2005-03-21-Contemplating Freedom Of Living
Marin #40
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Connectedness
2Group: Marin TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Michael
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening
2Lesson
3Dialogue
4Closing
Topic: Connectedness
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Creator Son and Daughter of God, You are always so welcome. Last week we thanked both of You for the graciousness of Your manner, Your gentleness and support. Tonight we would like You to know that it has occurred to us, this would be the ideal way for us to relate with our fellows. So while we try for a wise and loving intention, we also need to be open and mindful of what our real effect is on others. We ask for Your help in finding the courage to know and accept this. Amen.
Michael. Good evening, My children, this is your Father, Michael; this is your human brother, Jesus. Thank you for your heartfelt appreciation. Thank you for your understanding and acknowledgment that We are always reaching out to you. But though We and our Heavenly Father want this contact, it will always be you, from a freedom that is unfathomable to you, who acknowledge Our reality in your lives. You do not have to do this. This is your choice. When you make this choice, We reach out and pour as much of Our love into you as you can stand. Let it sweep you away. Let the feeling of Our love overwhelm you. Let the tears from Our forgiveness wash you clean and ready to start anew.
Lesson
You are no small part of Us. We have given you Our nature. We are all part of the Deity Absolute, that absolute, God-created cosmic reality whereby our Father has given you so much of His fundamental power – the ability to create. You yourselves are able to initiate your new life, and you have Our help. Here let Me suggest that your true life into the future will always be somewhat new if you are on the right path. We have assured you there is no limit to how much you can grow, so why cling to an old, outgrown, hardened and callused skin of habit that you must leave behind in order to make room, in your present moment, for what is awaiting you in potential?
Now the tricky part. Since this freedom is so much a part of your nature, you cannot feel or perceive it as something else. You cannot hold it as a concept, for as a concept it is still only a possibility. As a physical example, you can think only so much about reaching out and getting hold of some object. With your mind and imagination you can do this, but this is not the same as actually reaching out and picking something up. Notice in this most simple act, you are not fully conscious of all the complexity involved. You simply do it.
In the same way, you can worry forever about freedom and whether or not you have it, but this is not the same as exercising it, using it. Like the simple physical act of moving, there is always some mystery in the essence of freedom that you cannot grasp. This is why I said your own freedom will always be somewhat of a mystery to you, an unfathomable mystery. But it is also bottomless in it’s use, My children. However, the concept of freedom is only an abstraction. This is the tricky part that so many do not understand and, all too ironically, become paralyzed contemplating freedom.
Then too, We have offered you the understanding of how, from your human viewpoint, because there is this mystery in how you do the most simple things, the future is somewhat opaque to you. You do not know exactly what you will do until you are doing it. We offer you these insights so you can appreciate your very nature and, rather than being put off by this puzzle of yourselves and others, turn it into wonder.
Begin to wonder; My goodness, how did I do that? Yet it is done. There is something standing there in the universe that wasn’t there a minute before. You have just changed things. Why not change something else? What’s next? You might even change yourself. This might just tickle the dickens out of you. You might have more fun than you can stand.
Is your concept of God so tiny that you cannot imagine that He deliberately created you this way, so you might share His nature with Him? Now let Me suggest further that its only when you have a full appreciation of your creativity – how it all just happens by doing it – how everything you do will have a bit of God’s hand in it because He is right here with you, it is only when you have a full appreciation of this delightful unknowable-ness of the future, that you can go ahead and effectively make your plans anyway.
For it would be a colossal error not to realize the profound effect that foresight and planning can have in your life. This is where wisdom – what you have gleaned from all your past, your soul wealth – this is where wisdom comes in. This is where you make full use of what has happened and proven possible, so you can have some sense or imagination of what has not yet happened, but might be possible. And this, My children, will be uniquely yours. This could be your creation, your contribution.
This is where your soul, your wisdom, even your inherited genetic abilities fit in. All these personal factors from the past are unique, and your fundamental reality, your personality itself is unique. So too your creation can be unique to the degree you are able to achieve a conscious, personal presence in the here-and-now. Do you have memories or do your memories have you? Are you consciously thinking and reflecting on the things you have done and experienced, or are you partly asleep in habits and social/cultural conditioning, going along in your bubble of familiarity acting out behavior you may have initially created, but years and years before?
So, how do you achieve here-and-now? One way We have suggested is a kind of stillness meditation when you try as sincerely as you can to relax, to let go, to release all the ongoing considerations of your present life. Here you are trying to sense a very subtle spiritual point of departure before any specific action. You will never be able to do this one hundred percent because, as I have suggested, you are bottomless to yourself, you are infinite to yourself. But by relaxing anything you can conceive of – simply relaxing concepts, impulses, drives or desires as they come to you, you are increasing a subtle ability to feel this infinite realm of pure existence, home base.
Some of your philosophies have called this The Void, but not as a concept of nothingness, rather the mother of all things, an as yet unformed consciousness which gives rise to all concepts and desires. This simple relaxing to feel yourself just living is an exercise that, by contrast then, gives you an appreciation of what happens when you get back into action. You can begin to experience the wonder in what you will be choosing to do. If you do not take a break and stop what you are doing, how can you have this choice of whether or not to continue to do this same thing?
In your activities themselves, My children, I would encourage you to have some artistic hobby, some relationship with the material world that gives you feedback and the gratification of bringing into the world something which had no prior existence. It could be some small sculpture or painting, a bit of music, some writing, a little flower garden, a delicious bite to eat – whatever tickles your fancy. This gives you an experience of both the plasticity and stubbornness of “stuff.” As you see your creation grow out there in the objective world, you’re offered the opportunity to notice it’s never exactly as you planned, but the Father’s hand – in continuously creating you and the world – and also the hand of the Unqualified Absolute – pure chance, as you encounter it – have also played their parts.
This is the combined mental/physical/spiritual reality that you experience, and this is how you gain a joyful, free-swinging appreciation of it. Once you consciously enter the experience of your life this way, what an ever more fantastic wonder you will find in the next human being who comes your way. Goodness! – here comes another infinity! Here comes another unfathomable reality – both to me and to himself or herself!
This is reality, My children. You will find, once you are able to perceive this, you will be so transformed – in perceiving this transformation – love and kindness and forgiveness and joyful delight are almost second nature. For you will be seeing with the eyes of Spirit, of creativity, of appreciation of how much God’s hand is in every tiny aspect of life. If it sounds like a wild roller coaster of a ride – great! You certainly won’t die of boredom, as some are. This is what is in store for you, My children, some day on the Mansion Worlds. Why not welcome it and make it today? Certainly it seems rather scary, until you realize Whose hands you are in, Whose heart is keeping your heart beating, with Whose mind you are able to wonder, Is this for me? Any time you are ready, just stop a moment, let It All come to a crashing halt, and step aboard. We are here, ready to give you a hand up.
If you have any questions or comments this evening, We can do that too.
Dialogue
Student. Father Michael, I noticed as You were speaking, how free I am at the moment, but also how conditioned I am from the past, and that freedom scares me. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. But I know I’m more free than I was a year or so ago, or even yesterday. And it’s progress, not perfection, that keeps me going. Being free from the past – the traumas and incidents and conditions and decisions I made in the past – about the past…I don’t know how to overcome that…or if I can overcome it…or… I don’t know what I’m saying now… Any comment You could give me would be appreciated…
Michael. Well, I think you’re experiencing, right now, the real essence of what I talked about this evening. You started out with realizing you are getting the knack, the technique of it all. You are more and more able to realize your freedom. You are increasing your nerve to try new things by realizing this is the only way they will have reality for you. The proof of this is that, as soon as you try to grasp hold of the mystery, to express it to Me, it all disappears. (Laughter – Michael’s too) Where did it go? Just don’t mistake the concept for the actuality. There is a delightful old parable about a centipede going merrily along until some other bug asked him how he did it – handled all those hundred little legs. The poor centipede thought about it so much he ended up paralyzed. The pitcher winds up, here comes that ball, you swing your bat, and yet – how do you do this?
I’m pointing at a mystery within human existence which men all through the ages have encountered and feared, so, unfortunately, the less self-honest or scrupulous went on to pretend they knew the answer to. There have been enormous castles of logic and reasoning designed to hide the fact that the castle was still suspended in the middle of the air over a chasm of what will always be incapable of being known beforehand because of the creativity and chance within the next moment. Then they would wonder why everyone seemed so brutal when they tried to live, and force others to live in these castles of lifeless dogma.
Besides this, a failure to realize that your own freedom is only in the exercise of it, can get you bogged down indefinitely in sheer inertia waiting for something or someone else to get you started. The more free you are, the more the initiative resides within you. So be at peace, My son. You are getting the knack, and that is what counts.
Student. Thank You, Father Michael.
Michael. It‘s very peaceful here, is it not? There is a certain peacefulness in wonder that comes very close to worship, in being thankful our Father has such an ironic sense of humor, that our own nature, which He created, can be so unfathomable to us, yet positively there and marvelous at the same time.
Student. Yes, Michael, I have no questions at this time, just a feeling…a desire to spread my wings. At times I feel like, as I spread my wings, I’m so encased, still, in an eggshell. And this is quite painful, at times, in…letting go, I guess. Speaking with a friend today, I felt so much different than what goes on in the world that I just wanted peace and quiet within myself. But then I also have this desire to spread my wings and be as my Father intended me to be – to create, consciously, with what He gave me…
Michael. Yes! I congratulate you on your increasing ability to experience what I can only express in human terms as God’s two-hundred-percent-ness of life. For both these seemingly complete-in-themselves realities are true. You are learning to spread the wings of your spirit to catch the mighty wind blowing through the universe. This is the enormous spirit of God – the Supreme Being of time and space. So, yes indeed, you can feel the need to spread your wings and just soar on those currents, once you begin to feel them. Yet here you are, still in the womb of your first existence. [I say womb rather than eggshell because you are a mammal.] (Laughter) Here you are, just starting out in eternity.
You haven’t even died and been reborn yet – physically. So this is also true. They are really not contradictory. Relax and let yourself stretch to feel them both, without pain. This takes some doing. This is not an ability you were born with. This is one of those acquirements, My son, being here-and-now in the full possession of both these dimensions – the soaring and the being grounded – an earned ability. So don’t forget, abilities are forever. This is what makes them worth their, sometimes, awesome price. Keep growing. If it seems impossible at times, if it seems to take all you have, rest assured you are pointed in the right direction.
Student. I was wondering about that. Yesterday I felt so…for want of a better word – distraught, about what I was feeling, my soul felt so pained. And I didn’t know why. My whole body felt so consumed by this pain. At times I was able to be still with it and meditate, but then it would come up again. Then I thought I had wasted the whole day – my energy, my time, my life. It was not a very loving place, and it affected everyone around me. I even felt like giving up. But then, after speaking with (Friend) and going to church, I realized I knew so little about love. And I want to know more – to understand much better. Without my ego getting in the way – without trying to fix things. I feel like I’m in such a different place. That my being is changing – my attitudes and my perceptions.
Michael. Yes, it’s really something – to feel – is it not?
Student. But I’ve been told I feel too much – that it takes over me – that it affects everyone around me. Whether this is true or not I don’t know. All I know is I am feeling! But if I’m not feeling joy, or love, or God…
Michael. Yet, My son… I would suggest that being open to what effect you are having on those around you, is one of the most truly loving things you can do. Sometimes your increasing ability to feel all the living strands of your life pulling this way and that sets a good example for those around you who may be a little too shy about feeling this in their own lives. So this good example is breathing life into a certain dead-ness of their experience they might not be aware of.
On the other hand, there are those things which you need to go through alone. These feelings of having wasted your time are moments of evaluation you do right to experience. Feelings of giving up remind you of the freedom you have to do just that. So give yourself time to know these well. This is another function of your stillness, relaxing just to feel and acknowledge all these different aspects of your life.
In addition, because some feelings are so strong, and would have so disruptive an effect on other people, it is most loving for you to also acquire the ability to – contain yourself – when this is called for. This is granting others the freedom to be themselves at that time, rather than you taking over the space and demanding everyone present go along with your emotion.
What are you really doing to and with your companions? See this ability to contain yourself as a positive, creative aspect of your ego – your awareness of yourself. Folks with little ego-consciousness – of who they are and what they are doing to themselves and others; if this becomes too severe, have to be institutionalized. Having a strong, self-confident, yet open and sensitive awareness of yourself is a loving gift to others. You are then taking care of yourself in such a way that they don’t have to.
Student. A friend was wondering how to be with me in those moments, because she is really effected…doesn’t know how to interact with me. So what could I say to her? I really want to be alone. I guess I could say that.
Michael. I think most people in successful friendships find ways of letting each other be, and realize everyone needs time alone with themselves – with only the company of their spiritual family. Then there are times you don’t want Our company either. Enjoy moments of feeling yourself to be totally alone in the universe. Realize a marvelous completeness in this too – for awhile. Until along comes some stark loneliness, and there is nothing so wonderful as company, again. Grant each other this ability, this freedom to be alone.
Make it part of your lifestyle, work it into your relationships. Introduce this to your youngsters – as a shared ability to just say, “Excuse me. I’m going to take a walk and think about things,” or, “I think I’ll meditate awhile” – however you wish to express it. And know this is a good thing. For there are romantic notions about being stuck together – friends, couples, families. A little bit of this is fun, but it can be terribly enslaving if you cling onto it. Let each other go, and enjoy the delight of meeting again – renewed and refreshed. Think about these things and read and reread them as part of your meditation.
Closing
Well, it is time to part. Yet we go forth holding each other in our hearts. As you more fully acquire this wonderful knack of freedom, you carry an ever increasing awareness and love for Me along with you – for this is where I live. I truly appreciate this. The love of My sons and daughters on all My many, many worlds is a gift that I, in My own way, find beyond My ability to contain or express. I can only thank My Father for creating Me, and surrounding Me, filling Me too with wonder. Good evening, My children. Be in My peace.
Students. Good evening,
Michael. All our love.
