2005-05-23-Your Guardian Guards Your Potential
Marin #49
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Your Guardian Guards Your Potential
2Group: Marin TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Nebadonia
2TR: JL
3Session
1Note
2Opening
3Lesson
4Dialogue
5Exercise
6Closing
Topic: Your Guardian Guards Your Potential
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Note
Here She is again, with a message of how different aspects of our lives are connected and influence each other. I was a bit surprised at the vehemence with which She defined some of the causes of inhuman conduct, but glad She doesn’t pull Her punches when needed. Her over-arching love and compassion always shine through. Jerry.
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Once again we gather in together to enjoy each others’ company and to experience Your great spiritual presence. We thank You very much for making Yourself known to us this way. And we welcome so deeply Your words of hope and reassurance and love. We appreciate Your gentleness and Your consideration, and we hope to take on these qualities in our own lives in relationship to our friends and fellows. Amen.
Nebadonia. Good evening, boys, this is your mother, Nebadonia, coming in on my Mother Spirit carrier wave, bouncing off your minds and echoing about the room. It’s always such a joy to be with you and see your smiling faces turned up with such anticipation. Well, we have shared a lot together these past few years. I know for you it has been countless times of totally opening your minds and your hearts to Michael and I, enjoying and putting to good use this time by being able to forget yourselves and learn how to trust Us, how to give yourselves over to Us and let Us carry you along for awhile.
Lesson
This trust is something that We enjoy so greatly, and it gives Us an ability to deeply heal the torn and frayed fabric of your lives that is just a natural consequence of bumping up against some very hard edges of reality. But as one of your poets said, it is these small shocks day to day that keep you sane. Or to use another very human expression, getting down to earth – or getting your feet on the ground – is for many folks, with perhaps a too abstract orientation, a real accomplishment.
And so We advise you to stretch with your feet solidly on the ground, open your hearts to all those about you, and in the higher reaches of your super-consciousness – your whole outer global perception – realize you are also dwelling in a spiritual dimension whether you are always aware of it or not. But it is so wonderful to feel yourselves in this extraordinary dimension. You can realize it is part of your personality, the spontaneous, creative part that gives you the ability to exercise your will and achieve the full dignity status of being a human being.
Then further to realize that in this dimension of spirit you are not alone. This is the realm of discrete personal spiritual beings, several of whom have been with you from the very beginning. Long before you were born, your Guardian Angel volunteered to take on the watch-care of your human life. This, for Her, was a supreme blessing, something that She worked and trained very hard to be accepted into the ranks of those who could be assigned the watch care of a living person.
So She has been with you always and, as your Urantia Book has informed you, is primarily concerned with your eternal life. She is not here to soothe your ruffled emotions or to make the way before you free of all bumps and rifts. On the contrary, since She has an eye on your eternal growth, She is most interested in exercising you in your dimension of choice, of decisions. For it is this decisiveness right within the need to choose that builds up what you can recognize in each other as character.
And so She would much prefer you live a very vigorous and challenging type of life, fully engaged, that requires you to make decisions, to exercise your will like a kind of spiritual muscle, for only in this way can you grow in this dimension. Only by making fully existential decisions can you get a feedback from the totality of your human reality – physical, mental, spiritual, and then even soulful. You get back this information that informs you which way reality is going today, for both you and total reality are changing and growing.
Your Guardian Angel is truly guarding your potential by helping you exercise yourself spiritually, so that your values continue to evolve to encompass ever greater reaches of experience. Slowly but certainly, starting from the tiniest little kernel, you are helping create for yourself an existential reality. Starting out as almost pure experience you ever so slowly build up a soul that is the creation, not only of your personal experience, but of the presence of God Himself within you. Which brings us to a very unique kind of being, a pre-personal being.
This fragment of God has been your companion for many years now in your mind. He has so often provided the thoughts that you have recognized as – the next step – especially when you were at a fork in the road where you were really stumped in your personal ability. This was so often your Father Fragment, the Mystery Monitor in your mind who enjoys your experiences with you, who would suggest, this is the better way. This was perhaps not the easier way, in fact, it was usually the more difficult way, but it was the way that led to greater growth.
Pause for a minute and just consider how you could appreciate what this presence of God within you has been doing your entire life. This, My children, is worship. This is the deep and profound thankfulness that God has been a partner with you all along. As We offered the notion once before, He was so often the missing link that connected your life. So when you look back upon many years of experience and realize you cannot fully credit yourself alone for all the marvelous adventures you got yourselves into, and out of, He was so often involved in that choice whenever you paused to feel for what was the right thing to do. And you all have a kind of ironic sense that the right way is somewhat independent from the easy way. Sometimes they coincide, sometimes they don’t.
There were those hard decisions you had to make of, what felt at the time, a choice between beauty and truth. Now perhaps, from your position of greater maturity, you can see these were bogus choices because in the final analysis there is no distinction between beauty and truth. But sometimes when you were younger you had to choose between what seemed nice – say a beautiful possibility, and something else which told you that this was a little too much only pure human longing – one of those things that, wouldn’t it be so nice if…? But no. A greater truth occurred to you and said, Go this other way.
This is some fantasy you have to surrender, you have to give up for something greater over here called real. And so you learned the difference – mainly that fantasy was your own individual creation, whereas there was something called reality which was largely God’s doing. This was your Father Fragment. This was the presence of God helping you distinguish the greater truth. And so you can be thankful and worship that without this presence helping you along, helping you decide what was real, you might not have survived.
In choosing God’s greater reality, you learned the means by which this choice could also lead you to stay in contact with all your fellow human beings. In a parallel fashion you could choose to accept a greater social agreement on what is good, giving up your own personal notions of what would be good for you alone. I think you can see how this orientation was the basis for all the love and friendship you have enjoyed so deeply in your life. These are all those absolutely invaluable friendships that have formed such an enormous part of your soul.
So, My children, you can thank your Father Fragment for not only capturing and preserving these precious moments of your life that you shared with your friends, but for helping you acquire the ability to establish friendship in the beginning. This is just one more way in which God is in the human beings surrounding you, He is so much a part of your ability to recognize them. This is why surrendering some small portion of your day, some period of shelving all your busy desires in order to be still and peaceful and share the pure experience of knowing God is in your mind, is a most sincere form of worship and connection.
Some day, My children, you will become one with this presence of God. Well, consider what you have to offer each other, though, in a way, you already belong to each other much as Michael and I belong to you. Your Father Fragment offers you eternal life, the persisting cosmic reality of your soul. And since this is a – pre-personal – fragment of God, which is to say a fragment of His absolute, infinite power that is subservient to your will and your decisions, that takes on your complete experience without erasing a single, spiritually significant moment; this is the life of personality that you have to offer. There is a transcendent equality here of infinite Creator-fragment and finite creature, and this equality exists because God wills it to be so. There is no other reason or explanation, nor is any other required.
So do not think that your fusion with your Thought Adjuster someday will be some alien merging in which you lose yourself. On the contrary, it will be finally coming home. It will be the total merging of you with a partner that, as a human being on Urantia, you are already one with in your soul. So rest deeply and profoundly in what is already an inseparable love.
If you have any questions or comments this evening, I would certainly welcome them.
Dialogue
Student. Well, Mother, I have actually two questions but it may take up too much time to answer both. But one from tonight is, how do I go about giving myself over to You and Michael, and what would it look like? Is there a doing to it? Is there a way to do it? The other question is, Just when I think I know what prayer is, something comes along and I find out it’s what I thought it was. What is prayer?
Nebadonia. Well, C; the two questions one at a time. There are many ways you can enjoy Our presence and be as humanly possible in accord with Our viewpoint and Our spiritual values. One is these meetings, of course, surrendering so much of your awareness and your feelings just to ride along on Our words as they come to you, and enjoy this living presentation of our viewpoints. And We are just as thankful as you are that now you have these recording devices and the willingness to spend the effort to transcribe these words, not only for yourselves, but for the whole world out there on the internet who will read these someday. So this too, re-reading these lessons, can be a way of suspending yourself for a short time and enjoying what part of Our viewpoint and values can come across in these words.
When you re-read these lessons try to achieve the same freshness, the same openness, so that your intellectual and emotional responses can reflect back to you how you are evolving day to day. As much as you can, very forthrightly and self-honestly wrestle with any contradictions you perceive. Get to the bottom of them. Be unafraid to question anything or everything you read to exercise this relationship you have with God right within you. Give your Thought Adjuster the opportunity to adjust your thoughts. Feel for a quality of the greatest reality, for above all God is what is real in the sense of totality.
Another great way you can relate with Us is simply to talk to Us in your mind. Simply address Us and We will receive it. Nothing you address to Us is lost for I am part of the mind with which you think the thought. In your human life it is My mind adjutants, especially the higher ones of wisdom and worship, which help you be thankful to our Father, and help you know what is the best choice from the totality of your life’s experience. For this is wisdom, and it is not so much something I give you as it is something of your own I help you realize.
As long as you trying to live the best life you can, My son, we are in accord; you are really using Me. When you strive to experience life in its fullest, to break out of dulling habit in order to feel – especially to feel the uncertainty involved in opening yourself to ever greater possibility – you are contacting and using Michael. You are allowing His Spirit of Truth to give you the feeling of life itself down on bedrock, the absolute facts of your life so that, since God’s creation is different each day, you will have a lifetime of unique, individual days, not just a smeary haze of habit and repetition. Whenever you know that today is a new day, and you feel yourself growing, you are with Us. And whenever you think, “Hello, Mother! Welcome! Let’s do this together,” I will be consciously with you as well.
Prayer is a very frank and humble asking for help; frank because it is an acknowledgment that you are at a limit of yourself. You have thought and felt and done all you can do, and so you are frankly acknowledging this. And in this awareness and acceptance of your own limitations, you are opening yourself to that which is greater than you. The perception that is possible then, of what is so much greater than you and yet responds to you, and answers you, is limited only by your ability to receive. It is this perception of the enormity of the spiritual realm that truly distinguishes humility from humiliation. This is why true humility is such a spiritual blessing.
Because here again, there is a choice. It is possible for you to identify yourself as a tiny little powerless speck in an enormous universe, and feel humiliated; or you can identify with the enormity of your perception itself. And so in this profound blessing of humility, of asking for help from that which is larger than, wiser than, and more powerful than you, you achieve some ability to direct this power – because it is responsive to you.
You can think of a friend who desperately needs help in some area and ask Michael or Myself, or our Universal Father for help. It’s like planting a seed of possibility in this person’s total being that can bear good fruit whether or not this individual is aware of it, but never, since it is a spiritual quality, never in contravention of their will. You can only pray that their will be softened somewhat to accept this gift of strength, or health, or whatever he or she is most needful of. You can pray for anything whatsoever, but only that which is in accord with spirit, in accord with the spontaneous creativity and expansiveness and wisdom of spirit will have any effect.
You can pray for yourself – for strength, for guidance. I think you’ve noticed these last several lessons We have tried to bring you over and over again to the point of wondering, What should I do next? This could be a prayer. This is reminding yourself of your spiritual power of choice. Then if you ask of Michael or Myself, or your Father Fragment, What is the – best – thing to do next? This really is a prayer. Does this answer your questions, My son?
Student. Yes, a great deal. It’s much clearer than it was. I like the idea of – What should I do next – for at times I have no idea what to do next, and I go ahead on prior knowledge. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t. So yes, I would love to know what to do next. I just forget to ask. Then I forget to let go enough so I do what You or Michael suggest. But I’m learning.
Nebadonia. Yes, you are. Especially that second part of your understanding, where you have to remember to accept being stuck – as you may experience it, and just stay, even if you sit there and pray for half an hour, or an hour, or even longer, until you are sure of what is the next, best thing to do – even if you choose not to do it. This takes courage and determination for in that time, as you open for Our suggestions, large, unexamined segments of your life may come up for review.
I will just mention in passing that every one of the religions of Urantia has a monastic ideal in which individuals go off to some sort of monastery or theological seminary and there spend a great deal of their days in prayer right on this point, acknowledging their all-too-human limitations to always know the best thing, but exercising their truly phenomenal human courage and determination to reach for that greater reality. So I encourage you to pray this way with as much determination as you can muster. You will find it is one of the most rewarding things you can do. And be in My love.
Student. Thank You very much, Mother.
Student. Yes, Mother. Forgive me, I haven’t been able to absorb all You’ve said tonight, for I seem to have been zoning out – I guess, forgetting myself. I do desire more and more to forget myself in my little petty grievances, in my desire to have things a certain way, and just relax this anxiety that I feel within myself. I really do desire to be of service in the best way, to use the gifts I have been blessed with – that at times I don’t even know I have. I guess what I desire from You at this time is a basic understanding of what it is I’m going through in my life, and how I can be of service, in my best capacity…to be…
Nebadonia. Well, My son, please believe Me when I reassure you that this orientation is everything. We have often mentioned the necessity of allowing yourself to stretch because this does take energy in all the facets of your being. To be open, to orient yourself toward greater possibility takes enormous psychic energy, which in turn rests upon a foundation of physical health. This is the body-mind energy required to be fresh and open to an ever changing reality, especially the living person-realities all about you. To wake up each morning and see your companions afresh, especially if they are not capable of doing this themselves, can be your greatest gift to them as you reflect them back to themselves. To leave all the disagreements and unresolved arguments behind you in yesterday and start out each morning as if you were reborn, this is the power of forgiveness.
Here let me mention that it does not require that you forget anything, for indeed everything you experience you are earning, everything you experience of a spiritual nature is becoming a part of your soul. So the human expression – to forgive and forget – really means to forgive absolutely, then remember you have forgiven; which means starting anew – as if – the problem hadn’t happened. Just this spiritual orientation – simply because you value this – because with your heart and your feelings you sense this is the way to live – this orientation of openness and forgiveness, this generosity of spirit also requires its own kind of energy that is not, at your stage of human existence, unlimited.
One of the things you can do for yourself and for your companions is to maintain a kind of inner fuel-gauge of your energies in all these aspects – physical, mental, and spiritual. Think of the small children you’ve known who were still too young to realize how crabby and argumentative they got when they were tired, and how they had to learn that when they were physically drained they should try to accept it. So too you can confess to your compatriots you are mentally exhausted – you just can’t think, your perceptions are getting a little blurry, and you need to rest. And just say so.
The situation might still be in full swing, but it’s time for you to leave. Spiritually your reserves are a little more subtle to evaluate, but this is another precious quality of your stillness times, your little mini-meditations all through the day. You relax the focus of your attention so you can contact and tune in to the background of your broader values. You remind yourself of this orientation towards what you are trying to do to keep growing in spirit.
And of course this orientation also points right at Us, reminding you to ask Us for help. Sometimes ask Us for company, to be with you, to share what you are going through, whether joyful or painful. Use Us. Ask for Our help. Spirit can reflect and give you information about your physical and mental state, a way of reading that energy gauge for at times, as you know, you can be so driven that it is only by deliberately stopping, and taking a deep breath, and heaving a mighty sigh can you allow yourself to feel just how tired you are. I might even suggest, My son, this was what you were doing this evening – just floating along on My carrier-wave, and getting the deep soul-rest you need. It is My mother’s great delight to provide this.
Student. Paradoxically, there is great pleasure in being exhausted, because then I’m compelled to lie down and just rest and do nothing, and ride Your carrier-wave, as You say. There are times though in my life that I feel I’m in a hothouse where the temperature is rising and I’m being ripened; but then there are times when I feel like….and there’s pleasure in staying in that hothouse…and I’m being stretched…but I’m also being nourished…and there’s love there, even though it’s difficult. But then there are times I feel I’m in a torture chamber and there’s pain, and all I want to do is run away and leave it all behind, and be totally by myself. And just go to Your arms, and Michael’s, and be one with God… (Sigh)
Nebadonia. And so you see another irony, that all that spiritual pain leads you to Us.
Student. There are times I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to believe. Or how to live. Is what I’m doing aiding my spiritual growth, and the growth of others?
Nebadonia. Well, we seem to be hitting a run of ironies here. (Laughter) Because We have been encouraging you to entertain this uncertainty, allow yourself to feel this uncertainty, and not fear the gap between opening yourself to – let go – before you may know how to – let God suggest the better way.
Student. But everyone around me wants a decision – is putting their lives, in a sense, in my hands.
Nebadonia. Here I suggest you exercise your wisdom and, for their sake, not accept any more of that responsibility than will do them good. This is your tough-love, as you call it – requiring of them the response-ability – the ability to respond to what life is bringing them. This is a another decision that is helped so much by this orientation to be open to them. But don’t forget, My son, you can simply say, Wait a minute! You can refuse to be rushed. You have so many human expressions that capture this very essence, one being, “The hurry-er I go, the behind-er I get.” So you may have to remind them of this, and refuse to take on what is rightfully theirs – however unpopular it may make you at the moment.
Student. But they’re already feeling I’m taking too long. I guess they’re uncertain as well.
Nebadonia. This is where you encourage them, as I’m encouraging you too right now, to think about it. Give them these concepts as tools they can use; that they too have to welcome a certain essence of uncertainty to break away from what is mere habit and repetition, or automatic re-action. This may be a new thing for them, so share these concepts. These concepts are genuine tools they need in order to understand themselves, and what they’re going through. Which is why We offer them to you. Especially the youngsters need these ways of thinking. So share your thought processes with them. Give them an example of how to think.
Student. (laughs) The reason why I laugh is because, one of the things is, I don’t think! I just come from a place of feeling. I’m not a so-called intellectual. I don’t come from a place of logic.
Nebadonia. I wouldn’t put such a narrow interpretation on thinking. Thinking is as much intuition and feeling. Let Me suggest that in this ages-old human quandary and argument about which comes first – thinking or feeling – I suggest that feeling is the more fundamental reality. To a large degree thought is just articulated feeling. And logic is only one of many ways of arranging thought, derived mainly from dealing with physical reality. Mental reality and related psychology is something else. Essentially thought is just putting minutely detailed feelings into specific words so you can remember or share them. This is why We caution against thought becoming too abstract to the point of being pure logic, or rhetoric, or dogma with no feeling, no full human reality behind it.
An example of this are folks who are abstract materialists and spend so much of their lives, their time and energy, acquiring material possessions not for the concrete reality of these objects themselves, but merely as abstract symbols of status and power. A true concrete materialist is what I would call a craftsman, a great craftsman who really knows his stuff, and how to work with it to make objects of beauty and wonder. So I recommend you be a concrete feeling-ist. Precisely articulate your feelings and so, show others how you are connecting your reality, how you are feeling your way along from point A to point B. Because here you are at point B. Somehow you got here. You might share this with others.
Student. I guess our feelings are a barometer of our soul, and they show us we are alive, that we exist, that there is a force within us – a life force.
Nebadonia. Yes, and part of this life force of feeling is Michael’s Spirit of Truth. Indeed, for those who are too abstractly oriented, and consider themselves great masters of reality, there is a greater need for them to acknowledge the full human experience of those who may be inarticulate this way, but are enjoying a even greater physical, mental, spiritual, and soulfully balanced reality for that very reason. As humanity’s general abilities of scientific thought and achievement are somewhat outpacing its spiritual development, there is enormous hubris or arrogance of abstract intellect abroad on Urantia. It is from this position of arrogance and power that many inflict so much deliberate pain on their fellows – deliberate in the sense of the callousness and disregard of genuine suffering that doesn’t register in their abstract, cynical concepts of right and wrong.
This is literally what enables those who are engaged in truly obscene, deliberate practices of torture and killing, enables them for however short a time to appear even somewhat mentally sane within their closed circle of all those who share their greater spiritual insanity. For which the only solution is Michael’s Spirit of Truth, is this orientation and determination to acknowledge the full spectrum of human life. After your Second World War, during the Nuremberg Trials, a definition of evil was given as, the inability or refusal to empathize with another – a very good definition of some of the practices that took the lives of millions. So welcome your feelings, My son, and never feel put upon or belittled by the arrogance of abstract thinkers.
Is there anything more I could help you with this evening?
Student. Just the reassurance that I’m heading in the right direction in my spiritual growth, because this is my life and I want to express it in the fullest I’m able to, and I have no conception of what that is. I say these words, but I have no idea of what that is. I’m afraid of what that is – the uncertainty – of what that entails. But I know I need to take small steps, as You’ve advised in the past… (more heavy sighs).
Exercise
Nebadonia. Rest in Me awhile… Let the seeming paradox of what is actually a true spiritual triumph soak in. Let your awareness of this uncertainty, this human not knowing for certain what is the next step, be seen as a kind of spiritual triumph, for so long as you can keep this alive, so long as you do not make it into just another abstraction or knee-jerk reaction, so long as you can truly wonder what is the best thing to do next, you are pointed in the right direction.
Then you make your decisions, remembering as fully as you can all that was involved in them. Later, as you reflect on them, you keep the temporal sequence straight in your mind; that is, you keep this evaluation which comes later, separate from all the previous stages. If you can do this you will be staying in touch with your soul – which contains all this. You have the openness and the unknowing; you have what information comes to you to work with; and then you have the decisions you make – so often without complete knowledge. Then you have the consequences and your evaluation of these consequences. Keeping open to all of this, remembering why you did things and wondering about the next step, this is a large part of your spiritual power.
The more completely consciously you can do this, the more you will be living right along with your soul. But as you have not yet fused with your Thought Adjuster, don’t be discouraged that your ability to do this will also come and go, following very closely that fuel-gauge of your energies. Which is why rest for your body, sleep for your mind, and stillness and peace for your spirit are so essential.
Closing
You are always welcome in My arms. Live in My love. Good evening.
Students. Good evening, Mother.
