© 2016 Byron Belitsos
© 2016 The Urantia Book Fellowship
The truth about personality is a universal mystery—but we do know a few good things about it. In this essay, we dive into The Urantia Book ’s robust teachings on the nature of personality, or what I also call “selfhood” or “personhood.” I’ll compare these ideas with related notions from both the world’s wisdom traditions as well as a few representatives of depth psychology as we examine the complex relationship between healthy ego development and higher spiritual attainment. Along the way I will also make a few risky excursions into philosophic psychology and speculative theology, and call out ways that The Urantia Book ’s idea of personality constitutes a startling revelation to modern psychology and today’s living religions.
My ultimate aim is to highlight the serviceability of The Urantia Book ’s unprecedented revelations about the nature of personality reality. These include (1) the paradox of how each personality’s uniqueness in eternity coexists with its equality before God, and (2) The Urantia Book ’s revelatory description of the special endowments that always come with the gift of personality: creative free will, self–consciousness, and cosmic intuition. My hope is that I may enhance your idea of the centrality of personhood in the cosmic economy; and also help you to gain a better appreciation of what is knowable about personality, either by experience or revelation. May this essay also inspire you to relish the truths of the beauty and goodness of the Father of all personality with increasing love and awe.
Let’s start with the earliest source of the idea of personality in the West. At Exodus 3:14 we meet the mysterious I Am, who declares himself to Moses in a rather dramatic way. After Moses asks for its name, he receives this startling reply: “God said to Moses, ‘I Am Who I Am’. This is what you 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-andtake dialogue and even used a show of fire to get his points 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 ” created by the original I Am, whose first impulse was to “make man in our image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26). And this notion soon became a bedrock doctrine of Christianity.
Similar ideas emerged in other ancient venues, especially in Greek philosophy. In our democratic political traditions that go back to ancient Greece and Rome, the status of personhood conferred certain inalienable rights on citizens who could be now described as free and sovereign individuals. Slaves were the exception that proved the rule: they were not defined as persons under ancient law, so they were not free and did not need to be treated with dignity. Christian thinkers arrived at a splendid concept of personhood that freed all slaves regardless of legal status. This concept declared our divine value as children of a loving Father, once stained by the sin of Adam but now salvaged by the grace of the Atonement. We can know the preciousness of the human individual, they taught, by accepting the truth of God incarnate as one of us, and thereby entering into his personal essence through worship, service, and the sacraments.
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 U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. But the Urantia Revelation offers an unprecedented expansion of what it means to be a person. Politically speaking, it begins by calling for a global bill of rights and individual accountability before global law (in the Urmia lectures). It then goes on to declare us to be citizens of a much more encompassing realm than the nation or even the planet—ultimately proclaiming our right to ascend to Paradise and our duty to contribute to the evolution of the Supreme as cosmic citizens. Above all, The Urantia Book establishes human personality as infinitely unique and directly sourced from the Father, and able to serve in a sacred and sublime partnership with the additional gift of the Thought Adjusters, which are a pure fragment of true God.
These revolutionary teachings arrived with a whisper, unknown and unacknowledged in a world swirling in doubt and turmoil about the dignity of personhood. Communism and fascism were built upon a critique of individualism and a frontal attack on the classical ideal of the free, sovereign, and rational self endowed with inherent rights before God. 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. Freud and Jung made clear that the ego, the conscious self, was like 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 “protean self,” the idea of the insubstantiality of the self already had a distinguished pedigree in the venerable teachings of 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 Dalai Lama often restates the classic 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 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 they reveal no stable organizing center or enduring continuity of consciousness. This observation that the self or soul lacks any cohesive quality has its own lineage in the modern West, best represented in modern times 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.
In the face of such radical claims, you or I might insist on our “me-ness” as a matter of common sense. But it’s not unfair to ask: Just where or how is this sense of “I” or “me” to be located? In reply, one has to admit that our sense of self is rarely the same from day to day, or for that matter even for a few minutes. We’re more like helpless observers of an ever-changing flux of states, thoughts, feelings, and objects of awareness. And then here comes the Buddhists again, whose disciplined methods of introspection practiced over hundreds of years provides no direct evidence of an enduring person or some identifiable artifact of selfhood—aside from the perishable human body.
But again, we in the West—we rugged ones out here in the “land of the free”—hold out hope for something more solid. Better to choose something that stands for the “I am,” some abiding feature of the self that can provide a feeling of constancy of the self in the presence of unending flux. “I am an immaterial thinking self,” says Descartes. “I am my feeling heart,” say the Romantic poets. “I am a coherent set of electro-chemical transactions in my brain,” say the materialists. But if direct experience is the criterion, none of these perceptions is stable and reliable across time, not even in one 24–hour cycle, given our nightly surrender of selfhood to the dark world of dreams and deep sleep. Purportedly, devoted Buddhist meditation has revealed the ultimate truth of impermanence, not only of the self, but of all things and beings.
But as Buddhism grew in sophistication, later interpretations concluded that Buddha did not exactly hold to a settled doctrine about no-self—not to mention other crucial questions, such as the existence of an afterlife or whether 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. If I may paraphrase, the Buddha would say: “O monks, do not brood over such views. Such brooding, O monks, is senseless.”
If one considers the rich record of the Buddha’s dialogues with his students, we learn that he was a pragmatic healer above all. He was absolutely committed to reducing their suffering and pain. The best medicine was to encourage his followers to let go of their identifications with “this or that” phenomenal reality, for all such attachments to that which is impermanent will lead to frustration and delusion. Consider also the nondual schools of Hinduism, now increasingly popular among millions of Yoga and new age adherents the West, once the bastion of independent selfhood. Generally known as Advaita Vedanta, they teach that “personhood,” including our self-awareness, is derived from Brahman, the underlying impersonal essence of the cosmos. Brahman can be defined as a self-sufficient universal consciousness with no “existential Other,” and thus is unable to engage in loving relationships with human persons.
This school of monism, with its concept of an indeterminate One, stands in stark contrast to the trinitarian doctrines of the West according to which the Absolute I Am personalizes as the “Eternal Father” of the “Eternal Son,” these two being distinct “hypostases” that somehow operate as one by virtue of the unifying power of the Holy Spirit.
In classic Hindu doctrine, the transcendent Brahman corresponds to an entity residing in each of us known as atman, or the Self—a concept that the Urantia text celebrates as a foreshadowing of its own teaching about the Thought Adjuster, especially in the later Buddhist formulation of an indwelling Buddha-nature.
Teachers of nondual Vedanta would agree with Buddhists that we can have no direct cognition of this entity. Any particular idea or perception of a self that we may have, and all forms of identification with any given content of consciousness, cannot be the atman, since this entity was never separate from the indivisible, impersonal, absolute, and universal Brahman. Any particular attachment is a limit on realizing the truth of pure consciousness without an object. Think of the proverbial eye that can’t see itself or the tongue that cannot taste its “tonguehood.”
But if we turn again to the classical Western idea of God in its highest expression, we can say that the eye of God can see itself, and even humans can do so too at the end of a long process of personal evolution.
Original Deity sees “Godself” in perfection. There exists an “Other” in the Godhead; God is absolutely reflected and revealed in the person of the Son, the absolute Other and the absolute of personality. “The Eternal Son is the unqualified personality-absolute,” says The Urantia Book, “that divine being who stands throughout all time and eternity as the perfect revelation of the personal nature of God.” UB 10:2.4
The nineteenth century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel called this intimacy of God and the Son the absolute reflection —that is, the existential perfection of God’s selfawareness. Hegel declared this divine transparency to be the basis of divine personhood, as well as the source and essence of human personality. Hegel’s philosophical theology made more explicit the inner meaning of the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, and the Urantia Revelation greatly amplifies these same meanings in its discourses on “Deity personalization” in Part I.
My point here is more limited: the very concept of personality, divine or human, requires a self-awareness of both the fact and the truth of our unique personhood. And it follows that our own quest for perfection (“Be you perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect”) implies that we have a goal of perfecting our own self-consciousness—for in this we are emulating the eternal state of the self-reflected consciousness in which our Father always abides. The Father absolutely knows himself in and as the Son, and the Son ever knows the Father in perfection. Hegel’s notion of absolute reflection is practically paraphrased in this well-known Urantia Book passage: “ [The Father] is the only being in the universe, aside from his divine co-ordinates, who experiences a perfect, proper, and complete appraisal of himself.” UB 2:1.3
So, what’s the upshot for us as sons and daughters of God? The first profound step toward our own proper self-appraisal is none other than Father fusion —fusion with the Thought Adjuster through our direct recognition that the indwelling Father fragment is our truest self. Later we identify this as “True Self” consciousness.
Technically, nondual Hinduism would deny this experience. We cannot fully know the atman and still remain self-aware; rather, to attain the Self is to disappear into its depths. We can foretaste this submergence of the personal ego through the devoted practice of meditation or ritual. We’ll know its earmarks when we achieve the state of nondual bliss—a temporary oneness with the One. Remember that the existential One (or Brahman ) cannot allow an absolute Other—for there is no true sonship or daughership with God in such monistic theologies. Brahman is neither a relational nor a self-aware I Am.
The illuminated state of bliss—the goal of most nondual practices—is not a true-self-reflection. It is only available in the moment of the pure experience of consciousness as such, sometimes known as witness consciousness—the moment-by-moment awareness of the insubstantiality of selfhood and emptiness of all objects or mind-moments that arise in awareness. The optimal sadhana (spiritual practice) entails contemplations and meditations designed to realize that we will blissfully return to union with Brahman ; our spiritual goal is enlightenment through merger with this impersonal Absolute essence. We will then realize that our apparent sense of separateness was an illusion. Ultimately, we will “fuse” with Brahman, and lose all sense of separate identity and self-consciousness, allowing us to “get off the wheel of reincarnation.” In this moment, we realize that we always already are one with this great It, in no way separate at any time from its essence. And that’s why the Hindu sages teach “Thou art that!” (tat tvam asi)—we are identical with Brahman.
Our sense of personhood is illusory, for no separate self could have existed in the first place. Our nondual enlightenment is nothing personal. We as individuals are nothing special in the face of the Absolute—we are not unique and beloved sons and daughters of God, but impersonal units of the Godhead.
So, which is true? The adamantine uniqueness of the personal self—the idea that we are potentially immortal beings with singular rights, duties, and free-will prerogatives whose personhood is rooted in a loving and personal God? Or instead, must we overcome any sense of separate selfhood in a quest for impersonal enlightenment through disidentification with all contents of consciousness and all limiting identities? Or else, might there be a third option: Buddha’s teaching that to concern ourselves about this issue is useless because the essence of personhood is ultimately unknowable?
According to the Urantia Revelation, the reality of personality is self-evident to divine beings, but its ultimate essence is unfathomable for God’s creatures, at least those who have not achieved Father fusion. “Personality is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universes.” UB 5:6.2
In terrestrial life we lack the cognitive capacity to “see our own eyes.” The truth about personhood is an imponderable, just as Buddha proclaimed. 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. And when that occurs we can apprehend this revelation only by means of faith and insight, and with perhaps a bit of theological speculation as displayed in this essay. Divine revelation has the capacity to change the equation: “The universe fact of God’s becoming man has forever changed all meanings and altered all values of human personality.” UB 112:2.7
Such a divine revelation about the meaning of personhood was not available at this scale to Buddha or to the Hindu sages. Establishing an adequate understanding of personality requires a dramatic epochal revelation of the sort that we see in the incarnation of Christ and in the event of revelation we know as The Urantia Papers.
Jesus was and is the living revelation of authentic selfhood. He is the “icon” of personhood, as taught especially in Eastern Orthodox theology. His life was the ultimate disclosure of the potentials of human personality. His eventful story and his relationships with ordinary men and women were a revelation of the transcendental principle of “personalness.” The Christian theological claim is huge: We can know the truths of the personal self by studying the life and teachings of Christ, and by apprehending him as divinity personified. As the Son, he is the source, “with the Father,” of our abiding human personality. And that means we too can become divinized.
The same theology is now mercifully updated and restated for the modern world in the fifth epochal revelation, specifically in Part IV of _The Urantia Book. In these pages we glimpse the exemplar of the perfection of the unification of personality in the life of Jesus.
But of course the Urantia text also goes a big step beyond an expanded narrative about Jesus. It calls out many previously unrevealed aspects of the mystery of personality in Paper 112, “Personality Survival.” In its theology and cosmology (provided especially in Parts I and II), the Urantia text also offers an original and unprecedented philosophic teaching about the divine source and nature of personhood.
So what, then, is human personality, even divine personality, to the extent that we can grasp it in this life? Human personhood is said to be gifted by divine fiat upon each individual, conferring powers of reflective awareness, self-determination, creative consciousness, relative free will, and the capacity for cosmic insight. Beyond that, the stock description for most Urantia students is that personality is both (1) an utterly unique bestowal and (2) an unchanging reality—as in these authoritative 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. UB 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. UB 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. UB 112:0.12
These are vivid and remarkable quotes. But I believe they stand out from other important statements because of our bias in favor of the Western idea of the independent and autonomous self. On closer inspection, we find that The Urantia Book ’s full depiction of personality is even broader and deeper—and is also richly paradoxical and mysterious.
First mystery: While personhood is stated to be “ unique in eternity ”—we soon come across the disconcerting statement in Paper 112 that personality has no identity.
Personality, while devoid of identity, can unify the identity of any living energy system. UB 112:0.7
But how can this be possible? How can something 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? Further, might it be possible that, in so doing, our unique personality conditions the mode of appearance of our identity at any one moment, doing so “secretly” but always consistently? A party may have all sorts of activities within it, but the hostess of the party always confers on the event a special flavor or color. She may even condition the party so that all sorts of qualities express themselves spontaneously.
Think of your personality as your very own “personal hostess” on loan to you from a perfect source—“heaven’s personality agency” if you will. She is a consummate professional. She delivers consistent quality no matter what the work conditions may be. But each hostess provided by the agency is different. Each one brings with her absolutely unique and adorable qualities, so special that they far transcend and outlast anything that may appear on the surface of your life as your temporal identity—such as housewife or doctor, rich or poor, old or young, American or Chinese. Other persons who come very close to you will feel her presence as something quite precious and unusual. Your friends and lovers always feel this “something” each time they see you. The closer they get, and more they get to know your unique and unchanging qualities, the more likely it is that they will fall in love!
Hopefully, meanwhile, your identity is moving on an upward path. It is growing from ego-centrism toward soul identification—and later, to Thought Adjuster identification and fusion. Your personality graciously provides an unchanging container, a “sacred space,” in which your identity may evolve according to your life choices; yet there is no reason why your personality cannot impart a certain flavor or a certain “look and feel” on each version of your identity that emerges.
Now, let’s address another but related mystery: Personality may not be the determiner of your temporal identity, but we are told that it is the unifier of the given ingredients that comprise identity—whatever these may be at any level of personal development.
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. UB 112:1.17
Personality is, then, a “cosmic systemizer.” As such it is far from a static “thing”—for it is dynamically unifying your constituent parts, thereby always updating your “system.” But personality itself is an operating system that never needs to be updated! It always provides the same high-quality functionality.
But again, how is it that something so dynamic is also “unchanging,” always “permanence in the presence of change”? Herein we must face another paradox. Like the Tao, perhaps it is the case that personhood changes, but always remains the same.
Allow me to go further. Let us suppose that personality confers a systematic wholeness on whatever ingredients we supply through our daily choices and experiences. Echoing our earlier discussion, can it be that our inherent quality of uniqueness arises from the uniquely creative manner in which our personalities bring about these provisionally unified systems of self? And can it be that this style or method of unifying the self is always the same?
What we can say with more confidence is that, if at any moment we “freeze frame” and look inside, we will discover a very specific mix of elements, aside from an unchanging manner in which our personality “colors” this mix. This must be the result, because the factors being unified are always in flux. There is no separate self in operation here—no special self-existing “me” with a certain content and identity that stands alone and unchanging in the cosmos. That’s the illusion of self-centered egotism. Our freewill choices never cease to change the content of the identity of the mortal self as they show up in the container of our personality.
From the subjective point of view, the job of personality may be to focalize our existing psychological sense of identity. Personality does its level best, let’s say, to beautifully unify our very partial identifications. It lets us stand tall as an individual in the moment, ready for concerted and singlepointed action. Yes, our self-presentation will always change, but there is a distinct and highly individualized system in place that confers unity and stability on the ever-changing constellation of elements, including contents that are entirely unconscious.
I would further speculate that, when one of the ingredients in our self-system is flawed, the “selfhood-systematizing-function” known as personality will precipitate out this flawed feature. It will spin out key elements so that they show up in the self-presentation of the whole. An adept psychologist (or spouse) will be able to pick out this inconsistency in the mix. Sometimes this element betrays itself only in a single frame. But if there were not a systematized (but again provisional) whole, this out-of-place part might never have been revealed against the backdrop of the whole.
Now let’s bring our self-awareness back into the picture. You and I can honestly say “I am this or that ” because personality is inherently self-conscious. We marvel at the self-awareness even of little children.
But of course this “I” is not perfectly self-conscious. In daily experience we are not easily aware of personality’s systematizing operations. Its work is unconscious—as Freud or Jung might put it.
The revelators give us a startling explanation for this apparently occult quality of personality functioning: “The type of personality bestowed upon Urantia mortals has a potentiality of seven dimensions of self-expression or person-realization.” UB 112:1.9 And, in this same passage, we learn that only three of these dimensions are finite! These finite dimensions have to do with direction, depth, and breadth, it states. And the higher dimensions of personality aren’t even named.
In other words, personality chiefly operates from outside of space and time. Which is why we get this warning:
Much trouble experienced by mortals in their study of human personality could be avoided if the finite creature would remember that dimensional levels and spiritual levels are not co-ordinated in experiential personality realization. UB 112:1.12
The upshot is that personality quietly carries out most its functions unconsciously, far outside of all possible experiential awareness. We can’t ponder such transactions, nor can we self-realize them in our experience, because this other- than-finite activity is not accessible to any finite being.
We have established that personhood is largely unknowable. Yet it does have a known subset of dimensions in the finite realm—enough so that we can fall in love with the manifested personalities of other persons! We’ve also glimpsed the idea that the personality that functions within each one of us is absolutely unique, always and forever.
But now we have a new problem: If all this talk about permanent uniqueness is true, how is it that at one and the same time we are utterly equal before God, who is “no respecter of persons”? In other words, how is it that we are nothing special from the perspective of the infinitude of God—as Eastern religion might put it—yet we are at the same time “unique in eternity”?
Here’s what I am getting at: The Urantia Book finds a way to advocate all three of our possible positions about the reality of personhood: uniqueness (the general Western view); emptiness or “nothing special-ness” (the Eastern understanding); and imponderability (as in Buddha’s special warning to his students). But how can all three be true? They can all abide as true because paradox lies at the heart of the Urantia Revelation.
And is interesting to note that we can map these three positions into the gospel teaching of Jesus as provided in Part IV of The Urantia Book : the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man (or, the parenthood of God and the siblinghood of humankind, in gender-inclusive language).
Let’s go the route:
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.
Yet, at the same time, we are nothing special. Any apparent differences between you and I pale in comparison to our enormous cosmic distance from divine perfection. The eternal and infinite God regards all of us to be of equal status in the cosmic economy—a truism that is also found in the Old and New Testaments. (“For there is no respect of persons with God.” Romans 2:11; “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).
Offering a revelatory enhancement of such perennial biblical wisdom, The Urantia Book puts it like this:
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. UB 112:0.12
In other words, two great principles apply to personality, which are really two opposites that only God’s infinitude can unify: the reality of our individual uniqueness (“they are nonaddable”), alongside the abiding truth of our utter equality before the divine throne as God’s immature children. “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,” said Jesus. UB 133:0.3 In the faces of such a paradox, this quote goes on and makes clear that our personhood is also imponderable.
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. UB 5:6.2
Evidently we are falling down a cosmic rabbit hole into even more mystery. Perhaps a way out is to take a detour and consider how these revelations about human personality square with contemporary notions of selfhood.
Perhaps most helpful for us is the work of Marc Gafni, PhD, a contemporary teacher of spirituality in the lineage of integral philosopher Ken Wilber among many other influences. Gafni offers a cutting-edge “evolutionary” take on the realities of personhood that builds upon leading psychospiritual theories and teachings, East and West.
In his breakthrough work, Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment (Integral Publishers, 2012), Gafni argues for three distinct “stations of the self”: the separate self of the secular West; the impersonal “no-self” of the East; and the unique self that we know about from the Urantia Revelation—which Gafni, a former rabbi, derives especially from his studies of esoteric Judaism.
Gafni calls this third station our “Unique Self,” a phrase he coined. Unique Self is “an irreducible self-validating essence,” “the personal face of essence,” and “a unique expression of all that is.” According to Gafni, “God loved you so much he personalized himself as you.”[1] Such language is reminiscent of this well-known and beloved statement in the Urantia Revelation:
The love of the Father absolutely individualizes each personality as a unique child of the Universal Father, a child without duplicate in infinity, a will creature irreplaceable in all eternity. UB 12:7.9
Gafni’s three phases of selfhood unfold as we “grow up” spiritually. Conventional society is organized around the apparent solidity of our “egoic personal self.” But with the growth of insight, egoism gradually dissolves as we awaken to the insubstantiality of self. We recognize that the stance of ontological separateness is a fallacy. We are all made of love.
If we pursue this insight to its logical conclusion, we stabilize in the perception of the impersonal nature of “True Self” (another of Gafni’s coined phrases)—the general goal of the nondual enlightenment practices of the East.
Our full recognition of the insubstantiality of the egoic self “is the ground for awakening to Unique Self.” In this final phase, we recognize that nothing remains but our unique perspective, our singular position in the cosmos as a discretely aware individual now able to identify with transcendent realities, including the enormous arc of cosmic evolution. Gafni makes much of this issue of perspective.[2]
Stabilized awareness of Unique Self is a development of late adulthood, if it is ever achieved. It can require a life-time of psycho-spiritual practice and life experience to see through one’s egoic personality, accept that we are nothing special or separate, and thereby awaken to the nonpersonal nature of our True Self—which paradoxically shows up uniquely in each of us.
Before we go on, a little background on basic psychology is in order. According to mainstream modern psychology, healthy ego development requires that we first learn to operate as separate selves in the practical world of our family of origin. When an infant recognizes that it is distinct from its mother, this is the dawn of the “separate-self” awareness that Eastern religion insists must be later shaken off in adulthood. Having achieved a sense of “my” and “mine,” the child begins its first experiments in life experience. If its “object-relations” are healthy, its ego soon emerges as a relatively unified center of awareness. A normal child is able to make its first independent moral decision at around age 5 or 6, according to the Urantia Revelation. In this moment, a Thought Adjuster arrives and unconscious soul evolution begins behind the scenes—but its identity is properly and naturally bound up in ego development.
The danger of youth (and otherwise normal adults)— states Gafni along with most ego psychologists—is not so much that they sense themselves as separate from their parents, society, or community, but that they fall into a “ false separate self.” These cases are the unhealthy manifestations of an insecure, traumatized, or distorted ego that, for example, harbors neurotic beliefs about being “not enough” or “unlovable.” But if the ego finds a path to becoming balanced and functional—in an environment of loving relationships with parents, siblings, and friends—it will naturally evolve to more advanced structures of awareness. It will become increasingly able to manage the complex features of everyday reality, interacting with them with knowledge, skill, and wisdom. Urantians might say that the self is working its way through the seven psychic circles of human growth. [See UB 110:6.1]
The upshot, according to Gafni, Jung, Wilber, and others: We maintain and improve these adult ego structures all the way up to the highest stages of our personal growth; we never leave our healthy ego behind, as Carl Jung made clear in his theory of individuation. We simply “transcend and include” previous ego states as we go. We should endeavor to improve the functionality of our ego structures throughout adult life—but if we are growing spiritually, we move beyond ego’s exclusive attachments to self, family, profession, community, race, gender, religion, and nation. The mature ego operates with increasing competence in all of these realms, but is also increasingly free of limiting identifications with any of them. Far from being merely ego-centered, we now become world-centric, then universe-centric, and ultimately we emerge as God-centered. We arrive at the doorstep of our True Self, the indwelling God.
Our attainment of this level of consciousness could itself be seen as a particular kind of ego competency. But as we become free of partial identifications, something more profound occurs: we no longer block our intrinsic awareness of the limitless and unqualified consciousness that dwells within. Some degree of God consciousness now abides within us as the ever-present background of our healthy ego awareness. And this state of being, once again, is our True Self, according to Gafni—or the no-self of Buddhism and nondual Hinduism. Welcome to pure and abiding true-selfawareness, now free of limiting self-concepts!
True Self becomes evident when we stabilize in the experience of this effortless expanse of awareness. We joyfully identify with this moment-by-moment “flow” state. We are detached from any particular contents of consciousness. All moments of awareness are welcome. We are no longer like a separate “monad” standing apart from things, somehow existing unto ourselves; we are a space-time manifestation of an eternal self. We are one with the One. We recognize that all personal selves, including ours, are One Self. In his space, God truly is no respecter of persons, because we are all equal and all one before God’s majesty and grace.
But wait, here comes a key theological distinction.
The absolutely self-aware and omniscient Divine Person, by definition, pervades the universe with omnipresent divine consciousness. Divinity knows all that is happening in real time. This means that, in effect, it operates from every point of view. It has no perspective because it takes all perspectives.
It is still the case that, when True Self shows up, this purified self-consciousness still carries along with it the memories, the life skills, the wisdom, the worldview, the mature and healthy ego—that is, the unique perspective —that is exclusive to that person. Their well-adjusted ego is the summation of that singular perspective.[3] In other words, enlightenment is not the extinguishment of the healthy ego as taught in some systems, but rather the earmark of a mature and highly refined ego that has let go of all lesser identifications. It lets infinitude take the best seat at the feast of experience!
As our identity expands, each stage of psychological growth offers us glimpses of our ontological uniqueness, according to Gafni. For example, at more conventional stages we sense the singularity of our body, our family and community, our life story, our special talents, our specific skills and roles. This sense of our particular contribution grows as we mature. But with the attainment of no-self or True Self—now fully detached from any given ego position but capable of skillfully adopting any ego state as may be required—we paradoxically get a much clearer view of our uniqueness. He writes: “Our personalized expression of True Self is our Unique Self. The understanding that True Self always shows up differently through every pair of eyes is the central realization of Unique Self… The True Self is always looking through a perspective.”[4]
Again, perspective without realization of True Selfhood is the separate self-ego, not yet aware that it is embedded in a larger universe, the evolving divine cosmos that produced us in the first place. But with the higher attainment of True Self realization, we recognize that we are cosmic evolution showing up in person, as evolutionary author Barbara Marx Hubbard famously says in her writings.[5] “In the awakened Unique Self, evolution becomes conscious of itself,” writes Gafni. “The awakened Unique Self who has evolved beyond exclusive identification with ego is constantly being called by the evolutionary impulse.”[6]
A crucial additional point: True Self enlightenment is never some universal, all-encompassing awareness of all possible perspectives on reality. One becomes “True Self,” not “True God.” When we attain “no-self,” we don’t take the point of view of the Absolute. Instead, we let the Absolute take our point of view. “To love God is to let God see with our own eyes, which is to empower God with our unique perspective,”[7] writes Gafni.
To clarify: God may see with our eyes, but we don’t see with God’s eyes. Even in True Self consciousness, we are not perceiving and engaging with reality just as it is, as would the Divine Person. This is the fallacy of many sectarian and cultish teachings and absolutist religions—an error that has thankfully been corrected in our time by interfaith dialogue, multicultural awareness, and postmodern criticism. Instead, by disidentifying with our separate self, we recognize that we are engaged in a vast enterprise in which we and all other True Selves—each with its own precious and unique viewpoint on the universe—are constructing a composite reality based on our endless array of perspectives. We sense our relativity in the cosmos, we honor the perspectives taken by other Unique Selves, and we increasingly recognize the unique contribution that only we can offer. Gafni calls it “the Unique Self symphony.”
There are points here that can help us understand The Urantia Book’s revelations about personality. Gafni’s work and those of his colleagues throw fresh “evolutionary” light on many of our key distinctions. In return, The Urantia Book provides needed corrections or enhancements to evolutionary thought.
One of these enhancements arises from The Urantia Book’s theology of personality, which we are about to consider. These original ideas about personhood far transcend the idea of the irreducibility of the “unique perspective” of the enlightened person who has seen through egoism and has come to identify with cosmic evolution—although such an achievement is no small matter.
To get at this, let’s first review first what happens within the finite realm. As we’ve noted, personality acts as our host, systematizer, and unifier. It holds the space as we make those freewill choices that migrate the seat of our identity to our immortal soul. But we are also told that personality also has dimensions entirely outside of time and space. Why must this be the case? In brief, the answer we are given is that the gift of personality to his children is the vehicle of the Father’s personal presence in time.
Personhood must have transcendent dimensions because it is divine in essence. But the converse is also true: Divinity is essentially personal, although we have to add that it has nonpersonal dimensions as well.
Stated otherwise, personality is a primal manifestation of the infinite; infinity inherently personalizes as the Father of all, who in turn personalizes as his children. Nonpersonal manifestations (Paradise, Havona, and the evolving universes) are made available in the service of all personality, both existential and evolutional. These unfathomable transactions took place in eternity but have “fathomable” links to our finite realm of time.
So we must up the ante once again—this time with the added revelation that personality is the chief attribute of Deity. And further, that personhood is in fact the most important single reality in the universe.
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. UB 1:5.7
Personality, in the supreme sense, is the revelation of God to the universe of universes.UB 1:5.13
The Uantia Book is, from this standpoint, a “personalist” teaching. Some interpreters even contend that the ontological reality of personality is the central revelation of the Urantia text.
The foreword to The Urantia Book can be notoriously difficult, but a brief encounter with it helps us understand these points. The foreword purports to reveal the fundamental definitions and the a priori principles of cosmic reality. Right from the outset we learn of the primal division within universal reality: that between realities that are “deified” and those that are not (i.e., “undeified realities”). In the next step, we learn that deified realities are by definition personal, since God is personality. Here again is the equation of divinity, personality, and reality.
Now, if we limit our purview to the evolving universes, we discover that the primary distinction in the space-time domains is also that between personal and nonpersonal realities. “Personality may be material or spiritual, but there either is personality or there is no personality. The otherthan-personal never attains the level of the personal except by the direct act of the Paradise Father.” UB 5:6.3 Two other crucial distinctions in the evolving domains, we are told, are that between actual and potential and existential and experiential realities. The upshot is that human persons are part of “deified” reality, but we are also evolutionary and experiential.
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, as we noted, it offers an astonishing list of fourteen characteristics of personality. For the complete listing of attributes see Paper 112, sec 1–2.
I will close our discussion by highlighting a selection of seven of these. My list is paraphrased or otherwise derived from the fourteen attributes. I’ve put special emphasis on the attributes of will, cosmic insight, and love, which we are now ready to tackle. What follows is a synthesis in the form of aphorisms of the points made in the course of this essay, while adding final inferences and speculations:
1. Human personality is a transcendental gift that is independent of space and time—but represents the personal presence of divinity in the finite realms.
Personhood is a direct bestowal from God as First Source and Center. It does not evolve into being as does the human soul. Personality is either present or it is not present; it is “changeless,” yet it is also dynamic in ways beyond our comprehension. Personhood is existential and “incomputable”; it has no measurable units, as does energy in all its forms (including the energies of mind, soul, and spirit). The Divine Person is One and indivisible, and all of his bestowals participate in this unity.[8] Further, human personality—as a manifestation of an absolutely indivisible unity—is inherently “encircuited” with the Divine Person. The personality circuit, an exclusive revelation of the Urantia Papers, enables the Father to maintain personal contact with all persons: “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.” UB 32:4.8 Marc Gafni has a wonderful phrase for this ineluctable quality of the unity of Creator and creature personality: he calls this God’s infinity of intimacy.[9] On the other hand, the capacity for creatures of time to receive and embody the transcendent gift of personality—to become freewill, self-aware persons—is an evolutionary attainment. Far back in the story of humankind, slowly evolving hominids achieved a certain evolutionary readiness that triggered this gift of bestowal from Deity; they achieved “will dignity.” [This story is told in Papers 58–63 in The Urantia Book.] Since those far-distant times, all of us have duly received the mysterious gift of personality at birth. It is notable that “Lucifer denied that personality was a gift of the Universal Father.” See UB 53:3.2
2. Personality confers qualities of self-awareness and creative freewill, and activates the capacity for scientific, moral, and spiritual insight.
Personality is a universal mystery; but we are offered many clues about it. Among these are the revelation that human personality possesses, in a limited way, two powers that are intrinsic to Deity: self-consciousness and will. “Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive behavior: self-consciousness and associated relative freewill.” UB 16:8.5 We can readily observe these attributes in action. Even infants possess a modicum of self-awareness and some degree of liberty of will, a primitive ability to consider options and choose their next experience. In a grand sense, every infant (and adult) participates in God’s infinite will and unlimited self-consciousness. Our capacity to make decisions presupposes a self-awareness that is rooted in God’s own perfect self-consciousness. God’s gift to us makes available a capacity in the mind that is naturally self-reflective and able to evaluate and decide among options that come into consciousness. These two inherent attributes of selfhood, self-consciousness and relative freewill, are a priori signs of the divine origin of personhood. In addition, personality enables in our thinking what are known as the three a priori cosmic intuitions, thereby activating our perception of “three basic mind realities of the cosmos” : the mathematic, judicial, and reverential forms of discrimination. See UB 16:8.15
3. Individuals can reciprocate by choosing the “will of God.”
These transcendent gifts naturally evoke a grateful human response. We can respond in kind by detaching from limited and partial ego identifications, thereby releasing the will from the mechanical grip of worldly desires. The achievement of “no-self” enlightenment liberates our will to choose the way of God. The divine will becomes self-evident to us when our ego-identifications drop. A Course in Miracles correctly teaches that our deepest will is God’s will. By consistently choosing God’s will, we move toward Father fusion, the irrevocable choice to live in God’s will.
4. Personality is creative—relatively free of influence from past events.
Personality allows interiority, an internal space in which we are relatively free from antecedent causation. Our inner life offers a province of free choice in which we’re not helplessly reactive to external stimuli, as is the case with animal minds. We can rise above any given incoming stimulus. We can instead open within us a zone of “free attention” wherein we can engage in reflection followed by creative choices. “[Personality] is not wholly subject to the fetters of antecedent causation. It is relatively creative or cocreative.” UB 112:0.5 Only personal beings are self-observing or self-reflective, that is, able to gather in their thoughts and feelings and calmly choose a particular direction of action. Personalities have, at least in potential, the internal spaciousness that opens up the intellectual capacity required to think, plan, evaluate, and choose among options. And that’s another way of saying that personal beings are moral and creative beings, capable of recognizing and worshipping the source of all personality.
5. The personal is primal, always “superordinate” to other parts of the self.
Personality is our highest attribute, just as it is God’s chief characteristic. As God as Universal Father is prior to his creation, human personality transcends and has the potential to control all domains of energy-reality. “Personality is superimposed upon energy.” UB 0:5.4 It has prerogatives that are logically prior to those of all other 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.” UB 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. We use the medium of mind to make those choices that lead to self-mastery in relation to the living energy systems of the self. This is another way of saying that personality is “causal,” for it is the source of a self-consciousness that fosters self-mastery and the balanced unification of all factors of selfhood.
6. Personality has no identity, but is rather the host of identity; it unifies and systematizes the elements of selfhood around chosen identities.
We’ve seen that, at first, our identifications are partial and narrow. These self-chosen or culturally imposed limits, often rooted in fear, come under challenge when we inevitably find ourselves confronted by wider realities. A healthy adaptation in the face of such challenges leads us to choose a more inclusive identity, resulting in a higher-order selfawareness. We integrate more into our domain of selfhood, and eventually become God-centered. At the highest level, we may identify with “witness consciousness” itself, abiding in an awareness that is independent of all perceivable interior or exterior phenomena. We forsake any given part; we choose instead the whole. Such is the theoretic nondual state of True Self.
Technically speaking, personality is a transcendent function that (unconsciously) unifies and systematizes selfawareness at any level of attainment, high or low. Confused, splintered, traumatized, or disassociated persons lack unity in their self-sense because they are unable or unwilling to adapt to the given realities in their experience. That’s why they appear especially unstable and lack consistency in their behavior. But the Buddhists are also correct that even in the healthiest of us, consciousness may appear to have no stable center. Nonetheless, the personality quietly unifies what it can, even in those who are mentally deranged. A person who is unclear about their life purpose, who is subject to conflicting emotions, or who is self-deceived, is a divided person. Such folks may even be duplicitous. We may feel that they are not trustworthy. Practically speaking, a unified person is one who has reflected on their life purposes and goals in prayer and introspection sufficiently enough to allow their personality endowment to do its primary job: the systematic work of unifying his is her living energy system in a balanced way.[10] 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 unity and perfection, ours to achieve in time as a highly personal attainment made possible by the intrinsic attributes of personality. God’s gift of personality—a direct bestowal by God—is able to confer increasing unity on such an evolving being. “The purpose of cosmic evolution is to achieve unity of personality.” UB 112:2.15
7. 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.” UB 112:0.13 Personhood is nonlocal—a “unified field” that envelops us, also known at God’s personality circuit. Once we cross the threshold into this nonlocal field of personal selves, we—as persons—find that other persons are attractive to us in general. Each one we encounter is lovable in their own way. They are like a fractal of the Divine Person—who, after all, is the source of all these unique personalities in the first place. The participation of each one of us in the unified field of personality makes us inherently sensitive to and appreciative of the personalitypresence of others.
Especially when we encounter those we care about, we don’t just observe the details of their face, age, dress, demeanor, speech, or behavior; we take in the whole person. We may find that we adore their personhood, just as it is. We may intuit the beauty of the transcendent unity of the unmistakable distinctiveness of a unique personal presence. Personality 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 non-personal 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.
Theologically, our cosmic equality is sourced from the Source of all personhood—the God of personality. This is another way of saying that the divine gift of personality imparts moral consciousness, which in turn ripens into love, mutual regard of whole personalities, and which finds its fulfillment in the contemplation of and union with the Original Personality. Loving other persons is a recognition of their irreducible and infinite uniqueness, their radiant personal qualities that ultimately point to and participate in the Infinite itself.
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
And from here we can logically proceed to the Golden Rule, and all other standards of ethical conduct. The brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, which Jesus came to proclaim, is possible because the God of all personality is the sole source of all personhood, equally so for each of us. In the end, who needs a definition of personality when we can experience and savor its delights directly? And if no human person is present, we can always commune with the everywhere presence of the Divine Person.
Both the Unique Self hypothesis and The Urantia Book support the grand idea that each instance of personality must be absolutely unique. But what can explain the ongoing explosion of unique, experiential beings who populate planet Earth, and presumably all other inhabited planets? Each singular perspective supplied by each person must have ultimate value. It must have a transcendental purpose. In some sense, as I have argued, human personhood allows the existential God—an infinite and perfect being who exists outside of space and time—to have something impossible to get otherwise: a replete experience of the sub-infinite evolutionary domains as they slowly evolve toward perfection. We might say that God desires to have an “all-experience,” and therefore does he require a virtually infinite diversity of experiencing subjects, each of which provide him their unique viewpoint upon evolution.
The Divine Person encompasses and transcends 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 performance. And that, indeed, is a love supreme.
Byron Belitsos (Evolving-Souls.org) has advanced training in philosophy, psychology, history, and theology. He is the publisher, editor, or co-author of numerous acclaimed books, including many related to the Urantia Revelation. A student of The Urantia Book for over four decades, he has spoken widely about its teachings at conferences and on radio and TV programs. This essay is excerpted from his forthcoming book Your Evolving Soul: The Cosmic Spirituality of the Urantia Revelation. Byron resides in San Rafael, California.
See the opening chapters of Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment (Integral Publishers, 2012). ↩︎
“Core to Unique Self theory is the mapping of the three distinct stations of self: separate self, True Self, and Unique Self. Through this journey we realize that the personal is not left behind but rather is evolved. [We must] transcend the narrow personal nature of the separate selfpersonality for the impersonal True Self of classical enlightenment to emerge. But the goal of enlightenment is personal plus, not personal minus. The deeper realization of True Self is Unique Self. This third station of Unique Self realization brings the personal back online as the very expression of enlightenment through the personal face of essence and emptiness. The station of True Self finds the total number of True Selves to be One. This, however, is only true in the realm of un-manifest One-ness, as there is no True Self anywhere in the manifest world. Why? Because every individual’s awakening to this Oneness arises through his or her own unique perspective. In this way, True Self + Perspective = Unique Self. Any experience of formless True Self, when it manifests through an individual, manifests as the Unique Self. So to repeat, there is no True Self anywhere in the manifest world; there is always a perspective.” See “Unique Self: Why It Matters,” by Marc Gafni. Accessed Nov 16, 2015 at: http://www.uniqueself.com/unique-self-theory/unique-self-basics/marc-gafni-on-unique-self/unique-selfwhy-it-matters/. ↩︎
The essence of this perspective is the soul, according to the Urantia Revelation. In this state, we have transferred our seat of identity to the soul itself. ↩︎
Ibid, p 18. ↩︎
See for example Conscious Evolution (New World Library, 2015). ↩︎
Ibid, p 40 ↩︎
Ibid, p 29 ↩︎
Here and throughout this section I draw special inspiration from George Park, independent philosopher and author of “Personality and Man,” which first appeared in Urantia Fellowship Herald (2007). http://www.urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/herald/. Park also believes that personality is bestowed at birth, or possibly at conception. I am indebted to George’s work. ↩︎
See for example “True Self, Unique Self, and the Infinity of Intimacy,” accessible at http://www.ievolve.org/true-self-unique-self-and-the-infinity-of-intimacy/. ↩︎
“The unique feature of [Jesus’] personality was not so much its perfection as its symmetry, its exquisite and balanced unification.” UB 100:7.1 ↩︎