Your Evolving Soul: The Cosmic Spirituality of the Urantia Revelation
352
Your Evolving Soul: The Cosmic Spirituality of the Urantia Revelation
352eBook
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Overview
Sparks of genuine revelation are contained in many religions and esoteric systems. Your Evolving Soul declares that we’ve been graced with a new revelation for our time: the little-known Urantia Book, which has quietly sold over one million copies in a dozen languages. According to the author of this comparative analysis, the disclosures about self, soul, and spirit in the Urantia Revelation stand alone in their coherence and richness of detail. Your Evolving Soul is the first book to fully explain this advanced teaching for the ordinary reader, offering clarity and inspiration for those on any path.
Belitsos compares the Urantia Book’s futuristic teachings about the threefold design of the human self-system to the models of selfhood proposed by many previous thinkers, ranging from from Plato and Saint Augustine to Carl Jung and Ken Wilber. He provides essential context for this discussion by illumining the relationship of the Urantia text to scientific psychology and to the world’s religions, with special emphasis on Christianity and Buddhism. Your Evolving Soul also provides an introduction to the cosmology, theology, and philosophy of the Urantia teaching, and reveals its many affinities with contemporary integral theory and modern theology.
Through his lucid interpretation of the Urantia Revelation, the author offers a model of the human self and soul to be tested, examined, and compared—not a finished truth to be accepted as doctrine. Readers of this book will discover a plausible hypothesis of how our evolving soul becomes an immortal vehicle of our true identity. They also learn how our soul-making decisions can lead to the development of a creative, loving, unified, and perfected personality, now and into the afterlife.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781579830373 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Origin Press CA |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 250,917 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Your Evolving Soul
The Cosmic Spirituality of the Urantia Revelation
By Byron Belitsos
Origin Press
Copyright © 2017 Byron BelitsosAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57983-036-6
CHAPTER 1
Soul Glimpses: Poetic and Paranormal
Think of the Soul. I swear to you that body of yours gives proportions to your Soul, somehow to live in other spheres; I do not know how, but I know it is so.
— Walt Whitman
One hot and humid summer day in 1961 in suburban Cincinnati, I was engaged in aimless play at our neighborhood pool like any other nine-year-old boy. At one point, I jumped into the kids' end of the pool. Or so I thought. I was so startled by the unexpected depth of the water that I began to panic, for I had not yet learned to swim. Instead of gently hitting bottom four feet down, I was now lost in a full ten feet. I struggled and churned, frantic to get my bearings. In a flash, time slowed down as I entered a place of sheer terror. But before I could take a gulp of water, I was pulled free by a vigilant lifeguard.
In the few seconds before the rescue, I had what I would call a mini near-death experience (NDE). I saw my short life pass before me in a complete review: scenes of parents, siblings, school chums, teachers, our cat, my bedroom, me riding my bike — an explosion of distinct images of encounters with each important person or thing in my young world. And each scene that paraded through had an aura of truth and light around it. The feeling associated with this instantaneous experience was rapturous though my body was paralyzed with fear. I believe that this experience provided a rare glimpse of — as Walt Whitman might say — the proportions of my soul. Much later, I came across a poem by Emily Dickinson that seems to capture the essence of this modest childhood NDE:
The Soul's distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity —
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place —
Not yet suspected — but for Flash —
And Click — and Suddenness.
Looking back, I believe that the sudden "Danger" of drowning disclosed to me a "distinct connection," as Dickinson puts it. I caught a vivid peek of what I now believe was my youthful but immortal soul. I discovered ("as Lightning") that the deeper self on the inside (my "Landscape") is luminous. It's available all at once in a "Flash." And yet it was hidden away ("Not yet suspected"). An unfathomable self was hidden (as "Sheets of Place") under the surface person I thought I was.
Dickinson was prescient in declaring that the soul, the essential self, suddenly reveals itself in "quick Calamity." We'll shortly see that NDE life reviews offer paranormal proof of that poetic proposition.
John Keats and the "Vale of Soul-Making"
My own small life review led me to several provisional insights that I have carried with me ever since. We carry within us our life-story-as-a-whole; it contains our essential personal experiences that are somehow cumulatively stored up within us. This corpus of experiences can suddenly disclose itself when we face mortality; and the wondrous and numinous quality of these memories must be evidence of an immortal pedigree.
Further research inspired by the Urantia Revelation builds on these insights. According to my synthesis hypothesis, not only does the human soul consist of the sum total of the energetic record of all of our experiences, but these poignant moments of spiritual significance also have what the UB calls survival value beyond this life and may even contribute something unique to universal evolution.
As I see it, our evolving soul is a living, growing, shimmering entity of light, but its luminosity differs from the pure light of that "spark of God" that, according to poets and Gnostics, also indwells us. Instead, the evolving soul is a psychic product of an alchemical blend of widely divergent elements that, in certain moments of daily experience, get "mixed" behind the scenes in our deepest interior. The process of soul-synthesis occurs when worthy impulses, intentions, or states rise above the instinctive or reactive level of mind to what one could call the mid-mind. There they engage with the indwelling God-self that reaches down from the higher mind, which seeks an energetic resonance of recognition. These factors — a resonating mental content and its acknowledgment by the inner spirit — dissolve, so to speak, into one another, creating a blended substance of the subtle realm whose luster is unique.
In essence, the spirit-self selects and highlights those mind-moments it deems worthy of immortality, even if the immediate experience involved is painful or disturbing or seemingly ordinary. Our afflictions and predicaments and our sincere efforts to adjust to such difficulties — as well as our aspirations and our efforts to attain worthy goals — are especially soul-making. But a third factor is required, according to the UB: another part of us, which the text calls our unchanging and unique personhood, unifies and holds the space for these transactions to occur.
Even a child has such a psychic repository of life memories constitutive of a young soul, as I discovered. But to gain any direct awareness of the soul's subtle content is no small matter. The evolving soul seems to divulge its secrets only when we are in deep and sustained reflection and meditation — or else suddenly in dreams, epiphanies, or calamitous events.
The most potent soul-making situations, I believe, are those in which we wrestle with challenging dilemmas with an attitude of faith and hopefulness. We especially grow and stretch the soul when we are tested by demanding situations that summon creative choices among competing values. And if such choices and the resulting actions are infused with our highest consciousness of truth, beauty, and goodness, then our soul growth is all the more accelerated.
The brilliant John Keats intuited this process in a famous letter to his siblings, in which he opines that the world is "a vale of soul-making" ("vale" referring to "valley"). While making a point about Christianity's misguided theology of suffering, Keats takes a stand for courageous human development as the reason for our sojourn on Earth. To illustrate the idea, he contrasts his idea of soul-making with the traditional Christian idea that this world is a vale of tears. Note how his letter's description of the soul's purpose has an uncanny similarity to our synthesis hypothesis:
The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is "a vale of tears" from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to heaven. What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the world if you please "the vale of soul-making." Then you will find out the use of the world. ... There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity ... in short they are God. How then are souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them, so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? ... Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! ... As various as the lives of men are, so various become their souls.
This world of our travails is a "school for our souls," proclaims Keats, the author of "Ode to a Grecian Urn." And it's fascinating to note that The Urantia Book has a direct allusion to this very letter of Keats: "Jesus hardly regarded this world as a 'vale of tears.' He rather looked upon it as the birth sphere of the eternal and immortal spirits of Paradise ascension, the 'vale of soul making.'" [149:5.5]
In his letter, Keats prophetically distinguishes the evolving human soul from "the sparks which are God." The "sparks of divinity" have "identity given to them," as Keats puts it, and this evolving identity becomes increasingly able show to itself in our moments of crisis or penetrating thought — as Emily Dickinson points out.
Paranormal Revelations of the Soul
Can modern folks like us take inspiration from that which poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and John Keats proclaimed about the soul in the nineteenth century? Can we find scientific support today for what the Urantia Revelation asserted about the evolving soul when it was published in the mid-twentieth century? We can find confirmation, I believe, when we examine the burgeoning scientific data about near-death experiences and related paranormal phenomena.
I first heard about NDEs from Dr. Raymond Moody's classic 1975 book, Life after Life. And I have long been aware that NDE research has generated other bestselling books and inspired feature films. But I was surprised when I later discovered that rigorous scientific research on NDEs has gone on for decades all over the world and is based on a vast archive of data. I've been even more amazed to discover that many of these same research scientists are stepping out as advocates for the existence of a soul or a nonmaterial self that survives into an afterlife. The NDE field has come a very long way from earlier days when experiencers who went public suffered ridicule, social ostracism, and even psychiatric and pastoral abuse and condemnation.
We now know that almost every account we have of the thousands of near-death experiencers (NDErs) includes a report of the joyful awareness of a discrete soul or nonphysical selfhood, along with the certain knowledge that it will survive death. These people are made aware of the same numinous qualities I felt in my mini-NDE, but with far more profundity. My terror of drowning induced a startling epiphany, but a "hard" NDEr actually does drown — as, for example, in the case of Dr. Mary Neal, the director of spine surgery at the University of Southern California, who perished in a whitewater kayaking accident but was revived after experiencing a spectacular NDE. "Before my near-death-experience," says Dr. Neal in an interview, "I believed in God and took my kids to Sunday school but was not particularly religious. ... With my near-death-experience, the truth of God's promises and the reality of eternal life became a part of my every breath. I am in constant prayer and regardless of what I am doing, I try to reflect God's love and live for His glory." A similar case is that of David Bennett, a commercial diver who drowned in a violent storm but returned to tell his own NDE story. Bennett, previously a brash and self-centered young man, is now a well-known inspirational speaker and spiritual teacher.
Generally speaking, NDErs report the following experiences: a temporary (and verifiable) death; a sudden eruption into a supernatural domain of light usually populated by celestial beings and deceased relatives; the experience of being jettisoned back into their once-lifeless body to survive on Earth; and the report of a life-changing memory of these events. Among the most profoundly evidential aspects of their stories are the ensuing radical changes in these people's lives, as witnessed not only in the cases of Neal and Bennett but in hundreds of other instances as well.
NDE archives also include reports from deceased persons who channel from the other side, in what is technically known as After Death Communications (ADC). Many such cases are known as "evidentiary mediumship," because their communications contain verifiable facts and information that could not possibly have been known by the medium. Speaking from the unseen realms, these voices provide unprecedented information about the afterlife through reliable psychic mediums on Earth, some of whom have been studied in extremely rigorous, controlled scientific experiments going back more than a century.
One of the world leaders in the scientific validation of such phenomena is Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona's Department of Psychology. He is the director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health, where he has conducted a myriad of double- and triple-blind studies. Schwartz, the author of The Afterlife Experiments and other important books in this field, has also published more than 450 scientific papers and has studied ADC and other paranormal phenomena for over three decades.
Perhaps the most reliable source of information and research on NDEs is IANDS, International Association for Near Death Studies. Other leading research centers of note in this field are the Institute for Noetic Sciences, led by its chief scientist, Dean Radin, PhD, and the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, led by former radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long. Both men are distinguished authors. Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, was a pioneer academic researcher and original editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
In some spectacular, well-documented cases, the dead are known to speak to us directly through electronic media in a phenomenon known as instrumental trans-communication (ITC). Such cases are included in NDE archives if they independently provide confirmable facts about an individual's life, and for other reasons. Schwartz insists that scholarly afterlife study should include the data that has been gathered regarding NDEs, ADC mediumship, and ITC.
Afterlife reports by NDErs do have wide variations in their particulars and the degree to which these paranormal experiences can be recalled. But the shared characteristics that have been noted by peer-reviewed research scientists reveal uniform features across culture, religion, age, race, and gender. For example, according to premier early NDE researcher Kenneth Ring, author of the classic Lessons from the Light, "Religious orientation was not a factor affecting either the likelihood or the depth of the near-death experience. An atheist was as likely to have one as was a devoutly religious person."
But what's most relevant for our inquiry is that innumerable NDE experiencers — including many children — report having had a life review. We now have at least five thousand documented NDE cases, and about a fifth of these include descriptions of some form of life review.
The cumulative weight of the vast body of life-review cases — along with the rigorous scrutiny of this data by scholars and scientists — points directly to my synthesis hypothesis: We carry within us an up-to-the-minute repository of the poignant experiences of our lifetime, and this record is radically distinct from the brain memories that get extinguished at death. Rather, a certain selection of our life history has been synthesized in and as an immortal soul that lives on without the physical body. This subtle entity survives into the afterlife and somehow displays itself in splendid detail in the NDE life review. It is possible, too, that elements of the life review are summoned from other extradimensional sources.
Such reports by NDE experiencers are all the more significant when we consider that, as author Roy L. Hill, puts it, "[NDErs] are not engaging in speculation. They are reporting consistent observations about the nature of the soul because they are reporting from direct experience. Put more simply, NDErs know the soul because they lived as the soul. Arriving back to their bodies, they were entrusted with more keys to their real essence."
I see NDErs as modern-day Gnostics. NDEs in general, and life reviews in particular, infuse the experiencer with self-knowledge, offering a dramatic revelation of true gnosis — a word that we examine in detail in chapter 6. "When you return to this life," writes experiencer Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot, "you are still a regular person; you haven't suddenly become a spiritual guru or a shaman, although you may become one later. On the other hand, everything in your paradigm has shifted and you possess a rare gnosis that life is eternally continuous. ... I was reborn to a new life (reincarnated) in the same body."
Very often, NDErs describing their life reviews report that they were surprised, deeply embarrassed, and even horrified by the disclosure of their soul's deepest secrets. They even beg to have the life review halted, but are always very lovingly reassured by any higher beings present that the outcome of the review will be beneficial.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Your Evolving Soul by Byron Belitsos. Copyright © 2017 Byron Belitsos. Excerpted by permission of Origin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Note to the Reader xv
Introduction xvii
Part I Introducing an Epochal Revelation
Chapter 1 Soul Glimpses: Poetic and Paranormal 3
John Keats and the "Vale of Soul-Making" 4
Paranormal Revelations of the Soul 7
NDE Life Reviews: Nonjudgmental and Multiperspectival 12
Chapter 2 The Grand Cosmos: A Universal Theater for soul Evolution 19
A Unified Stream of Guidance and Ministry 22
The Personal Heart of Cosmic Reality 24
God as Infinite Love Personified and Self-Distributed 27
The Eternal Trinity and the Origin of Evolution 30
A Brief Anatomy of the Universe of Universes 35
The Trinity in Time and Space 37
The Goal of Perfection in the Afterlife 38
Part II Self and Soul in the Urantia Revelation
Chapter 3 The Synthesis Hypothesis 45
The Human Soul: An Alchemical Synthesis 47
Soul Evolution as a Faith Adventure 50
Faith Marries Potentials to Actuals 54
Exploring the God of Experience 56
The Drama of the Evolving Soul 60
God Fusion: The Ultimate Destiny of the Soul 63
Chapter 4 Cosmic Individuation: The Circles of Self-Perfecting 67
Ideal Conditions for Cosmic Individuation 70
Circle-Making and the Quest for Selfhood Reality 72
Traversing the Seven Circles 75
Jesus and the Two Axes of Self-Perfecting 81
The Vertical Growth of Value-Consciousness 84
Quantitative Soul Growth through Seasoned Experience 86
Part III A History of Self and Soul-East and West
Chapter 5 Early Beliefs about Self and Soul 93
The Invention of the Soul in Primitive Religion 94
Self and Soul in the Ancient Near East 96
Soul and Spirit in the Classic Western Religions 98
The Special Role of Greek Philosophy 99
Aristotle's Monistic Concept of the Soul 102
The Question of the Indestructibility of the Soul 104
Aquinas on the Aristotelian Self 106
Saint Augustine and the Human Soul 108
Chapter 6 Gnosticism, Eastern Christianity, and the The Urantia Book 111
Gnosticism and Christian Heterodoxy 112
Gnostic Myth and the UB's Revealed History 115
Eastern Christianity and the Path of Deification 120
Asian Ideas of Self and Soul 125
Chapter 7 Self and Soul in Modernity and Beyond 131
Modernism and its Discontents 134
The Coming of the Integral Age 137
Integralism and the Urantia Revelation 140
"Showing Up" with Multiple Perspectives 142
Wilber and the UB on "Growing Up" 147
The Lines of Human Development 150
Which Line of Growth Is Central in Human Development? 155
Part IV Foundations of Cosmic Spirituality
Chapter 8 The Nature of Personality Reality 165
The Origin of the Idea of Personality in the West 166
The Riddle of Personhood-Ancient and Modern 168
Personality as Host, Unifier, and Systematizer 171
More Paradoxes of Human Personality 175
Revisioning Personhood with the Urantia Revelation 177
Chapter 9 The Gift of the Divine Indwelling 187
A Grand Meeting of Opposites 189
Naming and Describing the Inner Divinity 191
The Inner Betrothal Day 196
The Felt Experience of the Inner Light 199
Chapter 10 Cultivating Contact with Spirit 205
The Path and Fruition of Disciplined Meditation 206
God-Consciousness and Intellectual Self-Mastery 209
Divine Will Is Yoked to Human Will 212
The Inner Discovery of Life Purpose 217
Reincarnation on Earth Versus Purposeful Ascension 219
Chapter 11 Evolutionary Deity and Cosmic Spirituality 225
The Grand Project of the Ages 230
Special Supplement
Section 1 An Apologia 243
Section 2 Key Celestial Authors of the UB 251
Section 3 Human Sources for the Urantia Revelation 253
Section 4 The Origin Story of the Urantia Papers 259
Section 5 The Historicity of Revelation 265
Appendices
Appendix A Urantia Cosmology and Current Astrophysics 269
Appendix B Mother Spirit and Christ Michael: Local Universe Representatives of the Trinity 273
Appendix C Some Core Contributions of Ken Wilber 275
Appendix D The Quantum Plenum and Space Potency 279
Acknowledgments 281
Glossary of Terms 283
Bibliography 297
Index 301
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