2007-07-16-Michael
Marin #139
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Michael
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: Michael
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, We appreciate your efforts and your rather incomprehensible ability to convey to us your spiritual truths and insights in so many ways, through so many transmitters–each it seems with his or her own range of sensibility. Taken altogether the transmissions resemble a rainbow created by spiritual illumination shining through a soft rain of your wisdom coming down all around, and within, us. We are quite tickled to have the Teaching Mission in our lives. We thank you for your blessings, and ask you help us express this wisdom in our own lives, both for ourselves and in service to others. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening, my dear children, this is Michael. My heart is very full this evening just being here with my faithful students, my dear friends. I know the faith and the trust you put in me, and I do appreciate the honor you do me in being here tonight. It gives Mother and I great humility, as Holy Spirit and Creator Son of Nebadon, to witness the courage of our children. We see our Universal Father’s motivation, the wonderful human drive for truth and understanding, shinning out of your souls. We only wish there were some way you yourselves could experience your own souls even more than you do, before one day joining with the co-author of those very souls–and so our lessons on the dimensions of spirit that you literally inhabit and live within.
Lesson
By now you should have some real perception of the effects of spirit. Think of how often it has been likened, by all the various cultures in the world, to the wind that blows unseen except for the way it tosses the trees about. So too now you are beginning to be aware of what we mean by value, and how it is such a fundamental part of your human reality. Now you can have some appreciation of its origin and, indeed, the kinds of spiritual beings humans are.
I know that, in a way, this creates a kind of hardship of incomprehensibility of what humans have been doing to each other all through history for lack of perception of each other as spiritual beings. A great part of the Urantia book is devoted to making the history of Urantia even somewhat comprehensible so you can have an appreciation too of just how far your world has deviated from what is otherwise a nearly universal program of spiritual progress and planetary evolution.
I’m talking about hundreds of thousands of years of warfare and crime that is unique and peculiar to those worlds which went into rebellion. It’s almost beyond your imagination what your Urantia would have been like if it had known a continuous planetary evolution of culture for some five hundred thousand years now, rather than the utter chaos of the last two hundred thousand years since the Lucifer and Caligastia rebellion. Yet this is all rather terrible proof of your freedom, my children, of just how much of your lives are in your own hands.
On the largest scale the most fundamental paradox human beings face is that Universal Reality is at one and the same time both absolutely singular and yet infinitely diverse. Most of your metaphysics and/or religions have leaned very much to one side or the other. What you call monism is the view that reality is a single organic whole, but in which individuality has, historically, mistakenly come to be considered an illusion. Essentially, in these systems of belief that God is everything, the whole goal of religious endeavor is to put an end to karma and rebirth—the continuation as an isolated individual, return to the godhead by way of Illumination, and be dissolved in it–escaping the illusion of separateness. On the other extreme those who can see only the infinite diversity of the physical universe you call materialists. They perceive no ongoing spiritual unification of the cosmos whatsoever and are dedicated to explaining all phenomena in terms of a very strict cause and effect deriving from some conceptual Big Bang that started it all.
Now here we come telling you that neither of these extremes represents the true reality of the situation. Each is only partially true; neither is exclusively. There is a oneness; the entire creation is an organic living reality in which personal beings have only a limited autonomy and are caught up in the destiny of the whole. Yet on the other hand, it is the will of the Creator that his personal beings–his creations–be granted a nearly unfathomable unique individuality and freedom–from their own point of view—with a limitless expansion to occupy them for the rest of eternity. You are truly unique creatures, my children; you were created as such. You have a time/space beginning, but potentially no end. Very much of your destiny is, on a day to day basis, in your own hands–as persons, as members of societies, nation/states, and world civilizations.
Mother Spirit spoke last week about not being self-determined by mere symbolical representations of various natural and societal forces because you yourselves can grow the ability to delineate them both evermore finely. This is the glory, if you will, of your recent scientific method, for also paradoxically enough, to human beings anyway, the finite material cosmos is also infinite. You have not reached any top or bottom, by any means. There is no end to scientific discovery either. Yet all the while, at every moment in time, you express God’s essential oneness, his essential unity of divinity, by being, like him, complete, with nothing–no pieces–missing, just as you are.
If all this seems like a heap of contradictions, so be it. I can only tell you what is real from my point of view. As Mother Spirit put it, the great game of the universe, and your day to day life, is one of bringing all this very real “stuff”–your own bodies and all this world around you–under the control of your spirit, through the mediation of mind. So you too, my children, individually reflect the Trinity, discovering and utilizing God’s laws with your own spiritual essence of the Eternal Son, with the help of the Cosmic Mind of the Infinite Spirit, funneled down to you through Mother Spirit. You yourselves increase your quotient of spiritual divinity by the unifying function of your God-given personality. What fun! Enjoy it well, my children. This game was made for you. But now I feel some questions and comments bursting your seams, so I yield the floor over to you.
Dialogue
Student: I don’t have any questions right at the moment, Father Michael, just: thank you for your friendship, and love, and guidance, and also Mother’s love and guidance.
MICHAEL: Thank you, my son, we’re happy you can feel our love. This is why it is humbling, too, that we are so truly blessed with our children. Be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
Student: Greetings, my big brother and father, my friend, Michael. There are some burning questions in my curious mind, as usual, and I hope you will entertain them for me tonight. I wish to start with the question of how is this planet, at this time, being treated by extra-terrestrial visitors? It’s my understanding that it’s being treated like an emergency room where only those whose highest interest is of the patient are allowed access. This has come into play since the Lucifer Rebellion has been adjudicated and the planetary circuits are open now only those who are here to help. Whereas before the adjudication, there were those who were allowed access to this planet that did not have our best interests at heart. So I would just like to know if I’m clear on what is taking place now with the visitation of our extra-terrestrial brothers and sisters.
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, ever since the days of Pentecost when I received the mantel of authority of Master Son of Nebadon, there have been no what you might call evil-intentioned beings of any kind whatsoever visiting Urantia. You must keep in mind what I spoke of earlier about the rarity of those very few planets that went into rebellion, in the entire history of our Local Universe of now some three million, eight hundred thousand—plus planets.
The spiritual quarantine of the apostate planets, just recently lifted, always worked both ways. But there was really no need for it to do so since the other planets in rebellion had not the means to visit you, and all the superior spiritual beings such as Lucifer and Satan were eventually shorn of their travel tickets, if you will. (laughter)
No, my son, for some hundreds of thousands of years now, ever since the Lucifer Rebellion and the default of Caligastia sent your world into such chaos, there’s been a kind of persisting wrong life-adaptation, or more precisely, a lack of cultural evolution, and forestalled, normal societal progress, which continued, as I mentioned earlier, the incessant warfare and crime that is unique to those few planets, out of millions, that went into rebellion.
The natural period of intense competition and warfare between the emerging colored races and the aboriginal peoples of a world is very short-lived and ends, generally, soon after the installment of a Planetary Prince and his corporal staff. Indeed, Urantia, as you know, progressed quite satisfactorily for several hundred thousand years on this divine program. But right now, ever since the adjudication of the Lucifer Rebellion when the call went out for volunteers to come to Urantia and participate in this accelerated phase of the Correcting Time, the only beings even capable of coming here have, believe me, been thoroughly tested already as to the purity of their spiritual motivation, the depth of their commitment, and the power of their love. So fear not on that score. Does this answer your question?
Student: It does, Michael, but there is still one open end here that I cannot figure out or find the answer to, and that is, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of stories of those who have been so-called abducted and taken somewhere onboard space ships and examined in very unpleasant ways. The most recent film I saw depicting this was Fire in the Sky. I’m trying to understand what is this all about? If these extra-terrestrials’ intentions are highly spiritual, what are the experiences of all these different people? What is the source of these experiences? I cannot fathom what’s going on here.
MICHAEL: What you are looking at, my son, is an extraordinarily complex crystallization of the whole world’s history of fears, imaginings, and hysteria. In one way it is a kind of romantic reaction against the almost all-conquering success of your empirical sciences. So many spiritually- or mystically-oriented folks cannot accept that their own notions of pure materiality—which are not exactly scientific–are true. They feel compelled to express their deepest intimations, and reassurances, that there must be something else happening. For as you know, so many of the these abduction tales are absurd. Why would beings capable of interplanetary travel be so interested in human physiology that they could not obtain this information through a thousand and one other more subtle ways? (Good point) Even your own wildly imaginative TV science fiction series Star Trek evolved the notion of a Prime Directive of non-interference, one planetary civilization to another.
You are also witnessing this mystical resurgence in your mass culture. Now literally hundreds of movies and TV series are devoted to the occult, with witches and warlocks, and magic. So ask yourself, my son, what yearnings are being expressed here? This is what I meant by a crystallization of history’s fears and dark imaginings, a polarization of opposing reality-viewpoints, a kind of romantic reaction to materialism. Think of the popularity of the whole Harry Potter series. What is really being expressed with this wonderfully detailed and comprehensive articulation of all of mankind’s magical, mystical desires, and hopes and fears? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk out some morning and meet a real elf? (much laughter) So you see what I mean. But rest assured, this is just the insistence of the human soul that there is something more than material happening here.
Ironically, it’s actually stoking the fires of curiosity when something like the Urantia book–something that enormous and comprehensive inside–begins to detail and articulate all it does. For as the book says: The creation—Universal Reality, authored by God, is neither magical nor mystical, but follows laws based on his true infinity of power and wisdom. So sometimes these magical, mystical yearnings of your fellows are a kind of back-handed respect being paid to God’s real and absolute mystery–to all subordinate beings. It just comes out from time to time in weird ways. (much laughter again) When you read these accounts, my son, you must evaluate them for yourself on a case by case basis. Can I help you any further along these lines?
Student: Yes, that was quite a bit of clarity. I appreciate that, Michael. Thank you for taking the time to answer that question quite thoroughly. I do have one more. We were earlier discussing the sequestering of those truly evil people who continue to pull this planet the wrong way and keep others from growing in spirit in any way they can. I’m trying to understand what is meant by these terms–that they will eventually be sequestered. Do I understand this correctly? Will they be taken away any time in the near future as we go into the stages of Light and Life?
MICHAEL: My son, I would have you consider completely anew, if you will, the nature of evil. What is its origin? What is it? What is it for an individual to knowingly embrace it?–indeed, is this possible? Or does evil on a human level really reflect an absence of spiritual awareness of true values coupled with a lack of willpower? Mother Spirit touched on this last week when she introduced a notion that turns the common human comprehension of power on its head. You have Lord Acton’s famous dictum, referring to social and political power, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. To which Mother Spirit contrasted the more profound, ultimate power of spirit, and made the statement that this kind of truly absolute power, the kind which approaches Supremacy in the human mind and soul, corrupts absolutely no one.
This I hoped to portray in my life as Jesus. I once advised Peter, in his intention to defend me, to put up his sword because there were then legions of angels sitting on the nearby hills, eager to rescue me. And I know it has been an incomprehensible fact for so many, ever since that day on Calvary, as to why a being with my power would choose to do what I did. I offer these examples, my son, for you to reassess your notions of power—what it is, and who really has it. What is really determining peoples’ lives on this planet?
I think some of these individuals of power—as you might consider them—have already sequestered themselves from the true spiritual glory that might have been theirs otherwise. It is not that they do not do great evil. They cause an unimaginable suffering that we of the spiritual family of Urantia directly experience. But the only cure is love. The only real power is faith. Each of you, my children, can act day by day according to the lights your own spirits shine before you–along with our help.
So you see there is no need to sequester these individuals. It is only necessary to spread the glory of personal freedom so all their followers can each know their own human spirit and dignity of will. Very few of evil intention work alone. It is only the unexamined belief, the unconscious identification, of others in them—all this need for a leader to tell one what to do–that gives them power, whether political, societal, or ecclesiastical. I repeat: the power, and the choice, is in your hands. But then a blossoming of individual dignity of will is only another name for approaching planetary Light and Life, is it not?
Student: Yes, Michael, thank you for reminding me of the obvious. (much laughter)
MICHAEL: It’s not always so obvious, my son… (Well, when you put it that way…{more laughter}) It’s an ensnaring net that still catches so many, and beguiles them into giving away their own true power to others. This is the essence of all authoritarian forms of government, and society, and religion. People can have an unintended weakness to remain spiritually adolescent, and want some other person to tell them what to do. Be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
Student: I’m deeply moved, Lord Michael, by your words on the subject of fear. I work with many teens and very devoted Christians who have this fear of hell, and it’s the wrong motivator for teaching love. Fear is just wrong, as far as I’m concerned. But how do you undo this fear? If people would only understand that our all-merciful Creator could not possibly punish and forgive at the same time—it’s becoming so obvious to me. So I try to find questions that teach, and sometimes they come to me. Is there any other way to free up all this locked-up fear, to help them get their freedom back, and feel you, and get some hope for humanity? How do you get people to see the obvious?
I ask questions like, what is the sin that could put you in hell; or, what part of your body is suffering; or, who is already in hell—do you have a list of names? Do you have any other ways I might use?
MICHAEL: Yes, my daughter, you are coming face to face with people’s lack of trust in themselves, what you might consider to be a kind of duality because there’s no inner consistency or comprehensiveness in their beliefs. The ability of the human mind to hold a number of self-contradictory notions all at the same time leads to this situation. They are validly not trusting themselves because what continuity they do have residing in their personality and soul is somewhat aware of this inconsistency.
And so, not trusting themselves, and simultaneously not wanting to accept the fact they are co-creating their own reality, they have no faith they can create their way forward. Instead they rely on driving themselves along through fear, forcing themselves to be good for fear of what might happen to them, as this is exemplified in notions of hell–though conveniently put off into the future to allow them to keep sinning—by their own measure, today. This only plugs a lot of guilt into an already messy situation.
This is a difficult situation, my daughter, because it is not amenable to reason. (much laughter) The best you can do is, really, try not to confront them, but simply express your own positive spirit. This is most effective because it keeps you out of all kinds of dead-ended arguments, or even seeing them as overly-needing you. Let them be free to be who they are, and channel all your love and concern into expressing as best you can, at those moments, your own faith in yourself. Be a living example right in front of them that their souls and their spirits can recognize.
As you know, I taught equally well with asking questions, and answering questions, so the questions are good to peak their interest, to capture their curiosity. But you have to literally be the answer their souls are looking for. Just express your deepest feelings of who you know God to be. Then introduce, as gently as you can, these notions of spiritual power we were talking about—that they themselves have this power. They themselves are creating with their systems of beliefs and feelings their own reality, and your way of understanding is just one alternative.
My feeling is that you’ve been evolving this technique on your own, so I’m just encouraging you to carry on. Experiment. See what works. Welcome the feedback you will get. Learn from them.
What is this psychology you’re encountering?
Student: I’m learning I have to be graceful in approaching them. There’s no other way.
MICHAEL: Good. You run into the same phenomena I just explained to R here, a kind of fundamentalist reaction to all your science and materiality, that goes off into mysticism, and heaven and hell, and kindred notions, that appear to the more scientifically-minded as some resurgence of Medieval beliefs. This is the polarization I mentioned. You are encountering how sincerely these beliefs can be held.
Student: Yes, and on that subject of goblins and ghosts, and extra-terrestrials, what first grabbed me in the Urantia book and got me to reading it: I once opened it at random—I’d had it for about twelve years—and I read that: Oh, by the way, in close proximity to earth there is a planet of non-breathing human types. And this exactly mirrored a dream I’d had about going to a planet of this very kind of people. Was that real? (much laughter) I’m sorry, but I’ve pondered that for years, Michael; thank you.
MICHAEL: Well, I hope I won’t disappoint you, my dear, by not answering—exactly. That evaluation is for you to make, because it has a unique kind of reality—if you will allow me this seeming evasion—for you. But yes, there are various series and types of human beings–that we almost, at times, question the wisdom of including in the Urantia book…(much more laughter…); like mentioning that Adam and Eve would fly around on giant birds…(etc…) [[ Fandors – UB 73:3.4 and UB 66:5.6 ] But facts are facts. As a distinct series of human beings, the non-breathers on the atmosphere-less worlds are quite real, and you will meet them some day. Maybe you can answer your own question then. Meanwhile, be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
Student: Hello, my father/brother Michael. I have a couple of questions for you. We are so blessed by the Correcting Time. It is an explosion of grace, and there is so much that has happened in it over these years. I wonder if you could assess where it is now and what is its current status? Within that, where do you see the quest for world government and world democracy fitting into the overall trend? For those of us working on that, what council do you have now as to how to make that happen? It was in the Urantia book, but so long ago, I wonder if you could help me get my mind around that?
MICHAEL: Yes, my son, with respect to the Correcting Time and the latest phase of that, the Lucifer Adjudication and the Teaching Mission, Mother Spirit and I have dropped a lot of hints over this last series of lessons that things are going quite well. As we’ve said before, that a hallmark of wisdom is a sense of proportion, so the success of the Correcting Time must be measured by what it set out to do—what it needed to do, what stood to be corrected, what the situation was before, and how long it had persisted. Think of the thousands of years of warfare almost unknown throughout all the millions of worlds of Nebadon. As you know, this has persisted right up to the present day. You recently had what you’ve called a Second World War in which tens of millions of persons perished of starvation and exposure, as well as directly, when their lives were blown apart.
The greatest acceleration of social evolution, as your Urantia book mentions, is not even by altruistic motivations, but economic things like trade and the cross-fertilization of technology-hungry cultures, also entertainment and sports–evermore peaceful kinds of competition. It is only very recently you’ve had an electronic kind of world soul come into existence to parallel the spiritual one that’s been here from the beginning. Now almost anyone can fire up their little portable generator, or sit in a bicycle kind of rig and pedal one, point an antenna at the sky, and bring in the rest of the world. These mass communications and the electronic connections are bringing an international language—pretty much English—into existence.
This is causing the polarization’s I mentioned, one being that of mysticism contrasted with science, another we’ve called the competition of cultures which have been isolated for many centuries, such as that of Western Europe and the United States, the Middle East, The Far East, and India. There is within each of these cultures that which is antithetical to the others, and the fundamentalists within each—those who have survived to date only by dint of isolation—are rightfully worried that their beloved way of life will perish merely if the peoples of their cultures are given personal choices of lifestyle. Yet here comes that freedom of choice–the universal goal of all world cultural evolution–through the air, into the computers, and out onto the screens. A world culture is emerging with fantastic rapidity compared to any other time which has gone before.
Ironically, because it is somewhat consistent with these fundamentalists’ fears, there is also a real danger here of a wealth of historical culture being lost. But the way out of this danger is not a further panic and related extremes of violent, heavy-handed coercion, trying to stop evolution, but the exact opposite. An open-minded, welcoming creativity of all these movie- and TV-makers to capture this wealth of culture before it perishes—as has inexorably all the past before it—is the way out. For example, in your own country you had a very short period called The Expansion of the West, yet look how many good, bad, and indifferent cowboy movies it spawned. Only recently has your open competition for movie goers and TV watchers evolved a kind of mature realism that can begin to capture the reality of that time, as compared to, shall we say, the Roy Rogers and Gene Autrie singing cowboy romances of the early ‘fifties. (much laughter)
As with so many human things, the way forward is with a mature, open-minded and open-arms creativity, because isolation is self-dooming. And further ironically, sitting in front of your TV or computer screens, with so many channels and websites running 24/7 devoted to world cultures and your fellow men and women everywhere, and all the past—all the archaeology and wealth of technology-based discovery; you have the whole world’s cultures and history available to you as never before—and growing—across all former demarcations and boundaries.
Get used to it, my son. You are in the middle of a Renaissance like no other. You can only do your best to nudge it a little this way or that. A world culture is emerging, fortunately beyond any person’s, society’s, government’s, or single culture’s ability to control. But then it always has been.
There are still those remnants of the Lucifer Rebellion determining peoples’ lives—their attitudes, their expectations, their notions of reality—that they are unconsciously co-creating. The struggle for Light and Life is not over yet. As Mother Spirit and I have also said, you do not have to anticipate any decimation or apocalyptic cataclysm, any world-wide catastrophe; it is still going on. There are still millions and millions dying of hunger and exposure while millions of others are dying of gluttony and surfeit.
Do you remember that passage in the Urantia book where it states how the human mind intrinsically enjoys, seeks out and creates, material means to express itself? You are now seeing for the first time the material means by which your world can feed, clothe, house, and educate its entire self, but more because of this emerging world culture’s valuing doing so. This social evolution is inexorable—with your help. We’re back to the large and the small, the One and the many, inextricably reflecting one another.
As for your own personal efforts, my son, you know how to tap into your higher consciousness, and Mother Spirit, and myself, and our Father. You must make your decisions day by day in the light of all you can absorb. But the wisdom is yours, as are the decisions. I can only offer to help you keep your hopes up. (much ironic laughter this time) Have faith, my son.
Student: Thank you, Michael. Thank you for that answer. Thank you so much.
MICHAEL: Well, I did tune in to some of your doomsday scenarios…(now everyone broke up, Michael referring to the lively discussion before his lesson) I can only ask you to recall all those times before, like when the Black Plague would come through and wipe out a third of the people. Think of your recent two World Wars. Think of the genocide even now going on. There is always this tipping of good and evil happening, and we can only work to lessen the worst effects. There is an enormous possibility for both, and that constantly modulates, but it is part of the human condition. I was once criticized for saying that the poor are always with you. I draw your attention to what the Urantia book calls the inevitabilities of the human situation. (Ed: page 51) So once again: social evolution is inexorable—with your help.
Student: Anyway…Michael, I wasn’t here for that doomsday talk… Anyway, I’ve been reading this great book called Spiritual Peacemaking. I’ve been asking myself, and asking the universe, the direction to go in my life to open myself up to a greater expression of who I am, and my own faith—putting myself out there. There’s so much good material in this book I want to jump ahead and read it from the back; you know what I mean?
Anyway, something you said about, we can change the things we see but not the things that are, because there is a reality—God’s reality: heaven on earth is already here. All we need to do is see it, and live it, and believe it. We really need to focus on that; not to minimize what is going on the world—that is tragic. But when we are in tune to our true sense of self, then we are empathetic to everyone’s situation.
Because I’m by myself a lot, I always ask myself: who am I? And it goes deeper and deeper each time. So I imagined throwing myself into a linear accelerator, to find out who I am, and as I progressed further and further, I quickly, in a sense, became nothing but light and energy. But there was also awareness. There was no more gender, no more social/economic labels, no more being Jewish, or Christian, or Atheist, or whatever. I was just pure awareness. And that’s heaven—here, now.
(another student: Wheee!)
But you know, my feet are on the ground; I still have to pay my rent. It just opens up whole new possibilities and potentials, still always my choice to live in this reality I cannot ever be apart from except in my blindness. So…
MICHAEL: Yes, my son: amen. It’s good to find your home base—as we once called it. It’s good to just hang out there for a while. You may discover the magical-enough possibility that when you joyfully let it go, without clinging, without any self-pity of leaving this pure state, but just lightly let it go to rejoin the world, it tags along with you and does indeed transform all that out there. So once again you are face to face with: what is real; and what is ideal; and where do they merge; and where do they not? You discover the adventure is, by God’s good grace and love for you, continuing. There is another step to take, another risk requiring courage, another dimension to encounter and make your own. So we thank our Father that he made us the kind of beings we are, whether Creator Son or human being—that I had the great honor and delight in experiencing, myself. Rest in my peace, my son. I’m delighted you’ve found so much of it already, and are willing to look the economic necessities in the eye with a brave attitude.
Closing
My children, it’s been a full evening again. I want to thank you all for making such a transmission possible, for indeed all your devotion, and trust, and faith, and delight, made this what it was. So I thank you all very much. Rest tonight in my peace. Good evening.
