Soul

What is a soul? Such a simple sounding word, a word which little children know, and yet such a profound concept - even a miraculous, growing, living thing in our midst. In every human will-creature of normal mind lives a Father Fragment, the Divine Indwelling Monitor.

What then, is the soul? Simply put it is the creation, the child of the Divine Father and the human mother.

How does this soul evolve? The Adjuster comes to live when the human makes their first moral decision. The soul is born at that moment. To understand this miracle we must first analyze or understand that mind. Let me explain.

The conscious mind of the human is divided into three segments. Higher mind is not usually in human consciousness, but it is the Adjuster, higher mind, Divinity. The animal lower mind, the electrochemical impulses, the body, is also largely not conscious. In the middle is the conscious human mind, resting on the uncertain rocky and explosive bed of the electro-chemical lower mind and reaching up, extending to the midst of the Divine. In the arena of conscious human mind is where the decisions are made, influenced by the Divine pilot, which gives birth to and in essence creates the evolving morontia soul.

Free-will of the creature is always paramount, tantamount to all. The Adjuster does not manipulate, dictate, tell, or in any way dominate the human will. It is in the arena of choice, the middle mind that the soul grows. How does this happen? The Adjuster influences. As the human will is consecrated with a conscious decision to the Divine will, the Adjuster's influence increases and you can more clearly hear and do the will of The Father. Thus the soul evolves.

The miracle is that even on this material plane, you can achieve the morontial. Do you truly grasp this concept? Your evolving soul is morontial. The more you are in line with the will of the Divine adjuster; the more you will actually live the morontial on this planet.

Before death or translation, the soul can only reach a morontial stage. After death and re-personalization, the soul is more readily replacing the human, purely human, will. After fusion, of course, survival is assured. This morontial child within all of you will grow stronger in time. The mind is the soil from which the soul grows. The mind of the human where will resides determines the rate of soul growth.

But, my brothers and sisters know this, the mercy of the Lord. It does not matter if you do not comprehend God. It matters only that you wish to comprehend God. It does not matter that you do not recognize fully truth, beauty or goodness. It matters only that you wish to recognize truth, beauty, and goodness. Every day that you live you grow closer to actualizing and comprehending the Divine.

And this is what is causing your soul to evolve and expand: the human mind. Simply: material, lower mind; morontial, middle mind; spiritual, Divine, higher Adjuster mind. You can achieve a morontial outlook in a material body. That is your soul.

Question: When you discuss the three levels of mind, how do they relate to the Infinite Mother Spirit and
that mind?

Answer: That is an excellent question. Mind, human mind, mid-mind, must be prepared to receive the Adjuster. It must have the seven Adjutant Mind Spirits, have attained the seven levels of Adjutant Mind Spirits, which are the gifts of Divine Mother and her spirit. Therefore, Divine Mother is the Deity, which prepares mid-mind for the bestowal of the Adjuster. Also, as mid-mind works with the Divine mind, Mother Spirit is working in mid-mind to help the child of time hear the Divine.

The human mind is capable of greatness, of eternity perfection. But the choices are your own. You, the human will, may turn the mind, mid-mind, away from the Adjuster into sin, evil, even into nonsurvival. It is the arena, more so than the Adjuster, of the Mother Spirit, which offsets these lower impulses.

Question: Do the impulses, the negative impulses that you are discussing come from the lower mind, the human electro-magnetic impulses, and if that which you try to fight with is the mid-mind, with the help of the Mother Spirit and the Adjutant Mind Spirit?

Answer: Some come from the lower mind. Yes. Some come from character flaws.

Question: Where does a character flaw reside if not in the mid-mind?

Answer: You are not created in perfection; therefore it is the will of The Father to create within you rungs on the ladder of spiritual evolution. These rungs are your faults. Your feet climb it at your will, and your destination is God the Perfect.

Question: Where does the soul go when the brain dies, when the human mind dies?

Answer: The soul is shepherded to the mansion worlds by your guardian seraphim where it is reunited with the Adjuster and personality of the human.

Question: So if a person's mental capacity, through either disease or illness or old age deteriorates and becomes no longer able to function on a spiritual level, that person's soul and Thought Adjuster wait in the Mansion worlds until the body dies and the personality is resurrected?

Answer: That is absolutely correct.

Question: You spoke of the mind being the arena of choice, the conscious mind. Is it the will that makes this choice a function of the personality? Is it identical to the personality?

Answer: No, not identical. But it is a personality function. Your personalities are incomplete in your present form. Your personality will become, or your soul will become your personality on the Mansion Worlds.

Question: Well, I'm a little confused. We are told that personality is one gift of The Father and is an unchanging attribute or entity.

Answer: But you have not attained it fully, yet. 

Question: Just as we have a piece of The Father living within us yet we are not communicating with Him fully yet, is it similar to that?

Answer: Your personality is bestowed, but you have not grown into it fully yet. Your personality will be seen more clearly in the morontial because it is more fully seen. It is your soul; it will become your soul.

Question: Well what is this thing that does the choosing?

Answer: Will. It is human will. It is a part of personality bestowal, but it is not synonymous with personality. There are times when you may choose to follow higher mind. Other times your choice will be not so evolved. You are the same personality but your will varies.

Question: When the impulses of the lower mind, the electro-magnetic and chemical make up our mind,
weighs on us too much and we fall prey to it with anxiety or fear or even chemical imbalances, will appealing to the higher mind offset that, or will we just learn to live with that? Is there a way to reach a balance again in an unbalanced lower mind by appealing to the higher mind?

Answer: The balance will be achieved by your choices. Even though impulses may be strong and sometimes irresistible, you can choose in mid-mind not to act. This is balance.

Question: Though we choose not to act, which in essence is the best thing possible in a situation where your lower impulses are strongly affecting you, will the choice not to act constitute more soul growth, and will that help ease the struggle? Is there a way to ease the struggle against the lower mind impulses?

Answer: Yes. The more the human will chooses the higher road, the easier it becomes, because you make
spiritual progress - psychic circles progress. Also, soul growth and the reality of the morontial is actually put into practice and lived here on the material level. But you must choose. Starting as a child learns to walk, you fall, stumble, but you must get up again and take those few steps. Even when one has mastered walking there is running.

Question: The Urantia Book says that after forty years old the adjuster is like a controller. Does that mean that the mid-mind is used in some other way?

Answer: No, it just means that mid-mind had become more adept at hearing the Divine mind. It also means that the experience of the human has tempered the will with wisdom and evolved higher values. So choices are at a higher spiritual level and the adjuster has a bigger field to plant seeds in.

Personality, which is a gift of The Father at birth, also resides in mid-mind while you are in this material body. But it is much more identified with the morontia life after death or translation when the soul develops will, and can more consciously align itself with personality-Adjuster consciousness.

Man is conscious only of will. As one progresses spiritually and through time in this physical state, it becomes easier to get a glimpse of the spiritual leading of The Father fragment. However, your task, brothers and sisters, should be thus: to consecrate your human will to the doing of The Father's will. If one does this in a positive way, one is assured of eternal survival. Not now, but eons from now, you will surely stand in the presence of the First Source and Center from whence your fragment came.

It is not so much your task to fully understand the Divine, but only to wish to understand God. It is not so much your task to be Godlike as to wish to do the will of God, and - in eternity - you, too, will attain Divinity. Day by day as you live your life, study your choices and consciously become aware of choosing higher, ever-higher values and climbing toward God.

Unfortunately your great struggle, brothers and sisters, is with your dual nature. You are physically a part of nature. You are animal in origin. But there exists within your mind the Divine. And you have the ability, potential, to transcend nature, the material, and exist in the realm of the spirit. This is a conflict. It is personality, which integrates this conflict.

Let me try to explain further. How difficult it is to be a finite being with an infinite piece of Divinity. It is unbalancing. Those mortals who do manage to transcend the baser material realm also are prone to other pitfalls: pride, ego, and self-satisfaction. It is a balance that one must achieve. There is nothing wrong or inherently sinful, evil, in the infinite temporal material state. To the contrary, it is a creation of the eternal Sons and Daughters and is good. It is what you do with this state by your will decisions that determine your destruction or survival. So, although it is hard to project, understand, the destructive nature of man it is a true reality risk and is determined in the tiny choices of everyday life. This is what you must become more aware of.

No human is born evil. Rather does the will of the human twist the mind choices until evil is embraced. Your soul is but a shadow of the real you. It is being created for your next life, not for this one. But even in this material life here on this planet your soul is developing awareness, awareness of the Adjuster and the human personality. Just as the Adjuster, of course, is aware of his soul - his child, the soul - the human personality will become more aware of the evolving morontia self.

The mind ideates; it thinks. It deals on an intellectual realm of facts. The Spirit, The Father, is truth eternal, absolute. The soul feels. Please let me emphasize the feelingness of the soul. It is the difference between scientific knowledge and true values. The soul deals in the realm of values, and the will can force ever higher and increasing awareness of ever more spiritual values: truth, beauty, goodness, and love, Godlikeness. You grow more Godly.

The human condition is a delicate balance between uncertainty and security: the uncertainty of what lies ahead; the security of the love, mercy, and Divine compassion of Deity; the uncertainty as a newly ascendent child of God; the certainty, security, that one day you will stand in the presence of the Creator, Himself. This is the human struggle.

But make not the mistake to live only on the material plane. This is one of the greatest dangers of this age. A society that dwells only on the material level is doomed to extinction. Because man has these opposing natures there is the potential for conflict. The conflicts we see in nations, societies, the world wars, poverty, prejudice, bigotry, oppression, unfairness of every kind, have at their root the inner conflict between the spiritual and base natures, the dual nature, of man.

There is also a risk of inner civil war in such a diverse being. Inner civil war, conflict causes you to lose the peace that Michael promised you, the sublime peace that transcends understanding, causes you to lose touch with spiritual realities, causes much wasted effort and a cut off from spiritual help. While you cannot control the world, the environment you can control is the inner life of yourself, the inner man or woman. In this inner life are the decisions of eternity created. This is the source of all creativity. And if you approach life not from the outer material world, but bring to the world the inner nature of man, the creative force which stems from The Father, Himself, you will make a difference in the world, but most of all in yourselves, in your ascent Godward. This is the important fact to grasp.

Even with the strife, anxiety, uncertainty, poor genetic make up, lust sinfulness, slothfulness, poverty, prejudice, bigotry, hatefulness, lack of God consciousness on this planet, many, many, many, many of your mortals do ascend and fuse. This is the great miracle of the Adjuster.

When you look around at the world or at your own individual lives and get discouraged, depressed, despairing, remember that out of such seeming inhospitable soil have sprung many souls whose eternal life is assured. From these very conditions and worse, children, as you will see - will spring the chorus of ascending mortals. And that is your destiny if you so choose it.

Question: I get confused about the desire to expand my soul and live in my soul, and seek other souls, and
you are saying that the soul is for the next life. I feel such a desire for it here and now that I am wondering if that is dangerous somehow, or negative?

Answer: No. You are simply confusing terms. You feel a desire to know the personality, which will be spiritual, of your fellows. When you are on the Mansion worlds, the personality and the soul are evidenced together and as you ascend, both become fused on the spirit level with the Adjuster. Your soul is evolving now and therefore it is difficult to be your soul because you are not - you are physical. The Morontial, the soul, is a small part of you which you and The Father are creating as co-parents.

Question: What about people who forego the material existence while they are here, who try very hard to
communicate with God and give up the world to do it? Priests, or monks or holy men. Is that something
to be desired? That kind of attitude here?

Answer: I will generalize, and it is not set in stone. But no, it is not to be desired, because the gift you give to your Adjuster is experience in the world. To skip that is to open the door to many problems of ego and pride. And the goal is not to forego the material but to live with it and transcend it in your area of free-will choice. To live in the world but not of it was the great accomplishment of Jesus.

Question: You said something at one point about the will. It was almost as if it was a separate thing from
us. Is the will completely from an animal level or it is it from personality?

Answer:  Personality exercises dominant will choice on this level but the will is the offspring of the conscious human mind, mid-mind. It is your only area of control or choice. You cannot effectively influence other things: your body, material world, the Adjuster. But you can exert influence and growth through will in the material conscious mid-mind.

Question: How do we develop the soul while we're in our mortal condition? It seems to us from reading the Urantia Book that the exercise of the soul is what helps to build it. Just as physical exercise would help to build the body, experience helps to build the soul. Is that correct?

Answer: Experience, and how one chooses to react to this experience. You have the choice, will, to react positively in the mid-mind. Much latitude is there. For a while an experience might appear tragic. You have the ability to see the spiritual reality behind the material tragedy and to live in that realm of love, survival, and spiritual growth.

Question: Page 1205 of the Urantia Book says “Adjusters are devoted to building up spiritual counterparts
of your careers, morontia transcripts of your true advancing self.” What is meant by counterparts?

Answer: For example, you may have a human understanding - analysis of a situation where you were
disappointed or hurt, and it might be remembered by you as a sad or humiliating experience. Your Adjuster may have a completely different interpretation - record of that. He registers your soul growth through disappointments, the progress you have made in your understanding of experiential difficulties, the spiritual progress as you broaden your value to higher meanings and this day, incident, might be recorded as your victory with a feeling of success - achievement on the part of the Adjuster. There are different realities for creatures so far from the spirit. What you think of as defeat is probably your highest illumination.

Question: Carrying through on this, would it be correct to say that which is counterparted is real and will
exist and that which is not is unreal and will pass on?

Answer: Absolutely, that is correct.

Question: In the relationship between people - between personalities, what is the optimum way of relating to other people that would achieve the best soul growth? For instance, the motive, does that make any difference? Or the truth of how you are relating to that person, how does that make any difference in the growth of your soul?

Answer: That is a deceptively simple question with much complexity. The optimum is to love one another. But this is not realistic, for to love one's fellows truly you must understand them. Understanding begins when we place the spiritual ahead of the ego. So, the realization that we are one family created by one Father is essential, not just in terms of lip service, but in terms of true service to one's brothers and sisters.
Mota is not that significant. It is the quality of the interaction. You will always experience imperfections in yourself, annoyances, impatience, and conflict. These are a part of your imperfect state. How one - what one does determines a realistic goal of relating to others. Jesus said “turn the other cheek.” I am not as adept as our Creator-Brother-Father, but I would say sometimes the highest good in terms of personality relationships is avoidance if one is not evolved enough to come from a place of highest values with another being.

The sincere commitment to understand is important in terms of perspective: the spiritual rather than the
“me.” But it will be impossible to remove the ego, but remember it is not instinctual. Ego is instinctual, animal, but personality can break that stimulus response. For example, if one is physically struck, the animal will fight or flight. The spiritual intervention of personality might cause a different reaction. The highest would be to allow The Father to be seen in your relationships with others, for you to reflect and embody His perfect qualities of love, mercy, patience, wisdom, truth, beauty, and goodness. Partially these can be attained by you, and not always consistently, but that would be the ideal.

Question: Would the personality that I have received, for example, that the soul be me in potential, and that
personality that I exhibit here - different sense of humor or whatever - is that the reflection of that reality? When we talk at this level, we talk about having personality and recognizing personalities, and types of personalities, if we are 99% potential then what is that that's here?

Answer: Potential. Let me explain. The you that you will be is personality, like letting the personality out of a locked room. It exists but unseen. It will be the combination of your fusion with your Adjuster and soul growth and eventual transmutation into a spirit being. Your personality contains the potential of all the ascension career. It is there in you now. But it is not apparent because it will be based upon your choice-decision-action throughout your entire ascension career. Your free will determines the release of your potential into actuality.

How does one see the one percent here? Your guide, in general, should be spiritual fruits. That is evidence of your personality, your unique personality. How does one love? How is your love different from any other created being, the tones and songs and harmonies that you bring to the quality, the universal quality of love, is and forever will be different than any other personality, a jazz interpretation of a universal theme.

Time creatures that we are, it is beneficial to repeat often special moments, and to repeat often that the event is meaningful, it is valuable to oneself. Just as the Master said be of good cheer, repeatedly, it is important for us all to repeat expressions of value, of hope, of ideals and goals. These often restated dreams become reality through constant effort.

The mind is easily satisfied with information bits, can store information from many years back and still access the knowledge. But your soul is quite different. It lives your dreams; it is the reality of your ideals. It is a constant expression, dynamically, independent of knowledge - though built upon knowledge and life experience. It is the constant repetition of cheer, of peace, of stillness. 

This soul that you are faces eternity. Though as yet rising through the transitions of time, it is eternity. To a time oriented creature, things eternal appear either static or as a constant cycle. Both visions are time oriented. We draw closer to the eternal through repetition, through time oriented discipline. I commend you as a group for such cyclical devotion in meeting with myself and my associates as you do. No one moment will bear stupendous results, but each effort enlarges the platform upon which your personality functions, broadens the arena wherein your soul may receive the nourishment that allows the growth that will take you to the portals of eternity. In fellowship we share; our struggles become our victories, and there is no victory without a struggle.

The soul is always in a forward momentum and has connections to your material side and also to the Indwelling Father. I could say that the soul is grasping first before what the material mind can grasp. This is 
contrary to what many believe. Yet, the soul is the seed from which all your personal aspects stem from. The Father is your light and sustenance. Your experience designs how you will grow. This planet is experiencing 
new things and there cannot be things hidden from God or from the consciousness of your fellows. The past, present, and future are visible from a morontial sense. Old things are fading away — all things are becoming new. The soul most definitely has a more divine ear than the mortal mind. Your material mind may have rejection for certain things, but, the soul — in combination with the Father Fragment — saves things of value. 

The key for improvement is, of course, within you, your Indwelling Spirit. This is your sounding board to the troubles and trials of you lives. God resides within you, giving you personality and His Spirit. To the extent that you are unable to cope with the challenges in your life, this signals periods of misadjustment with the Spirit residing within you. To some degree, all of you have this. It is a human condition. Misalignment with your Indwelling Spirit is more common than alignment, for the most part, when you are not a universally conscious citizen.  

But as you become aligned, as you desire to become aligned, and begin to question and sort out and sort through the inherent spiritual possibilities within you, and as reflected outside of you in the thoughts and papers and recollections of others, you slowly begin to evolve a sense of soul consciousness. Soul consciousness does not mean that you have glided into perfection. Simply the desire to be aware, to be loving, to be kind and in tune with God does not make it so; but the desire does make way for progress. I think each of you are aware within yourselves of progress that you have made since you have become aware of the possibilities of spirituality that exist in this world at this time.

Realize your progress, find that assurance that you are more aligned today than you were in the past; and yet to realize that you can also most effectively deal with those situations when you are unbalanced or overwhelmed by trying to consciously seek guidance and attunement, even as you would here in a meeting with us. Awareness is the first step to correcting any misadjustment, misalignment, and therefor the process for each of you has begun toward becoming a more perfected universal citizen.

Elyon: To some seeking truth is an exercise of discerning what is true from what is false. The endeavor is a 
discipline of separating one from the other as you would separate curds from whey, juice from pulp, discarding what does not conform to the goal of the search and retaining that which applies. This undertaking is a method of discernment useful to the intellect of the human mind. Sorting and sifting is a 
function of mind that enjoys categorical understanding. Each episode of discernment, while contributing to the organization of your mind; and each episode, while contributing to additional mind capacity, also contributes significantly to soul enlargement. This enlargement of soul is another level of truth discernment. I do not seek to downplay the value of truth discernment to the mind, for it is quite important in your search for cosmic understanding. I wish, however, to focus upon the soul level, for it is a little less tangible to you at this time.

I mention separating curds from whey. To the discerning mind these distinctions are clear based on qualities of manifestation of the two products derived from the same source, in this case, milk. When the 
mind clearly discerns these distinctions it quickly can apply these distinct products to uses beneficial to the mind. The soul does not discern the truth qualities as does the mind. The mind will contact, observe, analyze, verify, accept, and reject truth elements.

The soul — perhaps at a risk of crude comparison — rather feels, experiences, a living quality at each phase of the discernment process. It will in a sense appreciate milk as milk, curds as curds, and whey as whey. It will appreciate the process of separation as well as the process of homogenization. It overviews all of the elements. The mind will discern use and nonuse; the soul accepts both usefulness and non-usefulness as an integrated oneness. So, the mind seeks for truth resulting in meaning. The soul finds truth that results in value. The greater the ability of the mind, the keener it is to sort truth from the erroneous. The greater the development of the soul, the larger its encompassment of all things real. In time and space reality must contain the unreal, for this is the duality that energies life, that stimulates the mind and inspires the soul.

The mature mind will not fight the assertions of error by another but will discern the level of understanding and patiently pursue an opportunity for the offering of elimination and correction. A mature soul likewise discerns the context wherein an erroneous assumption lies. A soul which has grown for a significant period of time perceives the appropriateness of an erroneous assumption based upon the growth level of the personality pursuing truth. While the mind may wish to correct error, the soul embraces the one in error knowing through its own experience that this other individual will grow and shed what was useful for experience that is of greater use. The context will shift.

Sometimes a personality becomes confused when not discerning the difference between mind and soul. One may be perplexed or embarrassed over earlier conceptual beliefs that are no longer possessed as truthful. But his soul does not discard these now outdated understandings; it incorporates them into the 
field of wisdom, that broadened viewpoint.

Jesus while on this world admonished his apostles to speak to the soul and spirit of man, not to challenge the beliefs, to confront error — for this is the innate ability of mind to do so — rather to approach in the awareness of the presence of soul, to react to another as a father would to his child or a mother would to her child, understanding their age or maturity or growth, not condescendingly, rather supportively. The wise parent has undergone the same growth.

Discernment of truth to the mind is the taking things apart for understanding. Discernment of truth to the soul is the ability to interconnect, to synthesize and enlarge the context. Both are extremely valuable in your ascension. Each one provides the Indwelling Spirit the opportunity to reveal new truth. To use another example, for you to make bread you often take whole ingredients, break them down to smaller forms, extract what you want, discard the rest, reassemble it. This is the function of mind. The soul sees and experiences bread from the gathering of the wheat to the slicing of the loaf.

Even the enemies of Jesus loved him because he approached his relationships applying his soul experience as well as his mental discernment. All of you who have read of his trial before his execution have felt angst over the unfoldment of events, perhaps wished that Jesus could have out-argued his accusers and proved his point. And this he could have done expertly with his mind. No. Instead he stood before his fellows loving them, recognizing the Father's indwelling presence in each of them, grasping fully their current levels of spiritual growth. It did not matter to him to demonstrate his superiority in spiritual unfoldment. It mattered to him that his children who were his accusers had an opportunity to receive divine benevolence, acceptance, and love. This is the manifestation of a mature soul and one who does not fight for truth but lives as truth.

Harold: There's a danger in accepting everyone for where they are in that there would be no challenge to help them progress. If someone is seen doing something wrong or that doesn't make sense even in their own definition, isn't it our responsibility either by example or otherwise to explain that they need to change what they are doing?

Elyon: Yes, this is quite true. This is why the universe is designed as an educational system, each one teaching to the level from which they have just emerged. Because of this process those in need of correction, realignment, or adjustment to higher levels are better receptive to one so near in experience. The one so near in experience offering a revelation of a higher way is more understanding of that particular orientation that is being corrected.

I am glad that you pointed out that acceptance does not imply complacency or condoning of behavior that is disruptive to spiritual harmony. With this understanding and the application of compassion you then become led to minister rather than condemn, to display an alternate and perhaps progressing position for another. To turn this around, each one of you is likewise at a stage of error, and someone will come your way to offer advancement. Discern with your soul the acceptance of the Father of where you are now, the 
grace of His offering through a fellow of that which you can attain immediately.