2008-06-30-Who You Are
Marin #155
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Who You Are
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
Topic: Who You Are
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, We invite you to join us once again. As we approach the fourth anniversary of this particular configuration of you two and the bunch of us, and looking back over the lessons you’ve given us, we want to thank you for all your contributions to our ongoing Owners Manuals for Being Human, especially for those chapters of the Workshop part on what to do when we were broken down in bad health from bad habits; or just lost and floundering when some kind of massive indifference overtook us, and you helped us care anew.
You’ve also helped us realize this complexity that we are, and this in turn has given us some great insights as to how men and women all through history have viewed themselves–how they felt about themselves and their concepts of Deity, who and what they thought God was. So we thank you for these insights that have helped put us in touch not only with ourselves and each other today, but with the past, the history of our race as well. Amen.
NEBADONIA: Well, good evening, boys, this is your mother, Nebadonia. I see my two stalwart sons are here once again, holding down the fort, so to speak. I’m glad to be another continuity you can have in your lives–this continuing relationship that we’ve grown together. I’m certainly delighted you can feel us more and more within yourselves as a subtle background presence of my Mind/Spirit endowments and Michael’s Spirit of Truth. Hopefully you can even recognize your Father Fragment’s input from time to time, most easily discernable, as we’ve said before, as a kind of flash out of the blue, those wonderful ideas you get every so often that seem to perfectly encompass and illuminate both you and the situation.
Lesson
We’re happy too that this complex being you can now feel yourselves to be does give you some insight as to how, all through the past, men and women have so many times mistakenly misidentified with only part of their being, to the exclusion or the devaluing of other aspects of being human. For here too you can see a parallel growth in which each individual recapitulates in their own life’s developing maturity the evolution of civilization itself.
As a human child spends long times just eating and sleeping, so too very primitive men and women, consumed with the hunt for food, only began thinking in a focused way when they were hungry. They felt very close to the animals about them and had little self-awareness of their mental, let alone their spiritual natures. They seemed to themselves so much like the animals, they were just a part of the scenery without any detachment or remove from it, at the mercy of natural forces. Their intrinsic human/spiritual nature was projected outwards and everything had spirit–the trees, the rocks, the water, the clouds, the weather–very early separated into a good or bad spirit depending on how it affected them.
Then with the ongoing development of concepts and language and the eventual creation of writing, they gained the ability to pass on actual thoughts from generation to generation. Now there existed with this whole, growing, external-objective continuity of concepts and their relationships, the beginning of philosophy, the struggle to understand this mental dimension of human reality of thoughts and words, expressions, writing, literature; with, in due course, an enormous increase in vanity to consider one could achieve a kind of immortality just by being great and being written about; or doing the writing.
In the beginning their gods and goddesses were just projections of human nature who carried on pretty much like super-humans only one step above their social and political leaders, who in turn were living out the common desires of the day, meaning a lot of food, many mates, sumptuous dwellings, luxury. But with the evolution from the tribal witch doctor or medicine man to the more isolated and specialized/learned priest class, there began an identification with a realm of spirit that was evermore subtly distilled out and apart from a rather scorned merely ordinary mental/physical human life. You still have, and you can still read these enormous volumes of the early Chinese and Indian and Western philosophers, their speculations and their conclusions as to what constituted humanity and deity, ignorance and enlightenment, illusion and reality.
By this time the major aspects of being human–the physical body, the mind, the spirit, what we call the personality–the uniqueness of the individual, and too the soul–an actual Morontia reality, part spiritual, co-authored by the presence of God within you, as well as what you yourself are choosing to contribute by your day to day decisions: all this was somewhat within their evolving self-consciousness. Yet you can see in the various teachings how the relatively few literate, extensively trained men and women of those days so often identified exclusively with notions of pure spirit which, ironically, by the very uniting/creative power of their personalities, and their beliefs, enabled them to experience their life as some Oneness–Pure Spirit–God-consciousness. The intense focus of their religious practices was to provide and sustain this experience. And indeed, as we have said, in your day to day experience you very rarely know anything purely physical, mental, or spiritual, but that your personality infuses/unites both physical fact and mental meaning with the presence and value of spirit.
Michael and I spend so much time on these concepts with you, my children, to help enable you to stay in touch with all aspects of yourself as you go through your day to day living. So much of the suffering we see in modern peoples with enormous individual choice is due to their concentration upon, their only half-conscious choosing of, one aspect of themselves to the detriment of the others. An example is when a person chooses a certain state of mind, a certain excitement, a certain stimulation provided by some drug that is extremely, even if not immediately, detrimental to their physical health. Another case is when folks identify so much with some misconceived spiritual nature they become contemptuous of so-called ordinary people. Whole sub-cultures devalue the physical being of their fellows and nonchalantly dismiss the real suffering going on. Some philosophies are so concerned with pointing out the oneness of reality–as they see it, they deny the actual individual personality that exists in everyone. People so indoctrinated can go through a great part of their lives never feeling, never experiencing their own God-given uniqueness. Some even flee from this very feeling/experience for the responsibility implied within it–that they themselves can and therefore should take some greater control over their own lives.
Rather, see the whole evolution from childhood/primitive/tribal/cultural dependence to a kind of mature self-reliance in experiencing your own personal spirituality, and joyfully sharing this within with your Father Fragment, in prayer and meditation. This way you can have a wonderful sense of who you uniquely are, and what you can uniquely offer others, at the same time avoiding the terrible loneliness and isolation this great experience of uniqueness threatened in endless centuries past.
This is why we’ve given our lessons on what constitutes God-created individuality; what personality is. You are such a pure creation of God’s you cannot pick yourself up by your own boot straps; you cannot literally see yourself; you are, more or less consciously, the living, unique point of view from which you are experiencing your life. So this is your mission, my children: what constitutes a healthy, self-conscious individual?–someone who is staying in touch with their physical health and their mental rationality, able to use their mind for the fine tool it can be developed into. How do you find/create the mental estate wherein everything has meaning, realizing too the over-capping, frosting-on-the-cake value of spirit? You have been getting the feeling of how this most subtle of human dimensions–your continuously emerging from your spiritual origin–points toward the living origin of everything, points towards the Supreme Personal Spirit–God himself.
To feel all this simultaneously takes some practice. Your day to day lives, your work, your hobbies, your interests generally emphasize one aspect more than the others. There will always be some very physical work or play, some connection with impersonal matter/energy. There will always be a need for deep mental concentration, and some stillness practice in which you let not only your own spirit, but also Michael’s and mine, and our Father’s, swell forth inside and let you know we’re with you.
Believe me, my children, we understand your fatigue at times in spiritual realms. We’ve reassured you not to worry that spiritual energy, just like physical and mental energy, is used up. It’s something you need to replenish from time to time in your stillness, in your meditation and prayer. For even in this realm, as in the realms of physically unhealthy habits and mental laziness, in this realm too you get exhausted with being good. You feel you need to take a break and be bad for a while, if only for variety. This is very understandable.
This is another area in which a kind of tough sensitivity can save the day, save you for another day. If you are really sensitive to yourself and others, you can be satisfied with being only a little bad–(Mother Spirit chuckles)–without hurting yourself or them. So we advise avoiding anything that numbs you out while taking a break from time to time from your most strenuous spiritual strivings. Don’t worry about this potential you have as a spiritual being; just rest in Michael’s peace and my love. Let all the striving go. Replenish your spirit in enjoying your God-given pure existence. Just know that you are!–however perplexed, however you feel from time to time there’s a piece missing here or there.
This is only due to your over-emphasizing some other aspect of yourself. For you, like all of God’s creation, are complete moment to moment. Potential–possibility is part of your nature. This means that you can continue to grow. You can continue to add to your soul throughout eternity. This is who and what you are, my children. You are this very complex living being, a God-created personal being with the evolving ability to unify your life, just as He is the personal unity of the creation.
This is our gift to you, my children, this profound, even cosmic truth. We reassure you, you are not alone in your very nature. Every personal being from the highest to the lowest is essentially a God-created being endowed with His spirit you call life, adding to their experience what is analogous to a human soul. There is something growing here, something evolving, all of it part of the Supreme Being, that aspect of God who unites everything spatial and temporal.
So this is the adventure you are on. Welcoming it is that deep spiritual faith you can grow that lets you let go of your self-consciousness in order to be fully one with what you are doing, trusting you will pop up again to yourself–especially if you have decided to create your own highly conscious continuity. Be very careful here. You shouldn’t see this as some state of mind, however subtle–some continuous blissful emotion or pure awareness you can be in all the time–although this is often how enlightenment is presented. You can’t remember to remember something in particular; you’d be doing little else. You need to trust yourself and let go; forget yourself.
But you can decide to meditate and pray on a regular basis, and deepen this continuity and awareness. You can acknowledge spirit whenever it spontaneously occurs to you. You can simply enjoy reflecting on what it is you are doing and experiencing. This is the growth, the evolution of the conscious self, and it too need have no limit.
Welcome to our view of who and what you are. We, your parents, have no fear for you whatsoever. Michael and I have experienced a trillion, trillion times over the tenacity, the strength, the perseverance of our children’s spirits. If you have any questions or comments this evening, on this or anything else, feel free.
