2007-03-05-Bogus Cultural Attitudes
Marin #121
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Bogus Cultural Attitudes
o 1.2 Group: Marin 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
Topic: Bogus Cultural Attitudes
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, We freely admit we do but barely comprehend the reality of the spiritual dimensions, even those intrinsic to our human nature, that you’ve introduced–you yourselves vast across so many eons of time and light years of space. But: say on. You warm our hearts, and tease our curiosity, and inspire our imaginations with your words of hope and love. And so we do pray you continue. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael of Salvington; this is Jesus of Urantia. Thank you for your warm invitation, my children: I accept. Let’s go forth together, for I too have a soul that is fulfilled with my experiences with you. This is why we call upon you to stretch to taste of the glory that Mother Spirit and I know as we stretch ourselves across our millions of worlds, and get down to every single one of our children. This is our ability we treasure so dearly. This is truly what makes us what we are, and we delight in fulfilling our Father’s purpose for us. And so we invite you to join this glorious game.
Lesson
We hope you understand why we cannot be more forthcoming–from a human point of view–and more completely answer some of your deeper requests. You must understand that we are like any loving, doting parents who stand their little toddlers on their feet, and then hold out their arms almost touching, to encourage their child to take those first few hesitant steps—for you, exercising your self-power of creativity and imagination. And so we reach out to you.
We hope you can feel this. Feel our deep and abiding love coming through as our wisdom, because our wisdom informs us, even more deeply and thoroughly than it can you, yet, of what you can do, what you are capable of. Yes, it does take effort. We must encourage you to exercise yourselves. This way the steps are yours, and they are yours forever. They are what you build yourselves upon. Your soul and your spiritual development depend upon you exercising your own creativity, stepping off into the oft-times scary unknown to follow one of your own ideas.
You can pray for guidance, and we ask you to do so. Just as thoroughly as you can articulate the need, do so. Then wait, open and expectant, for the subtle suggestion. It will be there if you are ready. It will be there if you are ready to step off and apply it–give it a try. It might be something as simple, yet necessary as: what do I do next? How do I fill the next hour? This is the basis for all morality, my children: what is the next, best thing for me to do? You have this capability, but you must exercise it. You can see it is the basis for all your creative art, totalizing in an art of living. This is where it takes nerve, it takes courage to try things because you are becoming aware of all the issues or events that have kept you from trying that very thing before, whether shyness or embarrassment, some previous notions of failure, some other notions of impossibility, or impracticality.
These boundaries could have been very necessary and worthwhile at some previous stage of your development, but you may have outgrown them. You are no longer that you. You have grown. You can do more now. So when you encounter these self-created boundaries—consciously—rejoice! Explore them. Feel them—consciously. Get to know them; get to know why they are. They’re deep insights into the person you once were, but may be no longer. These are little peepholes into your souls, my children. These are one way to relieve those precious moments of your life and get some small comprehension of this growing spiritual dimension of your human nature; get some appreciation of how enormous your souls are.
So: here comes an idea. Just look at it. Try not to reject it out of hand, even if it says, “Pry yourself out of your easy chair and take a walk!”–even though the wind is howling and the snow is blowing sideways. (group laughs) “This is what you need to do; this is your next best step.” Think about issues of health surrounding a, hopefully, ever deeper respect for this physical being you are. Think of the constant reevaluation it takes to get beyond all the old-wives-tales and former wisdom of past ages, still hanging on, but no longer applicable to what you can do with your marvelous body these days.
Sometimes the only way you can achieve here-and-now is to realize what you don’t know. You need to experiment, because no one else can tell you, either. You have to formulate the experiment. You have to understand it. You have to try it. Then you have to evaluate it: did it work? Am I better or worse off? This is why we tease you with the notion of a great chasm yawning in front of you at times, simply because it’s a valid perception. You are getting out towards the edge of what you know, what you’ve already done. There is not only a whole world, there’s a whole universe out there, calling to you: and it’s all unknown. This is your eternal situation. It was created out of our Father’s wisdom and love for us.
Though it might seem counter-intuitive, or even paradoxical, you can find a very sublime and strengthening rest right in the middle of all this dynamic unfolding. That rest, my children, is because you are exercising: you are fulfilling a purpose. You are experiencing what is possible, and you can rest assured in this. There is something called accomplishment. There is a way of evaluating what you’re adding to your soul. Life is not some habitual round, some rabbit-path of least effort. That is what actually stifles your experience of life.
When I was with you as a human myself, in spite of my growing inklings of the kind of being I was before this time, still I was able to keep increasing my own capacity for experience only by staying close to my Father’s will. Very early on I had a wonderful sense of him, keeping me company. This same sense of his presence is available to you. But you have to want it, because one aspect of your free will is that the spiritual community, all the way up to our Father, does not impose itself upon you. You have a genuine choice of ignoring the whole spiritual community, though obviously, for those who were never introduced to it, the choice may not rise to the level of consciousness. One of the great and truly beneficial purposes of mankind’s religions, most valid right down on the person-to-person level, was one person, out of love, telling another what he or she discovered in their inner life.
You can pray for this contact. You can ask for divine guidance and help in every human endeavor. Make this part of your genuine reality-experiments, for true spiritual beings do not ask you to accept anything on blind faith. Rather, seek to know your own, eyes-wide-open faith. Be very familiar with what you are doing, what you are expecting, what you are hoping for, what you are asking for. All this self-knowledge is experience too. It’s real.
So, my dear children, you must try things. You must exercise yourselves. While spirit pervades and gives value to your physical and mental realms of experience, the opposite is similarly true: you need to exercise your mind and your spirit like a muscle, for they too grow with use. This is stepping off and hanging yourself out there, sometimes on the seemingly thin thread of hope and faith. It makes the accomplishments real. There is no substitute for it. As you put it, “It’s its own thing.”
This is the real stuff of your eternal life. This is all the soul stuff you’ll ever have, because it is all you’ll need. It is what is true and actual. It is part and parcel of you being a cosmic fact, an absolute reality involved in changing things by your own creative acts. Something new has come into existence and will ever be a part of the Supreme Being because you created it. In this you are most closely made in Gods’ image. Right now is a good time to start. And so will be five minutes from now, and when tomorrow becomes now.
Yes, I know: you can feel all that inertia piling up, feel those sticky lumps of laziness clinging to your heels. But consider: that just gives you some measure of the effort, because these are not two separate things. The effort is precisely what it takes to overcome the inertia, to reject that laziness holding you back. So be not afraid to feel both. Think of all the stimulants the human race has been enamored with from the beginning of time, just to avoid feeling the effort. Yet the experience of feeling the effort, and the drag, is what makes you strong. So fear it not, my children. Rest right in the accomplishment, in the doing–as counter-intuitive or paradoxical as that might seem. It was all set up this way for a purpose: to feed your soul, to fill your lives with accomplishment, to join with your Father in the creation. If you have any questions or comments this evening, I look forward to hearing them.
Dialogue
Student: Father Michael, I don’t have any questions, just a comment. I’m still working on the last two weeks’ worth of explanations from you and Mother, and also from Welmek–who gave me a standard to judge myself by. I’m beginning to see where I’ve been…not avoiding feeling, but rather lazy. And I’ve also discovered a lot of the things I was afraid to do, was simply being afraid to make mistakes and get punished for them like when I was a young person. That stuff doesn’t exist anymore, except for me; but less so now than before. So thank you very much for your explanations and love.
MICHAEL: You are very welcome, my son. As Mother Nebadonia advised you, Don’t feel like the Lone Stranger. Tonight I wished to address the universality of this basic human situation. A great part of this hesitancy, as your Mother Spirit mentioned, is how in so many ways you must be conservative and not just squander your energies in any-old haphazard way. Your conservatism, these boundaries you feel, may have once had a valid purpose. They need to be understood and respected.
I wanted to address why the fundamental experience of effort is necessary. Your Urantia Book states that while your relationship with God, the Father, is one of son-ship, creature to Creator, your relationship to the Supreme Being purposefully entails effort. You can experience the true reality, the fact of accomplishment. For a human being this means changing and evolving even your own spiritual status. This too is in your hands. So keep striving for the courage to feel, to experience. Do the best, most necessary thing. This is God’s will. You will find it is its own greatest reward. Just keep leaning into it, my son, and find my peace right in the act.
Student: I will, and thank you again.
Student: Michael, I would like to address a question that has been on my mind for a little while now. You’ve often spoken about the opaqueness of the future, yet I’ve read accounts of those who have experienced remote viewing, in the present, and they speak about viewing the future. But we know that it is opaque, and can change with each individual’s decisions at any particular moment. So my question is: what are those, who remote-view the future, what are they seeing–exactly? This confuses me. I was hoping you could address that tonight.
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, the difficulty in answering the question is in its generality. For I think you can intuit that these individuals’ visions are as unique as they are. So my answer must also be general.
We’ve talked about foresight and how it is an intrinsic part of your curiosity, at first, and then your wisdom too as that grows–to try to penetrate the future. One of the benefits of your recently developed scientific, empirical method and the energy/material world it has segregated and brought into focus, is that not only can some effect be noted throughout the entire past, but you can also project it, with mathematical accuracy, into the future. But when you get into the mental and spiritual/creative realms you mentioned, of human and extra-human activity, the future has not happened yet. It has no reality but only what you can think of as potential, existing now.
We say that God can see the omega from the alpha, that his knowledge and wisdom includes all the possible choices of every personal being who is, yet at the same time does not invalidate a single personal choice and that choice’s effect upon that individual. But we would question whether any sub-absolute being has God’s powers. You have a whole hierarchy within the spiritual world—of which you are a part, my son—of validity of foresight. On the human level, the more detailed you examine these claims, you find so much is only belief, and the great power of belief; and so you must evaluate this like everything else. Most individuals who sincerely believe they have this kind of ESP don’t realize it is a species of super-conscious extrapolation from what is already known. At times it seems to them very prescient because it coming from their higher consciousness, and their belief in it can be quite genuine. But you must evaluate it, and do, pretty much as you do everything else.
The future has not happened yet. It is still up in the air—as you say. We believe that even God does not choose to anticipate fully the free-will decisions of his children; just as do neither Mother Spirit nor I. We are truly ridding along with you, and just doing our best too to bring about a good outcome. That is what is at stake, moment to moment. If you think about it, this is what gives an irreversible reality to it all. There is something really happening here. A certain part of it you are beginning to focus on, and realize, cannot be anticipated, just because it is the sum-total of everyone’s ongoing creativity. On the largest scale, that is the Supreme Being. Does this answer your question? (much laughter)
Student: Ahh…yes! (more laughter) Yes. I can just visualize you with your hands out, a few feet away, saying, take that step. In other words…yes, it does answer my question. Thank you, Michael.
MICHAEL: You are welcome, my son. We never mean to belittle the sincerity with which individuals believe in their own abilities and visions, but one is never absolved of the necessity to evaluate these for oneself. So thank you for taking that step towards me. And be in my peace.
Student: Yes, Michael. I have a question about stepping off, or breaking through—whatever you wish to call it. What about the disconnect that appears to me between how I want to live my life, and how I actually do? There’s the ideal—the idealism, and then there’s the reality. When you mentioned inertia and laziness, there is also fear and conventionality. Part of the fear of stepping off from what has been conventional is loneliness. I’m alone, with no safety net: that’s it!
Yet if I do not step off and embrace my ideals of what is true, and is good, and is love, and is decent, I will die at a young age—if I cling to conventionality, and sameness. I will miss God’s original intention for me. That sounds kind-of heavy…(laughter)…but it’s not!–always. So…(heavy sigh)
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, once again I congratulate you on beginning to feel, and accept with that feeling, all these different strands pulling you this way and that. This is the first necessary step–the determination not to be afraid of feeling what you say is a disconnect—we call it a stretch—between the ideal and the real. As we’ve said before, it’s like having one foot on a dock and the other in a boat, and you are beginning to be aware of how loose the tether is between the two. You might even be ready for the realization you are the only tether between the two. You are the connection. The dock is the past, or what is known—what at least seems to be fixed, while the boat is bobbing around with the living flowing of time and circumstance rushing by. And yes, it is true, you can suffer a lot of little deaths all along by a refusal to live.
Student: That’s the quandary I feel. What action—even an inner one of stillness—am I to take? Is it internal?
MICHAEL: Only in its inception: it has to begin in your creative imagination, the spiritual source of your freedom. You yourself have to create an alternative to all the other that is—which no animal can do—which is what constitutes you a human being, a creature of free-will dignity. You have the creative capacity to come up with something other than all the rest, and that gives you a choice. This is what you have to explore with experiments. This was my lesson tonight, and I can feel how it has set you all back to reevaluating so much. That was my purpose.
The more you can be aware of—consciously–deciding, day by day, what you want to do, and what you will do, maybe even what you will be forced to do; it is these conscious decisions that actually give you rest, because they are accomplishments that add to your soul. Because the stream is flowing by and each day is bringing something new, this is the acceptance that experience will be different all through your life. This constitutes a full life—staying right there in the middle and not opting for the dock and what only seems to be safely known; or haphazardly casting yourself adrift with an irresponsible “Wheeeee…,” and coming to an immediate disaster.
Student: Yes, I am very much aware of that possibility. I do have a sense that when the change is necessary, or is to occur, it will happen; it will be effortless. When I see the boat and the dock, I see myself in the boat, but the boat is securely tethered to the dock. So… Anyway, that’s where I see myself.
MICHAEL: Well, you still have one foot very much on the dock. You expressed this as the known, the conventional, the real. We’re trying to get you to face the fact there is no tether. You are the connecting link between your past and your living now. But you do have company. (Michael laughs, and is joined) If you look up and down the river bank, you can see all of humanity, even all the spiritual community, in the same situation.
There is no such thing as effortlessness, except where you have already paid the price and are actually coasting along on previous accomplishments—for a while. When things seem to come effortlessly, it’s because you’ve already paid your dues. The more willingly you do that, the more effortless it can seem. But the drag is always there. That’s the other half of reality—if you will. It’s why it takes effort. Without this necessity there would be no reality, nothing really happening.
Student: Thank you—more stuff to ponder.
MICHAEL: Yes: be in my peace.
Student: Michael, in this amazing teaching, this philosophic presentation, it sounds like reality is this situation in which we are faced with a decision, and we are the bridge between the dock and this little boat, and there is no other reality other than constantly being this kind of bridge between the known and the unknown, between something that doesn’t require paying dues—something conventional, and something that does require paying the dues of effort, of right effort. When we make what Buddha calls the right effort—not too much, not too little, but just the right amount, to spark a soul-discovering decision, or soul-making decision, that is what real living is. It’s called wisdom. Wise living is being in that place and not being presumptuous, on the one hand, and overly audacious, nor being too timid on the other hand. Is that what you’re saying? That’s the reality of the Supreme? I’m just trying to understand.
MICHAEL: Well!—you’ve done a very good job, my son. That’s very much it—exactly what I was saying. Think of mankind’s infatuation with stimulants—which are still far and way his greatest love of psychotropic substances. They can make something seem effortless, but they are just catalysts which enable you to use energy you’ve already taken aboard—if you will. In other words, they are not food; they are not real nutrition. They are not the source of energy. I’m just suggesting that the way to achieve Buddha’s ideal is to have the courage to feel the effort, because it is exactly proportional to what is needed to overcome the drag, to reject the laziness, to move the inertia you have as a physical being involved in physical activities. This extends into the mental and spiritual realms. There are comfortable and well-though-out paths through your mind, yet you’ve all encountered mental Mount Everest’s, challenging intellectual heaps of concepts you’ve had to struggle with to comprehend.
The shortest way, the best way is to recognize the fear involved in confronting the effort, and overcome it with wisdom. Take refuge in feeling the effort itself. This seems counter-intuitive only because you have so many bogus cultural attitudes and temptations saying you needn’t feel it. Yet, as you point out, that is directly contrary to experiencing life. (Yes) So I think you comprehended my point very well this evening.
Student: I guess I’ve never heard of any way of putting this that referred to the feeling of effort, the feeling the accompanies our freedom to choose one thing or another. Why would it be a feeling and not a thought or a cognition? I’ve never grappled with that. In faith and worship I have a feeling of being, and of your presence, say, and I relate to feeling myself in the way you talked about. But could you say a bit more about this notion of feeling?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, this is only because feeling is the more fundamental human reality. We gave a lesson one time on how thought/conceptualization is only finely articulated feeling. True, some people do try to talk themselves into the effortlessness of some upcoming strenuous activity, and hide awhile in the thought, divorced from feeling effort, but this is generally a kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul, or a fool’s errand, and ultimately inefficient. We suggest it’s more fundamental, more soul-enriching, simply to feel the effort.
It’s just that so much of your culture teaches you the exact opposite, that a good life, a successful life is effortless. Yet only when you have a total acceptance, a total oneness with effort, when you are right inside of it and are thrilled to feel that drag, that inertia giving reality and substance to your life, can it validly be expressed as seeming effortless. But that’s commitment, arising from a wisdom you have to earn.
Student: One more thing, if you don’t mind—defining the drag. Is the drag the thread between our habits, our habitual behavior, and totally free behavior? I’m not sure what the drag is.
MICHAEL: In the physical world the drag is purely material—lifting this or moving that, moving this physical body of yours. In the mental realm it is more a question of inertia, sometimes fear of the unknown, sometimes a sense of the amount of pure effort it’s going to take to understand something. But I’m saying tonight that this is real—not an illusion, not a mistake because you’re not doing something right. It is the basis of reality. Even in the spiritual realm energy is expended and used up in accomplishment, and must be replenished.
Something real is being done is all these realms—physical, and mental, and spiritual. Something is being changed. Something is being created. And these processes require effort because what already is has a kind of stubbornness to it—call it inertia, or momentum, the persistence of reality: whatever. These are not separate realms: they pervade each other—especially the spiritual realm of value. This is why it is such a spiritual triumph to feel the value in your experience of not kidding yourself, but wading right into an event and feeling what’s involved. This is why individuals who have had to struggle so dearly, and yet were not crushed or destroyed by the struggle–you can perceive how they have so much soul.
Student: When you find people who have been crushed by it, and you are ministering to them, what do you need to understand about the movement of their minds, and their hearts, and their wills—which is disturbed and holding them back? For example, I have a friend who I’m worried about, who doesn’t seem able to rise to the occasion now. He’s been crushed by a victimization he has legitimately suffered.
MICHAEL: When you are faced with real trauma, whether of a physical, or mental, or spiritual nature, it helps to separate these somewhat in diagnosing the situation. Often the greatest part of friendship is just being there with true empathy and allowing this person to share their experience. This assuages the alone-ness and feelings of being disconnected the trauma has produced. It used to be called the laying on of hands, but sometimes a good, heartfelt hug, or holding someone’s hand and sharing the painful moments with them, letting them know they are not alone, lets soul speak to soul, reach across and touch spirit.
This can be the opening to a conversation where you can help them sort out what happened, and come out of the shock that is universal with all three kinds of injury. There may be large pieces missing in their life. Help them understand, which is an enormous power because it reassures the personality there is some sense that can be regained when so much is lost, and things just don’t make sense—the mental part of the injury. Spiritually, they have a loss of value. People who have been injured are no longer who and what they once were, and this registers as a great loss of value. Just your valuing them can help.
The critical limit here is knowing how to help this individual towards true health, because there can also be a defensive mechanism of identifying with being a victim. Here are difficult decisions to keep from being what you call an enabler, and reinforcing this person’s clinging to the injury, identifying with it, which may be a stage to go through. How to get out of that and begin to be a creative, initiating personality once again is the goal. In this you can be the example. Some people never do turn that corner. They cling to the injury like someone clinging to an anchor; it gives them identity, and explains things, but it pulls them down—at least in this life.
Student: Yes… Thank you.
MICHAEL: You are welcome. I wish you all my love in the attempt. Just let it flow through you. Keep feeling my presence through this process. Keep in touch with spirit to show you the next best step to take in helping your friend find my peace, and his own creative spirit.
I thank you, my sons, for listening to me tonight and taking to heart what I felt I needed to lay on you as a bit of a weight. I do this to help you penetrate ever deeper towards a divine necessity you can accept as part of God’s will, that actually gives meaning and value to your endeavors. There is a lot of cultural conditioning, a lot of hubris floating around, you have to get over—a lot of silly notions that devalue the effort needed. But deep inside, right at one with that effort, and whatever there is that requires effort to overcome, is that pure joy of accomplishment, of being one with our Father in creating what is, and what will be. Be in my peace. Good evening.
