2006-07-10-Perfection of Matter & Personality
Marin #98
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Perfection of Matter & Personality
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Michael
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Perfection of Matter & Personality
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Welcome. We welcome You into our minds, into our hearts, into our lives. We’ve come to appreciate this connection You offer us, and consider these lessons truly a blessing. We pray You continue to give us these penetrating spiritual laws, seen from Your greater perspective of meaning and value. Help us entertain and understand, then give them a try, so we can keep growing into what is possible. Amen.
Michael. Good evening, My loyal sons, this is your father, Michael, your once-upon-a-time human brother, and brother still. As Mother invited you to realize in Her last lesson, We are your helpmates and playmates. There is nothing that gives Us greater joy than the laughter and merriment of Our children, just as this is your greatest joy too, when your own children thoroughly enjoy themselves.
Lesson
For all of human life is not always merry, or even pleasant, but it is good and fitting and proper to enjoy the blessings that our Father does lay before us, and not let our times of suffering and trial ruin the good times that come in their own season. This is another facet of being open to the possibility presented to us every new day. You call it, Taking things as they come–being open to the possibility and the changes that are such an intrinsic part of being in this enormous creation of God’s, deliberately created in an imperfect, yet evolutionary state so that each of us has our part to play.
Just think if God had created the whole universe in some kind of mechanistic perfection. In fact He has created part of the universe this way, the impersonal part. Pure energy and matter, the material part of the universe does obey His absolute physical laws. But as soon as you think of the realm of physics and chemistry, mechanics, you can feel how this is so contra-distinct from the realm of personality.
When you perceive and understand the uniqueness of individual personalities, only then do you realize a full beauty and depth of meaning and value, even if it is only your human lives on Urantia. It is somewhat an article of faith for you to accept what your Urantia book teaches you about worlds without end–the Morontia phases of your life to come on the Architectural Spheres; accepting there are literally trillions of evolutionary worlds with their human types of life at all stages of development. And this is all in the realm of personality, unique, individual personalities beyond numbering that only God himself knows fully. This is the personal universe, all stemming from the personality of God.
And for this very reason, My children–the existence of personality at all stages of perfection, you have what you call imperfection; or as it is sometimes experienced by yourselves, suffering, pain, loss. These are all very real. They are not some illusions you need feel guilty for experiencing. They are consequences, if you will, of the ability of imperfect beings such as yourselves to experience a degree of choice, a freedom of will. As your Urantia book puts it most succinctly, the endowing of immature, imperfect beings with a relative degree of freedom does lead inevitably to tragedy.
But without this dimension of personality, without this freewill choice, you would simply have a mechanistically perfect universe without individual participation.
You would not have a part to play, the meaningful existence that is possible for you now. Further, once you see this is true not only for yourself, but even for all of your immediate spiritual seniors–including Mother Spirit and Myself; when you see that we are all striving for perfection, then the existence of suffering in the universe does not become such a metaphysical problem.
Choices between good and evil, right and wrong, are simply inherent in beings such as yourselves endowed with moral discrimination. This is how your personality reaches towards perfect function. These are the sign posts, the guides, if you will, towards perfection. You are imperfect, so you have to be prepared to experiment—knowingly. Strive to know what you are doing, what is involved in your decisions. Make your decisions with the continuing courage to be open to the results.
And in making your decisions, My children, never forget that Mother Spirit is right within your mind, adding a dimension of Her wisdom to augment your own, helping you find the courage to try these life experiments and understand what is happening to you. I am ever beside you, and right within your feelings, offering you My peace–the profound spiritual relaxation that allows you to tune into Our presence and receive Our help.
Above Us in origin and literally taking on your personality, making a spiritual record of your experiences together, is a living fragment of God himself in your minds, co-creating with you, your souls. This presence of God is also accessible to you, My children. Those courageous individuals who, all through history, greatly led their fellows into the light, those persons you call saints who focused their lives on giving themselves to others, these were, and still are the persons who are able to connect with their Father Fragments. These are the soulful individuals of great character who transcend their own limitations by making full use of the spiritual help available to you all. They have been, and are the living examples of what is possible to accomplish, to know, to experience, to love and to enjoy.
So We would have you, when you envision and feel for this transcendent reality, this God-created universe that surrounds and upholds you, We would have you realize what the reality of personality gives to you, and gives to us all. We would hope you could accept with joyful hearts the difficulties that are inherent in your current personal status.
Accept these difficulties as the true gifts they are, giving an added dimension of meaning and value to life. Accept joyfully with faith that there is a spiritual record being created of all your experiences, far transcending what you know of as memories–which are mostly a function of your physical body, your brain and nervous system. Have faith that whatever may befall you in terms of loss of memory, does not affect your soul in the slightest.
You can look forward with hope and joy to the next phases of your life on the Mansion Worlds when, with the much more subtle, quasi-spiritual/material body you will have, your Father Fragment, and your soul, will be so much more accessible to you. The prompting and pure spirit offerings from the fragment of God within your mind will be so much closer and clearer. Indeed, in looking into the future, there is truly nothing to fear, for all pain and suffering and loss does come around. The struggle of life does give meaning to existence. Your faith becomes a trust in God’s creativity, in that what He has deliberately created with His infinite and absolute wisdom, can be trusted as being ultimately necessary for meaning and value.
So as you look towards the past, My children, realize that nothing that has ever happened was unnecessary. Every past event from the largest to the most minute was a resolution of existing forces–physical, mental and spiritual/personal. And yet all that!–all that only leads up to this present moment, this Eternal Now. For to a degree, what of this will continue into the future is a matter of your choice.
True enough, there is an enormous universe happening out here, and we are all but tiny bits in a gigantic drama taking place. But how each of us perceives that, and acts upon it, is to such a large degree dependent upon our own choices. And this is God’s great gift—both the universe and our freedom. He is truly our Father of infinite love and understanding. How we open ourselves to accept ever more fully our experience of life, is how we offer Him our most sincere worship and appreciation.
So we thank You, Father, for this transcendent reality in which You have placed us. We thank You for the encompassing wisdom of Yours that holds us securely, while at the same time enticing us, teasing us, at times demanding of us that we reach out, we stretch ourselves to understand even more. What a gift, so much beyond our comprehension; but in our very need and desire to comprehend, we find the peace that passes understanding. We can leave our adventures of the day and rest secure in Your arms. You renew us and bring forth another day, both similar to all those which have gone before, yet always new. For this we thank You, Father, and we feel very much one with You. For it is our desire too, that life and reality be just as You have created them. Amen.
If you have any questions or comments, My sons, bring them forth.
Dialogue
Student. Father Michael, I had planned to ask a personal health question, but from the lesson tonight I’m beginning to see that it is something I need to take care of myself, in conjunction with medical doctors, and Yours and Mother’s help.
The real question, I think, is, how do I open myself more to You, and to my Father Fragment, and to Mother and the other beings in my life? I have a… structure, for want of a better term, that I’m inside of. It doesn’t let much out, or in. It’s something I’ve built up since childhood. Mother had a very good lesson on that, through Donna at the Center for Christ Consciousness. It was me right down the line. But how, how do I open up? How do I get out this box that I’m in, this structure? It works well enough to get by, but not well enough to become closer to You and to Mother and to my Father Fragment. I guess that’s the real question.
Michael. Yes, My son, to answer your question most directly: one small step at a time. Here you are–right on the edge of the unknown–because you can feel it! From My perspective I can feel it calling to you. In opening yourself up to real possibility, you are feeling a kind of reflective discomfort with what you’ve known so far. And so I congratulate you, My son, for being willing to experience this discomfort, what you feel is a box enclosing you, rather than seeking any number of ways to just dull the sensation. You are feeling more and more the desire to open yourself and reach out. So first of all, be not afraid of this discomfort. Feel the wisdom in experiencing it. Feel the desire in you for more life. Credit your desire to become more awake, to arouse yourself from the slumber of the past and reach out, for you are beginning to wonder what more you are capable of, if only you knew how.
Student. Yes.
Michael. I want you to think, My son, about what I talked about this evening, the moral dimension of human life. This is your desire to find a better way to contact Spirit. When you think about change, not in general, abstract terms, but in a very immediate way—what will you do differently tomorrow, remember it’s just part of human nature, a truism if you will, that small steps hold better than grandiose, melodramatically sweeping changes in which, as you say, you throw out the baby with the bath water.
In terms of energy, so much of this is based on your physical health, and by this I mean the whole–holistic view of your entire physical being–your activities, your nutrition, your rest. You have the full intellectual capacity to examine these. But this implies a willingness to change, to try something new, to get beyond denial. You can keep a journal to help yourself understand the causes and effects involved, and remember what you are trying that’s new, and whether it’s working or not.
This is a kind of curiosity and enlivening interest in experimenting. This is what you and J were talking about before the lesson this evening, that you find yourself greatly fatigued and kind-of weighted down by your diet. So go to something lighter, something that gives you more energy than what it takes up.
You’ve probably noticed by now there are certain seeming paradoxes about your personal energy. Sometimes, as Mother said, you have to separate being physically tired from being mentally sleepy. For sometimes you do need your physical rest. Yet at other times, when you are mentally sleepy or not as alert as you wish to be, you are faced with a seeming paradox. You can either take a nap, or the opposite—exercise, take a walk. Either one would be equally efficacious in the short run, but as you know, it takes a little more gumption, good old-fashioned gumption–pure effort, to take the walk. And this is what you may need to exercise most of all.
Student. Yes.
Michael. This is the openness you’re seeking, My son, a sense of newness about this body of yours. Feel and appreciate all these habitual patterns of how you see yourself, and then welcome the discomfort. Welcome feeling the fatigue, and let it motivate you. Realize that this fatigue is not inevitable, it’s not a part of growing older. Even here your habitual notions of what different ages bring about, these notions need to be reexamined.
And this is a real challenge! As soon as you go to give up, shall we say, certain regular daytime or evening habits, you’re immediately confronted with How do you fill the time? (Student chuckles) I see you have a little chuckle of recognition there.
Student. Yes, Father, I do. You’re right. That’s the fear.
Michael. This means exploring your interests. What do you want this greater spiritual contact for? What are you going to do with it? What entices you, what seems intrinsically interesting? I think you can see now how single-knit, how tied together are all these different facets of mental and physical and spiritual life. You can see how you settle into certain comfortable habits in the face of this challenge to fill your life with more meaningful, more spiritually valuable activities.
It boils down to how much life do you want? Can you accept from Me, if only by faith, you do have this choice? You can choose to have more life. This choice is, first, finding those things that are enticing you and pulling you forward–finding interests to sustain you. Then with this motivation comes a reexamining anew all your habits of rest and activity and nutrition. I think you know this deep within you, My son, for you have read about, or seen on television, different ways in which other folks have turned their lives around and discovered just how malleable, how flexible, how adaptable is this life vehicle you’ve been given. You are what you are by all these thousands of choices, or refusing to choose, you have known in the past.
Student. Yes, I’m beginning to see that. That structure I was talking about is a kind of safe-house I constructed that kept me from looking at the outside world I didn’t want to deal with. I know what You’ve been saying, that it’s a matter of exploration, and I know…I’m interested in exploration. I’ve always been interested in exploring. I’ve always been driven by a quest for spiritual growth. I haven’t always achieved what I wanted to, but nevertheless, here I am. I like being where I am, but I want more. I want what You were talking about, the more life, the fuller life, the all-I-can-get life—the appropriately all-I-can-get life. I don’t want anything that’s not appropriate. But I don’t know how—except as You said, little step by little step—forward—in conjunction with You and Mother Spirit and my Father Fragment.
Michael. Exactly, My son. You grasp My meaning immediately, and fully. So think of these three general categories if you will, activities, nutrition, and rest. Try some small step in each one. In terms of nutrition, see if you can move towards living foods, lighter, more easily digested food that gives you energy—the fruits and vegetables, the complex carbohydrates. Look at your body afresh and ask yourself what small activity is best to invigorate you and get you in shape.
Student. I notice that a lot of…still what I eat is being called “comfort food,” as opposed to nutritious food. But I see now I can also make better decisions that lead up to a big change in how I look at my food-stuffs.
The other thing is—rest and relaxation and all the other things?—I’ve always wanted to make a big change and get it over with; but that doesn’t work. Maybe I don’t have the foundation to build on, that I thought I had.
Michael. Yes, it’s a matter of changing this “comfort food,” for you are beginning to understand what a terrible toll these empty calories take on your body, and on your energy. You need food that more profoundly comforts your intellect and your spirit. As you just mentioned, your spiritual quest is the true comfort of your soul. This is the nutrition that stays with you, that brings a quality of uniqueness to the events that add to your soul, rather than just doing the same old superficially comfortable things that, as you are discovering, take such a toll on you physically and mentally. These “comfort things” are an enormous fraud. Now you are getting the moral acuity to see that. (Yes).
This is the difficult part too, My son–initially accepting a moral dimension into your life–having all your little routines take on a moral dimension. This can be most uncomfortable at first. Which is why I advise you to start by taking small steps, so as not to be overwhelmed. Keep in mind how far you have come, and what joy you do find in spiritual discoveries. One at a time just trade these fraudulently appealing things for what truly comforts your soul, what truly gives you good, solid nutrition that refreshes you, and doesn’t just steal your energy away.
Student. Yes! The phrase keeps running through my mind, that I should tiptoe through life–in the sense of taking small steps instead of trying to get quietly through without doing anything.
Michael. Yes. This is being truly scientific. You make small changes and then stay open to note the effects. Don’t forget or rule out success! These small discoveries are what sustain you. At times you project yourself into the future and wonder how you can possibly do this or that you envision, but these small successes do sustain you. These are the proofs you are doing the right thing. Some of the things you’ve tried are not working. So you simply trade them for something better. This is your spiritual quest. This is how you keep feeding your soul, you keep moving forward without all the guilt or recrimination.
As to precisely what these choices are, in order to evaluate even some minute question of diet or activity; take a moment of your stillness to get in touch with a broader context, and let all your Spiritual Family inform you, right along with your intellectual studies. You are surrounded with such a wealth of information about nutrition, about activities, I do not feel, in your case My son, a lack of information is the choke-point; it’s not the bottle-neck. You know what to try. Now you need the spiritual gumption to do it.
Student. Yes.
Michael. So be unafraid. Step out and experiment. Let your successes sustain you to the next step.
Student. It sounds so simple when it comes out of Your mouth. I think I’m seeing for the first time how small successes lead up to large ones, rather than I wasn’t large enough—I wasn’t big enough.
Michael. So all along, My son, you have to feel for the results of these good things you’re choosing. The quest not some abstraction. It’s what works—whatever that is.
Student. Yes.
Michael. The proof is in the energy you feel, the accomplishments you are able do. At the end of the day you will have had a unique, living opportunity, not just what you’ve been doing the last few months, or years.
Student. Yes.
Michael. This is what your spirit tells you it wants. So just realize, now, you are asking for a more conscious moral dimension in your life. All these little day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour comfortable habits. You are going to welcome the reevaluation of them.
Student. Yes.
Michael. This is what it’s going to be. So accept any discomfort that leads you to greater life.
Student. Yes, I can see that. I look forward to the reevaluation. I’m not too sure about the discomfort yet, but I think it’s always been there. I will welcome…needing to feel it.
Michael. Yes. If your moral discrimination has been asleep for a while, it can be rather uncomfortable to feel when you go to do some very basic, familiar, killing-time kind of thing, and realize, My goodness!—what am I doing? I’m killing time here! And time is what I have. All eternity is this Now that I’m in. The discomfort you feel is just being able to see these habits for the frauds they’ve been…(Yes)…and the box they’ve put you in.
Student. Yes—this box is becoming much more clear—not clear to see through, but clear that I can see it. I can see what it’s cost me in life—in living. The real benefit is that I don’t have to stay there. I have a lot of help getting out of it. Thank You, Father, for Your love and support and guidance. I love and appreciate You.
Michael. You are very welcome, My son. In the coming days you will, obviously, be coming and going with this realization. (student chuckles with recognition again) You will have your clear moments, and then your kind-of sleepy, enervated moments; so during those moments when you are clear, as you are now, as to what you have to do, get hold of your courage and take a small step forward while you can. Then enjoy the good results that let you take another step. I know this is not something you can yet see, it’s still too abstract—this person you want to be. But this person will be standing, one step at a time, on what works.
Student. This person I want to be, envisioning this person, is someone going forward. I also see I can make mistakes and it’s not fatal. Just get up and keep going.
Michael. Above all right now, I feel you desperately need more energy–
Student. Yes.
Michael. —a more pure, healthier, stronger, more alert kind of life. Your spirit is strong, and your mind is keen enough to explore. It’s just a mater of breaking out of these sleepy comforts…(student laughs) But, enough!
Student. Yes—thank You.
Michael. You are very welcome.
Closing
And so let’s bring this evening to a close with a recapitulation of what it means to be conscious of your own personality’s sense of morality as it applies to the day to day choices you make in how you are living—this day—right now. Think about this deeply, My children. Ask yourselves. Do you want a greater sense of morality in your life? Do you really want to question, more and more continuously, whether what you are choosing to do moment to moment is good?—good for you–good for the others in your life. In essence, is it God’s will? Does it reflect the desires of this Supreme Being who truly loves you and wants the best, the fullest life for you? Are you doing anything to deliberately, if only half-consciously, numb or dull your sense of right and wrong—sometimes simply what is better? Or can you welcome this joyfully into your life with an abiding faith that your moral discrimination leads you to what is real—to discovering what really works—for you and your fellows?
Mother Spirit is right within you, Her love supports you. She is ever welcoming your embrace, and your quest for a better way of life. I am right beside you, and in your heart–in your feelings, as you feel your way along, sometimes through moments of pure black obscurity as to what is the right thing to do. A pure fragment of God himself is here too, has always been here, tying these moments together, creating your soul—from this viewpoint, creating the story of all these choices you have made.
Oh My children! If you could only see your souls as We do. But then, you will some day. Rest in My peace. Good evening.
