2016-11-17-Creative Spirit & the Imagination
Lightline #500
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Creative Spirit and the Imagination
o 1.2 Group: Lightline TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Nebadonia
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Creative Spirit and the Imagination
Group: Lightline TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, thank you for a beautiful day–you two and our Universal Father. Here in Northern California it was one of those cool but very bright and sunny days with just a little breeze stirring through the redwoods. Then: “When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, and the stars begin to twinkle in the night’”–to quote an old song–it seems like a good time to tune in to Mother Spirit who is in all of us; and give her voice. Amen.
Lesson
NEBADONIA: Good evening, my dear children, this is Nebadonia, your Mother Spirit for this part of the galaxy here-about–the Mother Spirit of Nebadon, your future home on into the distant future, as you would think about it. For you have many personal changes and worlds to visit and live on before Michael and I bid you adieu and send you off into the universe. This is a wonderful local universe and we are very proud of the work we have done, and proud too of the constant progress our children make all over.
Remember, dear ones, a very, very few worlds like your own—so very few–went into rebellion against the well-established, dynamic, advancing, spiritual-evolutionary pattern for our children on all our evolutionary worlds. This is one of the reasons–not the only reason–but one of the reasons Michael chose to have his human life here on Urantia because it desperately could use what he initiated, his spiritual “correcting time”–correcting some of the ways in which your world and its people were let down by higher spiritual beings in authority.
Your social/political world
It might be one of the hardest things for you to see, depending on your own, personal situation, but there is an inexorable evolution happening on your world, especially socially in the way people relate to each other. There are scenes of the most abject horror still happening, deliberately caused by people to terrorize their subjects, and we can only ask you to open your hearts to their suffering. Re-open your minds to all the various political solutions being offered and use your own wisdom to decide among them.
Then go out and do what you can, even something rather easy these days: to cast your vote for your own political leaders. Be a part of this process. Have the responsibility—the ability-to-respond to what your own, deepest wisdom tells you is the way forward. There’s an old expression of “putting your own oar in the water” to help pull things along towards an ever brighter future for everyone.
Michael spoke last time of your creative spirit, the intrinsic part of you that is one of those attributes which, from one person to another, can be the most widely and consciously understood part of them; or the least consciously experienced and understood. He spoke of the illusion that so many folks live in, what they consider to be a total objective reality around them–their situation: for you, even what your eyes are seeing and your ears are hearing right now, and what your body is feeling.
How you interpret and experience reality
But I want to clarify that this is only an illusion if you think you are removed from it and just observing it. Here the key word is interpretation. You are interpreting everything you experience in terms of your past, even from deep within your soul, in terms of meaning and value. Consider two people from greatly different backgrounds seeing the exact same thing; yet this is only in some illusory “objective” way because they are not literally identically seeing even some physical object in front of them.
It can be very meaningful to one and totally meaningless to the other. Then, in the spiritual realm of value, what importance does it have–if any–from one person to another? Obviously the most easily understood difference like this is when two people are looking at something very complex and technological. One person is experiencing just a meaningless squiggle of lines and connections, where another person, familiar with the technology, sees not only what the construction means, but also that it has value just because it was constructed to serve a purpose.
This is what Michael meant when he said that, to a person who has the illusion they are being fully objective, especially with respect to another person, and even more so to another race or culture; by not taking cognizance and being aware of their own subjectivity, their own interpretation, they are living in a kind of personal illusion.
Creative spirit and imagination
NEBADONIA: I sense there are still some to whom the idea of a creative spirit being part of them is still too nebulous, so I would like to contrast it with a more familiar term: imagination. Probably the chief difference between these two is that your creative spiritual nature is so much a part of you, it’s mostly unconscious. It’s just the way you personally/uniquely unify your own sensory apparatus, co-creating–as your Urantia Book puts it–the reality you experience.
Imagination tends to be at least a little more conscious. People can deliberately set out to consciously imagine something. We’ve given many lessons encouraging you to imagine the best, most perfect life for yourselves. Put in the effort, concentration, and focus to really think about what would be the best thing. Then if you want to put in a moral dimension: What is the right thing to do? It may be the very next minute, the next hour, tomorrow. Considering everything: what is the right thing to do?
This takes imagination because it does not yet exist, but you are conscious of doing it. You are using your creative spirit to feel your way along and extend into the future. We encourage you to do this irrespective of how much you may be able to live up to your own sense of rightness. This is a stretch like having one foot on the dock and one foot out in a boat; one foot in the reality you have known so far, and yet one in something kind-of nebulous and floating around as what would you like to have happen? How do see your life?
Because without this orientation, without this inner compass directing you towards what your wisdom tells you is right; without this stretch you don’t grow as fast as you could. You’re just re-acting to things as they come along and only maybe, hopefully, forced to grow to encompass new realities. Yet sometimes folks get destroyed by this challenge because they don’t have their own inner compass to know how they want to grow. They are not consciously using their imagination to extend their own path out there into the future, then keeping that in mind right alongside of what is actually happening.
Imagination run wild
Of course so much of imagination is, as part of your creative spirit, unconscious. Folks can get so totally caught up in their unconscious imagination that it destroys their lives and they have to be institutionalized. Their imagination can run wild and fill them so full of unnecessary fears and reactions that they are more or less paralyzed. Think of all the training folks have to go through who are going into danger–such as firemen or infantrymen–so that an uncontrolled imagination doesn’t misinform their actions.
This is why in your meditation, as you bring your own imagination and your own creative spirit ever more into consciousness, you become ever more free. You become more connected with objective reality as a conscious, humble orientation. This is the way to go to be self-aware and as self-conscious as possible; then strong enough to just let go and be totally involved in your work, in your friends, in your joy.
This is that mental/spiritual stretch, my dear ones, just like stretching all the muscles and joints in your body. It’s the mental and spiritual flexibility that welcomes this next moment and all that it holds. It gives you some way of steering your way through all the alternatives and choices coming at you. It leads to much more open-mindedness and your ability to take in an ever greater variety and spread of information.
Keeping your beginner’s mind
This is what you will be confronted with forever. As Michael likes to tease you: it is a big universe out there. Your Urantia Book so beautifully delineates realm after realm after realm you will grow into. As I said at the beginning, when you’ve come up through the thousands of years of all the worlds you will visit; and all the training you will have received, including the five hundred and some physical and spiritual changes you will have experienced; and Michael and I are bidding you a fond farewell to send you off out into the galaxy: you will still be just beginning.
Think of those who have gone through the physical experience of their entire super universe, then through all the worlds of Havona, and finally achieved Paradise— however many hundreds of millions of years that takes. That is your destiny, my dear ones. So get off to a good start. Meditate and feel–feel your own power of creativity. Use your own imagination like a pathfinder out there in front of you, feeling for possibility. Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, see if you can imagine some of those.
Dialogue
Student: Mother, let me read you something that I jotted down in my notebook today while I was driving. (Aside: So it was jotted down very dangerously, but we won’t discuss that…) This scene is part of our action. God, with whom we are in constant touch, is beyond our scenario. Yet the more we can become one with that, the steadier our hearts. Is this essentially what you just taught us?
Objectivity as an orientation
NEBADONIA: : Oh yes. The main purpose of Michael and I, with these last two lessons, is to give you a lot of examples of how your own creative nature is involved in everything. Even though objectivity can be a pure orientation, getting totally beyond yourself is absolutely impossible forever and ever because, as a creative being yourself, you will always be co-creating your own reality in how you “take” what is happening.
Meditating to gain here-and-now
NEBADONIA: As you noted, there can be an orientation towards, a “becoming one” with the universal spirit that is God. He is a single spirit that is personal and all-encompassing everywhere: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. He is a spirit presence that you can do your best to tune into. This is why we say it is good to do a kind of meditation where you just sit down and say, “OK, God, what do you have for me now–this time?” It helps you realize that every moment of God’s creation is different. I think by giving a respect and desire for this realization you do approach him, and this approach, as you know, is something that will be forever since he is part of you, a presence within you that you can tune in to and let it speak to you.
It is how to get beyond your own programming in a kind of meditation where you aren’t just doing something you’ve already pre-programmed, like many religious exercises. This is just sitting down and giving part of your life over to being open- minded and letting him speak to you. You will be approaching him forever, clear up to the point where you actually merge with him in a Paradise embrace and become, again, an even more advanced kind of being. You will be embraced by the full Trinity and become even a greater being than of all of the millions of years it took you to get to that point. So yes, it begins now. It begins whenever you have that wonderful feeling of being in touch with him.
Student: Yes. Thank you.
Faith
NEBADONIA: : Well: keep on. Keep on keeping on. Keep on with this delight. This is where faith comes in. It’s the confidence and trust in things unseen, even if not fully working out in your life just yet. Still, trust that his guidance is there, and be open to it.
As I said this evening, develop your own sense of what would be the best thing to do, the right thing to do. It’s your sense of morality. What is the right thing to do with respect to yourself, your friends, and others you come in contact with? Even if you can’t yet do the right thing, have the courage to let it influence you. Try it out. Experiment. All this takes a great deal of nerve but it keeps you here and now and up to date with your own life. It keeps you from being overwhelmed and trapped for years in some very terrible incident in your past.
As you probably know, there are folks who had a rough, maybe even brutal childhood which so totally crushed their young spirit they never quite recovered. Clear into their adulthood and old age they are still talking about the mean step-father or whoever did all these things to them. These are poor souls using a terrible experience as an excuse not to try. They need the idea of open-mindedness, of being open to a changing here-and-now—their life–becoming more friendly because of their own creative spirit.
Being aware of your own bias
You just went through a political season doing your best to be open to the different alternatives being presented by a lot of different political folks, and you could probably sense how you related more towards one view or the other. It’s good to be aware of different viewpoints, make your choice, and then live with what your whole society has decided. This is the excitement. This is the fun. This is the wonder of these lives that God has created for us. So carry on. Be in my love.
Student: Thank you.
Closing
NEBADONIA: : And so, my dears, take heart. Take courage. Have a deep respect for your own and another’s creativity for this is how we are all most the children of our Universal Father, God himself. It is our sharing in this ultimate power of his— creativity itself, something bursting out into time and space from nowhere but your own personality.
Extending your hand across differences
NEBADONIA: Michael and I have given you these lessons on how your own self transfigures and transforms your very reality for you; and to be aware of this. Be aware. Feel and see this creativity in others, and how their orientation is coloring everything they experience. This is the hand that folks can extend across differences of race and sex and age and culture. It’s the mutual respect and acknowledgement of creative spiritual beings. Enjoy it. Thrive by this very ability you are given.
Michael and I bid you a good evening. He sends you his peace and I bid you to be in my love. Feel it all through and through. Good night.
Student: Good night, and thank you.
