2017-02-16-Turning Things Around
Marin #236
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Turning Things Around
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
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Turning Things Around
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, welcome. Come join us and be with us in thanking our Father for the fact that, here in California on the West Coast just north of the Golden Gate, Spring has definitely sprung. True enough, Old Man Winter still might have a storm or two brewing out over the Pacific, but there is a touch of warmth in the breeze now and we know he has lost most of his teeth. All he can do is gum on us a bit with another storm.
Here along the sidewalks of the small towns and under the redwoods, the daffodils are holding up their bright faces with that deep yellow that goes on and on. The tulip trees, the magnolias have been out for about a week now. You turn a corner and then that yellow of the daffodils is magnified a thousand-fold on the huge acacia trees with their millions and millions of tightly-packed, little quarter-inch fuzzy spheres of bright yellow.
So our hearts rejoice in one more Spring. Somebody told me one time—(I’ll have to look it up on the International Movie Data Base) that back in the 1930’s there was a wonderful movie made called One More Spring about some homeless folks who make it through a winter in a graveyard caretaker’s shack. So it is definitely one more Spring. Amen.
Lesson
NEBADONIA: Good evening, this is Nebadonia, your Mother Spirit. Michael and I are happy to join you and yes, we too can celebrate with you, on dear old Urantia–in parts anyway–Spring has come. We share your joy at this change, this renewal. True, there is a difference as you go across your country between parts that are getting nice and warm again, and those that are still pretty well buried in snow. In some parts the evergreens are 90% of all the trees and there isn’t that much change. Then there are other places that are 90% deciduous and Fall brings the first killing frost and all the leaves to the ground. Then you have endless square miles of bare trees with only an evergreen here and there. But surely, all over the world, even in places where there is only a difference of rainy and dry seasons, there comes this renewal, these dependable cycles of nature herself.
Tonight I would like to talk a bit about the process of renewal right within your own life, right within your own mind, body, spirit, and soul. It is what your personality can know through experience: how to turn things around just because you have done it a number of times. Various things hit you, sometimes an accident of your own or someone near you, a loved one; or financial disasters. Various things can throw you into a deep winter of your soul and you catch yourself, almost by surprise, to realize that, yes, I am suffering! This hurts!–whatever it is.
Sometimes there is only a withdrawing back into yourself to conserve your vital energies, your strengths and your hope. You hunker down in this dark winter of your soul. Here is where your meditation really and truly pays off because sometimes you have to just sit still and pay attention to your breathing and your heartbeat one moment after another, hanging on to see what the next minute or two brings.
But to turn this around? Maybe it is the loss of a dear one. Maybe you suddenly realize that your health has gotten terrible. You’ve allowed your well-known bad habits to creep up on you. You’ve let yourself get unhealthy and all of a sudden, it seems, you are stumbling along–your legs, your whole body feels hollow and you wonder where is your strength? But to persevere, to keep your hope and an open mind as to what might be going wrong; or how to accept the loss of a loved one when it seems half of you is no longer there? You more or less have to slowly grow back into your own self-sufficient fullness.
This is the adventure of being human–into which you are irreducibly thrust by our Father. But to turn things around, even for the first time? Hopefully this is where having some small tragedy or difficulty–shall we say some physical difficulty as a youngster that you survived–is such a blessing because you have actually experienced, your personality knows that things can turn around. You can come through this new winter in your own personal life just with the sheer strength of life itself within you. Life is your Father’s purest gift, and can reassert itself and come swelling forth once again.
And so, my dear ones, you personally recapitulate the seasons. You have your Spring time of renewal in your life with all your friends and acquaintances, and your work. Something new happens. There is a growth, a budding-forth, and so it goes for a while. You have a wonderful Summer of that creative warmth that feeds you energy. It gives you encouragement to carry on and lets you know that yes, whatever it is you are experimenting on in your life, it’s working! There may be the little ups and downs where things don’t work, but you take them in with no denial, and they teach you something, and that becomes part of your soul.
Then comes Autumn and all along the small harvests of goodness because you are getting healthier and stronger. Things have turned around and are working. Your friends are there and the good times are happening. And because you have gone through some difficult times, because you did stay true to yourself and your friends, your soul is ever deeper. You touched something real that helped you turn things around. This is the wonderful process that leads to spiritual wealth. This is what gives you the value of things where, shall we say, if you were just constantly coasting downhill, no effort required, you would never have that value. You would never have that spiritual depth and breadth.
This is what leads you to trust in life itself. It gives you the deep assurance and understanding between you and your Father, that you hold within, that life was deliberately set up this way. Granted: a big part of life might still be a mystery and remain so for a long time and many life-times to come. You can’t pretend to understand it all. But that confidence and faith within you assure you life was created by an infinitely loving God, and capable of being turned around. Even that humanly ultimate good night will lead to a very bright morning and Springtime on an ever more glorious world where there are still things to try, things to experiment: true adventure forever.
This is the promise of Springtime that teases you to stay ever green. Keep in touch with and appreciate all this experience you are gaining, all the growing that life is demanding of you so that you too can reach out a helping hand and be that bright sun to someone else who is in the depth of the cold winter of their soul. It’s the sharing of fortune and misfortune alike that really doubles the joy. So yes!–Happy Spring-time, dear ones. Now if you have any questions or comments, let them spring ever new, ever green for Michael and I. That is our delight.
Dialogue
Student: I want to thank you so much for all the many wondrous and beautiful things you do for each of us all of the time. I have a special question for you today. You wanted to talk about renewal. My question is: if we put our bodies in the white light and we extend this white light about a foot beyond our bodies, will this neutralize all the toxins in our body? You know–the food we put it in our body and the atmosphere around us, because we are surrounded by so many pollutants these days. I just wondered how effective that will be? Thank you.
NEBADONIA: Well yes, my dear, that is a great question. I would break it down into the three main phases of being human–the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. For the physical part of you, your body, the physiological mechanism that you are part of and is part of you right now, real true wisdom and acceptance is to keep from putting any kind of poisons within you. There is no final degree to which, shall we say, you can stop refining your diet, especially as you grow older. What may have worked wonderfully in your 20’s or 30’s may not work so well in your 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s.
It might be a very humbling truth to accept that you have to stay truly open-minded and experimental with your body. Listen to it. Respect what it is saying to you about your giving it strength or taking it away. What is giving you flexibility? See the effort it takes to constantly stretch and move ever joint in your body to stay flexible and mobile with an ever greater range of movement. This is what your personality has to accept so physical things can be turned around,
But in the mental and spiritual realms, what you are suggesting here works wonderfully, just to have faith in, and exercise your own inner light, your own sense of goodness and love and appreciation for this life you have, for this mind you have, and for this creative spirit you have. This works very well as a way of focusing and just glowing, just glowing away with that wonderful light. Then if you wish to visualize it even extending beyond you, that is all the more wonderful. Let it burn up all the mental and spiritual poisons you are susceptible to every time you turn on the TV or walk out into society. Even be thankful if you can walk out your door and around your neighborhood in relative safety when, in so much of the world, even this is something fraught with terror and the uncertainly you are going to get back home again.
This is thankfulness. It is the true measure of your worship, my dear. Be thankful you have this inner light that can burn away all of the negative things that can come your way socially and politically–all that–as you stay open-minded and willing and able to take in all that is happening around you: to be a good citizen and aware of what is happening. You need this inner light to return to and to keep glowing–glowing with worship and thankfulness. So yes, by all means: carry on. Keep that light bright. Student: Thank you for your wonderful words, but they don’t really address the question I was asking. I probably didn’t express it properly. I wondered if it will neutralize the different toxic elements. We can do everything we can–eat a well as we can, all those things; but I don’t know if physically that light can neutralize the toxic elements that are in our proximity as we eat, as we drink, and are in our bodies.
NEBADONIA: My dear, a part of wisdom is to be truly honest with yourself with what works and what does not. This is an acknowledgement of simple cause and effect on a biological level. You cannot take in poison and then do some spiritual exercise–however powerful–to negate it. You cannot have a terrible diet with unhealthy food and no nutrition in it, and keep strong. It is the acknowledgement of this aspect of your human, physical reality that is truly a spiritual blessing.
So in the sense of neutralizing some poisonous diet, it would take so much energy to neutralize just the tiniest bit, your own wisdom would tell you not to take it in in the first place. Your own wisdom will tell you that you have to respect the physical aspect of yourself. Otherwise you get into what we call spiritual arrogance–to think you can take anything into your body, and then by some kind of magic, neutralize it. This is the wonder of humility–the acknowledgement of something greater than yourself—that is the hallmark of true spirituality. Now does that make sense?
Student 1: It makes sense; and I understand that absolutely and completely; and I do everything I can not to take anything toxic into my body, but that is still not my question.
NEBADONIA: What is it you wish to neutralize–specifically? What are the toxins you are talking about neutralizing?
Student 1: Well, they are all around. You know they are in the air we breathe. There is everything you do. Our world is just so polluted, you can’t avoid everything. My personal belief is, there is a way to totally neutralize whatever is negative in something. That was what I was asking. If that light is concentrated and focused, can it totally neutralize the harm of something?
NEBADONIA: Well my dear, again I can only think that if you are talking about something physical, shall we say being in an environment of so much smog—carbon monoxide from cars going around—or if you are living in a building which is overly damp and growing with mold everywhere–anything physical like this: there is a definite limit to what you can do spiritually.
I was talking about your mental and spiritual aspects–the meaning and value of your life to you, and the things you are encountering in your society and politics. But in terms of taking physical things into your body–say carbon monoxide or dioxide— there is a definite limit to what you can neutralize, and a very close limit which will simply kill you. It is so important to keep this distinction in mind because there is no way you can be in a heavily saturated carbon dioxide situation like in a closed garage with your car running. In some cities in the world where the pollution is absolutely terrible, people are not dying for lack of faith or spiritual motivation. So keep that in mind if you would. Entertain that possibility. When it comes to physical things you have to acknowledge, with all humility, that physical part of you that responds. Be in my love.
Student 1: Thank you.
Student 2: Yes, I thought I would throw out in this conversation: we have been told recently that we actually have some capacity to change the very dynamic of things like water. And so this intrigues us as individuals–how much we influence what’s around us everywhere, like water. I believe we have the ability to affect the water. I believe these are our sentiments, similar to when we bless our food and seek to transform its nature.
I see we have some jurisdiction over this, and I think this is where the line of questioning comes about, as to how much we are able to manifest this with the conditions around us
NEBADONIA: Yes, my son, I guess I don’t fully appreciate, perhaps, to what you are referring, because water is water. I don’t see the necessity or the utility of changing the nature of water. The nature of water is perfect as it is. Think of all the thousand and one things it does–if we are only talking about physiologically, right?–within your body. What in the nature of water would you want to change with some notion of improving it? I don’t understand what you are pointing at here. What kind of deficiency could you correct, or what kind of extra quality could you give water? It has to be pure. Obviously it cannot be contaminated. There is no way you can have traces of arsenic or some other poisonous material in it.
Obviously you want your water to be pure. But once you have this combination of hydrogen and oxygen that life on this planet is designed around, what extra do you want to do with it?
Student 2: My concern is that I feel water is no longer pure. It was created pure but has been polluted by the efforts of mankind. If that is true and, as you say, we should not have toxins in our water, it begs the question if there is anything we can do about that with spiritual pressure–I guess is the incomplete concept.
NEBADONIA: Oh no, my son, I am sure here again I don’t understand because I know you are aware of a dozen-and-one different kinds of things that are sold to purify water, whether they fit under your sink or attach to your faucet–any number of filtrations systems that can remove contaminants from water. Obviously some contaminants cannot be removed by normal processes, but I’m know you are aware too every municipality, every city, every small town its water plant in which they are doing this very thing.
True, sometimes terrible things happen where a whole city, through some kind of political corruption, has a water filtration plant that doesn’t work. But I am pointing out here a respect for a physical reality that was created by a spiritual Being, and has its own spirit in its very nature. Pure water is simply pure water. You can actually make it by burning hydrogen. Other than that you have all of the thousand and one ways humanity has, through the ages, struggled to purify its water. Now with a lot of industrial contamination, things like lead mines pouring contaminates into the local river, I know you are aware of: this is nothing to concern yourself with spiritually except insofar as your own creative spirit, and the creative spirit of mankind, continually, hopefully finds better and better ways of purifying its water.
But directly-spiritually, by taking a glass of water with a trace of arsenic in it and thinking there is some kind of spiritual process whereby you can drink that water and not be affected? I know this is not a kind of hubris on your part. I am just pointing out a respect for what human physical-ness is. There is no way I know that you can take contaminated water and purify it spiritually.
Student 2: Thank you. That is very helpful. Thank you.
NEBADONIA: Again, my son, just think of the dozens and dozens of different ways all over the world, depending on what the contaminants are, people have done their best to purify their water. The Boy Scouts teach if you come across some strange stream somewhere, you first let it settle out so all the mud goes to the bottom, or filter it through a sock. Then you put in a few drops of bleach to kill any micro-organisms– field-expedients like boy scouts and soldiers learn.
Throughout I’m pointing out a respect of the physical-ness of things–chemistry, physics, bio-chemistry, and what it takes to sustain living things. Human spirituality, as creative as it is, it does have definite limits when it comes to directly affecting the physical realm. So thank you for that question.
Student 2: Thank you for that answer. I guess that’s one of the reasons they call it the Law of Physics .
NEBADONIA: Yes! Like I said, folks who live in cities that are so polluted, the air is so heavy they can hardly see a couple blocks, the fact those folks are getting all their lung diseases, and dying, is not through a lack of faith. They are not crippled spiritually so they can’t, through some kind of spiritual faith exercise, negate all that poison.
The answer lies in another direction. Michael and I often refer you to our definition of humility as a spiritual blessing of being aware of something greater than yourself, whether you are standing on the shores of an ocean, or here, acknowledging the limitations of what you can do to the physical world around you through pure mental- spiritual effort. Be in my Love.
Closing
Well, my dear ones, if there are no more questions or comments, let me close by once again bringing up that wonderful, wonderful possibility and actuality of renewal. I am sure most of you with some years in your soul can recall times where your own personal life turned around. You came out of a soulful winter of severe storms that really shook you, yet with an ever stronger faith and a willingness to try different things, and keep track of them. You kept learning and growing. As your Urantia Book states it: the relationship between you and your own soul is one of constant growth, or you start to die.
You have come through things of health, or the most severe loss of all, the loss of a loved one who was so much a part of you. Yet you stay in touch with them in your soul, and keep the faith. Then here comes another spring in your life. This is what your loved one would have wanted above all for you–a renewal, a fresh start again.
So we have our inner seasons and our other seasons, and small shocks that keep us sane. Ever keep in mind, dear ones, life is an adventure. You don’t always know what is going to happen next. This is why one of the most sincere prayers you can have between you and our Father is: “Dear God, dear Father, what do I do next?” Then listen for the answer. Michael wishes you to be in his peace, and I send you my love. Good evening.
