2012-03-01-Enjoyment

Session

Opening

Prayer: Thank you, God, for this gathering, this enclave of kindred spirits united in friendly fashion to come before you to dare to believe that you know us, that you welcome us into your presence and imbue us with your divine affection. What a challenge then for us to reveal you to our fellows as we pass by. We can do it with your help. Amen.

TOMAS: Good evening. This is Tomas, your Teacher, a member of the Teacher Corps. I am going to be your host this evening. It has been some time since I have been before you in this fashion. Of course, I am interested in your development and your format. I am able to observe it and your developments even when I am not working with you intimately, but it is always my pleasure to become more intimate with you as we share our mutual understanding and new enlightenment, as we trudge the road of happy destiny. Welcome to you all this evening, and those in the hinterlands who read or hear these words.

Lesson

I have been conveying to Gerdean for the past couple of hours the word “enjoyment” and as soon as I impressed upon her the word “enjoyment” as if to think that might be this evening’s topic, she has been running around chasing her tail like a frisky puppy wondering what I want to talk about enjoyment for or how I would like to go about talking about enjoyment. It is sometimes an enjoyment in and of itself to drop a hint and then watch as you try to guess, in great delight, what enjoyment is in store. This invites anticipation which is another enjoyable state of mind and being.

In fact, enjoyment is a state of mind and being. Of course, you all know that you can do things like go to the amusement part, or a concert, or a social gathering and find enjoyment there. You can enjoy things on your own: reading, gardening, composing emails … these are enjoyable activities and pursuits. I believe you’ve been advised in the text about enjoying yourself in 101 different ways, all of which (or most of which) are a result of your cultural evolution and thus worthy of celebration and enjoyment – providing, of course, the indulgence of such enjoyments do not overstep the bounds into destructive behaviors. There’s a pause for study: the ethics of the effects of enjoying oneself.

Sometimes enjoyment is had as if you were a cat and mouse, and the cat will enjoy playing with its victim – at least until it tires of the game, and the mouse either escapes or is finally put out of its misery, so you see all enjoyment is not “ethical” and this difference in values and meanings is an example of one of the ones you will encounter and master en route to a new level of questionable ethics on higher and higher levels. It seems there is always something to think about, some wrinkle that needs ironing, in particular as you become more sociable.

When you just hang out at home and your social intercourse is more or less with the clan or the family or the tight-knit friends you’ve had for a comfortable amount of time then familiarity (that which does not breed contempt) will allow for a great deal of latitude as well as compassion and understanding and mercy but in polite company perhaps you are not afforded the luxury of behaving or speaking so freely and openly as to imply a familiarity that is unwarranted at this point in the association. Much of the problem you encounter on the Internet, in your communications there -- not to disallow ordinary conversations at work or on the street, shops and so forth-- reveals that there are many people who don’t enjoy life, who don’t know how to enjoy themselves in a quiet and enduring way. Enjoying oneself is more than an event, more than a shopping spree, more than something that occupies your time and mind like a birthday party. It is a state of mind.

Sometimes I see mortals pining over lost opportunities to enjoy themselves. Or unable to do the things they did in their youth or under other circumstances, and this diminishes their enjoyment of today because they regret. And regret will rob you of your enjoyment of those memories of what you did accomplish, what you did do, and it doesn’t do you any good to judge them on your own accord, to say “Oh I wasted so much time; oh, I wasted so much money; oh, I wasted so much energy” for that is what it takes – time. It takes time to learn life’s lessons and you have been given an eternity in which to learn them. They [life’s lessons] all come along in their own course, in their own time, and their own pace, and so you might as well learn to just enjoy the way life happens as you live it, as you pass by observing yourself living the human experience.

There are so many things that are written into the pattern over which you have so little control, you might as well just accept much of life as a spectator and save yourself much aggravation. Even as you savor those choices you do make and the path you have chosen to walk. Even enjoying the pain, the grief, the sorrow are all a part of the brilliance of this formulating experience of your mortal life. And especially I wanted to impress upon you how important it is that you remember God at all times as a part of your composition. In one way or another – in fact, in several different ways – divinity lives in you and around you, at all times.

Even when the finite figure falls like a leaf from the tree in the autumn, there is life in the tree itself as there is life in the living vine, of which you are one of the branches. And so enjoy every phase of your existence. The dark parts will pass, error will fall away, but that which is enduring and eternal has value and is of the light. You live in the light. Enjoy living in the light. And when the dark storm clouds overhead tell you otherwise, remember the magnitude of God and enjoy the comfort of His proximity.

I join you in your prayer to become every closer to and with this fragment of perfection eternal, that you would indeed become one. There is nothing more enjoyable than that!

Well, I have addressed the topic and I appreciate Gerdean indulging me, even though we did lose her at one point. No worries, though. Tell me about yourselves now. Tell me what is on your mind. What would you confer with us about? Have you got questions this evening, or comments you would like to make? The floor is open. Let me see where we are technologically. I believe the pattern is for you to press star six in order to un-mute your line. Would someone like to try that and start the conversations? Well, it’s either that the code is in error or no one wants to talk about it. Let’s see what we can find out. “All callers are un-muted.” In that case, I will sit here and wait for someone to voice themselves.

Is it that you have no framework for enjoyment? Is it not a frame of reference? Or reverence?

Dialogue

Mark: I’m just enjoying the discussion. I have no questions.

TOMAS: Well, yes, who can argue with enjoyment? You can’t just put it in a drawer and say “I will enjoy life later” for if you do, that’s what happens. You put joy in a drawer and you go around without it.

Mark: I believe it is A Course in Miracles that says joy is life’s function.

TOMAS: It certainly would be if you are in a state of enjoyment because of your spiritual condition. Your very molecules are illuminated! And since life seems to thrive on fulfilling itself, there you go! All life enjoys functioning at its capacity.

In fact, a coveted state could be considered a love-saturated soul. Love-saturation is the norm for higher levels of deity, but as we “trickle down” into the material worlds.… [We were unplugged again. I suspect Gerdean would like to chalk it up to senility; I will allow it.]

Mark: I thought your thought concluded with an ellipsis.

TOMAS: Yes, truly. There is much to be said for that because after a point, what more is there to say? And yet, to close off the point is to close the door on it and it’s worthy of staying open. Someone might wander in!

Well, here we are looking at a new month on your calendar and there are many things to enjoy in the month of March. March is the anniversary of my debut, as it were, as a transmitter/receiver Teacher. The group was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1993. It is also the anniversary of the Rio Rancho group which has also subsequently dissolved. Groups come and go. It is a part of the evolution of it all, part of the organism of planetary life, milling around on the ground floor of creation, morontia-ized sufficiently to cause a glimpse of the Supreme.

The light is coming on. This is news you always seem to like to hear. It needs to come on with you, within you, which is why I speak to you of enjoyment, as I see so many mortals enjoy so many things that are so shallow and so short lived. Really, so many of them are destructive, obsessive. Truly, they are not enjoyable pastimes at all but a dramatization of what enjoyment is supposed to look like, carrying it all to the enth degree, outdoing each other in affectations, moving farther and farther away from sincerity, and thus losing contact with that Source of true enjoyment that craves and fosters that which has endurance and joy.

Mark: Tomas, are these movements, cultural movements, cyclical? By that I mean … there was a time – and I’m sure all of us on this call were a part of this time – when enjoyment was entertainment, what was offered to us culturally was very nourishing. Of course, I’m talking about late 50’s, 60’s and into the 70’s. It seems that what we were enjoying was indeed very nourishing and, as you say, it has gotten thinner and thinner until it has reached the height of superficiality. Are these movements cyclical? Will the more nourishing entertainment – modes of enjoyment - be making a comeback because the superficial aspects will become so non-nourishing that people will start looking elsewhere for something, as you say, is more authentic? Does this happen on its own or do we have to make it happen?

TOMAS: Well, you have asked a couple of questions and made a couple of observations that cause me to have to take my time in responding. My first response is, no, it’s not cyclical as much as it is organic. If you take a picture of the globe, a weather map of the globe, as it is depicted on your news program, you can see the weather pattern moving around the globe – the storms, snow, hurricanes, hot weather, rain and when you pull back to a distance to, say, the astronauts and look down, you can see that same atmosphere but from a farther view. It’s always doing something, the weather, at one point of the world or another. And that’s how it is in terms of the cultural changes I was talking about; there’s always some going on somewhere, but they are not necessarily cyclical. They are more organic.

The weather patterns on Urantia are sometimes easily identifiable because of interior conditions. The planet is not cool yet, therefore it has its gas, turbulence, air bubbles; the plates are not well settled and so there are earthquakes and tsunamis and cyclones to accompany the turbulence. And that is not cyclical unless you are comparing what is happening on this evolving world with other evolving worlds as they cool. Perhaps you could notice a cycle or a pattern in all evolving worlds that could indicate cyclic activity, but I was simply talking about growth.

Oh, bad example: if you go away and leave your refrigerator unattended, there are some things that will get moldy before others and there are other ways that things deteriorate in a refrigerator or in a compost pile that differ and so it does not all happen at the same time; there are different conditions that affect different life forms … bacteria and whatnot. And so you see my thought is more organic and less cyclic, which would indicate a shorter pattern, a scheduled thing you can almost count on. Now, again, if we are comparing worlds, that’s one thing, but if we are talking about this planet and the circumstances on this world, no, they are not cyclic. Or such is my response.

Mark: Hmm. Thank you.

TOMAS: I am not setting myself up as an authority, you see. I can enjoy life much more if I am not constantly setting myself forth as an authoritarian, or someone who knows something about everything. I am a teacher, yes, but I am also a student.

Mark: How long have you been observing this world?

TOMAS: Oh, I began observing fairly recently. It was in the early 1900s that I began to be aware of the circumstances here and that was because there were murmurings going on about the Teacher Corps and volunteers were coming forth and so I began taking a critical interest. I was selected, as you know, and have been dedicating a great deal of time since then to understanding you better, your history as a race of beings, as well as you as a species, and certainly you as individuals.

I am enjoying this task immensely, in case anyone should wonder. Most of us in the Teacher Corps, in fact, are having a fine time. Some of us have had to go back to Salvington for a little pep talk or a remedial class now and then to learn how to handle you, but overall, I believe we are all rather pleased with the progress. I can’t speak for my superiors, of course, but we in the Teacher Corps are not discouraged.

Mark: That’s good news.

TOMAS: Yes, and this gets me back to enjoyment, but before I talk more about what I came to talk about this evening, I would like to hear from you who called in to talk to the teachers. Now is your opportunity, if you want to engage with a member of the Teacher Corps, now is your chance. I am simply your elder brother, nothing more, nothing less. [Pause] Well, more about enjoyment then.

This is somewhere you could be of great service, to help teach values, the kind of values that will lead to a step up in behavior patterns for Urantia mortals, and that is to give some thought as to the level of enjoyment that you see happening in you and around you. Do you see individuals who manifest their enjoyment in ways or such ways that would indicate to you that they are trying to prove something to themselves or others? Are they misplacing their values such that their enjoyment is blatantly off-center and skewed? Is this enjoyment appropriate for their age, economic circumstances, educational levels, cultural background? Is this an opportunity for you to be fraternal and comradely, as opposed to being judgmental, and participating in those forms of enjoyment that contribute to being spiritually fragrant?

Jesus had no trouble getting along with the common man. He was a common man in that he was one with his fellows. He did not lord himself over them. He did not act as if he had something they didn’t have. He enjoyed his time he spent with them. He came to know them, right there on the spot sometimes, just by observing how they stood, and certainly by how they enjoyed themselves, even if they did not enjoy themselves.

So I just thought I’d throw out there the possibility of service for you, an opportunity to observe your fellows so as to be rendered more god-conscious and spirit-led. Enjoying your life will give you the freedom and the opportunity to see the opportunity to be of service, to uplift and enlighten as you pass by.

Closing

And with that I will bid you farewell for the evening, having had a most enjoyable session with you.

Amen and farewell.