Welcome to "Illusions to Delusions," a standalone chapter from a larger essay on the Atonement concept of Christianity. This discussion delves into complex philosophical and spiritual concepts that originate with illusions. I aim to unravel a challenging statement from the Urantia Book: "Man creates his primitive religions out of his fears and by means of his illusions, while the higher animals have fears but no illusions, thus no religion." I provide definitions of exoteric terms in-context for readers less familiar with the intricate ideas discussed in the Urantia Book such as: the adjutant mind-spirits, the thought adjuster, the cosmic mind, and personality. Should it remain difficult for a nascent reader to the revelation to ascertain connotation in-context, a glossary defines many of them in the larger essay this is a part of. You can find it in the topic block next to this one on the website (deboldgroup.com). The main focus of this paper explores and explains the unique nature of humans as disclosed in the Urantia Book’s revelatory universe model, highlighting how humans differ fundamentally—not just in degree but in kind—from animals.

Bob Debold, Fairfax VA. May 2024

Illusions to Delusions

There are two more correlated topics we need to consider related to Atonement’s origins before moving further on with its history: illusion and delusion. There is a truly novel revelatory statement made by a Brilliant Evening Star of Nebadon that can be quite puzzling. It appears as an introductory declaration in paper 85 The Origins of Worship. He writes:

85:0.1 (944.1) PRIMITIVE religion had a biologic origin, a natural evolutionary development, aside from moral associations and apart from all spiritual influences. The higher animals have fears but no illusions, hence no religion. Man creates his primitive religions out of his fears and by means of his illusions.

What is puzzling in reflecting upon this disclosure is how the marriage of fear and illusion can spawn religion considering the obvious morality and spiritual capabilities humans have as super-animals. Remember, the revelation tells us that we humans begin to separate from the animal kingdom when the adjutant of worship engages. Thus, it makes sense to reason that this adjutant, when it makes “first contact” with an increasingly expanding neurologically complex brain, initiates a progression to a level of thinking that produces illusions. I believe this can be empirically tested. More on that idea later. A Life Carrier of Nebadon resident on Urantia informs us that:

65:7.7 (739.3) The adjutants function exclusively in the evolution of experiencing mind up to the level of the sixth phase, the spirit of worship. At this level there occurs that inevitable overlapping of ministry—the phenomenon of the higher reaching down to co-ordinate with the lower in anticipation of subsequent attainment of advanced levels of development.

This evolved mind-spirit bridge which the revelation asserts humans acquire for accessing cosmic mind and ultimately spirit is, so far, the only model describing in end-to-end detail how God’s plan (as we understand as executed by Deity) “tethers” humans organically to the cosmos. This is understandable; the most salient indication that exists is the wide functional gulf between animals and humans for all sorts of things. For me, designing and constructing societies and civilizations is one of them; processing complex symbols and language offer two others. Nancey Murphy conjectures many of those capabilities are merely different-in-degree. She describes two factors that she believes are different-in-kind because “God cares about them:” the first is the human capacity for morality; the second is our capacity for relationships, with God as well as with other humans.^[ref] Professor Murphy emphasizes proper relationships are what is central to New Testament teaching on what it means to be human.

The Urantia revelation teaches that the jump from animals to humans constitutes a functional transcendence as well as a brain-mind structural transformation. By structure, a superconscious zone materializes above consciousness that it also deems as “supermind.” It is the location where the Thought Adjuster will take up residence as well as where it will instantiate the soul as a morontia counterpart to the human’s willful value development. By function, it is the gateway for cosmic mind’s reflective influence; the Divine Counselor refers to this when he remarks that cosmic mind saves will creatures from becoming “helpless victims of the implied a priori assumptions of science, philosophy, and religion”^[ref] with this newly developed capacity.

As noted above, differences in kind or degree between animals and humans are self-evident with respect to most who think about these anomalies. However, not all agree on the why behind the degree/kind designation. Let’s look at three primary types of individuals: scientists, philosophers, and theologians. Each explore the differences between animals and humans through various lenses, each bring to the table unique perspectives shaped by their respective fields. Scientists who write about consciousness, reason, or mind typically focus on material components to understand the basis of cognitive abilities; philosophers, make assumptions that wave a wand of “emergence,” exploring these concepts in terms of abstract principles; while theologians simply state there is a self-evident divergence as a fact of God’s assumed purposes, arguing that God creates humans in His image, which accounts for their unique cognitive and moral capabilities.

In substance all three positions postulate causation. Each position reasons the cause of a human’s transcended capabilities over an animal are respectively the result of a) material complexities, b) emerging phenomena, or c) God’s intervention. Ironically, the Urantia revelation provides the basis that there is a modicum of truth in all three positions!

The fifth epochal revelation, the Urantia Book, is the only available publication on earth that provides a comprehensive and comprehensible archetype originating with God (as the First Source and Center), his Trinity cohorts, Paradise, and the three Absolutes of Infinite Potentiality - affectionately known as the Seven Absolutes of Infinity.^[ref] As far as I am aware, and even following a lengthy search through a number of artificial intelligence (AI) research domains, along with google scholar and archive.org, there is limited evidence in literature going back into antiquity, where anyone has developed even a hypothesis that designates and then integrates the functions of adjutant spirit-mind with the Holy Spirit creating a supermind (superconscious) on top of animal mind which then is able to reflect into cosmic mind that can elicit a response from cosmic mind.^[ref] It is through this top-down bottom-up design that reflected cosmic response provides a mortal mind insight to then make forward looking decisions for evaluating ends and means – the ground-truth for morality.

I must point out though that the idea of a superconscious has some recent history, however limited.

Ken Wilber is a leading contemporary theoretician of the comprehensive domain of integral philosophy. Many thought leaders consider Wilber’s esteem unequaled in the discipline using his works essentially as basic texts.^[ref] In Up From Eden,^[ref] in his chapter entitled Voyage Into the Superconscious, Wilber reasons that we humans have a capability of progressive transformations to increasingly organized consciousness. He refers to these more structured forms as the superconscious. But Wilber wasn’t the first to discuss this concept. That salute belongs to William Walker Atkinson.

Atkinson’s 1909 book Subconscious and Superconscious Planes of Mind,^[ref] may very well be the reason the revelators present the concept of the superconscious as a fact and truth in The Urantia Book. Atkinson says “The Orientals for centuries have recognized these mentation activities which cannot be considered as resulting from the past race or individual experience along the lines of racial memory or heredity, or of the memory of the individual classified them as belonging to the "superconscious" plane of mentation—a plane above the ordinary plane of consciousness, just as the subconscious is a plane below it, and the "psychic" plane parallel to it.”

With respect to Atkinson’s depiction of the superconscious, he gets very close to the expansion of this truth that the revelation illustrates as an essential “energy system” for contact and communication with spirit. “Human consciousness rests gently upon the electrochemical mechanism below and delicately touches the spirit-morontia energy system above.”^[ref] Of these spatial locations related to the human mind, Atkinson presages the Urantia Book, and in my opinion, is what permits the Solitary Messenger to expand cosmically upon that truth.^[ref] However, while Atkinson does speak of the divine mind, and in other places a “divine presence” interacting with a person, he does not posit a Thought Adjuster, a fragment of God, as residing in the superconscious mind, which according to a Solitary Messenger is not in the material brain,^[ref] but “in the mortal mind of man” which clearly supports Rupert Sheldrake’s hypothesis of the physical brain as predominantly a “tuner.”^[ref] Sheldrake’s thesis that the mind and memory is external to the brain matches quite well with the Urantia Book’s revelation about the adjutant mind-spirits and the cosmic mind.

Wilber’s view of the superconscious describes it as the culmination of a process which encompasses personal development and human evolution in general. There is a lot for a URANTIA revelation student to consider with Wilber’s approach to human growth. In his first book of a two-book series, The Atman Project A transpersonal View of Human Development, Wilber outlines a three-domain cycle of consciousness that moves bi-directionally. He doesn’t approach this cycle as I do based upon the revelation of truth, but one can impute truth in much of his philosophy. The sister volume Up From Eden A transpersonal View of Human Evolution , goes into much more depth into the psychic transformation of an individual (and a society) from subconsciousness to superconsciousness, culminating in the wholeness of the Atman, or God. There are two crossovers to the revelation here: 1) fusion with one’s thought adjuster, and 2) the seven psychic circles.

The revelation emphatically supports most theologians who teach that a communication bridge exists from each human to God and vice versa; the philosopher is validated that evolution has produced an organic emergent transcendental cognition in a human; and the scientist is justified with her belief that matter matters in understanding causation and energy-process as a factual basis of the objective universe. (All three views are required to harmonize the implied tripartite puzzle that science, philosophy, and religion maintain.)

It was John Ballie^[ref] who quoted L. P. Jacks as saying “the soul of man is the universe turned outside in.” Ballie further interpreted that statement as meaning that a logical and consistent philosophic concept of the universe cannot be built up on the postulations of either materialism or spiritism, for both of these systems of thinking, when universally applied, are compelled to view the cosmos in distortion, the former contacting with a universe turned inside out, the latter realizing the nature of a universe turned outside in.^[ref]

The revelation further clarifies this needed harmonization this way: “Never, then, can either science or religion, in and of themselves, standing alone, hope to gain an adequate understanding of universal truths and relationships without the guidance of human philosophy and the illumination of divine revelation.”^[ref]

It is none other than a Universal Censor who informs the reader-religionist that moral decisions cross over into a realm beyond mere intelligence into a spiritual area of virtue - morality. Humans have the superior capability of garnering insight in advance of experience. This is designated spiritual insight. Discerning final aims extends beyond just crafting approaches; most animals can devise basic strategies for overcoming obstacles. (I’d even speculate insects and bacteria can too). Virtue is defined as “conformity to the cosmos” and alternatively “realization of duty.” Ask an elephant or a dolphin to do that. Might be a stretch? Here’s the statement the Universal Censor makes supporting these contentions:

16:7.4 (193.3) As a result of experience an animal becomes able to examine the different ways of attaining a goal and to select an approach based on accumulated experience. But a personality can also examine the goal itself and pass judgment on its worth-whileness, its value. Intelligence alone can discriminate as to the best means of attaining indiscriminate ends, but a moral being possesses an insight which enables him to discriminate between ends as well as between means. And a moral being in choosing virtue is nonetheless intelligent. He knows what he is doing, why he is doing it, where he is going, and how he will get there.

It should be apparent from the discussion in the section in this essay Effects Beget Causes in the Cosmos, that the superconscious, as the location of the supermind, provides a unique cosmic portal that emphasizes the function that the supermind has capabilities that the subconscious does not have. Thus, animals have feedback mechanisms while humans have both feedback and feedforward systems that can experience the cosmos. And it is just this cosmic feedforwarding experience occurring in the superconscious that produces illusions of other-than-material. It provides the feeling, the experience, of other-than-self – of an agency beyond the material. And it all is processed in consciousness which validates the statement that “religion may be the feeling of experience, but it is hardly the experience of feeling.”^[ref]

Once again, it is a Melchizedek that admonishes the reader of this differing perception of experiencing these feelings in the conscious mind where he discusses conversion and mysticism in the paper Religion in Human Experience :

100:5.4 (1099.2) Most of the spectacular phenomena associated with so-called religious conversions are entirely psychologic in nature, but now and then there do occur experiences which are also spiritual in origin. When the mental mobilization is absolutely total on any level of the psychic upreach toward spirit attainment, when there exists perfection of the human motivation of loyalties to the divine idea, then there very often occurs a sudden down-grasp of the indwelling spirit to synchronize with the concentrated and consecrated purpose of the superconscious mind of the believing mortal. And it is such experiences of unified intellectual and spiritual phenomena that constitute the conversion which consists in factors over and above purely psychologic involvement,

Previous to the engagement of the adjutant of worship, the first five adjutants function exclusively as conditioners of biologic evolution. They stay at level relative to the capabilities of animal neurology, i.e., brain functioning, and reach outward to sense nature; they are functioning like radar transmitters attempting to “see” what is out there. The revelation refers to them as “circuits.” Now that science knows about fields, it seems more appropriate to metaphorically visualize them as concentrical ubiquitous fields.

Figure 1: Fields send out specific electromagnetic signals in all directions and dimensions at the same moment through space-time. Moving cars pick up the same signal and information no matter which way they are going or how fast they are traveling.

The Life Carrier description of what our first two ancestors were witnessing as Fonta and Andon, in that order, somehow demonstrated to the Life Carriers that at long last the twins were finally able to, through mind, tune into and connect with the adjutant of worship that had been long been resident on the planet hovering in field mode waiting for an organic brain to connect beyond matter up to the edge of the cosmic mind and the spirit domain.

62:6.5 (709.6) Imagine our joy one day—the twins were about ten years old—when the spirit of worship made its first contact with the mind of the female twin and shortly thereafter with the male. We knew that something closely akin to human mind was approaching culmination; and when, about a year later, they finally resolved, as a result of meditative thought and purposeful decision, to flee from home and journey north, then did the spirit of wisdom begin to function on Urantia and in these two now recognized human minds.

Figure 2 is an AI depiction of a field version of the first six adjutant mind-spirits available to all planets in the local universe but particularly specific to the humans that are connecting to the outermost circuit in the concentric layers which is the field containing the mind-spirit of the adjutant worship. Illusions are established by the stimulation of this adjutant when circumstances in the human’s environment cause the individual to process this new downward reach from the cosmos. (This is not yet cosmic mind).

Figure 2: AI depiction of a field version of the first six adjutant mind-spirits as they imping upon an individual.

Figure 3: AI depiction of a field version of all seven adjutant mind-spirits as they condition an entire planet.

An illusion is generally temporary until it becomes a fixed false belief in spite of evidence to the contrary; at that point it becomes a delusion. A brief review of the definitions provides a good starting point for understanding the relationship.

An illusion begins as a false perception or misinterpretation of reality, often resulting from sensory distortion or misrepresentation of stimuli to the conscious. Illusions can occur in various sensory modalities, including vision, hearing, touch, and taste – material elements. Factors such as optical illusions, cognitive biases, or perceptual errors generally are internal structures that give form to an illusion. Illusions in magic refer to perceptual distortions or misinterpretations of reality deliberately crafted by a magician to entertain and mystify audiences. Magicians use various techniques, such as misdirection, sleight of hand, optical illusions, and psychological manipulation, to create the appearance of impossible feats or supernatural abilities.

A delusion, on the other hand, is a fixed false belief that persists despite evidence to the contrary. Delusions are typically rooted in a misinterpretation of reality or causality. Cognitive biases, social factors, or psychological disorders can influence these misinterpretations and can take on pathological dimensions with disorders such as schizophrenia. The key aspect of a delusion is the persistence of the false belief in the face of contradictory evidence or logical reasoning. This persistence distinguishes a delusion from other types of false beliefs or misconceptions, such as myths, legends, or superstitions, which may be more open to revision or change in response to new information.^[ref],^[ref]

A couple of examples may help with understanding these conditions. While wandering through a dense forest, a primitive human perceives a shadowy figure moving among the trees. Startled and fearful, the person attributes the movement to a lurking predator or malevolent spirit. However, upon closer inspection, the sighting is an abnormal shifting of light and shadow, creating an illusion of something fearful where none exists. During a drought, a barbarian performs a series of rituals and sacrifices to appease the gods and bring rain to the parched land. Even though the individual has come to learn that there is a lack of a causal relationship between any personal actions and the fact that rain happens when a cloud has become saturated to the point of expulsion of its contents, he/she continues to maintain that his/her actions directly influenced the weather, reinforcing a delusional belief in the efficacy of the rituals.

As described above, fear is a powerful emotion that often drives humans to seek explanations, comfort, and reassurance in the face of uncertainty or danger. Anthropological evidence shows primitive humans experienced profound fear and anxiety about their place in the world and their ultimate fate when confronted with natural disasters, illness, death, and other phenomena beyond their control. They sought solace and answers through religious beliefs and practices that promise protection, meaning, and transcendence.^[ref]

Within the definition of religion as "an independent realm of human response to life situations,"^[ref] a fear that creates an illusion serves as a foundational relationship that animates religious responses. In an intellectually immature mind, these responses transition the desire for protection, meaning, and transcendence into beliefs and practices that become fixed as individual and group realities.^[ref] Thus, religion emerges as a distinct domain of human experience that transcends purely pragmatic or utilitarian concerns; it encompasses existential, spiritual, and moral dimensions. Through these responses to life situations, humans temper their deepest hopes, fears, and aspirations, seeking connection with an invisible other – the divine.^[ref]

Religion then is a purely human response to life that offers explanations for the mysteries of existence, provides comfort in times of distress, and instills a sense of meaning and purpose in life. However, by attributing agency to supernatural beings or forces, humans unwittingly become dependent upon these unseen but nonexistent actors. The agent then becomes by default the resolver to help navigate the complexities of the primitive world; lessening the anxiety component of fears of mortality, suffering, and insignificance.

Unfortunately, or maybe better to say ironically, when an agent has the power to resolve a fear, the individual gives up his/her will for the agent’s will. If the individual believes the agent requires appeasement, the agent controls current and future situations. And this aspect of projecting an ominous future without appeasement, is a distinctly human response also! The Divine Counselor describes this succinctly using the revelation’s concept of personality:

16:7.3 (193.2) Only a personality can know what it is doing before it does it; only personalities possess insight in advance of experience. A personality can look before it leaps and can therefore learn from looking as well as from leaping. A nonpersonal animal ordinarily learns only by leaping.

This metaphor of looking and leaping can be methodologically defined as feedback and feedforward mechanisms. Leaping provides the animal a feedback mechanism inherent in memory for adjusting the leaping the next time; only with a feedforward framework would looking offer a personality the ability to evaluate means and ends.

My point here is a subtle one; the savage constrains his/her free will to an illusory capricious agent; but in fact, without a spiritual rebellion the likes of the Luciferian one, the malevolent spirit doesn’t exist! The mind of the individual completely fabricates the sentient spirit as a result of the illusion. And if the illusion solidifies into a fixed belief, it becomes, at first, a non-pathological delusion.[ref] When this happens, disarming the individual’s hardened delusional position becomes difficult because the transition from illusion to delusion neutralized one’s reasoning capability by crowding out judgement with an erroneous (evil) conviction.

There are many mechanisms that can affect this neutralizing: lack of critical thinking skills; emotional susceptibility; cognitive biases; and social influence with groupthink to list a number of the more prominent ones. These four and others are normal and natural to a primitive human. It is exactly what a Planetary Prince and his staff must patiently work to support the normalization of human society for both personal and societal growth. The illusion that some invisible sentient actor is employing its free will demonstrates the subservience of the savage to some other personality – albeit assumed. The illusion – the other-worldly spirit agent(s) – is in control of the savage’s action; it is in control of her reasoning capabilities and by consequence, her free will.

Even a primitive savage employs the capability of her human personality with cosmic mind to “look ahead.” The act of propitiating that she will employ to get the invisible sentient agent to capitulate to ending some demonic act (like creating a drought) is a future-oriented act. This capability will serve her succeeding generations quite well as they become more intellectually mature to begin to develop wisdom and spiritual capabilities that reach into the cosmic dimension of reflective thinking.

What is clear from the revelation is that when the adjutant of worship makes contact with the emerging human mind, since it is spirit “reaching down” for the first time, the animal mind now must decipher, consciously, the directionality of the response which is now entirely foreign. In addition, if the adjutant of wisdom is not yet functioning, then cosmic mind is not responding yet either, which is not yet making available complex cosmic reasoning to operate in the emerging human mind. This inability to now experience in one’s mind that there is something “out there” as Mulder would say, sans reason, is part and parcel with how an illusion develops.

The revelation gives us enough cosmic scaffolding to reflectively ponder where current society is with respect to this extremely salient concept. As we begin to appreciate our true cosmic origins and human linkages to the Father’s mandate for perfection as voiced by Jesus, we begin to better understand our present-day status and current problems of our native planet. The result is we can progressively improve upon the understanding of humanity’s place in God’s universe of universes as humanity’s field of knowledge has the capability of forever expanding. The Atonement concept circumscribes this thinking. It is through reflecting upon the cosmic dimensions of the revelation that can open the portal to delightful insights into God’s universe of universes. One merely has to suspend disbelief and begin sincere reflective thinking!

During the Planetary Prince era, there are scores of individuals on the Prince’s staff that are visible; they must patiently provide general and discrete support to ensure each individual they have contact with has sufficient capabilities to make a freewill choice and to make those choices with a progressing harmony of intellectual, moral, and spiritual considerations. I’d say that’s not an easy task in a pre-caveman society! And on Urantia, perhaps due to its experimental status, this must have been even more difficult than “normal.” On non-experimental inhabited spheres, the colored races appear one at a time; on Urantia they all appeared at the same time. The celestial plan for Urantia had to take into account the mosaic of races which appears to have complexified the issue of patient progressive personal and societal growth.

In a discussion about planetary helpers, a Melchizedek makes a point that it takes angelic support to assist the material son and daughter (Adam & Eve) in overcoming the natural tendency of strife among the races.

39:5.4 (437.3) It should be apparent that, when an Adam and Eve arrive on an evolutionary world, the task of achieving racial harmony and social co-operation among its diverse races is one of considerable proportions. Seldom do these races of different colors and varied natures take kindly to the plan of human brotherhood. These primitive men only come to realize the wisdom of peaceful interassociation as a result of ripened human experience and through the faithful ministry of the seraphic spirits of brotherhood.

The most appalling accessory to the small probability (10%) of a planet’s experimental status is the almost total disintegration of emerging society as a result of the Lucifer rebellion; it markedly modified the course of Urantia social evolution and of spiritual development that already had 700,000 years of maturation, 200,000 of it with planetary helpers like the ones described in the paragraph above. Urantia has never been the same since; we can trace many of the planet’s pathologies to this event, and the delusional persistence of Atonement is one of them. The Melchizedek in writing about these ministering spirits reveals that the Atonement concept is “normal” for planetary evolution but to eradicate it requires specific seraphic ministry.

39:5.6 (437.5) In the more advanced epochs of planetary evolution these seraphim are instrumental in supplanting the atonement idea by the concept of divine attunement as a philosophy of mortal survival.

We will see that a number of contemporary philosophers and theologians are in fact addressing the Atonement concept as a definite constraint to moving forward cosmically pointing to Atonement’s confusing cognitive dissonances about God and morality. Maybe, just maybe, the midwayers and/or the master seraphim anticipated this and thus the push to stimulate these supernal ideas to be further fleshed out by those who may delight in cultivating these qualities of courageous and independent cosmic thinking.