LESSON 3: Why a soul? — Deep Space Travel & Universe Economy

THIS DOCUMENT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY
and explains things the way that the Truth Beauty and Goodness Commission currently comprehends them. All information contained herein is subject to change as clarifications and additional revelations may become available.

What is the soul?

The soul of mortal man is a living construct of morontia energy suitable to the need. It is mortal before it is fused with spirit (it can die of neglect through the absence of survival values), and only becomes immortal after fusion during the morontia part of the ascension career.

How is the soul created?

The soul is first created, or initiated, by the Thought Adjuster as an energized morontia pattern, and at first is akin to an empty shell, much the same way the mind and brain of a newborn mortal is alive and functioning, but otherwise empty until new sensations and experiences start pouring in.

How is the soul maintained?

There are two aspects to maintaining a soul:

The physical energy requirement which is largely supplied through the electrical and life circuits of the mortal biological heart (very little of this is understood by our current science). This is why the soul is so often associated with the biological heart, and why excitement of the soul can often be felt by the heart as a type of jubilant energy surge.
The morontia requirements of personal growth, and the spiritual requirements of life value, experienced through the mortal adventure and discovery of Truth Beauty and Goodness are sustenance for the soul. This sustenance is referred to as your — survival values.

What of our mortal memories?

Our mortal life memories are not stored in the soul. These memories become the eternal inheritance of the Thought Adjuster, and if your TA returns to you in the resurrection then all these mortal memories will also be restored to you once you awake from the transitional death sleep.

These mortal life memories are of two types:

Internal personal memories. These are the mortal memories that are personally perceived and stored in the memory section of the biological brain. The Thought Adjuster makes a spiritual and eternal copy of all these brain memories that have survival value*, and they become the TA’s eternal inheritance (whether we choose survival or not).
External memories, the things we do outwardly. These are recorded and preserved by our Guardian Seraphim. A crude comparison would be of someone video taping your entire life. These recordings become part of the Local Universe’s permanent public records and archives.

* This document doesn't discuss emotional memory. These are the memories stored outside the brain at the body's cellular level by people (usually young children) who have not yet received a Thought Adjuster and are therefore without a soul.

Why is the soul needed?

The Urantia Book tells us that physical matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and that the resurrection halls of the Mansion Worlds are many light years away from Earth**, thereby making slower than lightspeed travel through the vastness of space, from Earth to the Mansion Worlds, within a normal mortal lifetime (average 70 yrs), all but impossible.

** No precise astronomical information is currently available, but current speculation ranges from 11 to 430 light years away from Earth.

This explains one of the fundamental reasons for the existence of souls. Souls are used as a means of converting our most personal survival values from a biological physical format/state that is too heavy and dense for faster-than-light deep space travel, to a very light and strong morontia format/state that can easily be enseraphimed for faster-than-light deep space travel. In this sense the morontia soul can be loosely compared to a digital flash drive, onto which critical and essential computer files can be copied and later removed for easy transport to a distant location. The big heavy computer (which is hard to transport) equates to your mortal body, while the small and lightweight flash drive that can easily be carried anywhere equates to your soul.

To offer a crude analogy we could say that the mortal body of flesh and blood is like a computer, and the soul is like a portable flash drive.

When the mortal body is alive, it is like doing work directly with the computer.
Any important work that must be preserved in a distant location is also copied to the portable flash drive for safe keeping and easy transport at a later date.
Eventual physical death of the mortal body is like turning off the computer when the work is done.
Once the material body is dead the Guardian Seraphim remove its soul for later transport to the Resurrection Halls***. This is like removing the flash drive containing all the essential data (survival values) and transporting it somewhere else so it can be connected into another more powerful computer (an upgrade) at a distant location.
When the distant location is reached the flash drive is reconnected into a new computer. The new computer is then turned on and work continues exactly where it left off with all the critical data intact. Likewise when your soul reaches the Resurrection Halls it is reconnected to your new morontia body and you are restarted (awakened from the death sleep) and life continues where you left off with all your survival values intact, having been safely transported from Urantia to Mansonia 1 by your soul.

*** Not all resurrections occur on Mansonia 1. There are various types of special resurrections that occur at the Constellation Headquarter in the special Resurrection Halls located there. Details of these special resurrections are in the Urantia Book paper 43:1.5.

The embryonic soul

The Urantia Book sometimes refers to the mortal soul as being embryonic in form. It is alive and functioning, but is not yet fully developped. It is akin to a foetus, a mortal life inside a womb, that is not yet grown into a fully functioning and independent man. The resurrection is akin to the birth of a foetus, where it can now begin to grow fully and autonomously as a full fledged Morontian working his/her way through the 570 levels of morontia life, culminating in achieving the level of a first stage Spirit on Salvington.

The soul in relation to bestowals and incarnations.

First, it is crucial to understand that all bestowals are also incarnations, but not all incarnations are bestowals. Therefore there can be some fundamental differences between these two types of descending visitations. The Urantia Book only offers lilmited coverage of this topic, which can be summarized as follows:

All 7 required incarnations (material, morontia and spirit) of a Paradise Creator Son (Michaels) are also labelled as bestowals, eventhough only the seventh one is fully material and born of woman.
Paradise Avonal Sons can come to an evolutionary sphere in various ways and for various purposes, but only when they are born of mortal women are they referred to as bestowals.
Melchizedeks can sometimes physically materialize on a sphere, the way Machiventa did on Urantia long ago. In such cases Melchizedeks are not born of women, and appear as full grown adult males and are therefore not considered to be bestowals. They are merely incarnations.
Bestowals and incarnations are very peculiar in relation to souls. Souls are fundamentally a requirement of ascenders. Bestowals and incarnations are typically related to descenders.

There is another point of interest specifically in relation to bestowals. The Urantia Book states that on an evolutionary sphere, only one Paradise Son bestowal occurs. This is the normal course of development for normal planets. However, as Urantia is now demonstrating (but is not mentioned in the Urantia Book), this singular bestowal rule can be sidestepped on planets with unusual needs. It is now known that Urantia has many unusual requirements which necessitate additional bestowal missions.

The question to be answered is, do descending incarnations and bestowals require a soul? Let's examine the historical evidence as presented in the Urantia Book for some possible insights.

Machiventa Melchizedek incarnated on Urantia as a full grown male of the species, yet was still fully cognizant of his Melchizedek identity and remained in contact with them. What can we infer from this fact? It is safe to assume that in his incarnation Machiventa still had access to his Melchizedek memory with which to record his experiences of survival value. This would negate the need for a soul as a recording mechanism to pass through a resurrection. And since he was returned to his spirit state here on Urantia, there was no need for a soul for deep space travel to a far away resurrection hall. Conclusion: incarnations such as Machiventa's do not require a soul.

Michael of Nebadon incarnated on Urantia as a full bestowal born of woman, as a first born male babe of the realm. What can we infer from this fact? There is very little we can infer from the Urantia Book account of this bestowal. What we are told is that after His mortal death, Joshua ben Joseph resurrected (apparently through His own innate ability to do so) as a first stage morontian ascender, and that he quickly ascended through various morontia stages until He returned to His full spirit state as a Paradise Creator Son. There is no indication in the Urantia Book that Paradise Avonal Sons on bestowal missions become morontia beings after their mortal death. These post bestowal morontia appearances seems to be related to only Creator Son bestowals.

Herein lies a dilemma. If a descender (Paradise Son) is born of woman as a male babe of the realm, without immediate knowledge of his spirit ancestry, then how can He record His own life experiences of survival value without a soul? Yet, if He is to have a soul, then what becomes of that soul once the bestowal mission is over and the Paradise Son returns to His original spirit state? It does present a paradox.

At the time of writing the Urantia Book we were told that this bestowal mystery was one of the greatest remaining paradoxes/mysteries of creation. Apparently none other than those who had completed a bestowal mission and had access to the secrets of Sonarington knew the answer to this paradox.

UB (13:1.8) The secrets of Sonarington include the secret of the incarnation of the divine Sons. When a Son of God becomes a Son of Man, is literally born of woman, as occurred on your world nineteen hundred years ago, it is a universal mystery. It is occurring right along throughout the universes, and it is a Sonarington secret of divine sonship. The Adjusters are a mystery of God the Father. The incarnation of the divine Sons is a mystery of God the Son; it is a secret locked up in the seventh sector of Sonarington, a realm penetrated by none save those who have personally passed through this unique experience. Only those phases of incarnation having to do with your ascension career have been brought to your notice. There are many other phases of the mystery of the incarnation of the Paradise Sons of unrevealed types on missions of universe service which are undisclosed to you. And there are still other Sonarington mysteries.

I am happy to say that the answer to this mystery (at least in part) has since been unexpectedly revealed through a unique and unprecedented occurrence on Urantia which transpired about 10 years ago at this precise geolocation: 11°13'06.6"N 60°45'17.8"W

Through this unusual and unique occurrence, which lasted approximately 50 minutes of Urantia time, one of the Secrets of Sonarington inadvertently became exposed (without breaking any universe laws), and the mystery of why bestowals do not require a soul was laid bare, along with a number of other details about the Secrets of Sonarington and the underlying mechanics of bestowal missions.

Locked up in the seventh sector of Sonarington is the technology required to make bestowal missions function. It is technology far far beyond what the mortal mind can comprehend, but thanks to cutting edge developments in the movie industry there is now a sensible analogy we can use. The movie Avatar showcased a technology that allowed the consciousness of a person to be transmitted to another body (an avatar) in a different location, through the use of a complex technology. In the simplest of terms this is somewhat similar to what the Sonarington bestowal technology does.

To begin a bestowal mission, Paradise Bestowal Sons report to the seventh sector of Sonarington and are, for lack of a better term, connected to what can only be described as a bestowal chamber (a room containing all the necessary technology) which establishes an instantaneous conscious connection with the avatar (a first born mortal male of some realm located anywhere in the 7 superuniverses), while at the same time filtering out all awareness of His surroundings and spirit self. The inner workings of this instantaneous connection (not subject to time and space) remain unknown, but it can transmit full consciousness bidirectionally.

It was further revealed that this seventh sector of Sonarington currently houses almost 5 million of these bestowal chambers, each with a full compliment of spirit attendants, and that this number is always slowly increasing as the inhabited universes continue to increase in size and number, thus requiring an ever increasing number of bestowal chambers to handle the growing demand.

To ponder such wonders will eventually lead one to an inevitable conclusion. This bestowal technology is like a super charged soul on steroids! Everything a soul does, the bestowal technology does far better, more completely and without the limitations of time and space, thereby making a soul unnecessary for bestowals.

In fact, the mortal soul of man is a vastly scaled down and simplified implementation of bestowal technology concepts, designed for ecomony of scale, to be used by trillions upon trillions of mortals simlutaneously across the vastness of the 7 superuniverses, without the need for the permanent installation of countless chambers and even more attendants. The soul is a superbly fine tuned, marvelously efficient and completely effective mass production version of the full bestowal technology, designed to effectly work within the limitations of time and space.

The Father Fragmentation Process

After the incident that unexpectedly revealed some of the secrets of Sonarington, it was determined that this partial revelation was insufficient on its own, and would lead to too much wild speculation about other matters, therefore the following additional information was revealed regarding one of the secrets of Divinington, the creation of Father Fragments.

Father Fragments are originally composed of two parts fused as one when still inherent in the First Source and Center. These two unified original parts are Personality (pattern) and Spirit (Thought Adjuster (TA), life). On Divinington these two parts separate (unfuse) temporarily, to later become one again through successful Father Fusion with a mortal.

Mortals who reject the ascension career pass away and their Personality fragments return to Divinington.
The abandonned TA likewise returns to Divinington to await reassignment to another personality.

Some TAs become personalized by receiving their own Personality fragment. These Personality fragments are from the adandonned fragments of the failed ascension careers mentioned above.

The plan will be completed when all Personality fragments have been reunited with a TA in one way or another, in one era or another.