The Spirit in Man

Spirit never drives, it only leads. If you are a willing learner, if you want to attain spirit levels and reach divine heights, if you sincerely desire to reach the eternal goal, then the divine Spirit will gently and lovingly lead you along the pathway of sonship and spiritual progress. Every step you take must be one of willingness, intelligent and cheerful co-operation. The domination of the Spirit is never tainted with coercion nor compromised by compulsion.

LESSONS 1 to 4 are now available! Other lessons will become available soon.

ALL MATERIAL ON THIS SITE IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.

LESSON 1: Spirit Foundation & Support Infrastructure

Spirit foundation: The sevenfold spirit influence

Holy Spirit in the Bible

The terms Holy Spirit, Holy Ghost, and the Spirit of God are used somewhat interchangeably in the Bible. These designations cover the references in the Urantia Book of the following different Spirit realities:

  1. Personality circuit of the Universal Father.
  2. The spirit circuit of the Eternal Son.
  3. The omnipresence of the Infinite Spirit.
  4. The Thought Adjuster bestowals of the Father.
  5. The Holy Spirit presence of the local universe Mother Spirit.
  6. The Spirit of Truth.
  7. The seven adjutant mind-spirits of the local universe mind endowment.
Some main attributes of Spirit are (with Biblical references):
The Urantia Book expands our comprehension of Spirit

In a way, mankind is subject to the double influence of the sevenfold appeal of the universe spirit influences. The early evolutionary races of mortals are subject to the progressive contact of the seven adjutant mind-spirits of the local universe Mother Spirit. As man progresses upward in the scale of intelligence and spiritual perception, there eventually come to hover over him and dwell within him the seven higher spirit influences.
And these seven spirits of the advancing worlds are:

  1. The bestowed spirit of the Universal Father — the Thought Adjusters.
  2. The spirit presence of the Eternal Son — the spirit gravity of the universe of universes and the certain channel of all spirit communion.
  3. The spirit presence of the Infinite Spirit — the universal spirit-mind of all creation, the spiritual source of the intellectual kinship of all progressive intelligences.
    Note:  These first three Spirits are part of circuits originating beyond the boundaries of Nebadon.
  4. The spirit of the Universal Father and the Creator Son — the Spirit of Truth, generally regarded as the spirit of the Universe Son.
  5. The spirit of the Infinite Spirit and the Universe Mother Spirit — the Holy Spirit, generally regarded as the spirit of:
  6. The mind-spirit of the Universe Mother Spirit — the seven adjutant mind-spirits of the local universe.
  7. The spirit of the Father, Sons, and Spirits — the new-name spirit of the ascending mortals of the realms after the fusion of the mortal spirit-born soul with the Paradise Thought Adjuster and after the subsequent attainment of the divinity and glorification of the status of the Paradise Corps of the Finality. 

The following three distinct spirit circuits originate in the local universe of Nebadon:

  1. The bestowal spirit of the Creator Son, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth.
  2. The spirit circuit of the Divine Minister, the Holy Spirit.
  3. The intelligence-ministry circuit, including the more or less unified activities but diverse functioning of the seven adjutant mind-spirits. These are the 7 spirits mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

The Urantia Book identifies these seven adjutant mind-spirits of the Book of Revelation.
These mind-spirits function in the human mind in accordance with its capacity of receptivity.

  1. Spirit of Intuition.
  2. Spirit of Understanding.
  3. Spirit of Courage.
  4. Spirit of Knowledge.
  5. Spirit of Counsel.
  6. Spirit of Worship.
  7. Spirit of Wisdom.

This simple chart illustrates the relationships between these various Spirits. In combination they form the Spiritual infrastructure which guides all intelligent life to discover itself and the very source of life and creation. Spirits-chart.pdf

A solid Spiritual foundation provides the Divine downreach to man, but does not begin and end merely in the Spirit realm. Man finds himself in the mortal-physical realm, and as such must also provide his own upreach to Divinity through his own initiatives and co-creative efforts, in response to the gentle and loving promptings of his Spirit helpers. One such co-creative upreach initiative is known as A Spiritual Bill of Rights for Humanity.

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LESSON 2: Father's Gift to Man — His Spirit Fragment

It all begins with the gift of personality

Personality is difficult to define — but it always seeks unification.

Personality is recognized as functioning on diverse levels:

  1. Physical level — the physique.
  2. Intellectual level — the mind.
  3. Emotional level — temperament.
  4. Social level — ethical disposition.
  5. Moral level — the character.

Personalities may be similar, but they are never the same. Persons of a given series, type, order, or pattern may and do resemble one another, but they are never identical. Personality is that feature of an individual which we know, and which enables us to identify such a being at some future time regardless of the nature and extent of changes in form, mind, or spirit status. Personality is that part of any individual which enables us to recognize and positively identify that person as the one we have previously known, no matter how much he/she may have changed. It is through personality that you will be able to recognize your friends and loved ones in Heaven. Personality is like a unique signature that each one of us has, and it cannot be forged or duplicated.

Personality is distinguished by two self-manifesting phenomena of behavior: self-consciousness and associated relative free will.

Self-consciousness consists in intellectual awareness of personality; it includes the ability to recognize the reality of other personalities. It indicates capacity for individualized and shared experience. Self-consciousness recognizes the functioning of mind and the relative independence of creative and determinative free will.

The relative free will which characterizes the self-consciousness of human personality is involved in:

  1. Moral decision, highest wisdom.
  2. Spiritual choice, truth discernment.
  3. Unselfish love, brotherhood service.
  4. Purposeful co-operation, group loyalty.
  5. Cosmic insight, the grasp of universe meanings.
  6. Personality dedication, wholehearted devotion to doing the Father’s will.
  7. Worship, the sincere pursuit of divine values and the wholehearted love of the divine Value-Giver.

The full function of a personality indwelt by a fragment of God the Father (a Thought Adjuster), is what constitutes a spiritual son/daughter of God.

Father's downreach to the inner man via His Thought Adjusters

As discussed in The Soul in Man LESSON 1, Father's next gift to man is a fragment of Himself in the form of a divine and perfect Thought Adjuster (TA), which arrives when the first moral decision is made.

A person's biological sex is of no consideration in the assignment of a Thought Adjuster. Both males and females are equal recipients of TAs.

Man does not have to go farther than his own inner experience of the soul's contemplation of this spiritual-reality presence to find God and attempt communion with him because God lives through His Thought Adjusters in every one of his Spirit-born sons and daughters. What a mistake to dream of God in some far off place when the Spirit of the Universal Father, His TA, lives within your own mind!

Man does not passively surrender his will to the Adjuster. Man is not a slave to his Adjuster. Instead, man can choose to actively, positively, and co-operatively follow the Adjuster's leading. To the Thought Adjuster the human will is supreme. And they so regard and respect it while they strive to achieve the spiritual goals of thought adjustment and character transformation in the almost limitless arena of the human intellect.

That somewhat explains what this downreach is, but how does it actually work in man?

The very simplest way of explaining it is that mind is your ship, the Adjuster is your pilot, the human will is captain.

Remember from The Soul in Man LESSON 1, that the arrival of the Thought Adjuster also signifies the creation of a new nascent soul. That person is then responsible for the growth and survival of his/her new soul, but man is not born with an instruction manual on soul growth. In a simple sense the Thought Adjuster is akin to such an instruction manual. The TA is the one who guides, teaches and encourages a person to pursue the types of adventures and experiences that promote genuine soul growth. And this is not done haphazardly. There is a universal approach to soul growth based on 7 fundamental, essential and sequential stages of soul development. These are referred to as the 7 psychic circles.

These 7 psychic circles are an inner reflection of the universal expression of the 7 Heavens which are discussed in our School of Cosmology curriculum called: A Traveler's Guide to the Galaxy.

We know very little about these 7 psychic circles other than psychic circle 4 has to do with becoming socialized (according to Father's standard), and that one cannot progress through them randomly. They must be accomplished in sequential order and an inner journey of self discovery, leading prograssively inward. They deal with inner personal growth of survival value, in other words soul growth. While full knowledge of these 7 psychic circles is the domain of the Thought Adjuster, how they are applied to each person's soul growth can vary significantly from one person to the next, and that makes these 7 psychic circles difficult of precise explanation.

The Urantia Book has extensive coverage of Thought Adjusters in papers 107 to 112.

Father's downreach to the outer man via His Spirit of Truth

The new helper which Jesus promised to send into the hearts of believers, to pour out upon all flesh, is the Spirit of Truth. This divine endowment is not the letter or law of truth, neither is it to function as the form or expression of truth. The new teacher is the conviction of truth, the consciousness and assurance of true meanings on real spirit levels. And this new teacher is the spirit of living and growing truth, expanding, unfolding, and adaptative truth. Urantia Book 180:5.1

Father's Thought Adjusters function in the human mind in perfect synchrony and co-ordination with all other spirit ministries, including adjutant mind-spirits, Holy Spirit, Spirit of Truth, and other influences.

While the Thought Adjuster functions in the human mind and guides us through the inner journey of our own intimate spiritual journey to contact the Father, the Spirit of Truth functions in the human heart to lead us through the 4 levels of outward interpersonal growth.

The Spirit of Truth is covered in LESSON 7.

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LESSON 3: Man's Gift to the Father — Doing of the will of God

The upreach of man to God

The topic of doing the will of God is such an extensive subject that we simply cannot do it justice in this short lesson. Entire books can easily be dedicated to merely a single aspect of this vast study. And so, in the spirit of keeping this lesson down to a reasonable length, we have chosen to highlight some major points through the use of simple lists. We leave it as an exercise for the reader to dig deeper into his/her specific areas of interest.

Personal religious experience

Every different culture of humanity has its own unique religious perspective on human existence, and these religions can never come to intellectual unification. Human unity can only be achieved through the religion of the Spirit. Human minds may differ, but all humanity is indwelt by the same Spirit. The hope of human unity can only be realized when the divergent religions become transformed by the unifying and ennobling religion of the Spirit — the religion of personal spiritual experience.

The religion of the spirit means effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty, and progress. The religion of the mind — the theology of authority — requires little or none of these exertions from its believers. Tradition is a safe refuge and an easy path for those fearful and halfhearted souls who instinctively shun the spirit struggles and mental uncertainties associated with those faith voyages of daring adventure out upon the high seas of unexplored truth in search for the farther shores of spiritual realities as they may be discovered by the progressive mind and experienced by the evolving soul.

The philosophic elimination of religious fear and the steady progress of science add greatly to the end of false gods and to the eventual destruction of that ignorance and superstition which so long obscured the living Creator of eternal love. The relation between the creature and the Creator is a living experience, a dynamic religious faith, which is not subject to precise definition. To isolate part of life and call it religion is to disintegrate life and to distort religion. Religious convictions may be arrived at through wise reasoning, but the individual becomes certain only through personal experience.

Marks of religious living
    1. Causes ethics and morals to progress despite inherent animalistic tendencies.
    2. Produces sublime trust in the goodness of God in the face of bitter disappointment and crushing defeat.
    3. Generates profound courage and confidence despite natural adversity and physical calamity.
    4. Exhibits inexplicable poise and sustaining tranquility notwithstanding baffling diseases and acute physical suffering.
    5. Maintains a mysterious composure of personality in the face of maltreatment and the rankest injustice.
    6. Maintains a divine trust in ultimate victory in spite of the cruelties of seemingly blind fate and the apparent utter indifference of natural forces to human welfare.
    7. Persists in the unswerving belief in God despite all contrary demonstrations of logic and successfully withstands all other intellectual sophistries.
    8. Exhibits undaunted faith in the soul’s survival regardless of the deceptive teachings of false science and the persuasive delusions of unsound philosophy.
    9. Lives and triumphs irrespective of the crushing overload of the complex and partial civilizations of modern times.
    10. Contributes to the survival of altruism in spite of human selfishness, social antagonisms, industrial greeds, and political maladjustments.
    11. Steadfastly adheres to a sublime belief in universe unity and divine guidance regardless of the perplexing presence of evil and sin.
    12. Goes right on worshipping God in spite of anything and everything. Declares: “Even though he slay me, yet will I serve him.”
      ~ All references are from the Urantia Book.
Religion in relation to social institutions
Characteristics of true religion
What of faith and belief
Religious insight
Religious experience
Science and religion
Philosophy and religion
21 Steps to a spiritual awakening
  1. Recognizing our need
  2. Believing in God
  3. Accepting God's grace
  4. Admitting our shortcomings
  5. Forgiving others
  6. Asking others' forgiveness
  7. Accepting God's forgiveness
  8. Living new lives
  9. Committing ourselves
  10. Praying
  11. Balancing physical with spiritual
  12. Persisting in our search
  13. Gaining perspective
  14. Gaining faith
  15. Experiencing assurance
  16. Deepening fellowship
  17. Serving others
  18. Sharing our spiritual experience
  19. Loving each other
  20. Loving Jesus
  21. Loving God
Conditions of effective prayer — The laws of prevailing petitions


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LESSON 4: The Universe Mother Spirit

Good morning, my dear ones. This is Nebadonia, your Local Universe Mother Spirit. I would be happy to give you a few facts about myself. I am called a single-origin being, which means that my parent — the Infinite Spirit of Paradise — is who long ago created me to fulfill this function of being the Mother Spirit of a Local Universe out here in time and space. I was created, and am always tickled to be, a companion to Michael, a Creator Son of God, a dual origin being whose parents are God the Father and God the Eternal Son. The two of us got to know each other, then left Paradise many hundreds of billions of years ago to come out and organize preexisting material in space to, in time, create the organized systems of worlds in our Local Universe.

I was part of the creation and evolution of life

We also created many orders of spiritual beings who, once the evolutionary worlds were ready for it, helped us create physical life on these planets, and then shepherd the evolution of that life along to human beings. In the case of your world, this was about a million years ago when the first human beings were able to receive God's presence — Thought Adjusters — within them. They were twins — Andon and Fonta. This evolution of life through to the emergence of human beings was directed both by the Life Carriers who started life, and me. So you are by no means an accident, neither in your origin nor in your destiny, which is forever if you so choose. In fact the pattern for your kind of being is quite eternal and existed long before our Local Universe.

You will meet and live with higher spiritual beings

I have been the Nebadon Mother Spirit now for nigh on to four million evolutionary worlds inhabited with your order of beings. As for the orders of higher spiritual beings Michael and I have given birth to, it is your destiny — after your physical death and in your continuing life — to meet and live with them as you work your way up through the transition worlds of our Local Universe. You will be meeting and living with these different orders of spiritual beings, starting with the cherubim and sanobim who will be your companions. When you first regain consciousness after death, you will have these Morontia Companions to lead you to your new living quarters. In time as you evolve yourselves, from being less physical to more purely spiritual, you will be able to visualize and associate with these ever-higher orders of spiritual beings as you grow to acquire their larger dimensions of reality.

Also, as you get more and more spiritual, you and I come into an ever-greater companionship. But even now as a human being in your first life, I'm very much a part of your mentality as an inner spiritual presence throughout the space of our Local Universe. I'm like a bubble in foam since my spirit determines the spatial extent of our Local Universe and, as I am surrounded by other Local Universes, my space impinges upon theirs. Being spiritual, their Mother Spirits and I are quite familiar sisters with each other. In fact, through our mother — the Infinite Spirit of Paradise — we keep in touch with each other throughout our Super Universe of about 100,000 Local Universes. I briefly mention this because your Urantia Book reminds you that a hallmark of wisdom is a sense of proportion.

Acquiring a sense of proportion

This truth personally applies as you grow up through your childhood and adolescence, especially now in your modern electronic age of television, computers and internet. You encounter thousands of concepts concerning scientific facts, and the social/political realms, long before your own living experience gives some substance to them. Here my Mind/Spirit Adjutant of Wisdom augments this function of your mind and soul. You begin to get your own sense of proportion as together we begin to flesh out the sometimes disproportionate and biased viewpoints given in your mass media.

This is why Michael and I encourage you to constantly reach out and foster an inexhaustibly hungry curiosity for ever broader points of view. You live in a big world of literally thousands of different cultures, now so much more available to you. We tease you not to settle for the small picture, but constantly strive for an ever larger one to give you a greater sense of proportion. This is not only for your own personal life, but also for your responsibilities and duties as a citizen of your local community, state, and nation.

Your curiosity and spiritual creativity

With this wonderful aspect of curiosity, this hunger for more experience, you can fulfil your function out here in time and space: You can keep growing. Always remember: your essence — your personality — is unchanging — you will always be you. So too is the presence within you of God himself. We call this presence a Thought Adjuster because God can give you literal, discreet ideas to consider, right along with your own. Being a spiritual/creative being, you have your own original ideas to consider, plus you also have God’s.

While your personality is unchanging, the interaction between you and this presence of God — the co-author of your soul of experience, this relationship is one of constant change, constant growth. This is your function and your purpose here, my children: to experience life. Yet some poor, lazy souls consider curiosity a curse. They want to settle down and say “Enough! I’ve had enough of life!” Yet in this case, shy of dying they are driven on to keep experiencing and growing.

One essential tool you are given as part of your nature is something we call courage. Again, this is part of you, part of your mind, and spirit, and soul that I augment. My dears, always remember you live within me. I am surrounding you and part of your mentality simply because I am a Creator Daughter of God. We are in contact and your spirit and mine are intertwined.

Perception — Knowledge — Understanding — Courage — Counsel

It is my delight to experience your life right along with you, my purpose to augment your dimensions of mind and spirit. I boost your Perceptions and your ability to grow Knowledge — what you've personally experienced in your life. I help your ability to coordinate your knowledge as Understanding, especially what leads to what, what causes what. I help you with the Courage to keep exploring and growing.

Beyond these four is my Mind/Spirit of Counsel with which I augment your abilities to relate with each other. I help you counsel each other by sharing your experiences, your knowledge, and your understanding. This enhances your part in God's great attribute of sharing, here, your life with others — my Spirit of Counsel.

The power and connection of worship and wisdom

I help you worship — to feel and express your appreciation for being alive. Think of what you encounter, not only in your immediate environment but now, through your modern technology, the universe with its hundreds of millions of galaxies and their attendant gigantic phenomena. I help you be aware and thankful for all of this, all the way to God our Father. Fundamentally, what we call Worship is simply, yet most profoundly, ”Thank you, Father — for me. Thank you that I am! Thank you for my unique personhood that you created to share so much with me. You’ve made us so much alike — each a center and co-creator of everything we have the ability to experience. So: thank you for me. And thank you for all these others like me with whom to share my life." Finally, in time, along comes my seventh Mind/Spirit Adjutant to help you summarize and effectively use the previous six — Wisdom. It’s the great functioning treasure you are earning by living day to day.

With these adjutants in mind, let’s focus on courage. Think of it as a precious ability. It’s what you need to fulfill your God-given curiosity to extend yourself into — and do — what is yet unknown to you. This is Total Reality, and encompassing to you. It contains you and is infinite to your order of being — no top, no bottom, no sides, no end in time. Your wonderful Urantia Book encourages you to entertain the notion that even the inexorable passing of time can be endless forever — if you so choose — in an Eternal Now.

And now, especially because you are physical and involved in real possibilities called health, and danger, and injury — i.e. mortality — it takes courage to even want to extend yourself, let alone be able to extend yourself. Yet insofar as this is a major demand of your function as a living, soulfully growing, experiential being, you can never have enough courage. It’s always something you want to treasure, appreciate, and above all exercise.

The need to exercise courage

Exercise courage in the physical realm as well as in the intellectual and spiritual realms because it helps you expand in all of these. Physically it helps you with these bodies of yours so susceptible to pain, injury, and aging. Constantly, and ever so carefully, feel your way forward through pain and fear. Get out there and experience this world you live in, full of the others surrounding you. Every single one of them is like you, a unique being directly from God. My dears, these others — family, friends and even strangers passing you on a busy city sidewalk are what truly fill your soul, not only the physical things you own and treasure and have fun with, but these other living unique beings. Through all the aches and pains, courage helps you stretch, stay loose, mobile, and able to get out there — to move and keep moving.

In intellectual realms, you are also in another enormous encompassing of mind and spirit that challenges what you have accepted so far. It takes courage to seek and encounter those things which are directly contradictory to what you believe to be true. This is especially important, not so much in scientific realms of empirical knowledge — things that can be demonstrated — but in the social/political realms where you run into bias at every turn. Not all this bias is necessarily cynical or malicious. It just arises from the enormous variety of human life on your world, everything from living in the center of a great city, to being out on the open farmlands and in the small towns. There are hundreds of different human cultures in all the countries of your world. Now you can internet-contact and enjoy all these different viewpoints that directly challenge what you have accepted so far. Keep reaching. Keep growing.

Here is where you most need to broaden your horizons so your own personal, social and political viewpoint expands and helps you fulfill an ever-greater responsibility to make choices as you mature. This is your intellectual courage. Continue to fearlessly entertain different notions, trusting your ability to sort through things, correlate and compare them, and then come up with agreements and disagreements that add to your wisdom. This is where your curiosity is so valuable, and your courage so necessary.

The courage to act upon God’s suggestions

Michael and I remind you that your spiritual nature is your creative component — to personally come up with something new. This too takes courage to exercise, to put the new ideas into reality and act upon them. The idea is one thing, and the necessary precursor, but then to act upon it sometimes takes enormous courage. It’s why Michael and I have often encouraged keeping an open mind to what comes up, because ideas are partly God’s — right? It’s your Thought Adjuster teasing you with a new idea. So entertain it and keep it in mind — whether you can do it right away, or not.

Both God’s and others’ creativity and control

God’s ideas might be challenging the comfortable mode of life you've evolved so far. Keep them in mind, and let them tease you to act, because they help you grow and add something new to your soul. Remember, my dears, you are in God's Reality, and his creation is not repeating itself. There is something presently and eternally new within what we call his Eternal Now, and not only through God’s incessant, ongoing creativity. There’s the creativity of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of personal beings throughout the universe, co-creating and controlling this whole physical creation. Imagine the spiritual extent of it — some 300 levels to grow into by the time you get to Paradise, some 300 levels of reality that surround you even now. You will grow to recognize and use them, one at a time, in your coming future.

My dears, this is the function and the glory of courage, that loving companion to your curiosity that helps you stay hungry for more — and keep growing. You have an eternity of experience to come, in an ever-new Eternal Now.

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LESSON 5: The Adjutant Mind Spirits & The Holy Spirit

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Opening 2025!

LESSON 6: The Creator Son

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LESSON 7: The Spirit of Truth

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LESSON 8: The Most Highs

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Opening 2025!

LESSON 9: The Planetary Manager & the 24 Elders

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Opening 2025!

LESSON 10: Angels — Lots and Lots of Angels

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Opening 2025!