© 2005 The Brotherhood of Man Library
Personality is the most important feature of our being. Firstly it is a unique and unchangeable gift of God. Also it is the meaning of the whole living and functioning creature–for it unifies all factors of reality, co-ordinates their relationships, and imparts the qualities of our identity and creativity. (UB 112:1.17)
In this article, we attempt an in-depth study of what the Urantia Revelation tells us about ourselves, our minds, our personality, identity, and consciousness. Our starting point:
From where do we derive our minds?
Cosmic mind at its origin is a manifestation of the mind of the third person of the Trinity, the Infinite Spirit. It comes to us indirectly via the Seven Master Spirits of Paradise, and directly from the Creative Spirit of our local universe, along with her team of helpers, the Adjutant Mind Spirits. These are comprised of the adjutants of: intuition, understanding, courage, knowledge, counsel, worship, and wisdom.
There exists in all personality associations of cosmic mind a quality which might be denominated a “reality response.” And it is this reality endowment of will creatures which saves them from becoming helpless victims of the a priori assumptions of science, philosophy, and religion.
The cosmic mind unfailingly responds on three levels of universe reality:
Causation–the reality domain of the physical senses, the scientific realms of logical uniformity, the differentiation of the factual and the nonfactual. This is the mathematical form of cosmic discrimination.
Duty–the reality domain of morals, the recognition of relative right and wrong. This is the judicial form of cosmic discrimination.
Worship–the spiritual domain of religious experience. This includes recognition of divine fellowship, spirit values, eternal survival, and ascent from the status of servants of God to the joy and liberty of the children of God. This is the highest insight of the cosmic mind–the reverential and worshipful form of cosmic discrimination.
These scientific, moral, and spiritual insights, are innate components of the cosmic mind which endows all will creatures. The experience of living never fails to develop these three cosmic intuitions; they are constitutive in the self-consciousness of all free-will creatures.
In the local universe mind bestowals, these three insights of the cosmic mind are what make it possible for mankind to function as rational and self-conscious personalities.
These same three basic factors in reflective thinking may be unified and co-ordinated in personality development, or they may become disproportionate and unrelated in their respective functions. When they become unified, it is these three cosmic intuitions that provide objective reality for mankind’s experience in and with things, meanings, and values.
Mortal identity is a temporary life-time condition that becomes permanent provided only that its accompanying personality elects to become a continuing universe phenomenon, an entity in eternity.
Personality is that quality in reality bestowed by the Universal Father. While itself devoid of identity, personality can unify the identity of any living energy system.
Personality is unique, both in space-time and in eternity. It is changeless–there are no duplicates, no copies. It can be added to spirit, is uniquely conscious of time, and manifests both self-consciousness and free will.
During earthly life the material self has both personality and identity, and is indwelt by the Spirit of God. After death the material body returns to whence it came, eventually becoming dust. However two non-material factors of the surviving personality persist. One is the memory transcript of the mortal career–which is in the keeping of its personal God-Spirit fragment. The other, the immortal soul, is in the custody of the Destiny Guardian.
Both the soul and the memory transcript are essential for re-personalization. It is the reunion of the formerly indwelling God-Spirit fragment with the soul that reassembles the surviving personality and ‘re-consciousness-izes’ the individual at the time of survivor awakening.
Intelligence alone does not explain the moral nature. Morality and virtue, are indigenous to human personality. Moral intuition, the realization of duty, is indigenous to the human mind which carries these intrinsic concomitants of cosmic mind. It is also associated with the other inalienables of human nature, such as scientific curiosity and spiritual insight.
Mankind’s mentality far transcends that of its animal cousins, but it is a moral and religious nature that especially distinguishes man from the animal world.
The selective response of an animal is limited to the motor level of behavior. The apparent insight of higher animals is really only on a motor level–usually appearing after trial and error experiences.
Mankind, however, is able to exercise scientific, moral, and spiritual insight prior to all exploration or experimentation.
Only a personality can know what it is doing before it does it; only personalities possess insight in advance of experience. A personality can look before it leaps and can therefore learn from looking as well as from leaping. A non-personal animal ordinarily learns only by leaping.
When men and women fail to discriminate the ends of their mortal striving, they find themselves functioning on the animal level of existence. They have failed to avail themselves of the superior advantages of that material acumen, moral discrimination, and spiritual insight which are an integral part of their cosmic-mind endowment as personal beings.
Virtue is righteousness–conformity with the cosmos. To name virtues is not to define them, but to live them is to know them. Virtue is not mere knowledge nor yet wisdom but rather the reality of progressive experience in the attainment of ascending levels of cosmic achievement. In the day-by-day life of mortal mankind, virtue is realized as the consistent choosing of good rather than evil–and such choosing ability is evidence for the possession of a moral nature.
Choosing between good and evil is influenced, not only by the keenness of a moral nature, but also by such influences as ignorance, immaturity, and delusion. A sense of proportion is a necessity in the exercise of virtue, otherwise evil may be perpetrated when the lesser is chosen in the place of the greater as a result of distortion or deception.
Mankind’s moral nature would be impotent without the art of measurement, the discrimination that is embodied in the ability to scrutinize meanings. Likewise would moral choosing be futile without that cosmic insight which yields the consciousness of spiritual values. Mankind ascends to the level of a moral being because of its endowment of personality.
Morality can never be advanced by law or by force. It is a personal and freewill matter and must be disseminated by the contagion of the contact of morally fragrant persons with those who are less morally responsive, but who are also in some measure desirous of doing the will of God.
Moral acts are those human performances which are characterized by high intelligence, directed by selective discrimination in the choice of superior ends and the selection of moral means to attain these ends. Such conduct is virtuous.
Supreme virtue, then, is wholeheartedly to choose to do the will of the Father in heaven.
The Universal Father bestows personality upon numerous orders of beings as they function on diverse levels of universe actuality. Urantia human beings are endowed with personality of the finite-mortal type, functioning on the level of the ascending sons of God.
Personality is a unique endowment of original nature, the existence of which is independent of, and antecedent to, the bestowal of the indwelling Spirit-of-God–nevertheless, the presence of this spirit reality does augment the qualitative manifestation of personality.
Personalities may be similar, but they are never the same. Personality is that feature of an individual which we can know–and which enables us to identify such a being at any future time regardless of the nature and extent of all changes in form, mind, or spirit status undergone by that personality.
Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of reactive behavior–self-consciousness and associated relative free will.
Self-consciousness is the intellectual awareness of personality actuality. It indicates capacity for individualized experience in and with cosmic realities–the attainment of identity status in the personality relationships of the universe.
The relative free will which characterizes the self-consciousness of human personality is involved in:
The bestowal of the divine gift of personality upon such a mind-endowed mortal mechanism confers the dignity of cosmic citizenship and enables such a mortal creature forthwith to become reactive to the constitutive recognition of the three basic mind realities of the cosmos:
The full function of such a personality endowment is the beginning realization of Deity kinship. Such a selfhood, indwelt by a pre-personal fragment of God the Father, is in truth and in fact a spiritual son of God.
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you Will never grow.
Ronal E. Ostom
Physical life is a process taking place not so much within the organism as between the organism and the environment. And every such process tends to create and establish organismal patterns of reaction to such an environment. And all such directive patterns are highly influential in goal choosing.
It is through the mediation of mind that the self and the environment establish meaningful contact. The ability and willingness of the organism to make such significant contacts with environment (response to a drive) represents the attitude of the whole personality.
Persons cannot very well perform in isolation. Man is innately a social creature; he is dominated by the craving of belongingness. It is literally true, “No man lives unto himself.”
But the concept of the personality as the meaning of the whole of the living and functioning creature means much more than the integration of relationships; it signifies the unification of all factors of reality as well as co-ordination of relationships.
Relationships exist between two objects, but three or more objects eventuate a system, and such a system is much more than just an enlarged or complex relationship. This distinction is vital, for in a cosmic system the individual members are not connected with each other except in relation to the whole and through the individuality of the whole.
In the human organism the summation of its parts constitutes selfhood–individuality–but such a process has nothing to do with personality, which is the unifier of all these factors as related to cosmic realities.
In the human system it is the personality which unifies all activities and in turn imparts the qualities of identity and creativity.
In all concepts of selfhood it should be recognized that the fact of life comes first, its evaluation or interpretation later. The human child first lives and subsequently thinks about his living. In the cosmic economy insight precedes foresight.
The possession of personality identifies man as a spiritual being since the unity of selfhood and the self-consciousness of personality are endowments of the super-material world.
As mind pursues reality to its ultimate analysis, matter vanishes to the material senses but may still remain real to mind. When spiritual insight pursues that reality which remains after the disappearance of matter and pursues it to an ultimate analysis, it vanishes to mind, but the insight of spirit can still perceive cosmic realities and supreme values of a spiritual nature. Accordingly does science give way to philosophy, while philosophy must surrender to the conclusions inherent in genuine spiritual experience. Thinking surrenders to wisdom, and wisdom is lost in enlightened and reflective worship.
In science the human self observes the material world; philosophy is the observation of this observation of the material world; religion, true spiritual experience, is the experiential realization of the cosmic reality of the observation of the observation of all this relative synthesis of the energy materials of time and space. To build a philosophy of the universe on an exclusive materialism is to ignore the fact that all things material are initially conceived as real in the experience of human consciousness. The observer cannot be the thing observed; evaluation demands some degree of transcendence of the thing which is evaluated.
In time, thinking leads to wisdom and wisdom leads to worship; in eternity, worship leads to wisdom, and wisdom eventuates in the finality of thought.
The possibility of the unification of the evolving self is inherent in the qualities of its constitutive factors: the basic energies, the master tissues, the fundamental chemical over-control, the supreme ideas, the supreme motives, the supreme goals, and the indwelling divine spirit of the Father bestowal–the secret of the self-consciousness of man’s spiritual nature.
The material self, the ego-entity of human identity, is dependent during the physical life on the continuing function of the material life vehicle, on the continued existence of the unbalanced equilibrium of energies and intellect which, on this planet, has been given the name life.
But selfhood of survival value, selfhood that can transcend the experience of death, is only evolved by establishing a potential transfer of the seat of the identity of the evolving personality from the transient life vehicle–the material body–to the more enduring and immortal nature of the soul and on beyond to those levels whereon the soul becomes infused with, and eventually attains the status of, spirit reality.
This actual transfer from material association is effected by the sincerity, persistence, and steadfastness of the God-seeking decisions of the human creature.
Creature personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting and characteristic phenomena of mortal reactive behavior: self-consciousness and associated relative free will.
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.
The relative free will which characterizes the self-consciousness of human personality is involved in:
Human self-consciousness implies the recognition of the reality of selves other than the conscious self and further implies that such awareness is mutual; that the self is known as it knows. This is shown in a purely human manner in man’s social life. But you cannot become so absolutely certain of a fellow being’s reality as you can of the reality of the presence of God that lives within you. The social consciousness is not inalienable like the God-consciousness; it is a cultural development and is dependent on knowledge symbols, and the contributions of the constitutive endowments of man–science morality, and religion.
Unselfishness, aside from parental instinct, is not altogether natural; other persons are not naturally loved or socially served. It requires the enlightenment of reason, morality, and the urge of religion, God-knowingness, to generate an unselfish and altruistic social order. Man’s own personality awareness, self-consciousness, is also directly dependent on this very fact of innate other-awareness, this innate ability to recognize and grasp the reality of other personality, ranging from the human to the divine.
Unselfish social consciousness must be, at bottom, a religious consciousness; that is, if it is objective; otherwise it is a purely subjective philosophic abstraction and therefore devoid of love. Only a God-knowing individual can love another person as he loves himself.
Self-consciousness is in essence a communal consciousness: God and man, Father and son, Creator and creature. In human self-consciousness four universe-reality realizations are latent and inherent:
You become conscious of man as your creature brother because you are already conscious of God as your Creator Father. Fatherhood is the relationship out of which we reason ourselves into the recognition of brotherhood. And Fatherhood becomes, or may become, a universe reality to all moral creatures because the Father has himself bestowed personality upon all such beings and has encircuited them within the grasp of the universal personality circuit. We worship God, first, because he is, then, because he is in us, and last, because we are in him.
In responding to a question about the soul, Jesus said:
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. 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]
And: “Upon your death, your records, identity specifications, and the soul—conjointly evolved by the ministry of mortal mind and the divine Adjuster” [indwelling Spirit-of-God]“—are faithfully conserved by the destiny guardian together with all other values related to your future existence, everything that constitutes you, the real you—except for the identity of continuing existence and the actuality of personality both of which are represented by the indwelling God-Spirit (who rejoins you upon your reconstitution.)_”(UB 113:6.1)