1993-02-07 Success or Failure of Mission – Sessions 1-3
Tallahassee #28
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Success or Failure of Mission – o 1.2 Group: Tallahassee TeaM
• 2 Facilitators – o 2.1 Teacher: Will, Machiventa – o 2.2 TR: Unknown
• 3 Session 1 – o 3.1 Opening – o 3.2 Lesson – 3.2.1 Service, Practice – o 3.3 Closing
• 4 Session 2 – o 4.1 Opening – o 4.2 Lesson – 4.2.1 Progress – o 4.3 Closing
• 5 Session 3 – o 5.1 Opening – 5.1.1 Focus, Moment – o 5.2 Dialogue – 5.2.1 Ego, Defense – o 5.3 Closing
Topic: Success or Failure of Mission
Group: Tallahassee TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Will, Machiventa
TR: Unknown
Session 1
Opening
WILL: The love of God surrounds us. The power of God supports us. The love of God enfolds us. Wherever we gather, He is.
Good evening and greetings to you all once again. I am your teacher, Will, who loves you.
Lesson
Service, Practice
WILL: It has not been long now, calculated even by your time, that we have been meeting, and yet we detect in each of you a great change. Each of you to some lesser or greater degree has been continuing asking yourself, “In what way shall I serve?” I think it is important to consider not the question, not the answer to the question, but the fact of the question. During the ministry of Jesus, his apostles and other able disciples, although believing firmly in him, in his teaching, in his example, in his authority and his divinity, were nearly incapacitated by the tremendous stone that lay in their path. In their case, the great obstacle was thoughts about, “What shall be my place in the kingdom?”
Now, 2000 years later, I think we can say that the world has changed, that people have changed and that our Master’s mission was largely successful, not in the fashion in which it was originally intended, but with the power of the Father’s ministry mixed in. You people, not alone in this world, genuinely ask yourselves not “What will be my place in the kingdom?”, but “How may I serve?”. This is great progress. Yet this question, for all its commendable qualities, remains, for you, as for the chosen apostles, a great stone in the path.
For most of you, believing in the value of service, believing in the teaching presented in the Urantia Book, believing in the lessons of the Master’s ministry, questions remain about this present ministry which relate essentially to its veracity. And we say to you in response, look at the question that you ask, look at the stone in your path. The quality of the question that you ask is the measure of the truth of this ministry. We feel that the changes which have occurred in your lives of your own volition in response to the leading of the Adjusters and the minor contributions made by the participants in this mission are in themselves the best indication of the truthfulness of this effort.
Of course, the question still remains, what to do about the stone in the path. Practice. Practice will change your perspective. Practice will cause the spirit in you to grow larger, taller, lighter, more confident, more fluid, more balanced, more resourceful and the stone in the path will correspondingly shrink until it becomes just another feature of the pavement. With practice you will become more sure of your place in the kingdom. With practice the question of how to serve will solve itself. The question will itself sublimate, evaporate, become subsumed in the answer. This is my lesson for you tonight.
Each day opportunities arise. As you progress, you will be able to detect opportunities which would have once escaped you; fallen beneath your attention. No one enters Paradise untested. You are all coming along well. I commend you. Until assignment to this group, I had forgotten the perspective of life in the material world and the impediments that the fact of material life raises, minute by minute. I thank you for this opportunity to incorporate realistic lessons which I had previously thought I well understood. I am relearning something of the perspective with which you approach these efforts. That puts a different face on things.
But there is no person in this group with whom we are displeased. All are doing well and we thank you for your attention and the application of your very talents and your forbearance with some of the more abstract aspects of this ministry. But most of all we complement you for your fortitude and your patience – two qualities which will carry you far in doing the Father’s work. This week, openings and closings. Be alert for which you are causing, whether you are causing openings or are causing closings.
Closing
WILL: This week, more opportunity. This week, more people – whom God loves equally. They are your brothers and sisters, no matter their station in life or their earthly capabilities. Every soul will fly someday. That is all I have to say. Until next week, God go with you and bless you. Shalom.
Session 2
2/19/93
Opening
(Spontaneous transmission while enjoying a coffee break and muffin at a local restaurant, several days after Vincent asked whether I was still receiving messages.)
Lesson
Progress
MACHIVENTA MELCHIZEDEK: Certain persons in this teacher group have on numerous occasions expressed the view that the proposition of changing the world one person at a time is too implausible to be realistically achievable within any timeframe conceivable by humans. It has been posited that one teacher group per town will be insufficient, that a teacher for each neighborhood would be insufficient, and even that a teacher for each household would be insufficient – witness the resistance of certain members’ life-mates to this effort.
While I am personally affronted by this expression of doubt, I am not personally offended by it. In fact, as you might guess, I welcome this as an opportunity to teach, for there is a lesson to be gained here. You humans forget that this one-person-at-a-time restriction works on both sides of the equation. It affects our efforts to carry on this ministry – it is a two way street.
Each of you can thank me later, as I am sure you shall, for here is the gift of my lesson to you: you are not personally responsible for the success or failure of this ministry. Neither are we teachers personally responsible for any failure. Nor shall any of us be covered in glory for its successes, however modest or extravagant. All of us – both sides – are in the same boat. Our obligation, each of us, is limited to serving the Father as we honestly divine His will to work through each event in life.
Do not trouble yourselves as to whether the Universal Father’s plan will ultimately succeed, or whether its completion meets your personal assessment of timeliness. If you can do this, if you can accept the Father’s pace, then we have some assignments for which you would qualify as candidates. If you can make your business God’s business, then we have challenging opportunities in store for you.
Do not presume to measure God’s progress; look rather to your own house. You fail to realize, because of your physical situation, what we know: You are the ministry. You are called upon in service to God and mankind. We are doing little. We expect you to do nearly everything.
Closing
MACHIVENTA : We have only begun, and things are going well – look at the frankness and honesty of the exchanges we have developed at this shallow point. Now go and make mistakes in His service.
Session 3
February 21, 1993
Opening
WILL: The love of God surrounds us. The power of God supports us. The majesty of God enfolds us. Wherever we gather, He is.
Focus, Moment
WILL: Good evening and greetings to you all. I am your teacher, Will, who loves you. We above are often insensitive to human situations. In particular your limited appreciation of certain inexplicable facts of the afterlife which are not readily understandable in the midst of the material life. I would like, therefore, to expand on the lesson which the Melchizedek began earlier this week.
Fear not those things that might happen to you in the life of the spirit. There are too many potentialities for the human mind to deal with. If we take the simplest model and look upon it in a graphic form, I think you will readily begin to see. Between this moment and the next, let us say that there are three potential choices. You might call them the highest path, the path of habit and the lowest path. In our simple model, between this moment and the next moment, there are choices to be made. However if we extend the scope of our model, not from moment to moment, but from day to day, there are an infinite number of moments. If there were only three choices between each of those infinite opportunities you can see how the possibilities rapidly proliferate to such an unmanageable number that the human mind cannot deal with them, at least in any reasonable fashion.
Let us say then we used a blue pen and we marked, not all the possibilities, but only those which were selected. If we charted the possible choices which were actually acted upon from moment to moment, I think each of you would agree, it would not be a smooth line. The line would veer up and down and back again. And if we make our model one more step complex and factor in the pull on that line provided by other personalities who accompany us through life, which pull is akin to magnetism, we would then see that our line would not be describable as straight in any fashion. Our line would tend to be strongly drawn toward or strongly repelled from the other personalities which we encounter in life.
When Melchizedek says you are not personally responsible, part of his meaning is that your responsibility is not adjudged moment by moment. What you are responsible for is the overall trend. And, of course, as in any measurement, the greater the period of time, the more realistic the measurement becomes. Your responsibility is limited to selecting the higher path within your capabilities to sense it. The only personality capable of tracking, measuring, predicting and logging the consequences of all the potential choices is that of the First Source and Center. Only He has the capacity. It is far beyond the ability of any personalities involved with this ministry. We like things much simpler. Although a majority of the personalities involved in the celestial ministry are eternals, our method of dealing with the infinite number of choices is to concentrate on the present and we recommend that method to you. There are simply too many to be reasonably conceivable.
A great thinker from your century stated at one time, among other things, that the problems of the world that have arisen from the quality of thinking in the past are not solvable at the levels at which they were created. This is true because of the proliferation of potentialities. Solutions to the world’s problems lie in the future, not in the past. The solutions to problems in your lives and the lives of your brothers and sisters lie not in fundamentalism but in the future. It is not possible to return to the past and deal with the present. The problems of the present are far too complex to be dealt with by past thinking.
We therefore recommend that you stand in the present with your face to the future. Devote all of your abilities to the selection of the path that most closely fits the Father’s path as you understand it and then act upon it. This is why Melchizedek can blithely say, “Go now and make mistakes.” You will not do harm in God’s name. For this reason we say, do not trouble yourselves. We think you are up to the task. The only cure for any of it is practice. We see that you are all on the inclining path and this is good to see. It tells us, the members of the various teacher groups, that our efforts are not in vain. I understand that there is a question.
Dialogue
Ego, Defense
JUDY: Good evening, Will. First of all I want to tell you that I have missed you for the last couple of weeks. About three weeks ago we started a line of questioning about the ego and I have found some of your answers to be very helpful in trying to tame my own and I wanted to follow up on a couple of questions about the ego. As I understand it from the last time we were together and talking about this the ego is developed to protect personality and it means well but it gets in the way of spiritual progress. Am I right in assuming that the more spiritual we become the less ego driven we are and the more personality driven we are?
WILL: You will outgrow your material life ego. Ego seeks to organize even those matters for which it is unfit. The ego is less than personality. It is only a tool and like any tool it runs on and on, even in the absence of purpose. Each of you will find as you become increasingly Godlike, that it is less necessary to provide distance between yourselves and other persons. You will find that true brotherhood and sisterhood exists in honest defenseless interaction. That true strength requires no defenses. Only the coals must be sheltered. The torch is not in danger of being snuffed out. Does that answer?
JUDY: Is there something we can do to diminish the role of ego in our lives?
WILL: Our present pursuit is thought to be the most effective method. Disciplining mind and soul and causing them to work together in a complementary relationship. For you, the most effective gimmick to apply as policy is to think before speaking. When you see achievable results then extend that to thinking before responding. This will be different than filtration. Thinking will require applying the lessons which you have absorbed up to this point to your direct dealings with persons who may or may not be aware of the Father’s message. By thinking your soul will be required to exercise itself and assist your human mind. You may find this tiresome in the beginning, but it is good exercise. Next question.
JUDY: A couple of weeks ago you contrasted our group with the Utah group and you implied that one reason that our group was stable was because it only had two transmitter/receivers while there were many in the Utah group. Was that perception accurate?
WILL: The number of transmitter/receivers in a group is not the cause of the cohesiveness or the fractionalization of a teacher group. The individual qualities of persons and the degree of cohesiveness of a group as a whole will be the determinative factor as to whether the group remains a functioning entity or whether it splits, each person going his or her own way. This ministry does not require group action. Clearly little success could be realized if the humans willing to entertain our message were restricted to activities in groups, tandem or larger. It is felt however that as a general policy, greater depth of understanding can be gained by humans through interaction in sharing the lessons learned and their attempts to put the word into deeds and, for this reason, we encourage group action and group reflection. I think that covers it. Next question.
JUDY: It seems to me that we place an undue burden on Eric and Melissa as transmitters/receivers and other members of the group are willing to serve. Should they be more patient or should they be more active?
WILL: Each thing in its own time. Your transmitters are not suffering. They are hardly overworked. They must deal only with some uncertainty, which uncertainty is a consequent fact of life on a material world and the degree to which they are willing to participate in spite of uncertainty is an exact measure of their degree of comfort. This one [Eric] is learning to live with ambiguity. It is good practice for him. Perhaps there are other questions tonight.
VINCENT: Do you have anything you want to tell us about the surprise you told us about earlier?
WILL: There is such a thing. I detect though that there is a certain resistance and it is true that nearly all these predicted events have gone awry for one reason or another. Therefor I am personally reluctant to bring any further discredit upon myself (laughter). Although I can live with the shame, it seems to be a matter with no profit in it and so I decline your bait and we will let things develop as they develop. Next question.
SUSAN: Right at the end of your lesson this evening you made a comment that caused me to think twice and I wonder if I could get a little clarification. I think I know what you meant but you said “You will do no harm in the Father’s name” or something to that effect and I am thinking that you were speaking personally to us as a group because the first thing that came to my mind was that there has indeed been great harm done in the Father’s name throughout the centuries on this planet and I just wondered if I interpreted that correctly?
WILL: I am your teacher. This group is my assignment. I teach this group. It is hoped that my teachings will increase the spiritual awareness of all those who have any occasion whatever to contact the individual members of this group. All of you well know that the words uttered here are not the totality of my teachings. The words are but a subset, therefore I can say, my teachings are for all. My words are for you. It is no shame upon me or upon you if my words should be used for an improper purpose. It is not the first time that such an unfortunate event has happened on your planet. It will not be the last. But that is not my wish nor yours. I refer you then to the first words with which I opened our lesson tonight: fear not. The acts are yours, the consequences, God’s.
Closing
That is all I have to say. I bid you farewell and look forward to our next meeting wherever that should take place and leave you now in the Father’s hands. Shalom.
