What Really Survives?

Ken Glasziou


   Most new readers of the Urantia Papers experience a feeling of exultation and relief as they learn that even those Urantians in whom the faintest flicker of faith still flickers will receive the chance to go on to the mansion worlds after mortal death. We may even get the impression that, except for a new and better body and a new and better mind, we more or less start off on the first mansion world exactly where we left off here on Urantia. But what actually does survive from our life on Urantia?

   Re-personalization is described in Paper 112. The reassembly of our constituent bits and pieces involves, first, the fabrication of a new morontia body and mind followed by the return of our Thought Adjuster, the custodian of our identity, who supervises the return of our personality. Next to arrive is our soul, an entity built up during mortal life by our Thought Adjuster through the conservation of all things from that life having either spiritual value or being essential for our future universe careers. During this transition period, the soul has been in the custody of a special seraphic guardian. 

   Our re-awakening is likely to be a bit of a shock. We will be so changed, the spiritual transformation will be so great that if were not for the Adjuster and the destiny guardian administering the morontia equivalent of first aid, much of the mortal life would at first seem to be a vague and hazy dream. (1235) So much for our delusions about starting where we left off on Urantia.

   What survives of our mortal memories and attributes is the responsibility of our Thought Adjuster whose task is to recall and rehearse only those memories and experiences that are part of, and essential to, our future universe career. What may these be?

   We are informed:  "much of your past life and its memories, having neither spiritual meaning nor morontia value, will perish with the material brain; much of material experience will pass away as onetime scaffolding which, having bridged you over to the morontia level, no longer serves a purpose in the universe" (1235) . 

   The mansion worlds are the morontia worlds, morontia being a term covering a vast level that intervenes between the material and the spiritual.The step from material to spiritual is simply too enormous to be bridged directly.

   Material beings like ourselves could never cope with these changes that lead to an entirely spiritual existence if it were not for that direct gift we have from God of an actual fragment of himself we know as his "Indwelling Spirit" or "Thought Adjuster."

  The presence of this divine Adjuster in the human mind is disclosed by three experiential phenomena:
     1. Our intellectual capacity for knowing God--God-consciousness.
     2. Our spiritual urge to find God--to be God-seeking.
     3. The craving of our personality to be like God--the wholehearted desire to do the Father's will." (24)

    For better understanding of the next stage in our universe career, we need to be critically  aware that all that is "personal" about ourselves  that survives into the morontia life, is processed by our Thought Adjuster because it has some kind of potential "spiritual value."

   The reason for this is that in the spirit world which is to follow our temporary morontia existence, the things of this world, those things associated with material matter, simply have no existence, hence are useless. If we value our experience on this planet and hope to take at least some traces of it with us, then we need to develop a "feeling" for those intangible concepts so frequently referred to as "spiritual meanings and values." The Papers tell us :

   "...when an attempt is made to make plain the realities of the spirit world to the physical minds of the material order,
mystery appears: mysteries so subtle and so profound that only the faith-grasp of the God-knowing mortal can achieve the philosophic miracle of the recognition of the Infinite by the finite, the discernment of the eternal God by the evolving mortals of the material worlds of time and space." (27)

    What applies to "infinite" and "eternal" also applies to "spiritual." Over and over again, the Papers refer to spiritual meanings and values with no further elaboration.

   "Spiritual" is a term that has similarities to concepts in our language for which the meaning is "in the eye of the beholder." To specify exactly what we mean by holding that a particular object is more beautiful than another, we would need some scale to judge their relative beauty against our ideal of perfect beauty.

    We can think about "spiritual" in a similar way if we make the characteristics and nature of God himself, our ideal of "perfection." But in doing so we are immediately confronted by our absence of real knowledge of the perfection of God--except in so far as that perfection has already been revealed to us.

   For this, we have two main sources--personal and individual revelation between each of

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