2005-05-16-Difference Between Inner & Outer Space
Marin #48
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Difference Between Inner & Outer Space
2Group: Marin TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Michael
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening
2Lesson
3Closing
Topic: Difference Between Inner & Outer Space
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Well, we’ve just enjoyed a long visit with our older brother Welmek, and He left us tuned in with a greater sensitivity for who You are as our parents. So we thank You for this gentle pressure of Your presence we can feel and know, it is You, reassuring us You are here. Amen.
Lesson
Michael. Good evening My children, this is Michael. Rest awhile In My peace. It was your older brother Welmek’s purpose and success in getting you stirred up, (laughter) – which I see you recognize was what you were asking for, and what you needed, so now just rest awhile. Feel My presence in your heart center, radiating out through your body, and then too your inner-space – as Mother calls it – everywhere still, everywhere peaceful. Notice how when you are deeply at peace within yourself, you really needn’t shut out the outside world or go away anywhere.
Generally you have your eyes closed just to help relax and let go the visual connection, but there is no need to turn off your auditory connection with the rest of the world, unless it’s particularly bothersome or distracting. On the contrary, sometimes it is very restful and useful in a spiritual way to incorporate all you hear and just let it be. Let all the world out there have its own life. This is practicing your peacefulness right in the midst of activity.
See if you can feel for a difference between listening – in an active sense – and simply hearing. Notice the difference between your inner-space and outer-space. Notice how hearing seems to combine the two. Your inner-space can go out and out and yet contain the sounds of the world, whereas your sense of space beyond your body is dependant so much on sight. Now, without opening your eyes, visualize what is all around you.
Pretend you can see it to make it more distinct. Is this not just a persistence of recent memory? Since you are in a familiar location where you are meeting tonight, there is an even longer lasting memory of what is around you. These are some of the subtle distinctions We have been trying to help you experience for many lessons now, how much your seemingly living perceptions are actually the persistence of memory – familiarity, and how much it is the fresh, raw material energy impacting the retinas of your eyes, or your eardrums.
Recognition means to know something again – to re-cognize something. And yet this happens so instantaneously within your brain you are very seldom aware of how your mind functions in recognizing and ordering – putting into order and form – all the raw physical data your senses are taking in. In fact you are generally only aware of this process when it breaks down in some small way. For example, those of you who particularly love dogs or cats will see them from time to time in what turns out to be, on second glance, just a tuft of grass in an open field. It’s like part of your mind is looking to see cats or dogs, and not recognizing things.
So think how this operates in any form of pre-judging – prejudice. In a roundabout way, this is why peacefulness and stillness within you is an essential precursor to fresh perceptions, because if something deeply unconscious within you has to allow you to see what is not expected or desired, it becomes a matter of, how do you influence yourselves so deeply, so consistently beyond what you can remind yourself to do? We looked at this once before in terms of the very desirable quality of being alert. There is no way you can force yourself through sheer desire and effort to remind yourself to be alert. You have to seek and welcome, and then recognize a qualitative enhancement in your life, out there in seemingly objective reality.
Interestingly enough, all through history this has been the main reason that people used, and continue to use any number of psychotropic drugs. What you call “getting high” – for the very reason you don’t call it “getting low” – is an attempt to enhance your life – to feel better, to perceive better. But the main requirement for this kind of experimentation is wisdom, and an absolutely thoroughgoing self-honesty – a conscious and persistent reevaluation, as with all other aspects of your life, of means and ends. As with other activities or other forms of ingested foods – general nutrition – you have to ask yourself, what is the cost for whatever effects you are experiencing? Whatever substance or food you ingest, just ask yourself, what is the – complete – effect, physically, mentally, spiritually, and soulfully?
Is it enhancing or ruining your health; can you think and perceive and function better or worse; are your values more or less clear and evolving; and are you more or less connected with the whole of your life? This has to be evaluated over a period of time, yet this is enormously complicated – this evaluation – by what you call in psychological terms – habituation, which is a kind of physical/mental familiarity. For psychotropic drugs, over time it generally takes more of the pure biochemical to produce the same special-effect due to the amazing ability of your bodies to adjust to different inputs and still maintain an over-all feeling of normalcy, a marvelous ability designed to evolve over many millions of years to enhance individual survival.
The use must be measured too in the purity of the effect. Certain drugs may enhance certain abilities, but at the expense of numbing other, more subtle awareness, while others can be immediately destructive of physical parts such as irreplaceable nerve tissue. There is no hard and fast demarcation line between these substances and what you may have inherited from your family and immediate culture as daily nutrition and treats. Here too wisdom would have you seek for an ever deeper understanding of what all foodstuffs are doing for, or possibly against you. Fortunately for your ability to experiment wisely in what you ingest, there is an enormous wealth of general information, however contradictory some of it is in terms of espousing the latest diet fad. We suggest you to make small changes and reflect a lot on the effect of these changes. Be truly scientific. Stop using any concentrated substance for at least a month or so to see if you have become habituated, even to the point of addiction where the mere cessation of use brings on dis-ease. But beyond this, to really know what effect anything is having in your life – in true empirical-fashion experimentation – realize the only way to know what it is like to do without something, is to do without it – nothing else.
You are a nodule of experience, My children. This is your fundamental reality. This is why you were created, and why your Father enjoys so much making a journal, a living soul-reality of your experiences for the both of you. So it helps your wisdom grow by using your imagination to sense the limitations of your experience, for this gives you a small ability to, in a sense, imagine what you do not yet know. You also pay proper respect for what you may have heard about, but have not yet experienced. And this can be a very loving regard for another person’s experience, that you know you’ve not had. It keeps you from belittling or making small of another’s suffering and difficulties. It opens your heart to them by breaking down this barrier, this self-pretense that you know how they feel.
This is how you experiment. This is how you contact – somewhat – what you have not yet experienced. This is how you open yourself to wonder what the next step might be. This is how you consciously change one item at a time in your life, and then reflect on it greatly, to know what influence it had. This is how you practice your peacefulness and your stillness to perceive how things are really changing. This is how you stay in touch with Our good advice and suggestions.
Some of you bridle at the terminology of Thought Adjuster, forgetting that this pure spirit of God himself always makes suggestions as your very thoughts themselves, perfectly content to accept your decisions as to whether or not you incorporate them in your life. But this is your way of tuning into and receiving suggestions from a viewpoint infinitely vast and wise. So don’t concern yourself with the origin of thought so much as feeling for the wisdom in the content.
This is the hallmark of your Father‘s suggestions, and all it requires – but no less – is an enormous self-honesty to recognize. So I encourage you, My children, cherish and accept the wisdom that is within you completely irrespectively of your ability to incorporate it into your life. Never shut yourself off from wisdom, from knowing deep within you what is the right thing to do, whether or not you can do it. Just do your best, and keep in touch with Us. We will never forsake you. Our forgiveness is absolute. And so We also encourage you to, moment by moment, forgive yourselves and refuse to indulge even the tiniest speck of guilt.
Find – imagine – create another way to do ever more what is right. That is the challenge. And that is why it is so full of joy. However close or far you are from perfection, My children, never cut yourself off from the compass of spirit that points the way. Feel yourself stretch to encompass both where you are and where My Spirit of Truth in your heart tells you, you should be heading. And enjoy the journey. This is one that has no end. In this case, everything is the journey.
Closing
Think how many ways human beings have tried to express this, how in so many cultures they have shied away from saying good-bye, and come up with expressions like, See you again. So I’ll say too, See you again. I’m here in your heart and your feelings, and Mother Spirit is in your mind and all around you. Come visit Us soon in the still reaches within, and stay awhile. Then take Us with you.
