Your Evolving Soul by Byron Belitsos

Author:Byron Belitsos [Byron Belitsos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57983-054-0
Publisher: Origin Press
Published: 2017-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Integralism and the Urantia Revelation

Integral thinkers around the world are building an emerging culture based on an understanding of large-scale evolution and cosmic integration that has many characteristics similar to that of the Urantia Revelation. This new integralism has roots in holistic evolutionary philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Alfred North Whitehead, and Sri Aurobindo. But today the field of integral theory and practice is led by Ken Wilber—one of the world’s most inclusive thinkers and its most widely translated philosopher.87

Integralism scales up our understanding of evolution, cosmology, culture, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality in a way that complements the community of inquiry growing up around the UB. While these two systems may disagree about what exactly constitutes the errors and excesses of the previous three worldviews, at a minimum they seem to agree to the idea of adopting a transcultural and integrative stance in relation to all of them.

The UB and integral theory have something to teach the other. One on hand, The Urantia Book’s revelations about psychology, theology, evolution, history, angelology, and cosmology widen the outlook of integralists. Its teaching about the purported real nature of the atman (the Indwelling Spirit of God) and the evolution of an immortal soul is compatible with an integral understanding of selfhood, and can provide new depths to integral psychology.

For its part, integralism provides an advanced template for an updated cosmic spirituality based on today’s latest advances in developmental psychology, integral health and medicine, evolutionary theory, integral philosophic method, and consciousness studies, all of which occurred after the publication of the UB.88 These new disciplines have been embraced by integral theorists, and I believe that Urantia students, if they are to keep current, need to embrace these new developments as well.89 In particular, it would be especially helpful if Urantians made use of the culturally neutral language of today’s developmental psychology, which integral theory very effectively employs in its descriptions of human growth. I attempt to do so in the remainder of this chapter—as one illustration of the benefit of using integral theory to assist in the exegesis of the Urantia Revelation.

Furthermore, just like the UB, the emerging integral worldview is super-interdisciplinary. And in addition to harvesting disciplines almost unknown at the time of the UB revelation, integral theory provides an advanced protocol and methodology for the integration of all of these disciples, which Wilber calls the Integral Operating System (IOS).90 I cover the IOS in a rudimentary way in the next section. For a beginner’s overview of Wilber’s system as it relates to the themes of this book, please see Appendix C.

Ken Wilber’s integralism arose from his own heroic and extensive cross-cultural research that sifted through the entire spectrum of partial truths of the world’s great wisdom traditions and today’s psychospiritual teachings. With the help of scientific psychology, the integral perspective has pruned many errors or limiting perspectives, giving us a model of human development that purports to transcend but include the best elements of them all. This is not unlike

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