© 2007 Jean-Claude Romeuf
© 2007 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
| The Biological Improvement of Humanity | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 40 — Autumn 2007 | After the Death of His Life Companion |
“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)
Cime is not with my flashlight that I will succeed in lighting the sun! May the spiritual Being who would be at the origin of this poetic metaphor forgive me for the plagiarism! It is enough to read carefully the pages of the Urantia Book to know that the ideas that I am going to express here on the subject of certain questions that I have always asked myself, are more explicit in the text of the book, than my human attempt to explain them.
I admit, I struggled (didn’t you?) before hearing the revelations relating to the questions I was asking myself about the mind, identity, the soul and personality.
It is from this, although aware of my cerebral disability and my inexperience, that I will try to untangle a few threads.
Everything begins with the mind. Only the mind is creative. Since Pentecost, Adjusters have been universally distributed on Urantia. But the essential condition for an individual to be indwelt by a Mystery Monitor is to have a normal mind, having moral status. I also know that for the mind to become co-creator of its surviving identity, that is to say of its immortal soul, it is necessary that it be the receptacle of a Thought Adjuster. So I ask myself the first question: what is a normal mind?
It is known (UB 5:5.13) that: “Neither limitations of intellect, nor even a lower moral standard… can invalidate the presence of the divine spirit in the individual…_”. My brilliant intellectual capacities therefore have nothing to do with the presence in me of the divine spirit. The same is true of my moral standard. If I had been born into an isolated tribe, unfortunately deprived of television and the truth contained in the newspapers, I would have a completely different morality. If I had not been put on the rails of a moralizing but yet so often demoralizing society, it could be that I have nevertheless inherited certain moral and social advantages, specific to my tribe. In this way, as a volitional creature, it would have happened about the age of six, that an Adjuster, on the first occasion on which I had exercised my free will by a moral act, came to share with me, my human experience. This is to take me with him to the high place of his origins.
In a roundabout way, UB 109:6.1 gives us a glimpse of additional information: “Any significant value in a volitional creature is certain to survive…” If the one who discovered this meaning or estimated this value does not survive, the Adjuster “confers these surviving meanings and values to a higher type of mind, a mind capable of surviving” This last quote allows us to conclude the chapter by saying that at the level of revelation, a high mind is not necessarily that of a great thinker, a great philosopher or a great scientist, but rather that of someone who has chosen to follow the will and directives of his personal God. The normality of the mind is therefore not measured by the degree of intelligence. Fortunately!
During his earthly life, thanks perhaps to the blessings of Providence, the human being endowed with a normal mind, that is to say a mind of a high type capable of surviving, that is to say a mind elevated in authority by increasingly difficult moral decisions, is subject to a double identity (UB 5:6.7):
The combined result of the creative attributes of the material mind of the human Self and the spiritual mind of the Adjuster, will allow the establishment of a third intermediate identity between the material and the spiritual: the morontia soul that the midwayers call intermediate mind, because it makes the connection between physical and spiritual phenomena. While the material mind has the possibility of believing in God, the soul created by the joint action of man and the spirit, now has the possibility of knowing God. Being of divine origin, the soul seeking and finding God along the ascension stages, has an infinite potential for growth. In agreement with the midwayers, we can say that the soul is of a mental nature, precisely because its potential for growth is infinite. Now, we know from the revelators that the mind has no limit. If the soul were only of a spiritual nature, its growth would stop when it found itself in the presence of God the Father.
At the moment of death, temporal identity will dissolve. Apart from personality, the only human reality that persists is morontia identity. Man therefore has every interest from now on in participating in the development of his soul through positive choices.
If the Adjuster has not cut himself off before, because of amorality and why not immoral acts or by the refusal of God, he inhabits the human mind until the cerebral functions of his host can no longer fulfill their role of volition. At the time of death, the Adjuster loses the personality he had borrowed, but whether his subject survives or not, he takes with him to Divinington, the experiential memory of the meanings and values he had helped to build.
Although he rejoiced in our earthly successes and was sorry for our failures, the Adjuster did not take an active part in the events, that is to say the facts, of our life. This mission was entrusted to our guardian angels. Let us thank them for having contributed from the outside, to the material organization favorable to the development of the meanings that we have acquired and thus, to the development of the values that these meanings have been able to engender. The seraphim are therefore precious helpers allowing our soul to become more beautiful and greater. They are also the historians of our life, because they keep within them a curriculum vitae of our earthly experience. Precisely, after death, they are the depositories of this curriculum and of the duplicate of the meanings and values of our soul (the original being the property of the Adjuster).
Let us not quarrel! At the time of the resurrection, everything will be returned to us! Nothing is left to chance! The archivists of the World of the Archangels also make a curriculum of our existences, record our personality and guarantee our identification. However, it is now that the mystery thickens. We are told that the personality is, with identity, one of the components of the human Self. Neither the Adjuster nor the guardian angel is in charge of it during the sleep of death. The reunion of the Adjuster and the accompanying seraphim allows the identity to be reestablished and the individual to be repersonalized, but the personality is resurrected (page 565.8). The certainty of this phenomenon by which I will regain my consciousness is at a higher level than that of ordinary beliefs. I commit here on Urantia, the faith and confidence that I have in the Universal Father! This is an opportunity for me, who knows myself to be mortal, to know his infinite greatness and his unfathomable love. Who else but God can resurrect me? Who else can grant me again, the same personality giving me the cognition of being his only son, in the midst of a universal brotherhood?
On page UB 42:12.9 a Powerful Messenger tells us that: “The phenomenon of the presence of a personality is not a manifestation of energy, whether physical, mental or spiritual” This sentence, which goes beyond all philosophical understanding, would make more than one atheist laugh! But I, whose hope is not to be doubted, here on Urantia, as small as I am, I am certain and even, in a certain way, conscious of this abstract reality made of the same substance with which the Universal Father is provided. The substance of the personality is proof for me of the existence of God. This very substance obliges me here to renew my confession of Faith.
Jean Claude Romeuf
July 15, 2007
| The Biological Improvement of Humanity | Le Lien Urantien — Issue 40 — Autumn 2007 | After the Death of His Life Companion |