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Who Am "I"?
26 posts · 5 participants · started Apr 26, 2016, 5:19 PM
Gee fellas, thanks. What a surprise! And it isn’t even my birthday.
I thought I’d share a page from my mini-ebook on the Holy Spirit as it is pertinent to this topic about identity:
Human beings are permitted to chose their own identity. They can associate themselves with different aspects of reality according to their own liking. The ideas people usually associate themselves with are the ones they recognize and comprehend as having meaning in their lives. A progressing individual strives for greater meaning, and we are told that it is not so much what a person is, but what a person is striving to become, that really matters to the cosmos.
For evolving humans there are two basic types of identity to choose from, temporal and eternal. Temporal identity is focused on material and earthly things; eternal identity is focused on spiritual values. The goal of experience is to transfer one’s identity from an infatuation with the transient material aspects of life to the more enduring and potentially eternal realities discovered within the morontia soul.
What a person strives to become is what a person is attempting to identify with. To identify with something is to recognize its value and desire to make it personally meaningful. For this reason, the character of the personality reflects what it identifies with. The character of a personality striving to identify with the spirit within its soul will reflect spiritual fruit as a consequence.
Striving is a discovery process which leads the mortal mind to the morontia soul and the Spirit who indwells it. The mind aroused by the spirits of worship and wisdom is the gateway to the soul, and the path through that gateway is illuminated by the combined ministries of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of Truth. Discovering that gateway and beginning on the path to higher meanings requires but a flicker of faith, a drop of desire. However, continuing on the path requires persistent dedication, and most of all, striving to love. Love is capable of identifying the will of God, and it is literally true that Deity must be loved in order to be known.
- 111:1.5 And it is not so much what mind comprehends as what mind desires to comprehend that insures survival; it is not so much what mind is like as what mind is striving to be like that constitutes spirit identification.
- 107:6.2 Your individual Adjusters work to spiritize you in the hope of eternalizing your temporal identity.
- 5:2.4 The proof of fraternity with the divine Adjuster consists wholly in the nature and extent of the fruits of the spirit which are yielded in the life experience of the individual believer. “By their fruits you shall know them.”
- 2:6.9 Love identifies the volitional will of God.
On potential and identity:
112:2.20 (1229.7) The material self, the ego-entity of human identity, is dependent during the physical life on the continuing function of the material life vehicle, on the continued existence of the unbalanced equilibrium of energies and intellect which, on Urantia, has been given the name life. But selfhood of survival value, selfhood that can transcend the experience of death, is only evolved by establishing a potential transfer of the seat of the identity of the evolving personality from the transient life vehicle — the material body — to the more enduring and immortal nature of the morontia soul and on beyond to those levels whereon the soul becomes infused with, and eventually attains the status of, spirit reality. This actual transfer from material association to morontia identification is effected by the sincerity, persistence, and steadfastness of the God-seeking decisions of the human creature.
110:7.5 (1212.6) When the evolving soul and the divine Adjuster are finally and eternally fused, each gains all of the experiencible qualities of the other. This co-ordinate personality possesses all of the experiential memory of survival once held by the ancestral mortal mind and then resident in the morontia soul, and in addition thereto this potential finaliter embraces all the experiential memory of the Adjuster throughout the mortal indwellings of all time. But it will require an eternity of the future for an Adjuster ever completely to endow the personality partnership with the meanings and values which the divine Monitor carries forward from the eternity of the past.
As I recall, there is text which says that potential which becomes realized/actualized creates ever more potential for even more realization still to come. Our own potential expands by its own realization over time by increased experience and wisdom. An endless cause and effect loop magnifying unknown potentials that are, as of yet, not even recognized as potential. In each life and in the collective universes, every embrace and expression of truth, beauty, and goodness (love) is another seed planted with more potential for the each and the all, which “will require an eternity” to be fully expressed.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
I thought I’d share a page from my mini-ebook on the Holy Spirit as it is pertinent to this topic about identity:
Thanks Bonita!! I think one of the most important opportunities on this Forum is for each student to learn to articulate the contents of the Revelation by writing about our growing understanding of the text. For new readers, simply learning what the UB says on multiple topics is very important, but for the student who is to also learn to teach others (a mandate given in the Papers – you have not learned what you cannot teach), such personal expressions of knowledge and understanding is a challenge. The next challenge is to learn how to give such expression in different settings to different religionists in a way that is a finding of common beliefs in ways which allow the introduction of knowledge in a non-threatening or self righteous manner.
The willingness to so share must be combined with wisdom and graciousness and where better to learn than this place and others like it where sincere students may freely share concepts and perspective in a nurturing environment for such sharing….and caring.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
- Bradly wrote: As I recall, there is text which says that potential which becomes realized/actualized creates ever more potential for even more realization still to come. Our own potential expands by its own realization over time by increased experience and wisdom. An endless cause and effect loop magnifying unknown potentials that are, as of yet, not even recognized as potential.
The quote I think you are referring to is 115:3.6 which states that the final dynamics of the universe concerns transferring potentials to actuals. There can never be an end to potentials since the source is the I AM. We also know that gravity response reacts only to actuals, which functions to return them to their source as well as maintain cohesiveness and stability. Actuals open a revelation of more potentials for recognition and growth, a process which will never end because the source of potentials never ends.
p1263:3 115:3.16 The final dynamics of the cosmos have to do with the continual transfer of reality from potentiality to actuality. In theory, there may be an end to this metamorphosis, but in fact, such is impossible since the Potential and the Actual are both encircuited in the Original (the I AM), and this identification makes it forever impossible to place a limit on the developmental progression of the universe. Whatsoever is identified with the I AM can never find an end to progression since the actuality of the potentials of the I AM is absolute, and the potentiality of the actuals of the I AM is also absolute. Always will actuals be opening up new avenues of the realization of hitherto impossible potentials—every human decision not only actualizes a new reality in human experience but also opens up a new capacity for human growth. The man lives in every child, and the morontia progressor is resident in the mature God-knowing man.
For us humans we actuate by choice, and if we choose a higher truth, it will actualize. Untruths will not actualize, they cannot be acted out because they are unreal. The reason why living truth, the process of actuating potentials, increases the possibility for further growth has to do with human free will. Free will can only function within actualized reality. But because human mind has a spirit nucleus, it can strive to discover, recognize and interpret unactualized (potential) reality, then exercise volition to actualize it as a finite reality. This widens the scope of free-will choice. Unactualized reality (potential) and creative imagination are cousins. And that is why the Adjuster can do some really fine work of revealing cosmic potentials within the “controlled channels of creative imagination.” And that is also why the Spirit of Truth is so valuable in translating and revealing ways to actualize, or live those potentials.
p1300:3 118:6.7 Volition, the act of choosing, must function within the universe frame which has actualized in response to higher and prior choosing. The entire range of human will is strictly finite-limited except in one particular: When man chooses to find God and to be like him, such a choice is superfinite; only eternity can disclose whether this choice is also superabsonite.
109:5.1 Supreme and self-acting Adjusters are often able to contribute factors of spiritual import to the human mind when it flows freely in the liberated but controlled channels of creative imagination. At such times, and sometimes during sleep, the Adjuster is able to arrest the mental currents, to stay the flow, and then to divert the idea procession; and all this is done in order to effect deep spiritual transformations in the higher recesses of the superconsciousness. Thus are the forces and energies of mind more fully adjusted to the key of the contactual tones of the spiritual level of the present and the future.
101:6.7 Revelation teaches mortal man that, to start such a magnificent and intriguing adventure through space by means of the progression of time, he should begin by the organization of knowledge into idea–decisions; next, mandate wisdom to labor unremittingly at its noble task of transforming self-possessed ideas into increasingly practical but nonetheless supernal ideals, even those concepts which are so reasonable as ideas and so logical as ideals that the Adjuster dares so to combine and spiritize them as to render them available for such association in the finite mind as will constitute them the actual human complement thus made ready for the action of the Truth Spirit of the Sons, the time-space manifestations of Paradise truth — universal truth. The co-ordination of idea–decisions, logical ideals, and divine truth constitutes the possession of a righteous character, the prerequisite for mortal admission to the ever-expanding and increasingly spiritual realities of the morontia worlds.
[Incidentally, in the last quote the author explains how the gateway works. First, organize knowledge and ideas of the material mind. Second, appeal to the spirit of wisdom to transform them into worshipful ideals. This shoots the thoughts straight up the gateway to the Holy Spirit of the soul where the Adjuster can spiritize them and the Spirit of Truth can translate them and send them back through the gateway to the material mind for action. We then, by our own free will, choose to take action and a new reality has become actualized as living truth, the living God. Not to mention that this free-will action based upon the partnership between the Adjuster and material mind causes a new invasion of divinity within the soul, which causes it to grow, and thus provides more capacity for illumination of further potentials.]
