2019-04-25-Looking Forward
Marin #242
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Looking Forward
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Michael
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Closing
Topic: Looking Forward
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael–you especially, Mother Spirit. Tonight we are so pleased, happy, and delighted to feel you all around us, along with God the Father, the Eternal Son, and the Infinite Spirit. You too are omnipresent, right along, I understand, with the Master Spirit of our particular Super Universe. But you, Mother Spirit, are actually right inside us as part of us, part of our own spirit and mind. Then too, as a daughter of the Infinite Spirit of Paradise who is responsible for the whole physical universe, you too are part of our bodies whose living physics and biochemistry keeps us going as the kind of beings that we are.
Tonight I would like you to–if you would–speak a little about this kind of beings we are, not only who we are, but what we are. Our wonderful Urantia Book talks about all the different orders of personal beings above us, we being the lowest form. Even our sweet dogs and cats–our most beloved pets–or our most advanced primates–are still not personal beings like we are. So would you speak to that and give us some appreciation, not in an egotistical way, but some true appreciation of God’s handiwork, not only for ourselves, but for all those we meet and share our lives? Thank you.
Lesson
NEBADONIA: Good evening, this is your Mother Spirit. Yes, I am all around you, my children. And you are correct: I share this omnipresence with a number of higher and equally purely spiritual beings, and so this space all around you is a very spiritualized space. One of the wonderful things you can look forward to in your life to come, after your human one, is to get a greater and greater sensitivity to spiritual realities. Not only will you be able to visualize and relate with the lower spiritual beings like cherubim, sanobim, and seraphim–the ordinary angles–but even the higher spiritual beings can make themselves visible to you, so you can get to know them too.
(Looking Forward)
NEBADONIA: Then, as you go through hundreds of transformations of your very being, which is rather physical to begin with, not only as a human being but in your immediate Morontia life; as you yourself become more spiritual, you will be able to tune in to the greater and greater realms of spirit that are actually all around you right now, but can’t yet be perceived so directly. These realms are now a matter of your faith, and something we like to tease you with–what you have to look forward to experiencing.
Now let me address this question of not only who you are as your human life has been unfolding so far, but what you are. This is where we get back to the Urantia Book’s most profound and comprehensive presentation of this–along with Michael’s and my own—with the term personality. We have teased you with the notion this is not just your Personality Pete and Petunia in your high school year book. Nor is it what so many psychological and religious organizations or systems of thought and meaning attribute. But it is almost unique to the Urantia Book’s definition of the profound nature of personality.
(Origin of Personality)
It comes from the fact that God is a personal being and not just some abstract law, or theorem, or impersonal force in the universe. He is the origin and creator of everything, the First Source and Center, as we say. Every personal being is a little like he buds off a part of himself and sends them going off into their own life with a degree of autonomy, even from him. The proof of this is that some human personalities are definitely behaving in very un-God like ways, ways which are not loving towards their fellow folks.
Personality, in this sense, is the fundamental reality of what you are. You are a personality, and then you are endowed with–as part of you–a creative spirit. As a living creative being, in each moment of your life you are co-creating part of all you are experiencing. As an experiential being, your purpose is to experience. This is also God’s purpose because he experiences the life of all personal beings in what we call his “personality circuit.” God experiences everything every personal being in all of creation experiences.
This means both his—and your–purpose is a living extension, a growth and expansion through time. Cosmic experience, in the most fundamental, universal sense, is growing. Even the number of personal beings of all the different orders is expanding. The universe is truly expanding, not only in physical creations, but personally, right on down to you. It is the way you will both be expanding forever.
For you personally this expansion is what we call your soul, the living repository and spiritual counterpart of your life. Actually, part of your soul is by way of the presence of God within you. God too is keeping this perfect spiritual record of all your experience. It is your true possession, my dears.
(Being Unique)
Now when we get into the attributes–the qualities–of personality, one of the most fundamental characteristics is your uniqueness. From Michael’s and my standpoint, a very clever, cute way of referring to personal beings is: “They are all the same–no two alike!” But I must say that sounds a little paradoxical, or even contradictory. But it is a fact. Every personal being shares this quality of being unique. There are no duplicates; and your unique human personality comes directly from God the Father.
Look at it this way. Only God the Father has the infinity of creativity to create a near infinity of unique, personal beings throughout the universe. This is something that, hopefully, you can get some appreciation for within yourself. Psychologically speaking, it is your subjective reality. You yourself have an inner reality of how you experience life that is not identical to any other person’s. The greater appreciation you have of your own unique subjectivity, the more you can experience this in everyone you meet.
Think of being on a crowded city sidewalk, or most of you have had the experience of being in a large city’s busy airport where in the course of a few minutes you can see hundreds of people going by in a hurry to get to their destination: and every one is unique. Every one has their own unique inner world that is unlike any one else’s–even their closest brother’s or sister’s, husband’s or wife’s.
There can be a real loneliness in this awareness. But we offer the possibility that you can feel enormously alone and unique, and yet still not be lonely because this is what you share not only with every other person you meet, but with the whole human race on your planet, and even with all the spiritual beings throughout creation. This is a shared thing, something you all have in common–your inner world.
(Ego and Personality)
This is very different from what you call ego. This is a very important distinction because so many of your religious and philosophical traditions point you at an experience where, in a sense, you disappear. They take this as an absolute truth that there is no such thing as personality. There is no personal being experiencing; there is just experiencing itself.
Yes, this is definitely a human experience possibility with, generally, a lot of training within traditions, in how to achieve a very special meditation where self-consciousness ceases to exist. You can have this experience of just experiencing–just consciousness of consciousness itself. Then you come out of this experience of total oneness, insofar as you say hello to another person; and then there are two–you and them.
We think of ego as only the totality of who you are to yourself. It includes your past, your present, and some of your your hopes and notions of who you may be in the future. But this ever-changing consciousness is so contra-distinct from personality.
Number one: your personality does not just come and go in this way, and part of the training in meditation is to realize how your own awareness of yourself is constantly in flux, constantly changing. Our definition, feeling—our reality of personality is that it does not change and, as such, it is somewhat beyond time and space. It’s somewhat beyond even this living, physical body of yours. It will survive when this particular way of living you have now does come to an end, and your life is itself transformed into something higher.
So personality not changing means: a persistence of something unchanging in the midst of the universe and everything around you, and your whole physical being and mind themselves, all changing. This transcendent reality is why you cannot get a direct hold of yourself within your ordinary ego-consciousness. You as a personal being are the point of origin, while your ego is somewhat like a necessary mirror. It is a way of being you for yourself–consciously. Of course it is somewhat like a mirror in a fun-house.
There is always a greater or lesser distortion simply because your ego is an imperfect—because temporal and incomplete–representation of you. Ego—self-awareness–is something you learned to do as a child–to be aware of yourself, and it comes and goes. It can even be a curse when an egotistical person’s own sense of themselves is at such an enormous variance with how everyone else experiences them. This disconnect can be very isolating and truly lead to some unfathomable loneliness.
But a good sense of ego is being thankful you have this creative spirit that can present–hopefully somewhat realistically—you to yourself. This is a tool with which you can relate to others, if you will. It is how you present yourself.
(The physical)
These aspects of your personality constitute how you relate to all the rest of you. There’s the physical part of you that obeys chemistry and physics: you have weight and you take up space. You are actually bio-chemistry: you are alive, alive in a way that is still beyond your most advanced science. Life is a true miracle that remains something ungraspable because no single one of you can read the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of books, written on biochemistry, on life itself. And yet you have it. You are alive. We can only reassure you that you will always have this. It is actually a matter of your freedom, a matter of your choice, my dear ones, just how long you will live into eternity, and how–what kind of life you will have. There is so much given right into your own hands.
(Creative Spirit)
This freedom is that autonomy I mentioned that comes right from God, and depends on the creative aspect of you—your spirit, that creates—or not–your choices. You create your own subjective inner world, and how you relate to that, and then to all that is not-you–right down to the chair you are sitting on, the room about you, or maybe you are listening to this while out walking in the woods: this is your attitude. Attitude is your relationship to yourself, and everything else that is not your own pure personality.
Your attitude, like your consciousness, comes and goes. Every twenty-four hours you need those hours of sleep, letting yourself go and trusting you will awaken again. The ultimate trust and attitude is that after dying you will re-awaken with a better, more expanded version of yourself, on a fantastic real world beyond your imagination.
(Body, mind, and soul)
This is why I love to tease you with all of these aspects of yourself that are somewhat ungraspable. In one way, my dears, even your body, your mind, your spirit, your soul: they all go off the scale. Here you are, swimming around in infinity–in every physical direction and in every spiritual dimension. And yet you go on. You make your arrangements for tomorrow, or the next day, or even a year or two from now, in the midst of everything changing all around you–your world and society, all the economics and politics and everything else going on that affects your life.
There is this persistence. There is something continuing, and this is you. You are this persistence. Michael gave a wonderful lesson last time on how to bring this persistence, this continuing nature of yourself, more and more into consciousness. True, your personality is in God’s hands. But consider: to be aware of it, to actually create a greater conscious persistence of yourself, right in your own life, so you can make those enduring decisions about what to do tomorrow, or the next day.
You would also have a greater appreciation for who you were at five years old, or twenty, and a greater appreciation for all those folks you have known. Think of all the people you have known and shared so much with, that are so much a part of your soul. You might say the true value of your life is because they too are ungraspable. They too are “walking infinities” with their personality right from God.
(Meditation—reflection—discovery)
This is your meditation. This is your choosing to do something just for its own sake that so profoundly affects your consciousness and attitude. Good meditation will be somewhat different every morning because every morning is different, and you too will be different—your soul of experience will be growing. So we ask you to take some time out–ten minutes, fifteen or twenty minutes–each morning, to check in with yourself on the most fundamental level.
Let your personality experience this new you without any other program. See what is happening this next morning, that has never happened before. Oh!–but enough teasing. Let me open to your questions or comments, whatever you might want to contribute.
Student: Mother, I have a comment I’d like to make. It’s kind-of a question. The Urantia Book states it is the Father’s will that I become holy, just, and great. But when I contemplate being great, I run up against the egotistical version you were speaking of. I might see myself being great only in the crooked mirror of a fun-house. Being great seems to me a function of ego, and yet I know it really isn’t. I’m curious to see–to hear–your comments on how to perceive the word “great” from your standpoint.
NEBADONIA: : Yes, my son. I think it points to something that could be kind-of scary in a way. It is part of human life to get tired and fold up, or you might have had some terrible, horrendous experience. Either way you may want it all to stop. And yet there is the notion of no stopping—ever–especially with respect to experience. No matter how world-weary you get, full up and overwhelmed at times, there is no end.
(There is no end)
Greatness becomes not a possession, but an approach, and something that will never ever stop. You will continue to approach greatness. You will continue to get greater and greater and greater—forever–because God will be your companion right alongside you with Michael and myself. We’ll all be going along with you, even after you leave our Local Universe. You’ll come back and visit from time to time, maybe millions and millions years from now.
This is the whole dimension of greatness. It’s something you’ll constantly become, if you can find a way to keep growing; keep growing consciously because this is where your ego self-awareness choice comes in.
Through your meditations–relinquishing your ego and all your plans, and so forth, and getting beyond any present, ego-related ideas of who you were, say, when you were fifteen years old–for a few precious moments you can touch your soul and actually be fifteen again–if only for a few moments. Re-experience the whole feeling and awareness of this, as distinct from mere ego-driven ideas. This helps you be aware of the limitations of ego-consciousness, and that your personality—you—and your soul are so much greater.
(You keep growing)
It’s what I talked about tonight reassuring you, you are more than ego. Your personality is so much more enormous. Your soul is so much more enormous than you can readily get ahold of with a memory or two. This is how you achieve momentary greatness: you keep growing. In one way it is never complete. You are never allowed to rest for long being great. There is more to do.
After you get completely familiar with our own Super Universe of a hundred thousand Local Universes, there are six more Super Universes to explore—trillions of worlds.
And so: someday, my son, someday you will be truly great. As your Urantia Book informs you, and we echo, it is only momentary; you might say, pauses in being great. You can say, “This has been a great day!” There is still another to go. In this you are very close to our Father, because this is what he is doing for himself. Being God and being in touch with it all, he too is growing.
We call this aspect of him the Supreme Being, the evolutionary expansion that he himself desires to do, and is doing very well. So we encourage and tease you to be like him. Become great for a moment, and then keep going. Does that help?
Student: So it is more of a direction, not an attainment.
NEBADONIA: : It is a momentary attainment. You can feel great. You can rest for a while in all you have genuinely accomplished. But then there is always more to go.
Student: Right.
NEBADONIA: : You’ll still be alive. There is always more there–more personal beings to meet and appreciate. In one way yes, it is like Michael’s Spirit of Truth. It is a way to orient yourself. It can also be disquieting since you can’t stay as you are for long. It is a little scary that there is no end to the effort. But that is just another name for eternal life.
Student: Thank you, Mother. I appreciate your comments.
(Genuine Accomplishment)
NEBADONIA: : Yes, my son. You can have wonderful moments of greatness. They are part of the reward of living. There is such a thing as genuine accomplishment, and these moments can be truly great in the big stream of time, with a lot of little starts and stops. But then you begin again. You keep your “beginner’s mind” and be thankful for all you have accomplished. This can be a non-egotistical way of being truly thankful and appreciative of your human ability to accomplish things. This is part of God’s plan for people. You go on and use this as strength, as food for your soul. Be in my love.
Student: Thank you.
NEBADONIA: : So, my dears, this last question brings out one way in which you, as a personal being, were made in God’s image. There are theological notions that God is not aware of himself; the universe is not aware of itself; there is nothing here in the sense of personality, and that the highest goal of human life is to live in a state of: No one experiencing–just experience.
But this is not the fact of the matter. Michael and I can speak directly as personal beings ourselves, and being in contact with our Father–as a personal being. This is true for the Eternal Son, the Infinite Spirit, and the Master Spirits of Paradise; the spiritual heads of the Major and Minor sectors of our Super Universe; the Creator Sons and Daughters like Michael and myself of the Local Universes; down to the Melchizedeks and all the different orders of angels.
Closing
(Embracing and Letting Go)
NEBADONIA: These are all the different kinds of personal beings, each with their own creative spirit, and all as unique individuals. This is what our universe is blessed with. This is what you are and, hopefully, you too can feel blessed. So embrace your uniqueness, and see it in everyone around you, especially in those closest and most singular to you, the very special ones with whom you share your life. See them and respect them. Embrace them, and then–most profoundly–let them be. Let them be themselves, and even encourage them, as we encourage you. Good night, my dear ones. This is your Mother Spirit saying: Be in my love. Good night.
