2005-01-13-Scarcity

Session

Opening

Greetings dear friends, this is Serenia - I am happy to be with you again as always. We enjoy being in your presence and relating to you with heartfelt tenderness and pride in your willingness to continue week after week on this journey towards reclaiming yourselves and your world.

Tonight I wish to pull together some of our recent lessons into a more unified expression. I wish to talk about an over-riding model of planetary culture that is a result of the rebellion and default and a great impediment to your forward movement. Naturally, in our language, we have a single word for this that reveals in its very being the multi-faceted nature of the problem. But in your language, we will have to pull together various terms to weave into a whole.

Lesson

The single word most critical to this discussion, however, is scarcity. Your planet as a whole tends to operate on a model of scarcity and deprivation. This is an utterly natural response to a world that lost its celestial administration, first that of your Planetary Prince and then of your Garden of Eden and your celestial parent models, Adam and Eve.

For you have been literally deprived, like orphaned children left to roam the streets grabbing scraps wherever you can and in order to survive, dashing with the meager bits to hide in the corners in the dark. The loss of the steadying influence of that cultural legacy is unfathomable. So much so, that you cannot grasp what you have lost without viewing it by understanding the echoes of the planetary dysfunction that reveals it to you as a response to those terrible circumstances.

One of the scarcity responses is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is always a scarcity model. Within the fundamentalist mind set, there is never enough to go around, and only if you obey certain strict rules will you survive. Always there is the threat of disaster and the often grim hope of a miraculous salvation.

This constitutes a natural response of any child thrust into the orphanhood and forced to survive without being helped to grow up into the adult status that was your natural birthright. Harshness, or its concommitent, victim mentality, are expected responses to such situations. So in order to address the loss of the teachings of these administrations, you must understand what it is that you have lost. And in order to understand that loss, you must see the ways in which your distorted unfoldment of culture reveals that which you lack. You are so close to it, that it is often times difficult of assessment with any degree of realism.

One of the most clear-cut manifestations of this scarcity is your poverty of spirit, your difficulty in attaining any true and lasting sense of self-worth. And this must be addressed. The degree of guilt that many of you experience, the degree of self-flagellation for largely understandable errors and missteps, is profound, and to us, tragic and heart-rending. For you to stand tall as beloved children of a loving father and mother is still very difficult for most on your world, even many of you who have worked with us now for so many years.

All too often, you seek to gain self-esteem by inappropriate sacrifice of self - not the sacrifices of service, but the literal sacrifices of your own wants and needs that as healthy children would propel you to self-respect, and thus to far more capacity for true service than you can now manage. Without permitting love to fill you, serve as you like, effectiveness will often escape you.

When we came to this group, our first words to you were instructions to seek the father in stillness, to learn to allow him to love you, and to embrace abundance. You sought to understand our words and concepts, yet you remained baffled and confused by them. So much of your cultural history was not in support of these concepts. You understood them intellectually, at least in part, but you could not put them into true and lasting practice. You could not allow real experience with these concepts to truly take hold and transform you in the spirit. You have made progress, certainly in intellectual understanding, and in baby steps of experiential understanding. But you are only beginners yet. Still, your grasp of these problems is now at a place where we can begin teaching you on these essential topics more in earnest, so that you may understand the vast planetary problem this poses, and can begin the personal transformations that will enlarge your hearts enough that you may be filled with what is to come.

Your Urantia Book says that a pint cannot hold a quart. Without this enlargement, try as you may, comprehend intellectually as you may, the joy and abundance of a full spiritual life as a true son or daughter of the Father's universe simply cannot be yours. You have often put this in terms of your inability to "have" the good things of life, the difficulty in "having" love and joy and all manner of truth, beauty and goodness. You have felt keenly the sense of unworthiness, undeservingness attached to this inability to "have". You can see it, sometimes want and yearn for it, but it seems to remain beyond your actual grasp. For evolving beings, conceptual knowledge is only had upon the experientialization of that knowledge - it is in the moments of experiencing that it is truly becomes yours to keep. This is a primary utility in experience. And a personality cannot have full experience alone.

Sharing is essential to full experientiality - whether with spirit sources or human companions. And as knowledge is only truly possessed by sharing, not merely in comprehension, so also truth, beauty and goodness - special coordinating forms of knowledge - cannot be possessed without sharing.

But without a sense of your true personality selfhood, you cannot actually share experientially. Many of you have noted that however much you talk and seem to understand one another in mind, it is difficult to put things into action together. You can take your understandings to your spiritual sources, but without a true sense of self, it is difficult to reach a point of genuine contact. In addition, part of your difficulty with diversity is that without a well-developed sense of personality-selfhood, the diversity is perceived as a threat to your developing self. And this is not even inaccurate. In the developmental sense of the human race, the self-hood of the tribe is itself hard-won, and then hard-defended for protection of that still fragile self-hood.

A distorted sense of selflessness leads to a need to defend ones viewpoints in a way that a clearer self-respect through personality development does not require. In order to share well with one another, you must have self-respect - healthy self-love - and you must have a grasp of true diversity.

Sadly although understandably for young evolutionary beings, there is much finger-pointing by those whose senses of selfhood are slightly superior, towards those whose defensiveness is more noticeable. Instead of enlarging the picture on your brothers and sisters when they are defensive, you judge them as inferior, as engaged in wrong-doing, and sometimes make such judgments all too plain. You do not stop to think of your advantage, and their disadvantage. You do not first seek to understand them. And so all of the various reactions of distortion - for you are all yet more or less distorted on this topic - mill about and cause disunity where you most need and seek unity. But unity without uniformity is still very difficult for you to grasp and live.

In the normally developing tribe, uniformity is highly prized, and in a developmental sense, necessary. Without the guidance of celestial oversight in full planetary administrative function, this tribalism finds its way into the narrowing streams of nationalism and fundamentalism lacking in upliftment capacity. Had you retained the administrations of celestial oversight, you would have been able to experience a degree of refreshing diversity and originality the likes of which you have little ability to perceive as you are and as you have developed. And those witnessing such diversity would have gone back inspired to teach others with compelling examples of truth, beauty and goodness that such an administration lastingly represents on a developing world. By the loss of your celestial administration, you are still far more largely in a tribal state - struggling as you do to move through more advanced social development yet dragging the unresolved evolutionary struggles along with you - than would even begin to be ideal. This is a terrible devolutionary momentum in the midst of your true desires to move forward.

It will be necessary for you to manifest ever increasing compassion with one another as you tease apart what happened to you as a world, as a culture, as families, and as individuals. At this point in time, that compassion is hard won, and not yet operant to the degree necessary for a truly forward-looking world. We would ask you to ever remain mindful of this need to understand your planetary siblings and equally to understand yourselves, yet also to cease in castigating yourselves when you find that your behavior has not been what you would prefer, either in lack of compassion, or failures of defensiveness. It is asked of you simply that you note that you have erred, resolve to try harder, then do try harder, and forgive yourselves when you fail again, moving forward step by step through recognition of the problem and determination towards progress, but not being deterred, or distorted by overmuch self-blame. Your world is not an easy one on which to exhibit any degree of perfection of behavior, nor is your developmental stage likely to produce such results readily. Self-respect in this stage of your existence does not consist in perfected behavior, but ever-perfecting motivation. Your sincerity is all that is needed to move you forward. Sincere mistakes are merely your learning experiences as you move through your unfolding lives. Self-deprecation readily turns into false humility.

Scarcity still runs planetary affairs. And you have often seen how the outbursts of abundance are greeted with all manner of negative responses from suspicion to downright disdain. Your world, for all the lip-service given, still does not at large welcome notions of abundance. They seem to many to range from laughable and childish reactions to delusions to dangerous decadence.

It is a sad world where abundance is perceived as decadence, but then this is indeed a sad planet. Those who refuse to recognize this difficulty and who believe, understandably, that full joy for the world (which would equate to life and light) is just around the corner are impeded in their effectiveness by their unwillingness to see the seriousness of the problem for exactly what it is, not what they would wish it to be. To live with the frustration of the reality of the situation while putting out endless energies on behalf of the positive is not an easy task. And by and large, most of you make this attempt valiantly and we are impressed and heartened by your courageous dedication. But there is much yet for you to know and understand to make you more effective in the work that lies ahead.

Over the coming weeks, we will seek to address in more detail this problem and what you can do to more effectively deal with it.

For the moment, I will say that the critical day to day things we recommend are as they have always been - Seeking the Father in stillness - knowing that the kingdom of heaven is within - not merely in the adjuster's magnificent indwelling but in your increasing personal relationship with that indwelling spirit. Remember that the Spirit of Truth uplifts you through the agencies of our beloved Michael and Mother Spirit, and in the middle of challenge, if you cry out to them, you will always be heard and help will ever be yours.

Knowing that you are beloved, and worthy of that love - this is still a great challenge for most of you. Letting the love in is essential in order for it to ever go on through you to others. But in order to truly perform that service, you must be willing to take that love purely for yourselves as well. There is no escaping this requirement. Without it, your service can never attain the levels of genuineness necessary to truly inspire. And you must recognize that the Father's will for you and all of his children will ever and always be abundance of every good thing possible. All truth, and beauty, and goodness is yours and surrounds you and fills you and entices you to the Source and Center of all things.

Your unworthiness prevents this, but when told this, most of you jump to self-judgment for your unworthiness, instantly performing the act of disrespect of self that causes the problems in the first place.

You simply must begin to love and forgive yourselves. As you forgive others you will know forgiveness, but as you forgive yourselves, you will better understand others to forgive them. These things - loving self and other, with the ever surrounding and uplifting love from the father and you to the father form a trinity web, a set of thought, feeling and action that cannot ever be fully separated. No one aspect is the most important one, even as the Trinity Deity of all is truly three in one. You will find many such associative functional combinations on your journey to Paradise - and for some time yet you will misunderstand, trying to make one aspect more important than the others.

Our beloved Michael said to Love the Father with all your heart and your neighbors as yourselves. You cannot love your neighbors, nor God, if you do not love yourself. The key to self love is permitting God's love for you, and specifically you, to be had within yourself. Not to immediately give it away because the touch of joy is so frightening and painful, so out of tune with the notions of scarcity which have become false values to you. No.

To receive it and glory in it and be transformed by the joy of it. And to respond back with the joyous gratitude - not humble as a small, worthless being, but boldly grateful and encouraged to stand tall and strong as the beloved child you are - this is something that will spring forth from your permitting God's love to truly be yours. Likewise, loving and seeing your brothers and sisters and taking the joy of the awareness of their individual personalities and true selfhood - knowing them, understanding them, loving them - this is a Supreme love, and your natural development towards that evolving Supreme. In the moments of loving others, you will find God the Supreme and be satisfied and spurred on in the same moment.

Through this trinity of beingness, you can find the entire experiential purposes of the evolutionary journey in your hearts. These are the simple truths to hold fast to as you journey to understand more thoroughly your work of this world. But their simplicity holds the whole of the evolving universe, and your experience with the truth, beauty and goodness of this will never end.

Hold fast, dear ones. For each of you, the true hour of your deliverance is in your own hands. Nothing that has happened to your world or to you can separate you forever from this fount of love. Discouragement is understandable, but build your faith in the ultimate outcomes, not the momentary ebbs and flows of time. You are safe in the hands of loving Parents. Your world has been orphaned, yes, but no longer, and you as personalities have never been orphaned, despite appearances. It is harder as agondonters to know this truth, but you have bravely continued - and we ask you to continue yet further down this road. Trust the truth of your existence, that you are beloved children of a loving father and brothers and sisters together in the Journey of all Time.

Closing

We love you beyond our ability to express it in your language, and yet, that is itself contained within the vastly greater love that the Father has for you in every smallest second of your existence. In love, we are all together, diversity in unity.

Know that you are loved and abundance is truly there for you. Farewell until our next meeting.