2000-11-30-Change

Session

Opening

Welmek: Good evening, dear friends. This is your teacher and friend, Welmek. I am very happy to see you this evening and that we are once again gathered for our discussion of spiritual growth.

Tonight I have selected the topic of change for discussion. What does it mean to change? Why are humans so resistant to change? What is it about change that you fear? I would like for you to take a few moments, to take this into stillness and make contact with your spirit and ask what is it about change that you are not ready to embrace. If you are willing to share your answer briefly with the group we will discuss your answers. Take a few moments and when you are ready, please begin.

Student comments summarized:

Student: Change is associated with stress and tension.

Student: Changes are on two levels. At a superficial level..a laziness. Also, on a moral level, am I growing? Fear of loss of self.

Student: Change is not always something better.

Student: Feels is changing rapidly and want to be used and placed on a higher level. Wondering if changes are being blocked by certain fears.

Student: Enjoys change, but feels may be blocking it when it comes in.

Lesson

Change

Welmek: Your essential human make-up is heavily rooted in change for you are experiential evolutionary creatures. And yet even though this is part of your nature to change, to evolve, to grow, it is something you resist because it requires you to leave the comfortable posture you have grown into to embrace a new idea or new situation or life circumstance. You don't always know what that means or what it will do to alter the quality of your life in either a positive or not so positive way. This evening I would like to focus on change at the various levels of existence: the areas of material reality where the human must live life on the physical world; the level of mindal change that occurs as your mind embraces new ideas and new concepts; then I would like to address change at the spiritual level, the level where you come to understand more fully of who you are in your relationship to the Father and the Father fragment within you.

In your answers this evening, I detected many levels of your resistance to change. You may not always see change as something to enjoy, but it is always a part of your life, your existence. It is something that you must get used to because this is something that will be occurring and happening to you all throughout eternity. You never stay static even when you become a sixth stage finaliter in the Corps of the Finality. You will always be changing and growing as you will always be experiencing new aspects of life, new brothers and sisters to know, new opportunities to share.

However, now on Urantia, living on this physical world, changes you must encounter: changes of jobs, housing, in your finances, these are all of the things that affect you at the material level. And as you know, your world is highly unstable, There can be many changes affecting you throughout the course of your life that can happen quickly or in a couple of months or years. Nevertheless, these fluctuations in your physical stability are all part and parcel of the material life. I would say to you, my friends, this evening that in order to encounter these changes (I wanted to say embrace them, but I do not think that is a word that many of you would appreciate) look at them for what they are. How does this affect who you truly are as a child of God? These are not as important as you may think, but you see, so much of your living is so heavily invested in physical reality that when these changes occur they uproot your life and throw you off balance. You feel uncentered, you feel disconnected. These changes are transitory and do not have much to do with who you truly are as a child of God. I will come back to the material changes later in the lesson but I did want to define what these are.

The next level of change occurs at the mental level. How will you handle the changes in your physical life? How will you adjust to them? How will you find a way to incorporate them more gracefully in your lives so you do not seem to be so uprooted or disoriented? These are some of the things that happen at a deeper, more subconscious level when you go through all kinds of mental changes. You must find the ways to understand them, then the intellectual understanding or the emotional adjustment to them occurs. How will you perceive them, how you will come to understand these changes?

You must allow for the fact that all of life new ideas will filter into your mind through the spiritual circuitry fused through your being. There are times in your life when conditions are ripe for new ideas to form crystallized awarenesses in your conscious mind, and you become enveloped in this new understanding. This projects you into a new mode of thinking that realigns the old or former outlook. When you have mental changes affecting you, these reshape how you perceive your reality. So these can also be uprooting for a time because then they say to you, "well if I have this new understanding, then my behavior must change." So how do change your behavior to accommodate this new thought?

These, then are some of the emotional adjustments you must make. The propensity you have in doing this is the proportionate emotional attachment or emotional affinity you have to the new idea that is trying to come into your consciousness. At times it can be abutted against the old patterns of thinking or the established cultural mores. But when these new ideas come in, they are allowing you a choice of how you will react to them and how you will perceive this.

And then you have change at the spiritual level. This is the level where true harmonization and true embracing of all change occurs. This is the level of personality development where the soul substance of your being is being magnified, is being polished. The animal nature is gradually giving away to the divine personality that is embryonically housed within your soul. Change at this level is, for the most part, unconscious. It is not something you can judge or evaluate. It is only in seeing the fruits of the spirit as you look back in your life in time, say six months or a year, and see how have grown or how your behavior has changed.

This is perhaps a somewhat more involved discussion but I wanted to plant some ideas in your mind. Now that the seed is being watered, I would like to ask if you have questions.

Dialogue

Personality, Expression

Student: Question about personality and how it relates to a deep part of my personality that doesn't change and how it fits into the soul and being.

Welmek: Your personality is your true identity. It is the sum and substance of the essential nature that has been given to you by your Father. Your soul is the experiential creation of the personality expression of those activities and insights that you have as a person. You are an expression of how you live your life. Does this help? Do you need further clarification?

Student: Perhaps about the problem personality. It seems to me that people's personalities can change dramatically over the course of the lifetime.

Welmek: Your cultural definition of personality varies greatly from the personality definition that is in your text, that is the personality definition that the universe depicts. I would say that personality is changeless. However, what changes in a person is the outlook, is the perspective, and the behavior varies according to how a person perceives his or her environment. This is conditioned upon several factors: the genetic imprint, the family environment, the cultural mores, the receptivity of truth, the call within of the Father fragment, and the person's choice to fully cooperate with the spirit. All of these components modify the [[personality]'s] behavior. It does not modify the personality itself. It modifies internal environment and the outward behavior. Do you see? Do you need further clarification?

These are very involved concepts for you to fully embrace. I would say that if you were to look at a person who at one point has a lot of inner turmoil in life, you might see mood swings, you might see anger and frustration. And then you might see, at some point, that this person had some involvement with a positive person and so the person's behavior begins to become more loving and compassionate, and the anger begins to disappear and the resentment begins to fade. What has changed in this person? It is their personality or is it their outlook and behavior? A person's essential essence stays the same. How they relate to their environment becomes more reflective of the true nature of reality. Each person at their sum and substance is a child of God. Within them is love, is patience, is goodness, is the element of the Father's real and stable nature. There are many factors and many ways in which to express their personality (inaudible). You are each becoming a diamond from this rough hewn rock that is your animal nature. With each change and decision that is rooted in the Father's will you are polishing off a piece of that rough smudged rock and becoming a beautiful gem. Does this help?

Student: Yes.

Student: I'm wondering if children express their personality better than adults do? They are naturally themselves until the adult world gets a hold of their psyche? Is there any truth to that? They seem so unaffected until a certain age by extraneous factors.

Welmek: There is an idea in your culture that children are these pure personalities and to some degree I would say that this is accurate. There is an essential nature in the child that is of pure innocence and love. It is the essential complement of the Father's personality when the child is rooted in the Father's personality circuit the essential nature is formed. There is a natural uprush in its expression that you see at these young ages, 2 or 3. You see a very a open and trusting nature. But you see temper tantrums and selfish and immature behavior. Now would you say that is the personality of the Father?

Student: Of course not. I'm talking about the personality of the child that is bestowed by the Father. In the teen years or early adult years you lose contact. I have a image that within this emotional immaturity there are moments of pure personality you don't see in the adult.

Welmek: Yes, that is accurate, but the child is not a fully developed reflection of the personality potential expression that is most reflective of the Father's bestowed gift; that the individual has not acquired the requisite experience and stable behavior manifestation that would allow the fruits of the spirit to be portrayed in all circumstances. And this is the process of maturity, this is the process of growing in personality expression and stabilization. The personality is and of itself is stable, the expression of the personality is what matures with time and experience.

What you see in a child is the natural openness and connection with the Father that has not been trampled upon by fear, by erroneous belief systems, by doubt, anger or other spirit poisons that so insidiously mask the true personality. The personality is still there, but there are all these smudge marks on this beautiful diamond which is being developed. With each stroke of love, with each polish of compassion, these smears of the spirit poisons are eliminated. Take your buffing pad and begin to polish the smudges from your personality and from that of your brothers and sisters. It is love that erases all the smears, all the dirt, all the layers of grime that cover these beautiful gems each of you are.

You may not be able to fully see this yet but the Father does. The Father knows each of your personalities by name and loves you so dearly. If you could only see yourself the way the Father sees you, you would have no doubt as to who you are and what you are evolving toward. This would help you to see that change, especially at the spiritual level, is something you rejoice in because you are becoming more Father-like. You are becoming that essence of absolute pure spirit that is so sublime and exquisite. Each of you has that potential.

When you connect with this idea, when you connect with this feeling of who you are as a person, then at the mindal level you begin to see your concepts of who you are and how you should feel about yourself begin to become more positive. And when you see yourself in a positive way, when you embrace yourself as a child of God, your personality potential begins to be expressed. You know where you are being led is wonderful.

Will this change be a material outworking of your life? It is only for you to decide where you will live, what job you will have; how you will manifest your physical life is entirely up to you. The Father gives you much discretion to determine how you will live in the material world. But your material life can be more fully stabilized when you are more secure in the realization of who you are at the spiritual level, and to have the conscious realization and feeling, emotional attachment of who you are as a child of God. This will help you through the deprivations in your material life, for you will find that what you valued or what was important to you begins to alter, and those material things that you once placed a high regard on do not seem to important. Are there other questions this evening?

Stillness

Student: How do we get rid of the smudges?

Welmek: Take out your buffing pads in stillness. I would say to you spend time communing with the Father each day. Ask the Father what unlovely quality you exhibit in life. Ask the Father to wipe away that smudge, and to show you how to wipe that away for yourself. You could envision, in stillness, the Father taking his gold cloth of love and applying it directly on that quality do you not like about yourself and replacing it with understanding, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and truth. Each day when He will do this, the more brilliantly your gem will shine; the more light you will attract and the more will light attract to you.

Student: How can I more accurately discern the difference of my fear of getting in the way of my choice and the fact that the choice might be what I want?

Welmek: I would ask you to consider what kind of decision you are making. Is this a decision at the material level of altering your physical circumstances? Is it at the mental level where you are altering your conceptual understanding of an idea, or is this at the spiritual level where you are beginning to embrace a new truth about yourself?

First, I would advise you to take this into stillness and ask your inner spirit at what level this change is occurring. If this change is occurring at the physical level, you might spend a few moments in asking what this change will mean to you. In the example you said earlier: thinking about moving to another city, you might want to spend a few moments in exploring what does this mean. Will I have to find a new job, new home, and will I have to establish a new social life? What does this mean to you? Spend a few moments in looking at the facets of what this decision will mean. Then, when you are able to see these elements more clearly and distinctly, then ask what is it about these apparent changes that you need to adjust in your thinking. You are taking this to the next level in making the mental adjustment. What is it about moving to a new home that I do not like, that I fear? Is it the moving process, is the feeling of being uprooted? Begin to analyze and look at more objectively the facets of what it is that you are feeling.

Then go on to the spiritual level to ask the Father to give you guidance and insight as to why you fear this change, for the strength and inner resolve you need to make the decision. The decision is yours to make. No on can make the decision for you; this must be your free will choice. But try to see the ramifications of what your decision may mean in your life and how you may react to it. Insights will help you to handle the fears when you are in the time of change.

Student: I knew you were going to tell me to find the answer in stillness. I almost didn't ask the question.

Welmek: But do you understand what it is that you can bring to your spirit and the elements of what it is that you can ask? These are the deep questions that echo throughout all of your life. The Father will not make choices for you, nor will He always allow you to see what the outcome will be in your decision, for you must learn to adapt your life to the circumstances you are in. But at the spiritual level, He will give you strength, courage; the assurance that no matter what circumstances you find your material life in, he will always give you the support, love and patience you need to guide you through the situation.

My friends, change is all around you. Is it inevitable throughout your life, your path. You cannot escape it even though there are times in your life when you want some stability, your want some relief from change. There is one place where you can go where all is infinitely stable, eternally peaceful. That is in stillness in communion with the Father. Establish yourselves more fully in the assurance that no matter how your material world changes around you there is always one place where you will be secure and given the guidance to make the best of the changes that are happening.

Closing

I leave you this evening with this thought. The Master was most adept at handling change. Any time you feel that you are fearful, any time in doubt of how you should handle a situation, go within in stillness and connect with Michael and his human experience. Ask him how he mastered the changes that befell him in his life. There is no greater guide, there is no greater source to understand what you are going through. Allow yourselves to see the Master in his life and how he handled change. Allow his courage, his grace, his utter serenity in the vindication of his life through the Father's love to fill your heart, to fill your source, and to move you through the change with grace, poise and trust. Good night, my friends.