2005-06-06-Prayer
Marin – MAR#50
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Prayer
2Group: Marin TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Michael
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening
2Lesson
3Dialogue
4Closing
Topic: Prayer
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Another special evening has come around and so we come to You with open hearts and open minds and ask You to help us be aware of the special presence of Yourselves that You bring to us. We want to thank You too for this series of lessons in which You are showing us there are many more dimensions to being human than we are aware of. We thank You for painting a picture of the kind of lives we are capable of living – tuned in to all these extra dimensions. Amen.
Michael. Good evening My children, this is Michael, your immediate spiritual father, and a son of our Universal Father with you. Indeed all personal beings in this vast universe are sons and daughters of God. We look to Him and we can appeal to Him for His absolute and infinite power and guidance to be given to us in the most appropriate way judged by His wisdom. And so we open ourselves in prayer most especially for that which we cannot know by ourselves alone.
In the humility of opening ourselves to that which is greater and wiser than us, we strive as much as possible to recognize what is, almost by definition, unfamiliar – that which we cannot anticipate. So we have to keep in mind when we make a petition to higher spiritual sources, the next step is in receiving this insight, this new strength or, so often, the new direction we need to take in our spiritual journey. We have to be ready to accept what comes to us, initially without prejudice, for any kind of pre-judging this important information will only block it or reject it out of hand.
Lesson
When you offer your prayers be as thorough and precise as you can be, first to help yourself by acknowledging what it is you feel you need. This will then help you so much in being able to accept the answer. As We have cautioned you before, there is often a gap, a period of time which comes between your petition and the answer. Think of this as the time it takes for you to realize what you have just asked for, for your prayer changes you and helps you see the situation you find yourself in; expressing your situation and what you feel you need helps bring you into the present moment.
Then it takes a certain amount of time for you to turn yourselves around from this expression, to turn the focus from yourself toward that great Out There of the dimensions around you where We spirit beings dwell – while still We will answer you within a kind of Universal Inside that we all share. So this gap between your prayer and the answer you receive is entirely a function of your own being ready. Spirit is capable of answering you instantaneously from the vast potential They have of spontaneous creativity. But at the same time, since We are so sensitive as to hear your plea for help, We wait upon you until you are ready to receive Us.
Don’t worry you are tying up Our time, My children, for We do not require what you know of as human patience. The more spiritually unified and capable of being spontaneous you become, the more you are paying attention to what is, as you put it – coming down – this moment, the less patience you will ever need. You will be acting more fully in accord with all the potential in the present moment, and there will be no part of you, in a sense apart, unengaged, waiting patiently. So We hear your prayers and We answer you as soon as you are ready.
This may take some time, this turning about within yourself, this going from expressing your situation and your needs, to then letting that fall away and rising fully up into the present moment – open, expectant, yet still and peaceful throughout, so you can tune into and receive the subtle message of spirit which is in itself a kind of spiritual triumph. This is the willingness to feel the uncertainty that we have been discussing – uncertainty because you do not yet know the answer. So think about this. Realize that immediately after your prayer you may feel that chasm of the unknown opening before you and mistakenly think you have done the wrong thing, or are turning in the wrong direction. But this is the right orientation – opening to the vast inner reaches of spirit. So you wait in devout prayer, feeling a kind of emptiness, a broad field of super-consciousness, expectant, hopeful, and ready.
Often the answer will come as a great idea. This may be the immediate presence of God who lives right within your mind and makes suggestions as your own thoughts. Many times you will only recognize the source as your Thought Adjuster when you are truly self-aware of how stumped you were just the moment before, so when a new idea comes at you, as you say – out of the blue, and is startling in its appropriateness – how it seems to be both deep and broad in addressing all the facets of the problem – you can know for certain this was your Thought Adjuster.
When you pray to Me, My children, it helps greatly to remember Me in your heart, and I mean this quite literally. Think of how still and peaceful and how sensitive you have to be to feel your heart beating as you are just sitting there in prayer and not, shall we say, just finishing some powerful physical exercise. So this is a good way to tune in to Me. Spend some minutes just feeling your heart beating, marveling at this life force within you. As you tune into your feelings on all these levels of your physical heart beating, the sensitivity of your mind to do this, and then the spiritual peacefulness you can feel in this assurance of life, you will be more and more open to the gifts I can give you, the answers I can provide, the pictures I can paint in your mind of the next step to take.
Here I am always working with Mother Spirit in this dimension of worship, of thankfulness for life. And Mother, though all Her adjutants of mind ministry to you, can give you a sense of the vastness of our own past. She can help remind you of all the years and years of human experience with all the many people you have known. She can give you an appreciation of your own hard-earned wisdom which can help you elaborate and refine the response you are getting from spirit.
Since your own mental processes are often so slippery to you, so hard to get hold of, or slow, or still, We would suggest when you have a particularly serious prayer you utilize something as simple and yet profound as a paper and pencil to write it down. Here again, just expressing your situation and what you feel you need will help you acknowledge your reality and how you perceive it. This will help prepare you for spirit’s response.
Then as you feel for your heartbeat, as you open yourself in wonder at the life coursing through you, as you sit in thankfulness to our Father and this gift He has given you, and you start getting the good ideas, the understanding, the insights, write these down too. Give them an objective reality there on the paper so you can further acknowledge that something is happening. For it is ever true, My children, you have to give spirit beings Their reality for the very reason that it is within your range of freedom to deny this for yourself. You have to acknowledge where you are and what you are asking, and then you have to acknowledge what you have received. You have to make it real, to act on it.
Finally, never surrender your ability to choose, your innate human dignity of will. Here We have encouraged you to separate these two different aspects of your reality, knowing the right thing to do, and choosing to do it. We offer you this tool and salute the courage it requires to not deny, but to accept and strive for wisdom, for knowing what is right or the best thing to do, for being open to receiving this in prayer without in any way initially blocking it with notions of how possible or desirable it might be. Open yourselves to truth. Hear what My Spirit of Truth has to offer you. Write this down to help you remember it. And then decide whether you will do it, or not.
This decision can be somewhat independent of the wisdom informing it, and this helps you accept the fact you are making a decision, rather than trying to smother or deny the wisdom. I think you can sense immediately how this requires you to stretch even further to hold both your wisdom and the perhaps less than wise decision, but this stretching is essential in order to keep that truth alive in you, so for however much or little you may be able to incorporate it today, it will still be with you tomorrow. There will be time tomorrow for tomorrow’s decisions, when you will be another, hopefully more mature, more fully grown you.
This is the essence of prayer, and putting it into action. This is the stalwart and courageous facing the enormity of what you do not yet know. But you can do this with hope, and beneath the temporary and reoccurring uncertainty that is so much a part of this opening yourself, you can feel beneath this, down on the bedrock of your life, the realization you are a child of God, and the absolute security of that. This is the uncertainty with security We invite you to experience, and know the joy of the spiritual triumph contained within.
If you have any questions or comments, My sons, I will be glad to hear them.
Dialogue
Student. Yes, Michael, I’d like to ask for more understanding on the quote of “keeping the conscience void of offence,” as we wrestle with everyday necessities and spiritual value attainment.
Michael. Yes, My son. I look upon this expression as a way of reminding yourself of the importance of intention. Incorporated in this is a humble awareness and appreciation of your human limitation. You do not always have adequate information, either about the situation you find yourself in – including all the other folks involved – or even about yourself, what your true motives may be. You find yourself in the dilemma of how, even with the purest heart, how can you make the right decision based on such an insufficiency of knowledge, of facts? But when the facts and the associated mental meanings or relationships are either lacking or unclear, you can fall back on a purity of intention, for this is a spiritual value.
This is being – in your expression – free of offence, proceeding with a great intention to offend no one, all the while humbly realizing you may. Here you can encounter a blessing if this other person or these other people you do not wish to offend have their own spiritual sensitivity which can pick up your good intentions, and credit you with this – however awkward or seemingly inappropriate is your overture or response to them. Think about what a blessing it was you’ve known from time to time when you misstated or inappropriately suggested something, but with a good heart, simply because you valued not giving offence, and the other person recognized this and immediately forgave any clumsiness of your expression.
So too My son you can be as gracious yourself. Turn this around and realize what a blessing it is you can give to another if, however awkward or seemingly inappropriate or clumsy may be their reaction to you, you can realize their good heart, their good intention, and return that. Does this answer your question?
Student. Yes, it greatly simplifies the whole mental process of thinking about it, and I’m grateful for this. Along the same line, I’m also struggling with the question of when as we get older we kind of make decisions based on thinking, and there’s far less emotion involved. We seem to be breaking away from emotions, or things to feel right, and be able to use the intellect more calmly, and it is a struggle to go through the transition from trying to feel what is right and more relying on the more mature thinking. Could You give me some help in this area?
Michael. Here, My son, I would direct you to what Mother Nebadonia expressed so well in Her last lesson about the interrelationship between logical thinking, feeling as emotion, and feeling as intuition – that sensitivity to relationships which cannot be expressed completely in logic because these relationships include other dimensions of reality in addition to the physical plane from which logic has been derived. I would ask you to seriously reconsider your generalization that mature thought somehow separates itself from emotion or feeling. Indeed this can be a kind of mental laziness, even a poison that many folks get into by abstracting thought to the point where it is devoid or separated from feeling. It begins to follow some unfeeling and unquestioned inner habit-pattern that, when applied to tender living human bodies and minds, can cause enormous mental and spiritual pain to your close companions.
Extended socially, the very facility with which certain abstract concepts are used for handling physical reality, such as mathematics and geometry, then on into certain kinds of sociology, then as well for applying cultural patterns left over from hundreds of years ago from other situations entirely – old patterns of thought now reduced to dogmas of right and wrong, means and ends; this facile ability, when it’s used to exercise personal power through political organization, can be and was the basis for some of the greatest horrors man has inflicted on his fellows. This was because social and political thinking had departed so far from the realm of empathizing with full human experience – thought, feeling and intuition – and stepped over into what you express as the ultimate political cynicism, the end justifies the means.
Rather I would encourage you to think of maturity as embracing thought and feeling and intuition in a very spiritually unified way. For as Mother pointed out, they are so inextricably interrelated. It would help so many folks to realize that what they feel embarrassed about as incompletely logical thought is actually a valid expression of feeling. This can be all the more righteously done if it is simply recognized as such. In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this.
This is one of the functions of thought, expressed in words, to enable people to share their feelings. And as useful and necessary as pure abstract thought is in realms like mathematics and geometry and science, it is only so when directed toward understanding the physical world as devoid of personal mind as you can make it – the ideal of pure objectivity, which is experientially impossible. For now even your own science’s sub-atomic theory proposes there is no final separation between matter/energy – as perceived by the body’s senses through a lot of really complex machinery – and mind, as you experience these experiments. In your daily lives this is your success in experiencing and understanding both the world and yourself as Mother’s inextricably interrelated single reality.
However useful abstract thought is in specific limited realms, it is when it is misapplied to achieve political ends, when individual men and women and children are reduced to mere ciphers in an equation of naked power, you see then the kind of horror that people inflict upon each other to gain and maintain control, and I personally experienced in the manner of my death. So I bid you welcome and respect all the facets of your human being and do not equate maturity with a lessening of any of them. Does this help you, My son?
Student. Yes, dear Michael, once again it is a great help and comfort, and I can see why Your Spirit of Truth is called ” the Comforter.”’ Thank You very much.
Michael. Yes, it is a comfort to accept the full humanity within you that God has created. So be in My peace.
Student. Yes, Michael. When we last spoke privately and I outlined the situation I’m in, You said I inherited this. And You said it three or four times. I was wondering what You meant by that? – that I inherited this family and this situation.
Michael. Well, My son, I was trying to help You appreciate the complexity with which things confront you in choosing to be with another person. You inherit along with them all the people they are associated with – children, parents, friends. It is how to appreciate the fullness, the complete package – if you wish to think of it this way – that you inherit somewhat as you inherited so much else in your life. Your own family, and immediate society. This is not the inheritance which you more narrowly think of as material possessions you acquire when your parents die.
When you are born you inherit the whole…kit and kaboodle, and it is a token of wisdom to realize this – that in this sense nothing is simplistic. Almost every human being lives in the midst of a fantastic complexity of relationships.
Student. Yeah. You also mentioned many times that the decision is mine, totally mine, of the direction I am to take – whether I move into a bigger home, or to part ways, or various other…manifestations. Let’s say I decide to stay together and have a family, and my daughter, and move into a bigger place, and that is my decision. Is it fair for me to presume that since the universe knows my needs and the needs of all those involved before we even articulate them, and this could be on the material level – that the right habitat will manifest, and the funds to take care of all of this will manifest? Do I have the right to presume this, because of the intentions I have put forth? And also one more thing: will this also affect the spiritual growth of everyone involved in a positive way – including myself?
Michael. The shortest answer would be simply, No – to your presuming on the universe, and to whether you grow spiritually – Yes, it’s possible – that is up to you. I put it so bluntly so you can feel the intended impact of what is actually your freedom, because this freedom entails or contains the possibility of making a mistake. You can choose a certain course of action and set out for it, and the universe only promises you a consistency of God’s and Higher Spirits’ continuity. Physically, the sun will come up tomorrow, gravity will continue to stick you to the surface of Urantia. The Spirit of the universe, the Supreme Being will continue to grow. But for all the individual persons around you, each with their own free will – an enormous complexity of desires and responses – the universe cannot help you in this. The universe cannot promise you anything along these lines without abrogating their freedom.
Keep in mind what I just said about intention. Yet even this is limited to the degree you know your own intentions. But if your mind and your spirit are open to what We have been teaching about making decisions – being very clear as to why you are doing things, what kind of information you are basing these decisions upon – about yourself and about all the other folks involved; and you make a decision which involves the physical consequence of moving; you may still arrive at a situation which is much worse than the one you are in now. That’s a possibility. We can only offer the discipline of being very honest with yourself. Then if the situation does become worse – no matter what happens in your life – you have a clearer idea of how you got there, and you can learn from this experience. You can increase your store of wisdom, and make a better decision within the new situation.
Student. Of course life does give one cues toward a certain direction, or there is a certain inner intuitiveness about what one needs to do for oneself. So hopefully I will follow these inner cues so that the decision I do make and actualize will not result in something disastrous.
Michael. This is your good intention. But it does not insure or guarantee any results whatsoever. Your feeling of life giving you signals is just your own projection, for life includes all living beings of which you can only know so few. Rather, it is a way of objectifying what you said in your next sentence was your inner feelings about the situation and what is the best direction to take. Yes, this is what you have to go on. And the more clear you can be about this, open and honest with yourself, the more of the complexity of the situation you can understand, the better will be your chances of growing, and everybody growing as you proceed into the future. But in all of this you are also – absolutely fallible. It is only with a full appreciation of this fallibility of the very best intentions can you arrive at the humility of accepting your human condition.
This humility can lead you to Those who are greater than you. It can encourage you to ask of spirit what is the best thing to do, even though the reception from spirit is still dependant on your own human abilities. This is your human situation, My son, and the more you are able to realize this and then humbly and courageously share this with all those involved, you may be surprised at the companionship and understanding that can be generated on this foundation of truth, no one is infallible. This is when people really pull together, when each recognizes how much they are dependant on all the others for a good outcome, and how much the group is depending on them. This awareness of your own human limitations is not, I caution you, any kind of self-abasement or self-flagellation or masochism or anything negative of this nature. It is the recognition of how the good outcome is dependant on all the persons of the relationship working together.
Student. Yeah, I had a sense that, in order for all of this to work toward a positive outcome, there had to be a unified sense of intention and humility among everyone. It’s quite a challenge having my daughter there now, living in the living room, and trying to keep everything as harmonious as possible. I’ve been “letting go and letting God” a lot lately. And even though it’s a challenge with all the various personalities and the pressure to make changes, there is also a sense of great spiritual opportunity for everyone involved, in order to be…the idea of tolerance and respecting others, compassion, and just the awareness that we are all under one roof with all our various needs. So I do see that. Once again, there’s that feeling of uncertainty You have mentioned before, uncertain about the outcome of all of this, because things will change, and have to change… (sigh).
Michael. Well, My son, you are showing great wisdom because you are staying open to this complexity. So you can speak from a fullness of experience and see the spiritual triumph possible when people are determined to share whatever may come. I must confess that so much of your human situation in its broad outlines was deliberately created this way by our Father as the best way to raise His sons and daughters, almost to insure you would acquire character. Is it not really a blessing when you can be aware of this, and begin to glimpse the true spirit so often hidden by the complexity – to see His spirit beneath and intertwined through it all?
Student. The challenge for me is to have this understanding and to see this wisdom…but to allow it to unfold, to allow the other personalities involved to share in that wisdom, to have faith in what I have come to understand, that we are all going in the right direction…eventually…wherever that direction might be. To learn too to let go any position I might hold onto so tenaciously. It’s a struggle at times just to be an open vessel of spirit…and just let it pull in its own way…in God’s way…whatever that way is…
Michael. Yes. There is a strength in accepting the irony that as you get better and better and wiser and wiser, the decisions keep getting larger as well. Be not too daunted by the fact you are just beginning the first few tentative steps in your eternal life, and the decisions will keep growing as you do. Without these ironic facts there would be no real spiritual growth, for there would be no necessity for it.
Now to welcome this necessity – especially when you feel it weighing on you in the face of the next big decision – that is true worship and faith, and acceptance that the Father deliberately set it up this way. But as you make these decisions and can look back upon an ever longer lifetime of them – both good and bad, there can also exist a self confidence and growing assurance and faith based on real experience that you’ve earned, so that your soul is also absolutely real. And you do have those wonderful moments – from time to time – of spiritual triumph where you glimpse how it is all perfectly tied together.
Well, My children, it has been a full evening. Are there any more really pressing questions?
Student. I have some more…but they can wait until next time. I do want to thank the Father for putting me into this situation. (Laughter all around).
Michael. Yes! – that’s the spirit!
Student. It keeps me on my toes! On some level it keeps me alert and keeps me alive. So…I guess.. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Closing
Michael. That is really being in accord with the Father’s will. I think – from a human standpoint – the flavor of reality is often one of irony. Irony – if you can glimpse the completeness of reality with a sense of humor, for sometimes it comes across as a paradox when you are caught on the horns of a dilemma and reality can seem to be frightfully self-contradictory, or downright impossible. But it is not just a pendulum swinging back and forth between pain and pleasure, understanding and complication, irony and paradox, but it is that growing, absolutely existential reality of your soul, your personality’s true possession, that can persist and keep growing – forever.
There is something happening here that can keep on happening, and it is both you and the purest fragment of your Father – inextricably tied together already, looking forward to being absolutely fused into one being someday. Your courage and your faith give you a taste of this even now. Rest in My peace. And rest also right in your own souls. You’ve earned them. Good evening.
