[tmtranscripts] 04-07-01 SPOKANE TEACHER BASE

[ZooidODell at aol.com]

DATE: April 7, 2001
LOCATION: Spokane, WA
TEACHERS & TOPICS:
    DOLORES: "The soil of the soul"
    HAM: "The garden of the heart"
    PAULO:   "Planting the spirited seed"

DOLORES: I'm not experienced.  I am therefore fumbling somewhat.  However I 
am eager to learn how to do this dance of transmitting, broadcasting, 
communicating, and yet I like to think of it more as a sharing, an exchange, 
a symbiotic exchange between your creative energies and my energies also from 
the Creator in a mix of metaphors and images which will companion you and 
edify you while providing a certain food for thought or a fertilization of 
the soul's soil.

The time of year you are in on your hemisphere here where I am transmitting, 
is recognizable as that season which is in the great thaw, the stirrings of 
life having been dormant for these many months, which allows for the cycle of 
life to repeat itself in season.  Today you find your soil moist with spring 
drizzle and thriving with new growth – worms, bugs, bacteria -- and all 
manner of illustrious and industrious elemental life forms which stir the 
soup that will bring forth the aroma of full fledged flowering of Spring.  It 
is so easy to parallel your spiritual development today with this passage in 
history because your spirits, your souls, are stirring now with the 
enlivenment calling you forth in the Great Thaw after the long, dark 
isolation.  

There is little to see on the surface, but a potential every now and again, a 
sprig of green denoting a future daffodil or tulip, a curly green vegetable 
that might spring into a fern or a frond of herb.  It all looks rather 
passive as you skim the surface of vision, but in truth this represents a 
depiction of your spiritual awakening.  The soil of the new dispensation is 
alive with new growth.  Long dormant thoughts and concepts are emerging.  All 
the ingredients, nutrients, are in readiness for a tremendous flowering of 
spirit growth.  Look closely and pull up a clump of dead weeds to see a 
thriving community of potential just beneath the compost of last Autumn's 
discards.  

Have your teachers not been telling you it would happen?  Now that it is 
happening, are you truly surprised and are you so comfortable now in your 
winter comfort that the new creatures emerging from the dirt are more 
frightening to you than exciting?   There is no hurry.  In this garden there 
are a lot of things that will not even bloom this year, that are still in 
lengthy developmental stages.  Some of these seeds will come to fruition in 
the Fall, and only that seed that is responding to its own nature knows if 
and when it will spring forth into new life.  But be assured that growth is 
upon us.  Early foundations are being recognized and acted upon.  

I am happy to be here this afternoon and paint with you a picture of the 
garden with its early seedlings and fat red-breasted robins portending the 
promise of new life ahead.  Ham is here and will speak.

HAM: I am Ham.  Blessings upon you here in your base of operations for the 
advancement of the kingdom and for the association of fellow caravan 
travelers who pass by en route to points beyond.  (Long pause)  Yes, I do 
speak slowly. (Another pause) I am reaching deep into your heart, untying the 
knots that have grown up as tangled roots.  

The garden that Dolores spoke of is like "The Garden of the Heart" and the 
Master Gardener is called upon to cultivate this soil such that it fosters 
new growth.  Thus the conscientious caretaker will take that time required to 
filter through the clumps of hardness that have formed in the heart, in order 
for those tangled roots to emanate out into the far-reaches in search of new 
food, new strength, gaining nourishment to grow greater in goodness and in 
mercy.  

Indeed you are making the tree good.  "First make the tree good and this tree 
will give forth good fruit."  There is no point in attempting to hurry the 
hand of God, for no matter how heartfelt your yearning, you cannot ripen 
before your time.  You cannot will growth.  Growth, like faith, is organic; 
it comes from the Source when conditions are ripe.  When the soil is ready 
the seed will stir and bring forth life.  

You are His branches.  Some of these branches may be perceived as the trunk 
of the tree or the major branches that hold up the arms of the smaller 
branches and twigs and leaves and blossoms and fruit.  All parts of this tree 
are a part of the living God.  No part is more important than the other.  
Each part of the whole contributes to making this tree good.  You may build 
birdhouses to hang in this tree.  You may build a tree house and place it 
above the ground and take shelter from the beasts of the field.  Play upon 
it.  Eat from it.  And when its time has come, derive heat from the warmth 
its wood provides when you sit before its fire in fellowship with friends and 
family.

You cannot hurry natural growth.  We observe you all in your various states 
of dormancy and readiness.  We observe also our active co-workers in the 
mission of reclamation and re-encircuitment of Urantia into the currents of 
the universe, and give thanks for those contributions which add to the effort 
and to those who also pray, for their connection to the Universal Father is 
the fuel energy that feeds this living organism, is the fossel fuel that 
activates the machine, is the fertilizer that gives rise to heat in 
augmenting organic growth.  Our existence is in the hands of the Paradise 
Creators and no amount of force will open doors whose keys are lost or hearts 
hardened by imperfection.  

God is love.  He pours forth love into His Sons who pour forth His love into 
his sons – who is you. 

What a delightful company this is, loyal band of workers.  What an honor it 
is to behold the growth of the blanket of grace that covers you who find 
comfort therein.  I will depart.  I look forward to our next opportunity to 
share time and space together.

PAULO: Paulo here.  Amazing what happens when you allow life to happen as you 
pass by.  Expectations are a real bugaboo.  Human expectations are different 
from divine intervention.  They don't always bring you what you want.  But 
what is that song you sing?

THOROAH: "You can't always get what you want ..."

PAULO:  ".. But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you 
need."  Yes.  I guess then what that indicates is, although you cannot force 
growth, you can try to encourage growth.  

I'm looking forward to encouraging growth in our Teacher Base.  (Long pause) 
I'm feeling a lot of resistence here, as if I am speaking out of turn.  It 
must be my lack of experience in this forum.  I'm afraid my frame of 
reference is a scoshe more sociable.  I'm more familiar with some of the 
other heavenly helpers than the Teacher Corp.  

I feel like being enthusiastic and taking out an ad in the paper or putting 
up a sign in the front yard, as if to invite a level of sharing that might 
enliven or activate or enhance a standardized perception of what to expect 
when we talk of the spirit.  I'd like to hear your interpretation of what it 
means to be spirited.  How is that a quality of your personality that you can 
use in a practical way? in your mission work? in your arena?  What are you 
like when you are spirited?  What are the factors involved in creating for 
you an environment or a frame of mind that brings to you an impetus that 
allows for you then to be spirited?  

THOROAH: That's a good question.

PAULO: Do you think that being spirited is the same as being extroverted? Or 
spontaneous? Or hyper? Do you think that spirited is poised? And masterful? 
Gracious?  Out-going?  You have a phrase, "In the Zone."  You've been In the 
zone.  You know how it feels when you are functioning at your greatest 
capacity.  Percolating.  Humming.  How do you get there?  What brings you 
there?  What keeps you there?  What throws you out of there?  What knocks you 
off of there?  What is your Zone?   Is your Zone spirit-born? Or is it 
activated by caffeine or sugar? Or emotional pitch? Or payday?

THOROAH:    This tape is just about ready to end.
PAULO:   Okay. That'll give us a chance to think about what it means to be 
spirited.

Very interesting, your portrayal of what it would mean to you to be spirited. 
 Like a spirited horse, ready to do what it does with spirit, with passion.  
The inference at first is the exuberance, and yet I'd like you to look at 
spirited as a more subjective quality, in that, your spirit is operating not 
merely in readiness but in application, and so look at your ministry.  Look 
at your works.  Look at your interests.  That which you give yourself to with 
complete focus.  If it is baking or quilting; if it is working on the engine 
of your car or writing or preaching or singing or praying or crying – all of 
these are spirited activities.  It's whatever you give your heart to.

The point is, though, that you have given your heart to it, and therefore it 
can be spirited because your heart is in it.  Heart = love = God.  Well, I 
can see I have to correct myself academically here because I have it on good 
authority that God is love but love is not God, and so I don't want to be too 
loose with my example here, so as to misconstrue truth.  But I have no 
restraint when it comes to being spirited and having confidence of what I'm 
doing.  This is the kind of commitment and comportment that makes you a 
winner if you are competing for a prize or if you are giving off a radiant 
smile that would testify to your triumph in your victory over fear.  

The Zone is similar, if not the same, as Light and Life.  And so the question 
still is: How do you get it?  How do you keep it?  How do you stay in it?  
How do you reflect it?  How do you manage to reach out with it and connect 
with others so that the hand of friendship extends, so that the spirit of 
fraternity extends, out into the atmosphere as a morontial reality?

In my eye it's a spirited adventure.  And I have a vantage point that clearly 
assures me of its success, its eventual triumph over apathy and the dormancy 
of the former way, the darkness, the Winter.  Little plants, popping up here 
and there, each with its own light, I wonder why it is that you enjoy so much 
going around and turning off each other's light? In unplugging each other's 
light bulb?  Why it is that when you see a light shine you are suspect that 
its energy source is from a different source of energy than yours?

I can tell you why.  It's because you are so curious about this spirit 
business, these spirited people.  There are so many people acting spirited to 
get you to buy their product or to subscribe to their behavior pattern.  You 
are all part of the on-rush of sociology along with your striving in the 
realms of the spirit.  This is why it's safe to say that you who sit and pray 
are being as influential as those who make a lot of noise and flash a lot of 
lights.  Well, if you have done nothing else but encourage thinking, you've 
done something to generate the electricity that will eventually lead to these 
lights coming on.   

So, back to the flower bed, boys and girls.  Back to the process of worming 
our way through the thawed soil, aerating and fertilizing those areas wherein 
you will need to plant your seeds.  Sometimes you will find it feels a lot 
like talking to yourself.  

Any questions?  Any comments, interjections, or book reviews?

THOROAH: I'm going down my list, Paulo.  No, no, no, no.  Yes, an interesting 
lesson was taught to us on this job that I'm working at.  The demonstration 
was the silhouette of two people standing side by side pointing in the sky, 
or at least pointing up; and all they were was silhouettes, black on white, 
and he asked everybody to describe what they were seeing, and out of 20-some 
people there were 20-some different images that they had written down as to 
what that meant, and the point was that none of them were wrong.  They all 
were looking at basically the same thing and they all saw something 
different.  And the element here I'm thinking of is the reference to metaphor 
and symbolisms in explaining the universe to us and so we're kind of getting 
a silhouette, as it were, without all the details filled in and we're looking 
at this silhouette thinking that we know what it is.  And we have to do that 
until we find out what it is.

PAULO: These are interesting observations, yes.  The study of the human 
response is always an adventure.  How they are alike, how they are unlike, 
how easily they can be influenced in some areas and how stubborn they can be 
in other areas.  The analogy you give can be expanded to bring in other 
influences that will help to bring a focus in on what they are seeing, such 
that you would be able to tell who in the group was an optimist and who was a 
pessimist, but this speaks only to the mind.  The real power comes when you 
can access minds and bring spirit into the picture in such a way as to not 
create a similar picture but to create reality.  

This is the value of being spirited and knowing what it means to be spirited, 
knowing when and where your spirit lies.  You need to know yourself.  To know 
where it is in order to help bring it around to that spark of divinity that 
will ignite your flame and invigorate your soul such that you are once again 
spirited.  (You are always enspirited; you just aren't always aware of it and 
acting in conjunction with it.)  

Oh, well.  All of these murmurings are merely food for thought in my attempts 
to worm my way in and through the soil of your consciousness, to perhaps 
fertilize your brain and add some compost to your heart.

Thank you, Teacher Ham, for visiting us this afternoon and thank you, 
Dolores, for helping me out this afternoon with this Spokane Teacher Base.  
Until we meet again.  Good-bye!

THOROAH: Thank you, Paulo.