2000-02-29-As A Sociologist
Butler PA #95
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: As A Sociologist
o 1.2 Group: Butler TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Tomas
o 2.2 TR: Gerdean
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: As A Sociologist
Group: Butler TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Tomas
TR: Gerdean
Session
Opening
TOMAS: Good evening, my friends. I am Tomas.
THOROAH: Good evening, Tomas.
Lesson
TOMAS:: I am amused to discover and to share with you that my original profession as a sociologist is brought back to me more and more as I work with you here on Urantia. There were so many things about my life that I had let fade from my recollection, not because they were unpleasant memories, no, but because of the accumulation of experiences throughout my lengthy career.
There are many, many eras and experiences which fade somewhat in the memory because of the tendency to live more and more in the now, and when there are no residue hang-over issues from the past, the only generally recognized reason to go back into the past is for the recollection of moments shared in a sublime friendship, but my experience with you has lit the fires of recollection from my career when I was a mortal.
It is therefore a somewhat natural propensity for me to project onto you my interest in sociology and cultural anthropology. Is it not, after all, a natural consideration that in Correcting Time, as we correct errors from the past, the future unfolds with an entirely new configuration, one which provides unlimited opportunity for learning and advancement in the realms of sociology.
In your current vogue you are enthralled by the concept of community, retreats, and other means of living at peace with one another. This is so exciting for me, you see, because it is concrete proof of the encroaching era of Light and Life, for it is therein where brothers and sisters long to befriend each other and practice, as you understand, the Golden Rule and even to go beyond that, but lest we go too far afield, my initial instruction and foundation has been and always will be of a spiritual nature, for it is through the spirit that we are guided, that will advance and aid each civilization undertaken.
But I would like to speak more about the configuration of groups of people, and this does not count a husband/wife team; that’s a partnership, and even when Jesus is a part of the relationship, it is still a relationship of two mortals and that kind of relationship has its own blessings and curses, if you will. The group begins when you have at least three, and from then on each additional person presents an aspect of change for every member of the group. The goal, again, is to be self-governing through your own maturity, through your ethics and morals established through your relationship with Our Father and socialized throughout the brotherhood of man.
This is an ideal having not yet been realized sufficiently to turn the tide of your planetary government. Here I speak of another aspect of the Hundred Monkey Syndrome that has not been attained yet but it is a reasonable goal as we enter into the dawn era of Light and Life on Urantia — to be self-governing and to acknowledge that your peers are also self-governing, not requiring your leadership or counsel, only insofar as your relationship is mutually dependent upon the living God that is understood, respected, revered and worshiped by all.
One day your world will be settled in Light and Life and that will be the culmination, the glorious culmination of all these many thousands and thousands of years of effort on your part and on the part of your relations in the material realm — your predecessors and your progeny — animal, vegetable and mineral — attaining a way of life which gives appropriate acknowledgment and homage to Our Creator.
But until the global attainment, until full stage Light and Life is here, it is fascinating to speculate, in this extremely intriguing environment on Urantia, what might be effected in effort of attaining a degree of fraternity that would allow for the beginning of this potential to begin being realized and actualized. Configuration. Configuration is so important an element that the social architects aspire to bring together those compatible sorts of personalities which will be most effective in their relationship together, even serving throughout the future eras/ages to come.
Always must you remember the configuration of your members. Each occasion provides a different energy package. Each of you are becoming sufficiently astute to know and love each other in understanding of your strengths and in compassion for your weaknesses. By maintaining your spiritual roots, your ethics are able to acknowledge that in any given configuration there are strengths and weaknesses derived from the elements of the configuration.
Dialogue
TOMAS: Was that clear, Thoroah?
THOROAH: I think so.
TOMAS:: If you are in a group of people that you, in your assessment, have ascertained to have certain strengths and certain failings, you will know instinctually, intuitively, and inherently whether or not the configuration of the parties are in a position to make a wise decision about a matter which would be influential in the community at large; whereas a ruling or a determination by another grouping of parties will garner a different response.
I will be elemental and give a crass example of four women in a group will come up with a conclusion and four men in a group will come up with a conclusion and it’s not necessarily so that the women’s conclusion and the men’s conclusion will be the same, and therefore, it would behoove you to appreciate the balance of the four women and the four men intermingled, and with the balance made more equitable, then determine the strengths and the weaknesses of the composition of the community, of the social group, of the family unit, at its largest and most effective point.
This allows for greater representation, greater democracy. It allows for all your brothers and sisters to be a part of the reality of the family. Jesus is the decided head of the household insofar as he is God and has lived as man, therefore he represents, perhaps, the highest ideal. But your future world will be comprised of men and women taking their instructions from the invisible realms, not necessarily from human rulers. In the future there will be public servants in the appropriate sense but rulership, as it is understood in your government and has been known down through the ages, is a step in evolution that will evolve away.
THOROAH: “Evolve away.” I like the sound of that.
TOMAS:: It is therefore very tricky, these times you live in, because you cannot relinquish your leaders, but they cannot be allowed to stranglehold you; and you people, you avant garde of spiritual beliefs and values, are still subject to so much of the effects and cause and effects of your predecessors in politics and in government and in civilization, and so you are incessantly vulnerable to the might that is, even though it may not be right.
As you advance into your paradigms/prototypes of civilization which afford spiritual liberty and qualities having the earmarks of high civilization, you will do well to begin to appreciate the immediate configuration, feeling and sensing the Light and Life qualities therein. As that becomes a reality for you in your intimate associations, in your small groupings, you will feel emboldened to open yourselves to the possibilities of greater embrace, greater connection to others, and thus expanding the configuration and subsequently expanding Light and Life. I will leave it at that, for now. How are you?
THOROAH: Great. As I mentioned to Dan and Jill today, I feel as though I may have had a lobotomy. The last few weeks I haven’t had the same things going through my brain all the time. My life is just kind of up in the air, it seems like, and it feels good on one hand and it feels different and strange on the other.
TOMAS:: Yes.
THOROAH: And I’m not exactly sure what I’m feeling or what I feel about what I am feeling, but it just seems like I’m going through a change.
TOMAS:: I am certain that you are. I don’t know how you could not be going through changes, under all these circumstances. I could list several circumstances that are obvious; I however want to point out that feelings are simply feelings and whatever they are, they will pass, but the spirit is a reality that will not go away. It is constant and steady and not as invasive or as dramatic as feelings, nor is it as exhausting. And so perhaps as you stand naked on your new plateau of growth, you are able to discern that you are somewhat removed from your habits of your previous understanding, and so everything is different. The configuration of Thoroah is different.
And of course that immediately reminds me that each of you are constantly undergoing change and in this, too, each configuration is different. If it isn’t different, in a growing sense, it will become stagnant and stale and in need of a Fatherly fix, which, given your integrity, sincerity and intent, you will be provided with the impetus you desire.
Your personal teachers have been working with you diligently for several months. Your health habits have changed and they are paying off.
The geographic changes coming up are immense and your employment and financial circumstances are in limbo. It is difficult, thus, to get a handle on anything familiar and you are forced to resort to faith and you are finding it alive, flowing, and maleable, but hard to control. How fun for you to be experiencing these growth steps and exploring these opportunities. So you have been feeling odd.
THOROAH: Well, I have to say you explained the way I feel exquisitely, and that’s another one of the benefits of having the chance to have these conversations. You are as a sounding board because I can talk to you about the things I am thinking about and you give me a reasonable sounding board so that I know that I’m not crazy. If I have an idea and it’s good you let me know that and if it’s not, you let me understand why it’s not. That is such a valuable thing to have, from a mortal standpoint. You mentioned the conversation and the guidance will be coming mostly from the spiritual side, in the future. I had to laugh, as though it would be almost a complete abdication on the mortal’s behalf to allow the spiritual side to “tell us what to do”.
TOMAS:: What a well-chosen word. “Abdicate” your throne. Long live the King.
THOROAH: But having this conversation right now about that, this is so invaluable. I can’t take it for granted and I learn more about it every time we have a session and I’m getting a little more zealous about how to let people know that they can have spiritual conversation without telling them they can have spiritual conversation.
TOMAS:: These are the challenges we face also. Understood. We are making progress, however, you will notice. When we let Our Father reign, his will is done. We don’t have to work as hard as we think we do.
THOROUGH: You know what I have to work hard at, Tomas, is understanding what letting go really means. It’s easy to say “let go and let God” but I’m not really sure what it is that I need to let go of.
TOMAS:: This of course is why it is difficult to let go. Every aspect of the issue has to be investigated fully in order for you to finally release what it is that is not good for you, while you may retain that which has been good for you or might continue to have value. But to simply say, “let go and let God”, that is a difficult assignment for a mortal, and in respect to your intelligence and your free will, we would expect you to investigate your options and appreciate that in the beginning a child will want to have his cake and eat it too, will try to get away with anything just to find out how far its limitations run, but in time the appropriate guidelines are learned and enjoyed, stretched and sometimes comforted, and so there comes to be a realm of operation which maximizes the personality potential in service and in enjoyment of the life. That is the place which one would aspire to, were one to aspire toward human individuality, a unique child of God.
THOROAH: You can only get there by experience, I would assume. When you experience doing the right thing and the requisite results of doing the right thing, if you do that enough, pretty soon you understand what doing the right thing gets you, so as you learn to do that, give that to God, that experience must be what we keep going back to.
TOMAS:: Yes, yes indeed, and your parallel challenge is to recognize that many of your habits are natural to you and comfortable for you but they are not in keeping with His will for you, and so you weed out those less than ideal patterns while you cultivate and flourish within the recognition of your true reality. Then comes the confidence and strength, enabling you to quickly ascertain what to hold onto and what to let go of, or what not to embrace in the first place.
THOROAH: This is when you’re getting good at it.
TOMAS:: This is when you are making use of your adjutant mind spirit of wisdom, and the personal gratification is experienced in the worship circuit that is so much a part of you that rarely gets an opportunity to flourish. Well, that will change as you begin to find happiness within yourself, as you become happy and acknowledge it is because of your immediate and intimate relationship with the Father, your love for Him is such that you honor Him freely and openly, and this, Thoroah, is how you feed His sheep and how you present the Father’s love to them that they might see and know that they, too, can have Our Father as a living experience.
TOMAS:: Where were we?
THOROAH: How to let people know that God loves them just by showing them how much we love them.
TOMAS:: And we know that because we know how much He loves us?
THOROAH: Sometimes I don’t think I know.
TOMAS:: Sometimes is an understatement. We do not know how much the Father loves us. We cannot know except to the extent of our own capacity to perceive what love might be. So as you grow in your awareness of the reality of love, you grow in the awareness of the reality of Our Father, therefore you are able to express Him in how you express your love. This is why love must be redefined frequently, for you are growing and expanding, assuming you are also appreciating your experience of life and not just taking it for granted.
THOROAH: I think I do take it for granted sometimes. Maybe a lot.
TOMAS:: There are certain things you can assume about Our Father and that is right, healthy, appropriate. But there is also the admonition to not presume upon divine mercy and there is the admonition to produce fruit and this requires occasional pruning away of your old branches or aerating your soil, so to speak.
THOROAH: So if we don’t produce fruit and we don’t produce fruit enough, we are no longer alive, is that correct?
TOMAS:: I would have to say that is correct; however there are certain shrubs which only produce every six years, and so who is to say what your production levels ought to be. Only your Thought Adjuster knows for sure.
THOROAH: And that would be grace. Which we can’t presume upon either. It feels real secure, I have so say.
TOMAS:: Grace is such a gift. Such a gift.
THOROAH: That alone is enough to love God.
Closing
TOMAS:: That alone is enough to motivate a loving son to be pleasing in the eyes of the Bestower of such grace. In faith of grace, I will leave you this evening to enjoy the experience of your growing reality.
THOROAH: Thank you, Tomas. TOMAS: Good night.
