1995-07-02. Growth, Responsibility, Love
Nashville #20
Topic: Growth, Responsibility, Love
Group: Nashville TeaM
Teacher: Ham
TR: Rebecca
Opening
Ham: Greetings. I am Ham and I am your teacher, and also, your friend. You have come from a long earlier background of understandings, which I endeavor to use in these discussions, because you are unaware of all of the unusual and strange details of the universe that I could disclose. Therefore, you should take heed from our example and refrain from excessive disclosure when explaining the understandings you have acquired. Remember that your understandings are different than the understandings of others and should not attempt to force feed cosmic detail.
Lesson
Change, Resistance
That said, I would like to discuss change again. When you experience a change of any kind you are usually apprehensive and are frightened due to the newness of your experience. For example, even trying a new food product one is apprehensive that it will be unpalatable. Normally, humans stay with a few known food preparation that they are comfortable with. Trying something new is too difficult and involves too much apprehension. We find this amusing. Experiencing a real change in your life is even more frjghtening for you involving the apprehensions of encountering new humans, who are in reality your brothers and sisters that you don’t know, and apprehensions about your performance at some task, or just the fear of the unfamiliar. Humans show great resistance to any change in their outer surroundings and so you understand that the resistance to change in the inner life is even greater.
You all tend to remain in the old and familiar thinking patterns like we discussed last week. Discovering newness about yourselves is equally as frightening as setting out on uncharted waters. There could be monsters undreamed of or you could fall off the earth. This fear is ego induced. The ego in a large way is the familiar mental territory. It is mat which is proven and is who you think you are, mentally. Usually this small, but familiar, area involving self-perception and serf-instruction is your infant self. As you stretch yourselves to go beyond where you thought your limits were, then you discover that you can familiarize yourself with greater and greater aspects of being.
You learn that you are infinite in reality and that who you are today is a tiny fraction of who you are becoming in eternity. This involves first the thinking process of how you view your possibilities. Every human has the potential to be truly great in the eyes of others. This world is a small place and you can reach your potential in the flesh and be a world renown citizen, and yet, be at the bottom of the class, so to speak, when you graduate. Think of the earth as a giant kindergarten and of yourselves as needing to expand your experience so that you learn all that you can become in the flesh. You are all just glimpsing your future potentials and are examining who you are today and who you will be tomorrow.
Growth, Responsibility
Each step of self-expansion involves added responsibilities. An infant has no responsibility and gradually as he grows his world expands, and thus he becomes responsible for his own actions, taking into account the actions of others. You are learning to expand yourselves to take into account the actions of God. When you understand that you are encompassed, surrounded and protected through the will of the living God and his Sons, then you are given great freedom of action on earth. No longer are you enslaved through the circumscribed vision and short sightedness of the humans surrounding you. No, rather is your focus on your responsibility to God and to God alone.
You will find less and less need of the approval of those around you and you will see your responsibility more clearly in every situation. You who have the truth have responsibility to that truth. Your responsibility to God is a responsibility toward every individual who comes into your sphere of influence. This responsibility is profound, for it is a changing, indeed, a transforming realization that you are responsible to give God’s love to your fellow beings. You are not responsible for how they view you, you are not responsible for what they do with their lives, or their thinking. You are only responsible to God now.
God’s love is the transforming power to change, to adjust with love. Love is what allows change to happen. Love is the complete absence of resistance. Love is the complete absence of fear. You have used the excuse, ” I am afraid they won’t like to too long.” That’s not your responsibility. You have the responsibility to love and leave the consequences alone. Gods love does not carry requirements. It is not required that you are loved in return and you must not feel unworthy when your love is not returned. Keep you eye on God’s love alone and do not think how others react. This loving attitude will lead you into a great change. You will find yourselves altering entirely your world view and your old prejudices. Your old stereotypic mind set will gradually fall away as you reach out to the wonders of God’s world and see Him in the eyes of your brethren.
Ignorance is a jailer and it is a cell constructed of fear. It is only through human experience and human interaction that these bonds of ignorance are loosed. Shortly you will truly see every living human being, individually, as your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, all as intimate family, for you will know that this is the truth and this truth will be given life through your own experience. One cannot love human beings in the abstract, only by interaction, personally, individually, is love given life. Questions.
Dialogue
Q: It seems like over the last few months each of your talks is better than the last.
HAM: I endeavor to engage your imaginations and your hearts.
Q: None of us knows what is going on in the others minds. It seems like in the preceding week that the Father has been working on me about it. Your talk is right on target.
HAM: Well, as you grow spiritually you are sensitized to truth and so the lessons are immediate for you.
Stillness, Revelation
Q: It seems like in quiet time a revelation of truth will hit you all at one time. It’s like it has been brewing and it surfaces. Is that what you were talking about with him?
HAM: No. This is not the same. When you grasp a truth which before eluded you, and yet was coming together for you intellectually alone, this is similar, but it is different. You have the capacity for great intellectual understandings when this soul connection is made with something you already “knew”—there happens a revelation.
Q: Are there others like you who are teaching?
Ham: Certainly, yes, very many.
Q: Are the people listening?
Ham: Yes.
Q: So is the good winning?
HAM: We are very happy with the advancement of this undertaking, absolutely. Will the good triumph over evil? Absolutely!
Q: Comment to the effect that while he asked if me good is winning, he did not ask how long it would take.
HAM: Nothing is accomplished without the time factor intervening on Urantia. All human growth and progress comes through the auspices of time. Are there areas of concern? Certainly there are. And you should know that there is a great and all encompassing worldwide effort to correct the errors of human ignorance.
Love
Q: I want to ask about what you were telling us. You said as we find less and less need for approval from those around us, we will see our responsibility, and our responsibility is to God alone. David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Hitler all thought this. In the name of seeing truth and not needing the approval of others a lot of unfortunate actions have been taken. Comments?
HAM: Yes, do not stumble over this truth. There are certain humans who have used the God platform for their own self-exaltation and this is clearly not intended here. You know the difference and so do others. True spiritual living involves the consciousness of God in all aspects of life. And your first responsibility and urge from this consciousness is love of your fellow beings. Love is always the true fruits of God-knowing. Hatred, divisiveness, and dissension are the fruits of human exaltation. Any man who humbly and sincerely worships God, and knows himself as God’s son, realizes his responsibility is to love.
Q: We have so few examples of love, so few role models. One of the reasons we are so afraid to grow and change is that we have not seen it happening to others.
Ham: Yes.
Prayer
Q: It seems like it is recent and that in the past there was more love. It is hard when you are a human being when you have all of the deities of various nations and peoples of the earth pictured in a certain way. How should I think? How should I imagine God when I pray? I know its there, but it is difficult sometimes to put your finger on exactly what you are praying to.
HAM: Yes, I understand your confusion. God, the universal Father of all creation, is a person and He is personally present within your mind. His person is infinitely loving and all caring, all involved in every detail, no matter how small, in your life. When you talk to Him, express yourself freely and openly. Open up the inner recesses of your heart, hiding nothing. Allow His love to comfort you and His person to cherish you. Know Him as your Father personally and know that He is infinite goodness. Know that He is all concerned with your well-being and your happiness and that He wants all good things for you. Pray not, therefore, for things, rather pray for experience and growth and wisdom. The first part of your question, has the spiritual level of humans regressed, certainly not. It may seem so at times, however, overall spiritual progress is steady and has not regressed lately.
Fear, Crime
Q: Question about learning to love in a world where there is fear of crime. There are people and situations that we reasonably should be afraid of.
HAM: You should not have fear, while taking customary precautions is advisable. Fear of experience should not keep you from loving your neighbor.
Q: (There was an animated discussion here about fear, crime, and the need to learn to love our brothers and sisters.) How do we love the rapist? How do we find it in ourselves to love a person like Charles Manson? I find that very hard to comprehend.
HAM: You are unable to love the abstraction of a person. This is obvious. However, loving the person would be a different experience, even one who had committed grievous sin.
Q: Isn’t it true that you must learn to love yourself before you can learn to love others?
Ham: There is a connection, also lack of human interaction limits ones ability to love.
Q:(An lively discussion of violence, guns, television, and actual danger, occurred here. It ended with questions about how we can stop the violence.)
HAM: These are human problems for you to work out and not within the scope of this lesson time. I would say that young adolescent children have extreme amounts of energy. And this energy has to be channeled productively or they will answer another calling. Children are children even if they have guns. Too much freedom leads to license.
Q: Something that David said, a lack of role models strikes me as important.
Ham: Yes, and a lack of anything to do constructively.
Q: Really we are all children on this planet, and most of us don’t know it , and they are masquerading as adults. Really they are imitating other children imitating adults.
Ham: True.
Failure
Q: Question about fear and changing your life. When you are trying to stretch yourself and trying to do something new, how do you combat the fear that you won’t be good enough or will fail? Sometimes you make a leap of faith because you are forced to act. Often we wait until we see exactly what to do, get all of our ducks in a row. How do you combat the fear of failing and how do you take the leap of faith?
HAM: You must realize what failure is. Is failure real or is it a victory? It depends on your viewpoint. When you take God’s view, you can have no failure, only learning experiences. And so, your greatest failures could be your greatest victories. Also, the word failure implies a failure to somebody. You might fail in the eyes of the world, but you can’t fail to God.
Q: All failure is a growth process?
Ham: Yes, nothing more.
