2013-06-05-Your Greatest Power
Marin #226
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Your Greatest Power
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
3.2.1 Personality
3.2.2 Humility
o 3.3 Dialogue
3.3.1 Communication
3.3.2 Transmitting
3.3.3 Discernment, Intention
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Your Greatest Power
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
see discussion page for TR introduction
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, welcome. We do look forward to these meetings with you, and we come to you with our whole past, our whole soul’s worth of life experiences. And so we ask you to help us actually suspend all of this just to be here-and-now; to be what you’ve suggested so often, though sometimes it’s so difficult being open-minded. While you and Mother Spirit have never asked us to blindly believe anything you present to us–you don’t even tell us what to do, you just make suggestions–you do suggest then that we suspend any dis-belief in order to be open-minded and entertain whatever happens. We take it into us and it finds its own place for certain. So thank you for these suggestions. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening. This is Michael, and certainly this is true that Mother Spirit and I do our best to pay our respect always–throughout your life and even beyond–pay respect to your free will, for in doing so we are paying our respect to the ability of yours to create. It’s this creative ability of yours that your free will is dependent upon. As we have taught, free will only has true meaning insofar as you have choice. And as you live in an entire universe happening all around you, and more immediately with all the folks you live with day to day–all this continuing reality all around you; still you have a creative spirit that can come up with an alternative to what simply, but profoundly, is. And yes, this does include your past, this soul you have of a whole lifetime of experience.
Lesson
Your greatest power
You have creative spirit with which you can come up with something right out of your own unique personality. This is your greatest power. It’s also one of the greatest hindrances, sometimes, if you’re not aware of it. For most folks, and for most of their lives–most of their waking hours, there is no sharp dividing line between what they are presented with–what has independent reality from them–and how they themselves, then, are interpreting that with their own creativity. The Urantia Book talks about this as your co-creativity. You are co-creating everything. Now I emphasize that. Everything you are experiencing, you are part of that. As expressed in oriental philosophy, “Thou art that.”
Yet that–that whole universe surrounding you–this world, these people; they do exist. They are not just your imagination. You find this out very young when things cause pain. Something happens that you would rather wish hadn’t happened, whether it’s stubbing your toe or burning your finger. There is the persistent independence of that which is not-you. Yet as you experience it, you interpret it, even now as you are receiving me within you with all of your past experience, even understanding this language I’m using, these concepts I have to use to communicate.
Personality
It’s not always easy to be aware of just how much is your own subjectivity because, as Mother Spirit and I have taught, you’re not an object. You’re a living being and, as such, you’re in a living reality. All of reality is God–if you will–God’s life. So here you are in a living reality, a living being yourself where it can seem as if nothing is permanent. Nothing is stable except personality itself. The Urantia Book defines personality as changelessness out here in time and space, in the midst of everything else but personality changing, all the way from a molecular level on up to what you call living plants and animals, and other folks.
So tonight I’d like to delve into this mystery of personality. What are you in the most basic, fundamental, irreducible sense? You are this “personality.” But what does it mean to be unchanging where, throughout your human life and then on to your successive lives in the morontia realm until you head off into the galaxy as a first stage spirit and slowly, over the millennia, work your way towards paradise, there is this “you” created by God–directly so–that does not change? It means you will always be you. Yet this is for you now a matter of faith.
It’s also that thing that really has such a profound meaning for you when you reawaken on the mansion worlds for the first time. We’ve said what a change this is, not only for you and all your perceptions and abilities, but just the profound fact of having survived. You still are! And you walk out into a totally changed reality, a reality that is more soulful, more deeply soulful even than what you know now. It includes those you meet, for you can recognize, both in yourself and each other, this profound change in everything. But for now you can get some taste of each other’s soul even in this life. It’s what you call character.
You can have a sense of another’s personality and how they’re unique amongst all the other people you know–their personality, their uniqueness of being and also their soul of life experience that you call character. It’s that other part of them that is unique to them and speaks of their whole life’s experience. Or sometimes you even have a feeling of folks with almost no character, that they haven’t developed much. This is often a sad fact that folks are so self-limited they haven’t developed much soul for all their years of life.
But as the Urantia Book teaches and we affirm, your soul is co-authored by a presence of God within you. From the standpoint of personality, this individualized presence of God is part of your whole being. And as this presence of God within you is the co-author of your soul, this is the greatest assurance I can give you, my children, that though in your old age you might come into senility or various diseases like Alzheimer’s where your personality temporarily loses memory and its touch with your soul–what’s gone before–what you possess is vouchsafed by this presence of God. When you reawaken it is because God is part of your soul. Your Thought Adjuster–we call it–this presence of God that actually helps you think more spiritually, will be right there. This is why when you reawaken, you can realize who you are and who you’ve been. Your faith has been restored and actually augmented, that this is who you will always be.
Personality—a transcendent reality
So personality is a transcendent reality. We’ve often used that oriental expression that you are like an eye that sees but cannot see itself. Though you are a personality created by God, you can no more grasp your totality than you can pick yourself up by your bootstraps. Like this eye that sees but cannot see itself, you can only have what we call a reflection of you. It’s what psychology calls your ego. This is your total sense of yourself right now in your particularity, including your memory. You can–to a degree–be in touch with your soul, this transcendent reality of who you’ve been. Insofar as you can have a touch of this, so your ego begins to approach your totality.
But insofar as your totality is this transcendent reality, you only get little bits of it in your consciousness, and even then it depends upon your consciousness being self-aware and not totally caught up in what you’re doing, or what’s happening outside of you. It’s in your meditations, your deep meditations, you can have some feeling beyond your normal sense of yourself, your ego. You can relax into reliving–deeply, profoundly reliving, perhaps only moments of your past. But for those precious few moments you can be five years old again, when the door knobs were way up there and you were walking around, as someone put very poetically, in a little forest of legs.
But you never grasp yourself in your totality in present consciousness. Not only in this life but in the stages of your lives to come, this is what you will grow, this consciousness of who you are and what you are, ever more consciously, until that glorious day when your consciousness will literally merge with the presence of God in you. So you can see you have a long ways to go, my children. You’re just starting out in this sense.
Humility
For now the greatest spiritual quality you can have is humility. While some folks have a mistaken idea this is being squashed down–being humiliated–it’s actually the opposite. It’s where your personality chooses to acknowledge the enormity of what is not-you. That’s what humility is, an awareness of this gigantic creation. It’s really–even for Mother Spirit and I, for we are not God–just incomprehensible, like being on the shore of an illimitable ocean. It’s such a wonderful spiritual blessing to be aware and appreciative of this whole creation around you. It’s where my Spirit of Truth within you is an orientation to this open-mindedness to humbly ask of God within you: please let me be aware of a little bit more each day. Let me keep growing.
Because again, as your Urantia Book points out, your only lasting but eternal possession is your soul of experience. You’re an experiential being. That’s what you’re doing here. With this free will that your personality has in potential, you can decide. You can choose to be ever more open, to be less and less bound by the notions of who you are and what you’ve been. You thank God, thank our Father, that you are so much more than you can grasp, so much more than you can yet fully comprehend.
Humility
This gives you humility even towards your own ego, your own sense of yourself, and lets you know that you are so much more. This is the mystery of personality. I know you’ve been told that neither God nor the Creation are mysterious or mystical, but actually goes by his law. This is just acknowledging that you will spend an eternity encountering and doing your best to understand his law, the totality of Creation.
So this is what you are, my children. This is the transcendent reality of personality. This is what you can come to enjoy in each other, if you have this open-mindedness, this orientation towards an unfolding of truth–forever.
Well, I’ve teased you enough tonight. Let’s look into whatever questions or comments you might have.
Dialogue
Student: Michael, my mother passed away on May 31st. Would you be able to tell me what process she’s going through now, or where she is, relatively?
MICHAEL: Yes, my dear. One thing that Mother Spirit and I will–as you say, right up front—confess, that we cannot tell you whether she is one of the sleeping survivors or whether she, within a few days, has regained consciousness on the first mansion world. Because this is a deeply spiritual, you might say, assessment of her spiritual growth, we cannot share with others exactly where she is in her spiritual growth, and whether she is one of the sleeping survivors or not. We can only assure you that she still is, and like we all are, in the bosom of our Father. She will definitely have a further life. In this we can assure you.
Matters of faith
This is something that is a matter of faith for you now, even to the degree to which you give credit what I’m telling you: that all human beings do survive. It’s not a put-down to tell you that you have not yet the maturity, your personality is not yet mature enough, or experienced enough in this one life, to choose to cease to exist. Because you have not yet reawakened on the mansion worlds; you’ve not yet survived that enormous change, for your order of being, you call death.
But as we’ve taught so often, eternal life is not forced on anyone. We’ve only given one example of those who have gone so much against God’s will in their lifetime, who so identified with this smaller part of themselves, their ego and their own notions of who they are. We do give the example of Lucifer and some of those like him who no longer exist because they clung to the bitter end, you might say, to their own notions of who they were.
Eternal life is not forced upon anyone. But since God is absolutely merciful, he simply let’s those go who cannot accept his total creation all around them, who have no humility whatsoever.
In a way they choose to be totally full of themselves and not relate to this progressive universe around them that does demand that they do keep growing. Again, as your Urantia Book talks about the relationship of you to your own soul, to all of your experience: this is a growing thing where you cease to exist, you literally wink out by your own choice not to keep growing. So we can assure you that your mother, like all of you, will have this life to come and will have this choice. This is your ultimate freedom. Now do you have some further questions?
Student: No.
Communication
Communication via Thought Adjusters
MICHAEL: A question arose recently. It’s one of the big questions. Is there communication with those who have gone beyond? Because in your Urantia Book it does state that no one comes back for this kind of communication. But that is just emphasizing that no one comes back. All human beings when they die have a whole universe career ahead of them. We’ve compared “coming back” to a baby trying to get back into the womb. It’s also disregarding walking out into the glory, the unimaginable glory of even that first stage–the first mansion world–totally changed, expanded in all their senses, since you are just one great notch more spiritual and so much more in touch with the spiritual presences within you–your own Thought Adjuster, your own presence of God within you; and then too in a transformed, more soulful reality.
There’s no communication between personalities as such, but you all have the presence of God within you. As your Urantia Book asserts, and I assure you, this is God. And so all Thought Adjusters, all of these individualized presences of God throughout all of time and space, are in communication with each other. Your own individual soul of experience is part of the great Over-soul. Think of it as God’s perfect memory of everything that has ever happened by way of his omniscience and omnipresence.
Both you and anybody who has gone beyond are still in this huge spiritual field of God. It’s all around you. It’s part of you. And there is communication between Thought Adjusters, not only in this sense, but even among living people. It’s not that they are matchmakers. Thought Adjusters really don’t talk together and get two people meeting because they know that it would be a perfect match, as you see it. But there is something that goes beyond love-at-first-sight, which is usually just a recognition of someone who is similar to someone they’ve loved before, like a mother or a father. There is that recognition. There is that communication–that simpatico, if you will–between Thought Adjusters. No one can categorically limit in any way this communication between Thought Adjusters.
I wanted to clear up this point about communication with those that have gone beyond. For the most part, experiences of the dearly departed–as you call them–these are mostly your own Thought Adjuster’s ability to present to you their character, their personality, their soul. This is a true experience within you of those who have gone on. But it is best at your level of understanding now, and what’s possible for you to comprehend, not to put any limits on this, or try to fit things into pre-existing categories, what this living personality that you and others are that cannot be so easily grasped.
I hope this clears up some of this confusion folks have sometimes of the reality, and what they know deep inside themselves–as part of their soul–of what they’ve experienced of those they have loved and have gone on. Does this further clarify matters?
Student: Yes.
MICHAEL: Be in my peace.
Student: Okay. I would like to discuss something, Michael.
MICHAEL: Surely.
Transmitting
Student: I’m here because I’m very interested in the process of channeling and allowing myself to be open to a flow of energy that isn’t entirely my own. And so I’ve been practicing this in my morning meditations for a while now, maybe a couple of months. An old teacher has come to me in these mediations. His name is Frank Casafiette. (Ed: spelling?) What he has said to me is that I will be more ready to channel him when I can raise my vibration to more closely match his, and that one of the ways I can do that is to be more compassionate myself, to see people in a more open-hearted, compassionate way; in the way that I know he does.
Compassion as complete acceptance
MICHAEL: Well, yes, my daughter. When you think about compassion, think about it as acknowledging, as deeply as you can within yourself, a person’s totality. In other words, you’re eliminating pre-judging–prejudice and notions about who and what they might be. As you open yourself to the totality of another person, this is the essence of compassion because you are setting yourself aside and all your own notions about, shall we say, sex–whether they are male or female, how beautiful they are, how ugly they are–all these things that you are bringing to that moment. What we call open-mindedness is opening your heart and your mind to the ungraspable totality of them. This is very much what is required to channel. We just call it transmitting/receiving.
Also, in order to receive what someone else is transmitting, first of all it helps to make it physical. By this I mean you can take notes, or use one of these neat little recording devices we’re using right now. You’re giving the transmission a physical reality that you can relate to later. You can think about this later. You can just let yourself go and not be worried when something comes through.
It’s like in your meditations. You can have an idea, God can put an idea in your mind that is so precious, it totally disrupts your mediation. And so we suggest that folks, especially when they start meditating, keep a note pad handy. You can get information that’s so valuable, and you’re so afraid of losing it, it actually interrupts your meditation. Why don’t you try this? You can, shall we say, take written notes.
Student: I actually am doing that.
MICHAEL: Good! Okay. How’s it working out?
Student: Pretty good–pretty good. I’m having fun with it.
MICHAEL: That’s the essence.
Student: I was surprised that he came to me, but I had such a lovely experience during the time that… It was somebody else, a man named Edward O’Hara, who was channeling him many years ago here in Mill Valley. Actually, Casafiette was the first channeled entity I had a relationship with. And I so enjoyed it. I loved the perspective of being outside this set. I loved the sense of compassion that I felt, that I had never experienced that depth of compassion before. It just felt so good to be in that. So I really appreciate what you’re saying about setting myself aside and seeing people without any kind of judgments or evaluations. You know, that is not the normal way to go about it.
MICHAEL: Well, it takes enormous courage, enormous courage to be so naked yourself, and so open, and just be who you are without layers and layers of protection.
Student: Right. I absolutely see what you’re saying.
Limits to transmitting/receiving
MICHAEL: I would say: carry on. Just keep on. It’s progressive. Well, hopefully, wonderfully it’s a progressive thing of being more and more open to this. Because that determines what can come through. In one way, the greatest limitation of channeling and this transmitting/receiving is that it does have to fit into some kind of parameters of making sense. The greatest limitation is that it can’t be something that is totally incomprehensible, like some totally foreign language not even in your class of languages, shall we say something like Chinese. For those who are transmitting to you, their compassion is to put things as much as they can into some framework that you can relate to.
The more open you are in accepting an ever broadening framework might even contradict what you are bringing to the session, right? But this is open-mindedness, and the glory of this, my daughter, is that this can extend, then, to the rest of your life! You are training yourself with the help of this friend; you are training yourself to approach life itself this way. What is life itself, this enormous creation I mentioned tonight?–this totally incomprehensible thing surrounding you that you can get in all humility? You can just say “Wow! What is all of this?” with a great desire in your heart to grow, and to feel yourself as you are now growing into this. Be more and more open all the time as to what some other entity, some other personal being, can give you.
Student: Thank you. I’m following you one hundred percent. When you spoke of a framework, you know, an ever widening or expanding framework to allow that, I’m wondering what are the limitations of the framework that I have right now? Because I’m in it. I can’t see where my own boundaries or limitations, limiting boundaries–let’s put it that way–are.
MICHAEL: Exactly. Again, you can’t pick yourself up by your own bootstraps.
Student: Right.
MICHAEL: You can’t know what are your limitations, because that’s why they are limitations.
Student: Right.
MICHAEL: This is what we mean, and we’ve been teaching the last couple lessons, is that you kind-of–as best you can—kind-of hold yourself suspended between blind belief, on the one hand–like Mother Spirit and I: just because I say I am Michael doesn’t mean you have to believe it–and suspending your dis-belief–shall we say, automatically taking a stance against anything I say. That would be like: who or what is this happening called a Creator Son of God now? So you’re kind-of holding yourself suspended between blind belief and disbelief. This allows you to take in something new.
Student: I call it innocence.
MICHAEL: Oh yes!
Student: It’s an innocence, a state of innocence, isn’t it?
MICHAEL: Exactly.
Student: Okay. I know what you’re about.
MICHAEL: And there is a vulnerability here.
Student: Right.
MICHAEL: You are kind-of open and naked here. So we say: just get used to it because when you reawaken on the mansion worlds, everybody is a more soulful reality because everyone is capable of being more naked with each other.
Student: Right. Well, that’s sort-of like what a lot of people take drugs for–the expansive drugs like Ecstasy, and LSD, and mushrooms and whatnot–to create that sort of state. I mean that’s what the people I know do that for. I’ve achieved that too, such a very open-hearted innocence.
Critical motivation
MICHAEL: There it becomes very much a matter of your motivation. Why are you doing this? Is it just because you’re totally bored and you’re doing it for so-called kicks? Or is it because you are not only–and here’s what we emphasize–not only trying to push your own boundaries, you know, being open to that, but then how do you spend the time and the real effort–both emotionally and with all parts of you–to integrate them into your life? You open yourself up and, hopefully, take in something new, something that even blows your mind–as you say. But then comes the hard work too of integrating that, letting that find its place. As you know, so many scientists talk about working on a project for years and then sleeping on it, when of all of sudden—boom!–the whole thing comes together.
That’s because they’ve done their work; they’ve done their homework. They’ve put in the effort. Your mind is capable of this because you have the presence of God within you. You have my Spirit of Truth and its orientation towards what’s new and what’s bigger than you. And you have Mother Spirit and all the ways in which she augments these mental capacities within you–knowledge and understanding, intuition.
So I’d say: just keep going. Keep reaching. You have one foot—as in our last lesson we taught—one foot on a solid dock of what you’ve actually known, what you’ve actually experienced. But the other foot is out there in an untethered boat, wiggling around. It’s your getting used to the stretch, getting used to uncertainty–marvelous uncertainty, as the angels call it. Marvelous uncertainty–getting used to this, welcoming it, orienting yourself towards it.
Student: I hear you. I do. Thank you.
MICHAEL: Well: keep going, my daughter, and be in my peace.
Student: Thank you very much.
Student: I have a question for you, Michael, with the explanation I work with a lot of people, and I help people in my job. I find that I don’t–to my knowledge–I don’t judge a lot of the people I have interactions with. I feel like I bring compassion. But lately I feel I’ve lost a lot of tolerance to deal with people who present themselves to me who seem unruly to be with. I’m very curt and very polite, but I have no desire to deal with them. I’m wondering if this is a change in my own attitude, if it’s something that has to do with me and maybe I need to look at–if I’m being tolerant with myself and if I have a willingness to work with myself. Or maybe, if I’m shutting that off, that translates into an intolerance with other people. I am curious of the relationship between compassion and tolerance to work with others, I guess.
MICHAEL: Give me more of a context of how and when this happens. You say you’re working with other people. What do you mean by that?
Student: I have a job. I work in customer service, so I have to deal with a lot of people. I find if I maintain a friendly demeanor, it allows for a much smoother interaction. But I’ve recently experienced very little patience with people who seem to be ornery, and I wonder if I’m being short with them, or if I’m being short with myself.
Discernment, Intention
Assessing intention
MICHAEL: Here, my son, I would say is where you really have to reach for intention. You’re probably already doing this, perhaps unconsciously, but in this kind of dealing with ornery people, it’s my feeling that in human relationships this depends so much on intention. Because you can–as you say–try to get through life with rose-colored glasses and really deny yourself this assessment. I’d say it’s even more of a recognition of people being deliberately mean—mean-spirited. Because this is a reality, especially in your chosen line of work for the moment. This is what you are encountering.
If you are in a complaint department, you could run into people who are so put out by whatever they think was done to them, they might even be trying to bring justice themselves. They feel they have been put upon, and so they’re going to put it back on someone else. Yet there are other folks who, because of how they were brought up, or sometimes through a lack of really sharp intelligence, or sometimes a lack of compassion–but totally unconscious on their part, they can be ornery, but totally unaware that they’re doing so. Now does this distinction find a chord within you?
Student: Yes. I really enjoy the word “intention.” That was not something that I had considered before. I was more thinking of expectations, what I expected of them or they expected of me. I enjoy the use of the word intention. I think that word is causing me to reconsider what I’m bringing to the interaction. What is my intention? I think that keeps it much more present as far as the way that I deal with people.
MICHAEL: Well, excuse me, son, not to… By the way, you just brought up a wonderful point for me, and that is your intention. But I was mainly talking about their intention. Here comes an ornery person and as you start talking, they’re just belligerent. They could be mean. They could be insulting–all these sorts of things.
So: here’s this ornery person in front of you. To me, it’s making an assessment of how conscious are they of this themselves? Because with some people it’s, like I said, the way they were raised. They can be extremely ornery and mean without intending it. They’re not getting any real satisfaction out of this. They’re not going over into the realm of being sadistic and enjoying hurting you for the hurt they feel they’ve endured.
Here you’re feeling for their intention, what they’re really intending to do. Maybe it’s to get something out of you; maybe self-justification. How conscious is this within them? These are assessments you have to make, I think, in your line of work.
Conscious or unconscious orneriness
Also, how much authority do you have in determining how they’re treated? How much does it depend on you as to whether or not you offer a total refund or, in a sense, you have to send them away unrequited? Because if you have the authority to make these decisions regarding them, you’re going to run into some static on that point.
Student: I enjoyed the word “intention” because I feel like it reframes what my role is in that. What happens in the interaction is very much dependent upon what they bring, but also how I handle it. I can maintain a perspective of what I’m intending to do, and how I can treat this person with compassion or understanding. Beyond that encounter, I don’t have to take anything with me.
MICHAEL: What is your position? What is your authority?
Student: I’m not sure. I have a lot of roles. But I tend to enjoy making sure people are satisfied and happy.
MICHAEL:Well, that’s your intention.
Student: Yes.
MICHAEL: For me, my son, I congratulate you on being concerned within yourself if you’re being judgmental or not–as you say–if you’re being too short with them, or too dismissive. With things like this, I think it’s good that you’re concerned about them. I’m just trying to give you some tools to work with here, of how in your relationship with others–and not only in this job but all others as you come across friends and acquaintances or total strangers—how to go through life.
Assessment vs. judgment
We’ve taught many, many lessons on the difference between having to make these assessments and being arrogantly judgmental. Think of someone who is so wrapped up in themselves that every time you say “Hi,” or “Hello,” or even nod, they totally ignore you. I’m sure you’ve had that experience; and sometimes, just because they are in a snit and totally wrapped up in themselves, they don’t even notice you, and you kind-of forgive them. Other times they’re making a point of what you call cutting someone. You say “Hi” to someone like that and they are literally sending the feeling across to you–very deliberately, very intentionally—that you are nothing. They don’t intend to even acknowledge you exist.
This is what I mean by your own momentary assessments of how someone is approaching you, and what it means to them. How conscious is it to them? Are they deliberately doing this? You see what I mean? I’m trying to give you some tools to handle this situation.
Student: Yes. I like the distinction between the intentional and the unconscious approach. It seems very clear to me by the way a person behaves if they’re intentionally doing something, or if it’s an unconscious manifestation.
MICHAEL: In which case this can determine if people are literally trying to harm you–right?–you have every right of self-defense. Sometimes it’s by being rather formal, without returning any kind of insult, if you know what I mean. In other words, informality itself is a delight, to be informal with folks and exchange so much. With other folks you have to be very, very formal in order to, shall we say, not take their hurt and give them the satisfaction of hurting you. You see what I mean?
Student: Certainly.
MICHAEL: Right. In that case, it’s not being mean-spirited in return, not returning what they are coming on to you with. You are just letting them know that “No. No, you can’t hurt me. You’re not hurting me. I don’t accept all that.” In which case, if they are not capable of a warm and wonderful informality, you have to be a bit cold towards them, maybe even short. It’s certainly back on you, and I congratulate you again on being concerned with your own intention. You can work on that as best you can.
But also: don’t deny yourself this necessary assessment. We distinguish that from being judgmental, which we see as totally negative. Being judgmental is going on a big ego trip yourself and assuming you can totally sum up another human being. We say that is a terrible, mean-spirited thing on anybody’s part to be judgmental, to think you can play God and totally judge another person in their totality, irrespective of how they’re coming on to you at the moment.
But as when someone attacks you physically and you have every right of self-defense, and hopefully you know some judo where you can kind-of slough them off without hurting them in return, so in your position now, you can learn techniques of how to handle these folks without returning meanness for meanness. One technique is being rather formal with them. Intention and consciousness is the key.
Student: Thank you.
Closing
MICHAEL: Well, it’s getting late. Let me wrap up this session by saying thank you all.
Student: Thank you. I really appreciate this.
MICHAEL: It’s what Mother Spirit and I live for–to have these exchanges with folks. I appreciate your inner honesty and standing nakedly forth with what you really are curious about.
Student: Thank you.
MICHAEL: I must repeat again from some of our lessons that you are literally giving me reality in your mind. It’s almost an epiphany, a life-changing epiphany with people to be aware of what the Urantia Book maybe too nonchalantly calls your co-creativity. It’s the total subjectivity and also the humility to be aware of the enormity around you, and yet realize that you are co-creating that for yourself, and it is coloring everything that you experience.
We’ve taught so many times on the classical example of two people standing in front of a painting, and one totally loves the technique, and knows the artist, and knows the artist’s whole development. For them the painting there on the wall has all that meaning. Yet their dear friend standing right beside them and seeing the same painting, absolutely hates the technique and sees nothing there but a mess of color. Perhaps it’s an abstract painting, they’re totally into representational art, and this is just a big smear and a baby messing around could do better.
Are they seeing the same thing? And yet, there it is on the wall. It has its independent existence. But to really, deeply take this example into yourself and then be responsible–be able to respond with deep humility, especially when you are dealing with another human being that you cannot begin to comprehend in their totality? Only God can do that.
Then find delight in this humility? This is why you open your mind to their whole ungraspable reality that’s right in front of you–and dealing with you in turn! They have their whole unique take on reality to share with you.
Humility and openness = making love
This leads to some really delightful, spontaneous exchanges, does it not? Isn’t this truly making love? Isn’t this what it’s all about? It’s the fact that you can share so much–being the unique beings that you are. This is how you are growing, my dear ones. We can only tease you with the notion that it need never stop. This is just another meaning of forever.
Mother Spirit sends you her love and I bid you be in my peace. Good evening.
