1999-03-28-Redirection of Values

Session

Opening

Elyon (Jonathan TR): Hello, my friends. It is truly gratifying and rewarding to witness your pursuit of your homework this week and to see yielded therefrom much insight on your part. These perceptions that you made during your reflections create inroads, little openings into great avenues through which you may better develop the perfected creature you seek to be. I assure you that as you inspire myself to generate further activities of this nature for you to undertake you also inspire each other, for you reveal to one another how similar your different lives actually are.

Lesson

In a way, to redirect values is to discover that ultimately all values converge at the Supreme value of love, that by turning your awareness in that direction, the many values that impact your life take on a clearer focus in importance and usefulness. Values only come into conflict when your position in which you view them is turned away from the focal point of love. Visually you may think of it this way: Imagine on the end of a pole many long streamers. If you were to look at these streamers blowing in turbulent air, from the point of the pole these streamers would appear chaotic, fluttering around wildly in disarray and even entanglement. But when you look from away, you can see their connection to the pole and that they often are blowing in the same direction; they have a cohesive quality from an overview, from a stand back view.

By reflecting as you have this week upon your assignment, you stood back and looked upon your situations and perceived coherency, connectivity, with various events. They all had a meaningful involvement with the assignment. Again I restate that this is a morontia approach. This is that extra vision that morontia awareness provides as you live even through seemingly mundane events. I acknowledge your efforts and give you all good grades.

Dialogue

Sarah: Can you tell us where to even start on this? It's such a large introspection. Frankly, I would try to do the whole thing at once. I need some steps to begin to learn all this. A lot of lessons came today just from our conversation. I'd like your input. Should we go on with this next week?

Elyon: You may be assured that our guidance will be available. However, I would also make it plain that our guidance is not manipulative. We use flexible training procedures. By this I mean that your responses and your contributions to our lessons create the following lessons. Therefore, I have really no outline, no fixed series of steps that we will undertake, for your part will uncover the methods for continuing.

As you go through an assignment as last week's there are some applications that may help you. Your writing down what you perceive captures an impression before its worth fades, before the mind discounts its value. I would encourage you to do this for the subsequent assignments. Although I would discourage you from becoming overly preoccupied with the significance of any event throughout your days and becoming burdened with, in a sense, managing millions grains of sand, all these activities of every second that transpires throughout your day; I also request that you do not discount prior to reflection an event with the value judgment of insignificance. What I encourage is balance. Let those insights spring up before you; embrace them and reflect upon them without either becoming overly obsessed with dredging them up or discounting them as insignificant.

The practice of sharing them as you have today is where the results of these assignments become implaced within you and create the changes. Throughout the week you are discovering; in your meeting you are realizing. And the third element of this process, the week that follows you will discover that you are applying.

Perhaps this has helped you, though I would enjoy your feedback.

Sarah: You have made it perfectly clear to me. Maybe someone else has questions.

Tom: I was reading in the UB where it says that "Fear is a master intellectual fraud practiced upon the evolving immortal soul." What do they mean by practice, and who is doing the practicing?

Elyon: The practitioner is the mind of the individual. We spoke of levels of being a few weeks back. This practice is inflicted by the lower dimension. It is intellectual, for it is contrived; it is constructed by the mind in order to build a defense or a case meant to uphold a bias, a prejudice, or a judgment. It is an attempt to give soundness to an unfounded reality, to provide substance where there is none.

Fear precedes experience, or perhaps better said it is a reflection of lack of experience. The evolving morontia soul is experience. When the intellect does not understand, has no experience to draw from, it uses fear to create its own sense of ability, giving it an empty sense of assurance that it is capable of grappling with the problem, often leading to avoidance or a disastrous solution. The evolving soul then must await another experience potential and must at times endure this fraudulent value derived from the fear that restrains the process of growth.

Does this provide insights?

Tom: I'll have to review that, but there were spots of that that made sense to me. How does love fit in? Is the object for love to replace fear?

Elyon: Yes, for as our greatest teacher Michael has taught us all that we ought to trust like a child the guidance of the Father, love is the fatherly quality of soul experience. Trusting love propels the soul into the arms of the divine Parent, where fear will cause a cowering and distrust.

To return a moment to the question about this lesson plan, your assignments, this early stage can be thought of as like pouring out the many pieces to a building block set and rolling them around, observing each one without yet attempting to construct an edifice, being playful with the parts that make up an object, becoming familiar with their anatomy to better understand how they may be interlocked and assembled. You may approach your lessons this way, and the question of fear as an intellectual fraud, the evolving soul becomes exposed to life in this same manner. It undergoes experience through discovering the building block pieces and creating an integrated, complete item from the elements.

Fear can intercede and cause feelings that it is impossible to construct the edifice; it is not worthwhile to construct it, or the one you are building is the wrong one to be building in the first place. The soul is an emerging reality that is meant to be unique, and no one soul can be constructed wrongly. It is the result of successful spiritual attainment.

Tom: Thank you.

Elyon (Sarah): This is Elyon.

Your assignment this week gave each of you insights to be reckoned with or to say they are just okay the way they are. This is meant to be a light, happy experience. The way the lesson was done with you today was perfect. You learned a lot; you shared a lot.

Let me say that you can't bring up old feelings all at once. I don't mean to send you into depressions because you have too much to work with. There is no one way, "why did I do that?" or why anything. Just tiptoe into it, and remember that you are your own person, and you can do it or not do it as you please. One reason we are doing this now is because we have a small group. [There were four of us.] It wouldn't be too easy for you to talk about self if there were eight or ten people there. I think you need to do this, and your life will be much happier when you know why you feel and do the things you do. It looks really good to me. Do you mind if I take the assignment every week, too?

[Group laughs]

We've been talking of the evolving of the soul. To strengthen the soul in life brings it much stronger. Therefore, the strong personality will evolve. It is really hard for you to understand. We are always saying you cannot see the big picture. It would be fun to take you on a field trip. However, my associates say that wouldn't be a good thing for me to do. They would call it malpractice. Do the lessons or don't do the lessons, whatever makes you feel best. If it is okay you can take a few more steps this week and share next weekend.

I am real proud of you. You are my students and I love you always.

Group: Thank you.

Machiventa (Jonathan): This is Machiventa. I want you to continue with this current focus, but I would like to add one element to enhance your pursuit. That is, seek to discover or to place, if it is absent, structure to your ideals. Just as values may be redirected -- and you have witnessed in your week and in your discussion how events take on new meanings when the values are reassessed -- ideals are a source of great hope, but they likewise can be a source of great frustration. The defeated idealist is a sad example of that frustration. By structuring, in a way categorizing, an ideal, some of this frustration and disappointment or disillusionment can be avoided. For instance, your lives have multiple arenas: the workplace, the home, your recreational life, your social life. Each compartment holds a series of ideals and values. When engaged in one arena pursue those values and those ideals of that arena. Greater contentment will be experienced.

How many times have you felt, as you head off to work, that the ideal event of the day would be to undertake something completely unrelated to work? You then show up to work already unhappy. Instead, focus toward the project that is in your sequence of time and bring forward to your mind the ideals and the values that are involved in that arena. You will then enjoy your process without the conflict of other equally worthwhile values or ideals.

We greatly look forward to your feedback next meeting. Thank you.

Tom: When you speak of adding structure to an ideal, say honesty, and we choose the work arena. Is that what you are talking about? How you can apply that one ideal in that specific situation, for example?

Closing

Machiventa: Yes. Also, in the overall of your life you seek perfection, but you also realize in the material world many things will not ever become perfected because the planet itself is not in the condition where that perfection can become realized. So you need to establish an ideal which is practically adapted to the conditions.

Let us look at honesty. This is an ideal. Now if you were an undercover agent that ideal would take on different shading than would that same honesty if you were clergy. Does this illustrate how one ideal can be differentially applied?

Tom: We're not to take all the ideals we know but just a couple and focus.

Machiventa: This would be more manageable. Seven days is rather short.

One last note: Differentiate between an ideal that is philosophical in nature and ideal as it is often considered in the realm of desire and want.

I take my leave.