[tmtranscripts] Michael 8.28.06

[JERRY LANE]

Michael—August 28, 2006

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

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

(God shares His creativity)
(Co-creating your own reality)
(Escaping the prison of subjectivity)
(Dealing with family patterns/traditions)
(Self-honesty and humility)
(As you understand something, it changes)
(Only God knows all viewpoints)
(God’s greatest gift—we earn our souls)
(Who you are essentially)
(Happy just to be still, and alive)

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    Here You are, and here we are; it must be 
Monday evening.  What wonderful experiences these evenings have been.  
You’ve taught us how to open ourselves to what, almost by definition, is a 
spontaneity we cannot anticipate: You.  But we’ve grown our faith, and we’ve 
learned to trust Your presence and Your words for us--like a strong breeze 
beneath the wings of our souls.  So say on, dear Parents, we are ready to 
start another journey with You.  Amen.

MICHAEL:  Good evening, My children, this is Michael.  Sit up and spread 
these wings of yours, and see if you can feel not only My presence and My 
support for you this evening.  Let’s see if we can feel our Fathers’ 
presence within us as well.  For as Mother reminded you last week, this is 
His creation coming down all around us, a very real physical reality with 
all manner of living creatures and vegetation too; and if you take a moment 
and relax into your stillness, you can feel His creativity bubbling up 
inside of you as well.  Never forget, dear children of His, that what We 
refer to as His creativity is what you call—your life: all you’ve 
experienced.

There is a fragment of His pure presence that takes on your life’s 
experiences and, together with your personality, weaves these experiences 
into the rich tapestry of your soul.  In a way He is life itself.  He is 
providing and supporting this living that we all enjoy.  Though many of do 
not consider themselves pantheists, still they have a way to go in crediting 
that all creation does come initially from a single Personal Being.

(God shares His creativity)

This First Source and Center divests Himself of as much direct creation as 
He can by creating other creative personal beings, beginning with the 
Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, and spreading out from there--the 
Master Spirits of Paradise, the Ancients of Days at the heads of the Super 
Universes, on down to Mother Spirit and Myself, and including you as well.  
You were deliberately created in such a way that you share in the creation 
of your own experiential reality.

This was quite a puzzle for many ancient schools of philosophy.   From a 
human standpoint, was reality within the individual or was it out there: was 
there an objective reality?  If so, how could it be apprehended?  Did the 
inescapable fact of at least some measure of subjectivity forever doom the 
individual to any real grasp of reality?  Was any kind of peace through 
understanding possible, when there was nothing truly objective that 
individuals could understand and exchange?  Was the human race doomed to an 
eternity of misunderstanding, incessant warfare, because agreement was 
simply impossible?

Such is the nature of the human mind and comprehension that certain 
philosophical problems can be imagined but cannot be solved because of the 
way they are stated.  But you who have read your Urantia books can 
appreciate how much of that book is devoted to putting these ages-old 
philosophical problems in a new light, even from time to time introducing 
new terms-–concepts--that have had no previous human expression.

So We assure you there is an objective reality in existence, and it is 
initially the creation of a single Personal Being who then shares His 
creativity with a whole hierarchy other personal beings, including 
yourselves.  Together we all make up the Deity Absolute reality.  More 
specifically out here in time and space, We think of that aspect of Deity 
which contains all of our experiences as a kind of Soul of time and space, 
the Supreme Being, and He is an objectively real, self-existent, 
existential, personal being.

(Co-creating your own reality)

When you get down to the human level, your own personal life; when We say 
you are co-creating your own reality along with God’s creation itself, We 
mean everything you are aware of, including all these other folks about you, 
you experience both “out there” and “in here.”  Yet I sense you are, still 
after many lessons, wondering about this phenomena of projection, what it 
means.

For your vision, think of yourselves somewhat like a movie projector.  
Imagine light going out of your eyes and illuminating your world for, in a 
way, this is what your mind is doing.  When you recognize something, when 
you re-know it, when you know it again, the process is so fantastically fine 
and instantaneous you can go days, weeks, months and never be aware of it 
consciously, until you run into something new and you feel a sensation as 
your mind opens and reaches out to take it in.  It takes a moment to 
recognize—that’s the sensation--when you are seeing something for the first 
time.  This is why you love to travel and see new places, new people.

We gave the example once of not being, shall we say, an electronics 
engineer, but running into a fantastically detailed schematic of some 
computer hardware.  I could give a thousand examples: seeing a foreign 
language and realizing these are objective ink symbols on a piece of paper, 
but obviously you are not able to see them as someone who is familiar with 
them.

Think of the hundreds, even thousands of hours of training it takes to 
perceive certain facets of reality.  You have a saying that one of the 
hardest tasks of your sports is to hit a fastball off a major league 
pitcher, where the batter has only the thinnest fraction of a second to 
respond adequately to a particular pitch coming in at over ninety miles an 
hour.  Think of the hundreds of hours of batting practice this takes, and 
realize some novice cannot even see that little fleeting aspect of 
reality--though it is there.  On the other extreme of duration, in sports, 
think of a race care driver who has to stay on the precarious edge of his 
abilities for hours, more or less continuously.  This too takes years to 
work up to the upper ranks of power and risk.

Think of two persons listening to an orchestra playing classical music and 
realize how someone thoroughly versed in this music for years is actually 
hearing something entirely different from the person sitting next to him who 
is a total novice from another culture.  Yet you all experience this reality 
as if it is “out there”--however well or little trained you are “in here.”  
You experience the orchestra playing, period.

Now I ask you to extend this principle to all your perceptions, 
even—especially, internally.  Consider too how your experiential reality 
fluctuates with the quality of your attention, and the amount of energy you 
have to devote to it.  Does this give you a better idea of what We mean when 
We say you are a co-creator of your own experiential reality? (Yes) There is 
no limit to it.  This is the incessant and necessary activity of your mind, 
the very process of recognition.

You can see how social and political problems throughout the history of your 
race have been wrapped up in the ignorance of this phenomena.  How can 
individuals take responsibility for their own co-creations when they are not 
even aware of them?  I think you can see how this has led to some very 
serious impasses, from the beginning tribal stages on.

Yet there is a way of being open to another individual.  There is a kind of 
open-mindedness in being aware of this principle, for its implications can 
lead to a way of peace.  One corollary would be in realizing that people 
are, to a large degree, both what you make of them “in here,” and what you 
give them the freedom to be “out there,” for you.  And so We’ve given you 
lessons on how to welcome an increase in your perceptions of others’ 
individuality, by being spiritually grounded within yourself, so sure of 
your own completeness moment to moment, you can lower the defensive postures 
that your culture inculcates in you as you grow up.

(Escaping the prison of subjectivity)

This is just another way in which cultures mature, and civilization 
progresses: when individuals become so spiritually secure within themselves 
they welcome, they invite an ever greater range of freedom, delighting to 
see it, encouraging others to express themselves.  This is how you escape 
the prison of subjectivity.  By not identifying with any particular group 
viewpoint, you can seek out and welcome any number of others, and actually 
feel them adding to your soul, helping you grow.

You will, of course, from time to time, be overwhelmed.   But then you just 
pop up again, a little wiser.  (students chuckle)  Indeed, My children, just 
learning to follow along with Mother Spirit and I these Monday evening 
get-togethers, you are exercising your faith, extending your trust, 
suspending yourself in an act of self-forgetfulness to experience that which 
you cannot anticipate.  And that’s the knack of it; that’s the fun of it.  
This is the discovery of what’s possible when you feel spiritually complete 
within yourself, when you enjoy so thoroughly all presence’s, and the 
presence of your eternal companion—your Father-fragment.

You relax your own need to twist or make reality conform to any 
pre-judgment--any prejudices, even internally.  Ever so lightly, ever so 
delicately, let others be.   You will begin to perceive, then, a truly brave 
new world, and it’s its own reward. This is the growth of your spirit.  
You’ll know it well as an actual experience when the value of this living 
reality, these other folks about you, continue to grow in your sight, in 
your hearing, in your heart.

It is an adventure without parallel, and your own creative abilities put you 
inextricably right in the middle of it.  God’s will, Reality with a capital 
R, if you will, is something you will need to discover for the rest of 
eternity, for there is no bottom to it within or without.  We bid you 
welcome, My children.  We know you are going to like what you find.

If you have any questions this evening, let’s see what they are.

Student:  Thank You, Father Michael, once more.  I was wondering if there is 
any way to help my children not make the same mistakes I made?  There seems 
to be a generational pattern in my life, and in my children’s lives.  In my 
life, and my father and mother--biological father and mother that is, I see 
them having a lot of pain in their lives because of the, I guess, what was 
programmed in their minds when they were children.  Is there any way to 
un-program them, or is there any way to make it easier on them?  Or should I 
leave them alone and let them make their own mistakes?

(Dealing with family patterns/traditions)

MICHAEL:  My son, I commend your perception of how certain patterns of 
behavior do extend through generations, for these are family traditions in 
the broadest and most finely detailed sense.  It points at all those years 
and years of infancy and childhood and young adolescence during which the 
children directly imbibe reality by way of their parents.  I talked this 
evening about how you interpret reality, and this is where you learned how 
to do this.  Think of all those thousands and thousands of hours children 
spend with their parents, or even a single parent, simply learning how to 
cope--or not.

So take this principle we talked about this evening, how you necessarily 
experience reality in a co-creative act along with—whatever--that objective 
thing or person is.  I think you can see now if parents were aware of this 
principle of taking responsibility for how they are interpreting reality, 
simply by being open to a lot of different ways of looking at things, this 
self-honesty would enable them to share with their children a whole range of 
viewpoints and ways of interpretation.  It’s contra-distinct from presenting 
to the children an overly simplistic pretence of objectivity for, however 
consciously or unconsciously, they are telling their children: this is the 
way things are, implying this is the only way they are.  Can you see these 
two different ways of parenting?

Student:  Yes.

MICHAEL:  To My mind this is the greatest act of generosity a parent can 
give to a child, this kind of self-honesty.  The child gets not only some 
notion of the limits of the parents’ understanding, but is being given a 
living example of humility, of being aware there is so much more, as your 
Shakespeare put it, than was dreamt of in your philosophy—yes!  (students 
chuckle)

This is why genuine humility is such a blessing.  It’s not being humiliated 
and made to feel small, it’s thrilling to that much larger, even enormous 
perception of God’s creativity, of the unfathomable individuality of your 
fellows and their experience—their souls, of the bottomless mystery in all 
the forms of life around you.  Does this seem like a generous gift to give a 
child?

Student:  Yes, it does.  It would improve the child’s life, as well as the 
human race.  It would be progressive in the sense that the child could learn 
to pass it on to their children, and the children’s children pass it on.

(Self-honesty and humility)

MICHAEL:  Exactly.  And also this humility, this self-awareness, and then, 
if you will, the open confession to the child that you do not know 
everything there is to know, encourages each new generation to very 
consciously  reexamine what it is being handed, rather than having to go 
through a stage of indifference, and often throwing out the baby with the 
bath water—the good with the bad—in getting some distance--some objectivity, 
apart from the previous generation.  This is how all your bad karma is 
allowed to simply fall away, and not be passed on.  As Mother mentioned last 
week, to accept all the bad karma handed to you and treat it with humor, let 
it die with a smile, and not pass it on: what a spiritual generosity this 
is.  (Yes)

The opposite of this are those cases where you have children who were 
brutally mistreated as children, in turn molest their own children.  People 
who were brutalized in turn pass on a cynical attitude to their children, 
and they become brutal as well.  That’s the problem facing the human race: 
how do you put an end to this sort of thing?  So We suggest a spiritual 
generosity, what you might call a radical self-honesty, within and without.  
Welcome, encourage others to make up their own minds, feel for and follow 
their own hearts, find My peace in their own spirit.  Does this at least 
help answer your question, My son?

Student:  It does; yes Father, it does.  It gives me a glimpse of a new way 
of doing things, as opposed to just passing them along, and worrying about 
it.  Thank You.

MICHAEL:  You’re welcome.  With respect to your own children, just be as 
ruggedly honest with them as you can.  (Yes)  And be in My peace.

Student:  Michael, that was a beautiful answer to that question.  I thought 
I’d ask some follow-up about subjectivity.  One thing that really stood out 
in what You said was that we’re in a prison of subjectivity.  And so we 
begin to realize we’re co-creating our reality.  We learn to take many 
viewpoints on a given experience, and, I guess, our whole life.  We will 
never emerge from this subjective prison where we don’t even realize it’s 
our own decisions which are determining what we’re seeing.  I guess my 
question is, once we take many different viewpoints on something, then we 
have a new kind of subjectivity in that there are now many multiple 
interpretations we have to contend with.  So help me sort that out.  Is…am I 
on the right track, or how am I…what am I missing here?

(As you understand something, it changes)

MICHAEL:  No, My son, you’re right on track.  What I’m suggesting is that as 
you comprehend, as you deeply understand many different ways of looking at 
something, that something itself changes.  (Ah!)  You’re becoming more 
objective.  You are seeing with a greater depth and detail—specificity--what 
you perceive.  For as you understand yourself, and can relax more and more 
the various concerns pulling at you, you realize you are changing when your 
world changes.

You can accept philosophically there is...or take it from Me: there is a 
world out there.  (much laughter; Michael joins in)  There is a gigantic 
creation coming down, as Mother Spirit said, like a driving rain.  But it is 
capable of modulation, as you yourself grow and mature.  Think of your 
reality not so much as a prison of rigid steel bars.  It is much more subtle 
than that.  Some bars are more like putty.  But which ones?   For their very 
subtlety and all-pervasiveness, these bars are much harder to credit, even 
to detect at times.  For human beings pure objectivity is a philosophical 
concept, a good orientation, highly relative, something you will never 
acquire entirely; but also you will be moving that way and acquiring more 
and more of it—forever.

You have your marvelous concept of feedback.  (Yes)  You push a little here, 
and “it” pushes back.  To welcome that: think of what a much more wonderful 
world there will be politically when all the freely-elected leaders 
thoroughly enjoy, even thrive on being ever more sensitive to what all the 
others want, and need.  This is the whole principle of free elections, but 
it is also something you can enjoy immensely right in your own day to day 
life, by letting those around you feel comfortable in your presence.  
Welcome their individuality so they feel free to express it.   Do you have 
any further questions along this line?

Student:  Yeah—I do.  I could go on all night, but…  I should think that the 
upper limit of this ability to see multiple viewpoints is, must be the 
Divine Mind.  I mean—Your mind, in the sense of, well…You as a Master Son, 
sovereign of Nebadon, see all possible viewpoints on any given situation.  
That’s where we’re going—going to perfection in our sphere.  So I think if 
you multiplied all the viewpoints infinitely, then you’d truly get out of 
the conundrum of subjectivity, of the limits of subjectivity—the limits of 
the finite mind.  I’m getting lost…  I’ll stop there, and wonder if You have 
any comments?

(Only God knows all viewpoints)

MICHAEL (with great humor):  Well, My son, I’m highly flattered 
but…(students break out laughing…) you must remember I’m still learning.  
(more laughter, then: OK!)  The ultimate—as you put it—is only One Being.  
Only God, in a sense, is everything, and of everything, and in everything.  
We all move and have our life, our being in Him.  God is ultimately 
responsible for everything—in Total, for only He is able to respond fully to 
His complete creation.  This approaches that paradox where Total 
Reality—with a capital R—is truly one, and yet…and yet…infinitely diverse—as 
a matter of His will.

While I’m very flattered…(students break up again…) keep in mind I am also 
an experiential being.  I truly had to become the person you know as Jesus, 
to experience, and know directly, what it is to be a human--in spite of the 
fact that I share with Mother Spirit the worldly experiences of endless 
trillions upon trillions of human-type beings across all the hundreds of 
billions of years We’ve been out here.  (Wow)  Being Jesus was no dress 
rehearsal…(students break up again…), no shadow-play or play-acting.

In a way it is hard for you to comprehend how I could be a human being, but 
I was.  And it changed Me.  It was My graduation piece, if you will.  I 
truly gained something there in the waters of the Jordan when I felt My 
Father Fragment leave Me and then return with My Father’s message.  It was 
something I had not anticipated: and all the more glorious for that very 
reason.  This is why I had to go off for a while, and think things through, 
and come to some decisions about what to do next.  Because I truly didn’t 
know.  This was where I too had My human understanding of humility 
fantastically augmented, when, in a manner of speaking, the heavens opened 
up and My now Personalized Thought Adjuster presented to Me, then, the 
vision of who I had been, and what I was becoming.

(God’s greatest gift—we earn our souls)

So you see, My son, this is God’s greatest gift—that we truly earn our 
souls.  Though it may seem hard, at times, this is the meaning of meaning 
itself.  This is the proof, if you will, of our freedom.  But I must 
confess, I could go on forever too.  (more laughter)  Be in My peace.  
(another very long pause…)

Student:  Hmmm…whew!  Yes, Michael.  I keep on coming back--as You were 
speaking, addressing the question--to that image I had a few months ago, 
(Ed: the student had a long private session with Michael) I related to You 
about the layers of the onion skin of our subjectivity--our points of view, 
and habits, and patterns, in how we see the world.  As we peel the onion 
skin back—that I am this, I am that—I am a man; I’m a human, I’m Jewish, I’m 
a Republican—whatever it is that slants my viewpoint—I’m actually Green—that 
slants my viewpoint of how I see the world: after we peel all those layers 
back we come to the final layer, and we throw that away; then we ultimately 
get to—as You expressed—God’s viewpoint.  And that is God’s reality.

I was thinking as You mentioned co-creators, and we create our own reality; 
if God is the only reality, then it is only our understanding of this 
reality, that either enhances, and promotes, and lives out, or distorts 
God’s reality—His viewpoint.  So I find that, for lack of better words, 
totally awesome—to feel that, and to see that.

Because I didn’t have any questions initially, but when You were talking 
about the First Source, I thought to myself, how…what did God conceive 
of—first?  What could He conceive of, outside Himself?  What was His 
intention—to create?  Because all He had was Himself.  That means everything 
here is Himself—His viewpoint, His principles, His life, His absoluteness…  
(heavy sigh)

MICHAEL:  My son, this is why the Urantia book sometimes has to resort to 
pure poetry and speak of the One Being “escaping the fetters of absoluteness 
and infinity” by conceiving/creating finiteness.  It’s hard to express the 
true nature of God’s transcendent reality in the time-and-space terminology 
of your current English language.  There’s a lot of concepts you have yet to 
encounter, and this is also a wonderfully endless progression that will 
occupy you forever—confronting the enormity of the creation.

(Who you are essentially)

When you peel away all the particular attributes you might describe as your 
self, it seems you end up with nothing, for the personality—your ultimate 
reality—this unique being created by God—is not directly perceptible to 
himself or herself.  In Oriental philosophy they speak of the “eye that 
sees, but cannot see itself.”  This personality, We say, is changeless.  
Nothing you have ever perceived or experienced is purely of this realm.

The experiences of your personality, that your personality was created to 
enjoy, are captured by a pure, pre-personal presence of God himself.  And so 
your soul—no pun intended, but the sole possession of your personality--is 
not strictly in time and space either.  It’s a Morontia reality.  So when 
you peel away all those layers of what you are superficially, there is still 
something there--though various human philosophies have denied this 
even—claiming there is no real individualization.  They feel that all 
reality is some amorphous kind of God’s body where any individualization is 
only an illusion.  But We are saying no, you are the objective reality of a 
God-created personality, evolving in co-authorship with Him a potentially 
immortal soul.

You are individual creations of God within time and space.  You are a 
creature.  You were created.  You do have a beginning as an event related to 
time and space, though you yourself are not—ultimately—conditioned by or 
within those dimensions.  And that’s about as complicated…(Michael breaks up 
this time, and everyone joins in the laughter)) or let Me say, as 
uncomplicated as I can put it in your language.  Any time you try to express 
transcendental realities within a time/space conditioned language—such as 
these words are—paradoxes proliferate.  Rest assured, My son, you are!  And 
you are complete at each moment of time, as is God.  And yet, like your 
Father, you too are capable of infinitely growing—without end.  That is your 
true prospect.

Student:  So I will always be aware of myself—aware of who I am.

MICHAEL:  Only to the degree you are capable of learning how to do that.  
That too is another thing you have to earn, for as I’m sure you are aware 
of, you are not always fully conscious, or continuously conscious, of 
yourself.  This fluctuates both in quantity, and quality, as you go through 
your days.  But yes, you are capable of growing this ability too.

Student:  I love what You said, and Mother said, many times, that there is 
only one me, or one (Name), or one (Another Name).  There never has been one 
before, and there will never be one after.  This is it—for us: our lives, 
our responsibility, our uniqueness in God’s reality.  We’re our own unique 
expression of God’s reality.  We have our own distinct favor, and way of 
living.  Hmmm..

MICHAEL:  Exactly.

Student:  One small little thing: I wish—I was thinking about this today—I 
kind-of wish I was back in time to when You were on this planet, to see 
things first hand, without having  everything all kind-of distorted or 
changed over the centuries.

MICHAEL:  Well, My son, you are truly blessed with having the Urantia book’s 
version of My life, which is by far the most complete and comprehensive 
story of My life ever put on paper.  And it awaited—until it happened!  It 
could not have come out before it did--as complete as it is, for the 
concepts used are predicated on the three other parts of the Urantia book 
which proceed it.

You have that wonderful saying that all the past is but prologue.  And of 
course, My son, I am on the earth, right now, right here.  (I knew you were 
going to say that. {much laughter})  So you can anticipate Me—somewhat.  
(Thank You)  You’re welcome, My son.  You pay me a wonderful compliment when 
you try to anticipate…(much laughter…) what I’m going to say.  This gives Me 
great joy.  Every Father truly loves when his sons are creative, and 
self-consciously so—such a delight.  It’s part of taking that first step in 
being responsible for what you are creating, is it not?

And so, My children, your delight is Mine.  I treasure your struggles, your 
reaching to form your own philosophy of life—reaching out to comprehend all 
you can.  For only by doing so can you gain the self-confidence that comes 
from  real experience.  You can feel your subjectivity getting one tiny step 
more objective.  Reality has spoken back to you, and given you another clue. 
  Mother Spirit and I delight in teasing you to take that next step, 
sometimes by talking just an inch over your heads.  We delight so when you 
recognize it and appreciate it.

(Happy just to be still, and alive)

Then let it all go.   Just let it all come to a crashing halt, and sit here 
happy in the wreckage of all your plans and concerns, happy just to be 
still, once again, and alive—one more day.  Here’s where you’ll find My 
peace.  Good evening.


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