2005-07-11-Abilities & Confidence
Marin – MAR#55
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Abilities and Confidence
2Group: Marin TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Nebadonia
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening Prayer
2Lesson
3Dialogue
4Closing
4Note
Topic: Abilities and Confidence
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening Prayer. Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, Gladly we embrace Your suggestions – we feel our hearts beating, we open our minds; and then we forget ourselves. We relinquish our hearts and minds and turn them over to You. Come be with us and talk to us. Tell us of these wonders – the kinds of beings we are. Inspire us to go out and share these wonders with our brothers and sisters, some so greatly in need. Amen.
Lesson
Nebadonia. My beloved children, this is your Mother. Just relax awhile and drift along on Me. This is Me all around you, like a warm buoyant sea, like the river of life pouring from our Father.
I too am a river, a river of spirit pouring from the Infinite Spirit. You rightly know Me as the Holy Spirit, for all the rivers from Deity form a great living circle flowing back to Them. And so We have been helping you feel for the current, the trend of life toward ever greater life, the moment to moment fulfillment of potential creating genuine abilities, the capacity for more potential.
We have often mentioned spiritual abilities, and We have encouraged you to grow in these. But what precisely is an ability? Ponder this for a few moments and ask yourselves, What is this possession you can acquire, one that will stand you in good stead not only the rest of your lives here, but in all the days to come, beyond? What is the relationship between ability and potential? Are they nearly two phases of the same thing? If something is potential, that means it is not yet here and now, but it is a real possibility.
It can happen sometime in the future. So you can think of an ability as your own personal power to make it happen. As you grow in your abilities, it means you are adding something to your power that didn’t exist yesterday. You’ve encountered something new and you have learned how to do it. You’ve reflected on it and made it your very own, and now that you have it, you are larger, more things are possible for you up there in the future.
You even have an ideal, what you call a Renaissance Man, someone who has a love and a curiosity extending into many different fields of human endeavor, someone who delights in expanding his or her abilities and so can reap an immediate reward seeing their future opening up. Here the more you do the more you are able to do. Think of how this applies to the distinction We have been encouraging you to perceive between those aspects of your reality which are continuing day to day, and that part of reality that is alive and being created anew each moment. Ask yourself, with respect to these two phases of reality, what is strictly cause and effect and proceeding from antecedents, and what seems to be bubbling up fresh this moment, making this moment unique.
You can grow in your abilities to handle either of these phases of your human reality, for learning how to deal with that which has been continuing all your life is also a true ideal and in its own way bottomless. But think if you develop an ever more acute sense of what is new in each moment – this continuous creation of God’s that you can recognize as, this moment has never happened before – and if you were to welcome this which is new, perhaps even strange, would you not then be exercising and growing your abilities? Doesn’t this make sense, My children?
Think of someone you know who appears to be very comfortable in new situations, who actually looks forward to them and, having done this awhile, has truly earned his or her own self-confidence. This is someone who delights in the challenge of what may be momentarily uncertain. They know that in every new situation there is something more to learn, a greater ability to acquire, and then a larger, more diverse future in store. Whereas all of this – so delightful and invigorating – could and does appear as a kind of terror to individuals who are clinging desperately to an illusion of nothing changing.
We have used the illustration before this would be like trying to drive through life looking in the rear-view mirror of the past, not realizing that, since the river of time is from the past into the future, they’ve got themselves turned around. They’re being swept inexorably forward, but oriented backwards, willy-nilly, and now the front wheels are behind them and they wonder why it’s so hard to maintain a straight course, or any course at all.
We give you these examples so you can have a quality of recognition of what We are alluding to. To continue Our example of driving a car; as you know, the faster you go the more your attention has to be well down the road, out beyond the edge of your stopping distance, for all the unexpected things that do come up in front of you. In this analogy, the best driver is totally unselfconscious. The vehicle feels like a part of him. He knows where everything is and is very well self-trained, so there seems to be no intermediary between his intention and what he does mentally and physically to affect it.
This frees up his attention so it can be not only well down the road to where he’s headed, but there is enough for a glance in the rearview mirror of the past from time to time, and then even enough left over to look around and enjoy the going, appreciate the new countryside or city he’s being a part of. This is the best way to grow your abilities – unselfconsciously – with one hundred percent commitment to what it is you are doing – work or play, alone or with a group of your friends or co-workers.
You have an odd saying that the devil is in the details. But I’m just teasing of course. I think that referred to some legal shenanigans, the fine lines at the bottom of the page to catch the unwary. I’m really speaking about the delight in the details, the infinity of God’s creation that stands out when you are no longer wasting so much attention trying to perceive yourself perceiving life.
You are a child of God, and you can know this profoundly, deeply inside yourself. This is His possibly – He created as your potential – the wonderful ability to know you are faith son or daughter of God. You don’t have to try to see God in a flower. Just see the flower. The more you see that flower, the more you appreciate its uniqueness in its moment to moment existence there in front of you, the more you are with Us and with your Father. For this too is an ability.
Do you remember one lesson where I suggested that with a bit of detachment you can sense the qualitative changes in your perceived reality? This takes some real tenacious attention to notice and accept the feedback from reality – by way of your perceptions, to tell if you are more or less getting it right. Wonder about this. Wonder, Well then, how can I tell if I am growing in my abilities? How can I tell if I’m getting too self-absorbed? How can I tell if my world and the people within it I love so well – how can I tell if they are growing or fading away?
Let that wonder and curiosity go deep within you, My children. Then carry it forward to the next meeting with your activities, or with others. This wonder is another way of opening yourself. It is part of your attitude – your willingness and, here comes that word again, your ability to relate with all that is not you. Can you feel this wonder and this curiosity bubbling up inside of you? Can you see that as you aim towards perfection, as you seek to follow our Father’s commandment – Be perfect – this wonder and this willingness to share your life leads you toward being the fountainhead of the stream of your own life, a distinct and growing stream in the Father’s greater river? This is what We mean by ability. Now you recognize it and know how you nurture and grow it until you too are filled with delight, facing the unknown self-confident in all it has to teach you.
Dialogue
If you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s have a look at them.
Student. Mother, I was wondering what You and Father meant by – home, or home base – as something within me.
Nebadonia. Yes, My son, this was actually just a name Welmek, your elder brother and teacher, gave for an inner experience or awareness you can have. You achieve a level of mind, or a kind of mentality where you are open to receiving messages from your own personal Celestial Teacher. If you mean it generally, you experience yourself in a kind of pregnant potential, where you are able to relax and un-focus your present, ongoing concerns and, while enjoying this cessation of so many busy things, you feel you are at a point of departure. Everything is still and peaceful within, and yet you sense this is a dynamic point of origin. This is where everything begins, and so there is power here. Here is all that real potential We talked about.
Here you can rest and regain your depleted energies, physical and mental and spiritual. Here you can visit with your soul, and say, Thank You, Father – a hundred times over, when the dear folks you have known come up for review. You have an inkling you are getting closer to Deity here, whose absolute power is utterly peaceful and loving. And so you can call it home base. You are home – back where it all started, and starts again. Does this answer your question, My son?
Student. Part of it. I’m wondering is this a place to get to, or to go to, or to come from, or just be with?
Nebadonia. At different times, all of the above; truly. On wonderfully serendipitous occasions, it just happens. Other times you feel a profound need for touching this base. Yet you bring this about by relinquishing and giving up desire. You have this overwhelming need to get to some place within yourself, and yet you actually do so by relinquishing desire, even curiosity, and just delight in existing, reassuring yourself that you are. You let go everything you are capable of letting go, and yet you still are.
Experiencing this is sometimes what you need most of all to quiet all those fluttering anxieties, or those profound doubts, or that needless worry as if otherwise you might cease to exist. You summon the courage to let all of this go and give yourself back to Us and our Father. Then glorious of all surprises, you find yourself back at the beginning where you can rest.
So how home base appears to you, and how to get to it, or find it, or let it be, depends where you are in relationship to it. After all, it is home base. Does this make sense, My son?
Student. Yes, but the big question is, Where would I find mine? Or do I have one? Because I’m not sure I even have one. Is this where I would meet You and Michael, or the Heavenly Father within me?
Nebadonia. Let Me assure you, you definitely do have one. It is where you actually exist. But it is deep and it is often layered over with much mental activity, especially those kinds I mentioned of worry or anxiety or doubt. But this is the goal of your practice of stillness. So it’s a deepening experience, My son, something that can be felt even while your mind still has its random thoughts. This experience does not mean an absence of mental activity.
It’s a final reassurance of you to yourself that you not only exist, but this existence of yours is very profound, very absolute, and very secure. This is such a self-sufficiency, you don’t need to feel Us, or God as something apart from you. We’re actually a part of you here. Our only wish is that you be positive of your own absolute existence. Has this helped you to focus in?
Student. Yes, Mother, it does quite a bit. Ah, it looks like a great place to be, a great place to access every now and then, or a great place to come from. Thank You.
Nebadonia. Again, My son, it’s all of the above. It’s a kind of ideal insofar as it keeps modulating towards greater power and greater potential. In terms of stillness, you feel ever more empty and yet so tingling-ly alive, if you will. In terms of mind, you know a peacefulness, though random thoughts may come and go. And in your heart, in your feelings, is the calm self-assurance that so often leads right over into worship, into feelings of thankfulness. It’s something worth achieving, which means you kind-of aim for it, you remember it, then relax and relinquish all your striving. Let it overtake and come upon you. And be in My love.
Student. Thank You again, Mother.
Student. Yes, Mother, I wish to thank You for Your statement tonight about not looking for God in the flower but seeing the flower for what it is. That’s really a profound statement because the flower is God, and if you come from this place of home base, that’s all you see. You don’t have to look for God, because it already is. I think I’ll meditate on that tonight, and I thank You for that.
Over the past couple of days, with the idea of change, of going with the change, and then the book I’ve been reading called, “Tomorrow’s God” – that life is change, change is life…what I’ve been feeling lately is being aware of peoples’ inability to change, such as those around me, and for me it’s quite agonizing because it doesn’t seem natural and I have a hard time with it, because I feel it so deeply. If You have any comments about that, how to help people who have no ability to change, or to ask for change, or to be motivated to change – because for some change is quite scary. As You said, change into what? Letting go of ones identification into what?
Nebadonia. First let Me address your understanding of seeing the flower. You have a deep insight as to how the more you can feel yourself to be living at home base and coming from that self-assurance, the more you are able to set aside concepts of God. Concepts are human mental comprehension’s and there is a profound humility in realizing that your concepts of God, while well-meant and useful, are so much less than the flower, which is His creation.
This applies very directly to those individuals who feel at heart very insecure. They’re caught in a vicious cycle of hanging onto themselves so tightly, they are shutting out this wondrous creativity that could take them out of themselves and give them an experience of such joy in the Other – all the other creations of God. This is why, if you would be a spiritual teacher, My son, try to follow Our example and the example of Michael when He was on Urantia, living His life as Jesus.
Reflect back to people their absolute existence. Help them reassure themselves that they are, in this profound way, a child of God. Help them get over the illusion that they alone are keeping themselves going. Think of all the ways We have tried to reassure you of this. This is the only way to get them to let go of themselves so tightly and have these experiences of being overwhelmed with the sheer beauty and magnitude of God’s creation, so that they can lose themselves, and then have the following, even more delightful experience of popping up again.
They can realize this letting go of themselves into Gods’ creation is not annihilation, but growth. But when someone is out floating in this huge sea of God, clinging desperately to a little life buoy of just concepts of themselves, what they need more than anything else is a strong hand reaching out to them to help them stay afloat.
Which means you must see them Our way. You must see their absolute being in order to reflect it back to them. So always perceive, My son, how they are – completely independently of how they may see themselves. See them in their complete body and mind and spirit and soul, and you will have something to give them. Does this help you?
Student. Yes, it does. Yes, it does. Two thoughts came to mind when You were speaking. One is that for those who still have the inability to change, and are so full of fear of changing; that change still comes to them. Not necessarily in the way they desire. And secondly, the thought that to see each person as You say, actually changes the relationship that I have with these people. I personally have to let go of the past relationships I’ve had with these people – in the past – in order to reflect this absolute reality.
Nebadonia. Now you have it. Just be aware of your own comparisons, My son.
Student. Yes! Was that the agony I was feeling – was my own comparisons, my own evaluations, so to speak; or was it something deeper?
Nebadonia. I think that was largely it. You have to suspend your own ideas of the ability or the inability to change – in others, and just see them as God’s flowers. It may help to do this by realizing for some theologian, say, who has spent his or her life studying God and doing their best to worship, but having a whole lifetime of thousands of concepts of God swirling in their minds, getting in the way; to suspend all that just to see a flower might appear to them absurd. But consider the courage it takes to realize that all those concepts are so much less than the living reality in front of you, and within you.
There is certainly nothing wrong with concepts – recognized as such. They’re the tools in your mind’s toolbox of hard-earned understanding, expressed in words. You needn’t give anything up. All those concepts can still co-exist. But this orientation is what I was pointing to when I suggested you gain the ability to tell when that flower is growing ever more real and unfathomable in your perception. Go that way. And if this can happen with a flower, think what can happen with another person. So yes, My son, I think you hit it right on the mark when you very much understood My meaning. You realized how much you may have to set aside to let this person expand enormously in your perception.
Student. But it appears quite daunting. As You said that, I felt this constriction in my gut; but I know this will pass. I always wonder what it would be like to let go of all my beliefs and concepts, and see what appears. Maybe that’s home base.
Nebadonia. Well, is this not the very change you were wishing – they – were able to accomplish?
Student. Yes…yes. And maybe this feeling of agony is tinged with compassion and desire for them to experience life as the infinite potential that is – within them, that God gives them. Thank You.
Nebadonia. You’re welcome, My son. Enjoy being in My love.
Student. Dear Nebadonia, I’d like to thank You for Your part yesterday in my little awaking or epiphany coming back from Muir Woods. I understood a little bit better how our jobs on the Mansion Worlds won’t necessarily be easier, and that while we may feel we are waiting here for something to happen on earth, if we are very much being with a plan of our Divine Guide to prepare us for a better future, or a better understanding of the Mansion Worlds, or just a better understanding of, say, that poor English soldier who died of heat prostration back in the Revolutionary War, and may wind up on the Mansion Worlds wondering why he died in vain… And maybe somebody like myself who now understands compassion a little better, from what I’ve received, may be able to help that person.
So I felt the release of this hunger-tension for Paradise Perfection. Now I feel grateful for the cognition, or that better understanding of the ages of the universe that I received. Thank You, and I would appreciate any further comments on that.
Nebadonia. Yes, My son, it seems you are taking to heart what I suggested not too long ago, about not letting your ambition – your hunger for perfection – get in the way of receiving it. You go forward on two feet, alternating your left and your right, so We offer these parallel examples of what We mean by completion and perfection. They are so different in a spiritual way, they are not self-contradictory.
You are complete moment to moment. All the past, as complex and profound as you can think of it – in terms of karma, cause and effect; plus all the uniqueness of all those individual days – everything lead to now, and is completed in now. Because now there is something else happening We’ve called God’s continuous creation. It’s kind-of like the icing on a cake. God takes all that has been, without losing a whit of it all, and adds to it. And so each moment is complete in its uniqueness; it is fulfilled; it is like no other. And yet here comes another moment, another healthy dollop of Gods’ creativity, and it’s all changed. There’s something growing here. There’s even a direction, a spiritual direction to this growth.
You are very wise to feel this hunger for perfection in yourself as a human need to keep up with the universe. This is good. It helps motivate you and move you forward. It gives you an ideal to work towards and to hope for. So you take another step. This is the human way of realizing these two phases of God’s creation and creativity. Moments are not identical, yet you can think of the completeness of each moment as something like a dimension of reality they all have in common. The perfection is the living change. This deliberately created-imperfect physical, mental, spiritual, and soulful universe is ever so certainly and majestically tending towards perfection.
So I congratulate you on feeling that completeness, which in your experience was a kind of respite from and realization within your drive for perfection. You had a little inkling how to enjoy both. Does this ring true, My son?
Student. Yes, it’s a good understanding I’ll be able to share with others from now on. Very satisfying and stabilizing. It appears an even more profound sense of gratitude and therefore worship. I feel bond with my Thought Adjuster, very creative of an ongoing and living worship. Thank You.
Nebadonia. You are welcome. Let’s hope together you have many more such realizations, especially when your ambition or impatience for perfection gets in your way. Take that next step and feel complete in yourself.
Student. Thank You.
Closing
Nebadonia. Well, My children, I hope I have given you some inklings as to how open your future is, and how you can feel secure within this uncertainty. Faith is another word for trust, and as I have encouraged you to just see a flower, trust what you see in other human beings in all this unfathomable depth of their being part of God’s creation.
It will help you to realize too, that God is so much more than your concepts of Him, for this can augment the trust you have in Him. Whereas you may react with fear to your own concepts of what is to come, what will come will always be so much greater. And in this humility of accepting your human state, even while you are alive you become faith sons and daughters of God. You can find a freedom in this joyous acceptance, this humility of knowing reality is so much more than you can ever imagine or dream since there is no end to the surprise that is potential within it. Feel My love surround you and support you. Good evening.
Note
[T/R’s Note. Dear Folks, Here is a wonderful lesson from Mother Spirit on how we sometimes get in our own way with our thinking and concepts, and how to get out of this situation. I want to thank one of the “students” who works so hard and patiently with the transcribing, for me to edit. His help has been invaluable lately in getting this word out to you. Enjoy.
