2011-03-17-Mystery of Personality
Lightline #299
Contents
1Heading
1Topic: Mystery of Personality
2Group: Lightline TeaM
2Facilitators
1Teacher: Michael
2TR: JL
3Session
1Opening
2Lesson
2.1Personality
2.2Identity
2.3Defense
2.4Potential
3Dialogue
3.1Fusion
3.2Catastrophism
3.3Knowledge
3.4Morality
4Closing
Heading
Topic: Mystery of Personality
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
JL: Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Welcome. Once again we get to say that wonderful word: welcome. Tonight I would make a request and that is, once we accept this vision of yours that we are indeed caught up in a great spiritual Renaissance all over the world with the coming of the Correcting Time and all the topsy-turvy things that leads into–socially and economically, nationally, religiously, and all aspects of our lives we are now being severely challenged with; we do welcome and invite you to go where the nitty gets gritty and be down-to-earth with respect to our day to day decision making. Help us in that realm as much as you can. For this we are most thankful, thankful that you, Michael, had a life like ours, and you, Mother Spirit, were able to share that so fully with him. May we do the same. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael. Mother Spirit and I do enjoy your welcome and we bounce it back right to you. We welcome you as well. We welcome you to visit with us right in your mind, right within you deep inside here where we are also company with our Father. We invite you to welcome and be aware, as much as you can, of these spiritual influences in your life. We even tease you with the notion that the main difficulty in feeling us and experiencing us as something distinct from yourself is primarily because we have always been here.
Lesson
Personality
The fathomless mystery of personality
MICHAEL: We have always been a part of you, especially your Father Fragment, God’s own Mystery Monitor taking on your life. It might have been the origin, and probably was the origin of some of your greatest ideas. So it is nice to acknowledge that and be aware and thankful, appreciative, and worshipful for what the Father has contributed to your life as these great ideas you got right out of the blue–sometimes when you needed them so desperately. You were finally able to open yourself and say with all your heart, as we suggested, “Dear Father, what do I do next?”
Tonight I would like to open with a real mystery, a real, bottomless, fathomless mystery, and that is your essence–who and what you are. We call this mystery personality because it comes from a personal Being, an ultimate, infinite, and absolute personal Being who will always be so infinitely more than what we can conceptualize or experience, even given the infinity of time, the eternity stretching out before us. We will never encompass—personally–the very Encompassing that holds us. We will never be the same or even approximate this Source of all personality of hundreds and hundreds of different orders scattered across all of creation.
One mystery of personality, this reality of personality, is the quality of uniqueness. We know it is hard for you to grasp how this uniqueness of each personality is distinct from any kind of identity that you can put upon it. How can something be unique yet have no identity? That identity, my dears, is what you take on. In other words, it is not still, and never will be, quite you, you who are this uniqueness, this encompassing, this quality you share with God alone. Mother Spirit and I can perceive it, detect it, but it is something you share to some degree with your Father alone. He is the prime unique Being like no other, and this quality, this essence he bestows upon you as part of your being. And you have an innate ability as a creative, spiritual being the ability to organize, to unify and bring into an oneness of perception and realization whatever you encounter.
So off you start. At first you’re only a squalling, bloody, little bundle of life that knows how to nurse, and feel differences in temperature, and feel hunger. Then pretty soon you have some eyes and you can see things. Soon enough you have little hands out there that can grab things and put them in your mouth, so you are kind-of a seeing and grabbing and eating being for a while. Then comes that enormous existential, traumatic experience of separation, separation from your mother. Soon after comes the feeling of who you are. All of a sudden there is a “me” and what you call the “terrible twos and threes.” There is a “me” in existence. Soon after there is a “mine”–all those things your little hands can grab hold of: these are “mine.” So an ego, a sense of yourself comes about as you have this ability to unify yourself.
Identity
The hunger for identity
But with this, shall we say, hunger for identity, you also get this other ability to identify with something. At first it is just what tastes good and what you can see, then what your hands can grab hold of. Your personality has the ability to bring all this together in a unity of perception, a worldview. I am just going through all this to remind you that each one of you personally has come through all of these stages. It is like your personality is hungry to use its ability to unify stuff and this hunger comes out as goodness, a feeling of goodness of identifying with something.
So you identify with your parents, you identify with your family, you identify with all those things that you call “mine.” Then you go out into the world and soon enough, as a teenager, you are identifying with a small town or part of a neighborhood in a large city. You identify with a particular sex, perhaps with a certain kind of activity. You are a football player, or the Homecoming Queen, a scholar, or just one of the gang hanging out–all these identifications with so much of what you may question tonight in terms of society, or politics, economics. You just automatically, naturally identify with these ways you were raised.
But now we are in a Renaissance. We are in a topsy-turvy world brought about by an explosion of communications. In this we have individuals for the first time in history communicating so much more directly with one another. The marketplace of ideas, as you call it, has suddenly exploded, exploded all over the world. Mother Spirit in her last lesson likened it to thinking of the various political organizations all over the world as little islands of fairly fixed customs, little islands in the stream of information now flowing all around them and challenging them. This is good. This is necessary. This is just another stage of planetary evolution, simply with these electronic devices your minds delight in creating, that comes to all worlds at a certain stage of technological development; it’s that fundamental.
So tonight I would like to ask each of you how this affects you personally given all that you have identified with, yourself, right up to tonight. That is part of your very ego structure–who you think and feel yourself to be. This is what gives you identity to the degree it is particular: you are a certain sex; you are a certain cultured being depending on where in the world you grew up, even where in a nation/state, or city, or what family. All these things you identify with and give your life meaning can, at the very same time, also be limiting factors. Almost everything you can think of, and identify with, has an opposite. If you are a male then there are all those females running around, and vice versa. If you were raised on a farm then there are all those people in the big cities, and vice versa. If you are American then there are those Chinese, and Japanese going through all their troubles right now. There is the Middle East in turmoil, and the Russians; there are the South Africans. All this is available to you now, so how is your own identification a limit?
Let me ask you to be very honest with yourself and think about turning on your television and tuning in to some commentator who is expressing that which is almost antithetical to what you believe to be the true story or the right way of looking at things. It is here I would like to suggest that, beyond the cynicism or the entertainment value that all your commentators have to have today to be listened to or seen, I think most of you are aware that their comments are largely a matter of perception, especially along socially or politically contentious lines such as what to do with the present economic situation. You are aware of this whole range from the far left, to the left, to the center, to the right, to the far right is a whole spectrum of ways of perceiving the situation. So beyond any kind of cynicism or pure entertainment value, these people actually see things differently.
I call your attention to a very common thing. As you tune in your attention to someone who is not within your own realm of how to see things, you can feel your mind instantly arguing with every point being made. This is a natural defensive mechanism; it operates automatically. This is a very thing I challenge you to question and, if you can, get over it. For to be truly independently-minded, to be truly your own person, to withdraw all the automatic identifications you were merely raised with and have acquired up to now, to truly know what the other side thinks about things and, beyond that, how they perceive things, you have to have the ability to entertain and to truly want to understand how someone else–especially the other side–thinks about things: how they see things.
Defense
Automatic defense mechanisms
I know there is a great anxiety in this as you are exposed to any contrary, distinct opinions to your own. It does arouse enormous defensive mechanisms. But here, my children, you have to trust that there is within you, if you will only allow it, there is within you an ability to rise to a greater level than what this contention brings about. This is not a compromise. This is a synthesis. This is a creative act that your mind is capable of doing, knowing fully both sides of any argument, any dispute, or even any perception of how it looks. Your mind is capable of rising above this, realizing the facts involved, the true information irrespective of the spin or, as you might say, the twist. You’re arriving at something that is truly a greater reality than either of these contentious opinions, and that reality, my dears, is you. That will be your unique realization.
This is the most valuable thing that you have to offer, first to yourself, then those around you, your loved ones. You yourself have to be this synthesis. You have to be this creative act of resolving some of these contentious points of view. You yourself have to resolve this polarity that is coming about. To do this you have to be in touch with all aspects, all ways of looking at something. So this is quite a challenge but this is the only way, not only with an individual, but with any collection of individuals. All these collectives, all these various societies; this is what they depend upon. They depend upon the individuals within them because this is the only creative origin. That is where it all comes from: individual minds.
So you have your task before you. As Mother Spirit reminded you, this is not only your duty as a citizen–to be well informed of all the different points of view that are now available to you, with the ability to be independently-minded–to have your own unique point of view and be able to contribute something so necessarily needed at this time: this is also your reward. This is your reward as a child of God because this is what goes in your soul. This is that ability of your personality to come up with its own unique unity of all these very precisely identified things.
Potential
Limitless capacity
You needn’t worry. There is no limit to what your mind can hold. There is no limit to what you can realize. You just need to exercise this facility because this is what it means to be truly open-minded. So whenever you encounter something and you feel that inner defensiveness immediately arguing with whatever you are perceiving, rise above that defensiveness. Really go to the truth in order to orient yourself toward that greater synthesis, that creative ability within yourself. For here, my dears, is where I am riding along with you. This is where Mother Spirit and I feel a great big smile coming over our faces too as we see and feel another one of our children really blossoming in this potential they were born with: to be their own person; to realize the uniqueness of who and what they are.
And again: there is nothing more that the group, the society needs as for its individuals to be this independently-minded. Out of this creativity, out of this synthesis comes the ability then to look around and start taking in other individuals and all of their uniqueness. For at the same time you are going beyond categorizing, generalizing, and pre-judging, more and more you realize the old saying of: What Paul says about Peter tells you more about Paul than it does about Peter. You become more and more familiar with all different kinds of viewpoints. This is what is needed to e-valuate, to truly value what they have for you. You begin to see the humanity in everyone.
So this is my challenge for you tonight: to be broad-minded; to be sensitive to when that defensiveness raises up within you to challenge even taking something in. That is where you need to head. That is what you need to get over your own parochial, narrow-minded limitations. For someday you will have not only a whole world’s points of view to encompass, you will start contacting other orders of personal beings and have their viewpoints, their take on reality to encounter and encompass. It is always now. This very evening is the time to start, and I thank you for opening your minds and opening your hearts to me this evening and embracing this challenge.
If you have any questions or comments, I always welcome these too. Let them come from your heart. Go ahead and ask me what you truly don’t know.
Dialogue
Questioner #1: Michael, I have a question for you.
MICHAEL: Certainly.
Questioner #1: It is off the subject of what you were talking about tonight, though I am going to try to open up my mind to other viewpoints as well. I realize as we are here, and as we go to the next world where there are many orders of beings with different viewpoints, that it is good to start now.
My question is off the track of that particular subject. It is about fusion. I have been reading something from the Urantia book about it, and I have been thinking about it over the years, and I think I read that there are maybe a few every so often who actually fuse while in the flesh. I know you could have fused, but that wasn’t in your purpose to fuse with your adjuster. Of course that same adjuster is now the Personalized Adjuster of all Nebadon.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about fusion, what that entails, what we have to do, and even if it is not here, how it eventually comes about? Is there some process that a person goes through? I’ll just leave it to you to how you would like to answer that.
Fusion
(Adjuster fusion and soulfulness)
MICHAEL: Yes, my son. When you think about merging and becoming one with the presence of God within you, it seems like some impossible thing–in this first stage of your eternal life, identified with this body and mind you are using.
We have approached it before by way of your soul, this possession of yours that is co-created, co-authored if you will, by the presence of God within you. Therefore your soul is very distinct from your memories which are dependent upon your present mental state. To touch even a bit on your soul you have to sit down and pretty much shut out the rest of the world, and quit experiencing it for a while, just to let some past moment in your life swell forth; and be amazed at how much is still there.
And so this soul of yours is also a kind of encompassing to your conscious self right now. This soul of yours gives meaning and value to your day-by-day adventures. It is an active part of your life and an active part of you. But your consciousness, this conscious you we are talking to, has to grow for you to someday, in all consciousness, join with this co-author of your own soul, this presence of God. This is even part of what I was addressing tonight, how you grow your consciousness. I gave a whole lesson tonight on how to get over the very things that limit it–how you can even sense this when you encounter something, shall we say some other political opinion–for a very mundane example–you can feel yourself resisting it or arguing with it. It’s by getting over these defensive reactions, by trusting something in you that is creative, for literally you are co-creating your way along day to day. As you sit here listening to me today, or to those who will come to read these words in the future: you actually are co-creating the sound of my voice or these words on the paper.
Look around your room. You are the living point of view of everything you perceive. So this is what keeps increasing, my son–your consciousness of not only who, but even what you are. If you take greater and greater responsibility, this ability to respond to your entire situation grows. Your personality gets genuine abilities. You can see these abilities as a kind of soul-wealth. As your consciousness grows, you become more and more soulful as more and more of the totality of your experience. Your soul becomes more and more conscious and your personality more and more able to respond. This does reach a point where you do begin to approximate, as a personality, the presence of God within you. You begin to enjoy more and more this totality of all your experience.
So you can see how this is a rare thing to happen when you are so identified with your living, physical being, or even in many Morontia stages to come. These are not only spiritualizing stages–becoming more and more spiritual, your conscious growing more and more, your creativity growing more and more; these are also called de-materializing phases. Because what you are–not only who you are–but what you are is changing.
This reaches an approximation, near, I think–not equal, but a kind of parallel; all of a sudden you and your Thought Adjuster are just right together. This is something you will definitely feel coming on. But by then you will have realized there is nothing to fear, though you may fear it now. What the very presence of God within you–as a human being–is encouraging you to do, may be very fearful to your ego: you may not want to do it.
But finally you realize there is absolutely nothing to fear, either of God or of God’s will. And you will choose to do this. It is the ultimate choice. By then your personality will have grown its willpower to accomplish this. It does not just happen, my son. It is the final, ultimate choice and the final letting go of some kind of notion that you are totally alone, because the presence of God has been with you all along. And this is just another final, further realization of that fact. It is glorious. The only difficulty is we could talk about it forever. But I am giving you a sense of how you are capable of growing towards that moment.
Questioner #1: I really appreciate that explanation, Michael. I think that helps me to see I’ve felt myself heading in that direction. I do know that I have a great deal of growing yet to do. With your talk tonight it is going to help me expand my awareness as far as what I have identified with, and how I can be more open to viewpoints and expand my consciousness, and personality, and continue to make the doing of the Father’s will, my will; and having that as my goal every day. I appreciate very much your explanation to me.
MICHAEL: You are very welcome, my son. Think of it as consciously, continuously growing more soulful. Think of those people you’ve known who have great souls: isn’t this a wonderful thing? First of all that it is there: it exists. Secondly, it is part of you. We kid around that this is–to make a pun–this is your sole—s-o-l-e—possession, the only one you need. So: many people think this is what you truly are. You can think of it more like this is truly what you are becoming. You are also all the mystery of time; but that is for another time. Be in my peace.
Questioner #1: Thank you, Michael
Questioner #2: May I ask a question?
MICHAEL: Certainly.
Questioner #2: Thank you, thank you very much, Michael. It is a blessing to have you here. Can you put the incident in Japan with 10,000 dead in perspective? How do the heavens deal with the crossing-over of such a magnitude? And what would you have done had you been here to help the Japanese? What would you want us to do? Thank you so much.
Catastrophism
Disasters of great magnitude
MICHAEL: Yes, my dear. The numbers have little meaning to Mother Spirit and me, or even to our Father–if you allow me to speak for him. We just see individuals. We just experience individuals. Number has no meaning to us insofar as we approximate infinity, and our Father, of course, is infinite. So if you will, the fate of each single one of these people who lost their life is very much what it states in the Urantia Book. Whether they become one of the sleeping survivors or proceed directly to the mansion world, that is a very individual thing–that fate to which they go.
This is part of being on a geologically unstable planet. Were we to adopt a policy of not introducing life to evolve to the human state on a planet until it is fully geologically stable, we would lose millions and millions of years of human life. That is however susceptible to these totally impersonal forces and I myself, when I was a human among you, was as fully susceptible to these forces as one of you. There was no special dispensation for me, if you will. The world’s geological forces were not suddenly held in abeyance for me, as they are not for the people living.
I said once before in terms of, actually, certain human notions of fatalism–even notions of whether individuals caught up in cataclysmic events like this somehow are due for it, or have somehow earned it in a negative way: I said before, about the tsunami that happened several years ago: this is a purely impersonal force. It is due simply to the fact that the planet on which you live is slowly shrinking, slowly cooling over millions and millions of years. You will continue to have these crustal rearrangements nigh on forever, even though they will diminish. The one let loose now your own scientists can understand in terms of plate tectonics, how a certain force built up so that so much energy was released.
It is a purely impersonal thing how it encounters each individual in their individual life, where they were at that moment when the earthquake happened, and then the tsunami. This is all so individual it is almost beyond a human being’s capacity to understand even one or two other people, someone closest to you in your life, maybe someone you’ve lived with for years and years and have some grasp of who and what they are. They still have that uniqueness I spoke about between each individual and their Creator that is theirs alone.
As to what you can do about this, we suggest you be as generous as you can be. Be wise if you seek to help. Really search out and study those organizations that are literally advertising for your help, to convey your help to the Japanese people. Be wise in your giving, but give as much as you can.
Questioner #2: Thank you very much, Michael. Are there people who will go their reward without ever knowing you? Because I know you seek to work with the person irrespective of their beliefs of how they go to the Father–their ephemeral versions of heaven. Some people have never heard of you but are substituting other icons for you. Will they have the privilege at some point before eternity? Will they know you at all?–some of these people who have never heard of Jesus?
Knowledge
Will everyone come to know Michael?
MICHAEL, laughing: Well, in one way they know of me already. I am a part of every human being that lives. Every human being has my little nudge, my boost along the lines of being oriented toward this growth we call adventure. We call it seeking the truth, and discovery. It’s actually a possession in your soul. These lives you live are true whether or not they know me in a Christian sense or in an Urantia book sense with that kind of specificity.
Mother Spirit and I, and our Father are part of everyone living. When they reawaken on the mansion worlds, the very body and mind they will have in that realm, in that more soulful, Morontia realm; they will definitely know me a little bit better. All these spiritual presences that you are capable of experiencing now will be that much more available to you. So yes, upon awakening they will definitely know me. That whole realm is arranged quite differently than even your most advanced civilizations have achieved so far. It is almost a matter of perception.
Questioner #2: I am sure it will be wonderful. Thank you so much. I almost said, God bless you…. (laughter) That is OK. God Bless You.
MICHAEL: I certainly feel very blessed by my Father. That is something that we share, do we not?
Questioner #2: Yes sir, we certainly do share that blessing.
MICHAEL: You are very blessed, my daughter, and I think you know no small measure of my peace.
Questioner #2: Yes sir, I know a great deal of your peace, and I thank the Father and Mother Spirit. (They say amen together)
MICHAEL: My children, if there are no more questions or comments, let me invite you, along with Mother Spirit and myself, to send our prayers to all the still living on this world. Those who have died are in God’s keeping, but for those who are still living, not only those undergoing such terrible hardships and such uncertainty in Japan right now, but all over this world there is still a lot of deliberate violence, one person or another, not only in what you call war on a rather large scale, but also what you call crime–all the suffering that people rather intentionally inflict on someone else. Mother Spirit talked about a peace dividend that is coming about on the earth as more and more individuals are able to be their own people and stand on their own two feet and, if you will, withdraw their unconscious identifications with so many political and social structures around them.
Morality
Evil VS. goodness and light
You have a great word for what is coming about: the localization of events. So it is good to keep this in mind. From our point of view we see the spiritual glow of all the individuals on this planet like a World Soul if you want to think of it that way–all the living experience. Just the love, and the sharing, and the caring so totally outweighs and outshines all the poor, blighted vision that leads to so much cruelty. It is good to keep in mind that the goodness so totally overwhelms and outbalances any of these deliberate, painful things–pain that is caused by deliberate action. Though it might not be easy to see in your own individual situation, this can be a measure of faith and trust in the essential goodness of people, to see that they are all without exception individual children of God’s.
We must admit the whole game is terribly, terribly tilted towards goodness and light. In the whole that is never in question, and never has been, yet for some of you who are in the midst of pain or fear that is a matter of faith. So Mother Spirit and I most humbly acknowledge and thank you for that faith that comes right out your own personality, and right out of your own soul. We most humbly acknowledge the wonderful courage that people do show each other, and for each other. We are all truly blessed.
Closing
Let me say good evening, dear children, dear personal beings whom God grants you your own selves. Good evening, and be in my peace.
