2013-05-16-Open to Possibility
Lightline #397
Contents
1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Openness to Possibility
o 1.2 Group: Lightline TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Michael
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Note
o 3.2 Opening
o 3.3 Lesson
o 3.4 Dialogue
o 3.5 Closing
Topic: Openness to Possibility
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Note
See discussion page
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, thank you for being here. We are happy to have this contact with you, as well as the ongoing conversations we have with you sometimes twenty-four/seven, at least when we’re awake, right in our own prayers and meditation. It is comforting to feel you inside us, encouraging us to continue the adventure and be open to that which we can’t anticipate. These sessions with you are a perfect example of this, for how can we anticipate what illimitable spiritual beings have for us?
And so we do our best to follow along with what you’ve encouraged us so much, and that is to be open-minded. We are to open our minds and that means, in one way, suspending most of our past, in this eternal now, in order to welcome uncritically what comes about, trusting that we ourselves will in time come to evaluate it and have it find its place in all of our past, in all of our soul. So: we thank the two of you just for being who and what you are. Amen.
Lesson
MICHAEL: Good evening, my children, this is Michael, and we are just as happy as you are for this kind of contact. We are especially glad when you can have a feeling of us, an experience of us within yourself, and wonder what it is–my Spirit of Truth that you are given to help you feel your way through life. You can be aware from time to time and think about Mother Spirit’s Adjutants, and how she’s actually part of your mentality. She’s not only funneling the whole Cosmic Mind of the universe down to her human children, she’s also giving a little special boost to your intuition, your knowledge and understanding, your courage to keep the adventure open, and open especially to all of those around you, your wonderful community of close friends and acquaintances. And then there are those final two Adjutants of hers of worship, of being thankful for this life of yours, thankful to our mutual Father, and for your slowly acquiring soul of wisdom to appreciate all the foregoing, and be glad. For this “pursuit of happiness”–your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are no small things.
Blind belief and automatic disbelief
MICHAEL: It’s all so subtle, this inner life of yours. That itself is a blessing, to have your inner life full of subtleties and not be tossed around inside. And so we encourage–not only in listening to us, but taking in all of that world out there with all the folks in it—you suspend your disbelief, for disbelief is as numbing and depriving you of opportunities as what you call “blind belief”–blindly believing in certain things simply because of their origin in whatever person or organization. This kind of knee-jerk, automatic disbelief is just as crippling to your soul–to automatically exclude and discount what you would be so much more healthy-minded by entertaining for a while.
Don’t be afraid of this no matter what it is, because even in your nightly news you are sometimes presented with truly, truly obscene and terrible things that folks are doing to each other deliberately. This has been an aspect of all of human history, this amount of deliberate harm that folks do to each other in all realms—physical and mental and spiritual. This is especially true in the spiritual realm where folks do try to control you and render you dis-spirited so you don’t have the psychic and spiritual energy to be an independent, free-thinking person. This is what starves your soul, whether blind belief or automatic disbelief. It’s too much continuity, if you will, of simply what went before–whatever your past, whatever kind of parents you had and their upbringing, whatever kind of society you went out into as a small child.
One reason we teach about the reality of your soul, co-authored by God himself, is to relieve some anxiety about all your past. For it is certain that some of you may lose that very ability of your memories as you get older, or as you are approaching death. It is such a true and valid reassurance to know that God is co-authoring your soul and holding it sacrosanct for you. You need not be anxious in this way about the past: it is being preserved for you.
In your future life to come there’s so much to learn once you get off this particular planet and start rubbing elbows, so to speak, with the survivors of so many other worlds, at all different stages of civilization. There’s also the reuniting with so many that have gone on before you. Even then an open-mindedness will give you an access to an even broader and truer planetary history of Urantia. That was a purpose of the Urantia Book, to give you a fresh take on the last million years of human life, and all the things particular to this world.
Being vulnerable
MICHAEL: Yet this thing of open-mindedness, of refusing yourself blind belief or automatic disbelief can, at first, seem such a vulnerability. Here you are surrounded by all these true believers who are somewhat absent-mindedly or closed-mindedly going about their business—and as it affects you! It seems the only way to hold your own amongst them is to adapt your own closed, fixed ideology, and fight to the death, or kill them, in order to have that survive and thrive.
Then here Mother Spirit and I come offering you the vulnerability of refusing yourself–making it a conscious decision to refuse yourself this kind of seeming certainty. Ask yourselves: what is it like to live in a state of question, to refuse yourself the kind of un-questioning certainty that you see in others? Here again, my children, it is a matter of proportion over a period of time, because as you live in an eternal now, all your values, all your understandings on both a spiritual and mental level are what are guiding you into the future. Where it might appear that, in the immediate circumstances your lack of a certainty that others seem to have leaves you vulnerable to their machinations, still there’s no other way to live given any kind of duration at all, given any thought for your future and how that future is dependent upon your growing.
As we’ve said, so many human problems in the immediate now are at a kind of a loggerheads, a kind of balance, that it takes your own personal creativity, your own creative spirit to move forward. So you deny yourself this certainty that others might seem to have, but really don’t–no living human being is really certain of what’s going to happen tomorrow—and live in a state of question, live in a state of open-mindedness and uncertainty, for this is what enables you to grow. This is that inner space/room to grow, to blossom forth, to stretch out, to entertain whatever comes your way and, beyond that, to seek out and discover what can appear as a kind of hollow spot in your reasoning, in your life. The easiest way, if you associate yourself inside with any particular organization, is to seek out it’s opposite whether it’s in political or social realms, or in terms of national/international relationships. Get a sense for where you are, but then seek out the exact opposite and train yourself to entertain all of this.
It’s that stretch we’ve compared before to having one foot on the dock and one foot out there in an untethered boat, bobbing around. It’s only you that’s holding those two things together. You have one foot in the real past—your soul–to meditate on and let come forth with your true past and all that it has held. Yet you have your other foot out there, in a very knowing way, in this untethered boat bobbing around–this state of question of denying yourself some fixed ideology. This is what orients you towards duration. In the valuable but limited ego sense of yourself, of who you are and who you’ve been, this is more towards what you are becoming, for this too is a kind of infinity, this eternity that you’re facing. For it’s not only of duration in extent of time–what you call forever–it’s also in the height and breadth and depth of your growth, of growing into meeting this uncertain and, to you, impenetrable future.
Consciously creating your own future
This is where it takes courage to deny yourself a seeming easy out that will only cripple you in the long run, and foreclose so many opportunities. It means you have to dance, and get used to dancing lively to this stream of time that cannot be stopped or held still. This is the stream of life itself, right from our Father who, as we’ve taught so many times, is himself constantly creating a whole Creation that is not only continuing but also unique each moment. Strive to be like this, to be creative yourself, and to adapt to an ever changing and opening future. Now let me practice what I preach here and be open to your comments or questions.
Dialogue
Student: Good evening, Michael. Thank you for your lesson. It rang loud and clear and, in fact, stimulated me to step up with a situation. I don’t mean for you to get embroiled in the antics of your children, but let me pose a question. In the Urantia papers, which we regard as our text, it indicates that when people leave here, when they die and go to Mansonia, they do not come back and talk to us. In other words, we cannot chat with the dearly departed. They’re not allowed to send messages. Even Andon and Fonta were not allowed to send messages, although their greeting did squeak through. So I thought perhaps I would ask it this way: why is it set up that way? Perhaps if we could see the reason for it, the logic behind it, we could embrace divine wisdom a little more readily. Could you accommodate that?
Acknowledging death
MICHAEL: Well yes, my dear. The reason for this is what we’ve teased you with sometimes, the notion that human ideas have a whole history of reincarnation, and although it has many truths in it–first of all about the fact of going on to a succession of lives–we simply say you start here. In a way you can think of this life of yours as being in the womb of a first life, and you are born into the lives to come as you regain consciousness on the mansion worlds.
It’s stated very clearly, and this is very true, my dears, that you will never forget that moment of awakening and the enormous realization of survival. You have now left the womb of your first life, you have gone through a very major change called death, and that is quite an experience. Surviving that, reawakening from that is something that you will cherish for all eternity. Living is so much a part of what you are now, death does have enormous meaning. It is such an enormous change that the human mind and the human imagination–your creative spirit, have tried throughout history to, by every possible means, find a way around that seeming barrier. Yet even, I think, even in some of your Shakespearean plays it’s noted that death is that native country from whom no traveler returns. And the reason for this is: we use the analogy it would be like a baby trying to get back into its mother.
The main reason there is no such thing as a succession of human lives, as you are, is that very experience of death and reawakening in a very changed and soulful reality; keeping in mind the closest English equivalent to the word “morontia” is “soul.” You reawaken in a more soulful reality where everything is changed, even you yourself and then all of those around you, being able to walk out into a world in which the very physical senses you have will give you a completely different take on even the new animal and the plant life. All this is the totality of the change of the morontia worlds that we encourage you to read, and study, and get a feeling for this as much as you can.
All of these changes preclude and obviate the necessity for any kind of a subsequent human life as you know it now. As there’s nothing for a baby to be gained by going back into its mother, there’s nothing for you to be gained by living another human life. The morontia existence was set up by spiritual beings with hundreds of billions of years of experience, to meet all of the needs you will still have as a personal being.
For now it’s your trust in that, that first of all, there’s no need whatsoever for you to have successive human lives, to come back here. It’s also an acknowledgement on the part of the spiritual community, an acknowledgement of the meaning and the value, the spiritual value of death that is not to be obviated or just dismissed, nonchalantly dismissed in any way.
No “returning” but possible communication
So while there is no returning here to the earth, that kind of communication between now totally separate kinds of beings is also not possible. Yet those folks who have a feeling or an experience, themselves, of communicating with those who have gone on; this could only come about by way of a connecting link, right, some kind of medium of communication. And this could only be by way of what they still have in common. That is the Universal Father–that part of you that is right now part of your soul–his indwelling spirit.
Like every other thing presented to you, this has to be evaluated on your own. In other words, things such as reincarnation–as so many people do believe in this–you yourself have to feel, within your own understanding, you have to feel for what they are communicating–their own need for this and how this fits into their scheme of things–as to whether or not this is valid for you.
As I said tonight, it doesn’t hurt you; or in other words, it’s to your benefit to entertain anything presented to you like this. You yourself must evaluate it. We’re just saying there is no need for this, other than the human need to be reassured that there is life after death.
As to any communications from the other side, as you call it, just be open-minded yourself and evaluate the content in terms of your own sense of things. This may seem a paradox, my daughter, but it’s being open to whatever is presented this way, and yet having your own deep understanding of how there is no need for this, only a human desire to transcend death. That is something that each of you will encounter in your own personal life experience. But at the same time, don’t close your minds to what is being presented. Now does that give you a better grasp of this real situation?
Student: No, I’m afraid it doesn’t. It’s very substantial, and it gave me more to think about, but my peers are transmitting people that we’ve known here in the Teaching Mission who went on to Mansonia. They’re transmitting them as if they were teachers, and that doesn’t sit well with me because of what the book says. Yet if I say, “Well, the Urantia Book says we can’t do that; they don’t speak to us once they’re gone,” then I’m accused of being a fundamentalist book-thumper. So I need to have a better reason than that. When you suggest I just leave it open for everyone to interpret; well, that’s where it is, but it doesn’t give me any peace of mind at all because to me it’s error. I’m trying to forestall further error least we run into complete chaos. We’re supposed to be teaching principles that are progressive, not retrogressive. Things one cannot decide for another
MICHAEL: Yes, my dear, I understand that. But this is something you cannot do for another person! In other words, in your Teaching Mission you have to eschew any claim to pure objectivity, and trust in other people to make up their own minds. You can present your arguments as to why something may or may not be valid, but that validity is strictly for yourself. This is not something you can do for other people. None of you, no human being, no personal being ever escapes their own subjectivity–only God, in this sense–not even Mother Spirit nor I. We are not God. Only God is omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent. We can only suggest that, in your discussions with each other, you don’t invoke some kind of objectivity that you are not capable of, and present something as unalterable fact, when for other people this is a valid experience of theirs.
Student: Alright.
MICHAEL: You see what I mean?
Student: I do.
MICHAEL: It’s something that, again, this is a self-limitation you put upon yourself. In other words, you eschew, you deny yourself stating things as if they were objective facts. It’s so much more valid–from our point of view–if you keep in mind, and even if you state: This is only my opinion; this is how I see it.
Student: Well, yes, of course.
MICHAEL: Right. This is what I mean by being open to whatever’s presented.
Student: I just wanted you to take my side, you see.
MICHAEL: Well, reality is not so simple as that. What we’re saying is that mainly for folks who have passed over, there is no need for them to contact others. There’s nothing they could say or do that will, in a sense, totally mitigate the necessity for your faith in what is to come, and then too in the Author–with a capital “A”–of not only what is to come, but of your life right now. It is in God’s hands. It is God’s plan on this large a scale–the whole morontial life, because it’s not only in our Local Universe, but it’s rather universal. There is no need for those who have gone on to come back or even to communicate in order to continue on.
Believe me, when you awaken on the mansion world, there’s a reason why you will never forget it for all eternity. And it’s not on Mother Spirit’s or my part to pretend that we can adequately portray what that experience will be for you–except for all of our other trillions, literally trillions, of sons and daughters who have experienced it.
Student: Well, I look forward to it.
Being judgmental V.S. self-limiting evaluation
MICHAEL: Definitely. And in your assessing things, I think this is the difference between being judgmental and taking upon yourself the seeming God-like ability to judge another, and another’s expressions even, in his or her totality; and simply expressing your own personal evaluation…
Student: Right…
MICHAEL: …of what they are doing and saying. That’s the difference between being judgmental and yet acknowledging the need for evaluation.
Student: Okay. Thank you.
MICHAEL: Right. Hopefully that keeps the exchanges on your Teaching Mission List open and welcoming all points of view. Thank you for the question. Be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
Student: Michael, I would just like to use this opportunity, and you, to forward my love for Gerdean to her. I could just give her a big hug right now. I thank you again for all of your lessons. We certainly do appreciate this. So: we tune in.
MICHAEL: : Well, my dear, I’m as close–Mother Spirit and I are as close as your next thought, your next prayer, your next meditation. You see…
We are part of the unforeseeable adventure for Michael and Mother Spirit
Student: I feel that way all the time.
MICHAEL: (Michael, laughing:) …you are our adventure, because we don’t know what you’re going to do next!
Student: True.
MICHAEL: That is something…
Student: We keep you on your toes.
MICHAEL: Keeps us, yes, not only on our toes, but on our own worship and our own appreciation of our mutual Father, God, for the mystery of personality. Even the authors of that chapter in your Urantia Book we love to point you toward–Personality Survival–because it has such a wonderful description of what a human being is; even those authors say they cannot comprehensively define what personality is. It’s a transcendent reality that you are. You can’t even–to a degree–you can’t even fully grasp who you are moment to moment. It will take a whole eternity to stretch yourself out and find out what you are capable of.
Student: It’s a wonderful plan. You can’t beat it.
MICHAEL: This is why in one way we say that only God is of sufficient infinity to create an infinity of unique beings, even of so many hundreds and hundreds of orders of personal beings. And even though none of this is empirical, none of this can be demonstrated beyond what I’m doing now–my words and the way they resonate or not with your own feeling of what reality is and can be–this is that opacity of the future that awaits each moment to reveal itself. But then that’s just another word for the infinity of eternity. You’re right in the middle of it already.
Student: Hard to comprehend.
MICHAEL: So thank you, my daughter. Be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
MICHAEL: Well then, my dear children, let me bid you another Good Evening and hope that it is good where you are. It is good when you come to hear or read these lessons and these questions and answers we enjoy so much. As our dear sister pointed out, there is a necessity to reach for principles. It’s part of your understanding. We’ve called knowledge your ability to record experience. There it is: just the raw experience itself and what you know because you’ve done it; you’ve experienced it. But then think of all the hundred-and-one ways that you understand this experience–all the categories that you put it in–all the comparing and contrasting–all that goes into your understanding. Then there’s the sum total of all that being a kind of super-transcendent spiritual reality of wisdom.
The impossibility of pure objectivity
There is this need to discover principles, seeming truths that extend over a broad range of experience. Yet you very quickly find that there are no purely objective principles because, as Mother Spirit taught last time, you’re not an object. You’re a subject, and you have a whole subjective reality. It’s a part of self-honesty within yourself, and then too an honesty of expression to others, to acknowledge this. Simply say, “It is my opinion,” or, “The way it appears to me…”
Because so much of your discourse, especially your extremely angry or even insulting and dismissive comments toward each other is this assumption of objectivity, of essentially playing God and stating things as pure principle, or objective fact. Whereas, in reality, principles are simply delimited by other principles. This is especially true in social, political, and economic realms. You are not God. I am not God. None of us have his totally comprehensive grasp on all of reality. And on your order of human being, especially with what is the other inner reality of another person–even your closest friends, your lovers that you’ve shared so much with–there still is, we hope, the acknowledgment of the ultimate mystery of personality—meaning: another personality. And you are hundreds of thousands, and millions, and billions on your planet.
Empathy
By denying yourself this pure objectivity, and that kind of an arrogant stance, by denying this yourself in your expressions, you are approaching the greater reality of your subject-ness, your subjectivity, your inner life. You’ll also be acknowledging this in others, that inner life of theirs that you must try as best you can to feel. It’s called empathy. For it’s the lack of this sharing that is the root of the greatest evil amongst folks–their lack of empathy, their total inability to understand what they’re causing to happen inside another person, especially pain of either a physical or mental or spiritual nature.
Do glory in your subjectivity because this too is God’s plan–your unique personality and then your whole unique universe that surrounds you. So glory in this, my children. Have this deep abiding trust and faith in your Creator by acknowledging it’s his creation of all these others.
Closing
MICHAEL: Tonight is a lesson on the limitations that you willfully and wondrously accept for yourself. By doing so you become a good citizen and a good person for others. I thank you for opening yourselves to me. Good Evening.
