© 2008 David Elders
© 2008 The Urantia Book Fellowship
Presented at The Urantia Book Fellowship Summer Study Session, July 22, 2007
I believe that in probing the truths presented in The Urantia Book for a new and higher understanding, it is critical that we seek to comprehend each concept directly for meaning and refrain as much as possible from projecting onto new truth what we already understand, or think we understand. For example, while it is useful to examine the meaning of human fatherhood in the context of God’s fatherhood, it is wholly misleading to do the reverse.
Each human being constructs an eternal identity at the relationship juncture of a unique personality and a Thought Adjuster—both bestowed by God. Using gifted tools facilitating discovery, self-consciousness, realization, will choice, and insight, and aided by unseen helpers at every stage, we experientially weave ourselves together using the glues of personality—unity and love—to explore as cosmic citizens of sonship dignity our Father’s eternal and infinite reality.
We didn’t “earn” our cosmic citizenship. It was guaranteed us when the Father said to the Son, “Let us make mortal man in our own image.” [UB 6:5.7] Echoing the pattern of the Gods, a unique personality expression of the Father was bestowed by him on every humble, animal-origin yet normal-minded material human creature on each and every inhabited planet in the universes. This bestowal constituted each human being a “son” of God, which is not about gender but has to do only with personality status. Not long after this initial bestowal, as personality and its attributes, will and self-consciousness, take the first steps toward unifying the creature’s being, a second bestowal, that of a pre-personal spirit fragment, the Thought Adjuster, completes the actualization of the Father’s initial vision. With this bestowal, triggered by a child’s relatively free-will, self-conscious, moral choice, a new soul is born and a cosmic citizen is set free to find his/her way back to the bestower of the very personality and pre-personal spirit fragment which together with mind and consciousness constitute a new universe being created in the Father-Son-Spirit image.
Though our human bodies come from a collaboration of human, material potentials, who we really are (to use a well worn phrase) appears wholly gifted from above. Though our consciousness is limited to a finite framework, our unique personality and the Spirit fragment indwelling our soul both hail from a level of reality far beyond the finite. In between, mediating the relationship between these two far-separated realities, resides mind, sourced in the Infinite Spirit but manifest locally by one of his daughters. Our bodies are destined to remain on the material, planetary plane while our being-personality-spirit, climbing the rungs of cosmic consciousness, goes on to explore God’s infinite reality. We have begun the ascent of true cosmic citizenship, ever seeking higher employment in our Father’s spiritual economy. After all, we all want to work in the family business!!
So, who are WE really? And, just what does our cosmic citizenship mean—to us and to God? And when he and the Son made us in their image, what does THAT mean? And because we surely don’t want to re-gift these particular pearls of great value, what is the return we need to make for the gifts we’ve been given? We’ve neither asked for nor earned any of them—yet. Besides, we aren’t really sure of how to use these gifts very well anyway. We stumble around on our level of reality as if the Creator Son forgot to turn on the lights. Some image of the Gods we are!!
You probably think (or at least hope) that I am about to attempt to answer these questions so we can all go home happy. Well, keep breathing. No answers will be forthcoming; but, let’s explore some of the elements already discussed because in my opinion, one of the first responsibilities of cosmic citizenship is to begin to figure out the answers to such questions and thereby take our places as true, contributing per-Sons of God, citizens in his universe reality.
I suspect that we would all agree that who we are as cosmic citizens is one of the mysteries of personality that we need to unravel during our ascent to the Father on Paradise. Here are some ideas to reflect upon as we think about our place in the universe:
In Paper 1 we are told that “God is personality.” I take that literally to mean that God is personality—both all personality and each personality. Thus, while we cannot say that each of us IS God, we can say that God is each of us. When the conceptual “I AM” became Father to the Son and personality was realized, a Divine Counselor writes that God did so in order to escape “as a personality, from otherwise inevitable diffusion throughout the potential of Total Deity.” [UB 0:3.15] By focalizing personality and will choice in a manner less than total Deity, the Father thereby makes it possible for less-than-total-Deity experience and choice to take place (obviously including human will creatures). In other words, the bestowal of personality by our Father enables Deity (God) to function on sub-Absolute levels while retaining many Deity attributes. Thus, the Father can “become” the Eternal Son, the Supreme, or even a mortal, finite will creature. At minimum this concept offers us a heightened sense of the profound value and power of personality. Considered yet another way, being a personality has no meaning when there are no other personalities. You may be the boss when you’re home alone, but it’s not much fun!
I would suggest that when the Father bestows a wholly unique personality gift of his Deity reality on any qualified being, including mortal creatures, a similar pattern is repeated—the Father escapes from the need to “be” that particular person. Simultaneously, that now-personalized being receives some amazing benefits: the dignity of cosmic citizenship, free-will choice, the deity characteristic of unity, the potential of time/ space transcendence, the possibility of experiencing the absolute level of reality, future eternity existence, and via fusion with the Adjuster, “past-eternity experience and memory.” [UB 112:7.1] Thus, if all goes as planned, the bestowal of personality on humble, animal-origin creatures may well enable us to self-realize not only the great God who has become us but also to become consciously and increasingly aware, as we ascend towards God, of our past and future eternity existence as personalities. This is cosmic citizenship of an unimaginable order.
One of our integrated responsibilities as cosmic citizens is to “do God’s will.” For many of us that phrase means to do as God would do in whatever situation confronts us in the moment. Others might see it as an injunction to do as God wants us to do. I would like to speculate on an alternate concept. If it is true that the bestowal of personality is the process of God becoming each of us, then personality bestowal links us literally to “first cause” will choice. This would mean that when we use the “free will” which accompanies personality to make an uncaused and thus free-will choice (like the self-conscious, moral choices which build our souls and the Supreme), we are literally “doing” God’s will on his behalf on our level of time-space reality. Thus while that choice may appear to happen only in time, it also takes place simultaneously far beyond time and at the level of God’s will. So, in this way our decision may not be known to him in advance and is thus not pre-determined and hovering nearby waiting for us to discover and choose it.
“We” live and are self-conscious at the relationship focal point of a highly-qualified, unique personality bestowed by God and an unqualified pre-personal fragment of Deity. It is not entirely clear, at least to me, exactly who we are in this relationship of absolutes, albeit we are blessed to be present and know it as these two aspects of God interact—the qualified and the unqualified, exemplifying infinite diversity and undivided unity. Fusion unites these two and our self-developed morontial identity, the soul, in a marriage that secures our eternal existence as unique and personalized cosmic citizens and facilitates our exploration of God’s infinity. Surely our ascending careers will clarify who we really are and what personality sonship actually means both to us and to God. Until our journey is complete and we know for sure, we can take solace in the knowledge that we are in a direct and unending partnership with the very God we seek.
Cosmic citizenship is inherent in the bestowal of personality, but, like most experiential realities, it is the assumption of its responsibilities that make it real to us. Awareness of the responsibilities of cosmic citizenship begins during the early days of our human sojourn coincident with the embryonic awakening of moral self-consciousness and the birth of our souls. As this awareness grows, we begin to understand that our responsibilities include our duty to God in time-space, the Supreme, and the recognition that our choices contribute to his growth as well as our own. Grandfanda was the first human-born will creature to climb the ladder of cosmic citizenship all the way to Paradise, a task made even more difficult by virtue of the fact that he had no one to follow. But because he blazed the experiential trail, our way forward has been illuminated and trod by many before us. Nonetheless, the journey is ours alone to make unified by the unique personality that we are, or rather, that is us.
We live on a planet undergoing accelerating change, the breakdown of institutions and systems and thought that heretofore made us feel secure, with the consequent and increasing interpersonal stresses that have unnerved many of our fellows. Inasmuch as revelation comes to a world when the potential for further evolutionary growth has been exhausted, we can be sure that the arrival of this revelation signals that existing knowledge, concepts, belief systems, and evolutionary religions are now insufficient to help humankind integrate and understand this accelerating change and our new, unfolding planetary destiny.
We have been blessed with a revelation of truths that, if understood and truly practiced, can help stabilize our communities, beginning with our own. If we desire to be cosmic citizens in more than words alone, it is time that we together give ourselves fully to our cosmic responsibilities, not just to contribute what we can today, but to leave a building-block legacy for the future. The revelation is not ours alone, but the world’s. As Grandfanda did for us, we, too, can illuminate the way forward for others to travel making real the truths we have been told. The Eden we need to prepare for the coming of this new truth is the Eden of the mind, placing into human consciousness a new philosophy of living based on the reality of personality bestowal, its significance, and its promise of eternal life; the comprehension of a new and expanded cosmology that makes real our place in a universe teeming with children of God; and a new religion built on revealed truth experientially realized by direct, personal contact with our Father God, the God indwelling our fellow universe travelers, and the joyful responsibility of building our own souls and thereby contributing to the realization of God in time and space, the Supreme.
So we end where we began. Each human being constructs an eternal identity at the relationship juncture of a unique personality and a Thought Adjuster—both bestowals by and of God. Using gifted tools facilitating discovery, self-consciousness, realization, will choice, and insight, and aided by unseen helpers at every stage, we experientially weave ourselves together using the glues of personality—unity and love—to explore as cosmic citizens of sonship dignity, our Father’s eternal and infinite reality.
David Elders has been a student of The Urantia Book since 1970 and has explored the amazing concept of personality as revealed in the book for most of that time. He and Marta have been married for forty-three years and are experiencing one of the fruits of that partnership—the five grandchildren their two sons and their wives have brought into the world.