2006-05-08-Be Embodiment Of God’s Love
Marin #90
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Be Embodiment of God’s Love
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Nebadonia
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialgoue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Be Embodiment of God’s Love
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Prayer. Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, We welcome You, our dear parents, our close friends. So tonight our prayer is very simple. We invite You to share our lives with us. And we ask that You help us be aware of Your presence. We pray for the strength and the courage to realize as best we can Your spiritual viewpoint on our human reality. Amen.
Nebadonia. Good evening, My dear sons, this is your mother, Nebadonia.
Lesson
Like Michael, I too treasure the moments when you realize what a dear friend I long to be with you. This is Our treasure, and if We have anything approximating the good aspects of human pride—the pure delight that something is—We delight that We can be close to you this way. This is the glory of being the Mother Spirit and Creator Son of a Local Universe. This is the essence of Our divinity, that We are able to share Ourselves with our children, and enjoy our children’s lives as the richest part of Our own.
In this We represent, We actually are, We enjoy the connection of love that you prize so highly. We are literally the embodiment of God’s love for all of us, and We encourage you to do your best to feel yourselves to be that embodiment as well. No pun intended, but you do have the bodies for it. OK, maybe that was a pun. But your physical existence, while beset with certain limitations of time and space, does have its equally marvelous compensations. Your bodies give you contact with a reality governed by natural law, the cause and effect that, as you have so recently discovered, is in its own way both bottomless into the infinitesimal, and infinite in its extension.
The physical universe that your bodily sensations give you access to can be a marvel to experience, and so you can rightly feel blessed–if you have a great appreciation for both your physical bodies and the physical world they put you in touch with. Indeed these discoveries have been valuable and valid extensions of mankind, especially in the recent times of the scientific revolution where larger and larger groups of men and women accepted the discipline of having to demonstrate what they were proposing.
For this was the way you did discover and are so greatly elucidating natural law, which is more or less God’s habitual way of doing things. The very scope and enormity of it does give you a feeling of humility, for as you appreciate the history of science, you can have the humility of realizing that today’s theories and ideas are sure to be surpassed sometime, perhaps in the very near future. You are literally living in the middle of an explosion that started a few hundred years ago and, as your very modern electronics are proving the case, things are changing enormously rapidly because of it. So discovering all this natural law, all these habitual ways of God’s doing things, is wonderful and exciting. It gives you an ever greater sense of the continuity of God’s absoluteness, the infinity of His outworking both large and small.
If you will recall, it has even been Michael’s and My purpose to show you the limitations of this view of continuity, and point out something that is, not discontinuous, but existing right within the continuity—a newness, a uniqueness of events that have never happened before and will never happen again. As far as Michael and I are concerned, this only increases Our delight in God’s imagination, His creativity, that He could come up with a reality that is at one and the same time so absolutely reliable, so perfectly continuous right down to each single electron’s bouncing around in its little nano-second of events, yet at the same time, ever new–in a way not repeating itself, but capable of being unique each moment, on and on forever.
So We offer you the notion of the spirituality within physical reality. The physical world both without you and right within you as your physical bodies is not only continuous and reliable, but also ever new. That leaf you see falling from a tree outside never fell before, nor will it ever fall again. This is the spirit–if you will, the value within the world you see, for this is its very nature. Your own bodies, though persisting day to day, year to year, are also continuously changing. As you have paid more attention and learned more about these changes, you have to a large degree transcended some of the inevitabilities of past generations in terms of aging—what old age means. You’ve even come to the point where in your more modern societies by far the greater proportion of disease and accidents that befall you physically are within your realm of freedom, are a matter of your own choices or negligence.
And so We have offered you Our lessons on being open in such a way as to stay present with yourselves, and realize what is happening of your freewill choices, especially in terms of what you might call bad or unhealthy habits–the lack of resolve or the discipline to do what you know is the right thing. Tonight I would like to offer a viewpoint on two impulses or drives within you. One We have designated the hunger for perfection, the notion that there is kind of spiritual growth possible, a way of improving the quality of your life day by day, where you are increasing your knowledge, your wisdom, you inner power to do things, your decisiveness, your ability to choose among alternatives.
Yet obviously this can lead to impatience, even intolerance toward others you feel may be holding you back, or intolerance toward yourself by indulging in self-anger or guilt because you are not keeping up with some imagined program. Counterbalancing this hunger for perfection, this need to keep growing, is a kind of conservation of energies, a conservation of a status-quo—simply continuing as you are. My point tonight is that neither of these drives should be disrespected or slighted, but rather it does you well to see a fulfilled life as a balance between them. Obviously too much conservatism, too much emphasis upon maintaining a status-quo can actually lead to regression, a kind of back-sliding into laziness where an illusion of clinging to the same, secure thing day after day, that you’ve already known, causes you to miss the changes that are happening to you, and the opportunities possible.
Some of you think of this as an animal tendency–with some validity, because both animals and very primitive men generally only think when they’re hungry. As soon as their bellies are full they sleep until they get hungry again.
I ask you to see if you can feel these two drives within you, so you can recognize them, and have some conscious choice of what you need. Sometimes after a long, hard week of work you have so many things planned for the weekend, and then are dismayed when Sunday arrives you have no energy for them. This is not only being physically tired, but being mentally or spiritually exhausted. You can feel very desperate within yourself, rather than realizing you need to take a break from a linear/planned kind of time to feel your organic life. The best thing for you might be to tinker around, take it easy, have fun doing nothing, enjoy being lazy for a day. In this case, welcome some variety in your life. You all know examples of those who are driving themselves into an early grave trying to do two or three things at once every day of the week.
Whereas on the other hand, isn’t it refreshing after a day or two of being lazy to feel that old drive, that old ambition come back, and bestir yourselves, get out there and welcome another new adventure? See yourself growing in your wisdom, your power—the great joy of accomplishing things. So feel these two complimentary drives within you. Feel for how much they seem to be simply a fact happening to you, and then decide how much to either embrace or change your current state. Ultimately there is no status-quo.
You are bound for Paradise, no matter how many millions of years it takes or what enormous expanses of the universe you will traverse to get there, both within time and space and then beyond it. Yet within this overall adventure you were created to enjoy, you do have your little rest-stops, your moments of fulfillment, your need to stop and conserve your energies from being frittered away. You need to appreciate how far you’ve come, and how far you still have to go. So feel for this balance within yourselves, My children. Feel for the wisdom you are slowly accumulating as an ability to accept your present situation fully–to understand it, then let that be the basis of your free will. Practice your stillness.
Let everything stop so you can rediscover your home base, for it too is changing. Settle into where you are. Perceive the spiritual presence of the present moment, then linger awhile. Even though all the good ideas that come to you in your stillness tend to make you jump up and get going again, just stay awhile. Be still. Feel your breathing and your heartbeat. Enjoy your absolute existence. Then rise up refreshed. Look around in mild surprise at your human reality, and wonder anew how our Father does it. And away you go again, off to try your next experiment in being you.
Dialgoue
Oh!—by the way—don’t forget to take Michael and I with you. If you have any questions or comments this evening, I do believe that’s the next step.
Student. Yes, Mother, the word thirst came to mind, and how I seem to be always thirsting to understand more of who I am and more of all that’s around me–how I thirst to be still and experience the presence of God within me. Then I was thinking about being human and what a privilege it is to be able to experience all I am in being human, and of spirit. I was listening to a beautiful piece of music on the way here, and I thought, God, this is perfect—this beautiful piece of music. The sun was setting…and it was perfect—just to be able to hear and to be moved by this piece of music. It’s what life is all about. Or to be able to have a piece of bread and cheese, and to enjoy that; and a glass of wine. To be able to hug my daughter, and my son.
It’s interesting—the topic You brought up tonight, because I have been kind-of finding the balance between this thirst, this hunger for perfection, and conserving, or living in this world, and letting go of familiarity. I mentioned to Michael last week how I’d like to do other things with my life, but I also know things don’t happen so fast as I’d like. And I do notice a different quality within me, of seeing this world around me—a sense of detachment—a different texture that I feel.
Nebadonia. My son, there is some real irony involved in how feeling yourself to be detached this way can actually increase your perception of yourself and your connection to the world. The same applies to the degree to which you can achieve a marvelously still home base within yourself—in this sense, how detaching yourself from your activity for a certain special time enables you to refresh yourself spiritually so you can return to your activities with a greater sense of freedom. You can choose to do this or that because you now have a more conscious choice. You’ve just earned it. Michael mentioned last week how having this home base, and feeling your self-completeness within yourself, enables you to be more present for others, to be a better friend, because you now have something to give. Your detachment from your friend’s troubles is what they need.
You are providing a viewpoint they may not be capable of. You can help them see themselves as another sees them. You’re providing that precious, hopefully more objective viewpoint, the very thing they need for their understanding of what’s happening to them. Think of the marvelous feedback that friends can give each other just because there is a bond of trust and love. You can totally disagree with a friend and yet realize that underneath it all you each mean well. And so the paradoxical appearance of these things dissolves with a true understanding of what’s happening. It suddenly appears a real blessing, and you can give thanks you were introduced to this way of finding, and rediscovering your home base, your spiritual dimension, through stillness.
Student. Where does this desire to do something more fulfilling, something different with my life, come from? Sometimes I feel it’s more ego-driven than actual inspiration. As I was writing in my journal yesterday, and I asked Michael last week, it’s been my intention to open up to my calling—whatever that is. So I wonder what drives this desire for something more or different in my life? There is that saying, be careful what you wish for?—it may actually happen? It may not be what you had in mind. So there is that trepidation. I know I’m changing. I know I’m growing and evolving. I know I’m becoming more sensitive and aware of an absolute reality. I think it’s a natural inclination for us, that when we are exposed to this reality, this greater understanding, we want to share it with others. I wrote this in my journal, I want to share my love, share this essence, share God with others. If I don’t do that, what’s the point of my existence?
Nebadonia. Your drive to achieve has many levels or layers to it, because a lot of it is cultural, a very modern invention that endless thousands and thousands of years of humankind’s existence did not know. As your Urantia book has informed you, for hundreds of thousands of years there was very little individual or tribal progress. Primitive man was extraordinarily conservative, clinging to what he felt did work because with such a little knowledge of natural law, it seemed to him the slightest deviation from a status-quo of tribal knowledge–actually ritual–was immediately disastrous.
Compared to that, modern society, especially in these last few centuries of scientific discovery, and the fantastically accelerated evolution of a highly industrial, and then mechanical, and now electronic world, has everybody expecting things to change, and change ever more rapidly. It’s now a type of ambition you absorb as you are growing up. Within this overall situation, We merely try to spiritualize your ambition and point you toward more eternal, longer lasting values–hence Our lessons on introducing you to your own souls, the spiritual records of your experiences here. While you feel this expectation propelling you toward a changing tomorrow, We remind you that what you are doing today, each moment, is your true possession. Being here-and-now is an achievement, a supreme spiritual achievement.
For again, paradoxically-seeming, it requires you stay open to the past—the true story of what has happened, and feel the whole impenetrable possibility that the future is. Although it includes being aware of how imperfect you are as a young being just starting out in eternity—perfection being some truly enormous goal that will validly occupy you for… (Mother laughed here) endless eons to come; still right here and now you are complete.
From time to time you realize this completeness when one of your human moments swells to touch your soul with its momentary, seeming perfection—a little bread and cheese, a piece of music as you are driving to your Monday night meeting. So you have these moments of transcendental oneness with everything. Yet even these cannot be held for long. And so you learn to let them go lightly, so that they may happen again. Everything is changing. Here comes another now.
Student. I guess the desire to change is in a sense a dissatisfaction with the way things are now. Like I’m always wanting something different. Wanting more money, wanting to be able to do something—the freedom to do other things. Take a vacation, buy myself a new truck because mine is falling apart.
Nebadonia. But isn’t it nice to know your own imagination is creating these possibilities by contrast with which you feel this dissatisfaction? Otherwise you would feel yourself being driven by some exterior force, such as your culture’s general ambition to possess a lot of stuff. Think of the freedom when you realize these are your own choices, or what you have internalized. There is great discomfort in feeling you are not meeting someone else’s mark.
Student. Yeah, I get that, I mean I see that–like with my Mother. She worries so much about my future, how I’m going to have money for my future, how can I continue doing the work that I do as I get older. I don’t know what the future holds for me. As Jesus points out, just be here and now and let the future, let tomorrow take care of itself. I’m gradually embracing that.
Nebadonia. Yet even the little squirrels know to gather nuts for winter. One does need to make provision. It’s part of the conserving…
Student. And that’s where I get confused sometimes. When You say that, I feel this anxiety in my stomach. (heavy sigh).
Nebadonia. But keep in mind this is also part of the advancement of culture, for society is truly an imperfect insurance policy. The very fact you have a medium of exchange—money—is a kind of social agreement that what happens today will be given validity tomorrow. Your labors today will be worth food and shelter tomorrow, and the next day, or years from now. All your recognition of private property, which was by no means universal throughout history, or even the present day, means there is a valid way of accumulating wealth. So this too is a social contract. You can make wise physical provision for tomorrow. At the same time you realize it is not absolute. It is all very relative to something you call good health. This is also part of the full human situation.
Student. That’s where I feel I’m in limbo. I’m like walking on air. I’m walking in darkness with my arms outstretched feeling for something, feeling for an idea, or feeling for faith. Because as You said, it’s not absolute. I desire to live in the truth, to experience the absolute reality, to experience God’s reality, not some man-made reality. Man-made reality is limiting. It’s temporal. I’m grasping here, I know.
Nebadonia. Might I suggest that God’s reality, His gift to you is in His promise to you of a way to eternal life, but it is up to you to choose what that life will be. As for man’s reality, I just pointed at a social contract by which men and women agree, to a great degree, on the value of things, so you can put aside part of your wealth of today for tomorrow.
Student. But what if one is unable to do that? In my life I only earn so much, I can only work so much, so I’m not able to accumulate any wealth for tomorrow. So I don’t know how I’m going to live tomorrow. That’s where I depend upon the universe—to lead me to situations and experiences.
Nebadonia. Now, My son, you are face to face with the need to create, and how much of your life is in your own hands, as well as the universe’s. The universe will provide you with a setting, both in this life and all the phases of your eternal life to come, but what you do with this is so much a part of your free will. More immediately, what your old age will be like is dependant on how you spend your time today. This too is a balance between physical, and mental, and spiritual dimensions. You are a physical/material being with a need for food and shelter and other physical things. Yet the accumulation of material wealth is of little importance if your health fails because of it.
Student. But what of Jesus’ promise of, seek first the kingdom of heaven and all else will come to you? I mean, seek God within yourself. Seek love and life, and eternal life, and everything else will come to me. Love God with all your heart and soul and spirit. Isn’t that the most important thing?
Nebadonia. By all means. But also, God gave you an intelligence with which to realize the kingdom, to be like God himself—a creative being, actually creating your own reality along with Him, in partnership with Him. In your present situation, you need food, good nutrition to maintain yourself. If you would not be a parasite on those around you, you must work in some way for the necessities of your life. God gives you the ability of foresight to see that, as you realize, you cannot do certain activities indefinitely. You have to make provision for your old age if you would not be dependent on the largess of others. These are the basic facts of human life that men and women have faced since the beginning. This is the view of society as a kind of insurance policy that is not absolute. Accidents still happen. But it does call upon all your abilities and resources to solve these problems with your own creativity.
There is also a fine balance between being independent–somewhat, and being dependent upon others. Unless you’re a completely self-sufficient hermit, both are necessary. The social contract is itself evolving. The world needs to evolve to a more advanced culture with ever greater honesty and respect for each individual‘s needs for the necessities of life. This is that awesome responsibility–the ability to respond–that calls forth your own creative abilities, so you can have an equal partnership with your Father.
Student. My first impression is that I’m scared. (laughs) I really know very little—I comprehend very little. I just don’t want to think about money, about earning money. I just want to live!—live my life. And create, You know—beauty; and help others.
Nebadonia. This is well and good in itself, but you do have the fable of the grasshopper and the ant.
Student. What about all these books on manifesting what you want, and all these stories of people manifesting money, and creating the lives they intend to?
Nebadonia. Aren’t all these just offers of advise, sometimes stories on how different individuals did it for themselves, and want to share that with you?
Student. I feel like I’m putting the cart before the horse.
Nebadonia. My son, this is also another facet of maturity. A kind of human instinctual wisdom gathered over the years tells the young to go out and just live, for they don’t know if they will have a future, a full life. Ironically, if you get carried away in this, you won’t have an old age. But after a certain point you think you might make it, you might have an old age to look forward to, so some provision must be made. In a lot of societies you do have your governments collecting wealth to provide a social security, retirement plans, and so forth.
This does occupy a great deal of peoples’ creativity, and because of this, old age is transforming enormously from what it has always been. People are not only living longer, but as possible health increases, as physical and mental abilities are extended, what is possible for you today would have seemed miraculous only a few generations ago. Now you have that irony I mentioned earlier, that so much of your ill health and physical suffering is due to what you call life-style choices.
We see the present age as an enormous blossoming of individual freedom, compared to previous ages where plagues of diseases swept through whole populations; when natural law was so little understood. We ask you to keep that in mind and rejoice in your freedom to choose good health. Rejoice that God has put so much of your life in your own hands, and given you the ability to reason out what follows what; the foresight to see what will come after awhile. Plans always have to be provisional due to the very uncertainty of human life, but this is not to say there is no use for them. This is part of the adventure.
You have My Adjutants of Knowledge and Wisdom to help you make the choices. Remember that Michael and I are the first to agree with you that it is somewhat scary. We encourage you to cultivate faith in you own abilities, your own adaptability. Use the God-given talents you have.
Student. I plan to.
Nebadonia. Good!
Student. I really don’t think I have a choice, really–when I get down to it.
Nebadonia. Here I disagree, My son. You do have a choice. What I’m saying is, the choice is yours. It is put in your hands. The universe is so constructed as to respond to you, but the choice is yours. You can choose not to choose, not to make decisions. You can choose to, as you said, kick back and just coast along, ignore the future, let it take care of itself. Forget that it will inevitably arrive. Take your chances with whatever comes. This is a choice, and many make it by default. But then they feel they are the mere pawns of circumstance—rightfully so. That is not generally a comfortable situation to be in.
Student. What I meant was, if I choose life, and choose to live my life, my soul, then the choice is more obvious—than just kicking back. Thank You.
Nebadonia. You are very welcome. Yes—I meant it more in the narrow sense that we were talking about—making provision for your older age, that scary aspect of simply growing old.
Student. Some people think we don’t have to necessarily grow old… But that’s for another time.
Nebadonia. Yes. We can trust another time will come. We did cover a bit of ground tonight.
Student. I hope the people who read this will appreciate it.
Nebadonia. That’s their choice, is it not?
Student. True.
Nebadonia. Michael and I do grant that you are a very complex kind of being. And so We tease you into appreciating this very complexity, (laughter) and assure you that many, more purely-spiritual Beings come close to what you would think of as envy, that you have such choices to make. They are aware of the irony that for many of you, (here Mother laughed again) you consider this somewhat a curse. But this is the partnership our Father offers all personal beings; the essence of what personality means. Your very uniqueness can be somewhat scary, because no one else has ever lived your life exactly, before. All the best advise from your fellow human beings, or even Michael and I, requires you to decide what you will use, or not.
So I must caution, your freedom is not forced upon you. You can literally choose not to choose, by default, but in doing so you are thwarting God’s intention—that you become like Him, and you generally experience this as suffering. Suffering has as its main purpose to alert you and let you know, that whatever the cost you may feel is required for your freedom–whether consternation, or worry, or more positively, thought and reason—whatever is required to make your freewill decisions, is worth it.
Closing
That is the spiritual truth that forms your soul. For in choosing not to choose, you are choosing to not experience all you are capable of. As an experiential being, you are wasting time. But conversely, this is also the assurance that you have free will. You can choose to experience. You can grow your soul as an eternal possession. You can rejoice in a simple slice of bread and a piece of cheese, and know a moment of perfection in the music as you drive along, your daughter or son in your arms. That too is real. Be in My love, My dear son. Good evening.
