“… in human terms, as to whether ‘seeing’ is an attribute of the eyes, or an expression of the integrative powers of the brain, correctly understood, revolves around the question of whether the body or the mind can see or understand. This is not really open to question at all. The body is not capable of understanding. Only the mind KNOWS anything. A pure mind knows the truth and this is its strength. It cannot attack the body, because it knows exactly what the body is.” Taken from “A Course in Miracles”
Through the realms of time and space, wherever a divine spirit reality is present, whenever a real spirit-mind is functioning, there always tends to be produced a material or physical counterpart of that spirit reality.
On a material world you think of a body as having a spirit, but we (the celestials) regard the spirit as having a body. The spirit is the architect, the mind is the builder, the body is the material building.
The spirit is the creative reality; the physical counterpart is the time-space reflection of the spirit reality; the physical repercussion of the creative action of spirit-mind.
Mind universally dominates matter, even as it is in turn responsive to the ultimate overcontrol of spirit.
With mortal man, only that mind which freely submits itself to the spirit direction can hope to survive the mortal time-space existence as an immortal child of the eternal spirit world. Taken from “Urantia Papers”
Science may be physical, but the mind of the truth-discerning scientist is at once super-material.
Matter knows not truth, neither can it love mercy nor delight in spiritual realities.
Moral convictions based on spiritual enlightenment and rooted in human experience are just as real and certain as mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on another and higher level.
If men were only machines, they would react more or less uniformly to a material universe. Individuality, much less personality, would be nonexistent.
Ideas are sensations plus the reflective interpretations of the personal self. The self is more than sensations. There begins to be something of an approach to unity in an evolving selfhood, and that unity is derived from the indwelling presence of a part of absolute unity which spiritually activates such a self-conscious animal-origin mind.
Animals possess a physiological co-ordination of associated sensation, recognition and memory, but none experience a meaningful recognition of sensation or exhibit a purposeful association of these combined physical experiences such as manifested in the conclusions of intelligent and reflective human interpretations.
The fact of self-consciousness is associated with the reality of subsequent spiritual experience. It constitutes man a potential Son of the Universe and foreshadows his eventual attainment of the Supreme Unity of the universe.
Neither is the human self merely the sum of the successive states of consciousness (incarnations). Without the effective functioning of a consciousness sorter and associator, there would not exist sufficient unity to warrant the designation of a selfhood. Such an ununified mind could hardly attain conscious levels of human status.
If the associations of consciousness were just an accident, the minds of all men would then exhibit the uncontrolled and random associations of certain phases of mental madness.
The human mind early begins to manifest qualities which are super-material, and the truly reflective human intellect is not altogether bound by the limits of time.
A human mind, built up solely out of the consciousness of physical sensations, could never attain spiritual levels. This kind of material mind would be utterly lacking in a sense of moral values and would be without a guiding sense of spiritual dominance, which is essential to achieving harmonious personality unity in time, which is inseparable from personality survival in eternity.
That individuals so differ in their life performances indicates, not only the varying endowments of heredity and the different influences of the environment, but also the degree of unification with the indwelling spirit of the Father which has been achieved by the self, the measure of the identification of the one with the other. Taken from “Urantia Papers”
