2007-12-10-Mother Spirit’s Endowments
Marin #145
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Mother Spirit’s Endowments
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Nebadonia
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
Topic: Mother Spirit’s Endowments
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit, Tonight as we approach the perennial celebration of Michael’s beginning his life on earth as a baby human being, we wish to thank you for the establishment of life itself. Thank you for those hundreds of millions of years of your abiding with your own Life Carriers Sons in directing the evolution of life that eventually let to us, and will ultimately continue to evolve far beyond us. Thank you for developing and guarding our infant and childhood years with your influences of intuition, knowledge, understanding, courage and counsel, worship and wisdom. We wish to acknowledge and honor you, you who have been Michael’s closest companion from the beginning. As we live in the encompassing of your Holy Spirit and share our lives with you–that makes us yours, so too by the out-flowing of your unconditional love for us, you are ours. Amen.
NEBADONIA: Good evening, my children, this is Nebadonia. I gleefully accept your acknowledgement and your love. You indeed do me honor by recognizing my presence and my influence in your lives. I always welcome those times when you become aware of me and simply say, “Hello, Mom! I know you are right here with me.” It is during these times when, with the wholehearted love and devotion of your deepest personal selves, I am able to expand and augment my influence all the more. At these times we truly share together those aspects of my Holy Spirit you know as my Mind/Spirit Adjutants, the dimensions of my personal consciousness with which I endow my children.
Lesson
Mother Spirit (Mother Spirit’s endowments)
So think of them from time to time, my children. Consider my augmentation of your basic intuition, the instantaneous association of physical perceptions, mental meanings, and spiritual values into a cohesive reality for you. With knowledge and understanding–consider how you are able to organize life in so many ways of causes and effects–what leads to what–all the ways your advancing civilization has discovered of organizing human experience so you can readily use it.
Consider my Adjutant of Courage which helps you exercise your God-given impulses of curiosity, of adventure, of exploration–just the nerve it takes to turn outward and extend yourselves out there to explore, to experience. Think of my Adjutant of Counsel swelling your wonderful desire to associate with others and share all you have, all you’ve discovered, all that you enjoy and treasure so deeply. Your desire to share everything with your loved ones is so similar to your impulses of thankfulness/worship I help you reflect back to the sources of your life, Michael and myself, and our Universal Father.
Wonder about that Adjutant of mine that augments your own wisdom–that growing ability you have to bring all that you are and all you have been to bear on the present moment. This growing ability is so closely allied to what we have been informing you is the Morontia reality of your soul. This is your soulful wisdom and, as you can perceive it in yourself and in others, this is yours and their character. This is the fruit of your labors here. This is the spiritual import of your living experience for which, we have informed you, there is no substitute–anywhere. This is a primal and absolute cosmic reality, the spiritual record of your day to day life, the soul that you are earning.
Personality, Soul (Personality, soul, conscious self)
But although a number of our more recent lessons have been on the nature of your soul and how it, and your personality, and your conscious self are distinct from each other, Michael and I both sense that you are still in somewhat of a quandary as to how and when–(Mother chuckles)–you are any one, or all of these. In turn, your understanding of these distinctions greatly influences your understanding of a lot of ancient or even modern religious and metaphysical texts which often times did not or still cannot perceive these distinctions themselves. So often in addressing you–your conscious self you are directly aware of, they mistakenly refer to your absolute being we call your personality–a creation of God.
Because your personality is somewhat like looking into conscious reality we quote that old saying for the fourth or fifth time–we hope you are not getting bored with this, it’s so apt: you are the eye that sees but cannot see itself. Your personality literally contains all of your experience; its sole but only necessary possession is the growing reality of your soul. And as a container cannot contain itself, your personality cannot be outside of itself to perceive itself as an object of consciousness. Your personality is the essential you, the total deity-you that real-izes your experience–makes it real for your conscious self. It has the evolving function to, like all deified, personal reality, unify all its constituent parts: to become united.
As you go through your life in your normal waking hours, who you know yourself to be, and how you consciously relate to others, is distinct from this changeless personality even though you are self-aware in a way that no animal, not even the most intelligent primates, can be. Everything your consciousness can be aware of, changes. You may think your physical self persists day to day, but if you remember correctly all your adolescence and childhood years, even who you are physically changes enormously over the years. It even changes–in subjective feeling–hour to hour depending upon your state of mind. And your mind too is changing throughout the day, necessarily so to adapt to changing circumstances and inner reality.
Your self-awareness fluctuates from almost totally encompassing your attention in moments of reflection or stillness, to the opposite extreme when the outer world of your busy physical activity requires one hundred percent of your focus. Michael mentioned how even your seemingly fixed memories are also extraordinarily conditioned by your current state of mind; whether, say, you are maneuvering your high-powered car through very fast, congested traffic, or you’re nodding off for an afternoon nap, or watching something on TV that brings up a memory for a few seconds, or deep in your stillness when some spark of a memory triggers a flood of your soul and somehow or another for a few timeless moments it seems you are reliving some other part of your life again: how it looked and smelled, how it felt.
As for your own personal spirit, my children, think of those times perhaps during periods of transition or stress, pain or grief, when the value seemed to drain out of everything and nothing was worth anything anymore. Think of those other times when you were suddenly, inexplicably in possession of an epiphany where it seemed your whole life, and everything–even the tiniest thing you ever did–was of absolute value. In a moment of spiritual triumph and reassurance you could see how everything was connected and that nothing of spiritual value is ever lost.
All these aspects of your life, my children–the uniquely personal, the soulful, the physical, the mental, the spiritual: this is the enormity of you. But as you think of yourself and remember your conscious experiences–as Michael said, out of love and respect for you, this is the you that we address directly. True enough, I will admit we do tease and entice you, and maybe speak just a little bit over your head to get you to reach for a new comprehension. But we honor deeply this conscious you, this you–you know yourself to be. We simply say that it is only part of who we are able to perceive you to be, we who can see your soul and your God-given personality directly and completely. This is partly what it is to be the Creator Son and the Mother Spirit of a Local Universe. We are just this much closer, my dear children, to our Universal Father’s vision.
Understanding what you are–individually and collectively–has been a rather tricky problem for the human race for quite a few millennia now, ever since the question arose. Just on a mind level: when the concept of an unconscious mind was first introduced, people wondered: if part of your mind is unconscious, how can you be aware it’s even there? What does it do? What relationship do you have with it? With your early psychologies it was just an inference–inferred from a study of various mental illnesses and defects.
Meditation (Being super-minded; natural meditation)
Now here come Michael and I saying you are super-minded. You have a mind and a spirit so complimentarily- and mutually-informing each other they far transcend, not only quantitatively but qualitatively and in kind, any animal mentality you know of. So: how can you contact this greater mind, this super-consciousness of the spiritual aspect of your own personality; plus our Father’s presence in your mind adjusting your thoughts towards spirit, even providing the thought-connections from time to time? As we’ve acknowledged, this is intrinsically difficult at first because you are truly co-creating yourself. In meditation you let go, you relinquish this very person you know yourself to be and give up, momentarily, what you have worked so hard to create. Yet you all inevitably will some day: give up the life you know for greater life.
In addition, most of you who have some sense of success at life have built up a kind of inwardly-felt momentum and want to keep increasing it: and yet we recommend being still. Dare to let everything come to a complete stop. If you possibly can, set aside a day or two for nothing but meditation, being still, and following wherever your spirit leads. For while we acknowledge how challenging this may be, all of you who have more than half-heartedly tried this know the wonderful results that are possible. It can truly change your life from the inside-out.
But in labeling any particular kind of meditation as stillness, my children, we run the risk of alienating you from what you may have evolved purely on your own, if only half-consciously, long before you ever heard of Michael, or myself, or the presence of God in your mind. You may have already developed your own personal kind of meditation, maybe by taking a walk and thinking. You might think of it as resting and wondering, or sometimes being frankly stumped and sitting down to ponder a while. It’s been known for thousands of years simply as reflection.
Tonight I would like you to think about any natural meditation you may have been doing for years, but merely gave no name. It may have been resting contemplatively in the after-glow of some sweet success, some wonderful achievement. Maybe it was acknowledging being in a quandary, the fact you could not understand something recently happened, and you needed to slow down to think about things before you took your next step.
So you needn’t think of stillness as some kind of alien or wholly-other practice. You may have been doing it for many years already. In this context it’s almost universal that people can remember little moments of enlightenment, epiphanies of realization that have been the guiding lights in their lives that got them to here. We don’t want to make your own soul seem so mysterious you lose sight of its active nature that swells all your memories–given half a chance, and adds so much feeling/value to your days. We’ve even teased you with the notion that your Father Fragment, the subtle presence of God in your mind, is usually so hard to detect only because it’s been there all along. It’s an integral part of your life.
When you study different philosophies, different religions, different metaphysics, and as each tries in its own way to explain what a human being is, what human reality is, what your relationship to God is: see if you can infer these subtle distinctions and determine which aspect of your being they are talking about.
This is a way in which you can use these distinctions and related terminology to help your understanding, both of yourself today, and also, through the writings and teachings of persons from another time altogether–maybe hundreds or thousands of years ago; how they saw themselves, and each other, and their Gods: literally, what life felt like for them. This way both now and then reflect and augment each other, and your understanding of both
The easiest and most simple way of realizing and accrediting–being thankful for–the largely unconscious growth of your soul, my children, is by how the quality of your conscious life improves, for this is perceptible. The very quality of your consciousness grows. Life becomes infinitely more worthwhile and meaningful. Other people become ever more individual and distinct and intrinsically priceless. There is something growing, something expanding here. Memories swell forth with a fullness you can barely contain. They reassure you all your past is still here, all that irreducible and irreplaceable human experience you’ve earned. This is the purpose of life, my dear children: this is what you carry into eternity. We even have the feeling that this is why this living, growing, evolving universe of all of us–is.
(Mother Spirit’s Christmas blessing)
This is the over-soul of the Supreme Being that we all add to. This is a qualitative expansion that is perceptible. Now in this season of your celebrating Michael’s human birth, I wish you all a rebirth in this understanding of who and what you are–to yourself–to Michael and me–and to God. Let us give thanks to our Father that, amidst all this complexity of being, especially your human being, my children, He has given you a way to rest in His peace, and the peace of His Son’s.
If you have any comments or questions this evening, just address them to me as I invite you always to come to me: just as you are.
Dialogue
Student: Mother, thank you for your lesson on stillness. I find I still resist it. I don’t know why, but I do. It’s like I’m ready to give up because I’m tired of fighting it. I don’t know what to do about it at the moment.
(More on meditation au natural–reflection)
NEBADONIA: Yes, my son, but did anything I mentioned this evening about a natural kind of meditation or reflection—did any of that sound familiar to you?
Student: Yes it did, but not experientially, only intellectually familiar: I think I know what you mean.
NEBADONIA: You never just sat down and wondered what was happening?—(she laughs)
Student: Yes, I’ve done that, but only for moments, not for any extended period of time.
NEBADONIA: Did you ever have a feeling of this carrying over onto your activity, where your feelings seemed to have application in what you were doing? I mean, somehow or another you did get to here. You have lived this long, which, in your highly mechanized society, took some understanding. Do you have some sense of who you have been all along?
Student: I know I’ve had support from the other side—so to speak. My Father Fragment I know experientially—from experience: that’s not a theory. It’s harder for me to judge—not judge, but experience you and Michael. Other than that I don’t know what to look for. I know you’re there but I can’t perceive it.
NEBADONIA: This is why I mentioned some ways in which I’m right in there with you in terms of curiosity, understanding, worship, wisdom. You have all these naturally in and of yourself; I’m just a little augmentation, a little bump. You cannot detect me aside from these, yet. But as you say, you know I’m in you, and all around. You know Michael is beside you.
I think your problem is one of considering meditation or stillness in too formal a way. Tonight I wanted to point up its nature of reflection. I know you’ve done a lot of this. You’re a reflective person. (she laughs again) This is your meditation au natural, if you will. Think of those who are totally outwardly oriented and driven by forces they barely or never reflect upon. Their lack of evolved human reflection so often results in being driven by such un-examined animalistic or primitive desires and motivations they don’t stop to reflect until they’re surrounded by iron bars in prison. You are a long way from that.
Student (laughing): Thanks for that.
NEBADONIA: You have been reflecting quite a lot your whole life; and wondering; and curious, or you wouldn’t be here in this activity.
Student: Yes, I can see that.
NEBADONIA: All your spiritual studies, my son, have given you inner reactions to what you were reading. These naturally occurring responses and interests–or disinterest’s, agreements or disagreements, gave you experiences of your deeper self—what you believed, how you felt about things, what was of value or of no value. They formed the basis for the thousand and one decisions you made throughout your days following your interests or, at times, your sense of duty—when you felt you needed to help someone else. These all have an element of reflection, of self-knowledge in them.
Student: I hadn’t seen it from that viewpoint, but it does make sense now.
NEBADONIA: This is why this evening I mentioned ways people have been accessing their spirit and soul all along, but only half-consciously; if you will, meditating without knowing they were, this is so much a part of genuine human success. You reflect on what has happened so you can accept it and learn from it. Those who know none of this usually come to rather violent and horrendous ends very quickly, often enough when they run into each other. They are the predators within human society who refuse any reflection upon or responsibility for what they want to do, and so have no means or intention to acknowledge anyone else’s intrinsic rights. Again, my son, this is a far cry from the life you have known.
Student: Yes…
NEBADONIA: So here you’ve had one foot in stillness all along—(she breaks up laughing, and is joined by everyone). I’ll leave it in that sense then.
Student: It does break it down into pieces that I can understand. I’ve been looking at it from a very formal viewpoint, and trying to do it correctly, but I hadn’t thought about all the pieces. Thank you, Mother.
NEBADONIA: You’re very welcome, my son. Don’t forget the whole idea is to enhance the enjoyment and appreciation of your life, not put on some hair-shirt or sit on cushion of nails.
Student: I gave up those ideas quite some time ago.
NEBADONIA: I wanted to point up tonight what, apart from those brief memories while you are busy driving your car, or watching a movie or television, what swells forth as an encompassing feeling of a previous time. That is your soul. In your activities, this is your spiritual part yearning to express itself and catch your attention in your busy life, and say, Wait a minute! Remember this time too. Let this afternoon have true spiritual value and be a part of your soul. And so a lot of your stillness can be letting moments like this swell forth and reassure you of an enormous reality you cannot yet bring into full consciousness. You literally have to grow to embrace it some day, to become one with it.
Student: I look forward to that some day. (everyone laughs)
(You are not God)
NEBADONIA: This is when you fuse with the co-author, the presence of God. Remember: your life is your gift to God, in part by the way we’ve talked about where it seems you are God—that is, the fact He experiences everything you do. Yet there is also the way in which you are not God. By His will you were created potentially independent of Him. You can develop something to give back to Him of your own free will: your free will itself. You can grow the ability to consciously choose to seek out His will and augment it—join it with your own: or not. So be in His love, and mine.
Student: Thank you, Mother.
Student (far out and hesitant): I’m just allowing…what you just said, those last two or three sentences?–to kind-of settle into my mind here… I’m trying not to… I can’t feel the words… I’m trying not to have an opinion—about what you just said, but just allow the words…to sink in…
NEBADONIA: Well, thank you, my son! This is all Michael and I ever ask, that you open your heart and your mind to entertain what we have to offer.
Student: …because you do know that I do reflect…a little too much sometimes—(laughing)—upon/about things. Hmmm…
(Experiences of oneness: levels of reality)
NEBADONIA: I also addressed this concept earlier tonight as how to approach the theological monism of some of the older cultures’ highest writings about humankind and Deity where they assert, as you’ve introduced from time to time, the notion that everything is God; but where, obviously now, your conscious self is not. They did have experiences where they could realize the oneness of reality insofar as their conscious self dissolved into it. They did achieve, however briefly, touching upon a feeling of absoluteness, and intuiting the true fact that everything is connected with an absolute personal Being—the First Source and Center of everything. They evolved the concepts of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence to express the relationship and extent of this primal Being to creation. And for a human being this is an unforgettable, life-changing experience, especially if it has been sought for a lifetime. It can never be gainsaid nor dismissed by those who have not experienced it themselves.
But then as a human experience, what do you do with it? It transforms everything you see, and yet you are also confronted with the undeniable multiplicity of the world, the fact it is not one. So some of these folks, very sincerely looking back on their lives before this experience, came to the feeling/conclusion that their so-called normal or regular life before, of seeing only the multiplicity, had been some kind of illusion from which they had awoken; in effect though, concluding that everything is only One—God. This leads to the dichotomy of Enlightenment and Previous, yet you can understand how humanly valid this seems.
From our point of view seeing you as experiential beings, we say of both these periods of before and after—all your experience is valid in context; none of it is pure illusion or absolute: all human experience is relative. You may touch upon a human experience of the absolute, but you never become God, nor should you identify with Him or His vision without including that provision: this was/is only my experience. For once or however a person wholly identifies with an absolute, theoretically infinite point of view, it still remains his own making. But if he disregards this fact, the power of projection may create for him a world that appears to be somewhat illusory, especially the lives seemingly non-enlightened people live.
As your Urantia book puts it, in essence: while approaching numerous cosmic truths, you can fall victim to the error of failing to differentiate between the several levels of reality, such as absolute, transcendental, and finite. You can fail to take into account that what may be finite-illusory on the absolute level may be absolutely real on the finite level. And the finite level is where people actually live. No matter how you identify with the absolute, and how illusory then so-called ordinary life may seem, you still cannot put an eight-foot truck through a six-foot gate.
In decrying a kind of gross materialism, remember that the matter/energy manifestation in reality is not an illusion either. For while everything is connected through a single personal Being, it is equally true that through His absolute power of creativity there is a real, infinitely diverse universe—both the inner realm of Havona and the outer one of time/space, full of distinct, unique personalities created by Him and endowed with free will, even if only potentially to begin with. In this sense they are not God: they are His creation. As Michael said last time, He has the ability to create this kind of independent, personal being; and you are one of them. Your worship and honoring God can be, then, a freewill gift to him.
We just go on to say that you are not in any way divorced from Him—from His point of view and by dint of His out-flowing love and His experiencing everything you do. But with respect to your own conscious, deciding self, you can go totally against His will and His love for you. You can self-destruct. You can destroy each other. These are real events, even though you cannot kill anyone in the eternal sense. These wars you have are no illusions. Human suffering is real. And there is a real evolution out of these earlier, more primitive times toward a world of peace and love.
So thank you for keeping your mind open, my son, to entertain these concepts. For they are human-word concepts pointing at a reality that is transcendent. We do honor that supreme human experience that intuits that everything is One, if not exactly how it is so.
Student: I’ve always wondered about our being an independent creation of God because it runs counter to what I’ve been experiencing, or I’ve been a part of the past couple of years with certain teachings. I do wonder about my own uniqueness. With what you said–there’s a tinge of recognition; something resonated that there’s some truth to that.
(Unbridled spiritual ambition and allied discomfort)
NEBADONIA: This has been another way of saying what you’ve been discussing for many lessons now, how to come from your own self, independently of all these other teachings. Also, consider how those teachings which address only that part of you that is connected with God put the enormous burden upon your conscious self of an unbridled spiritual ambition, and a related discomfort—to live your life as God intended, as if you weren’t. Whereas we try to reassure you, you are. You already are—whole and complete in a way that transcends any kind of ambition, any kind of striving. Spiritual striving is a wonderful thing you can take upon yourself, consciously, but you need to rest from time to time in the greater, actual you, you already are as a creation of God. It’s a matter of balance, if you will.
You can see how those who achieved the transcendent experience of oneness wished to share it with others, but often made the mistake of calling the normative life of your conscious self an illusion. They rightfully emphasized how one has to struggle to achieve an ideal, but in doing so they put the ideal as something greater than the real.
Student: I guess what it is people are looking at is what they identify with, and we need to look beyond what we identify with, and what our points of view are; and to, as you say, rest in our naturalness, in our wholeness—without conceiving of it because, in a sense, it is beyond conception. If we try to conceive it, we are only minimizing our totality.
NEBADONIA: Exactly.
Student: So I’m just resting with that. In a sense the whole universe is resting; and to be aware of that, and rest in that.
NEBADONIA: Yes, that is true–except for those poor, restless souls who have no notion, no experience with what you just expressed. That too is real, and part of the whole.
Student: I understand—I’ve experienced that. As you say, everything we’ve experienced, even before we’ve had our epiphanies of revelations, they all lead up to this moment. I never thought those things I experienced in the past were illusions, just stepping stones to who I am now. They allowed me to become more familiar with the restful place where I am.
NEBADONIA: Yet, my son, you’ve often expressed how you’re driven by notions of not being who the universe intended you to be, who God created you to be. We’ve tried to offer ways of experiencing that very thing by, as you just realized, letting those concepts go. That’s why Michael asked you, What makes you think you are not…(they both break up laughing)…a full human being? You know?
Student: Yeah!—it’s great!—like in this book I’ve been reading—Spiritual Peacemaking—they address that kind of thing where we are living in this world, but we need to see through God’s eyes to our own wholeness; and then everything changes. We come to live from a place of wholeness, and what we create also comes from this place. We won’t have the wars, the human suffering, if every human becomes familiar with their own human creation. I mean life is supposed to be enjoyable! We seem to forget that. But hopefully that will change. And Jupiter won’t explode. Sorry: I had to bring that in. I do get tired of end-of-the-world stuff. So: thank you.
NEBADONIA: You’re welcome, my son. It’s nice to see the whole picture of both–the wholeness and completeness, yet still so complex it is difficult for a human being just starting out in life to unify all your often disparate elements. That takes some doing. Usually it will occupy you for quite a few Morontia phases to come. But you are well started. You do have your Morontia souls. And they do swell forth in your memories and get you to appreciate all you’ve already done, all the hundreds or even thousands of unique souls you’ve already known. Let me drop a little hint here.
When we speak of the dimensions you will encounter, a lot of this will be the other orders of personal beings. When you are first able to visualize and relate with Cherubim and Sanobim, then later, Seraphim, ascendant Midwayers, Material Sons and Daughters; each of these orders of being will bring other dimensions for you to encompass and make your own.
Identity (Who and what you are)
Meanwhile it’s nice when you can understand yourself as all these aspects. When you are identifying with one in an invalid way, as an experiential being—i.e. when you think you are directly experiencing your changeless personality—or the totality of your soul–you can remember you are this constantly fluctuating consciousness of self, dependent in your first, human life upon your physical body that must of necessity lapse onto unconsciousness quite regularly. You are this consciousness so conditioned by your current state of mind that must consider too all the thousand and one practical things of today, and for tomorrow. So rest deeply in Michael’s peace. I am indeed the encompassing you live in; I am the love that surrounds you. Take a moment from time to time to say, Hi Mom! I enjoy that so much. You are right, my children: I am yours. Good evening.
