© 1996 Meredith Sprunger
© 1996 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
Roger Penrose’s book, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, published by the Oxford University Press, 1994, explores the mystery of the mind and goes a long way to refute any materialistic explanation. Dr. Penrose, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, is a formidable mathematician and physicist who is probably best known for the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems in General Relativity.
The mystery of mind has intrigued philosophers down through history. René Descartes, the great seventeenth century philosopher, thought mind was an indestructible substance or reality, while others like David Hume regarded mind as simply an association of ideas, a bundle of experiences, without enduring substance.
The relationships between mind and body have been viewed in many ways. Descartes thought there was interaction between the two. Gottfried Leibniz rejected the interaction theory and postulated a parallelism or preestablished harmony between body and mind. Benedict Spinosa and Immanuel Kant regarded the mind and body as two aspects of a common reality; and there have been many other explanations.
The Urantia Book authors, as in so many other areas of knowledge, present the most reasonable and holistic explanation of this mystery known to me. Stated in an over-simplified way, there are three basic universe realities: matter, mind, and spirit. Mind can be associated with both matter and spirit; in fact, mind is the bridge between the two. The dynamics of these reality systems is well stated on UB 116:6.1:
In the evolutionary superuniverses energy-matter is dominant except in personality, where spirit through the mediation of mind is struggling for the mastery. The goal of the evolutionary universes is the subjugation of energy-matter by mind, the co-ordination of mind with spirit, and all of this by virtue of the creative and unifying presence of personality. Thus, in relation to personality, do physical systems become subordinate; mind systems, co-ordinate; and spirit systems directive. UB 116:6.1
Acomplete reading of The Urantia Book will give a unique and comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships of physical systems, mental systems, and spiritual systems of reality. I believe it is destined to raise the holistic functioning of human personality to a new and higher level.