2018-09-27-Personality
Lightline #533
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Personality
o 1.2 Group: Lightline 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 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Personality
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit; Mother Spirit, in our last spirit meeting you gave us a good lesson on what it is to be human with our particular kind of time. I am assuming it is different for angels, or Melchizedeks, or other kinds of beings. We humans live in an Eternal Now so that even our past–our recollections and how our past experiences influence us now—and then all our plans and projections in what for us is the future: both of these are so intimately dependent on how we feel and are experiencing this Now that we live in. The simplest way to say it is: It always now, and how we are feeling and experiencing it so totally affects our felt past and what we are capable of projecting into the future.
But because this can be somewhat abstract for folks, Michael, I would like to ask you tonight to maybe be a little more lighthearted and not wrestle with something so profound and ungraspable as time itself. Maybe just tell us a little about ourselves. Give us what you consider some of the more important points of all the different facets of us. The one chapter of the Urantia Book I always love to re-read and recommend to everyone is the chapter called Personality Survival, something that always deeply interests us. Maybe you could elucidate that chapter a bit for us. Thank You.
Lesson
MICHAEAL: Good Evening, this is Michael. Yes, my son, and for all those attending our meeting tonight, that would be fun. Let’s just have some fun and look at human beings in a light-hearted way, and maybe I can fulfill your request and give you, from my point of view, some of the more salient points of all these different parts of you.
For as you say, that chapter in the Urantia Book is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of what a human being is. The rest of the Urantia Book also talks about several dozen other kinds of personal beings–angels, Melchizedeks, Supernaphim, séraphin, cherubim–all the orders of angels and higher celestial beings like the Life Carriers who actually start life on planets like yours.
Personality
We always start with our definition of personality. You are a person, a personal being, and I consider the most salient feature of this is your uniqueness. In this you are not alone among the other kinds of personal beings I just mentioned. Every personal being of all the orders has this uniqueness. No one else is identical to you in all of time and space, and never will be.
The second thing is, that even though everything you are surrounded by and composed of–your body, your mind, your spirit and your soul–everything is in motion and changing except–somewhat like Mother Spirit’s lesson on this Eternal Now you live in–your personality is the one thing that is not changing.
Although this renders you almost impossible of getting a hold on yourself in any way beyond time–as we have said, you are the eye that sees but cannot see itself—it also means, most personally, that you will always be you, a million years from now, a billion years from now. There is part of you that will be continuous and unchanging through all of this.
Creative spirit
MICHAEAL: This is where you are closest to our Father himself and why you were directly created by God. This makes you a creature–deliberately created to go along with the other parts of you. So as impossible it is for you to directly grasp yourself, you are more or less your center where you are, and where you emanate from. You are both outside time and space while you are in it, experiencing all this around you and what you yourself uniquely are. It’s an absolute security that no matter what happens to you–physically, mentally, soulfully—in all of this, all your experiences to come forever–there is some part of you that will be an unchanging continuity tying it all together.
Next, as a human being, you have a very distinct and particular kind of spirit. This is your creativity, my dear ones. This is another direct gift from God, for you are correct in thinking of God as pure spirit, pure creativity. Of all his attributes and abilities, and reality itself, were it not for God’s creativity nothing else would exist: not this whole entire universe that your marvelous telescopes are bringing to you; not all the trillions of trillions of personal beings of all the different orders who are actually creating this physical universe of yours and taking care of it. None of this would exist without God’s creative spirit.
So when we say you are endowed with creative spirit, it means that God is sharing this part of his power with you. It is upon your creative spirit rests the fact that you yourself are co-creating and part of everything that you experience.
Inescapable subjectivity
MICHAEAL: On the one hand this means that pure objectivity is beyond you. For truly only God himself–even beyond Mother Spirit and me–you might say only God is everything, within everything, and all around everything. God is the only one being who is purely objective.
Because some kind of pure objectivity is never yours, it’s so critical that you keep in mind that your reality is specifically yours in a way. Then grant this realization to all the other human beings you share your life with, or are aware of with your TV and personal computers. All human beings are somewhat in their own unique reality, stemming from their own unique personality and their own co-creativity of all they are experiencing. Knowing this is so critical in their relationships with each other.
The great glory of this situation is: it’s what you have to share. You have something unique to you that they don’t have, and this is what the two of you, or the many of you, can share with each other. You can invite each other and expand each other.
Individual creativity and freedom
It’s your creative spirit that gives you your free will. You are not only presented with your reality moment to moment, you yourself can come up with, out of your own creativity, those fun alternatives, unique to you, to give you a choice. Not only are you being presented with a situation, you yourself can come up with something to affect that situation.
This is what gives you a choice. If you were not a spiritual being, you’d be like your favorite cat, or dog, or other pet that does not have this creative spirit. In one way they are only just reactive, even profoundly so with great intelligence, certainly. But they don’t have the personality or spirit that you have. So you are a creative being. Again, this is where God shares one of his greatest powers with you. All personal beings, all personality has this co-creativity, this spiritual power.
Yet you are rather unique among spiritual beings insofar as you have a physical body. Here, I would say, the most critical thing is: part of you is not unique at all but is, in fact, absolutely universal. Part of you obeys universal chemical and physical laws; and is alive with biochemistry, biochemistry so complex it is still beyond your libraries full of biology, still beyond your most advance medicine.
A unique/universal body to be treasured and honored
This physical part of you, my dear, is to be treasured for that very thing. You can if you stay connected with your physical self, if you choose to do this. At least this is the meditation we suggest, a way of staying in touch with your breath and spending a little time each day just being totally one with, and highly conscious of, your physical part. It is critical for your health. It is critical for all your sensations of sight, hearing, your feelings, touch — all of that your body gives you. Part of your body awareness is objective if you can stay in touch with it.
It obeys physical and chemical laws that are universal clear across the cosmos. This is the glory of your order of being. As your Urantia book correctly points out, the angels envy you, that you have this kind of living reality as part of you.
I want to point out too that there is also a uniqueness to this body of yours. Probably the only exception of this is what you call identical twins, two boys or two girls who come from the same fertilized egg that early on splits in two and goes on to make two separate individuals. Your literature is full of all of the special relationships that identical twins have throughout their lives. Still, from the moment they are born and start to experience, the uniqueness of their personalities begins to assert itself. Very soon even identical twins start to have separate bodies. But for 99.9% of the rest of you, you are physically unique to begin with. You can see this in photographs of old-fashioned large families with all the brothers and sisters. Every one came from the same two parents, yet each one is physically somewhat unique.
This thing called mind
MICHAEAL: Then you have this thing called mind. Here is where your Urantia Book talks about the influence that Mother Spirit has right within you, within your mind. First are your dimensions of intuition and perception–direct perception. Second, there’s the way you can store this experience as knowledge; you know something because you’ve done it. Third, there’s the way your understanding can grasp the dozens and dozens of ways things are connected. This is the chemistry and physics we talked about; Mother Spirit’s lesson on time; all your understanding that fills those enormous libraries of yours. It’s the experience that you can share and pass on from generation to generation among yourselves–knowledge and understanding.
Then there’s the more profound and purely mental aspect of courage, your ability to extend yourself into what is rightly unknown and fearful—your ability to go into it anyway. It’s the courage to do what your whole being tells you is the right thing.
Your spirit of counsel
Another dimension of Mother Spirit’s Mind/Spirit Adjutants that she helps you with is what we call her Spirit of Counsel, your being able to relate to and counsel each other. Think of all that you know that you’ve learned from, and have shared with, others. That is what this refers to, so much of it is both a mental and spiritual thing. Think of sitting down with your best friend and talking for hours about all kinds of stuff. It’s also your group ability to form all the complex organizations among people on your planet–the Spirit of Counsel.
Worship—an essence of appreciation
Then you have your purely human quality that no animal has; the spiritual/mental impulse of worship. This encompasses all the ways you can feel within yourself an appreciation for all that is, especially yourselves. It’s your thanking God: Thank you, dear Father, that I am! Here I am!–with all that you’ve endowed me with.
This is appreciating the whole situation surrounding you–from your own home, family, your neighborhood and community; then on and on to your whole world and the universe out there that is going to be your future forever. This is worship–thankfulness to God, thankfulness for what you are, and that you have all these others around you to share your life with.
Wisdom, bringing it all to bear—now
Then there’s the seventh, capping mindful/spiritual quality of wisdom. It’s the way you can bring all these other six facets of your mind and creative spirit to bear on this present moment, this Eternal Now that Mother Spirit talked about you living in. Wisdom is that facility of bringing all you’ve been and known to bear on this present moment. It is not only the mental meanings and associations within this present moment, but the spiritual values within it too. It’s not only what something may mean to you, but what is the value between this and that, what is more important to you. These are your dimensions of mind and spirit.
Then there’s you soul
Then there is that final, fifth, transcendent part of you, not exactly your personality, or spirit, or mind, or body, but your soul. You are a soulful kind of being. Here, Mother Spirit and I think the most important attribute of your soul, my dears, is how it is contra-distinct–not exactly opposite–but very distinct from your memories.
So many folks think of their soul as: just what I remember of myself, as who I’ve been, and what I have done, and all that. True, these are part of your soul, but your soul–the true and full story of your life–is also co-authored with you, by an individualized presence of God.
Your soulfulness is a special kind of reality we call “morontia,” so when you leave your present kind of life and go onto your next, we call that the “morontia realm.” It’s a special word in your Urantia Book that applies to not only the fact of what your life has been for you–all your choices, all your decisions and how they have influenced you and all the people you have known–but the fact that, as a human being, you have a presence of God as part of you.
An individualized presence of God, all yours
This is where God extends a presence of himself to be your life’s companion, literally starting out as an impersonal fragment of God that takes on your personality and life’s experiences. One name for this presence of God is your “Thought Adjuster” that can actually suggest thoughts to you as an integral part of your thinking. This is the origin of some of the best ideas you have ever had. So in terms of your soul, this is why your soul is so much greater than just the memories you can call forth. As the one true possession of your personality, this is the complete story of your life right from the very beginning. Compared to your conscious, readily available memories, your soul is enormous. It is all you have ever been, yet not only as you have experienced it, but also as your fragment of God has experienced it.
Letting your soul come forth
This is why being able to tune in to your soul for even a few precious moments–to relive parts of your life as you actually experienced them at that time–is so precious. This can inform this present you with who you have really been. It can remind and assure you that no matter what happens to you–say you get Alzheimer’s and lose your mind, or something else happens to you mentally or physically—all your human experiences held sacrosanct by a presence of God. This is your soul.
This is also why, for those of you who can get and stay in touch with this true reality of who you have always been–all the ups and downs, all the glories and hardships, all the people you have known–this is why you are rightfully called a very soulful person. It’s why you say your great artists, your musicians and your writers, have soul. There’s so much of themselves and their past experiences they can bring out and demonstrate in their music or their writing.
And so, my dears, you are these complex–wonderfully complex–beings. Mother Spirit and I have our own humble relationship with you. You are one of God’s great ideas, your human order of beings. Though we have a hand in your creation, we are like your human parents who do not directly create life–although some of our own living children, the Life Carriers, do start life on our planets—but are just passing something on. Life truly has its origin in God, and we too are his children, Mother Spirit and I.
Becoming one with your soul, and God’s presence
MICHAEAL: We salute you, my dear ones, for all these five different great aspects of your personalities, your creative spirits, your bodies and minds, and then these marvelous souls you are earning by living. We will always be with you. Your souls are so enormous it is going to take a while for your conscious selves to grow to become one with your souls and the presence of God within you. Then you will be designated another kind of being, but certainly of human origin. You will be a fused being, literally fused with and become one with the presence of God within you. And still!—you will be just starting out.
So enjoy life, my dear ones. Enjoy your bodies. Enjoy your minds. Exercise these creative spirits of yours. From time to time take some time out of your busy lives to be still and let your souls come forth. Now if you have any questions or comments on this or anything else, come on forth.
Dialogue
Student: I have no questions. I just want to say: you said a mouthful, Michael. That was beautiful.
MICHAEAL: : Thank you, my son. It’s always fun for Mother Spirit and me to remind you of the complex beings you are, and give you some appreciation for what your own personality is doing to tie you all together. This is that creative aspect of your personality that can present you as a single person, for yourself and for others.
Student: Thank you. Thank you so much.
MICHAEAL: : You are welcome. Be in my Peace.
Closing
Appreciate your ability to share your life with others
MICHAEAL: Well, my dears, if there are no more questions or comments, let me tease you and encourage you to do your best to appreciate with your sense of worship all that you are and all that you can be for each other. Remember this other great attribute of God our Father is his spiritual power, and then ours too, of sharing ourselves with each other. It’s one way we can be so much more than we are moment to moment by ourselves. True, we are originating so much right out of ourselves with our own creativity. But then there all these other ones all around us, everyone a unique person, and what we have to share with them by way of appreciating them.
It makes your day
Think of walking down a busy city sidewalk, and here they come. Now: to appreciate each one? Somehow or another you are both surrounded by such a field of energy that you can pick up on each other. In just a moment, that shared smile and assurance in each other’s eyes? As you say, it makes your day. So I bid you a fond farewell, for a while. I hope to meet you again this way. I will definitely meet you again—someday—face to face. Be in my Peace. Feel it! Let it comfort you. Let it help you be still, and let your soul come forth. Be in my Peace. Good night.
