2019-07-03-What Are Our Bodies
Marin #244
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: What Are Our Bodies?
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: What Are Our Bodies?
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Nebadonia
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Mother Spirit…and Michael–I am sure you are both here. Tonight, Mother Spirit, since you and Michael have already given us two wonderful lessons on our unique personalities right from God, and then the way we are endowed with creative spirit–so much so we are really co-creators of everything we experience in life and can never entirely escape our subjectivity; tonight I would ask if you would address another aspect of being human, and that is these living, physical bodies of ours.
Our group just got through talking about what it is to be alive. What is life? And again, do you and Michael want to tackle that big question? You have in the past mentioned that in spite of all of our tens of millions of books on physiology and life itself–including all the plant and animal kingdoms–it is still somewhat of a mystery, something transcendent and ungraspable. Yet at the same time we actually have it: we’re alive!—and you have offered us, for our faith, it is something we can continue to have forever if we so choose.
Now how about these physical bodies of ours that are actually are in an objective reality? Whether our consciousness and our personality come and go with what is real or what is imagined, our bodies do obey physics and biochemical, Natural Law. There is so much we are already familiar with, tonight I would ask you to give us your own special kind of spiritual viewpoint on these human bodies of ours. Thank you, and amen.
Lesson
NEBDONIA: Good evening, this is your Mother Spirit and yes, I would be delighted. It sounds like a very fun exploration. I will repeat this again, but let me start off by saying that for both Michael and I, our main suggestion with respect to these wonderful, living bodies of yours will be: the greatest attitude you can have is one of curiosity. Don’t just automatically or lazily assume you know what they are this particular moment–not yesterday, maybe not even an hour ago, but what is your body now?
Because they change with the whole circumstances of your life, changes that require curiosity and open-mindedness, a willingness to explore and accept what this present living moment has for you. Obviously your personality’s and creative spirit’s relationship to these bodies of yours changes every twenty-four hours with sleep, yet your life continues, even though you are not fully aware of it.
Obviously too, your physical being has something to do with your mind, so much so we usually put them together as your body/mind–a unit, since they effect and determine each other back and forth so greatly. Even during sleep, your physical memory of all you’ve experienced physically is so much a part of your dreams.
As for our viewpoint: one thing I would like to bring out is a kind of correction to your wonderful Urantia Book which does mention a few times–by one of the spiritual authors–your “animal origin.” I would not so much dispute that statement as to enlarge it because, my dears, your body’s origin is well before even the billions of years of the birth of this planet. Your human body forms actually predate the Life Carriers that started life on your planet. True enough, here on your world you definitely were evolved from plant and then animal life, but this was by no means any kind of an accident, as is sometimes postulated in your theories of evolution.
Life evolution on a planet like your earth, like Urantia, is very strictly controlled and determined. Consider the Life Carriers, who originated the life designs way back in their laboratories on the Constellation level, where they proposed a sodium-chloride form for your world once its oceans got salty enough to sustain life. Even way before that–as I say–hundreds of billions of years throughout our Local Universe, a human type of physical life had been existing.
So this is the true origin of these bodies of yours. Though they were definitely evolved on this world, that evolution was controlled by not only the Life Carriers, but by me. Your Mother Spirit had, and still has, a lot to do with these bodies you have now. For this is continuing. You will continue to evolve as a human race. These very bodies of yours will continue to evolve until sometime off in the distant future people will live to be hundreds of years old.
Of course this will have something to do with diet and nutrition. That too has to evolve as you become more truly open-minded and experimental with what really nourishes these bodies of yours and, contrary-wise, what is very harmful to ingest within your physical being.
So, my dears, these bodies you have are by no means any kind of an accident in the enormous, enormous complexity of them–every little bone, sinew, muscle and organ. Every one of the billions of cells that make you up is, in a way, pre-planned. Also, your Urantia Book mentions that your world is a decimal planet, one in ten of evolutionary worlds in which the Life Carriers are allowed to experiment just a little bit more. In other words, as is the case with most planets, life was not brought here by the Life Carriers—that’s what their name means—but the life that was started here was allowed to vary a bit from pre-established patterns.
If you can, imagine and appreciate this: the Life Carriers knew their variations would lead to human beings being more susceptible to viruses. Yet they also knew that at a certain stage of world history, along would come a Material Son and Daughter–an Adam and Eve–to biologically up-step the human races, and this would take care of that problem with viruses. So this is one of the aspects of the default of your Adam and Eve, that you still have these pesky viruses causing so much trouble.
This foresight is how far, and deep, and broad, the Life Carriers’ abilities are. When they started that original life implantation on your world they knew you would be the result. About a million years ago, when the first two human beings–Andon and Fonta, a brother and sister–were evolved, the Life Carriers were given a message from higher up: Congratulations, Life Carriers of Urantia, you have evolved human beings, living creatures of free-will dignity.
This is what your bodies are, the result of literally hundreds of billions of years of slow evolution throughout our Local Universe by all the higher spiritual beings, including Michael and me. We too are learning and evolving all along, and you are the end result of that, a result that even on your own world will continue to evolve.
Now that is a kind of objective viewpoint from the outside, you might say, a way of looking at human origin. But how about for you yourselves, from the inside? Here we get into the feelings and awareness that you are capable of experiencing all through your days and nights in your awake and sleeping cycles.
Again I call attention to these minds you have which are, as your Urantia Book goes into such detail to explain, so determined by your physical, bio-chemical nature. You are probably most personally experienced in this with what you call “psychotropic drugs”–starting with the cruder one most primitive societies discovered and learned how to create–alcohol. In other words, you take a physical substance into your body that changes your mentality.
Of course since those early times along have come literally hundreds of other substances that are physical and yet change your mentality. Your mind and body are so intrinsically inter-related that your body’s health depends so much on your mental attitude towards it. Here I will mention again the wonderful qualities of curiosity–just wondering with an open mind what is happening, and what is causing it. What is the linkage here?
This concerns all the knowledge and understanding you can acquire of what causes what. Continue to experiment. Continue to wonder and try different things, especially as you get older and your physical, bodily requirements change. Things you could do as a youngster are no longer healthy. Yet now you have your whole internet of information and a thousand-and-one recommended diets for you to try and see what works.
Unfortunately for many folks it is only a cliché, this thing of “diet and exercise”–the amount of movement your bodies require to thrive on. Keep stretching. Keep moving in every conceivable way you can think of. Just wiggle around a lot and grow flexible. Keep expanding in this way because as you get older, your muscles will tend to tighten up and restrict all your movements. Every joint in your body needs to move to stay healthy.
Then there are all your feelings, even that very scary one called pain. Even the ancients referred to the body as a “vehicle of pleasure and pain.” You need to be on good terms with pain in your life because, to some degree, it is unavoidable. As you say, “Accidents happen!”–especially as a child when your curiosity lead you to try things that involved pinching this or spraining that, falling down and skinning your knee, whatever. Remember those thousand and one little accidents you went through learning what not to do, but positively, how to do things the right way.
Be a connoisseur of pain, but not in any way masochistic. Avoid the advice that “If it hurts, that’s good!”–which is going in the wrong direction entirely. Be not afraid of pain, but instead when it occurs, be really super curious about it. Pain is a signal with a message to you. In its more severe forms, like a badly sprained ankle, or knee, or hip, or a pulled muscle: what is it telling you? Be open to that. Don’t get off in some kind of ego-proud way of just ignoring it. Respect it. Be open-minded to it, and again, be curious as to not only what it is telling you, but how to heal from that injury.
Michael and I wish your regular education–kindergarten on up through high school and college–would teach more and more about first aid–commensurate with every level whether it is first grade, or sixth, or high school. Teach more about first aide and how to analyze what pain is telling you; how to deal with injuries of all different sizes from the most minor to something rather severe; and how to help each other who are injured. This too is part of this physical-ness of yours, is it not?
Then of course you have all the pleasure your bodies are capable of signaling to your personality, and all the ways your personality can delight and respect that whole enormous cosmos of all the different pleasures that arise. Think of all the different feelings that as a youngster sometimes came over you unbidden in many little uncontrollable ways at first. But learning to create and control all that pleasure was fun too, was it not?
Very much like we talked about before, about your personality and your creative spirit, there is no limit to how much I could go on about these bodies of yours because they too are, on one hand, rather uniform. Which is good if you do get injured; your doctor doesn’t have to start from scratch exploring what has happened to you. As you say about your good surgeons, “They know their way around a body.”
Yet yours is personally unique to you, especially as your unique personality relates to it, learns it, and learns how to use it. So treasure this part of you, my dears. It is something that does change in that great transition of death, over to the mansion worlds. Yet as your Urantia Book informs you, you are still quite physical to begin with. You’ll go through hundreds of changes as you go from one world to the next, being carried there by transport seraphim, to wake up on a new world ever so slightly less physical and more purely spiritual. That too you have to look forward to. And so: enough. I’m open to questions or comments this evening.
Dialogue
Student: Mother, what is a good diet–a beneficial diet for these bodies of ours?
NEBDONIA: : Thank you, my son, for the question. As I suggested, nutrition is so complex it is very much up to you to experiment and explore. Use the scientific method you’ve evolved and learned of trying something to see how it affects you personally. It is also a good step to stop doing something for a while and see how that affects you. Sometimes you have a notion that something is really healthy, yet you develop some kind of unwanted effects. Just to try to see if suspending it makes you healthier.
This is very much your own personal responsibility–your ability-to-respond, right? It helps to meditate, reflect, and make notes. Obviously as you go through the day you are ingesting dozens of different kinds of things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then too many folks are into all kinds of supplements of herbs and vitamins and minerals, so keep a diary of what you are experimenting with, and what effect they are having on you. Remember the scientific method means you have a good notion of what you are doing one-at-a-time, because if you try ten new things all at once, it is hard to say what is causing what.
Your Urantia Book talks about Adam and Eve introducing a purely vegetarian diet, but this is not always practicable for folks. In terms of how much vegetable and/or animal material, it is a matter not of extremes but of proportion, so it is generally wise to begin with avoiding extremes. This is especially true regarding the literally dozens of diets on the internet suggesting this or that for some desired effect.
From Michael’s and my standpoint, we see that well over half to three quarters of your disease and ill health is due to, and well within, each individual’s choice, yet complicated and conditioned by their culture, situation, and upbringing. It comes back to you, my son, and your ability to respond, depending on keeping track of what you are doing. Continue to experiment, especially as you get older. What supplements might help you? What changes in your diet can help you control your weight, your flexibility and your strength. Keep that open mind.
Student: Good. Thank You.
NEBDONIA: : I’m sure you know that your taste itself can change enormously as you try something new. It too can evolve and inform you of what is healthy and what is not. Thank you for your question, and keep that open mind and curiosity. Keep trying things.
Student: I will. Thank You
NEBDONIA: : Be in my love.
Student #2: Mother, I have a question, a curiosity question. On this world we tend to go kicking and screaming into death, trying to hang onto life at all costs. Is there a corollary fear when we go from Mansion World One on up, or is it just the reverse?
NEBDONIA: : Yes, my son, that is an interesting question. Your Urantia Book mentions that the moment of re-awakening on the first Mansion World is such an enormous, truly enormous experience of having survived. Here you still are!–and in a slightly evolved body on a real physical world, walking out of the mansion halls with a little junior angel by your side to take you to your new home.
Imagine looking around and feeling with this new body you have, what a changed and more spiritual, more soulful reality you will be in. For that is what “morontia” means–soul—a more soulful world, and you!–that will be with you for all eternity.
From then on, as you get used to even this enormous change, right, you’ll have an equally great sense of being able to go on. Most of you are already so much more advanced than, shall we say, cave people, you might spend only a few weeks on this very first mansion world before you are ready to go onto the next. Then you literally get wrapped up in the body of a special angel, a transport seraphim, for the journey.
As the Urantia Book says, it is like getting on a train with a slumber car, falling asleep, and then waking up in a new city; but here you’ll be ever so slightly more spiritual on an ever so slightly advanced world, because these mansion worlds are all keyed to this evolving being that you’ll be.
So pretty much all your fear and anxiety of death is lost after your first transitional re-awakening. One of the main purposes of the Urantia Book is to feed your faith and your understanding of the very kind of being you are, a personal being capable–at your choice!–of eternity. You are capable of endless growth because that is the key: you will need to keep growing forever. Just think of the millions and millions of years it will take you to arrive at Paradise and join the Corps of the Mortal Finality.
You will be verging on a seventh-stage spiritual being and have the whole physical seventh Super Universe, as well as the billion worlds of Havona, behind you, now part of your soul. Then there is six more Super Universes to go out and explore. This is what is in store for you after that first big step when most of the fear is gone. All along you will be surrounded by spiritual beings to pique your curiosity even more.
Student #2: Thank you.
Closing
Nebadonia: Be in my love. (pause) If there are no further questions or comments, I hope my lesson this evening has been fun for you, talking about these bodies I’m sure you all feel you know so well. I hope I have piqued your curiosity as to the origin of them, and their marvelous complexity.
You are a personal being right from God, and as God himself is the single personal being who unifies all of creation–all of Paradise, all of Havona, all of the physical universes—so too your personality, right from God, has this same function of unifying all the different aspects of you–your creative spirit, these physical bodies of yours which are so much a part of and allied with your mind, then these eternal souls you are earning by living day to day. Remember: these souls of yours are counter-parted and held safe by a presence of God within you, also uniting all these different aspects of you.
My dears, I hope I’ve filled you with a bit of wonder, because both Michael and I wonder at you–especially as individuals. This is the way we see you. This is the way we experience you within all your family, social, cultural and national lives. Through all these different ways you are determined, we see and experience you as a co-creative being with choice, for what you are choosing to do, moment by moment, is what really fills your souls.
So keep living. Keep growing. Keep reaching out. Keep accepting and being open. You have just begun. Michael sends you his peace, and I bid you: Be in my love. Good night.
