© 2006 Berkeley Elliott
© 2006 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Serving: A Cookbook for the Soul | Volume 7, Number 1, 2006 (Summer) — Index | The Coming Scientific Validation of The Urantia Book |
The following article contains excerpts of a speech given by the author on July 22, 1973.
What is personality? Where is personality? When is personality? For many years I have pondered these questions and attempted to find answers, feeling they were available in The Urantia Book.
Webster’s Dictionary says “Personality—quality or state of being a person and not a thing or abstraction; that which makes a being a person; personal existence or identity. That which constitutes distinction of person; distinctive personal character; individuality.”
Individuality is described in the same volume as “The character of property peculiar to an individual; that quality which distinguishes one person or thing from another; distinctive character.”
We find very little difference in Webster’s Dictionary, but The Urantia Book makes a drastic distinction. When we speak of someone having a neat, nice, charming, great, wonderful, or terrific personality, we should substitute the word “individuality,” at least during our life in the flesh. A phase, or aspect, of personality could have a parallel to what we should call “individuality,” since personality unifies the identity of any living energy system, and our temperament, actions, character traits, morality—whether we are sincere and honest or hypocrites and frauds; kind or cruel, happy or sad (sulky), generous or stingy (frugal), selfish or selfless, helpful or do-gooders, fast or slow, lazy or ambitious, intelligent or dull, boring or entertaining, annoying or soothing, smiling or frowning, pleasant or disagreeable, affectionate or cold, friendly or aloof, positive or negative, mentally healthy or neurotic, Promethian or Epimethian, good, beautiful, and true or bad, ugly, and false. Many of these attributes of our “individuality” go to make up our character, our conduct, the real self.
In the human organism the summation of its parts constitutes selfhood—individuality—but such a process has nothing whatever to do with personality, which is the unifier of all these factors as related to cosmic realities. [UB 112:1.18]
Dr. William S. Sadler in The Evolution of the Soul, says that personality is the sum total of man’s equipment and experience; it is the totality of all that man is and does. He says, “I observe personality to function upon six levelsthe physical, the intellectual, the emotional, the social, the moral, and the spiritual. But when I put all of the activities with their characteristics of attitude, motivation, and behavior, together, when I add them up, I find in the resultant totality of personality so much that was not observably pre-existent in these component factors, that I am inclined to become a Gestaltist and conclude that parts derive their meaning from the whole—that the whole is something more than the sum of its parts. Personality cannot be defined because it is UNIQUE—not only that each individual is a unique personality, but that selfsame individual is likewise unique at each moment of his mortal existence. Personality is something which is relatively free from the domination of the otherwise universal law of antecedent causation. WILL is a function of total personality.”
Dr. Sadler also says, “The Spirit Monitor comes to indwell the mind of man at the hour of the completed emergence of his moral nature, that moment in human development when man becomes a moral being, a free-will creature, having the power to choose between right and wrong, between good and evil…”
William S. Sadler, Jr., in A Study of the Master Universe, says, “God has invested us with the priceless powers of choice that accompany his gift of personality.” In a speech Bill made in Oklahoma City on our Society’s first anniversary, November 23, 1958, he had this to say about God’s gift. “God gives us two priceless pieces of equipment. First of all, he gives us an absolute sense of direction. He incarcerates a part of his love inside of us. He lives in us. This part of God that lives in us is God’s love made real to each one of us, and this part of God that lives in us knows the way to God. It points just as unerringly God-ward as the compass needle points northward. It came from God, so it knows the way back to God. It is our unerring pilot.”
“And God gives us a second priceless endowment: he endows us with relative free will, freedom of choice. The pilot is not the captain. We are captain. The pilot can steer only as we choose. I think of all the priceless gifts which God could make to me, and none would transcend the endowment of freedom of choice. Otherwise, I would be a machine. With freedom of choice, I am a person, I can be a son of God. What does freedom of choice mean? It means that I just don’t have top respond slavishly to what happens to me. I have something to say about what I become. I have been liberated from marching in lock-step to antecedent causation. This book teaches me that the more outside of myself I go toward the material level, the less choosing I can do. The more I move inward away from the material, inward and spirit-ward, the greater is my liberation of choice, until when I reach the supreme choice, pro or con concerning God, here my choice knows no restriction as to whether I choose to be His son, to do His will. I am absolutely on my own. Here my choice is absolute. God has given us this perfectly splendid equipment, freedom of choice and an absolute sense of direction.”
We know the Universal Father bestows personality on each of us; he gives us a unique gift which is characterized by morality. Personality unifies our identity; personality makes us self-conscious and gives us relative free will (absolute in choosing to be God’s son.) We know the personality circuit is a direct line to the Father. We know this bestowal gift is changeless in the presence of change (the growing soul, the result of the relationship between the Adjuster and the personal mind.) We know the Thought Adjuster, our second direct gift from the Father, is the spirit nucleus of the human personality, and is subject to the personal human will. We should at least have a “feel” for what is personality and where is personality.
. . . Personality is that feature of any individual which we know, and which enables us to identify such a being at some future time regardless of the nature and extent of changes in form, mind, or spirit status. 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.
Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive behavior: self-consciousness and associated free will.
Self-consciousness consists in intellectual awareness of personality actuality; . . . [UB 16:8.4-6]
When does personality arrive? We know that the Thought Adjuster now comes at the age of first moral choice. “The Adjusters cannot invade the mortal mind until it has been duly prepared by the indwelling ministry of the adjutant mind-spirits and encircuited in the Holy Spirit. It requires the co-ordinate function of all seven adjutants to thus qualify the human mind for the reception of an Adjuster. Creature mind must exhibit the worship outreach and indicate wisdom function by exhibiting the ability to choose between the emerging values of good and evilmoral choice.” [UB 108:2.2]
Only a personality can know what it is doing before it does it; only personality…can look before it leaps and can therefore learn from looking as well as from leaping. A non-personal animal ordinarily learns only by leaping. [UB 16:7.3]
The seventh group of worlds encircling Salvington are the Worlds of the Archangels. All “are occupied by the personality record keepers. This enormous corps of recorders busy themselves with keeping straight the record of each mortal of time from the moment of birth up through the universe career until such an individual either leaves Salvington for the superuniverse regime or is ‘blotted out of recorded existence’ by the mandate of the Ancients of Days.” [UB 37:3.7]
What is a will creature? We know this has something to do with personality, but let us get some definitions.
When the Life Carriers operating on a new world have once succeeded in producing a being with will, with the power of moral decision and spiritual choice, then and there their work terminates. . . . [UB 36:3.8]
. . . For ages we had been on duty, assisted only by the seven adjutant mind-spirits and the Master Physical Controllers. And now, will, the power of choosing to worship and to ascend, having appeared in the evolutionary creatures of the planet, we realized that our work was finished, . . . [UB 62:7.6]
[Andon and Fonta’s] vague feeling of being something more than mere animals was due to the possession of personality and was augmented by the indwelling presence of the Thought Adjuster. [UB 63:1.4]
[The level of the seventh psychic circle] is entered when human beings develop the powers of personal choice, individual decision, moral responsibility, and the capacity for the attainment of spiritual individuality. [UB 110:6.13]
Entrance upon the seventh [psychic] circle marks the beginning of true human personality function.[UB 110:6.1]
The successful traversal of these [circles—from the seventh to the first,] demands the harmonious function of the entire personality, not merely of some one phase thereof. The growth of the parts does not equal the true maturation of the whole; the parts really grow in proportion to the expansion of the entire self—the whole self—material, intellectual, and spiritual. [UB 110:6.3]
The words “personalize,” “personalization,” and “personification” are sometimes used in the Papers as an act of “making real.” Some examples are:
Much as the Creator Sons are personalized by the Father and the Son, so are the Magisterial Sons personalized by the Son and the Spirit. [UB 7:6.5]
. . . when the forth-ninth Reflective Spirit has personalized, then a new and far-reaching reaction occurred in the Deity Absolute which imparted new personality prerogatives to the Supreme Being and culminated in the personalization of Majeston, the reflectivity chief and Paradise center of all the work of the forty-nine Reflective Spirits . . . [UB 17:2.2]
Our Creator Son is the personification of the 611,121st original concept of infinite identity of simultaneous origin in the Universal Father and the Eternal Son. [UB 33.1.1]
You mortals are persons; hence we can describe beings who are personalized, but how could an absonitized being ever be explained to you? [UB 30:1.114]
Jesus was the perfectly unified personality. “Although the average mortal of Urantia cannot hope to attain the high perfection of character which Jesus of Nazareth acquired while sojourning in the flesh, 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.” [UB 100:7.1]
. . . Christ Michael, while truly a dual-origin being, was not a double personality. . . . [UB 120:4.2]
The Urantia Book does not stifle imagination with an over-revelation. It stimulates and encourages speculation and conjecture. So shall we?
What can personality do for an individual without the Thought Adjuster? We are given every reason to believe if an individual has potential survival qualities, a normal mind, the Thought Adjuster has to be present to initiate the birth of the soul, the Morontia entity our moral and spiritual choosing helps to grow. Also, it is the spiritual influence of the Thought Adjuster the personality free will may choose to be directive. So even before the universal outpouring of the Spirit of Truth and the automatic coming of the Adjusters with the first functioning of the Spirit of Wisdom, can’t we safely conjecture the Adjusters arrived early?
Would a consistent, loving Father give his gift of personality to a mortal—the unique freewill choice to unify the individual and the ability to choose to make His will their will—without the Thought Adjuster, the absolute ingredient necessary for the birth of the soul and for spirit direction? Only with the arrival of the Thought Adjuster is there a soul born, and without a soul there is no survival.
. . . capacity for human personality is potential in the cosmic-mind endowment of the human being. But the experiential personality of mortal man is not observable as an active and functional reality until after the material life vehicle of the mortal creature has been touched by the liberating divinity of the Universal Father, being thus launched upon the seas of experience as a self-conscious and a (relatively) self-determinative and self-creative personality. The material self is truly and unqualifiedly personal. [UB 5:6.6]
The Papers tell me that human, personal, free will functioned on this planet when, and only when, all seven adjutant mind spirits functioned. Evolution proceeded, Michael came, left, and sent his Spirit of Truth. Since that time, the Thought Adjusters unfailingly come automatically the instant the spirit of wisdom, the seventh adjutant mind spirit, functions—the same time we become “will creatures”—or personality becomes apparent.
Although the Papers say the personality is antecedent to the Thought Adjuster, does this mean bestowed “slightly” before? We are told the Adjuster is subject to the human will. If the personality is bestowed before all seven adjutants become active, it is not functioning, for we are not a “will creature” until we have all seven working. At this point in time, we also have an Adjuster.
Since this priceless power of choice comes with our gift of personality from the Universal Father; since the Thought Adjuster is subservient to its choosing; and since they start functioning in our minds practically simultaneously; could we have underestimated the importance of the gift of personality?
We do know “No personal creature can be coerced into the eternal adventure; the portal of eternity opens only in response to the freewill choice of the freewill sons of the God of free will.” [UB 5:6.12]
Berkeley left Urantia in 1995, but what she really left to those of us who knew her as a best friend, was an amazing devotion and startling affection. Her involvement in Urantia affairs began in the late 1950s when she inherited the Herculean task of compiling and publishing Bill Sadler’s A Study of the Master Universe and the Appendices. She was instrumental in the development and chartering of several societies, led several weekly study groups in her home, and she was compelling in getting others to serve. She was chair of the International Fellowship Committee, masterfully organized numerous conferences, traveled extensively, and had unparalleled endurance and energy. Her humor was infectious, her friendship superb, and her ideas about how the Urantia community should be were strong. Those of us who knew her well knew her faults, but they pale to insignificance in the face of the legendary service and love she provided to everyone she met.
—Tom Allen
| Serving: A Cookbook for the Soul | Volume 7, Number 1, 2006 (Summer) — Index | The Coming Scientific Validation of The Urantia Book |