinds of ascending levels of clouds. I’ve seen others explain this like layers of the atmosphere too. The bottom layer, closest to the earth, the most material, is the subconscious, the next layer is full consciousness, the layer above is soul consciousness topped by the superconscious layer. Each layer has a gradation of mind ministry and each layer slightly overlaps the layer below and above.
The following should be considered as a very loose generalization: The subconscious is ministered to by the lowest adjutants overlapping with the middle adjutants, the conscious mind is ministered to by the middle and higher adjutants. The two highest adjutants overlap the the very lowest level of soul consciousness, and the upper borderland of soul consciousness overlaps the superconscious where the Adjuster lives. The Holy Spirit is the soul arena and she houses the Spirit of Truth both of whom are in full contact with the Adjuster in the superconscious.
The subconscious layer is never fully conscious. The soul layer grows in consciousness with the goal being to eventually become conscious of the superconscious layer. All this happens with circle progress. As consciousness slowly rises to the higher levels, the lowest layer (subconscious) becomes less and less real to the mind, the mind is slowly weaned off the adjutant influence. Mind gravity and spirit gravity work together to make the mind less responsive to material gravity. In addition to mind and spirit ministry, the personality presence of the Holy Spirit and Spirit of Truth work together to move not only the mind but the whole personality toward its divinity goal, its true potential – the Adjuster (who uses personality gravity).
How does this work? When you have thoughts in the conscious mind they become subject to free will. The thoughts in the subconscious are not subject to free will because they are not fully conscious. You can only choose from that which you are conscious and aware of. Once a thought is consciously chosen as one desiring spirit input, it will make it to the soul. A thought that makes it all the way to the supermind (soul) has to get there by choice and it can only get there if it is directed by the spirit of wisdom which overlaps soul consciousness. Recall the definition of mind:
0:5.8 2. Mind. The thinking, perceiving, and feeling mechanism of the human organism. The total conscious and unconscious experience. The intelligence associated with the emotional life reaching upward through worship and wisdom to the spirit level.
34:5.3 This ministry of the sixth and seventh adjutants indicates mind evolution crossing the threshold of spiritual ministry.
Prayer engages the spirit of worship and the thoughts of that prayer, in order to be acted upon by the universe, must be born of the spirit. In other words, those thoughts have to make it to the soul, the “spirit level” where the Holy Spirit provides the ability to repercuss that thought into the spiritual realm. Imagine what the power of thinking could be if all our thoughts become prayer which make it to the spirit level. Then we’d really be living the religious life, our faith would be alive!
168:4.10 7. No prayer can hope for an answer unless it is born of the spirit and nurtured by faith. Your sincere faith implies that you have in advance virtually granted your prayer hearers the full right to answer your petitions in accordance with that supreme wisdom and that divine love which your faith depicts as always actuating those beings to whom you pray.
7:3.6 Conversely, if your supplications are purely material and wholly self-centered, there exists no plan whereby such unworthy prayers can find lodgment in the spirit circuit of the Eternal Son. The content of any petition which is not “spirit indited” can find no place in the universal spiritual circuit; such purely selfish and material requests fall dead; they do not ascend in the circuits of true spirit values. Such words are as “sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.”
144:2.6 “But when you pray, you exercise so little faith. Genuine faith will remove mountains of material difficulty which may chance to lie in the path of soul expansion and spiritual progress.”
This happens when the spirit of wisdom is engaged. Think of worship as the desire for Deity and perfection, then think of wisdom as the means by which the mind discerns a worthwhile yearning, and with personality consent, directs it toward Deity. Wisdom is the means by which thinking is directed away from the material conscious level upward to the morontia level of the supermind/soul, but it must be chosen. Recall the choice of the twins to leave their family; they did so after meditative thought (worship) and purposeful decision (wisdom). The spirit of wisdom requires a decision or permission to direct upwards as explained in 168:4.10 above, otherwise wisdom is merely intellectual and material, humanistic. Here’s the definition of the spirit of wisdom again:
(1003.3) 92:0.3 2. The adjutant of wisdom — the manifestation in a worshipful mind of the tendency to direct its adoration in higher channels of expression and toward ever-expanding concepts of Deity reality.
85.7.3 When the worship urge is admonished and directed by wisdom — meditative and experiential thinking — it then begins to develop into the phenomenon of real religion. When the seventh adjutant spirit, the spirit of wisdom, achieves effective ministration, then in worship man begins to turn away from nature and natural objects to the God of nature and to the eternal Creator of all things natural.
But the question becomes, at least for me, how do the thoughts that have visited the soul and have become adjusted and spiritized, make it back down into full consciousness? The soul is not completely conscious, nor is the superconscious, so how is it that this inspired thought transforms the human mind? I think it does so by changing the attitude of the mind in regards to the specific issue, new light and a feeling of assurance with the result being a fruit or fruits. If it’s a true spiritual fruit, we’re not fully conscious of it, we just live it because it is so real it has to be lived. It’s like goodness and growth, both are unconscious but the effect on the mind, the attitude, the character is transforming because it’s from the soul level which has been invaded by a new phase of divinity.
(2095.4) 196:3.20 Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total objectivity — the universe and its Maker.
I think I’ll deal with Adjuster communion in another post, but suffice it to say that it can only happen in the soul. And because it can only happen in the soul, until a person develops a fuller degree of soul consciousness (which comes with soul growth), that communion is better described as a spiritual feeling – the feeling of the presence of God. The Holy Spirit is a personality presence, as is the Spirit of Truth, so the feeling of the presence of God may begin as a holy feeling but it is meant to progress to personality-to-personality fellowship and communion. When you’ve seen a Son of God, you’ve seen God.
I look forward to further elaboration…and really appreciate the atmospheric stratification analogy…the overlap and transitional edges of ministry are very helpful to my perspective.
But the question becomes, at least for me, how do the thoughts that have visited the soul and have become adjusted and spiritized, make it back down into full consciousness? The soul is not completely conscious, nor is the superconscious, so how is it that this inspired thought transforms the human mind? I think it does so by changing the attitude of the mind in regards to the specific issue, new light and a feeling of assurance with the result being a fruit or fruits. If it’s a true spiritual fruit, we’re not fully conscious of it, we just live it because it is so real it has to be lived. It’s like goodness and growth, both are unconscious but the effect on the mind, the attitude, the character is transforming because it’s from the soul level which has been invaded by a new phase of divinity.
(2095.4) 196:3.20 Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total objectivity — the universe and its Maker.
Me here: Paper 101, naturally enough, appears to go directly to these elaborative issues for our consideration. I think this process might be described as either a slow and methodical paradigm shift where insights by revelation bring new inflections of new context to an expanding perspective….new dots of concept are being discovered or uncovered or revealed and new lines are formulated between dots which deliver new depth and dimension, from 2 dimensions to 3….or sometimes the paradigm shift is a graphic SNAP and realignment of severe augmentation of inversion of our prior view – what we perceived formerly may have been real enough but not nearly so real as now – new altitude also expands the lens of longitude.
There is also the feeling of confirmation to consider….the role of assurance in the growth of soul and fruits of the Spirit. The fruits themselves change our perspective and paradigm and assurance! Those combine into the subjective experience of an objective perspective of reality which helps shape and guide our future choices/decisions and our motives/intentions which determine our philosophy of living…our very priorities and actions in this life. Confirmation and assurance feed faith like the breast nourishes the baby – the infant is aware of the feeding but not the radical or subtle changes and growth the feeding delivers.
101:5.11 (1111.1) Personally revealed religions are sponsored by the bestowal spirits representing the three persons of the Paradise Trinity and are especially concerned with the expansion of truth. Evolutionary religion drives home to the individual the idea of personal duty; revealed religion lays increasing emphasis on loving, the golden rule.
101:5.12 (1111.2) Evolved religion rests wholly on faith. Revelation has the additional assurance of its expanded presentation of the truths of divinity and reality and the still more valuable testimony of the actual experience which accumulates in consequence of the practical working union of the faith of evolution and the truth of revelation. Such a working union of human faith and divine truth constitutes the possession of a character well on the road to the actual acquirement of a morontial personality.
101:6.2 (1111.6) Throughout all religious experience, from its earliest inception on the material level up to the time of the attainment of full spirit status, the Adjuster is the secret of the personal realization of the reality of the existence of the Supreme; and this same Adjuster also holds the secrets of your faith in the transcendental attainment of the Ultimate. The experiential personality of evolving man, united to the Adjuster essence of the existential God, constitutes the potential completion of supreme existence and is inherently the basis for the superfinite eventuation of transcendental personality.
101:6.3 (1111.7) Moral will embraces decisions based on reasoned knowledge, augmented by wisdom, and sanctioned by religious faith. Such choices are acts of moral nature and evidence the existence of moral personality, the forerunner of morontia personality and eventually of true spirit status.
101:6.4 (1111.8) The evolutionary type of knowledge is but the accumulation of protoplasmic memory material; this is the most primitive form of creature consciousness. Wisdom embraces the ideas formulated from protoplasmic memory in process of association and recombination, and such phenomena differentiate human mind from mere animal mind. Animals have knowledge, but only man possesses wisdom capacity. Truth is made accessible to the wisdom-endowed individual by the bestowal on such a mind of the spirits of the Father and the Sons, the Thought Adjuster and the Spirit of Truth.
Confirmation and assurance feed faith like the breast nourishes the baby – the infant is aware of the feeding but not the radical or subtle changes and growth the feeding delivers.
Interesting. I’ve always thought of it the other way around, that faith feeds assurance. I feel assured because the source of my faith is reliably present, radiantly alive, active and engaged with me as a cocreative partner. I can face the outside world with courage because my inside world is secure and utterly dependable. Even when I forget this inner world or get distracted from it, I know without a doubt it will always be there to return to. My partner will welcome me back with open arms. My trust, my faith-trust in my partner allows me to work with him, or share with him, and because the work is so positive and real, I feel more and more assured, so I stay longer and longer transferring more and more of my life into the relationship. I think security and certainty come from the experience of the reality of it all.
Doing the will of God is nothing more than sharing the inner life with him (111:5.1). It almost seems that God does all the real work while I consent and do my best to outwardly express all the wonderful things going on inside. If my inner world is constantly being transformed by the boundless truth, beauty and goodness in there, my outer world will naturally yield its fruits – making all that potential value actual and real. It’s not the fruit that gives assurance but the utter realness of the experience. Personality realization is about becoming more real. The more real you are, the more assured you become. It begins with faith and then at some point you realize it’s an actual relationship with Truth himself, and Truth is inconcussible (118:3.3).
111:5.1 The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God—with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning-value possible.
118:3.3 Truth is inconcussible — forever exempt from all transient vicissitudes, albeit never dead and formal, always vibrant and adaptable — radiantly alive. But when truth becomes linked with fact, then both time and space condition its meanings and correlate its values. Such realities of truth wedded to fact become concepts and are accordingly relegated to the domain of relative cosmic realities.
While the two words are synonyms of one another, their definitions are also distinct. Intuition is the knowing of something without the understanding of it by hunch/feeling/impression/instinct or other form of perception that is not based on logic or knowledge; and insight is the discernment/understanding and comprehension/cognition of something or the reasoned result of reflection and consideration – insight puts pieces or concepts together into an integration or aggregation of greater meaning than the parts I think, while intuition is an instinctual knowing or reaction that does not require cognitive thinking.
This sounds pretty good. Intuition seems more about feeling and insight about thinking and processing. In regards to the spirit, I think we’re supposed to grow in our ability to feel the presence of God, which is a natural intuition if the spirit of worship is functioning. Meanwhile we intentionally attempt to direct our thoughts Godward, which becomes the natural discovery of insight if the spirit of wisdom is functioning.
The spirit of worship is the original religious instinct, or intuition, for humans and cosmic mind ministry provides additional intuitions and insights for each of the three levels of reality: causation, duty and worship. An intuition can sense or feel the reality of something and I think insight confirms it through unification by the personality.
16:6.10 These three basic factors in reflective thinking may be unified and co-ordinated in personality development, or they may become disproportionate and virtually unrelated in their respective functions. But when they become unified, they produce a strong character consisting in the correlation of a factual science, a moral philosophy, and a genuine religious experience. And it is these three cosmic intuitions that give objective validity, reality, to man’s experience in and with things, meanings, and values.
Dear Bonita,
Your post here ( post 30393 ) is truly a beautiful unwrapping of how our local universe mother fosters our morontia birth, and then makes possible the progress of our soul. Thank you!
Regarding “levels of consciousness” of the Divine Minister, I’m now thinking that her ascending gradations of ministry are made real, and accessible, via a sequence of such “levels“, each tuned specifically for nudging and nurturing baby souls. First, those impersonal urges of her “adjutant mind spirits”, then her utterly personal presence as “Holy Spirit”, and then… ?
Regarding “subconscious” and “material” mind, given that the lowest level of our system of mind consists in the rhythmic pulsations of the adjutants ( 117:5.7, 1286.5 ), and that these adjutant spirits are in fact a level of consciousness of the Divine Minister, I cannot see much in the way of material-ness in this system…? Of course, the set of interfaces evolved by the Life Carriers (for connecting the differential urges of these adjutant spirits with our biochemistry) reach into material foundations, but the phenomenon of animating material biochemistry via non-material urges should make us “pause to consider” !
Regarding that set of interfaces (evolved by the Life Carriers for interfacing their animal patterns with this adjutant level of the Divine minister’s consciousness), I’ve reworked that essay on how I now understand the UB story:
Link: Making Truth Accessible
And yes please, I’d love to get an earful of your thoughts
NigelQuestion:
Do you think the adjutants themselves form the matrix of finite mind, or do you think finite mind is an individualized circuit of the cosmic mind to which the adjutants minister?
Question:
Do you think the adjutants interface directly with the individual physical axons, dendrites and neurotransmitters of the brain? Or do you think the adjutants interface with mind which has been superimposed upon the physical brain energy system?
From Nigel’s paper, Making Truth Accessible
“Let us make mortal man…” Easier said than done. Sure, native science can follow how evolution might turn salty fluids into living tissue, but how to tickle up emotion in biochemistry? How to turn emotion into choice, and then heroic deeds? To get this process started, the Divine Minister broadcasts throughoutNebadon “a level of her consciousness” as a set of circuits, the adjutant mind spirits. These serve as targets for each team of Life Carriers, whose challenge is to evolve animals that can respond – biochemically and psychologically – to this adjutant urge.
I’m curious about this paragraph and my curiosity aroused the following questions:
- Who designs a life pattern, the Life Carriers or the Creator Son?
- Are the adjutants “broadcast” throughout the local universe or are they brought to each inhabitable planet along with the Life Carriers, being as the adjutants reside on one of the Life Carrier worlds?
- Are the Life Carriers responsible for the evolution of life or is all evolution-potential programmed into the original life pattern?
- What is the role of the Life Carriers in biological evolution?
- What is the role of mind and adjutant mind ministry in biological evolution? Intellectual evolution?
- Is building a physical energy system which responds to adjutant mind influence the only target of life pattern design? Or is there more?
- Is response to adjutant influence biological or intellectual? Or both? If so how?
- What is meant by adjutant urge?
I bring these questions up partly as a tease to our upcoming International Study Day on paper 36 – The Life Carriers. And I have a bazillion more, but no one seems interested.
Whoa, Not sure why the above formatting happened. Read the left hand column, top to bottom then read the right hand column. Curious🙀!!
Interesting questions Nigel. Maybe you can start a new topic to stimulate participation on this forum, if others are also interested. I’d like to respond to your first question,
- Who designs a life pattern, the Life Carriers or the Creator Son?
The Life Carriers. Life Carriers are beings classified with the descending order of the Sons of God and have their origin in the local universe. (35:0.6) They organize life patterns and formulas that have previously been approved. (36:3.2) (36:3.3)
But first a Satania scouting party is sent out to a world to look things over, before decisions are made. On Urantia this happened 900,000,000 years ago, more or less. (57:8.7) Life Carrier plans went up the chain of command for approvals and were finally accepted on Salavington. “These plans, proposed by the advisory counselors of the Life Carriers, were finally accepted on Salvington.”
So far I’ve asked 10 questions. Thank you Mara for your answer. Here are some more questions that occurred to me after reading Nigel’s paper:
- Does mind activate molecules and atoms, or does mind activate life associated with molecules and atoms?
- Does mind animate an energy system, or does life animate an energy system?
- What is the difference between animate and activate?
- Does mind respond to physical energy, or does physical energy respond to mind?
- Why doesn’t life respond to any form of gravity?
- In making contact with the minds of organisms, do the adjutants contact the organism or does the organism make a reaction-response to the presence of the adjutant? In other words, do the adjutants assail the organism or wait for the organism to recognize and react to thier presence?
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