Early Beliefs about Self and Soul

In the three chapters of Part III, I draw from my training in the history of ideas to provide you with greater perspective on our core themes. My hope is that other Urantia Book students can pick up where I leave off with more in-depth comparative studies of these significant periods in the unfolding of religious consciousness. I end this section with a look at the writings of Ken Wilber, whose work in certain ways culminates the global history of ideas and, in my view, points toward the historic significance of the Urantia Revelation. I am delighted to have been associated in small ways with Ken’s efforts over the years.

The Urantia Revelation offers sophisticated conceptions of Deity, evolution, personhood, soul, spirit, and the afterlife, which I summarized in Parts I and II. But how original are these purportedly revealed concepts? Are the UB’s teachings about such things a radical departure from the pool of human knowledge, East and West, or were some of these notions foreshadowed in traditional beliefs and scriptures? At a minimum, did the wisdom traditions at least break out some of the UB’s key distinctions, such as that between soul and spirit and personhood, or did they confuse or conflate these ideas? In addition, does The Urantia Book make a contribution by clarifying other vital issues in regard to self and soul that have remained mysterious, such as the nature of personhood or the destiny of the soul after death?

Part III offers a brief history of the wisdom traditions in which I attempt to tease out answers to these questions. Chapters 5 and 6 survey premodern beliefs, practices, and philosophies from around the world, but I especially concentrate on those traditional teachings (mainly in the West) that are most frequently referenced in the UB—especially those found in the Bible or in other Christian sources.

Chapter 7 changes gears a bit and focuses mainly on the work of contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber, founder of the integral movement. Wilber and his colleagues have created an impressive integrative philosophic system that highlights essential truths of the world’s wisdom traditions. Integral theory reframes these noble ideas of the past in terms of current scholarship—especially contemporary philosophy, modern evolutionary theory, scientific psychology, and human development theory. Because the integral vision is so inclusive and spiritually rich, it has important affinities with the Urantia text. The modest goal of chapter 7 is to compare and contrast the two with respect to a few key questions in psychology and spirituality, especially with an eye to how each system may enhance the other.

The Invention of the Soul in Primitive Religion

Let’s turn for a moment to the prehistory of humankind, when primitive tribes roamed the Earth in search of the means of survival and clues as to the mysteries of life.

We can only imagine how pummeled these earliest peoples must have felt by the unpredictable phenomena of nature. How would they cope with these overwhelming forces? Anthropologists tell us that indigenous peoples were constantly rocked by fright as well as awe in the face of the inexplicable. The water, the land, the night sky, the parade of wild animals and quirky natural events—all seemed to be animated from within by invisible forces or beings. Without exception, our forbears concluded that there must be a realm of unseen spirits that governed these wonders. But what if these powerful beings were venerated and given sacrifices? What if seers or medicine men could contact and then coax the spirit world to help the tribe in its daily struggles?

It turned out that some medicine men had their own magical powers. They stumbled upon practices or substances that induced altered states, allowing what seemed to be direct communication with the forces and spirits. While in heightened states of awareness, the shamans and seers could also sense a luminous presence within each person. This energy was akin to the magic and power of the spirit world. Did this inner entity or force, they wondered, have its source in the realms that were inhabited by the spirits?

The shamans gave way to priests—designated managers of the innate worship impulse. These individuals supplied the community with stories, symbols, and rituals, and later with scriptures that described the higher forces or principles operating within the spirit world as well as in the human realm.

Death was the greatest mystery to be managed, then as it is now. But the ancient scriptures were often indefinite on this subject. After death, would the aliveness of each person ascend to the upper world where they would meet the spirits? Would it instead descend to the lower world? Or would it return to Earth in a new body?

It had long been observed that when members of the group died, or when animals had been hunted down and killed, their breath disappeared. Was the faculty of breathing, then, the secret of life? And how did the power of breath enter into a newborn in the first place? Where did it go at death? If not breath, what was this animating force in each person, plant, and animal as well as in the weather, the sun, and the stars?

Later, teachers and philosophers arose to systematize the slowly evolving beliefs of their forbears. Their doctrines described a sacred entity within, or a soul of ultimate value, which was perhaps gifted upon humankind by a creator God or Goddess high above. This soul was life itself, the very power of breath. It looked out on the world through the eyes, and it had the ability to think and feel. It could survive death and live on in another realm if certain rules and rites were followed. And it might intercede for us with the higher spirits, if we requested an intervention, especially if the request were directed to deceased ancestors or holy men.

In almost every human tradition around the world, this animating soul was held to be both immaterial and potentially immortal, and the very source of life. But it was rarely described as a repository of one’s daily life experience, with the notable exception of Egyptian religion, the Hindu belief in karma, and some versions of esoteric Christian thought. Nor was it clearly distinguished from other attributes of selfhood, such as an indwelling spark of God or an autonomous selfhood and personality that could reflect and choose. Ancient thinkers, even Plato, most often conflated all these attributes as the self or soul. But at a minimum, some notion of a soul apart from the body was handed down in virtually every indigenous and premodern setting.

Self and Soul in the Ancient Near East

In traditional Western thought deriving from either the religion of Abraham, ancient Egyptian beliefs, or Greek philosophy, the soul was indeed described as an immortal essence that could survive the death of the body. It might live on in a higher world after being vested with a heavenly body, or be deposited in a new body through reincarnation. In the Mediterranean world during the Greco-Roman era, such dualist conceptions were most often rooted in or influenced by Platonism. Plato taught that the soul was the seat of personhood and the source of life. He believed that this nonphysical entity was the totality of a person’s true identity, and that the body was merely incidental as a vehicle for the soul; but this soul did not evolve.

Before Hellenism came to dominate the Eastern Mediterranean world, the Jews taught contradictory doctrines on the question of a soul and an afterlife. For example, in the times of Jesus, the Pharisees believed in a resurrection of the soul after death and held that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the afterlife; but the more literal-minded Sadducee sect repudiated the idea because there was no mention of life after death in the Torah. Still, a few hints of the promise of an eternal life to come are sprinkled in the Old Testament; for example, “Your dead shall live. . . . Awake and sing you dwellers in the dust” (Isaiah 25:8). The Jesus of the New Testament built upon these rudimentary ideas to proclaim the teaching of life eternal, attainable through belief in him and his gospel. And he dramatically and publicly demonstrated the existence of the soul and the afterlife in the most magnificent way possible in his resurrection and ascension.

But as to what and who this personal self was that survived death, and what really happened in the afterlife, little is said in either the Old or the New Testament. In the West, esotericists, mystery schools, and Gnostics influenced by Plato and Jesus attempted in later centuries to fill in the gaps.

It should be well noted, however, that Hebrew tradition does refer to the divinity of the human self. The book of Genesis inscribed upon the Western psyche the notion of the imago dei, the “image of God.” A divine “imprimatur” is stamped by the deities upon each human creature. This scriptural passage (see Genesis 1:27) clearly states that before the fall into sin, the high Gods (the Elohim) determined that they would create man to be “like themselves.” But soon after we were placed on Earth, our intrinsic divine nature was deeply stained by the sin of the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

Jesus later taught that “the Kingdom of God is within you.” Judaism and Islam also embraced the vague notion of the imago dei. But for each of these Abrahamic traditions, Adam’s fall had marred this divine inheritance. Could the original state be recovered? A special deliverance was needed if the self was to be salvaged so that it might survive death. Christian dogma stated that survival of the soul depended on participation in the sacraments of the church and, especially, on a personal belief in Christ, whose blood sacrifice on the cross had “ransomed” humanity from suffering the wages of Original Sin.

Soul and Spirit in the Classic Western Religions

In the religiophilosophic cauldron of Roman times, Greek ideas mixed with Hebrew, Christian, Egyptian, Roman, and many other influences. The linguistic possibility of a distinction between between soul and spirit emerged. The Greek word pneuma, the Arabic word ruh, and the Hebrew ruakh all referred originally to “vital breath,” later translatable as “spirit.” The Greek word for soul, psyche, also had equivalents in the other languages. In Sufism, a distinction was later made between qalb (heart or soul) and ruh (spirit).

In some unusual cases the idea of an inner spirit became more sharply defined as an otherworldly entity or preexistent divine spark that abides within as a gift from a higher being. In particular, the ancient Gnostic sects (which we will explore in chapter 6), most notably Valentinianism, posited an indwelling pneuma that was trapped in the physical world. But perhaps the purest version of this notion emerges much later in liberal Quakerism; its teaching of the “inward light” is strongly reminiscent of the God Fragment of the Urantia Revelation. But these vivid ideas of an Indwelling Spirit sometimes eclipsed the notion of an evolving personal soul in traditional thought; the two concepts rarely coexisted.

By some interpretations, it may also be said that traditional Chinese religion distinguished soul from spirit, as yang and yin. The Egyptians at times distinguished two entities known as the ka and the ba; the soul (ba) contained spiritual characteristics unique to each individual, and the ka was a preexistent life force. Various versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead describe a judgment after death, called the Weighing of the Heart ritual, in which the ba (which faithfully recorded a person’s good and bad deeds during life) was weighed on a scale against “truth and justice.” If the person was judged sufficiently moral, then an ascent of the ba or personal soul into the next world could occur. This Egyptian concept of the ba and its afterlife journey provides perhaps the first ancient version of an ascending personal soul of the sort described in the Urantia Revelation; it was also seen as distinct from a divinely gifted spirit-self. At first, states the Urantia Revelation, “only kings and the rich were promised a resurrection [of an immortal soul]; therefore did they so carefully embalm and preserve their bodies in tombs against the day of judgment. But the democracy of salvation and resurrection as taught by Ikhnaton eventually prevailed, even to the extent that the Egyptians later believed in the survival of dumb animals.” [95:5.13]

Much later, the influence of the great Christian mystics and possibly the influence of Asian ideas led some Christians beyond the classical dualism of body and soul-spirit toward an awareness of a spectrum of levels of being, ranging from body to mind, soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma). But Christians and Jews have long been handicapped by the fact that the terms “soul” and “spirit” are used interchangeably in many biblical passages, as some scholars point out, and also by the dualism of body and soul inherited from Platonism. Apostle Paul and other New Testament writers held to Plato’s dichotomy or fundamental duality of body and soul: each of us is composed of flesh and “soul-spirit,” and the two poles oppose each other in a war of sorts, which can be resolved in favor of salvation and survival after death only by faith in the grace of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, the possibility of a clear distinction between soul and spirit remained latent even in Hebrew scripture. The Hebrew word nefesh (the instinctive part of the self) was translated as psyche in the original Greek of the New Testament. We’ve noted that the Hebrew word ruakh, “vital breath,” was translated as the Greek word pneuma (spirit), which later becomes pneumatic hagio (the Holy Spirit). The term takes on a special meaning after Pentecost, which poured out on all flesh the spirit of the “Comforter.”

The Special Role of Greek Philosophy

Plato is, of course, the original source in the West of what has come to be known as substance dualism. His dialogues depict the human body as a lesser reality that is distinct from the immortal soul, and describe the soul as the source of life itself and the principle of life. The soul preexisted the body and would survive the death of the body. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates teaches his students that after his death, his soul would for a time exist on its own in another world where he will be “in a state of heavenly happiness.” While there, his soul would be able to think and feel and know itself as himself, as Socrates, and would eventually be reborn in subsequent bodies on Earth.

In general, Plato thought the soul was uniform and unitary; it did not have substantive parts, only properties. From the UB point of view, he conflated mind, soul, spirit, and personhood.⁶⁰ First of all, for him the soul was naturally and unconditionally immortal or eternal—not experiential or evolving. The body and all material things, according to Plato, are subject to change and dissolution, but the soul is an otherworldly entity that repeatedly incarnates in new bodies. The soul remains the same in essence throughout its incarnations. It was not influenced by the impulses of an additional entity or external power—that is, the inner spirit as conceived by later esotericists and the UB—but it was guided by its own native capacity to reason. To Plato, the soul’s only aspiration was to return to its eternal nature in a discarnate state, which had been forgotten at birth.

This, of course, is the famed theory of anamnesis, the idea that all true knowledge actually abides in the soul from eternity, and if it is to be retrieved, it must be recollected through conscious effort. “Seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection,” says Socrates in Meno. We can recover knowledge by rational philosophic discourse or by directly contemplating it through a kind of noetic cognition, which will reveal the divine patterns and ideal Forms of each idea or thing that the soul had already understood previous to the current incarnation. These “innate ideas” were self-evident notions intrinsic to the soul’s nature.

For example, at the most basic level, we’re born with souls that automatically understand simple ideas such as 2 + 2 = 4 or the shape of a triangle. Plato illustrates this famously in Meno, where Socrates leads an uneducated slave to solve a complex geometrical puzzle. At a more advanced level, we can discover the apparent existence in our minds of ideals or ideal concepts that cannot have been derived from any worldly experience. For example, consider the idea of perfect equality. We can never have an actual experience of this ideal, so how does it arise in the mind? The same goes for ideas of truth, beauty, goodness, and other abstract concepts—whence do such ideals originate if they are not observable in this world? Plato wondered. In fact, every philosophically significant word we use in everyday speech, such as “justice” or “infinity,” is a particular instance of a corresponding abstract Idea, or ideal Form. Plato posits these ideas as being eternal and incorruptible. Just as physical things are detectible to our bodily senses, these eternal ideas are only intelligible to our intellect. Ergo, the reasoning soul is itself eternal!

In essence, then, copies of ideal Forms actually abide in and as the soul, according to Plato, but they are obscured from view by the trauma of rebirth, and by bodily existence itself, which he compared to a prison. The purpose of education in this life is the recovery of the inborn ideas that one lost awareness of upon entering a new human body.

In this light, consider a unique but rather esoteric comparison: the Urantia Revelation, which is friendly to other cardinal points in Greek philosophy, suggests that the exalted residents of the central universe—who dwell in that highest domain in the cosmos known as Havona—actually instantiate, in their very existence as persons, divine ideals or eternal patterns. And they do so in perfection. In other words, these glorious persons are like walking and talking Platonic ideal Forms. They are nonexperiential beings who have existed from eternity.⁶¹ And all this makes one think that Plato was on to something rather profound with his theory of eternal Forms and the soul’s aspiration to abide in eternity.

Again, Plato never envisioned that the human soul evolves or can itself be modified by experience. Nor could he have ever imagined that the experiential soul—through its quest for perfection through evolution—has a vital contribution to make to these perfect beings residing in the domains of eternity. Yet, as I have noted (and which will be covered in more detail in the final chapter), making such a contribution is one of the primary reasons for our journey through the central universe in the afterlife, according to the UB.⁶²

Another proof of the soul on differing grounds is presented in Phaedrus and elsewhere by Plato, which depicts the soul as something that is uniquely able to “move itself”—as the “self-mover.” At one point he defines the soul as “the motion which can set itself moving” and which alone is able to move the body. Plato’s speculations along these lines led to Aristotle’s formulation that God must be the “Unmoved Mover,” later adopted into Catholic theology. From the point of view of the UB, the ultimate mover must be some other part of the inner triad—that is, the divine spark or the autonomous personality,⁶³ with its God-given attribute of free will. Again, Plato conflated these ideas and attributes into one entity, the soul. But he still managed to provide a rich concept of the ontological soul.

Aristotle’s Monistic Concept of the Soul

Whereas Plato was a substance dualist, Aristotle was a monist in regard to the human person and our attributes and capacities. Aristotle represents a significant minority position in Western tradition that holds that no transcendent soul or spirit of any sort exists on its own and, further, that although what we call the soul may be the seat of reason and insight—and as such may even be incorporeal—it is not immortal; in other words, there can be no instance of a soul without the presence of a material body. Conversely, there could never be a human body without what we call a soul. Soul and body are seen as one in Aristotle’s monist conception, but the word “soul” is used to refer to an intrinsic capacity of a person to feel, think, perceive, or make decisions. It’s not a separate substance that acts on its own.

In De Anima and elsewhere, Aristotle roundly criticized Plato’s arguments for the soul’s separate existence. For Aristotle, the soul is simply the “form” or “principle” of the body. A famous sculptor, for example, is commissioned to represent the emperor Augustus in stone, and the result is a life-sized statue. It may seem as if the artist has enabled the “spirit of Augustus” to enter into and animate his raw materials—but that’s only an illusion created by the artist. In the same way, the soul is merely the form of the body that allows the body to activate itself—or, as Aristotle would say, “strive for its full actualization.”⁶⁴

It is remarkable to what extent Western thought inherited an antinomy, a stark opposition, between its Platonic and Aristotelian lineages. On one hand, the soul is seen an independent, immortal entity divinely endowed with reason and innate ideas according to the Platonic tradition. But in the Aristotelian view, our “soul” is by nature one with us, embedded in our physical form and function and indistinguishable as a separate substance.

Earlier Christian thought, especially in the Hellenistic East, tended toward Plato’s substance dualism; this was especially so with Gnostic esotericism. But the medieval scholastics in Western Europe constructed a workable alternative view based on Aristotle. St. Thomas Aquinas gently overhauled Aristotle’s antidualism, constructing an Aristotelian edifice around the Christian dogma of the immortality and resurrection of the soul. But the result was awkward. Yes, the body and soul were a unity, as Aristotle had insisted, but it was a complex unity. Given that the soul is the abstract “form” of the body, it could for a time lead a separate existence after death before the general resurrection to come. We’ll return to Aquinas in a moment.

The Question of the Indestructibility of the Soul

It is important to remember that in all schools of mainstream Christian thought, salvation means the eventual reconstitution of the whole person in the afterlife, both soul and body.⁶⁵ (The Apostle’s Creed states in part, “I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”) This afterlife unity of body and soul must be so, they believed, because Jesus had himself experienced bodily resurrection while on Earth.

Jesus’s immediate followers and the later Church Fathers concluded that Christ’s resurrection made all believers capable of having their own personal resurrection, first of the soul immediately upon death, and then of our literal terrestrial body as it rejoins the soul after the End of Days. As the idea matured into later Catholic doctrine, the general sequence became as follows: After death, the individual soul is judged. It is either sent to Purgatory for purification and rehabilitation, to heaven for an existence of eternal bliss, or is relegated to hell for an eternity of punishment and pain. But regardless of the soul’s afterlife status, it will unite again with the body on the Last Day. In other words, after the final resurrection of the dead, the bodies of all of the dead—sinners and saints—will reunite with the detached soul that has gone before it either into heaven or into hell; all souls will live on eternally.

Recent scholarship has made clear that this Christian notion of an indestructible soul—which achieves eternal life in heaven or else an eternal damnation in hell, was a vestige of Platonism that somehow survived in Christian doctrine. It was Plato’s old idea of inherent immortality in a new form! This idea of unconditional immortality first originated from the prominent early Church thinkers known as the Alexandrians—Origen and Clement—and then was especially elaborated and propagated by Augustine, from there passing into traditional Church teaching.

But it is well worth noting that today a minority view is gaining prominence, at least among Protestant scholars. It is known as conditional immortality or annihilationism. This new development is of special interest to us because conditional immortality of the soul is the position that the UB takes in its complex teaching about the afterlife.

According to this trend in academic Protestant theology, no specific scripture clearly points to unconditional immortality. Biblical passages that describe the fate of unrepentant sinners, they say, strongly imply that the impenitent person ceases to exist. (For example, in Matthew 13:40–42 Jesus speaks of divine judgment by comparing it to weeds being thrown into a furnace; in Romans 6:23, Paul writes that the “wages of sin is death”; and Revelations vaguely refers to a “second death.”) The loss of immortality by those who utterly reject God is consistent with a loving and merciful God who would never condemn his children to an eternity of conscious pain and suffering.

But isn’t a God who annihilates his errant children also less than loving? Not at all, according to this view. God simply complies with the person’s decision to no longer live on in God’s universe. The annihilation is a mutual decision, not a unilateral ruling of an authoritarian and punishing God. “One of God’s essential considerations on our behalf is to respect our freedom,” according to Robert Wild, one of the rare Catholic scholars to adopt the conditionalist view. “This withdrawl [sic] of existence is not unjust since existence was a perfectly free gift in the first place. God does not owe us continued existence if we refuse to accept the purpose of existence.”

The UB makes clear that all of us will survive into the afterlife; the decision as to whether to engage in the long ascension to Paradise or to else to reject the afterlife career can only be made after our resurrection on high.⁶⁶ Only then are we provided with sufficient knowledge of the ascension plan to make an informed decision. Says the Urantia text: “All will creatures are to experience one true opportunity to make one undoubted, self-conscious, and final choice. The sovereign Judges of the universes will not deprive any being of personality status who has not finally and fully made the eternal choice; the soul of man must and will be given full and ample opportunity to reveal its true intent and real purpose.” [112.5.9] The very high beings called the Ancients of Days (who were introduced earlier as the rulers of our superuniverse) have the exclusive power to annihilate a person that has decided against eternal life, if this person freely chooses this fate. But if we soldier on in our soul growth until God Fusion occurs, an eternal life is assured.

Aquinas on the Aristotelian Self

The Urantia Book may at first glance seem to be Neo-Platonic. But it turns out that the UB’s concept of the soul also shares an important feature with the Aristotelian view, especially in the interpretation of Aristotle’s monism that comes down to us in the work of Aquinas, perhaps the greatest of all medieval philosophers in the West.

We saw that Aristotle described the soul as that which configures the structure and organization of the totality of the self, enabling it to live and breathe and operate in the world. In other words, the soul infuses form and function into the body; plus it actually animates the body with life itself.

A human being is, in other words, a fusion of soul and body. This fusion of elements is comparable to water: oxygen and hydrogen combine to create something new, a distinct substance existing at a higher level. Water has a unique and unitary substance in the same way that a person is a unified self with singular qualities. The “waterness” of water is present because of a chemical affinity (of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen) that resulted in the formation of a water molecule with its exclusive structure.

Aquinas accepts all of these Aristotelian notions about the unitary self, and simply adds that the Christian God makes it all happen. The soul is directly created by God, who pours it into matter, giving the disembodied soul a locus in which it may actualize itself.

But if the soul and body are unitary, how can there be life after death once the bodily form has dropped away? If the soul is not a separate and distinct substance, as is claimed by Plato and the dualists, how can the person have a heavenly existence in the afterlife? Aquinas answers that the soul can subsist (that is, maintain itself at a rudimentary level) on its own in its temporary heavenly estate. It is an incomplete self that lacks the form of personhood, but it possesses the intrinsic spark of life and can maintain itself and even have a functional existence, surviving on high until it is reunited with the body in the great resurrection at the end of the age.

To illustrate this, Aquinas makes clear that when Catholics are praying to the saints in heaven, they are not praying to the actual person of, say, Peter or Paul, but only to their souls, which are not the entirety of the personhood of these men. But when Peter and Paul one day become reconstituted after the final resurrection of the dead—that is, when their resurrected bodies unite with their souls on high—they once again become bona fide persons.

Along the same line, we’ve seen how the Urantia Revelation sharply distinguishes personhood from the evolving soul, not unlike Aquinas. Its teaching on the repersonalization of the self after death is based on the idea that personality, the locus of will and self-awareness, is the superordinate power in the self-system, as we’ve earlier noted. The soul and spirit do have a universe reality apart from their unification in personality, but they cannot constitute a living being with a true identity unless personhood is also present as the organizing principle. Personality alone confers unity and being on the other constituent parts of the system—the surviving soul and the Indwelling Spirit. And when personality is present once again (in the reconstitution of the self after death), we witness a recapitulation of our inner triad, but this time in the raiment of a heavenly body (technically, a morontia form) whose identity is now manifest in and as the surviving soul.

Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas was able to grasp the presence of the Indwelling Spirit as the cocreator of the evolving immortal soul, but they did understand that selfhood must be an unified system that displays identity, will, and self-consciousness through the fusion of form and function. We revisit these ideas in chapter 8.

Saint Augustine and the Human Soul

Of all ancient Western thinkers, St. Augustine offered perhaps the richest set of ideas about the soul in his Confessions and the other monumental works he wrote in the fourth and early fifth centuries, yet he never conceived that souls evolve or that a distinct spark of God exists within. The idea that the virtuous efforts of an experiencing self could generate a surviving soul in cooperation with God simply did not have a place in the early Western Christian theological equation.

Augustine struggled throughout his philosophic career with questions about self and soul. For example, is the soul bestowed by God? Does it pass to a new child through sexual procreation? He also puzzled over the question of exactly how Adam’s sin enters into each new soul. But he was firm in the belief that each soul automatically inherits the stain of ancestral sin as well as the guilt of Adam—a doctrine he adopted wholesale from St. Paul, who himself originated the idea of original sin despite the fact that it had virtually no scriptural precedent.

Because of the Fall, it was said, humans are depraved in nature. We lack the freedom to do good, and cannot perform the will of God without unearned grace. This doctrine of inherited moral depravity greatly influenced the medieval Church’s view of the soul, and was later revivified by Martin Luther and John Calvin, becoming a bedrock belief that has existed within Protestantism ever since.⁶⁷

Like Plato, St. Augustine conceived of the human soul as immaterial. The soul was unitary, but it was a complex unity, endowed with reason and many other faculties. Reason enabled the soul to control the body, Augustine thought, but reason and human will alone could never save the soul. For unless the soul was first redeemed by belief in Christ and by sacramental grace, its pedigree of original sin made its survival in heaven an impossibility. Augustine even believed that unbaptized childen who had died must suffer in hell, an idea that is fortunately no longer subscribed to by the Catholic Church.

Augustine followed Platonists in the belief that the soul is naturally immortal, always destined either for heaven or hell in eternity. But he departed from Plato in his description of the soul as “embodied”; it infused the entire body and could be simultaneously aware of pleasure or pains and other feelings occurring in the parts of the body. Indeed, Augustine came close to the belief that the soul is equivalent to what we today know of as awareness or consciousness. Thus he can be seen to have conflated the soul with what the UB would call the material intellect. But he added the idea that all souls, including consciousness itself, are tainted by the rebellion of Adam and Eve.

The soul not only is the seat of consciousness, but it is also intrinsically self-aware or capable of self-reflection, according to Augustine. In contrast, the UB states that self-awareness is a property of the personality and, further, that the personality’s capacity for self-reflection can only manifest itself through the material self (the mortal intellect) unless and until the seat of personal identity has been transferred to the soul by virtue of evolutionary growth. Augustine could never have envisioned the idea of an unconscious mind that was the locus of the immortal soul.⁶⁸

Finally, for Augustine the soul was not evolutionary. It was not able to improve itself, for example, by unaided moral action or through a Platonic contemplation of higher ideas. Even a soul filled with grace could not evolve toward God. After death, the immortal soul would abide in an incorporeal state until it was reunited with the body on the occasion of the general resurrection of souls at the end of time.

Following Paul, Augustine, and other early teachers, Christians thought of the soul’s heavenly existence as unchanging. There were no educational encounters or higher stages of personal growth in the afterlife—only the eternal bliss of heaven, or the pain of eternal hell. (An important exception, however, is the Catholic idea of Purgatory.⁶⁹) Only much later, in the fourteenth century, did the poet Dante envision an active life in the heavenly estate, but it was not until the visions and revelations of Immanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century that the heavenly life came to be seen as involving moral progression and relationships with others, in ways that were akin to The Urantia Book’s rich conception.

Many fascinating depictions of the afterlife have arisen in modern times, including the teachings of Spiritualism and of those of advanced psychics such as Rudolf Steiner and Edgar Cayce. Mormonism and Seventh Day Adventism also have certain affinities with the teachings of the Urantia Revelation about the soul and the afterlife. Plus, the findings of advanced researchers such as Fredrick Myers and the hypnotist Michael Newton have culminated in the varied maps of the afterlife that students of NDEs are now compiling. It is my hope that others can pick up my thread and provide additional comparative analysis. Because of its beauty, coherence, plausibility, and rich detail, it is my view that the UB’s descriptions of the destiny of the soul are now the standard against which all other models should be compared.

⁶⁰ But Plato was sometimes inconsistent on this point. In The Republic he speaks of the soul as having higher and lower parts: the appetitive (the lowest), the vital, and the rational. He left this discrepancy unresolved, but he made clear that only the rational part had volition and that it governed the lower parts. It could rally its vital center to provide emotional support for its rational purposes.

⁶¹ Imagine the thrill of meeting the person who is the perfect archetype of some long-held ideal of yours when you sojourn someday on one of the worlds of Havona. Can you picture what sort of ecstatic conversation you might have?

⁶² “Through their contacts with ascending pilgrims [humans in the afterlife], the Havoners [individuals residing in the central universe] gain an experience [that] overcomes the experiential handicap of having always lived a life of divine perfection.” [UB: 19:6.2]

⁶³ But the soul is able to self-initiate action at some point in its maturity, the UB says.

⁶⁴ Plato believed that the eye, for example, was just a “pass-through” receptacle; the act of seeing was actually carried out by the soul. But for Aristotle, the actual form of the eye is what imparts to it the capacity to see. Its morphology “actualizes” the eye by allowing it to fulfill its practical function. In that sense, our capacity for vision can’t be understood as a separate substance that is somehow a thing apart from the physical eye. By the same token, our ability to engage in abstract thought, said Aristotle, may seem to be a grand thing—possibly something divine—but it is merely another (albeit higher) form or capacity intrinsic to the body, which is itself contingent and mortal.

⁶⁵ These notions go back to the Old Testament, as one can see, for example, in this passage from Ezekiel 37: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them. . . . you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.”

⁶⁶ According to the UB, this resurrection occurs very shortly after death for those who had achieved the third circle. For all others it happens much later at one of the periodic group resurrections that occur at the end of a dispensation. See 189:3 for a fascinating account of the great dispensational resurrection that took place concurrently with Jesus’s own resurrection on Easter Sunday. Also in this connection, we’ve noted earlier the very exceptional cases of those who translate directly from Earth to the afterlife because they achieved God Fusion while in the flesh.

⁶⁷ This discussion is in part guided by Goetz and Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

⁶⁸ According to my own interpretation, only first circlers are soul-identified, that is, stabilized in soul-consciousness. Because of their advanced status, they have direct access to the contents of the soul, which for the rest of us is hidden away in the unconscious. (In other words, they would need no life review later on.) However, the UB alludes to the idea that the soul and Indwelling Spirit can communicate in the superconscious mind.

⁶⁹ According to this tradition, which dates back to the eleventh century, there exists an intermediate place or state of mind in which purification of the soul may occur before its entrance into heaven. But this option is only available to those whose sins are venial (forgivable by God in the afterlife) as opposed to those who committed mortal sins on Earth and did not repent before death. Such souls are routed to hell with no appeal possible, according to Catholic thought. But it is said that no one on Earth can definitively ascertain the final state of another individual’s soul; that is a private matter between that person and God.