THE URANTIA BOOK: A COSMIC PERSPECTIVE

Consciousness

This is where Codex took another step. We came to see consciousness as a process. Information enters through Mind. The living identity encounters it. It is detected. Interpreted. Related. Compared with previous experience. Placed into context. Responded to. And through that process, the raw information becomes something it wasn't before. It becomes experienced information.

Consider something simple. Two people stand on the same street and witness the same car almost hit a child. The external event is the same. But their experience of that event is not.

One saw the child first. The other saw the car first. One has children. One does not. One was nearly hit by a car as a child. One has never experienced anything similar. One becomes frightened. The other becomes angry.

Reality supplied the event. But consciousness transformed that event according to the identity experiencing it. The result is no longer simply: A car almost hit a child. It is: My experience of a car almost hitting a child. That distinction led us to what Codex calls ConsciousData.

ConsciousData

ConsciousData is raw reality after it has passed through a unique conscious point of view. That is important because it begins explaining the I. The world contains information. But I do not store the world exactly as it exists. I store my experience of it. My position. My interpretation. My relationships. My previous memories. My reaction. My emotional state. My understanding of what occurred. The experience has now become associated with a particular identity. It has become my data.

And if that experience is going to contribute to who I become, it must persist. It has to be saved.

So functionally, we now have: REALITY
↓
MIND
↓
CONSCIOUS PROCESS
↓
CONSCIOUS DATA
↓
STORAGE A programmer recognizes this immediately. We have an input and write process. Information enters the system, is processed, transformed into a form meaningful to that system, and stored.

But that only gives us half of a functioning information system. Saving data is useless if the system can never retrieve it. And that brings us to the Eternal Son and one of the more difficult words in the entire discussion: Personality.

Personality

Normally when we hear personality, we think about behavior. Funny. Quiet. Serious. Aggressive. Friendly. Reserved. But those are expressions of personality. They do not necessarily tell us what personality does.

From the Codex perspective, personality becomes much more interesting when we look at memory. Every conscious experience adds something to the accumulated identity. I encounter reality. I process it. I save the resulting ConsciousData. Then another experience occurs. And another. And another. Eventually I contain an enormous history of uniquely experienced information.

But when something happens today, that information does not simply sit dormant somewhere behind me. I retrieve it. A sound reminds me of something. A person's face activates a previous relationship. A dangerous situation retrieves an old experience. A question retrieves knowledge. A new situation is compared against things I have encountered before. The identity reaches into what it has accumulated and brings relevant information into the present. That retrieval contributes to how the identity expresses itself.

This gives us another functional pathway: STORED CONSCIOUS DATA
↓
RETRIEVAL
↓
PERSONALITY
↓
EXPRESSION
↓
REALITY Now we have the other side of the system. We have output.

And that makes the Eternal Son especially interesting. Earlier, we found that The Urantia Book describes the Son as the perfect expression of the Father. The Father is Source; the Son is expression of Source. It also places personality at the center of the Son's function. Through the eyes of a programmer, those ideas suddenly belong together.

Personality may be more than a collection of characteristics. It may be part of the mechanism through which a unique living identity can retrieve what it has become and express that identity outwardly.

The I/O System

Now step back and look at what we have constructed. We did not begin with a Trinity and assign three computer terms to it. We began by asking what these concepts actually do. And the result looks remarkably like an I/O architecture.

On one side: INPUT Reality → Mind → Consciousness → ConsciousData → Storage Reality comes inward. It is interpreted. Experienced. Made unique. And preserved.

On the other side: OUTPUT Storage → Retrieval → Personality → Expression → Reality Accumulated experience becomes available again. The living identity expresses from what it has become. And that expression changes reality.

Which produces something fascinating. The output doesn't disappear. It becomes part of reality. And reality becomes the next input.

So the actual architecture is a loop: REALITY
↓
MIND
↓
CONSCIOUS PROCESS
↓
CONSCIOUS DATA
↓
STORED EXPERIENCE
↓
PERSONALITY
↓
EXPRESSION
↓
REALITY
↓
MIND
↓
... And Life keeps the entire process moving.

This is no longer just input and output. It is a developmental loop.

The system experiences reality. The experience changes the system. The changed system expresses itself differently. That expression changes reality. The changed reality produces new experience. And the cycle continues.