© 2021 Claude Flibotte
© 2021 Urantia Association of Quebec
Claude Flibotte
Sainte-Julie
In order to start with a common basis of understanding of the terms used in the revelations, let us clarify together what the revelators tell us! This research will provide answers to many questions that are sometimes difficult to find among the Urantia Papers. The words in bold are mine to emphasize their importance in the sentence.
¶ Mind and consciousness
Mind is a gift from the Third SourceCenter. It is distributed through its daughters, the Mother Spirits of the local universes.
The Third Source and Center . . . As the Absolute Mind, he is the source of the endowment of intellect throughout the universes. As the God of Action, he is the apparent ancestor of motion, change, and relationship. (UB 9:1.1)
. . . Upon the attainment of personal status the Universe Spirit exerts just as full and complete control of mind gravity, in the local universe, as would the Infinite Spirit if personally present. (UB 34:2.2)
Mind is distributed to all living creatures endowed with identity.
The unique feature of mind is that it can be bestowed upon such a wide range of life. Through his creative and creature associates the Third Source and Center ministers to all minds on all spheres. He ministers to human and subhuman intellect through the adjutants of the local universes and, through the agency of the physical controllers, ministers even to the lowest nonexperiencing entities of the most primitive types of living things. And always is the direction of mind a ministry of mind-spirit or mind-energy personalities. (UB 9:5.3)
Unless pure spirit, all living creatures have minds.
¶ Evolution of the animal mind
The material mental circuit lent to the animal kingdom by the Divine Minister improves as the capacity of the brain of these animals manages to synchronize with the adjutant mental spirits.
At first only the spirit of intuition could function in the instinctive and reflex behavior of the primordial animal life. With the differentiation of higher types, the spirit of understanding was able to endow such creatures with the gift of spontaneous association of ideas. Later on we observed the spirit of courage in operation; evolving animals really developed a crude form of protective self-consciousness. Subsequent to the appearance of the mammalian groups, we beheld the spirit of knowledge manifesting itself in increased measure. And the evolution of the higher mammals brought the function of the spirit of counsel, with the resulting growth of the*** herd instinct*** and the beginnings of primitive social development. (UB 62:6.3)
I will let you imagine for yourselves according to the evolution of the different animal lineages, which correspond to the evolutionary continuation of the ministry of the adjutant mental spirits. Reference: booklet 65, section 2, “The panorama of evolution”.
¶ Animal mind and human mind
How can we differentiate the animal mind from the human mind, since they have the same origin?
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. (UB 101:6.4)
Mortal man first experiences the ministry of the Spirit in conjunction with mind when the purely animal mind of evolutionary creatures develops reception capacity for the adjutants of worship and of wisdom. This ministry of the sixth and seventh adjutants indicates mind evolution crossing the threshold of spiritual ministry. And immediately are such minds of worship- and wisdom-function included in the spiritual circuits of the Divine Minister. (UB 34:5.3)
¶ Consciousness (animal) and self-consciousness (human and +)
There is a distinction to be made between raw (animal) consciousness and self-consciousness, with animal consciousness rising to the level of a human being.
Imagine our joy one day—the twins were about ten years old—when the spirit of worship made its first contact with the mind of the female twin and shortly thereafter with the male. We knew that something closely akin to human mind was approaching culmination; and when, about a year later, they finally resolved, as a result of meditative thought and purposeful decision, to flee from home and journey north, then did the spirit of wisdom begin to function on Urantia and in these two now recognized human minds. (UB 62:6.5)
Self-consciousness consists in intellectual awareness of personality actuality; it includes the ability to recognize the reality of other personalities. It indicates capacity for individualized experience in and with cosmic realities, equivalating to the attainment of identity status in the personality relationships of the universe. Self-consciousness connotes recognition of the actuality of mind ministration and the realization of relative independence of creative and determinative free will. (UB 16:8.6)
Consciousness, by which I mean animal consciousness, has its origin in the material mind. Animals are conscious of their environment and react to it. Self-consciousness lies far beyond simple animal consciousness and is caused by the fact of personality.
¶ The Ministry of the Holy Spirit
How, and when, do we have access to the ministry of the Holy Spirit?
Living mind, prior to the appearance of capacity to learn from experience, is the ministry domain of the Master Physical Controllers. Creature mind, before acquiring the ability to recognize divinity and worship Deity, is the exclusive domain of the adjutant spirits. With the appearance of the spiritual response of the creature intellect, such created minds at once become superminded, being instantly encircuited in the spirit cycles of the local universe Mother Spirit. (UB 36:5.15)
¶ Identity
The identity of a being corresponds to all the components and manifestations that characterize this being. It is to be distinguished from the personality, a gift from the Universal Father, which constitutes an addition to the identity. We are used to confusing these two realities.
Human beings possess identity only in the material sense. Such qualities of the self are expressed by the material mind as it functions in the energy system of the intellect. When it is said that man has identity, it is recognized that he is in possession of a mind circuit which has been placed in subordination to the acts and choosing of the will of the human personality. But this is a material and purely temporary manifestation, just as the human embryo is a transient parasitic stage of human life. Human beings, from a cosmic perspective, are born, live, and die in a relative instant of time; they are not enduring. But mortal personality, through its own choosing, possesses the power of transferring its seat of identity from the passing material-intellect system to the higher morontia-soul system which, in association with the Thought Adjuster, is created as a new vehicle for personality manifestation. (UB 112:5.4)
¶ The gift of free will
Man’s free will is a gift from the Universal Father, but when are we blessed with this gift?
When mind is thus endowed with the ministry of the Holy Spirit, it possesses the capacity for (consciously or unconsciously) choosing the spiritual presence of the Universal Father—the Thought Adjuster. (UB 34:5.4)
It is therefore through the mind associated with the circuit of the Holy Spirit and endowed with personality that man acquires the capacity for free will.
¶ Personality
The revelators tell us that personality is an exclusive gift of the Universal Father. When the Eternal Son creates personalities, he does so in conjunction with the Father or the Conjoint Creator who can act for the Father (UB 6:5.3). When does the human being receive this gift from the Universal Father?
Personality is potential in all creatures who possess a mind endowment ranging from the minimum of self-consciousness to the maximum of God-consciousness. But mind endowment alone is not personality, neither is spirit nor physical energy. Personality is that quality and value in cosmic reality which is exclusively bestowed by God the Father upon these living systems of the associated and co-ordinated energies of matter, mind, and spirit. Neither is personality a progressive achievement. Personality may be material or spiritual, but there either is personality or there is no personality. The other-than-personal never attains the level of the personal except by the direct act of the Paradise Father. (UB 5:6.3)
Thus the gift of personality is included in the gift of mind. It becomes manifest (comes out of its potentiality) when the human being takes hold of the spiritual circuit of the Divine Minister, the Holy Spirit, through synchronization with the adjutant of worship and the adjutant of wisdom, thus commanding a new order of mobilization of the seven adjutant mind spirits (UB 62:6.6). We are blessed with personality long before the arrival of the Thought Adjuster.
Personality is a unique endowment of original nature whose existence is independent of, and antecedent to, the bestowal of the Thought Adjuster. (UB 16:8.3)
For further development, read the article “When is personality granted to us?” in Reflectivity, issue 330, November 2019.
¶ The Thought Adjuster
When do we receive our Thought Adjuster?
Though the Adjusters volunteer for service as soon as the personality forecasts have been relayed to Divinington, they are not actually assigned until the human subjects make their first moral personality decision. The first moral choice of the human child is automatically indicated in the seventh mind-adjutant and registers instantly, by way of the local universe Creative Spirit, over the universal mind-gravity circuit of the Conjoint Actor in the presence of the Master Spirit of superuniverse jurisdiction, who forthwith dispatches this intelligence to Divinington. Adjusters reach their human subjects on Urantia, on the average, just prior to the sixth birthday. In the present generation it is running five years, ten months, and four days; that is, on the 2,134th day of terrestrial life. (UB 108:2.1)
¶ Blade
When does our soul appear, and what causes it?
This supernal transaction of evolving the immortal soul is made possible because the mortal mind is first personal and second is in contact with superanimal realities; it possesses a supermaterial endowment of cosmic ministry which insures the evolution of a moral nature capable of making moral decisions, thereby effecting a bona fide creative contact with the associated spiritual ministries and with the indwelling Thought Adjuster.
The inevitable result of such a contactual spiritualization of the human mind is the gradual birth of a soul, the joint offspring of an adjutant mind dominated by a human will that craves to know God, working in liaison with the spiritual forces of the universe which are under the overcontrol of an actual fragment of the very God of all creation—the Mystery Monitor. And thus does the material and mortal reality of the self transcend the temporal limitations of the physical-life machine and attain a new expression and a new identification in the evolving vehicle for selfhood continuity, the morontia and immortal soul. (UB 111:2.9-10)
““The soul is the self-reflective, truth-discerning, and spirit-perceiving part of man which forever elevates the human being above the level of the animal world. Self-consciousness, in and of itself, is not the soul. Moral self-consciousness is true human self-realization and constitutes the foundation of the human soul, and the soul is that part of man which represents the potential survival value of human experience. Moral choice and spiritual attainment, the ability to know God and the urge to be like him, are the characteristics of the soul. The soul of man cannot exist apart from moral thinking and spiritual activity. A stagnant soul is a dying soul. But the soul of man is distinct from the divine spirit which dwells within the mind. The divine spirit arrives simultaneously with the first moral activity of the human mind, and that is the occasion of the birth of the soul.” (UB 133:6.5)
Birth means a new existence thus emphasizing a potential pre-existence! For a further development, read the article “How can they recover babies without souls?” in Reflectivity of issue 330, November 2019.
There you go! I hope this research will be useful to you and will have answered some of the questions that are often asked!