2019-07-25-Personal and Impersonal Reality
Marin #245
Contents
• 1 Heading
o 1.1 Topic: Personal and Impersonal Reality
o 1.2 Group: Marin TeaM
• 2 Facilitators
o 2.1 Teacher: Michael
o 2.2 TR: JL
• 3 Session
o 3.1 Opening
o 3.2 Lesson
o 3.3 Dialogue
o 3.4 Closing
Topic: Personal and Impersonal Reality
Group: Marin TeaM
Facilitators
Teacher: Michael
TR: JL
Session
Opening
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit: Hello!–Hello again! Here we are—again! It is always such a wonderful, warm, peaceful feeling to tune into the two of you again. It really stretches our minds to think of the two of you being so unutterably ancient–hundreds of billions of years now since you’ve come out from Paradise to start our Local Universe. And yet here you are, so young and youthful, so utterly spontaneous–as you have told us is your own nature.
You appeal to us to contact your enormous being with your kind of spontaneity where your presence–your now –is so much more enormous than ours. You reassure us that our present moments too are due to expand as we continue on and keep growing–the watch-word.
So tonight, Michael, if you would, I am asking you to continue this series of lessons on what it is to be human with all the different aspects of our being. So far you and Mother Spirit have talked about our personality, our creative spirit, and then Mother Spirit last time on these physical bodies of ours.
I realize the subject of cosmic/divine mind is so vast, could you mention even one-hundredth-billionth of what constitutes the reality of mind, if only our human minds? Perhaps limit yourself to what is the origin of these minds me have, and what are their basic functions. What are they doing for us? If you could so self-limit yourself, it would be appreciated. Thank you; amen.
Lesson
MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael, and yes, I would be happy to delve into these minds that you have, and we are right now sharing. Mother Spirit and I do love to tease you to try to feel and get a hold in some very subtle way on just what we are doing right within your minds.
You have asked about the origin of mind, and to go back to the very beginning as your Urantia Book so clearly delineates it for you.
To begin: there is a First Source and Center, a personal being from whom everything else comes. That is why we call this being God because—(although God is way upstream from either male or female, we use a gender just as a convention)–his first act of creation is to project reality into two very distinct phases.
(Personal and impersonal reality…)
One is that of personal living beings who each have a unique personality right from him. The second is a whole universe of impersonal reality you call matter and energy, that is not unique but is actually uniform, and follows universal Natural Law. Here every carbon atom is exactly the same as every other one with its electrons and neutrons–all the stuff that makes up this physical universe that you now know is in the hundreds of millions of galaxies your Urantia Book talks about constituting seven inhabited Super Universes and the Grand Universe beyond them.
(…and What connects them)
If you think about this primal creation with the separation between personal beings and impersonal matter and energy—one characterized by the first derived person—the Eternal Son of Paradise, and impersonal Paradise itself–simultaneously you have springing into existence the Infinite Spirit, the Third Person of Deity, whose function of mind is the connection of personality with impersonal reality—even your personality with your physical, living bodies.
This is the origin of the cosmic mind. Not only do God the Father and God the Son (or Daughter, in name) have a presence throughout all of time and space, the third person, the Infinite Spirit promulgates and projects a cosmic mind so all of reality is “minded” in this additional sense. A further aspect of this is something called Universal Reflectivity by which higher spiritual beings are in touch with all of creation instantaneously, not limited by the speed of light as you think of it in the material universe.
(Local Universe Creator Sons and Daughters of God)
Then as you go out from the Central Universe surrounding Paradise, to the seven Super Universes, and on down through their Major and Minor Sectors, you get to the seven hundred thousand Local Universes where for the first time personality is projected into two complimentary forms. In our own Local Universe this is myself–a Creator Son of God–and Mother Spirit, a Creator Daughter of God. Here it is Mother Spirit’s function to down-step the Infinite Spirit’s cosmic mind. As part of her own personality she herself projects her own Local Universe mind everywhere.
Her mind is literally what delineates the extent of our Local Universe. As we have said before, if you want to visualize Mother Spirit’s mindful function, think of her as a bubble in foam, surrounded all about by other Local Universes with their Mother Spirits, in space.
(Being super-minded via spiritual influences)
This is literally what she projects and experiences; and this is what impinges upon you as a human being. As your Urantia Book so correctly puts it, this is a part of why you are super-minded. She has an influence within you even beyond the physical functioning of your brain because your personality is in direct contact with hers. You are like a radio receiver picking up her signals. This is why we say you are super-minded.
Within your human mind you have several spiritual influences. You also have my Spirit of Truth, an orientation towards and a seeking out what is true and real, what really exists. As you are a living, expanding being, obviously this is a way to orient yourself to keep growing, because you are surrounded, right on your world, by the thousands you will come in contact with, in your life. This is another way you grow using mind.
Then there is Mother Spirit’s influence within your mind with what we call her Mind/Spirit Adjutants, literally functions of her own mentality and experience. In studying these you get a more comprehensive understanding of your own mental functions. We have already taught so much on these I’ll just briefly mention a few.
(Intuition-knowledge-understanding=perception)
We call intuition the way you know things directly as a combination of both mind and spirit for the very fact you are a creative being. You are co-creating everything you experience. There is no ultimate separation between your creativity and your mental abilities. This is how you know things immediately—beyond any intermediate–not only through your basic senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell, but also the way these are creatively combined to present you with, hopefully, a single reality.
The next function of your mind is the way you can store experience as knowledge. You can truly say, “I know this because I have experienced it. It has been part of my life.” Then there’s the way your mind just automatically, with Mother Spirit’s help, organizes this earned experience in terms of understanding. The most basic associations you share even with your pet cats and dogs. They hear a can opener operating at a certain time, and with that automatic association they come running. Yet the most crucial and useful understanding is what causes what–all the cause-and-effect you are involved in every moment of your life.
(Memories-meaning=perception)
These functions of your mind present you with a world that in turn provides the memories you control. You can sit down and decide to remember something that happened ten, twenty, thirty years ago: who was there, what was said, what was done. This is the way present understanding so thoroughly integrates even what you once perceived. More immediately, today, can you look at the schematic of a computer’s circuits and understand it? A few of you can, but for most it is just a squiggle of lines. I say this just to show you how your understanding actually informs and transforms your basic perceptions.
How you can control these basic mental experiences is a function of your personality, who you are in your very essence. You are the one who decides moment to moment just how you are going to use your mind. What are you going to see? What do you want to listen to? Where are you going? How much do you know about something? How do you learn more about it? How do you open and expand your mind? How do you become open-minded? How do you get beyond all the programming you were raised with?
This is so subtle it boils down to the thoughts you think, as a function of language and concept, actually determine perception. The members of very primitive human societies, ages and ages ago, had concepts by which not to only understand and know things, but even to perceive them. Primitive men and women without certain distinctions of what was living and what was not–without your inherited centuries of scientific knowledge of these distinctions–literally perceived everything as more alive–even personal–than your modern person: wind, fire, stone, trees.
Think of all the ways the collective mind of the human race is progressing and growing. As Mother Spirit noted about your bodies, and I gave my lesson on your creative spirit, there is no limit to what I could go on about mind beyond perception, knowledge, and understanding.
(What is reason, and “making sense” of something?)
Consider another function of mind: reason. What does it mean when two folks say, “Let’s sit down and reason together.” What does it mean to “make sense” of something, especially when it is brand new? How do you make sense of something you have never experienced before? But here it is right in front of you. We tease you with the notion that a great part of your reality is ever new.
True enough, your modern knowledge and understanding give you a profound grasp of that aspect of reality that is continuing, repetitive. You measure it by a humanly created time. You have all those marvelous clocks on the wall, wrist watches, and now your cell phones with the time on them.
You go through your days with so much of it at your choice. Yet when you get in your car and drive off to the city, that whole gang of cars surrounding you—as such–are ever new. Even if you live in a relatively small city and walk downtown to get some groceries, you will be passing people you have never seen before and will never see again.
(What continues; what is new, and only once?)
You turn on your television or computer to catch “the news.” There is a whole world now available to you through all your dozens and dozens of channels. But what is new all over this world of yours? What is happening now that is both a continuation yet also new, and hasn’t happened before, nor ever will again?
What does it mean to keep an open mind? How do you begin to grasp your own conditioning into how you see things? How you understand things now; and then, in order to keep growing, how do you get beyond this? Because it is so marvelously now, this electronic world you live in.
(Supreme curiosity and wonder are yours)
Treasure that very essence of mind called curiosity and wonder. What is it that gets you to wondering about what is it you don’t know…yet? What is it? How do you approach this?
Here you are face to face with the most wonderful function of mind, and that is: it is yours! Mind is that dimension of being human over which you have the greatest control. You can decide so much in your spare time; even how to achieve some spare time. What do you want to think about then? How do you want to use this mind of yours?
But: enough teasing. Like Mother Spirit’s lesson about your wonderful bodies, I just hope to give you a sense of this marvelous mind that, in one way, just to get through your days, you do have to kind-of “take it for granted.” Yet we do ask you–amidst all these busy lives of yours–just to meditate at least a little. Just give yourself over to ten or twenty minutes of doing nothing else but experiencing your mind.
(A little meditation)
Just sit down, close your eyes and ask, “OK, mind—(and all the spiritual presences within me)–what do you have for me now?” Then enjoy whatever comes up. Trust this marvelous creativity of yours, and this connection you have with not only Mother Spirit and me, but with our Mutual Father who is also right within that mind of yours. He can actually give you discrete thoughts. This is what it is to be open-minded and welcoming a rebirth of wonder. Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, we can bring those into our group mind here.
…To Be Continued
Dialogue
Student: I have a question. What happens to our memories on the first morontia world if we don’t remember anything bad that happens? How do we get a lesson plan out of that? How do we repent over our misdeeds, or learn from our mistakes, if our memory is gone?
MICHAEL:: Oh yes, my son, I don’t know where you got the idea that your memory is gone. It is not. There is also another thing your personality has, that Mother Spirit will speak about next time. You have a soul. And your soul contains everything spiritually significant in your life.
(Memories and soul remain)
Mother Spirit has teased you by saying that not every delicious hot dog or hamburger you’ve had in your life is part of your soul; but everything of spiritual significance is. There are both what you call good and bad, delightful and painful, experiences. These are all part of your soul. There is no arbitrary distinction or losing a good part of your memories of your life that were involved in pain, discomfort, or sorrow. These are all part of what makes you who you are and who you have truly been.
These are all valid, real experiences. So, my son, there is no way in which part of what you have experienced is lost. Rather, your memory is enormously, enormously increased because you will be that one small step more purely spiritual, with a fuller access to your memories and soul. You will continue to grow. You won’t lose anything. So does that help?
Student: Yes, I was under the impression that you don’t remember painful experiences, or you won’t remember who did certain things to you–so you don’t carry grudges onto the next world: that sort of thing. I am not sure where I got that, but I thought I got it from a transmission. I’m glad I stand corrected in that, and appreciate your comment.
MICHAEL:: Oh yes, my son. My goodness!–that experience you shared with another is now a part of who you were then, and partly who they were. You’re an experiential being. Your purpose here is to experience everything that happens with you; yet not all the small stuff persists because not everything is of spiritual value.
(Physical facts, mental meanings, spiritual values)
One way of looking at human reality is through three dimensions. You have physical facts–your body and this world you’re living on. You have your mind and all its mental meanings/associates and abilities that I talked about tonight. Your spirit experiences and recognizes value, and gives value to all the pleasures and pains and things that have happened to you. Mostly it is all the people you’ve known, in their fullness, that really fills your soul.
Mother Spirit says it is not every good little thing that has happened, but what really fill your soul are the people, these “little walking infinities” that you have known, and what you have done with them and for them. This is what really fills your soul. Your own reactions to experience—like your grudging–are something you have to learn how to deal with, because they too are an experience, an inner experience you yourself have to work on.
(Spiritual enhancement & the morontia world)
Off in your first morontia life you will be that small step more spiritual, then walking out into a much more soulful reality, both, with the glory of having survived. Knowing that you died, and yet, here you still are!–has a lot to do with grudges, hateful memories, and any negative emotions. All this, my son, is up to you to learn, even how to let things go and appreciate that high school bully you hated so much at the time. Does all this help?
Student: Yes, yes it does. Thank you for straightening that out.
MICHAEL:: Definitely, grudges are something you have to learn to get over. But that too will be an experience. That too will be spiritual growth will it not? Be in my peace.
Student: Thank you.
MICHAEL:: Well, if there are no more questions or comments, I really appreciate that last question because I think there is abroad a notion that your soul contains only the good stuff. But when you think about it, what really gives value to your life is all of it–all of it!
(Every moment in time)
Not everything is even beautiful to the same degree. Not everything is pleasurable or painful to the same degree. This is what makes each moment of your life somewhat unique. As I said this evening, not only do you have everything that is continuing, especially Natural Law in this physical world of yours, but you have the reality that something new is also happening each moment.
Your philosophy calls this “historicity”–the fact that each moment in time is unique, and has its own unique flavor to add to your soul. It is also what makes every single human being that you have a deep relationship with, more and more unique. You pass maybe dozens of folks in the course of a day, maybe hundreds of strangers on a city sidewalk, but think of the friends you have known for ten, twenty, or thirty years, perhaps your whole life.
Think of their depth of personality you have come to know. This is what fills your soul–all of it: all of the above. This is a presence of God becoming part of you. You will merge with this presence of God someday. But in the meanwhile, before that moment, there is his absolutely divine eternal presence saving everything for you.
(Soul as distinct from memories)
My children, your soul is so contra-distinct from your memories that you can easily call up. You can’t even begin—yet–to appropriate your souls. Your personality has to continue to grow enormously so that one day you become one with your own soul and the divine presence that is part of it.
(You have only just begun)
So keep growing. As Mother Spirit loves to tease you with: you have only just begun. Treasure these minds of yours and all they give you, moment by moment. Mother Spirit sends you her love, and I bid you: Be in my Peace. Let it too fill your mind. Good night.
Closing
MICHAEL:: Well, if there are no more questions or comments, I really appreciate that last question because I think there is abroad a notion that your soul contains only the good stuff. But when you think about it, what really gives value to your life is all of it–all of it!
(Every moment in time)
Not everything is even beautiful to the same degree. Not everything is pleasurable or painful to the same degree. This is what makes each moment of your life somewhat unique. As I said this evening, not only do you have everything that is continuing, especially Natural Law in this physical world of yours, but you have the reality that something new is also happening each moment.
Your philosophy calls this “historicity”–the fact that each moment in time is unique, and has its own unique flavor to add to your soul. It is also what makes every single human being that you have a deep relationship with, more and more unique. You pass maybe dozens of folks in the course of a day, maybe hundreds of strangers on a city sidewalk, but think of the friends you have known for ten, twenty, or thirty years, perhaps your whole life. Think of their depth of personality you have come to know.
This is what fills your soul–all of it: all of the above. This is a presence of God becoming part of you. You will merge with this presence of God someday. But in the meanwhile, before that moment, there is his absolutely divine eternal presence saving everything for you.
(Soul as distinct from memories)
My children, your soul is so contra-distinct from your memories that you can easily call up. You can’t even begin—yet–to appropriate your souls. Your personality has to continue to grow enormously so that one day you become one with your own soul and the divine presence that is part of it.
(You have only just begun)
MICHAEL: So keep growing. As Mother Spirit loves to tease you with: you have only just begun. Treasure these minds of yours and all they give you, moment by moment. Mother Spirit sends you her love, and I bid you: Be in my Peace. Let it too fill your mind. Good night.
