2013-02-21-A Measure of Independence

Session

Opening

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, help us settle down out of ourselves, out of our own lives and all of our busyness and concerns. Help us enjoy these few precious minutes with the two of you. Help us feel your presence right within us, along with the presence of our Father.

We thank you for this feeling of your presence. It helps our faith to have this feedback, to feel you as a kind of background, an awareness of consciousness that seems to be more than what we ourselves can create. I’m sure I’m very similar to all the other T/R’s in being very much aware that what the two of you come out with is well beyond my ability, and for this I am very thankful.

So: welcome. Be with us. Help us enjoy your presence. Amen.

Lesson

Michael: Good evening, this is Michael, and for us two--Mother Spirit and I—it is part of our enjoyment too--just to be with our children. It’s even doubly so when they can feel us, feel our presence. Even all those times--sometimes those worrisome, busy times when, try your best, you can’t feel us: still you have the courage and the faith to address us, to say hello and welcome us into your lives. In doing so you are reminding yourself that you’re not alone. You have a whole spiritual company about you. Yet it is our deepest joy to let you be, to let you have your own lives and be independent. For this is truly what God has given us all: a measure of independence.

• A measure of independence

True enough, we do live and have our being within him, and he does set the boundaries for our existence. His will does obtain in time and in the total, if not in each moment and in each individual--that very individuality that your individual personality is: his gift of you, to you.

As much as possible we let you have your lives. But we must confess, this is our deepest enjoyment, this miracle, this constant bursting forth that you are. We once said you are like a little fountain out in the middle of the air, like one of your surreal paintings. It’s the fact that you are constantly bursting into here-and-now, for each of you out of a source that is truly unfathomable and ungraspable.

But with time, with maturity, with experience--you experiential beings--you do come to have even a deeper faith. In all humility you grow in your awareness of that which is greater than you. This is such a blessing that you earn as you go along. And so you learn to trust. You learn to trust yourselves as you tune into yourselves in your meditation, as you take time out of your busy lives to be alone with yourself, and with us through your faith.

This too is something that you can feel growing through all the ups and downs and the almost absolute uncertainty at times. There’s real, true mental and spiritual suffering in not knowing what’s going to come next. Still: you grow that trust, that trust in our Father who created all this to begin with, and set you free, even though you may come to a dead end from time to time and be truly lost. Yet you find the courage to be still with yourselves and with us. You trust what comes through in those times, in those trying times.

For this is very much a part of your lives, my dears. This is very much a part of ours too because we don’t know what you’re going to do next. This is God’s plan, to give each of you--give all personal beings--as much freedom as you can grow. And so all of our lessons, all of our many, many lessons are on this growth of freedom that we wish you to have. We encourage you in this--even to be free from us. Really open yourselves to all the possibilities that can suggest themselves.

We’ve pointed at your conditioning, those things that both give meaning and value to your endeavors, and yet at the same time too, can be strictures, can limit you in feeling for possibility, for what is beyond and greater than anything you have yet known. Because, my dear ones, that’s what you’re in for. That’s part of God’s plan for his children in their surroundings. We call it infinity-in-every-direction. Even your finite physical bodies that are surrounded by space are still an ultimate mystery to you. You can’t begin to read all the millions of volumes in all of the libraries of the world on physiology.

Then there are your minds. Do you have them, or do they have you? Think of all the conditioning that you were raised in; but you now have such abilities to escape, to get beyond, to grow beyond. You can turn on your television or tune in to your Internet and bring in the world. Think of all those things under the wonderful title called National Geographic--all the geography of this planet of yours and how it determines, and yet also fails to absolutely determine, the folks living in it.

Now you have so many avenues to grow into, and grow out of your own conditioning as an accident of birth. You can grow into being a world citizen. Then imagine: someday you will be rubbing elbows--as you say--with all those citizens who have survived their lives on different planets. Talk about a different geography! Yet they too are personal beings who will be as delighted and mystified to see you as well, coming as you do out of this particular planet--Earth.

• Facing enormity, be not daunted

So as you face this enormity, be not daunted. Try as best you can to build the faith that realizes that a lot of this is God’s plan--that you may find yourselves overwhelmed at times, among so many truly human dimensions. Mother Spirit talked last time about the difference between those things that are limitless, like standing on the edge of the ocean and looking at all that salty water; yet, as you’re hiking along the beach, you have your little canteen of good, fresh drinking water. There’s only so much of it, and you had to make plans and preparations to have that along with you. You couldn’t trust that you would find some spring coming out of the rocks.

These are the two dimensions of the limitless, and then the limited. You will always have this, my dear ones: always. You will always be in this precarious position--if you will think of it--between the two of them. Yet you have the tenacity of life itself, right from God, to constantly bridge these dimensions, and realize, and feel deeply within your souls: this is what gives meaning to your life—both of these. It’s both the promise of eternity and yet too, time--time passing--never enough time to do all you can imagine. Time is one of the economic dimensions when it relates to anything at all physical. That you know for sure. These physical things you need done, you only have so much time to do them.

And then how about energy? How about mental energy? Think of projects in which, when folks have thought about a certain facet of this project for days on end, they’re allowed to continue in that because they have spent their mental energy in figuring things out. You don’t throw in someone brand new to take their place because their mental energy has been expended to get them to where they are in their understanding. So it is with you in your critical, creative thought and reasoning, all those mental/spiritual aspects that Mother Spirit helps you with. Even your spirit is a kind of energy that is expended. As your Urantia Book informs you, even in the next phases of your morontia existence, it’s not sunny all the time. There are repeating periods, much like your day and night now, for you to rest and not only re-coop your physical, and mental, and morontial energies, but also your spiritual energy because this is what your personality depends upon for manifesting yourself and all that you are.

Understanding this, we’ve teased you so many times with having one foot on a solid dock--think of eternity, and the other foot out there in an untethered boat, bobbing around--think of each unique moment that has never been before and will never be again. You are this living creature, deliberately created to bridge these two. It’s the combination that gives meaning and value, for you would be truly lost without both. You know yourselves of many folks who sometimes have worked hard their whole lives, suddenly win the lottery and are truly lost, and actually have miserable lives. All of a sudden their particular economic condition was totally blown away. Some adapt to it, and some don’t.

• Being still

It’s what you do with these precious moments that are passing--that are unique--that give to your soul. We say: take some time out of this precious life, this precious commodity you have, even though you will have it eternally. Take some time out of this passing time, these moments of your life, and give them over to yourself, your greater Self. Let this greater Self speak to you. Let this greater Self present to you what you need for today, this unique today.

My dears, I hope to give you some feeling of being comfortable in this, what you call, all-too-human situation, because it’s more than human. It’s what you will be forever, in a way. This is what your free will is all about--strangely enough: the necessity to choose. But this is what makes the choice yours. This is what adds to your soul, your unique soul.

And so, my dears, I hope you can slowly earn the feeling of being comfortable in this situation that our Father has created for all of us--that our choices are ours and they have meaning because they are necessary. There is always a choice to be made; and that is you. That is unavoidably who and what you are, and what you choose to become. Thank you, Father, even for these economic, limited aspects of our eternity.

Now if you have any questions or comments, let’s take out some time to do that.

Dialogue

Student: Yes. Michael, this is G. from Connecticut. I had a question. You know, I read a lot and then I also read The Inner Silent Voice. They talk about the experiment with the Mayan children and stuff that’s going on down in Belize. One of the things they mentioned was that, during the time of Adamson and Ratta, they were considered more like gifted. What they were referring to is that they were using one hundred percent of their minds whereas we only use maybe five to ten percent. Some of the people down there, that are in that training environment, their brain capacity has been increased to like forty percent to seventy percent sometimes. What I was wondering is, is that something that is going to be given to us at some time in the future?

• You’re always using 100% of your mind

Michael: Yes, my son, Mother Spirit and I are quite familiar with that way of looking at your mentality. But we disagree entirely. From our point of view, the way we see you as you go through your life, you’re always using one hundred percent of your mentality. What you’re talking about more specifically is distinct ways, shall we say, of using your minds.

What we mean by your using your mind one hundred percent is that, as you’re sitting there listening to me, just look around your room. Your mind is co-creating all of that for you. True enough, you know just physiologically this is light entering your eyes, and then your brain finds a way of making sense of it all out there. For you’re all aware of different kinds of mental aberrations or mental diseases in which that way breaks down in what you call hallucinations; or when you lose a kind of rational continuity to all that world out there, it’s because of some kind of mental defect.

But in terms of normal mentality, your whole mind is always, always creating and co-creating reality for you. We say co-creating because it’s not an illusion. There actually is, out there, that room of yours, the chair you’re sitting on. What these folks are talking about are particular abilities. We even talked one time about what you call mentalities. Sometimes in a very derogatory sense you talk about a mechanic’s mentality, or some housewife’s mentality, or the military mentality. Yet that’s just a whole encompassing context in which you act, shall we say, as a mechanic, or as a housewife, or as someone in the military.

It’s nothing to be despised. But since you may be limited to a very particular point of view, Mother Spirit and I have been encouraging you in terms of your social and political life to be as open-minded and broadminded as you can be, especially to take in those other points of view that you find disagreeable. Be aware of them. Be aware of how and why people think in different ways.

But from our point of view, my son, you’re always using all of your mind. It’s all there. There’s nothing, in this sense, missing. It’s just that sometimes you need to train it in certain ways in order to do certain kinds of activities. Now does this make sense to you?

Student: Yes. Yes, it does. It’s more or less, I guess, my perspective, or the individual’s perspective of what we’re actually looking at.

Michael: Again, this is usually with reference to a particular kind of activity that people are only using ten percent of their minds. From our standpoint, you are a complete being, but you’re not perfect yet. You don’t have a perfect interrelationship within you of all your parts we speak of—your personality, your creative spirit, your body, your mind, and then the enormous soul you have of all your worldly experience. It’s all there. It’s just that your consciousness is a linear kind of thing from moment to moment to moment. Sometimes too, when they’re talking about expanding your consciousness, this is what they’re referring to—going from not only a very lineal, one-at-a-time kind of mind, developing a consciousness that can focus on individual things, but a decentralized consciousness as well.

It’s what we call being humbly aware of all the different, enormous dimensions all around you that you can tune in to, and be aware of, and feel very tiny. But also you can glory that you can be aware of so much. Sometimes they’re referring to what Mother Spirit and I encourage you to do--to broaden your consciousness. It’s my Spirit of Truth that orients you to that which is greater than you--which is the truth, right? So I wouldn’t worry about using only a small amount of your mind. Your mind is yours, individual and unique. We only encourage you to be broadminded and open yourselves to as much as you can.

Student: I guess that’s why we go through the morontia worlds and all the other billions of worlds that we have to--so to speak—conquer, in order to eventually get to Paradise and really meet the Father.

Michael: And then you turn around and start out again. This is why we tease you with keeping your beginner’s mind because, even with a whole universe of experience behind you, you’ll still just be starting.

Student: It’s never ending. So we won’t be bored, I guess.

Michael: Right. Anyway, on the other hand: it’s kind-of a promise. Be in my peace.

Student: Michael?

Michael: Yes.

Student: This is G. You know me. I have a question, a situation that comes up often enough that I’m not sure how to deal with it comfortably. It’s having to deal with the fact that my lungs are pretty shot and, according to medical science, the disease I have is not repairable. It’s not going to get better--as if I had cut off my fingers; I’m not going to grow new ones.

I’m okay with this. I’m okay, that is to say, with recognizing my mortality. And I am duly preparing for the transition. I don’t think it’s going to come tomorrow, maybe not this year. But I’m certainly approaching the transition.

Many of my peers here--in their faith--are quite convinced I could heal if I just had more faith; or if I would just let it happen. And when I say, “Well, if God wants to pull a miracle, I’d be more than happy to do that; but I’m not going to set myself up with false hope”--I’m okay with it. I mean, this is Natural Law taking place. But it’s like--particularly with my peers in the Teaching Mission who are big into healing--they’re almost offended that I am not subscribing to the theory that, if we sign up, if we sign on, our lives can be extended. We can continue to serve here where the need is greatest; or certainly great, as if to say it is not so great over there, or something. I don’t know what.

But I’ve come to not even wanting to talk to people about that. They ask how I’m doing, and I tell them how I’m doing. But then they want to turn me into somebody I’m not, or undermine my faith that I’m doing the right thing. You know it’s hard enough to approach death without someone saying, “Oh, you don’t have to go there!” Well, I am going there, sooner or later--and in faith of my survival. I don’t have any difficulty with that. But I do have difficulty knowing how to deal with my fellows who are well meaning but, as far as I’m concerned, completely off base. Could you give me some guidance on how to deal with that, or correct me if I’m wrong? Thank you.

Michael: Yes, my dear. Well, you might ask them to walk around an inch off the floor.

Student, laughing: Yes, I might do that.

Michael: Yes. You brought up something, my daughter, in your illustration of losing a finger or some other bodily part like that. That goes just as well for some cell damage that is beyond repair. There’s no difference. There are some cells that are simply damaged beyond repair with hundreds, as you know, hundreds of different diseases.

• Spiritual arrogance

This is a kind of--I think we could call it--a kind of spiritual arrogance. It ties in with what I talked about tonight, that there are those folks who say there is no such thing as any kind of limitations at all. In one of the recent lessons that Mother Spirit had, somebody was saying that anybody, anywhere in the world, has available to them everything. She just mentioned, “Well, what about those thousands, if not millions of folks, just because of the circumstances of their birth and the life they’re thrust into, are going to live very short, stunted lives. You can’t say they have every physical and mental ability waiting for them, like someone in a more developed country where, if they have some kind of childhood disease, it’s considered only something they take a shot for, and it’s over. Yet in other circumstances, it’s killing hundreds of thousands of people.”

This is what I meant this evening about limitations, those economic factors that give your life meaning. The very fact that you do not live here forever has meaning, whether it’s in your individual life, or with your children, with loved ones. This is a fact of human existence, and without it your life would have a completely different kind of meaning.

This is why the Urantia Book goes to such enormous lengths talking about the different phases to come, the hundreds of different steps you’ll go through just in the morontial phase. From one to another there is this continuity of personality. There is this--along with all those specific, detailed, unique moments that will never end--there is also this continuity. As you know from all the lessons that Mother Spirit and I have given, I even tease you with the fact that personality, to your order of being, is a very strange thing. It’s nothing you can actually get a hold of. It’s nothing of which you can say, “Now I know the full extent of my personality.” Even in the Urantia Book, you’ll notice, personality is introduced by saying there’s no personality shy of God who can know the full extent of it. (Ed: paper Personality Survival)

So you are this combination that, true, your personality is there as long as you choose to continue: you will be. People can say--well, that’s what they’re pointing at. But when it gets down to cells of the body, whether it’s a finger or lung cells, these have a very definite life span, and there’s any number of things that can interfere with that. Like I said, you could just say, “Well, okay! You are a potentially eternal personality, why don’t you defy gravity and walk around, you know, in inch off the floor; or put your pants on two legs at a time.”

• Humility and wonder

That’s the only rejoinder you can have, my dear. You know deep in your soul what you have earned and what you have learned about the economic factors of human life. When it comes to this body of yours--even though it is, yes--we talk about the infinity of it in terms of your own body being beyond your comprehension, even your human races comprehension in all those libraries--still you can wiggle your fingers and wonder, what all’s involved in this? That’s the humility. That’s the wonder, right? Your own wisdom tells you, yes, that’s what I talked about this evening in terms of this human life of yours. Your time here is very definitely a finite thing.

Student: Well, I want to you to know I’m very grateful for it, even for the effort that it takes sometimes, just to get from here to there. I’m grateful for all the wondrous gifts I’ve been given, and the experiences I’ve had, the opportunity to have the friends I’ve made. My life is a gift.

Michael: Vouchsafed by God himself.

Student: Yes.

Michael: So: I’m glad you found a lot of my peace.

Student: Yes. Yes you are. You are my peace, Michael.

Michael: Mother Spirit sends all her love as well.

Student: Thank you.

Michael: Keep being in my peace.

Student: You bet.

Student: Well, then let me ask, Michael, if one is on a healing track, if one is a student of healing and is learning, is studying the application of light, part of this--I’m gleaning from your last lesson to Gerdean--that a part of this is a discernment on what or whom can be healed, and who cannot. Is this correct? One shouldn’t just go flinging the light about. Or does one fling the light, and let the chips fall where they may? “The act is ours; the consequence is God’s?

• Existential situation and truth

Michael: Well, I hardily agree with you there, my son, on that last statement, because you also are in an existential situation--your very existence being, shall we say, a humble one before an ever greater truth: You don’t know what you can do until you try. This is almost a definition of what you mean by trying with your whole heart. You cannot help but try to heal whatever condition you’re in. In other words, your orientation should always be towards greater health and more life.

But that’s not what Gerdean was talking about. When you lose a finger there’s no way—yet--you have of growing a new one. That is an existential fact of existence that can’t change. But that does not relieve you of either the intention, or acquiring the abilities, to get ever more healthy no matter what your condition is. I’m sure that’s what people in Gerdean’s situation are doing, and are advised to do; what we would advise you to do: everything you can to have more life. Always that is our wish for you to have this intention and develop these abilities.

Obviously there are a thousand and one things that, even if you go back only twenty or thirty years now, there were so many things that killed or destroyed people’s lives, or enormously stunted people’s lives that--in terms of both your medicine and your understanding about a holistic approach towards life--have enormously improved people’s lives; in many cases, saved lives. Think of your surgeons who get to practice so much on so many torn-apart bodies because you live in such a mechanical society. Think of your emergency wards. But also there are all the other different aspects of medicine that are constantly, constantly improving and growing in their understanding. There’s no limit to that either. As to what you can try to do, it’s incumbent upon you to keep that trial going, keep trying things, keep your truly scientific mind of experimenting with things. Then, as we say, you make your decisions and you stay open to the results. So there’s not any contradiction here at all.

Student: No, I see. Thank you.

Michael: Yes. You never know what healing can take place until you try. Yet at the same time you can know deep in your soul, deep between you and our Father, that certain conditions are not remedial. You’ve tried your best and yet things are going a certain direction. It takes enormous courage then to, first of all, to perceive that; then to acknowledge that and to make your peace with it.

Student: Right. That’s where the discernment comes in: not “can this be done” but aught--now that I’ve tried.

Michael: Exactly.

Student: Yes. I got you.

Michael: And be open to tomorrow; there might be something new. This is what your wonderful Internet, and all your wonderful communications are all about--your staying abreast of the developments.

Student: Michael, along those lines; what about the Akashic Construct and some of the celestials, like they mentioned Dr. Mendoza as, I believe, a midwayer who also helps in healing. Is that a resource that’s accessible on our plane?

• The role of culture in experience

Michael: Well, that is something else again. We’re getting into different cultures and how they refer to the spiritual community all about you. So much of the Akashic Record, like astral-traveling, is personal experiences. This is the name that some people in certain cultures with certain understandings--shared understandings--gave to these insights that are available to you. They are what we simply call, when you are meditating, the spiritual presences within you: Mother Spirit, myself, and our Father. Some people do refer to this as a certain kind of record that they can tune in to, a certain kind of wisdom they can tune in to and receive.

Different cultures give this spiritual part of you a different name. According to the way they’re raised, according to their culture, this can take on certain characteristics such as a person speaking to them, or some kind of an eternal record that they’re tuning in to. That colors how they experience, yet also gives it expression--at one and the same time--as I talked about this evening. At one and the same time it puts the experience in a context that gives it expression, it can also limit--you know--your receptivity. That’s why we say that, while there’s an efficacy to prayer, to asking for help from the spiritual community, there’s also just being still and seeing what wants to come up, what wants to suggest itself. Tuning into the Akashic Record, I think for most folks, is more on the order of prayer. It’s a way of tuning in to a preconceived notion of something that exists--this record. There’s also stillness, which is saying, “Okay, Reality/God/Totality: Here I am. What have you got for me?”

Student: Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you very much, Michael. That answers a lot of my questions.

Michael: It’s kind-of like the language you were born into, right? It gives you a way of thinking and expressing yourself. At the same time it can have limitations.

Student: It all goes back to stillness, I guess.

Michael: It’s like prayer and stillness. They’re very complimentary.

Student: I’ll continue to practice that. So: it’s taking a lot more work, I guess. But I’m not giving up.

Michael: Oh, never give up!

Student: Never give up. Nope, not yet. Thank you, Michael.

Michael: There’s something to be said for tenacity, which again can be either a blessing or a curse.

Student: We can learn that from you for sure, Father. Well, thank you again.

Michael: Be in my peace.

Well, my children, the clock up there--the big clock up in the sky there--says it’s time to close another session. We seem to be tuned in to a lot of paradoxes this evening. But they’re not really paradoxes. They’re not contradictory. It’s just that the very things that give meaning to your life are, by their very limited nature, by their very concreteness and, above all, by their uniqueness to this day that I did this or that, not another day: this particular experience is unique all to itself because that’s the nature of time in the reality of God’s manifestation.

• Creative spirit

It is seen that creativity—and not only God’s but what he gives you of his creative spirit; not only God but you yourself don’t have to repeat yourself. Stillness is a way of not only, shall we say, addressing a prayer coming out of your immediate past--what you need to know, what you’re asking for help on--but just opening yourself to this particular morning. You’re sitting here on this particular chair, this particular time and place. You’re realizing as parts of your soul come forth to be relived and appreciated, that time is not only passing, but that time holds everything. There is also a Supreme Being, an Over-Soul of all that has ever been: and yet continues to grow! That should be humbling enough right there--that your mind can only hold this feeling for a few moments, this sense of the totality of everything that has ever been, and yet keeps expanding; and it will keep expanding forever.

Closing

Enough of our paradoxes: there’s our completeness, and our wholeness, and our faith, and these promises that God does give us right in our very continuing existence. Good evening, my dear ones. Mother Spirit sends her love, and I bid you to be in my peace.