[tmtranscripts] Michael 11/7/05

[JERRY LANE]

Dear Folks,    Here's another great lesson from Michael on hope and 
security.

  Michael—November 7, 2005

Marin TM Group—Mill Valley, California—U.S.A.

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

(What is spirit)
(Spirit as value)
(The spiritual cosmos)
(Spirit never compels)
(Repression and denial)
(The gaps in your life)
(You are never separate from spirit)

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    We want to thank You for visiting us in 
this particular way.  We enjoy so much hearing your insights and 
understandings because we realize at the same time, this does not affect our 
own communication with You; does substitute for our own inner connection.  
There has been voiced some question about the Teaching Mission interfering 
with our own personal prayers, but You have assured us they are 
complementary, not in any way whatsoever in contention. So we thank You once 
again for these very special visits.  Amen.

MICHAEL:  Good evening, My sons, this is Michael.  Just relax yourselves for 
a few minutes and soak in My peace.  (pause)  Just pretend you are lowering 
yourselves into a hot-tub of spirit.  (long pause)

(What is spirit)

Lately We have been trying to help you realize just what spirit is.  Once 
you accept that this is a very natural part of human life, and you are 
surrounded by personal spirit beings who have your welfare very much at 
heart, you naturally wonder, perhaps, why you have not noticed this before.  
And so a good part of Our lessons and even your textbook, the Urantia book, 
is designed to help you realize what this dimension of reality is.

We can call it the realm of spirit, if you want to think about it somewhat 
spatially, but with your modern, post-Einstein minds, the dimension of 
spirit can suggest something not only filling space and being everywhere, 
but transcending space and being instantaneous in certain ways that have 
nothing to do with the physical universe, the speed of light and so forth.  
So spirit is not only everywhere as in Mother’s Adjutants of Mind and, 
literally, Her presence, but it is very extra-dimensional and transcends 
space/time as well.

So how do these very real dimensions impinge upon your life?  How do they 
affect you?  And then very personally, how are you yourself a spiritual 
being?  What part do you play in this spiritual community?  What are your 
own spiritual strengths and limitations? You’ve no doubt noticed, because 
We’ve used it often as a teaching tool, Our mantra of: physical facts, 
mental meanings or relationships, and spiritual values.

For a simple illustration, let Me suggest that just as you know immediately 
if you physically stub your toe, or mentally lose your train of thought, so 
too most of you have had the experience of picking up an old favorite object 
and noticing how it has changed from several years before.  Once it held 
great interest or fascination for you, and now appears to be somehow just a 
physical object. Obviously something has very radically changed and it isn’t 
the molecules that make up this physical thing.  You reason correctly that 
your own inner values have changed.

In our discussions on the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity 
and how you are at least a small part of all your seemingly objective 
observations, We mentioned two people looking at the same painting.  The 
physical object is there in front of them and they are seeing the same 
thing.  It can even have somewhat the same meaning to each of them.   But 
each can value it very differently.  To one it can be of no value 
whatsoever, while to the other this painting can touch them deeply and 
affect them even beyond their own ability to express.

And so in this way your spirit is right within your space with you, 
surrounding you in everything and everyone you perceive.  There is this 
value, even to the point where, if you have experienced moments of nothing 
seeming of value, you know how painful this can be. This for most of you 
would be equivalent to insanity, everywhere as much as if things lost their 
meaning and their relationships.  If you were to suddenly lose the value of 
things, and people especially, about you, very shortly life would not be 
worth living.  The pain would be too great.

(Spirit as value)

Are you getting a sense now of what We mean by value?  It is something which 
separates you from the whole animal kingdom, which in their own way have 
bodies and experience meaning.  An animal can learn from its trial and error 
how to accomplish a certain goal, and you are ever more delighted in 
discovering just how intelligent animals are this way.  But no animal can 
evaluate the goal itself.  This whole dimension is missing in their 
experience.  This experience of spirit marks you as a human being, a 
spiritual being.   This sense, or perception if you will, is part of your 
personality, it’s part of you.  It’s a dimension you enjoy as much as those 
of space, and all your mental powers of reasoning, memory, association, and 
so forth.

There has been so much of what you call spiritualist phenomena, with a bad 
reputation for being associated with various con-artists, that for many the 
word spirit still has a alien connotation, something wholly other.  So while 
they may have very deep feelings that God is spirit, and He certainly exists 
as an inner fact they enjoy, still they put Him and all His subordinate 
spiritual Sons and Daughters—such as Us—off at a distance.  Ironically 
enough they spiritually value their physical bodies and mental capabilities 
so greatly they unconsciously assume spirit is something else, it is not an 
intrinsic part of them.  And of course this is their freedom, this 
orientation or identification strictly with their physical/mental aspects.  
This is possible because they value them so greatly; spirit is there too, 
and always has been.  It is just unrecognized as such.

So what does it mean to grow in spirit?  What does it mean to have more 
value in your life as a conscious perception?  Think about this.  What would 
it mean if your dearest, closest friend suddenly had more value to you?  
Here you can glimpse how spirit is the primal antecedent to both mind and 
matter/energy.  As another person grows in value to you, this will be 
immediately reflected in both their physical appearance and your mental 
understanding and sharing with them.   When you think of a friendship truly 
growing, this is what is growing.  This is one way in which spirit 
transcends time, when two old friends get together and see each other not 
only as they are instantaneously in the present, but they can literally 
visualize with the eye of spirit each others’ soul—all those years of all 
the experiences they’ve shared.  As all these personalities go hurtling 
through space on all the billions and trillions of worlds, the spiritual 
record is what is growing for every single one, and for God himself—that 
aspect of our Father we call the Deity Supreme, the Supreme Being, the soul 
of the universe.  If you cannot yet perceive this directly, My children, do 
your best to imagine it.  Imagine: nothing of true spiritual value is ever 
lost.  This is the nature of reality, as our absolute and infinite Father 
creates it.

(The spiritual cosmos)

But enough for this evening, for there is no exhausting all the different 
meanings and values of spirit.  For so many people the surprising aspect of 
the Urantia book is not the cosmology, or the history, but the delineation 
of so many orders of spiritual beings, the concept that the whole physical 
universe of millions of galaxies—all this material/energetic creation is 
being administered by personal spiritual beings who are antecedent to, and 
directly creating and administering all this “stuff.”  This is probably the 
biggest surprise of all.  So as you go out and look up into a clear night’s 
sky, and experience the reality of the cosmos, now you can see it as the 
home of an enormous, nigh incomprehensibly infinite family.  And be 
reassured that though a few of the spiritual personalities of your local 
System, and your own dear planet, went astray in the exercise of Their 
personal freedom, with dire consequences for all of you ever since, still 
you can be reassured--for here is where your faith and your knowledge can 
actually ease your heart--that that whole starry realm out there—your 
future--is in good hands.  And so are you.  You are spiritual beings.  
Welcome home.

If you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s do that again.

Student:  Father Michael, thank You for Your support this last month, and 
thank Mother also for Her support.  I notice that I’m not doing things alone 
any more.  And I also thank all those who have supported me that I’m not 
fully aware of.  So thank You very much.

(Spirit never compels)

MICHAEL:  You are very welcome, My son.  And it is We who thank you.  We 
thank you for your faith.  We thank you for opening yourself and asking for 
help.  We thank you for acknowledging Us.  This, My son, is very literally 
how you add to Us, when you give to Us what only your free will is capable 
of giving.  The value of this gift—your trust in Us—is so great in its 
nature; this is why spirit in no way ever—whatsoever--compels.  The gift of 
freedom and the exercise of it are too precious.  So again, My son, We thank 
you for your faith and your trust, and We trust in turn, We truly have been 
of help to you .  Thank you for all the loving help you’ve given your friend 
through these very trying times.  Your prayers have helped you stay very 
clear in our mind in analyzing and understanding what should be done, what 
is helpful and what is not.  So rest in My peace.

STUDENT:  Dear Michael, earlier we were all talking about becoming more 
serviceable by learning what the great masters have achieved in the Far 
East.  It reminded me of one of Your favorite Old Testament quotes, “Create 
in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”  And then 
You add, “Purge me of secret sins”.  And I’d to ask You to elaborate on that 
a little bit.  I know by becoming a little bit more self-understanding, we’d 
become more serviceable to Your program, and a more stable platform of 
service.  So help us with having a little more insight into being “purged of 
secret sins” and of course the “presumptuous transgressions” that You 
mention as well.

(Repression and denial)

MICHAEL:  Yes V, this is more understandable to you in terms of modern 
psychology as repression’s.  These are your secret sins that you indulge in 
generally with a sense of guilt, and so are somewhat torn inside.  
Essentially you do not yet want to face an ultimate decision of ending these 
secret sins and so you try not to think about them.  This is very much to 
what that specific passage was alluding.

It is very similar to the psychological phenomena of denial, which is a more 
serious extension of the same process where you are able to remove this 
behavior from your consciousness entirely, even to the point of denying you 
are doing some physical activity right at the time, either by giving it some 
other name, or bogus motivation.

So how do you become conscious of what you may be denying or repressing?  
Ten points for the person who said or thought “stillness.”  (laughter)  This 
is that inner opening we’ve been talking about.  I hope it has not been seen 
as a contradiction where at one and the same time We advise you not to live 
in the past, yet at the same time be totally open to it.  What’s the 
difference?  It’s a matter of consciousness, of consciously establishing 
yourself in the present moment.

Living in the past means that these repression’s, or denials--the secret 
sins--are still being relived, are still having a great influence on your 
behavior, by their very nature, unconsciously so.  You can literally be 
doing things you will not admit you are doing, either to yourself or others. 
  It is only by opening yourself to the original events that gave rise to 
these secret sins can you in all consciousness become aware of them, and 
accept them.  This is the essence of catharsis, where the reliving of 
certain repressed experiences, and accepting them fully-consciously as part 
of your genuine past, can rob them of their power over you.

Here the process of maturity is one of seeing yourself not in purely 
black-and-white terms as being some kind of Prince or Princess of Goodness, 
or innately evil, but a person of strengths and weaknesses.  The strengths 
you can enjoy; the weaknesses you can accept and go to work on if you decide 
to, in your highly-consciously liberated present moment.

This can give you such a footing in genuine reality--seeing yourself at 
least somewhat as others see you--some genuine objectivity--that you can 
then suspend your “pretentious transgressions,” (laughter) as you loose your 
need to pretend--first to yourself, then to others.

This pretentiousness is that “pride that goes before the fall.”  For it 
takes only a simple flight of stairs to show a stiff-necked person the error 
of his ways, as he goes tumbling down them.  Does this answer your question, 
My son?

STUDENT:  Yes, I’m glad I asked it.  My older boy will be glad I did.  And I 
feel better already!

But the word I mentioned was “presumptuous” transgression, that was 
mentioned in the Urantia book, and I think J must have heard “pretentious.”  
I’m glad it came out, but the second part of the Urantia book quote is, 
“Purge me of secret sins, and keep back your servant from presumptuous 
transgression.”  And I guess that means the bigger ones?  Thanks, though.

MICHAEL:  Well it’s implicit here that “presumptuousness” cannot help but 
transgress on your poor fellows who have to put up with it. (laughter) So 
this trimming your own “pretentiousness,” and refusing so to transgress on 
your friends, is just another kind of spiritual generosity.  This is a gift 
you make others by truly, spiritually behaving yourself.  And be in My 
peace.  (Thank You Michael.)  (a very long pause…)

It’s very peaceful here, is it not, My sons?  You notice this peace is a 
kind of home base you can return to.  It is nothing you need fear loosing, 
because there is no way you can hang on to it.  There is no way you can 
directly create it, except by allowing it to be.

And so you step off again, and again, off into another adventure.  And away 
you go!  Because for that adventure to be fully real, you let go of this 
moment and trust that your own inner desire and wisdom will remind you to 
take a break again—sometime--and just enjoy My peace again.  (the pause 
continued for another long time; then there was a ripple…)

Did you have something, D?

STUDENT:  Yes.  Earlier last week as I went more and more into stillness 
with the desire to be more quiet, I also noticed how at times my life seems 
so, in a sense, hanging by a thread--so tenuous, and I realized that thread 
is my faith.  And the more my faith is enhanced and grows, the thread 
becomes stronger and wider, and like becomes a rope I am able to climb up.  
And as I climb up, I’m able to experience, as You have mentioned, new 
adventures, new challenges.  And as I climb up this rope of faith, there are 
new dimensions I encounter, and my capacity to love grows and grows.  And so 
does my desire to be quieter and more still, and to be ready for the next 
adventure—the next moment.  And it’s really quite interesting watching 
myself go through this (laughs) and to drop things that once were important 
to me, and familiar, then noticing the gaps to …find other things, or in a 
sense be more still.  So it’s interesting watching when those gaps appear as 
a habit has disappeared…of who I am, and what I do, in those gaps.  I notice 
what pulls me, and what doesn’t…interest me, except this being in communion, 
and to be in stillness, and to be creative, and to feel life…

MICHAEL:  Yes, My son.  I congratulate you on your growing perception.  
Everything you just mentioned is in the realm of spirit.

True enough, your life is hanging on a thread physically, yet I’m sure 
you’ve all read amazing stories of just how tough and resilient those human 
bodies you have, have at times survived the most amazing challenges.  And 
your minds too can become ever more tough and in their flexibility and 
adaptability.  The more you read, and talk about, and experience, the more 
lively and tenacious your mental facilities can become.

(The gaps in your life)

Noticing the gaps left by your suspended habits is very much a spiritual 
appraisal.  You accept the challenge that so many small habits--like smoking 
cigarettes, or drinking coffee--are used like little dabs of glue to hold 
your day together.  They are small connecting links without which you at 
first feel lost, because all of a sudden you notice all the separate pieces. 
  And so We suggest a little mini-stillness meditation whenever you seem to 
be suffering a gap.  Accept it into your consciousness.  Seize the 
opportunity to re-evaluate what ordinarily-familiarly comes next.  Something 
more interesting and valuable might suggest itself, if you give it a chance.

Your perception of a growing stillness is a realization of a new continuity 
now entering your life.  This home base We speak about, that you find in 
your stillness--so very tenuous and fleeting at first—it’s the continuity, 
the thread that you are feeling, more and more connecting all the separate 
events.

And so you’re also discovering that in its deeper essence, stillness is not 
just another habit, but rather a way of stopping habituation.  And in this 
you are, even while in your present mind/body vehicle, you are putting a toe 
into the Morontia realms.  You are becoming aware of your own soul as 
contra-distinct from your memories--which may or may not faithfully recall 
an event.  You’re discovering the true spiritual cord, the connection that 
is your spiritual record.  And in doing so, you are experiencing a Morontia 
reality.

This is great!  This is what We have been inspiring you towards.  So keep up 
the good work, yet never be too surprised if the road ahead still has a few 
major bumps, from time to time.  Are you content now, My son?
-
STUDENT:  Yes, Yes I am.  It’s great because I feel, I feel the spirit 
coursing through me.  When I wake up in the morning, I feel it so intensely. 
  It wants me to be quiet, and to be still, and to feel it.  And I do have 
those moments, those gaps where I simply don’t know what to do; and I just 
sit in it.  And as You said, see where it takes me.

We’re in such a society where we think we have to keep doing something, and 
our identities are so wrapped up in this doing something.  It’s like I 
mentioned last week, and another time, where I’m constantly un-defining 
myself, and re-defining my God-self, or re-acquainting my God-self.  So 
thank You.

MICHAEL:  You’re very welcome.  You see now how the key is that quality of 
recognition to simply realize, Here I am in another gap again.  And so the 
thing to do is to enjoy it—a little respite.  Nothing’s happening for a 
moment or two.  What might this be?  And be in My Peace.

STUDENT R.:  Michael, I guess it’s my turn. I’d hate to leave here tonight 
without an opportunity to converse with You in this way.

As you know we’re approaching what we call the Holiday Season, and in the 
spirit of this, I would like to come and sit on Your lap, and I’d like to 
tell You what I’d like for Christmas.  (laughter)  For Christmas, Michael, I 
ask for the gift of Union with Spirit.  And that’s what my heart desires.  
That’s what it’s always desired, even when I was a young boy.  I simply want 
union with You and my Father within.  That’s what I ask for, for Christmas 
this year.

MICHAEL:  O, My son,  why wait!  (hearty laughter) You have it now!  Just 
take a few moments and feel My presence within you.  (long pause)

(You are never separate from spirit)

So you see, it is ever thus.  We never really separate, though it is more 
Mother Spirit’s lap you are sitting in.  Yet I’m always standing close 
beside; and We do form a beautiful family, if I might say so.

You do not leave Us when you forget Us for a few moments, even completely, 
as you enter into your next adventure, or duty, or desire.

The superficial parts of your being, your momentary--and as D. just 
mentioned--your very busy and goal-oriented thoughts, do not really separate 
you from spirit.  You have a human life to live; and you’ve only to live it 
fully.  And all Our suggestions are only designed to help you be ever more.  
Because this is your own potential nature.  So keep reaching My son!  Keep 
initiating our contact.  Keep asking for help.  Continue to pause in your 
busy life, with your family and friends, your very serious duties and what 
you owe others, and especially in your moments of freedom—free time.

It all exists inside a package called spirit.  But this particular package 
has no outer boundaries.  And so you will keep reaching for them forever!  
You will touch something real, but that will be Us.  Your spiritual 
boundaries are like the horizon.  As you are already discovering, My son, 
the horizon gets larger.

So here’s your Christmas package, this evening.  Open it whenever you wish.  
And be in My peace.  (Thank You, Michael, it’s a beautiful gift!)   This is 
one gift that exists completely in the appreciation of it, so you’re very 
welcome.

The evening goes late, My children.  Yet there is a fullness here I hesitate 
to disturb.  Let us bid each other a Good Evening, in this encompassing of 
love.  Rest tonight in My Peace.  (All humbly say thanks.)


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