1998-10-04. What Is Peace?
Nashville #64
Topic: What is Peace?
Group: Nashville TeaM
Teacher: Ham
TR: Rebecca
Opening
Ham: Greetings, children, I am Ham and I greet you warmly this evening. We are extremely grateful to you fine students and recognize your sincere dedication and whole hearted allegiance to the mission, to Michael, and to the Father.
You all have far still to go in your spiritual enlightenment. Of course, this path extends all the way to Paradise. However, you can and are beginning to truly exhibit the fruits of the spirit which are greatly easing the overall burden of life and giving you each a greater happiness and peace than you have ever known before. We are delighted with your strong progress, and with your determination to overcome the obstacles that will forever crop up in your lives.
Lesson
Peace, Stillness
Tonight, let us speak about peace. Peace is that place where thought is quiescent and fear is nonexistent. Peace is something you can bring into your life from the stillness that is greatly helpful in gaining the balance in your emotional life that you seek. All of you in your quiet time reach that point of peace, that area of conscious contact with the Father fragment, that is quiet, calming, and peaceful.
You can bring this same feeling of peace and God-consciousness into your lives throughout the day by just refocusing, recommitting, rededicating yourselves to him at various times. When things seem to well up around you, where fears are threatening to engulf you, take a moment, draw one or two deep breaths, remember the Father is with you, and bring the stillness into that moment. You will be surprised at how the fears, the problems, seem to die down and how suddenly you have perspective that was not there before. This is expanding God-consciousness and bringing his peace into your hearts more and more frequently.
You don’t need to let problems and the day’s worries engulf you while you wait to visit your quiet time. Once you really make good conscious contact in the stillness, you can recognize that feeling and practice your ability to bring it in during other times of the day. Your goal is eventually to be free from anxiety entirely, to have conscious contact with the Father during all your waking moments. Even so, it is necessary to retreat from the world, to exercise your communion with the Father, even as Jesus did. The Master had continual, conscious contact with the Father and yet he grew tired and fatigued, hungry, all the things that add to any human’s irritability, he experienced. But, he dealt with this by withdrawing and entering the stillness where he could consciously pray to the Father and then wait to receive the Father’s uplifting power and to align his will with the Father’s.
Eventually, you will be able to closely align your will with the Father just as Jesus did and you will be able to feel when you are moving away from that will and be able to realign your will again. It is not so important for you at this stage to constantly be aligned with the Father’s will as it is for you to be able to tell when your will is aligned and when it is not. When you feel yourself becoming angry, hateful, fearful, distraught, anxious, these are spirit poisons that pull you even further away from your conscious contact with the Father.
So, you must be able to recognize what is happening within you and this is not to say that you must suppress your human emotions. On the contrary, you must explore them, work through them in order to dispel them and all of this is difficult and takes time. But, I say to you that the more you are able to work through these emotions and dispel the spirit poisons, the closer you will be able to align your will with the Father’s and the more you will be able to feel God’s presence during your day.
Let us all think of a time this past week when emotions have overcome you and you have lost sight of your spiritual connection. Recognize how suddenly this happens and also how suddenly you can feel very lost and at sea without any bearings. Also, think about how much of this emotional turmoil is actually fear based. Much of it is old patterns, even old ways of viewing yourselves that come from childhood.
Try if you can to make a connection between that which you felt this week and the early childhood pattern that spawned it. Were not these feelings, anger especially, really a self-defense mechanism that allows you to not look at your selves, but to blame it on somebody else, some outer stimulus that is causing you to react this way. Anger usually masks some form of denial.
There is much that you will be working on throughout your lives, much self-discovery, much self- understanding and self-forgiveness and then eventually you will come to a place where you don’t get angry any more, you don’t feel overwhelming anxiety for your minds will be stayed on God and that peace will be so present in your lives that nothing can pull or push you out of it. It is eternally true, he whose mind is stayed on God dwells in perfect peace. Are there any questions?
Dialogue
Anger
Q: Jesus experienced something like anger a few times in his life we are told by the Urantia book, at least the time in the temple with the money changers. Can you tell us a little about how that was different?
Ham: Certainly, I would characterize Jesus’s state of mind as righteous indignation rather than anger. He was not out of control, but fully self-possessed and thinking clearly without any personal feelings being involved. This was more an indignation at disrespect for the Father. Human anger that I was discussing is always based in fear and is always personal. Jesus by the time of that episode had moved far beyond those kinds of feelings.
Q: Would he have experienced those earlier in his life?
Ham: Yes certainly.
Q: Would you say that it is rare that we experience this righteous indignation and that most of the time we are experiencing this fear-based anger?
Ham: Yes, I would say so.
Q: Is this technique you were talking about going to help me handle the situation when someone is angry with me? Give me some more details if you can on how to keep from getting angry when someone is angry with me?
Ham: Yes, anger and fear do feed on each other and during an angry exchange, fears are awakened on both sides causing anger to be mutually expressed. One way to deal with this is to honestly look at the situation, at a later time not during the exchange, but later, and honestly say to that person, “When you express anger toward me this awakens deep fears that I am not able to find in myself the qualities that you are accusing me of not having at that moment. It makes me feel frightened, alone, isolated from the love that we usually share”.
This kind of honest exchange will soften the heart of the other person and that person will usually admit to some type of fear awakened that causes the anger such as, “When you do such and such, it reminds me of my father or something, and this causes an irrational fear that causes me to lash out in anger, even at little things”. But really, all you can do is work on your side, on your feelings, but expressing these deep inner conflicts and emotions is part of the healing process so even if the other person is unmoved the first time and the second time and even the third time, you are still working through your own feelings and healing your own inner wounds. But, normally the other person will be so moved as to begin examining themselves. Is this helping?
Q: That was very helpful. It sounds like we can’t expect to get over these reactions quickly. It will take a lot of effort. We can’t just meditate our way out of it.
Ham: Yes.
Parenting, Fear
Q: When I reflect on anxiety is seems that the hardest things to deal with are concerns that I have over the well being of family, especially children. Can you tell me something about those times when you are gripped by fear over the well being of someone you care about.?
Ham: Usually this stems from a fear of loss. It is your fear to lose the child, so the fear is really for yourself although it seems to be for someone else. It is a difficult thing to raise children and to protect them and nurture them through many, many years and then to come to a place where you must let go of that protective impulse. There comes a time, which is usually a long transition, when parents must relinquish their control and influence in their children’s lives to the Father and realize that in the kingdom you are siblings and your Father is their Father and you don’t have to fill the role of God any more. This is difficult for both the parent and the child, for you were God to the small child. Your influence has given shape to his or her understanding of the Heavenly Father, but you are not God, you are a child of God just as your children are.
Q: In those times, is it actually helpful to pray for angelic help or for some Divine intervention or is that more for our own peace of mind when we do that?
Ham: No, that’s fine as long as it is predicated with “Father if it is your will, please send angelic help”. That’s fine.
Q: This is a timely lesson for me because I think I had one of these releases of anger episodes today that is rooted is something very ancient. I had an anger come out at my father that I am hoping I am currently cleansed of, that manifest itself in high fever and aches. I am correct in the way I am seeing this?
Ham: Yes, anger and fear both very often manifest in physical symptoms, definitely. And, yes, there is a very deep issue between you and your earthly father that is coming to the surface at this time. These deeply buried emotional experiences often can cause physical illnesses. It is such an inner cry for help and recognition that the body starts to shut down some functioning. These can be very serious cries for help. You might not get the response you need to hear from your father at this time, however. So, be careful about banging your head against that wall.
But, you can imagine what he would say if he were entirely enlightened and had come to grips with his inner conflicts, how he would apologize, what he should say, what he should have said and done for you as a child. This is all appropriate and a helpful way to start working through this issue. Even writing this would be helpful, he needs to tell you that you shouldn’t have had to bear that burden as a child, that it wasn’t your fault, and that he was wrong, all those things. But, where he is in actuality right now, the denial is so complete that he will probably go to his grave without giving you that apology that he should. Your father is a very sick person, engulfed in spirit poisons and denial. But, the morontia experience unfailingly corrects all these things and allows for new beginnings. Is this helping?
Q: That is an extraordinary reading, thank you.
Personal Counsel
Q: Ham, do you have a message for me tonight?
Ham: Certainly, son, you are doing very well and are experiencing a lot of healing and a re-birthing almost of the spirituality that was unable to manifest before now. You are really seeing the world through different eyes and coming into a peacefulness and tranquility that had been missing. But of course, you still have challenges and problems, but nothing seems that bad now. You are realizing that with God everything is possible, that there is nothing that can’t be changed, nothing that can’t be overcome as long as you are willing to follow him and receive his guidance to change directions when needed and allow yourself, give yourself the total freedom to do that.
Don’t worry unduly about other people, realize that there are some things you can’t control or change at this time. Realize that everyone has their own destiny to fulfill and their own path to walk and that their experiences will all be useful in the end. Don’t feel guilt because you think you are supposed to, don’t feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Let guilt wash away, don’t hold on to it. It is a spirit poison and not healthy. You have to come to that point where the past is the past and cannot be changed so leave it there and walk on. You can only do one day’s work in a day. Let go of worries about things you cannot do anything about. Just be in the present, do what you can one day at a time, and leave the rest of the burdens where they belong, with the Father.
Q: Ham do you have anything for Esmirelda?
Ham: Yes, daughter, i see some new progress, like new shoots coming up out of the soil. These shoots are flexible, supple, bendable, they’re not rigid or unbending. This new flexibility, this new openness to newness is wonderful and is a great relief as well. It is a great relief to be able to change, for all things to become new, and to leave the burden of the old ways behind. Continue this new growth and be at peace. All is well.
Q: Elena?
Ham: Daughter, you are doing very well and are also sending out feelers into the world as you adjust and change and try out your new wings. Be at ease with yourself for you are beginning to truly take in the Father’s love and to rearrange some old thinking patterns, some old habits of thought, that are no longer appropriate.
Q: Rebecca?
Ham: Daughter, you are doing very well and are learning to expand your inner self for the soul grows inside out, its inner most parts expand and grow from its center. This is as it should be. You are beginning to understand the dynamics of soul growth and expansion which is just where you should be right now at this time.
Q: If you could tell me what I an going through right now and give me some advice.
Ham: Yes, son, often one’s greatest fear and greatest hope are linked together. The work you are undertaking at this time is designed to help you overcome your inner blocks and release your greatest talent. It is only when you are completely comfortable, completely in a place of automatic pilot, that your talent in performance will be able to ; come out. You are going through a period of intense struggle between the old childhood feelings of inadequacy and the old “I can’t”, with the imperative of the task which is “I must”. In all creativity there is a place in the middle where it must is and you are finding this place now and yes it is hard work to get there. But, be assured that you will get there and you will be given the ability to do all that which is necessary. I am glad to see your diligence surfacing. You are a very diligent worker once you decide to do something.
Q: Do I understand you to say here that my greatest talent is in performing?
Ham: Yes, it will be one your greatest talents, yes.
Q: Do you have anything to say to Frankie?
Ham: Son, we recognize your steadfastness in your work for the mission and your willingness to serve. Be assured that your task will be a source of great joy and challenge. You have much to give to others and your ability to give of the spirit is increasing every day. Go in peace.
Closing
If there are not further questions, I will retire until next week. As always, my prayers and my love are with you each. Farewell.
