2009-11-16-All That You Are
Marin #178
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: All That 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
3.2.1 Being
3.2.2 Free will
3.2.3 Stillness
3.2.4 Heart & Breath
3.2.5 Ambition
o 3.3 Dialogue
3.3.1 Prayer
3.3.2 Presence
3.3.3 Fear
3.3.4 Humanity
3.3.5 Unknown
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: All That You Are
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, Well, it’s a cool November evening outside, but we’re glad to brave the elements to get together tonight and feel the love and the warmth of your message for us. We do honor and appreciate the caring you show for us through your words, how you tenderly take care of your children. Then too at the same time you demonstrate a kind of tough love–if you will, and so we also appreciate how direct and uncompromising and honest you are with us, how you tell it like it is and give us something to aim for. In this we try to follow what you suggested once, Michael, that we orient to the truth, the ever encompassing and transcendent totality of truth, and keep that goal ever bright in our minds–irrespective of how humanly we may fall short of achieving it.
We try to honor the truth for we do accept deep in our souls that it is the truth and nothing less that gives us real choice and sets us free to accept and experience fully the consequences of our decisions. For this is how we learn; this is how we grow. Thank you for lovingly bearing with us in these struggles, ever encouraging us to keep moving forward, just as you, Michael, did with such an example and power in your life as Jesus. Amen
Lesson
NEBADONIA: Good evening, this is Nebadonia. Tonight I would like to carry a torch of Michael’s a little further on, one he gave you in his last lesson and on the Thursday night before that, when he gave a rough definition of the total personhood of a human being. I’ll just briefly mention that he started with the person you know yourself to be right in your own consciousness, your self-consciousness-self. This is the you that comes into being when you awake in the morning and lets itself be extinguished in sleep each night. His main point here was that this was by no means all of you. This “you” exists within a broad field of consciousness that is partly you and partly other, and in which you are sometimes self-aware and sometimes not. You may be lost in a piece of demanding work, or self-forgetful in the midst of some engrossing pastime.
Being
(All that you are)
You have your human body and the type of mind that comes directly as a result from it, the material mind of a human being. Also, giving birth to the creativity within your consciousness, you have your unique personality and the creative/spiritual component of it. Your personality is the creative aspect of yourself, the creative and unifying aspect of you, the deep and fundamentally unchanging essence of you projecting yourself into ever changing time and space whose events you experience with your physical body, mental consciousness, and spirit insight.
In addition, right within this consciousness of yours there is the great spiritual, or should I say, quasi-spiritual entity you are literally earning out here–your own soul, co-authored by a presence of God, lending meaning and value to your life as you grow more soulful. Finally, along with the presence of God there are the presences of your Guardian Angel, Michael’s Spirit of Truth, and my own Spiritual Adjutants augmenting various aspects of your own mentality–intuition, courage, worship and wisdom. This is the complexity of the human being, what we refer to as your completeness. Every normal-minded human being has all these constituent components that make up the totality of their living being.
Free will
On the question of free will: remember we define a human being as a creature–a deliberately created being–of free will dignity. No animal has this dignity of being able to choose its own destiny, its own life day to day. Yet in considering your moment to moment experience of life, think of all the conditioning with which you were raised that can so greatly determine what choices are available to you, even how reality itself appears to you. This conditioning, if remaining largely knee-jerk reactive and unconscious, limits your perceptions and interpretations of reality, yet, if fully conscious, gives even more meaning and value to your life–as you put it: you know where you’re coming from. Your conscious sense of the past is more than just your material-mind’s memories–if you will, just your brain’s activities; it’s also your soul–all your experiences realized as well from the point of view of God’s presence within you–that kind of totality.
Also, consider how blessed you are, my children, living in your modern age of electronic media being able to portray for you what Michael called all the hundreds of thousands of little mini-cultures all over the world. You are able to see and hear at least a little something of other people’s lives so profoundly different from your own. There you see poor individuals literally starving to death, dying of exposure without more than a few rags to cover their naked bodies as they sit on a bare piece of ground; all the way to the most fantastically opulent palaces and life-styles of the so-called rich and famous: all the vicarious experience–hundreds of movies, thousands of hours of reading and TV–you have within you so variously accessible.
Stillness
(Accessing your soul–prayer and meditation)
Tonight I would like to pick up the torch and take it a little bit further on how you can access this totality of your being. How do you let your soul come forth to augment and enlighten your consciousness? How do you get a feeling for the character you’re developing? As Michael said, this brings you to the necessity for some kind of inner reflection, some kind of meditation in which you can relax and take a break from all the more pressing immediate demands of your life, even take a break from those things which are of the most meaning to you, in order to let something new come in from creative spirit.
You can do this in a very directly focused way as prayer. You formulate the appeal within your mind and ask of the spiritual influences within you–your Father Fragment, Michael and myself–for our help, for our guidance. The more detailed, the more exacting you can articulate this need of yours, the better the context will be in which we can provide an answer. The better you can put up a framework here inside, the more fully we can fill in the picture.
It is possible for you to pray for someone else and actually have them affected in a positive way. If you tried any kind of prayer for something bad to happen–(Mother Spirit chuckles)–the petition wouldn’t go any further than your own skull. But you can devotedly direct and focus pure loving energy towards someone else, that they may be able to use it in their life as best suits them. This is the power of love transcending your own wisdom, the choices you might have for them. This is just a pure well-wishing and desire for them to live life and live it more fully, the ultimate caring of one personal being to another.
So when you’ve formulated your prayer, my children, be sure then to open your minds as best you can and just listen. It’s very rare that you will hear a voice speaking within your mind, a very clear “other” talking to you. Remember the presence of God is called a–Thought–Adjuster. This response can be so immediate, sometimes, the thoughts that follow your petition can be that answer, yet can be missed if you don’t credit this.
Just accept so you can look at and consider and entertain the thoughts that come into your mind, regardless of their apparent origin. You’ll be developing the ability to recognize truth irrespective of its source, and this ability is something that will stand you in very good stead throughout your life, whether praying or going about your daily activities. Get a feeling for that resonance within you that tells you that something resonates with your own deepest feeling of what is true or, even better, what may be more truth than what you’ve yet encountered. That’s a great feeling.
This is the value of prayer to help you realize what you feel you need, or someone else needs, and so, asking for help from the whole spiritual community. This is what the spiritual community lives for in part. It’s our delight; it’s our extreme joy to be able to help this way. As you said in your introduction, just accept what comes to you and look at it. Embrace it with an open mind, whether you are able to do it or not. As your Urantia Book puts it: modern people do not lack for ideas so much as they lack for ideals. So entertain these ideals as best you can. Do your best without any kind of reservation or self-judgment.
Another way of accessing the totality of your personhood is what we call meditation, or stillness, that is not focused so much as highly-consciously unfocused, broad and deep. What does that mean? It’s a way of opening yourself to that which you don’t know you need, maybe some more understanding and wisdom. It’s a way of suspending the past and all that you feel you’ve been to–I’ll use the expression–hang out in the present moment and see what comes up inside. You will be opening to what you cannot anticipate.
It’s like being on the edge of the unknown–consciously experiencing the next moment’s unknown rather than filling it up your own desires or entertainments–the radio, the TV, going to a movie, meeting with friends; all your activities. It may raise a fear or anxiousness of not being able to anticipate and have expectations about what is coming next. Being still, seemingly doing nothing, touches a primal fear in your animal nature toward this not-knowing what’s coming next. You’re just hanging out in this special kind of present moment, open-minded with patience and attention.
Now for those of you who have tried this, you know how difficult it is because your mind is ever active. There is no way you can hold your mind still for that very effort, that very holding will keep away the substantive input you hope will come–the new idea, the new ideal, the next step to take, fresh reflection on something you’ve done; perhaps, hopefully, even some suggestion from your Father Fragment, or Michael, or me. But without any anchor, without anything to hold on to, you quickly find that you get caught up in some mental story, some drama. You may have such a habituation to being entertained, your mind most anxiously wants to entertain you. So off you go, until several minutes later you realize you’ve been away on some great melodrama, unconsciously reliving a part of your life or worrying about something that might happen.
Michael mentioned that a seraphim, an angel, doesn’t have to worry about all the pain and injury that your body is at risk to experience–the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But there is, in meditation, an advantage to being human and having a physical body, a living continuity independent of your personality; so let’s make use of this living mind/body of yours, my children, in your meditation.
Heart & Breath
First, you can tune into your heart center. If you are still enough you can feel your heart beating in your chest without having to feel for your pulse in your wrist or your neck. You can marvel with gratitude that you are not even keeping your own heart beating. By keeping in touch with this living part of you, you are in touch with a transcendent reality that so many of you nonchalantly dismiss and very rarely experience so directly. Consider how so many of the modern peoples of the more developed nations live in really poor health out of such a disregard for the marvelous body they were given at self-consciousness. They live in the most terrible conditions of bad health in order to feed that mind-construct of theirs–their ego image of themselves, even risking their lives foolishly for some vain glory. But if you can be still and feel your heart beating, you can let the experience swell to suspend that inner, anxious self-clinging.
On another level both more immediate and yet more subtle, it’s quite an accomplishment to be able to observe your breath without affecting it. This is something different from your heart because this is something you can immediately and directly control. You can hold your breath–for a bit; you can take huge, gulping breaths; you can pant quickly and shallowly like an overheated dog. But to just observe your breath coming and going in and out only as your body needs and uses it, this is something else.
Try it, my children. See if you can just feel yourself breathing, continuously, if only for several minutes at first. It begs, but immediately answers the question: what is the relationship, the connection, between you and all the rest you are, between what you can consciously control and what is simply given each moment of life? See if you can feel with gratitude and respect this living encompassing of yours that’s so very rarely conscious throughout your days and nights. This is why every religion you have evolved over the millennia has discovered these exercises of heart and breath meditation. It’s how men and women have discovered a way of accessing their larger selves by focusing their minds on some actual part of them that is alive beyond their own doing, and in so doing, are able to relax the anxious busyness of their minds. The purpose of this, apart from honoring your living body, is to let your mind become still of itself and allow something present and new to occur.
Michael mentioned how strange this seeming non-activity must be to someone who is so outwardly oriented and inwardly self-centered and selfish with themselves they are consumed with busily building up and maintaining a sense of momentum in their lives. Now to suggest they deliberately bring that momentum to a halt in a profound stillness? How silly it must seem to them if you were to turn around your familiar saying to suggest: don’t just do something, sit there! You can see how difficult this is, how immediately it brings about a near-existential fear of losing themselves, losing control by relaxing their grip that they so desperately feel they need.
Ambition
(Let go craving ambition)
Yet unless one lets go their craving ambition completely and then discovers they survive the event, how else are they to discover that they are already complete? Unless something new is allowed to come into their inner world, they’re only going around in the same-old, same-old circles and actually starving their souls of the very completeness that is their birthright to discover. This is why it takes patience and courage to let a hyper-conscious stillness come into being, for your complete personhood, my children, the totality of yourself, though always real to us, is only potential to your self-aware experiential self–you.
It does little good for some religious dogma to tell you how complete you are if you yourself cannot experience it. This is what we offer you, a way of testing out what we say. One of the greatest gifts we can give you, my children, is a way for you to discover and fulfill yourselves with all you are, a way for you to access your own soul, your own higher consciousness, and your own creative spirit independent of the past.
Michael spent much of his last lesson trying to give you a feeling for how you are constantly creating, if mostly unconsciously, your own interpretation of the reality around and within you. Now you need to let go some of the busyness in your normal waking life, if only for twenty minutes or so, to be still and experience what your incessant creativity is doing. Look around: feel within. This is how you access the encompassing and transcendent truth of all you are always doing, for this realization is something you will be engaged in for all eternity. Why not start now? Have faith that you are all this full personhood and consciousness we’ve offered for your understanding and wisdom. Have the courage to let go your habitual need to be entertained. Just be still and see what happens. We’ll be right in here pulling with you, so be still that you can feel our presence too.
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, this is something you can bring forth.
Dialogue
Student: Thank you, Mother, for the wonderful lesson tonight. The question I have is, when I pray for someone else, and also myself, what do I pray for? What do I ask for? I can think of a lot of things–health, prosperity, well-being–but then if the Father already knows everything, how can I go about praying for someone else?
Prayer
(How to pray]
NEBADONIA: Yes, my son: well, that’s not a bad start–health, well-being, prosperity, maybe that they grow in spirit–that they too have some feeling of their soul growing within them. This is not only their experiences as they remember them, but also a greater totality as a presence of God registers these experiences.
Your prayers, my son, can be very much like what Welmek once invited you to do, and that is: with every person you come across, just beam love at them. Right in your own heart and soul, just wish them the best. This can also be a very profound prayer. It’s a generosity of spirit to give them your time and consideration and send them part of your life-essence. You’re putting that energy out there for them to tap into. Being pure spirit, it cannot be intrusive; it is always up to each personality to decide what to do with spirit input. We can only assure you to have faith that this transference of vital energy is real. You are literally giving them something of your own life force, your own strength.
This is a wonderful example of when one and one make three, where this third part–the energy you are sending, reflects power back to you as well as toward them. It’s like having a nice warm fire and wanting to share it with someone else, and in doing so, feeling and appreciating it more yourself. Letting God’s divine love and well-wishes flow through you to another, it strengthens you as well. This is the reward of the faith that it takes to do this. Don’t forget, my son, that faith is extending yourself out into the unknown, and so it has its own special rewards. That good feeling you get is real. So the form of the prayer doesn’t matter so much as the heart-felt intention.
Student: Should I visualize the person I’m beaming love at?
NEBADONIA: Yes, the more you can visualize them and focus the desire in your heart, the more you can feel their unique personality within you, the greater will be the spiritual connection between you two. The effort it takes to do this attests to the genuine desire of your feelings. So by all means, yes.
Student: The other thing I thought of is how afraid I am in myself of the unknown, and how often it’s stopped me so much in my life.
NEBADONIA: Yes, that’s a very primal fear and it’s not altogether baseless. All through human history people have witnessed what terrible things that the unknown and the unanticipated have done to them and their friends. For so much of their history people have been at the mercy of the elements and wild animals; and then of course, above all, each other–through hundreds of thousands of years of nearly incessant warfare and crime. So this fear of the unknown does have valid historical roots deep in the collective unconsciousness of the human races.
But this is where, my son, your wisdom can inform you that the best way to handle the unknown is by relaxing, by being highly consciously ready. Yet how do you do this seemingly paradoxical thing?–relaxed and ready? It seems contradictory, like the attempt to be still by effort, by vigorously holding your mind a blank. It can’t be sustained for long. Rather, you have to experience in your stillness how, by consistently relaxing whatever physical tension or mental worry or fear that arises–as they will occur to you–actually leads to a heightened unity of body and mind and spirit. These fears of yours serve to separate you from yourself inside, and yet as you face them and relax into them, you gain a greater unity of self and purpose.
For the faith and the trust in yourself and your spiritual helpers that it takes to try this, leads to those unique rewards that nothing else can give you. This is the reward that awaits every sincere effort. There are no shortcuts in spiritual development. You proceed by decisions. You have to decide to give these exercises in prayer, stillness and relaxation, a try.
Student: I will do that. Thank you, Mother, for your undying love and for giving us the truth of things.
NEBADONIA: You are very welcome, my son. Thank you for recognizing it; and be in my love.
Student: Yes, Mother. It says in the Urantia book about prayer, that the ultimate prayer is to pray for the extension of the kingdom of heaven. I found that very profound. That kind-of takes care of everything. (he laughs)
NEBADONIA, laughing along: Yes. It’s–how–do you do it!
Student: Yeah… That’s part of the unknown as well. It’s also faith, and imagining how God sees us. He sees our lives in love, and perfection, and joy–in our humanness. He can see the potential we have to become as He sees us, to become that extension of His kingdom.
Presence
(The kingdom)
NEBADONIA: If you’ve read the Urantia book’s version of Jesus’ life, you know what a stumbling block this was for his apostles. Even at the time of the [Paper 179 – The Last Supper last supper] they were still arguing about who was to be in what position in the kingdom, in spite of the fact he had told them over and over again that the kingdom was within. Tonight I hoped to give you at least one or two of the many keys to this kingdom, this total personhood that you are, sharing your life with us.
You need not always be self-aware to be in this kingdom. This is the wonder and the reward of self-forgetfulness, that you can go for a long time being highly conscious and experiencing other things, other people, without being in the picture–so to speak. The kingdom within continues to grow, sometimes, as Michael noted, even more fully for your not standing in your own light. You’ve suspended your self-centered evaluation of how things are affecting only you to really touch and mingle with your fellows; and now you have a fuller reality of them in your soul.
Student: Thinking about what C brought up about fear, it seems our cultures have so much fear embedded in how we interact with each other–like you said, for good reason sometimes. Is this something as a result of the Lucifer Rebellion, or has humankind always had this? You can read every day about someone being murdered, or abducted, or just random violence. It’s hard then to be an extension of the kingdom when this fear permeates our culture. There’s a lack of trust when people can’t look each other in the eye because if they do the response might be pretty bad. Or like today in the paper there was a mother and her small child killed for no reason. That’s so hard to overcome when you can see it every day. Fortunately I do have faith in the reality of God, and wisdom, and truth, and love.
NEBADONIA: Yes, my son, this is why we mention from time to time that humanity is not only plagued with large scale warfare but with crime, the plain and simple act of one person preying on another. And this predation is not only through physical violence but along the lines of social and financial harm as well, human parasites feeding on their fellow citizens very knowingly, very cynically.
This has been going on so long that it’s only by the way of your stillness practice of relaxing and tuning in again to the miracle of your heart beating, or just watching something, without affecting it, you yourself can control; it’s only by getting these inner awareness’s and abilities that you can grow and sustain your faith and confidence in the face of outward threats.
Fear
(Examine fears for their message)
If it helps–and it usually does–examine each fear as it comes up in the light of a possible caution from your higher consciousness of the whole surrounding situation; say, imagining some possible accident while driving. Your whole feeling/intuitive self may be sensing a real danger before your cognitive mind can imagine it concretely in thought. Here, rather than disregarding the fear out of habit, it pays to entertain the fear for what information it may contain. Being open to emotion, while at the same time not letting it control you, can give you a subtle read on a situation, a feeling-evaluation because feeling/sensing is the fundamental reality of your total self, your higher consciousness more in touch with reality than you are at times. So also consider fear as caution and see what message it might contain.
These fears are something you will feel as you try to relax, for they are what is keeping you from being relaxed. They are prompts–if you will–seeking to call your attention to something new, or some neglected past business. It might seem strange to consider it so, but the fear wasting your life in boredom can drive you to all sorts of time- and energy-wasting mere busyness, or needing to be entertained, that rob you of your inner sense of completeness. It’s the fear that most will face immediately upon trying to practice being still with only themselves for company. This is especially relevant now you can go through your entire day with some electronic gadget playing in your ear when you are apart from the TV and computer. You may never have been forced to examine your feelings and consider your own thoughts, so when you try, they seem too superficial and boring at first.
Student: I worry our youth, with so many of these things like i-pods and stuff, are losing, or never developing, the capacity to think for themselves. What’s happening to their abilities of discernment, or their ability to feel what they are doing to someone else?–the pain they’re causing? They know it’s wrong, but they still do it. Where is the spiritual understanding? That’s my feeling of fear: I fear for my own children, even though I understand so much of what God is, and the kingdom is. It seems so incongruent to our true nature–who I am: but I feel the fear. I’m not shying away from it, but it seems so unnecessary. It’s like I’m feeling all this fear because of other people’s incongruence with their true natures.
Humanity
(People’s true nature)
NEBADONIA: Yes, my son, but I would caution you about too easily assuming what is a person’s, or people’s so-called true nature. Your Urantia book puts this very succinctly: the endowing of immature and imperfect beings with a relative degree of free will leads inevitably to tragedy. The cosmic possibility for wrong-doing is the price we all pay for each person’s ability to co-create their own life and destiny, all the while, perfection of moral understanding and behavior is an experiential acquirement, not an existential actuality. Again, it does no good to think of someone’s true nature as intrinsically perfect when the individual is incapable of realizing it yet through simple immaturity, lack of experience. Prior to acquiring this experience, and reflecting upon it, a person is more or less subject to their heredity and environment, their unconscious conditioning. This was the meaning when Michael, as Jesus, asked of our Father to forgive his children; they knew not what they were doing.
In time, everyone–almost without exception–will come to know the fullness of what they do or fail to do. That is the promise of life beyond this first one you experience. That is the promise of reawakening on the Mansion worlds and looking about with such an awareness of having survived, with such wonder of enhanced perception and feeling, that even the most hardened evil-doers are given another chance to let go their selves and not be so cynically self-centered they would–as you said–kill a child and all its potential for life, just in order to feel a little more powerful for a short while–a truly obscene act. Yet that is what you have to contend with occasionally as a part of your human reality.
To set up a universe without this possibility of individual free will would be a kind of cosmic tyranny by comparison. It’s the very nature of Deity, of God’s will, to share not only personality but even creativity and freedom with all His children, the good and the evil alike. That is their choice to make.
Student: How free is that will then if it’s consumed or colored by emotion and instability, prejudice or deliberate training in evil? I don’t consider that free will. That’s someone enslaved by their own perceptions of what humanity is all about. Is true freedom of speech what incites riots, or prejudice, and hate, and ignorance? It doesn’t benefit a single human being.
NEBADONIA: Actually, my son, such criminal or warlike behavior does immediately benefit the perpetrator, if not in the long run of inevitable justice. It might be of help to see it more as self-centeredness. The freedom is there to do what they will, only most criminal activity is where a person holds their own immediate needs above anything and anyone else; it’s that me!–me!–me!–with which they choose, very knowingly at times, to hurt another. However pathetic a life they’re living, they are highly dangerous not only because they hold their own needs above anyone else, but because the obscene act doesn’t really satisfy for long, and usually only leads to another.
But you are correct in that their personality is still so totally conditioned by past events they can never achieve the real freedom of true, present-moment creativity. They are still only reactive. They’ve never experienced that glorious moment of seeing they are no more important than the next person, and that the needs they feel as a human being, of recognition and response, are universal and have to be acknowledged and balanced with everyone else’s. They want to play God and control life and death, or even pain–through torture, with another person. They not only fail to realize they have the presence of God already within them, but that it is also present in everyone else. They are really and truly pathetic beings, but they are also quite dangerous. That full reality of their humanity–their human possibilities–is something you have to deal with.
Unknown
(Welcoming the unknown)
But finally tonight, the anxiousness you encounter as you try to meditate can be just a general, vague fear of the unknown, yet ironically, that too is what you are trying to access, to bring out of the shadows and into the light of consciousness. It’s not only the past and past conditioning. It’s what you yourself with your own self-awareness cannot imagine, but can only be open to: that which is transcendent to all you have yet experienced: all the potential that awaits you. Welcome the unknown and see it in your future as a promise of endless adventure, beings and dimensions beyond human ken, and yet too your birthright to encounter, someday.
Closing
NEBADONIA: Good night, my children. Be in my love.
