2010-11-26. Urantia Book-Mansion Worlds.
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Lightline #285
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Urantia Book & Subjectivity
2Group: Lightline TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Michael
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening
2Lesson
2.1 Urantia Book
2.2Subjectivity
3Dialogue
3.1Mansion Worlds
4Closing
Heading
Topic: Urantia Book & Subjectivity
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
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[speaker]
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Welcome–welcome dear parents; welcome dear friends. Once again we gather together and look to you with bright shining eyes, opening ourselves to your presence both within us and among us. Help us appreciate these lives we have and this wonderful time of being able to converse with the two of you this way. So thank you for the Teaching Mission. Thank you for all your various sons and daughters of the spiritual community who are right here riding along with us. Welcome.
MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael. Let us give thanks. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you. Thank you for this creation, this infinite encompassing with no end, this endless adventure you lay out before us that only reveals itself moment by moment at your pace. Thank you for us–for each of us individually so that each of us can say: Thank you for me. Thank you that I am. Thank you that I am unique in all of creation and have the ability, by your good grace, to have myself–to have my life and to know my life; to love and appreciate my life. Thank you for all of us. Thank you that we can know each other and share ourselves with each other, and that we can carry each other on into eternity.
Lesson.
Urantia Book.
My children, I would like to say a little bit this evening about some of the things that Mother Spirit brought up in her last lesson through this T/R, which so many of you enjoyed. It did cause a bit of reflection and thinking again about some of your suppositions. I know it helped a lot of you to once again read parts of the Urantia book with new eyes, just for having absorbed each other’s points of view. It helped you be aware of these different points of view arising from a single text.
Think about your Urantia book sitting there on the shelf, or the coffee table or your desk. There it is. It has an existential existence, a cosmic reality if you will, obeying all of God’s material/energy laws you call Natural Law. You too have an existential existence in the very fact of your being. You definitely are, whether or not you can fully realize this or even feel it at times: you are! But you are also an experiential being. We like to call you a nodule of experience out here in time and space, not only as your unique personality, but also for being a focal point in a particular time and space which gives you a uniqueness of experience as well.
So when you pick up the Urantia book, what you are registering in your mind is your response to this existential object; i.e. for every one of you it is an experiential object. Some of your philosophers have realized that you never touch the thing-in-itself. It may help you to realize this by imagining picking up your Urantia book and opening it to discover it is in some totally indecipherable language with different symbols even. You are suddenly aware it is, in this instance, just ink symbols on paper. But the moment you start to read it in English, instantaneously you are responding to it in a way very unique to you.
This is the reality of the book to you. Also, as you just discovered in your exchange of points of view, is how very different that response can be because each of you is not only unique, you have unique backgrounds. You come from slightly different cultures. Your conditioning is different because of the very conditions in which you were raised. And while this conditioning at the same time gives meaning to what you read, yet it can also limit your responses, your response-ability.
Subjectivity.
It is almost impossible to keep this fact in mind–of your limited objectivity, or if you will, your intrinsic subjectivity–or you should be doing nothing else. Like enlightenment itself, this fact is not a state of mind you can carry with you. You are much too directly involved in what is happening to you to think of carrying some state of mind, some awareness, no matter how subtle or how tenacious. To live your life you have to let go of any such notions that would merely keep you from being fully engaged. So to live moment to moment, especially in your very busy technological lives, is a constant process of forgetting yourself, engaging something else or someone else. Yet it is nevertheless true that the Urantia book and all it holds is an experiential reality–for you.
I would like to extend what Mother Spirit said about the book existing in a very particular space and time which are not repeating. It is a view that every moment in time is as unique as is every place in space, especially that space right inside you. But while she meant this more or less as the time and space in which the book was originally conveyed to you, tonight I am pointing out the changing space and time every time you read the book.
Some of you who have re-read the chapter on the colored races, then gone back to re-read Mother Spirit’s lesson, found that both had changed in the meanwhile. You were sharp enough to pick this up, that a lot of your discussions helped you get over or see through your original take, and take it somewhat anew. This is the nature of human reality, not only that all the world around you is changing and evolving, but so are you. So even this existential object with fixed ink symbols on paper will change slightly as you read it, over and over again.
We’ve used the classical example of two people standing in front of a painting and, because of their backgrounds, seeing two entirely different things. Or take two people, one who knows the schematic of a computer or a piece of electronic equipment, and the other one totally ignorant of this. They are actually seeing two completely different things of one object, one objective reality. The more full appreciation you get of your own subjectivity, my children, the more you can appreciate the degree to which you can exchange and share so much, that there is that in you which does respond, even on a spiritual level of not only meaning and relationships, but value. It also points up the degree to which communication fails and how difficult it is to be what we constantly recommend: be open-minded.
We use one word to help you get a grasp of this, the word “entertain.” What does it mean to entertain another point of view–especially in the light of the psychological phenomena of denial, the very fact that you can approach, shall we say a piece of writing, a new person, a point of view, and right from the onset be set against it? Think of some commentator on television expressing a very contrary point of view to your own. You can feel yourself arguing with the slightest little thing he says right from the onset–poking holes in his argument. So you can see the difficulty in truly entertaining something new, something even contrary to your own beliefs. To be open-minded takes courage to do this, a courage of letting go that is more than self-forgetfulness. You have to really entertain, really allow yourself to follow along and believe, if only momentarily, believe that this is true; this is a valid way of seeing things. You have to trust that there is within you an intelligence that desires a broader truth and will simply emerge all on its own. You forget yourself and really entertain this foreign point of view, this contrary point of view, maybe even this hated point of view. You will pop up again to yourself, only you will have changed. You will have grown. That growth might be towards a little insecurity about having had the grasp of truth already in your hand. That growth might be a bit painful because it brings in all kinds of uncertainty about what you already believed.
Again, you have to accept this intelligence of yours that what is emerging–what you are giving a chance to emerge–is a more holistic and all-inclusive, more spiritual point of view. It now includes this other person. Don’t fear this uncertainty. Don’t fear this transition. Know it. Feel it deep inside yourself as a necessary thing to do, this opening of yourself. Because, my children, there is a whole universe out there before you. It helps to have a deep desire to get out of any parochial attitude you may simply have inherited for, as we said in a recent lesson, this is what you are raised with–points of view, prejudices, meanings wrapped up in certain cultures and conditioning, the very things that give your life meaning. Be willing to feel their incompleteness. There is a difference between contextual validity and truth.
I hope this clears up a lot of the difficulties that you may have experienced with that chapter in the Urantia book on the coming and then the dispersal of the colored races; first of all helping you see it from the point of view of the Life Carriers. What amazing, truly amazing beings these are who, with the help of the whole spiritual community, started life on this planet and then helped evolve it towards creatures of will dignity. If you have any difficulty with this kind of material go back and read it again for, as they say at the very opening, this is the story of the colored races from the time of their emergence to the latter ice age, the last ice age. There have been many, many hundreds of years of great race mixing since then. As Mother Spirit said, at the time of the Age of Exploration when you started to have direct contact between races–no longer just overland over the ages-old trade routes between Europe and of the Far East, Africa and India–all of a sudden you had direct contact. You all have experienced this contact through endless, first, writings, and now television and movies.
So to this degree the statements of the Life Carriers about the different cultures that evolved among the different races is simple historical fact. It accounts for how, shortly after this initial contact, the European nations pretty much carved up and colonized whole continents, all with the force of arms predicated on enormously different cultures. You can only wonder how these different peoples actually saw each other. In some cases where they had great artists on both sides of that cultural divide, you can be astonished at how they so totally exaggerated each other’s features. Then look at your United Nations today and you wonder where all those enormous racial differences went.
But then, inside each of you personally, strive to be that open-minded, truly independent person who values your own common humanity transcendent of any differences whatsoever–sex, or age, or race. You get so much more out of history if you truly entertain the points of view of everybody. It is a way of not taking offense at some indisputable fact of history. This is what happened here on this planet, and it is such a story! We are delighted your more modern civilizations have begun to see things from all these different points of view and what it must have been like on each side of those cultural divides–simply why people reacted the way they did. This is your heritage. This entire planet’s history is your heritage and this orientation helps you treasure all of it. Be unafraid. There is no limit to what your minds can encompass. There is no limit what your spirit can value and appreciate. So entertain all of these points of view. There is one for every living person–actually one for every historical person as well. This is what is being offered to you, but it is up to you to entertain this. It is up to you to entertain what I am saying to you right now. You are giving me reality.
So thank you, dear children. Thank you for this reality you give Mother Spirit and me right within yourselves. It gives you the ability to contact us and it gives us the delight of being contacted. This is our joy and this is our glory. And, in time, you will be able to see yourselves and enjoy yourselves as we do. You will even be able to see and enjoy each other as we do. It is a very humbling thing, this fact of each of our uniqueness. Each of us is a God-created being. Each of us is–in this sense–alone, but alone with Him, our Father.
In this we are very much like Him, for he too is singular and alone. But as he has those companions of his with whom he shares his absoluteness and his infinity, so too we have each other in the shared knowledge that this very uniqueness each of us has, is what we all have in common. This is not a paradox. This is not a contradiction. It is what we see in each other’s eyes. The very thing that makes us unique and separates us, unites us in our essence. So, my children, have no fear in this regard. Have the courage to open yourselves. It is for your own soul wealth. Give of yourselves in self-forgetfulness, trusting that you will come back to yourself a little more full.
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, we can do that too.
Dialogue.
Student: Michael, I would like to ask a question of you?
MICHAEL: Certainly.
Student: I really appreciate your broadening our perspectives on the Urantia book because I know that each of us has a different perspective–because of our lives and the things we have gone through in our lives. And I know that when I read the Urantia book, just as you said, I could have read something once or twice, then read it a few more times; and then on the tenth time I read something I looked at that same thing in a unique way. It is really the realities that it points to, not just a dry text but also something real. Unless I actually become one with the reality it is pointing to, I really don’t understand it.
Mansion Worlds.
I’d like to go off on a tangent–just a little bit. I know a lot of people in the world are suffering today because they have lost a loved one. The Urantia book of course speaks about the Mansion worlds, which is such a great thing for all of us to look forward to. We know when we die we are going to end up on one of the Mansion worlds.
My question is: I know there are some people who have tried their best to look at some of the details in the Urantia book. They have made a decent effort about where they think some the architectural spheres are, but I don’t personally think they have. They have made a good try, but I don’t think it is as accurate as it could be. I’m just wondering, if people of the world really knew where the Mansion worlds were, if they could locate them in space, would that make any difference about how they feel about the death process? Would that enhance their faith, or would that make any difference at all?
I personally think it would, but we would have to actually know where they are and then have the ability to somehow find them in space. I was just wondering if you could talk about that–as far as the death process goes. How can we overcome the grief that, not only ourselves, but that others have so we can share the knowledge we have–so we can make them feel a little better about that.
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, I understand your question. Personally I don’t think it would help to try to fix these in space because, as you were asking the question, I once again realized how much of the Urantia book is not empirical, not demonstrable–perhaps 90% of the book. Some of it can… As a matter of fact there are a number of individuals who are busily engaged right now in proving empirically some of the statements of the Urantia book along the lines of cosmology, even some of the history–shall we say–of the location of the Garden of Eden, and so forth.
But in terms of the Mansion worlds and what happens after you die, none of this is empirical; none of this can be proven. The Urantia book’s appeal is mainly to your spirit, your overall sense of value. This is why, as Mother Spirit said, the book was deliberately designed to include so many of what you call separate disciplines of human understanding and endeavors–to be self-validating, to give you the feeling that the personal being—God–who created all of this, also created death. He also created real separation as a part of life, as in those statements that loving couples who go on to the Mansion worlds and stay together for a while, still there will come times in their futures in which they will be required to separate.
This is not to diminish in any way the reality of the suffering, to suddenly feel that half of you is gone. It points up the very ability to share your life with someone and feel half of you–this other person–is as you say, a hostage to fortune, to chance: your loved ones–your children.
So it is a matter of faith, understanding, and trust in the totality of the revelation that I don’t think would help by pining it down anywhere. The Morontia worlds are not visible. There is no way of proving those statements are true any more than, like I say, 90% of the rest of the book. It is just within yourself and your trust in God, and in his design of life and death, that there is this necessity for separation. It is not some whimsical thing or afterthought. This may help you to some degree in handling the genuine grief. Does this help you, my son?
Student: Yes, it does, Michael. I think I got a different perspective on it. I have a few things also–just as you were speaking. There is no way that you really can prove, except through faith, that you… It starts with faith then. I’ve been developing a stronger relationship with my own piece of the Infinite Father, which has grown stronger over the last couple of years. I know that is where my faith is increasing so I don’t have any doubts about when I die I’m going to the Mansion worlds. So I suppose that is where a person’s direction needs to go rather than go to the words in a book. I realize the words in a book are static, and the reality of the Father is dynamic. And his truth is dynamic as it comes through us, just as your Spirit of Truth is dynamic. It is not static. So it is not like the words on the page of a book that are just staring at you and not doing anything until, as you were talking about, you live through it and experience what you are reading. But I really appreciate it because I think I gained a different perspective on it.
MICHAEL: And as you said, my son, those words aren’t really static are they?
Student: No.
MICHAEL: The tenth time you read those words they were different. The static existential reality of the book is a bit beyond you. Every time you read it, especially with real heart, real longing to understand it, it does change because you have changed. That is a bit paradoxical-seeming there–how a book has both an existential existence, and yet for you is an experiential reality too.
Student: I thank you very much, Michael. I appreciate these few minutes to have a talk with you, and I’m definitely going to think about what you told me tonight. I will try and put that into practice in my own life.
MICHAEL: For us–we cannot gainsay nor in any way diminish the requirement for faith. This is your choice. It is up to you to cultivate, and be willing to step out and do things in trust. There is no way we can deprive you of that, just like we—hopefully–are good parents in that sense–just as you are when you let your own children step out and stumble and fall from time to time.
One thing this discussion about the Urantia book has brought up is the degree to which we let you be. We even let the authors of the book be, trusting that if not for this particular time and space, parts of the book may not be readily assimilated and understood for a while yet. There are parts of the book which have been more or less generally disregarded and passed over. But this is why it is a revelation, an epochal revelation designed to inaugurate a new epoch of understanding. So: that existential object–(Michael laughs)–that collection of writings will continue to change in the experience of the people of the future. That is the strange nature of human reality. So thank you, my son, for your questions. And be in my peace.
Were there any more comments or questions this evening?
I know. This is a marvelous stillness we have generated here. It might seem, on your part, a shame to disturb it. But in an even greater sense, my children, nothing does disturb it.
Closing.
Then let me bid you all a good evening. It has been a time of thanks-giving so once again let me give thanks to our Father for all of us–both in your stead and, for me, I thank him for all of you. Come invite me and invite Mother Spirit to be part of your conscious lives. Give of yourself for both of us. Give part of your life over to stillness, then be as open-minded as you can. Hunger and thirst for that greater encompassing of which you are an integral part.
Yes, my children, you are constantly encountering yourself in everything you perceive. Yet, there is a way, there is an orientation, my Spirit of Truth can help you to a way of deeply desiring this openness, this receptivity and this curiosity about all that is not-you, even what might seem to be the antitheses of you.
This is the way to grow–with curiosity and encouragement. You can welcome the adventure that is coming your way. This is God’s will. And so we embrace it and say, “Thank you, dear Father. Thank you for this very necessity–for me to be a part, a creative part of my own life. Thank you for putting so much of me in my own hands.” Good evening. Be in my Peace.
