2011-09-15-God's Continuous Gift

Session

Opening

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, welcome: here we are again. This is delightful and kind-of scary, as ever, this tapping to the enormous field of spirit that surrounds us and sustains us. So vast it seems, so unknowable in a way, so we always ask your help to be with us and help us feel your presence. And there it is: here it is! You are with us, reminding us that you are always here. You’re very unobtrusive; you don’t force yourself upon us. Yet whenever we turn our attention to you, whenever we are still enough to feel your presence…here you are. So for this we do thank you.

Michael, we appreciated your last lesson on appreciation itself as the most sincere form of worship--this appreciating being alive no matter what our situation. No matter what our situation--appreciating being alive; appreciating this gift of a whole universe that we ourselves are co-creating. Here it is. It is ours. We were made for it. This is a little scary, the enormity of the creation and our part in it. So we trust in you. We put our faith in you and you return it one-hundred-fold. So thank you, dear parents, thank you for having us, and being right here with us. Amen.

Lesson

Michael: Good evening, this is Michael. Mother Spirit and I accept your warm invitation. We would ask you to pause a minute and just feel this whole field of consciousness of which we are a part. (pause)

It’s right in here that we are a part of you, and you are definitely a part of us. This is our glory. This is a gift from the Father of the very kind of beings that we are. We do worship and we do treasure this gift. Perhaps we can be aware of it more than your selves…we’ve had a lot of practice.

Creation

• God’s continuous gift

We really appreciate this whole universe, this whole creation that is laid out before us too. And it is more vast for us than for you--for all of our knowledge of it, for all of our contact with it and with the Paradise Trinity. It is a gift. And it’s God’s continuous creation.

Way back when, they had a notion of the universe being somewhat like a clock that was wound up and then given a little nudge and sent off on its merry way on a purely mechanistic cause and effect. We know and most of you know--you can feel it, you can experience it--there is a continuous creation coming down like a driving rain every moment, every little nanosecond, on to millennia--an incessant, powerful creation. This moment never happened before and it will never happen again because it doesn’t need to. There is something new constantly bursting forth not only from Paradise but from everywhere as if every little speck of space had this flowering, this bursting forth right within it. Call it God’s omnipresence and omniscience and omnipotence if you will: it’s real. It’s why, in a way, none of us living beings can really hang onto anything--because we don’t need to. On your level, my dears, you are not even keeping your own heart beating.

This life you have is also a continuously created gift, for neither are you nor your personality--your whole spiritual being--neither are you a biological clock wound up at conception that’s been kind-of just running down every since. You yourselves are part of this continuous creation that you are. For it’s in this creativity that God shares so much of his own nature with you. You have not only all of creation out there surrounding you, but you can look around right now and appreciate the room you are sitting in--the billions of little specs, the little numen that make up the whole phenomena of you and your situation, all alive and all in motion. This is also coming from you. You yourself are one of the little fountains out in the middle of the air, bursting forth, constantly creating your own experience. There’s your power; there’s your choice; there’s your freedom.

Freedom

• Where is your freedom?

And yet where is it if you can’t find it?--if you doubt my words?--if you don’t feel free?--if you are not experiencing that you yourself are a part of everything you’re aware of? It’s only in its use, my children. It can’t be held still. It can’t be captured. But it can be used. You can use this power of yours. You’re doing it incessantly. You’re doing it all the time but if you’re not aware of this, if you can’t really feel the thousand and one ways you are constantly deciding, consider. You are constantly using your spirit and your spirit’s sense of value to e-valuate moment by moment from the time you get up in the morning and sit there with your feet over the edge of the bed, evaluating how you feel. As you feel your way along during the day you are constantly, incessantly evaluating--using your spirit to evaluate what is happening to you.

If you can’t feel this, if you can’t be aware of this, let me suggest bringing it all to a crashing stop. Just be stubborn, not against yourself but for yourself. Just make a little space for yourself in time, and sit down and decide: I will not move from this spot until I decide to. Then just be still. Let everything go and watch how it continues to incessantly pop up for your choice, even if only to continue sitting there another moment.

And so this quest for freedom leads you to being still. In the midst of all this hurly-burly, all this incessant motion, this continuously living reality you find yourself in, you find stillness. You yourself can bring it all to crashing halt and just be still. As things come up you just decide moment by moment to look at them and then let them go until you feel with your whole being: yes, now I am standing up. Now I am entering back into my life, but now I have a feeling inside of this decisiveness. Now I can look around the room, I can look around at my life and realize all the thousands and thousands and thousands of little decisions and evaluations that got me to here. And I’m still alive! This is my life! No one else is standing here in this space. No one else has in their soul my group of people--all the people I’ve known in my life.

• The most personal reality imaginable

And so this can stay with you awhile, this feeling of decisiveness, this feeling of at least taking some control of your life because you are--like us--you are involved, wonderfully involved and a part of other folks and their lives as they have their lives in you. In this too, my dears, we are both most like our Father. We share this life we have, this appreciation, these values, and this wonderful sense of being a part of this whole creation that we’re aware of. It’s how we are taking it with this wonderful sense of freedom, of having some choice, and accepting then the ability to respond to that, and to realize where we are standing today. It’s not some random, higgly-piggly association of free-flying impersonal elements but the most personal reality imaginable—me. Here I am.

Thank you, Father. Thank you for this life of mine. Thank you that we have the ability to share this with each other, and fill each other’s souls. Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, I wanted to keep my lesson rather short so I could share some time with you. (very long pause)

What a wonderful stillness it is that we can share together. But like I’ve said before, my children, nothing really disturbs the stillness. It is something that contains everything. So if you have any questions or comments, don’t be afraid to introduce them.

Dialogue

Student: Michael, as a daughter and as a sister, I welcome you and I welcome you in my heart. I do appreciate the silence that we share this evening and other times, and I again appreciate your faith in each of us and our struggle to remember to come to the silence, and to leave with the strength to be in our own lives and to control our lives. I have what I consider to be an impediment and tiny, tiny millstones around my neck, and I just need to remember to bring them into the stillness and to leave them there. Thank you.

Faith

• Faith is rewarded with fact

Michael: Thank you, my daughter, for your faith--your faith in us and our Father, and your faith in yourself--your faith in your own desire for this kind of contact. As we’ve said so many times, faith is rewarded by fact. You believe, and because of this belief, this highly conscious belief, this trust in yourself and that which is beyond you and surrounding you, something happens. You’re renewed; even in some terrible physical condition you’re renewed. It’s not what it was yesterday but it’s what it is now. In that attention, in that respect you pay to your own living body, this is the way to go. This is the way to keep in touch with all that you are: body, mind, spirit, and soul. So thank you, my daughter. I’m delighted that you have found us, for in finding us, we are just that much more in touch with you. Be in my peace.

Student: Michael, I have a question. (Certainly) Michael, this is Sharon. I’m kind-of at the Faith-101 level and have been doing a lot of reading, and studying, and listening to the conference calls, trying to get a sense of myself spiritually. But I seem to have tremendous problems with intellectualizing everything. I understand it in my head but I don’t understand it in my heart. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts for someone that is very, very new to the path. Thank you.

Michael: Yes, my daughter. I want you to meditate on this and maybe write it down, and think about it, and feel this, and that is: entertain the concept and feel its depth: thoughts are only finely articulated feelings. Your fundamental experience of yourself and all that surrounds you?--this fundamental reality, this experience is one of feeling. That is the most fundamental human reality.

Feeling

• Intellect and feeling

From the time you were a tiny child you started to hear and then talk, all in a very natural development of speech. With that came thoughts and intellect--all the hundred and one ways that thought is put together, all the physical and mental and spiritual associations. That’s what I talked about tonight. You are constantly feeling and evaluating right from the way you feel when you get up in the morning, and how your breakfast tastes, and how the car is running, and what your co-workers are saying.

This is all spirit, for the Urantia Book offers a kind-of thumbnail way of dividing up this organic being you are into physical facts, mental meanings and relationships--all those thousand and one ways that different things relate to each other—and then spirit value and e-valuating. This is essentially the way you are feeling.

As you are very much wondering about the limits of your own intellectual take on things, this is in itself a feeling-evaluation. It’s your personality reaching out to feel more what is beneath thought--as origin--yet also what is beyond thought in terms of the inexpressible, that which cannot be articulated even in the most subtle intellect. So it’s a humbling thing to the intellect, if you will--to your intellectual abilities, to realize what they are based on. This is that heart-felt realization--the very humility of the enormity of all that constitutes you, my daughter, which cannot be intellectually expressed.

With a humble and open and contrite heart allow yourself to feel this enormity because, as in the introduction earlier, it is a bit scary--all that--that you cannot pin down, you cannot hold still, you cannot capture in the most subtle thought. These are just other dimensions of you. This is your living being and ultimately, my daughter, there is no necessary argument between feeling and intellect. So this is not something you are going to grasp instantaneously. It’s a process. But trust in your own heart that wants to feel. It wants to know what is before and beyond that marvelous intellect that, I hope, you don’t in any way throw away, like the baby with the bath water. It’s where the intellectual ego, if you will, gets strong enough and confident enough turn around and realize its own shortcomings.

So entertain these concepts and see if they don’t help you feel, even if it is a little bit scary at first.

Student: Thank you very much, Michael.

Michael: And while you’re at it, feel for my peace. It is right there in you waiting to be discovered, and it too is definitely a feeling.

Student: Yes, may I offer a thought? I was just remembering now a very telling moment when I felt a disconnection. I was trying to get beyond my intellectual construction from my readings in the Urantia Book--having read it over a number of years and still finding a part of my emotions, or my feelings, were a kind of coldness. I could talk or say something about it, but I couldn’t believe that it was, umm…

I don’t think I could even understand what it was for me until I was challenged by someone about my beliefs and my faith. Then the story, or construction--the revelation of the continuous creation that the Urantia Book brings out--the ways of thinking about the physical universe and the physical society of the universe: I realized that I had emotionally begun to love the universe around me--the world, the state, the street, the block, the people, the work, all thru the lens of the revelation of your creation, Michael.

If I were to throw the book away I would, for your love, want to create the world that I believe in, that I imagine, that I feel revealed to me by your presence and by the gift of entry into this, umm… It’s hard to explain but it would be as though the Supreme and your universe were created in me simply because it would be there as a way of coming into existence. Because here I am, and I have the gift of believing that my actions, my choices really do mean something to the world that I can’t see--that continuous creation. All of a sudden I saw the difference between my construction, my intellectual construction of my actions, and just a free-flowing belief that the actions that I would be choosing from now on would be the choices that I would offer to you and to the universe as my enjoyment of the world around me.

Revelation

• What is an Epoch Revelation?

Michael: My dear, I must admit that the Urantia Book is like an intellectual Mt. Everest. (Student: It is!) There are literally thousands of concepts in there that are unique in all of the world’s literature. And as you say, it is very up front about this. You look in the table of contents and ask, “Well, who wrote this thing?” and they’re all extra-human authors of all the different papers. So right there is what you call a literary pretention, not in the same sense of a pretentious person but in the sense when you pick up a historical novel and it pretends to be a story of what ready happened, or you pick up some science fiction fantasy and that is what it pretends to be.

The Urantia Book declares right up front that it’s an epoch revelation, and the very understanding--as you’ve experienced yourself as the realization of how it has changed your life by your just taking it in: this revelation would create a whole New Epoch on the earth if it were even partially understood. It takes a while to take this big mountain into you and live with it. You find that, in one way, it also separates--as all profound knowledge does. You find yourself living in two worlds; the world of the Urantia Book and the very kind of being it helps you fell you are, we spoke of tonight; and all those others who haven’t read it and to whom it is some kind of weird science fiction in parts, or pure theology, or geology, or--on and on: the enormity within those two thousand pages!

But this too, my daughter, you are finding out does help in the area of worship, of appreciation--all those thousands of orders of different personal beings throughout the creation--just to feel them. They’re all there, even as I’m speaking now they’re all scattered throughout the galaxies. They’re all living now and having their lives, just like all the human beings on your planet here are. So it stretches you, and it gets you used to being stretched. (Michael laughs)) It’s just beginning. You’ve got that whole creation out there to go out and meet.

Student: And because we are gathered here today, and each of those of the myriad of your created brothers and sisters of ours in the Local Universe are in also in you, and we are so much a part of every one of your sons and daughters, we thank your use of the Urantia Book to be in our hearts and expand our minds to our place in the cosmos.

Michael: Well, I thank you, my daughter, for the appreciation that you share with all of us of just what an amazing thing that revelation is. It too is one of those things that, in and around and before the words even, after you’ve read them and let them soak in, you have all that feeling, that understanding, that appreciation of those parts that make you break out laughing. While with other parts, like that declaration that the endowment of immature, imperfect beings—such as you all start out—with free will, leads inevitably to tragedy: you could shed a tear or two letting that soak in.

But this is our Father’s creation, and he is literally a part of you, experiencing your life with you. So rest in my peace, daughter, and keep reading. The Urantia book is also one of those things that, after you’ve read it and set it aside for a few years, you can go back and just be amazed you’ve even read it before. It’s awful big in there, and we are happy to acknowledge that. So be in my peace.

Student: Thank you, Michael.

Closing

Essence

• The essence of existence

Michael: My children, the hour grows late—as you say. Although, again, as we share this wonderful stillness and quiet together, moment by moment, in this very living power: we feel in our hearts and these marvelous bodies you have this constant beginning, this constant endless and unfathomable potential. And that too is a little scary--that it doesn’t end anywhere, anyhow, any when. So you have a deep feeling of humility in your heart knowing you can trust in our Father in the very essence of things from the taste of strawberries to a friend’s smile—all this essence—is God. We thank our Father for his…(Michael laughs) unfathomable imagination and creativity. We find our trust in him because our heart is still beating, and another moment that never happened before is upon us, and we live in it.

So thank you, my dears, for spending some time with me this way, this evening. I bid you a good evening. Be in my peace.