2007-05-21-How Much Life Do You Want?
Marin #130
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: How Much Life Do You Want
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
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: How Much Life Do You Want
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, We who have been following and enjoying your words for several years now feel blessed to be alive in the time of the Teaching Mission, and aware of it. We want to thank you for these opportunities–unique in all our experience–to talk with a Creator Son and a Mother Spirit. So often you seem to know the best next step for us to take, and you offer for our consideration your insights which go wonderfully directly right to the heart of the kinds of beings you know us to be—sometimes even better than we know ourselves. So it’s for these very unique gifts we are thankful. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening. This is Michael. Tonight I would like to get even further back to basics and reemphasize the several most important considerations we have offered.
Lesson
The first will always be the supreme fact of the existence of God: that there is a single, primal personality who is absolute and infinite, and whose omnipotence is expressed through the power of creativity. He is truly the father of reality in the most total sense you can conceive of and appreciate. If he had no other powers or attributes, this alone would make him worthy of our love and appreciation. The fact that there is a creator personality at the very center and origin of all that exists puts to rest in our hearts the fundamental need to know there is a Supreme Person with whom we can relate as personal beings ourselves. We can only assure you, my children, that both Mother Spirit and I do know that his primal nature of creativity of personal beings means that you are, each of you, unique in all creation.
One way you might think of this is that only God has sufficient infinity and omnipotence and absoluteness to create such a near infinity of unique personal beings throughout the cosmos. It flows directly from this that all personal beings are brothers and sisters, especially the human-types here on Urantia. You have been informed there are many trillions of worlds inhabited with similarly human beings as yourselves, yet of various series and types, which make you on Urantia here very close cousins indeed.
Through all the coming eternity of your lives you will always feel a certain special kinship when you occasionally run across another Urantian out there in the galaxy, and later in Havona. This will be a hallmark of your continuing growth, as Mother Spirit said last week, into encountering dimension upon dimension, learning and expanding enormously until that day when you can fuse with your loyal, faithful Father fragment, and super-modulate the kind of being you are.
So these are the two main cosmic facts we offer for you to treasure: the fact there is a personal God at the center of everything whose divine nature is one of unifying and holding together his whole creation, and even continuing to add to it out here in time and space—both in material and personal beings: thus making all personal beings related. All personal beings are worthy of mutual love and respect, and even have that delightful quality of a smile-equivalent of recognition of one kind to another.
The third most important fact we have been offering you in different ways so you can get a feeling of these dimensions we know you to have, is the fact that you yourselves are spiritual beings. You are obviously embodied with impersonal materials and energies in the special God-given state we call alive, and you are enabled with a level of consciousness due primarily to the billions of neurons that make up your physical brains and nervous system.
Yet here too there is another, greater, more primal and original dimension of reality we call spirit that actually endows your physical/mental being with attributes of the Cosmic Mind, coming in through Mother Spirit. So we say the type of mind you have—from our point of view—is that of the Mind/Spirit Adjutants of the Local Universe Mother Spirit. In a Light-Line transmission recently Mother Spirit gave her own take on these functional dimensions of her personality, and how they augment your material minds. We say these are Mind/Spirit Adjutants because they are literally part of Mother Spirit’s consciousness—her mind, derived from the Infinite Spirit. So right in your mindedness you are spiritual. You are super-minded; you are extra-materially minded.
Also you live in a certain phase of planetary development, a post-Bestowal Son time period. In the case of Urantia, where I myself was the Bestowal Son, after Pentecost the planet went into a new phase in which every normal-minded individual received a Thought Adjuster along with the influence of my Creator Son’s Spirit of Truth. This Spirit is known as the Comforter, for this follows most logically and directly from the fact that if you know the truth, consciously–the greatest truth being God’s will–universal material and mind and spiritual law–this truth can help you be free. Freedom is the origin of comfort, of feeling comfortable with your own nature and world.
Supreme above all influences is the fragment of God himself within you, the origin of actual thoughts for you to choose among–to enhance your freedom and growth. Your Thought Adjuster is also, we say, a Mystery Monitor because this points out the fact of God’s personality circuit whereby God the Father experiences everything that all his children do. As we know, he is riding right along with us in our lives, moment by moment, sharing all the joys and pain we experience. Thought Adjusters are much beyond anyone’s ability to exhaustively define, but their prime purpose is to act as perfect guides, to supply—if you can only be still and catch their subtle suggestions—the ideas, the next steps, the next considerations.
Coming from the Father himself, your Thought Adjuster will never rest, especially after once fusing and becoming one with you, until the two of you, made one, attain—from his standpoint, re-attain–your origin, God himself on Paradise. Your Thought Adjuster knows the way home. Yet, my children, we are still considering mind, your human mind. You have these spiritual presence’s representing God the Father, and then, through Mother Spirit and myself, representing the full Trinity—me being of origin in the Father and the Eternal Son, and Mother Spirit being a daughter of the Infinite Spirit. But in addition to these spiritual presence’s and influences, you have the fundamental reality of your unique personality, and you yourself have a spiritual dimension.
I offer for your interest to read the chapter in your Urantia book on Personality Survival, for in these few dozen pages is the most comprehensive description of the kind of being you are that has ever been put into a human language. It starts out by humbly admitting there is no way one can fully describe what personality is, it is so transcendent. But it very quickly illustrates that the personality you are, being the presence of an unchanging cosmic reality in the presence of all change, can never be an object of direct perception. Rather it is this fundamental reality of you that perceives, and then goes on to unite all the various parts and pieces of the complex being you are. Nothing you can know directly in time and space is of this unchanging nature.
All perception is a matter of contrast—figure and background, before and after. So this too we offer you, my children, this assurance that your most fundamental reality, a direct creation of God’s, is forever tied to your Father’s personality circuit–a dimension of his consciousness your theologians have expressed as his omniscience. You are of his essence, and we offer you to think of yourselves as little nodules, little manifestations of primal, personal reality out here in time and space earning your experiences, these experiences being taken on by your Father Fragment to become the joint possession of the both of you—a potentially eternal soul.
These are the spiritual dimensions we wish you to perceive and enjoy, to welcome and appreciate. Your conscious recognition of them is not strictly necessary. Those individuals you call materialists, who sometimes at great pains and with a sincere inner honesty to get to the bottom of things, to really understand what the totality of life is all about, who somehow or another more or less rigorously define spirit out of existence, do end up like pantheists who cannot go beyond existence to any kind of pre-existent essence, let alone have this essence that proceeds existence be a single personal Being—the origin of everything. To them the universe simply is, with all its transcendent qualities.
This is the ironic situation of a sincere and devoted materialist feeling she or he has achieved a comprehension they intrinsically value for its seeming applicability, its apparent truth to them, not realizing this value they give to their construct is itself a manifestation of their spirit. Which is partly why we offer these basic definitions of what we consider spirit to be, what part it plays in your live, what constituent part it actually is of you. We do hope that in the primal experience of your life–this living quality of feeling that forms the moment to moment encompassing of your consciousness–you can begin to feel these dimensions you inhabit. The presence of spirit can become an object of perception. Your spiritual nature can be known, even understood. And as you understand more and more of the origin within your nature of all that you are, you can begin to perceive this in others too. It adds a precious quality to your life, this appreciation of all these other little walking infinities about you, every single one of them a God-created unique personality giving rise to what you perceive. Go ahead and let it blow your minds. Spirit is greater than mind and will surely test you.
Further, I would like to add along these lines something Mother Spirit and I have been saying for a while, yet you may not fully comprehend; and that is when we say that you truly are. You participate in the Absolute by your very existence, whether you know it or not. For many of you this has been an incomprehensible puzzle, for you think that: Certainly, I know I am! But so many people don’t feel and act as if they really were. Their psychology is based upon an anxiety of their very being, and because this anxiety is so all-pervasive, it is largely unconscious.
Some of your existential philosophers correctly analyzed it as an experience of only constant becoming, never quite being. And we have just stated that all of your perceptions of yourself are in constant flux: you are a living reality. Almost every religion of Urantia has evolved forms of meditation designed to enable one to grasp some of these fundamental truths of your being. Yet because your metaphysics always associates primal reality with that which is fixed, and immortal/eternal, and infinite, and absolute—all these qualities—there is a human tendency to identify with them and feel this identification is in some way realizable, a human being could actually experience total reality as only God himself can.
And so in so many religious/philosophical systems there originated not only notions of Enlightenment, achieving Reality, Satori, being Born Again, being Reborn—various terms descriptive of these profound spiritual experiences—there also grew the illusion of some final experience that would take one beyond living contingencies to a fixed and settled state. With this as an unconscious basis in your cultures, so many people live in an anxiety of only just-becoming, constant change, with a pervasive dissatisfaction as if they could never quite just be. They can never feel complete because they identify that completeness with something fixed and unchanging.
This is why, my children, we have drawn a distinction between completeness and perfection, to enable you to realize a whole dimension of God’s creation—you included—that is complete moment by moment, yet capable of change, of increasing perfection, of evolving. However paradoxical or self-contradictory this vision we’re presenting seems to be, it is not in reality. In this sense, all of creation bears the hallmark of its Creator, an infinite and absolute being who is, however, not only complete, but continually replete, on into the eternal future. This is the universal expansion of both personal and impersonal reality. This experience of being, of feeling your completeness, has been achieved by many men and women all through history. It is an experience of becoming enlightened, or born again, and feeling your whole nature profoundly changed. Yet sometimes old habits die hard, and though you’ve had this marvelous sense of actuality, of finally feeling complete, the anxiety reasserts itself. Without some method, some way of having this experience again, and then again, it becomes but a past event and not an ongoing keeping up with an universal evolution that is the potential nature of your moment to moment completeness. As Mother Spirit expressed last week, this is the basis for your potential eternity.
There is no single great experience, ever, from which point everything is fixed and settled. The reward for your courage, my children, is to be given an eternity of situations which will call it forth again. If that seems a bit scary, we have our trust in our Father, whose wisdom sees fit to provide this necessity.
This is the nature of the eternity of now: that God is free, unconditioned, absolute and infinite, and he delights in bestowing as much of his nature on us as we ourselves decide we want, and are willing to work for, and can stretch ourselves to embrace. It has always been, and will always be, my children, a question of: How much life do you want? We sincerely thank our Father for giving us such a choice. If you have any questions or comments this evening, feel free.
Dialogue
Student: Yes, Michael, a large portion of your lesson really grabs hold of me. How much life do I want? I don’t know how to even approach that, to fathom that…
MICHAEL: Good! (much laughter)
Student: Partly I understand the stretch it implies, and the further expansion of dimensions of awareness…
MICHAEL: Exactly.
Student: I know it is beyond materiality, which we seem to get stuck on, thinking about a rich life. We focus too much on that… (long pause)
MICHAEL: My son, the question is not rhetorical: it’s real: but you don’t have to answer it right away. Student: Yes, but I think it is necessary. We don’t tend to question things, or ask ourselves the right questions. I mentioned to Mother Spirit last week a book I read—The Secret–that seems to be a New-Age flavor-of-the-month kind of thing, that is not really a secret—it’s been around for thousands of years. But the majority of it was on creating the kind of stuff you want. I’m not against that, but who is doing the asking? Who is doing the creating? Is it the expansive self, or is it something else, something constrained that sees only a desire to have expensive things and perfect relationships? That might be possible, but there seems to be something missing. Some deeper, more profound question is not being asked.
MICHAEL: Yes, this is why I asked the question, partly to get you to feel comfortable in the need to question your assumptions, and not always assume you have penetrated to the bottom of your own cultural conditioning—especially along these materialistic lines you are rightfully balking against.
Student: But it is difficult because we are bombarded every day by that, especially living in this wealthy county here where materiality reigns supreme. It is hard to maintain that equilibrium, that balance when people put their whole basis for relationships or values on that. Someone won’t even give me the time of day because I’m a gardener, and that bothers me. They don’t see me for who I am. Maybe they don’t see themselves for who they are.
MICHAEL: It is certainly a blessing to be able to forgive all these ill-mannered folks…
Student: Yes, but I wish there were…I mean… Your life illustrated a deeper life, a more expansive life. That’s what your life was all about. But I don’t have any role model out here, in my day to day life. Maybe the person who founded The Great Freedom; but I really don’t know her. The only thing I have are those books I’ve talked about–the Masters of the Far East–because they do live that life. They are able to express God, and know they are always expanding… So… Go ahead.
MICHAEL: I was going to tease you with the notion that this is what you get for being a pioneer. (laughter) You get out there by yourself and all of a sudden you discover you are the example. You are the antennae of the race out there feeling around for what is possible. Tonight I wanted to give you a feeling of the spiritual dimensions you have in addition to the physical and the mental, but when we break down human reality and experience into these components, to give you a little handle on what you are, you are also face to face with the single-knit quality of life. Yet it does help to break it down this way.
For example, with respect to the physical, how much life do you want in terms of health? What are you willing to do to be healthy and full of energy, to do the best you can to take in only good nutrition, and get enough exercise? Mentally, how can you be ever more open and flexible, and curious—really wondering about all that out there and all this in here. How much spiritual life can you tap into and appreciate? How can you grow the value of your life both inwardly and outwardly? What you are struggling with now, my son, is how do you balance these? How do you make the spiritual value decisions that, for the time involved, getting certain material possessions is just not worth it? Here it helps to keep in mind the amount of debt some folks are in, and the kind of treadmill they have put themselves on. How much of their whole lives do people spend only preparing to live, and never reach that maturity of realizing, feeling they are–total and complete as they are this moment. Those who are on such a self-generated treadmill can be truly pitiful. They simply have no time to feel free, to live a more spiritual life.
Student: What is even sadder is that they don’t realize they have a choice. They’ve kind-of given up their choice.
MICHAEL: Yes, there are those bad choices that, ironically, their good sense of honor binds people to fulfill. But you can pull apart the single-knit reality of your life to weigh these different dimensions, these different facets. You can have a wonderful feeling of expansion and possibility, and at the same time know the humility that there is always so much more life than what you are momentarily achieving with your as yet limited wisdom. It keeps you humble and down to earth. It might seem you already know how to live a better life than the one you are living (Michael laughs), and yet…and yet: not really. Moment to moment you are; you are complete in all your abilities and limitations. This is what your soul is, this moment to moment completeness as you go through life, captured by a pure, divine spirit, and held in trust for the both of you.
Student: There’s a question on the tip of my tongue I don’t really know how to articulate, because it’s like… The life I’m living now does feel richer. Within myself I do feel more the presence—God’s presence. (heavy sigh) I know there is more, although I don’t know if I can handle it…(laughing) There is that fear. I mean I can say I desire to do all these things, but I haven’t reached that place within me of certainty of transcendence. So I’m seeing the picture of my life and my family, and I see the wisdom of how things are now for the benefit of everyone, but… I don’t know if you’re grasping what I’m trying to say… Am I living my life to the fullest of my potential, according to what I know now? There is a part of me that desires to do other things, but I have no idea what those other things are. Maybe I am doing those things. Maybe I am living my life from my soul. And maybe I’m just looking at it from a limited perspective.
MICHAEL: This is what I meant by finding a way to feel comfortable in the necessity to question your assumptions. That may seem like a contradiction: that if you get too comfortable with yourself, then you will cease to question your assumptions…
Student: Yes! Like there are times when I’m doing my gardening, I do enjoy it. And there are times I feel trapped by it. But I am really loyal to the people I work for because I have a relationship with them. I care about them. It doesn’t mean they care about me, but that’s OK. I care about them—about who they are as human beings, and their families. So it’s more than just doing their gardens—although that’s what I do. Physically I know I won’t be able to do this much longer. And I do want to be more of benefit. But I do need money—to live. So those are the questions that are percolating… But I also have the faith, or confidence, to know there is a time and a place for everything. When I am ready to move on, that will happen. Maybe this is where I’m supposed to be—for now. Do you understand?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son. What you’ve been going through these last few minutes is what I call—and I think when you read the transcripts you will see this—what I call leapfrogging down the stream of time between questioning yourself, and then realizing anew you are this complete being at the intersection of all these various strands pulling you this way and that—defining who and what you are. Then along comes another question. It is this very process that is so terrifying to some people. They will go to extraordinary lengths to escape it by, in a sense, grabbing hold of something in this living stream, and settling for it, and saying: OK, I am this, and I am going to continue being this. And through the power of their choice, and belief, they actually have the ability to become fixated on an event, in order to feel saved and certain.
But in a larger, spiritual sense it is a way of dying. It is losing touch with the living nature of your being, your ever-changing nature, and identifying with something that is self-created from the most limited part of you—your own ego awareness, and who you think you need to be—and think: This is it now. For some folks it will be it, for this lifetime, and they will have to wait until their Morontia life when things will be so utterly, marvelously changed they will have a chance to start again.
But to keep your beginner’s mind, to keep open, and to have the security within yourself that this is the best way to stay in touch with life—the dynamic of it.
Student: How do I know… I guess when I have these moments…is to go into stillness and just kind-of drop everything and see and feel the wisdom move me.
MICHAEL: Yes—especially the wisdom part. The uncertainty, the self-questioning is more or less what you generate yourself from your own personality’s desire to keep growing, expanding–by questioning your assumptions to date. Then you do need to take a break from that and let the questions be answered from your higher consciousness, and from the spiritual presence’s who are within you. So you can rest right in the middle of the motion. You can feel complete. Tomorrow will be another day to once again question and wonder, entertain new possibilities, try new things, make some more mistakes.
Student: I sometimes wonder: do I hold myself back; or other times: should I push the envelop?–step into the unknown; or is life doing that anyway—like my new granddaughter, and the changes that involved. That was a real unknown! But. I mean, how much, as a human being ought I to… I guess it depends on what‘s driving us. Is it coming from that wisdom? Then it will naturally happen. But fear… That’s another story. I just don’t want to—as you said–be “settled.” I feel like I’m expanding within myself. I’m becoming richer within myself. I’m learning to be more tolerant and open-minded.
MICHAEL: Can you see the necessity for both of these…let’s call them phases, both the questioning and the assurance? Each has a validity. To know only a self-questioning doubt would be living a life of total anxiety, whereas living a life of settled, dogmatic assurance is only beginning a life of dying, becoming fixed. These possibilities shoot all through cultures, all through religions. Think of how so many men and women have had their wonderful re-birth in spirit, then allowed themselves to be coerced into some dogma; and theology took over this living touch with spirit. This has been the history of human religion.
Student: I guess the bottom line for me is that if I feel I don’t live up to my full potential, if I don’t push the envelop, I’m kind-of letting God down, letting myself down, letting you down. I’ve been involved with the Teaching Mission for four or five years and it seems like I’m still asking you the same kinds of questions. We waste so much energy over things that, if we come from our wisdom, if we live from the place of actualizing our potential, half the stuff we do in our lives would be so unnecessary. I just want to love. I just want to love without people seeing me as poor, or just a gardener, or this or that. I want to live as the original intention, that God intended me to live. I guess I’m slowly discovering, uncovering that.
MICHAEL: Well, it’s certainly given a great wealth to your life. Keep questioning, my son. And also keep seeking stillness. Keep feeling that completion, that actuality that is between you and God alone. It comes from him by way of Mother Spirit and myself, but he is also right here within you. The more acknowledgment you two can share, the less you need of recognition from others and the more generous you can be, beaming your love out to them—unconditionally. In doing so you begin to approach being like the Father yourself.
Student: I would like that.
MICHAEL: It’s quite a challenge, but the rewards are commensurate and immediate. This is that love you’re speaking of. (Yeah) So rejoice you can feel it!—and beam it out there!
Student: I will do so. Thank you.
MICHAEL: My son, thank you for taking this challenge head-on and wringing yourself out so thoroughly to do your best to come up to it, and embrace it. It is something all personal beings are confronted with—their very freedom, the enormity of the choices God has entrusted into their hands. It is a worthy focus for our worship, our deep thankfulness and unfathomable awe—even to ourselves–that such a Being—is! And is our Father. So… (Michael laughs) Carry on, my son. It only gets bigger..
Student (laughing): Yeah, I guessed that…
Closing
MICHAEL: …if you’re doing the right thing. I think you can now begin to appreciate what there is about my peace. Don’t be shy about seeking and thoroughly enjoying it, accepting it totally—moment to moment. Be in my peace. Good evening.
