© 2016 Carmelo Martínez
© 2016 Urantia Association of Spain
I ask you: what is the human being? What makes it different from animals? What’s its main attrbute?
I’m sure you can give me some good answers. Like, for example, the fact of having a mind capable of knowing our Father and worshiping him. But these days we are talking about the ascending career of humans and their eternal destiny, so I want to focus now on another characteristic of that human mind that is more clearly related to the ascent of humans, as well as intimately linked with the capacity to know God, something that gives us the potential to reach him. A characteristic that makes us “architects of our eternal destiny”.
Because the upward race is actually the race to make ourselves using a singular tool, a tool that, by express wish of the Father, is the only thing that is REALLY ours.
And the first thing is to read the instruction manual for the use of the tool. I will start with the Father’s plan.
We all know that our Father has a plan for creation.
It is an infinite plan, or almost, it is a plan that barely fits in our finite mind and that has aspects that we cannot even imagine in billions of years… and it is a plan in which we are all invited to participate. Let’s see it.
There is creation, our stage of action. The Father imagined it all, but he directly created only the central universe, and he did it for his own delight. He said to himself, “God, how good I am! … and what a little ass I have! ”and, whoops!, there were Havona and all its inhabitants. A perfect universe filled with perfect beings.
But the Father is a naughty grandfather and he thought “Why don’t we mess with Eduardo a little bit?” And the imperfect began to exist. And then he sent his elders of days to administer the imperfect creation, his master organizers of force to create matter-energy nebula by nebula, his creator sons to organize it into universes and create man (and regret of Yahweh and Allah, also to the woman), and to a whole multitude of perfect beings to help in his plan.
And he said to himself: I want to know what it is like to not be born perfect and have to achieve it by one’s own effort. And he asked us, and he told us: “Be perfect just as I am perfect… and then tell me, please”.
Let’s see how you manage to make all the galaxies and the universes and the planets perfectly organized, that they enter into stable orbits; to see how you make the societies that you form work wonderfully, to see how you bring creation to the perfection of light and life and, incidentally, you also perfect yourselves. Don’t worry, you have all the time in the world (literally speaking, because you will use up time doing it).
And when you make it, because you will make it, don’t think you’re done. Then I have another pile of creation out there that you will have to take care of for me. You can’t imagine how big it is; it is so enormous that you will have to transcend time and space to be able to handle yourself in it. But this too you will achieve, and yet this will not be the end either. There is more, but for now, up to here I can read.
And here we are, beginning this journey of working to make ourselves perfect and preparing to make the great universe perfect. The keys for this are “honesty, more honesty, and more honesty,” and are used with “decisions, more decisions, and more decisions.” The book says it:
“The keys of the kingdom of heaven are: sincerity, more sincerity, and more sincerity. All men have these keys. Men use them—advance in spirit status—by decisions, by more decisions, and by more decisions. The highest moral choice is the choice of the highest possible value, and always—in any sphere, in all of them—this is to choose to do the will of God. If man thus chooses, he is great, though he be the humblest citizen of Jerusem or even the least of mortals on Urantia.” (UB 39:4.14)
So with that tool we sincerely make decisions, and those decisions lead us to actions. Actions that can go in favor of the development of the Father’s plan, when we choose to do God’s will, or against. It is then a matter of choosing to build ourselves and make ourselves more and more perfect, to transform our initial imperfection into final perfection, to advance in “status of spirit”. But to choose there must be alternatives, and the alternatives are good and evil. The good is to choose the will of the Father, to follow his plan for creation. Evil, go in the opposite direction. The perfect beings of the perfect worlds do not have to choose in this way, but we do.
So, you may wonder, did God also create evil? And the answer is yes, but beware, only POTENTIAL evil. The good-evil alternative is necessary to be able to choose and thus perfect ourselves, but to choose it is not necessary that the evil be realized, manifested, expressed, it is enough that it be a concept in our mind. In reality, God has made it possible for the imperfect creation to reach perfection without the potential evil, which he has potentiated by way of contrast, ever becoming actual evil, which creatures can actualize with their decisions. And this is what it means that God has not created the current evil.
And now comes another issue that may be controversial. When deciding we have in mind the concepts of good and evil, and we judge between the alternatives that are presented to us which is good and which is evil. But we are not perfect… yet, and we can be wrong. We can honestly think that an alternative goes in favor of the Father’s plan and actually goes against it. It can be assured that there is an OBJECTIVE definition of good and evil, and the Father knows it: it is what he would decide in each alternative. But we are not perfect yet, and we can SINCERELY judge that something is good, and not be. The human mind has a SUBJECTIVE concept of good and evil, and can therefore make mistakes when choosing. That is why the book differentiates evil from sin.
Like so many other ideas, the book redefines the concept of sin. When we choose something that we think is right, but is objectively wrong, we are doing wrong (without knowing it). When we choose something that we think is evil, we are falling into sin. Although it turns out that objectively it is good. When we commit sin (according to the previous concept) repeatedly and stubbornly, we fall into iniquity,… and we will end up destroyed.
The most blatant example of sinless evil is Eva’s decision to “meet” (biblically) Cano in order to hasten Urantia’s plan for racial elevation. She was sincerely convinced that it was good, that she did not deviate from the Father’s plan. For this reason, Miguel never reproached him. He was wrong, but he did not sin.
Let’s go one step further. What happens to us, flesh and blood humans, when we make moral decisions, when we choose between good and evil? Well, we build or destroy our soul, that we are making it and giving it shape (morontia). While we are alive, this soul has a “shape” and contains those of our memories that have spiritual value, memories that conform to the shape that we give to the soul with our decisions. When we die in the flesh, the only death we will suffer in our entire career, our components are separated; They will never separate again in any of the successive transitions that we will have, because death is the separation of components and it will never happen again.
The Adjuster leaves and takes our memories; the soul, with the form that we have given it, remains in the custody of the guardian of destiny, the mind is extinguished (disconnected) with the death of the brain, and the personality (the fact of being who we are)… nobody knows where it’s going.
The body returns to the dust from which it came and disappears. The body cannot survive; to enable our survival it is necessary to have built our soul.
A corpse is not the person it contained. We respect corpses because that’s how our culture is. But in other cultures, for example in Tibet a few decades ago, the corpses were left on the rocks for carrion birds to eat. And they thought that this was the greatest utility they could give them.
Our I is not our body, our I is our soul. A corpse is not the person that once contained. That person is no longer available to anyone - does not communicate or associate with anyone - until repersonalization on the mansion worlds.
When they repersonalize us on the mansion worlds, they build us a body using the soul as the foundation. Don’t ask me what it means exactly because I don’t know, but what they have revealed to us is that the soul is a kind of seed of the first body of morontia.
The Adjuster comes into that body, and then there is a connection to the cosmic mind. A mind different from the adjutant mind that we had in the flesh begins to function in that body of morontia.
It is no longer activated by the adjutant mind-spirits; she is now connected to the cosmic mind of the seventh Master Spirit through the Divine Minister of Nebadon.
At that moment he regains consciousness. The soul contributes the morontia form and the Adjuster the memories that have spiritual value. And one’s own memories fit into that soul by a phenomenon that the book calls “recognition response,” which makes those own memories recognize themselves as lived by oneself. Even the memories of events lived without spiritual value for us and that, therefore, the Adjuster does not bring, when they are obtained by other means, are recognized in this way as their own.
In life in the flesh, the results of our decisions generate actions whose memory is kept in our adjutant mind. Of those memories, those that have spiritual value are duplicated by the Adjuster and are his permanent possession from that moment on. Also, those actions build and shape our soul.
As I interpret it, death is a break in continuity. Nothing like this will ever happen again. Nothing material can survive; for this, it is necessary to build something non-material. That is why this life in the flesh is an exception in our career. In the following lives the same thing continues to happen, but already acting on something that can become immortal. The memories are in the mind (which will change as we progress) and in the Adjuster. And the body (already from morontia) collects the results in terms of our improvement (as the soul did in the flesh).
When Adjuster fusion occurs, body and spirit are indistinguishable and inseparable. Each continues to receive memories and refinements as before, but they now form an inseparable unit. And when our morontia body evolves to be totally spirit, it follows the same process.
In short, there is a plan for creation and this plan defines good and evil. Humans are invited to collaborate in that plan, for which the Father gives us a unique decision-making tool that carries within itself the ability to know good and evil. The plan is to not just perfect the imperfect creation, but to perfect ourselves in doing so. That is, we have the ability, together with the spirit of the Father, to create ourselves as ascending children of God; we are therefore co-creative beings. And by exercising that capacity we become co-creating beings (of ourselves and, in part, of creation).
As it is said in UB 103:5.10: “Man is, very certainly, the architect of his own eternal destiny.”. And that wonderful possibility results from the possession of a tool that the Father gives us to be ours alone, a tool that makes us human and that is called FREE WILL.
And before finishing, a couple of clarifications. Free will gives us the ability to choose, but not to choose anything: only to choose between good and evil. In this choice between good and evil, free will is absolute, nothing can curtail it by the will of the Father himself; but, in everything else, we have no free will. We cannot choose to be birds, for example. Our free will is relative because it refers to good and evil, and moral because it has to do with our concept of good and evil, and it applies precisely to choosing one of them.
¶ References
- Light and Life Magazine (all old issues): https://aue.urantia-association.org/numeros-antiguos-del-lyv/