2007-06-11-Material & Spirit Mind, Memories and Soul
Marin #133
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Material & Spirit Mind, Memories & Soul
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: Material & Spirit Mind, Memories & Soul
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Welcome. Always and forever: welcome. We cannot imagine any time or instance or event in our lives in which you would not be welcome to be with us. We wish to acknowledge with deep gratitude the way you augment our abilities to realize–literally to make real for ourselves—more of God’s creation that encompasses us. For this we are truly thankful and we do love you very much. So come be with us–consciously, you who have actually been with us from the beginning. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening, my children, this is Michael, Creator Son of our Father and the Eternal Son. These are my parents, and I extend their love and good wishes to you.
Lesson
For the last several weeks Mother Spirit and I have been trying to help enable you to feel the spirit dimensions both of your own personality, of your own being, and also those of the spiritual family of which you are members. These members do love you and do their best to enable you to live evermore fully and richly. While not the sole purpose of their existence by any means, still in all, it is something which all the various orders of personal beings, the other children of Mother Spirit and I, do enjoy giving to you whatever they can. In the same way, even though Mother Spirit and I have always been able to communicate in different ways with members of human society right from the very beginning, from Andon and Fonta, still we enjoy greatly when a planet such as Urantia moves into this phase of its development, as all planets do, when we are able to communicate more directly through volunteers such as is happening this evening.
So keep in mind that even though the Teaching Mission does inaugurate a new stage of planetary evolution where so many different orders of personal beings are communicating with you this way, it is within the ability of each one of you to communicate with Mother Spirit and I. It is possible for you to address us and acknowledge us in your mind. The question often arises, how can you tell the difference between Mother Spirit, or myself, or your Father Fragment–the presence of God in your mind, or even the guidance of your Guardian Angel? We can only assure you that there is no necessity, at this stage of your development, to distinguish between us in our felt presence in your mind. We are very much in accord.
While not exactly of one mind–none of us can pretend to really have God the Father’s mind–there is certainly no disagreement between us. This is that marvelous ability we encourage you all to stretch into, where you can know a divine unity of spiritual purpose and accord without in any way requiring a uniformity of expression. For most people that comes across as a contradiction simply because they are not yet capable of realizing this for themselves. But nevertheless it is true within the larger spiritual community.
One way of looking at it is, we can let each other be free. We encourage each other, as we do you, to be free to explore, to seek for truth and follow wherever it leads.
Tonight, as on other occasions, I would like to extend a subject that Mother Spirit brought up last week, impressing upon you what we mean by material mind. For people who have no notion of any spiritual input from outside themselves, this is mind: this is the only mind they think they know. This is the mind that is solely the product of your physiological being, your brain and nervous system. Some of its aspects you share with the higher animal kingdoms which indeed evolved over the millennia and in time became augmented by Mother Spirit’s Mind/Spirit Adjuncts. You usually think of this as your animal nature, that nature you share with your animal cousins.
You are often in a quandary as to how to relate to this part of yourselves. Some of you declare open warfare and try to deny as much as possible any relationship whatsoever with what you conceive of as some kind of gross deformity left over from previous stages of evolution. Others take the exact opposite tack and conceive of a wonderful unity of being in which all aspects of themselves are treated the same—indiscriminately–and embraced with equal enthusiasm.
It probably comes as no surprise we recommend a more moderate course between these two extremes. Insofar as your own childhood recapitulates the evolution of civilization itself–a little two- or three-year-old is a bit like a caveman or -woman walking around; and I’m sure you can all remember your high school days when you were about at the Machiavellian stage of social gangs and so forth–pure power and status-seeking: but through it all you have experienced yourselves, every single one of you, personally, various primitive or uncivilized impulses that seem to erupt spontaneously.
Now you are marvelously beginning to study the animal kingdom in a greater depth than ever before. I’m speaking here of the higher mammals and your realizing just how much intelligence they posses, since even birds can learn much by trial and error, whereas the higher mammals learn so much more from their parents. That old expression of, monkey see–monkey do, has a great validity to it. You can often see a mother primate forcing her little offspring to watch what she’s doing, to learn. So recently you’ve had a blossoming of appreciation for animal intelligence with a parallel understanding of those impulses that arise within your own self that are shared with the higher mammals, such as possessiveness, jealousy, status, revenge/retaliation, fear.
The reason we suggest not being at war with these impulses is that this simply drives them underground and leads to a kind of arrogant hubris in thinking they no longer affect you. Yet at the same time there is some discrimination you can exercise in not simply going along with them willy-nilly, embracing every impulse that comes along as if it had some spiritual origin.
No animal has a true personality, this gift of God you do. No animal can be influenced by the Mind/Spirit Adjutants of Worship and Wisdom that a human being can. This dimension is totally absent; the gulf between even the most bright primate and that of a human personality is enormous: it’s one of quality and kind. Yet we recommend you stay in touch with your so-called animal nature. One of the best ways of doing this, my children, is to stay in touch with your childhood. This is no other than staying in touch with your own soul, the story of your life. As Mother Spirit put it last week, this is the enormous panorama that every human being traverses from the moment of birth to the ever broadening horizons of maturity. Welcome this enormous panorama of your life. Stay in touch with it, especially all those early stages when various animal passions would come over you and carry you away.
Understand them well so you can recognize the lingering traces of possessiveness, or jealously, the struggles for power and status. You gain enormous real power by doing so, the power of understanding that carries with it the ability to recognize these impulses in your fellows as well. This is just one more example of what we mean by staying open, stretching to embrace all aspects of yourself, to understanding them, then use as much of your wisdom as you can muster to wisely choose your course of conduct, to determine your own behavior with some measure of real freedom.
This we consider from a spiritual standpoint the true heroic effort and achievement of a human being, not that he or she conquers and controls others, but they understand and spontaneously and creatively become one within themselves. This is that divine, spiritual unity I spoke of at the beginning of our lesson tonight. Though you may not be able quite to achieve it in this first phase of your eternal life, you can stretch and try to be akin with your higher cousins, the angels. You can encourage the better angels of your nature, both for yourself and for those you love. This is where the real fun is, my children. Mother Spirit and I welcome you to share in our delight. If you have any questions or comments this evening, we can share them right now.
Dialogue
Student: Good evening, Michael.
MICHAEL: Good evening, my son.
Student: It’s my understanding that when you, and Mother Spirit, and our indwelling Father Fragment commune with us, you can do it directly without any assistance. But when the seraphim commune with us, they need the Midwayers such as the teachers use–the Midwayers to translate. Or do they communicate directly with us, mind to mind?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son; the seraphim generally use Mother Spirit, just as I do myself. She is already a part of your mind, a spirit part. Tonight I wished to cover the material part of your mind and offer you a way of relating harmoniously with it. But Mother Spirit is the super-addition that all the higher animals know, and then you as a human being know as well the dimensions of her mind-spirits of worship and wisdom.
The Midwayers themselves use her circuits. Here I’m speaking of those messages these beings wish to impinge in your consciousness. But there is also a kind of direct spirit-to-spirit influence, my son, that all spirit beings can use in contacting your spirit. But this spirit part of your personality is, like your personality itself, not an object of consciousness. For example, there is a kind of spirit-to-spirit communication going on all the time between your personality and your Guardian Angel, but this rarely achieves the level of consciousness, just as does so little of the Father’s Thought Adjuster’s input reach normal consciousness.
This is why we recommend the meditation of stillness, stilling the heavy currents and upheavals of your daily survival here so you can detect what Mother Spirit, or myself, or your Father Fragment wishes to give you. Does this help you understand these various levels on which you exist?
Student: Yes, it definitely expands my understanding, Michael. I thank you for that.
MICHAEL: If you can, see if you can exercise two attitudes, at first independently, and then perhaps in time simultaneously. Imagine yourself consciously as your personality, just looking in on life. It will still be only an imagination, but it can reflect a true reality; that the God-created essence of you, this unchanging, beyond-space-and-time reality of you, is real. Then you can identify, as most people do unconsciously, with your material mind and your body, and feel very much in space and time, and conditioned by them; which is why so many people feel trapped by life, especially in the experience of great pain or sorrow. These constitute the undeniable aspects of being a mental/physical being. Yet both these attitudes, the products of your creative imagination, do give you some greater sense of the complex being you are and, in turn, an appreciation for the difficulties you all face in trying to understand yourselves, let alone these others…(Michael chuckles)…all around you. But that is the great game, is it not?
Student (laughing with Michael): One of them…
MICHAEL: That’s what truly fills your soul—this life you’ve known: these other human beings you’ve shared your life with.
Student: I have to say, Michael, that seems to be what gives my life meaning–the sharing with these other human beings around me.
MICHAEL: As Mother Spirit said last week, this is where deep calls to deep, and leads to a real appreciation of how infinite/unfathomable other people are to you. It gives you a good sense of proportion when you compare these living personalities to all the material stuff that so fills so many peoples’ lives. You are truly blessed if you realize this.
Student: Michael, this question is a little bit off from what we’ve been talking about, but it is on my mind. This past weekend I was at a conference at Unity Village in Kansas City, and I attended a session where Sonja Melchizedek tried to bring forward, and encourage us to form, working groups. We had a mock working group—so to speak. The purpose of these groups is to work together with other individuals and, at the same time, with Celestials, to accomplish bringing about a new social order on the planet—no small task, or responsibility. I would like to know if there are other individuals at this time who are also being instructed in this same way—other than this small, tiny, little group of people at this conference?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son. Let me paint for you a vision of not just Urantia at its present stage of planetary evolution, but an even broader perspective of Local Universe evolution in general. Though I know this totally blows apart the parameters of your question…
Student: To be expected…
MICHAEL: …the entire spiritual family Mother Spirit and I refer to is not exclusively, but is intensely involved in evolving the societies of every planet at every stage. As your Urantia book informs you, even those worlds settled for endless eons in Light and Life still keep evolving, just as even those single evolved human beings, reaching Paradise and becoming Final—in a sense, still turn about and head back out into time and space to keep growing. I mean this as a direct answer to your question, my son.
Yes, every single person on this planet is being directed as much as we can, while still respecting their free will, to evolve socially, to use all the Celestial influences within their minds in order to form ever more loving and usefully/supporting groups. And this is happening. We’ve tried many times to impress upon you how accelerated this whole world’s situation is becoming with your modern mass media, where now, almost anywhere in the world, someone can fire up their little portable generator, point a dish antenna at the sky, and bring in the rest of the world. You are almost hyper-aware of the enormous polarization of cultures—the intense competition for cultural survival, that is a direct result of this.
So yes, by all means–by all spiritual means, we are endeavoring to have people come together and interrelate with each other, with Celestial input. And it is happening. Does that answer your question?
Student: Yes, it does, Michael. Thanks for showing me that broader picture. Sometimes I need my parameters expanded a bit.
MICHAEL: It is sometimes difficult not to get too tightly focused on just one particular way that this is happening overtly, in the case of your conference, and forget that the Teaching Mission, the Correcting Time, is very planetary-wide comprehensive. So be in my peace. Rest in this assurance: planetary social evolution is inexorable—with your help.
Student: Thank you.
Student: Father Michael, why is it necessary to relive my childhood? That’s one aspect of my life I really don’t want to deal with. Is it beneficial to me to accept what was there, and what was not there? How do I go about doing this? How do I access my soul?—as opposed to just memories?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, you partly anticipate my answer because it is not strictly necessary. But it is highly beneficial. The main benefit is one of appreciation. True, you do not need to know how you got to where you are. You can look around, and you are gaining an ability to feel your completeness in the present moment. So there is a kind of direct—im-mediate way of experiencing yourself and your reality, your world.
This is what I mean when I say it is not strictly necessary to know how you got here. You’re here! And we’ve reassured you of that: you are! And yet… Appreciation. Think about that, my son. Adding value. Now we are in the realm of spirit. As we hit you over the head with, from time to time, spirit is all-inclusive. Nothing that is real needs be left out. In fact, it helps to understand as well all that is not real–but is presented by your mass culture, that is highly unreal, and merely is designed to get you to buy the next gadget. But with respect to your own life, what we’ve just gotten through calling the panorama of starting as a tiny, barely visible, living cell in your mother’s womb—often compared in size to the period at the end of a sentence–you came up through all animal evolution within your mother, and then birth.
You’ve all seen pictures of newborn babies, if you haven’t experienced birth directly. This gives you some appreciation, my son, of your very beginnings, and all you’ve personally had to learn, had to experience, to get to where you are now. We call it recapitulating civilization, starting out as this little, bloody, squalling animal, and having to learn, yourself, all the stages that humankind came through.
This gives you an appreciation of what mankind itself has had to evolve over the millennia, almost a million years now since Andon and Fonta made a certain quality of decision one afternoon, and became human—creatures of will-dignity. It’s all there within you, so it is possible to get over any kind of prejudice, any kind of pre-judging all these events again from apart, and re-experiencing them from the inside-out. This requires setting aside all your Monday-morning Quarterbacking, all your judging–after the fact—Why didn’t I do this; Why didn’t I do that; Why did it take all those painful, frustrating mistakes to teach me this or that?
Your soul is a spiritual record from the inside-out as for the first time. You achieve this in your stillness meditation by allowing it. Have a deep wondering and curiosity about what it felt like to be five years old and the doorknobs were way up there and you were walking around in a forest of peoples’ legs. It’s appreciation, my son. It’s valuing all these stages you’ve come through. Treasure them. Let them pop up, as they will—once they are welcome. Just review for a moment in the transcript how you first categorized these stages so negatively, in your question. I think you will understand then the difference between your memories and your soul. Does this help answer your question?
Student: It does indeed. I’m looking at the events that were once very painful and upsetting as a way of learning, as opposed to mistakes I made. It gives me a positive outlook on those things. I’m learning to accept them as they were at that time, and as I see them now, and not be just embarrassing moments. I’m beginning to notice that I accept myself as I am much more, and not as I wished I was, or hoped I would be—just as I am. It’s actually pretty good.
MICHAEL: My son, regret and embarrassment are real emotions, and they have a validity. They are also methods by which you teach yourself.
Student: Yes…
MICHAEL: But it’s nice when you can have both the necessary evaluations of yourself and the actions of your life, but also have the experience from the inside-out—as it happened–as well as from this outside-in post-perspective. It’s good to have both. It frees you to be here and now, to feel your completeness now, knowing that as you mature, as you learn to understand this immature judgmental process, you will not some day in the future overly harshly judge, and therefore loose, the wonderful, delicate, unique essence of this moment. If you want to always have this now, being judgmental has to stop. You are literally learning how to be free, and to treasure your whole life. Your life is a gift to God, my son. Value it well. And be in my peace.
Student: Thank you, Father Michael. I notice I am a little freer than I used to be, and thank you for that.
MICHAEL: You are very welcome, my son. As we said before: you’re earning it.
Student: Yes. {much laughter}
Student (hesitantly, but with a great deal of peace…): Yes, Michael. It seems what I’ve been experiencing since we last spoke and you brought up the question, How much life do I want?–it’s like I can look at that at so many different levels. Just allowing it to sink into my soul, it seems like the same as asking myself what I really want. As I go deeper, so much stuff falls away. I guess what I really want is to…just breathe, freely and simply, as my true wealth. And just be…my grand-daughter’s joy in seeing me. That is worth millions. What I’ve been noticing too in my communications with people, I’ve been kind-of asking them to experience their own inner wisdom, and the decisions they have to make in their lives—to connect with who they are.
I guess that is what I want, to see others experience life from the core of their being. I’ve come to the understanding that there is only so much I can personally do. I can’t go and heal the situation in Palestine. I can’t go to Iraq, or this or that. But I can be of influence to those I come in contact with on a daily basis. It relieves a lot of pressure. I also desire to stop, to be free with no thought of doing anything. It seems like my body, especially this last weekend, doesn’t want me to do anything. It’s not fatigue; it just wants me to be still. Enjoy the sun. Be with my grand-daughter, and my family. And just silence. It’s interesting how these words just come up, because I had no idea of what I was going to say before I came here. It also feels like a paradox, like I’m expanding, but my mind is focused on the straight and narrow, on God, on truth, on living life from the inside-out.
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, we can all feel the peace you are finding. It really needs no comment…
Student: How much life do you want?
MICHAEL: Partly this is the blessing of humility, of accepting fully within yourself that question, How much life do I want? It’s the humble acknowledgment that you yourself are the limiting factor. It brings so much back home. And so, all of a sudden, and with great clarity, just this feeling of being alive, the simple yet boundless joy of recognition in a child’s eyes, is more than enough. It was also for this, my son, I too looked forward to being a human being.
My own appreciation of my human life is wonderfully boundless, to me. It is partly culture, and part of every individual’s necessary self-consciousness–coming up through childhood and general immaturity, that you strive so hard to realize your uniqueness: because it is there. You are a unique being in all of creation. But this orientation toward yourself as a distinct and unique being totally takes for granted and almost universally devalues that which you have in common with all other folks—the nearly ungraspable quality of simply being alive. And so you traverse an enormous circle, a vast panorama indeed, to come back to the beginning and treasure just being alive—feeling your heart beat, treasuring stillness and quiet, and being totally swept away by a child’s joy of recognition.
Student: It’s also allowing myself to trust in myself, that if all I want to do is rest, then that’s what I will do—rest consciously, and not beat myself up over feeling limited. Just rest, with no contrivance, and not identify with that limitation. I’m so consumed with doing more…with just…doing. But as you’ve said, our completeness is guaranteed.
MICHAEL: And trust is just another word for faith. Faith is fulfilled with experience. You experience that rest. Only in doing so can you realize how strung-out you’ve been. All perception is this matter of contrast. It’s with feeling/allowing your soul to pop out, from time to time, you extend yourself out there on faith, to let it happen. That is why faith has its own particular reward, its own unique reward that comes by no other means.
Student: It opens up a whole new view of existence, that one could not conceive of.
MICHAEL: That ‘s the surprise! (much laughter) That’s the real adventure. It’s unmistakable when you’re in the middle of it. And that it can be so restful and peaceful is the biggest surprise of all.
Student: It is interesting how restful it can be, but I still get really agitated at night when I’m sleeping. It’s like my whole body is trying to settle into all of this, but all my anxieties, and fears, come up. At least now I know: just rest. So thank you.
MICHAEL: You’re welcome, my son. Don’t worry about those few ghosts who are still chasing you. They’ll fade away in time. You’re certainly finding a bit of my peace.
Closing
MICHAEL: So: good evening, my children. It’s been a long evening, and a very rewarding one for me. I thank you for allowing me too, to let a bit of my own soul, as Jesus, pop up, and remind me of all those beautiful little children I never tired of holding on my knees. I was always amazed they were mine. For this I truly thank my Father for giving me such an opportunity to earn my human soul. Good evening.
