2010-07-26-Your Soul

Session

Opening

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Welcome. Tonight we have a few newcomers to our group so we welcome you in their stead too. For their sake we’d like to acknowledge that, through your lessons, you’ve invited us to think of you as not only our spiritual parents, the bringers of life--the originators of life on this world of ours and a million others, nor think of you as some august and far-removed enormous spiritual beings. You invite us to think of you as brothers and sisters, since we are alike, children of God: we have a mutual Father. Beyond this you’ve asked we consider you our closest and dearest friends, someone with whom we can have an informal, playful, spontaneous relationship.

In spirit you are known by so many names on earth; in our mostly Judeo-Christian group here you, Mother, are the Holy Spirit. It is your Holy Spirit that is a part of us, which gives and sustains our life and even forms a part of our mentality--our intuition, our courage, our understanding, our worship and our wisdom. And Michael, it is your Sprit of Truth that orients us toward a never-ending discovery of what is real so far yet beyond our furthest imaginings. I must confess it took a while for me to realize that my own mental and spiritual facilities were partly you two. So once again: Welcome, dear parents and dear friends. We open our hearts and open our minds to entertain as best we can what you have for us tonight. Amen.

MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael, and I delight as always in your welcome.

Lesson

You’re saying to me: Well--come, come be with us. So let me bounce it right back to you, my children: Come be with Mother Spirit and me. We realize how many times each of us use that word--we. We tease you with the idea that we are definitely like an old married couple, we’re so very much attuned to each other. We’re both spirit, pure creative spirit, and, just as with you, we’re delighted in our creations and--hopefully, like all good parents--we’re especially delighted in your independence, these unique personalities that God alone gave you. Think of how you too delight when your children begin to show forth that uniqueness of their personality, and become individual. On the one hand they are your children--they literally came from you, and yet they’re not yours at all. They belong to themselves and to God alone. Every human being has this utter uniqueness, this God-given quality that is theirs to share with their Father alone. And yet by this fact of existence, of God’s existence and of each one of His children’s existence, loneliness is only a temporary feeling of time and space beings. It is not the ultimate reality that your timeless, multi-dimensional soul knows.

Soul, Perspective

• Your soul and its co-author’s point of view

You realize, my children, in your theology anyway, that God is omniscient in the sense that He knows everything. You may take this a step further and say God experiences everything, all of existence. But beyond this universally recognized essence of His in all of your religions, there is the lesser known fact of an individualized presence of God which dwells within each one of you. We call this a Mystery Monitor insofar as this is God experiencing your life. And further: this individualized presence of God is literally taking on your life. If you will, it’s the most perfect, living record--(Michael chuckles)--you could imagine. Being a living aspect of God himself, it is also your life seen from His perspective as well, His infinite and absolute perfection. This is your soul and it is more, infinitely more than just your memories, your own limited ability to once again relive part of your life. Your soul is so much more. Just think: to relive a moment of your life you have to sit down, close your eyes and ears to turn off the surroundings, and just let it come forth on its own, because the experience is not only what you superficially remember. The fullness within the memory is your soul--how some previous moment looked, how it smelled, how it totally felt. Yet you can usually only do this for a few precious moments to reassure your conscious self, this ever changing consciousness of yours, that, yes indeed, you do have a soul.

So our assertion is even so much more than this, more than you can yet experience in your life, when we say your soul is this perfect record of all your experiences, all the good and all the bad as you might consider them: God experiences all that, and from His understanding as well. Your soul is full, not so much of all the possessions you’ve come to enjoy; it’s all the other people you’ve known in your life. For these people are like you. They too have this infinity and this absoluteness within them. They too have this reality, this cosmic reality of a soul, a unique soul of unique personal experiences. It is their life as it was, and is, experienced by a loving presence of God.

This is your treasure, my children. This is what you truly possess for this is what stays with you--as you. This is what you become when all the rest falls away, so even the final, impenetrable point of your life here you call death is truly a new beginning in a fantastically expanded reality.

This soul reality you can experience consciously, deliberately; you can absolutely know it exists in this life. But it requires faith to let fall away in stillness all the relative things you know by way of your mind alone. All your knowledge, all your understanding cannot prove a single fact of your soul to a sincerely doubting attitude. It does help though to think of it the way we do, so you know that it is more than just the memory you can recall nonchalantly--what you did, where you were on a certain date. Your soul is partly spirit just as you are partly spirit, and as your soul is also His enormous spiritual record of your life, so too you can have the spiritual faith-orientation simply to relive part of your life in meditation, reverie and reflection. Give up a little of your present life, in stillness, to let your soul come forth, to, if you will, be reassured that there is this absolutely priceless record of all your experiences, that what you are experiencing day to day is not totally fleeting with time. Everything of spiritual significance, of value in your life is being captured for you and held sacrosanct by a presence of God. This is how we--Mother Spirit and I--are able to see your soul.

Self, Being, Consciousness

• Your conscious self—a small part of your whole being

Your consciousness, being tied so much to an ever-changing, mental/physical living vehicle, it’s as if you can see just one little moving point on a map of your whole being at a time, shall we say one little tiny spot on a ridge line--that whole elevated line of your life standing out of your circumstances, whereas we can see the entire panorama of your God-co-authored soul. And so, my children, soul-awareness is a spiritual blessing you grow into as you grow older and are more readily able to access your soul: your life takes on more and more your soul’s values and meaning. As your soul-feelings for other people generate value within you, you see a value in them. You can begin to shine forth and see in others an equality of character. This is something you acquire as you live, but especially as you live faithful to all you have been--revealed in your soul. You are no stranger to yourself but you project who you really are--soulfully. You have the courage and the nerve to be who you most faithfully are to others. You shine forth your soul as character.

Think of those others you have met in your life who had this quality of genuine character. Was it something they too had to earn, earn by living? Mother Spirit and I--Creator Daughter and Creator Son of God--this is where we are most wonderfully humbled by His creativity in each one of all of you. You are our children and yet here you are with His gift of unique personality/personhood. It is God who set up this whole universe as a kind of learning ground for all of us. All of us out here in time and space, we’re all experiential beings and these lives we are living have no duplicate. There’s nothing that can stand in for living experience in all the cosmos, and none of us, none of us shy of our Father, can perfectly anticipate what’s coming next. He has set up the universes so that what is coming next is partly--in great part, I should say--what all of us, and each single one of us, chooses in our freedom. We say a human being is a creature of free will dignity and the whole spiritual community acknowledges and respects your freedom, especially when the rigors of certain planetary living renders the future beyond any human being’s ability to anticipate.

This is the adventure set before all of us. You parents cannot perfectly anticipate how these children of yours are going to turn out--as you say. Neither can Mother Spirit and I perfectly anticipate what you will choose to do. To us this autonomy and creative freedom of yours and ours is a supreme glory of God’s infinite love and compassion, else this whole universe would just be some shadow-play of His: there would be no real freedom within it, no deviation from His will. You parents can see and feel how infinite and absolute His love must be to set us all free. We can have a soul. We can earn our character because there is no other way except by living experience influenced by our decisions. This is His universal law that sets us all free and actually gives us ourselves, independent even of Him, even as you, my children, are independent of Mother Spirit and me. You can ignore us--for a while. It’s a little hard to ignore spiritual reality when you are reborn on another, more soulful world.

But your very day to day human experience on this world, this world in particular, is proof that human beings can and do ignore their spiritual origins, even their own inner personal spiritual reality. We look forward to the day when every person on Urantia is able to feel and experience that they are spiritual beings endowed that way by God Himself; and see this in each other.

This is my message for this evening: these wonderful souls you have in cosmic reality, these potentially eternal possessions of yours that you are earning here day by day. Take some time out of your busy activities just to reflect and enjoy the enormity of your own soul and all that you’ve been all these years. Let yourselves be truly humbled by what you yourselves have experienced. Then will your hearts be overflowing with recognition of the Origin of all of us and the amazing adventure He has set before us--forever. There is no end to you; there is no end to me; because there is no end to Him.

Thank you, dear Father, for giving my children the means by which they may truly have and know themselves. However alone and unique they are with You, as You are with them: loneliness is truly only a temporary human emotion.

Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, please share them with me.

Dialogue

Student: I don’t have any questions, Father Michael, just thank you again for your love and support, and your understanding, and your never-ending care.

MICHAEL: Did what I say this evening find some resonance within your soul, my son?

Student: I understand that there’s no end to me. Seems like there’s no end any of us unless they choose to end it. I look forward to the next life, and to the next lives after that one.

Limitations, Humanity

• One limitation in being human

Michael: Yes, my son, that is one limitation put upon you in this your first, human life: you really don’t have the ability to end yourself. It is with no condescension--I say this with all love: you are not yet cosmically mature enough to cease to exist. Those of you who commit what you call suicide, in any number of highly complex ways, for equally complex reasons--or lack of reason to live, perhaps--you will find yourself awaking on the Morontia worlds, and looking around and marveling just like everyone else. As I have said before, there will be no dissembling your surprise--and appreciation. (Michael chuckles)

True enough: eternal life is not forced upon anyone. Sometime in some far, far future date--as you would think of it now, you will have one unequivocal, irreducible decision to make as to whether to continue or not, except you will be making it in the wider and much deeper comprehension of your own soul, of your own life until then, seen more and more from God’s point of view as well.

So this, my son, this human limitation is another blessing of God’s: to credit that all your decisions take place within a framework of understanding--that He understands--and so in this way you cannot literally yet--as a human being--choose to cease to exist. That has to be a fully soulful, highly conscious decision to make over on the other side--as you say. Does this seem to make sense to you?

Student: It does. I thought there were certain people who chose not to go on, but you say that everyone makes it.

MICHAEL: That’s true.

Student: Well, that’s a relief! (much laughter)

MICHAEL: It’s, again, one of those instances of God’s--not only justice, which emanates from the Paradise Trinity--that impersonal factor which is no respecter of persons but treats all personal beings the same--that element of justice, of absolute equality His sight; but this justice is, in turn, overshadowed by God’s mercy. It’s His, and the whole spiritual community’s willingness to give you another chance. So you do not as yet have the oneness of your personality and its experience and potential to make that kind of decision: to choose to cease to exist.

The most evil doings of people--you now recognize, with enormous pity, the kind of hell they lived in to do the things they did. This does not mean you cannot protect yourself (Michael chuckles) from them and their actions. But when you see their souls someday, my son, and what those souls contain, you’ll appreciate even more what pitiful creatures they became. For them to see others mostly as creatures to be exploited; to see the whole of humankind on those terms: that is in itself already being in hell. And that very thing is what makes them so dangerous, yet so needy for a genuine love they have never experienced. Find it in your heart, if you can.

But yes, they too will survive to experience, themselves, what is in their souls, and all the pain and loss they have caused—but from a more soulful perspective. It is also in God’s mercy He would not deny them the ability to cease to exist and escape that pain if they cannot stand it, and grow beyond it. So you see, my son, this is not a human-level choice.

Student: Yes, thank you. I can see that now.

MICHAEL: This is a very absolute thing we are talking about here, a personal being, created by God, choosing to truly end their experience of life: yet that is a final hallmark of the freedom you have. You can only wonder why some being would choose to do this.

Student: Yes, I was wondering what possessed Lucifer not to be rehabilitated, when he finally knew what was going on?--much more so than we do.

Survival, Death

• The marvelous rewards of surviving death

MICHAEL: You have to stretch your imaginations to wonder about that moment of awakening, a moment your Urantia book assures you, you will never forget in all eternity--the supreme experience of having survived. You will have had the experience of death, and yet, here you still are--on a world so amazing, and with a kind of body and mind and soul that is beyond description. So think of rehabilitation in terms of just that reawakening experience alone, what it must be to walk out of the Resurrection Hall on a Mansion World and be able to visualize some of the lower spiritual beings.

Lucifer never went through this kind of existential change with its marvelous rewards of wonder and humility and appreciation. Once his personality became so twisted in upon itself he refused to acknowledge anything that would challenge his own self-appraisal of having been right all along, no matter how obviously deluded this situation might be to another. In a human being you call this being all puffed up and self-righteous, a very poisonous attitude with which to engage anything outside oneself. The greater the challenge to adapt to a changed situation, the more the warped personality clings to some past mistaken decisions and refuses to admit any evidence otherwise. Again, this comes under the heading of personal choice, even unto eternal ceasing to exist.

Student: Sounds very interesting—that reawakening.

MICHAEL, laughing: Well, we won’t tease you any more with that.

Student: Thank you, Michael.

MICHAEL: Be in my peace.

Student: Yes, Michael, you spoke about freedom, and the choices we have. Could you talk more about that—about what we are supposedly being freed of?

Freedom

• From what do we need to be free?

MICHAEL: Yes, my son. Mother Spirit and I do face somewhat of a difficulty in communicating in the English language here, but I do think you realize what we are sometimes wrapping up in a sentence or two, the Urantia book spends several pages on. That being said: think of your personality—this ultimate reality you are, this unique creation of God’s—the spiritual part of you that real-alizes your life—makes your life real. This part of you is projecting yourself out into your life, with your plans and anticipations and expectations: what is originating within you as to how to spend your life. At the same time, and from the time you were little babies, you experience also that life is coming at you. This is the bottomless adventure we talked about, with no end in time or limit in space. This is the whole, dynamically moving world and universe into which you were born, of personal beings and impersonal things, and their events.

From this point of view, my son, your own body is a living, infinite mechanism you were just given, with all its abilities and limitations you have to slowly learn—those fingers and toes out there, and how they’re connected—yours. You were born into a maelstrom of you and IT—all that Other out there. Your personality is endowed with creative spirit, so God is not only sharing personality itself with you, He is also sharing creativity. You are intrinsically creative. Every child automatically creates an inner world of his or her own. Then, as you live with your family and friends and associates, you try to express and share your inner reality—the feelings and ideas happening inside, coupled with the need, and delight, to understand them.

You develop an attitude—an ability and desire to relate to all that is not-you. And there it is!—your world, your people—uniquely yours, as you learn how to be civil with them, more or less recapitulating civilization in your particular culture as you grow up. On the personal scale, think of the “terrible-twos” when things become—mine!—and the automatic contention between playmates, yet too the discovery/invention of friendship. On a planetary scale, think of hundreds of thousands of years of nearly incessant warfare, yet too the ways so many have found of being civil, loving, and mutually supporting--until the world becomes as interrelated as it is.

All this, in your soul, gives meaning and value to your experience of life. It also determines how you perceive reality. This is the conditioning we’ve talked so much about; where you were born, the family and society and the larger culture within which you grew up. As your free will exists only in your conscious decisions, within this conditioned encompassing, the more you can be aware of your own inescapable subjectivity, and its unconscious assumptions, the greater will be your understanding of yourself and your ability to create the alternatives upon which your choices depend. Attitude, understanding, creativity—these form the basis for individual freedom.

As you are civilized/conditioned/cultured long before you develop the ability to question and examine these—call them the facts of birth you received when you were born—your emergence as an individual depends upon, in turn, your curiosity and exploration of who and what you feel yourself to be somewhat independent of your given situation. I’m pointing here at a growth of free will, and free will dignity, the emergence of an individual due to his or her growing understanding. This way you can give of yourself, and your unique take on things, to the community’s wealth of understanding. So there need be no end to the development of this free will dignity of yours.

You can see how it ties in with what I earlier discussed as soul, what you learn by living experience. Think again of those you’ve known with great character. Did they not also have this quality of dignity, of being true to themselves and having the inner oneness, the integrity with which to choose how to live…

Note

Dear folks and this student: my apologies for this abrupt end. Through a computer crash and the migration (I’m told that’s what it’s called) into a new computer with a different operating system, I lost the rest of this meeting--about another five minutes or so, I think. JL.