[tmtranscripts] Michael 4.2.07

[JERRY LANE]

Michael—April 2, 2007

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

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

(Commitment and detachment)
(Continuity and uniqueness in time)
(The time-units of maturity)
(Planetary progress is still individual)
(The pseudo-wisdom of procrastination)
(The Supreme Being)
(The courage to feel)
(Temporal flowers)
(Come join us)

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    Although you have informed us that your 
order of beings, so at one within yourselves and with God’s universal will, 
do not require the human virtue of patience, still we thank you for bearing 
with us--with your love for us and your faith in us.  Help us, as we read 
your words, realize the purpose of spirit is to help us grow the value, the 
understanding and the appreciation, with which we hold God’s gift of life.  
Amen.

MICHAEL:  Good evening, my dear children, this is Michael.  Mother Spirit 
and I thank you for the courage with which you take our words to heart, and 
then try our suggestions in your life.  You come to discover this is the 
only way if you wish know the validity of what we offer, the only way you 
can truly make these truths your own.  And so we call this an adventure, 
stepping off into the as yet untried and making another possibility, another 
potential real.  This is your most profound spiritual activity for this is 
how you confirm for yourselves the reality of spirit: you use it.  You 
discover how it serves you well.

(Commitment and detachment)

Tonight I would like to build upon the groundwork that Mother and I have 
already established in our last few lessons and consider further the concept 
of attitude, which is your willingness and your ability to relate, both with 
yourself and with the world around you.  What we’ve offered so far might 
seem a direct contradiction.  One the one hand we’ve talked about a total 
commitment to an event, to your work or your play, in which you can 
experience a wonderful effortlessness.  On the other hand we’ve suggested 
keeping a kind of detachment from your inner and outer activities.

If you’ve grown beyond worrying about your own feelings of effort, which so 
often masks or gets in the way of the event itself, now, through much 
experience, you’ve learned to forget yourself and commit to the moment.  If 
you’re climbing a hill, you don’t try to escape the feeling in your legs; 
your mind and your spirit don’t abandon your body.  You put yourself right 
down in those muscles and feel the weight of your body as you lift yourself, 
step after step, up the hill.  If you are confronting some extraordinarily 
complicated problem involving hours of reasoning and working something out, 
you don’t separate yourself from this mental task either.  You step off and 
take it moment by moment.  So it is with spirit.  When you feel the value 
draining out of some activity, you don’t let the worry and the fearful doubt 
overwhelm you, but you exercise your faith.  You continue in a loving 
attitude.  You have faith in your own devotion and willingness to trust in 
your ability to grow.  Your faith will be rewarded as it has been so many 
times already.

All these examples, my children, are ways in which you accept the profound 
reality of being an experiential being.  Over and over again in your 
stillness, in opening yourself to God’s will, you rededicate yourself to 
opening to yet more experience.  Even after I had become aware of myself as 
Michael, still, as Jesus, as a human being, over and over again I had to 
open myself and inquire with my whole heart and soul, what was my Father’s 
will today, this evening, right now?  How could I possibly experience more 
when I was already so full and at times weary with the mission?  How could I 
not get discouraged when so much of what I wanted to say, and can now 
express to you, there were at that time no concepts to match.  Think of all 
the ways in which you yourselves have become full to overflowing with 
experience, when you needed to take some kind of break, when you could take 
on no more.

But because your culture does not have any universally known techniques of 
meditation or stillness, you gladly accepted those methods that were 
offered.  These might be several hours of mind-numbing television, or 
various drugs that were, ironically, initially intended as stimulants, but 
once a habitual routine was established in their use, became the same old 
thing as last night, and last week, and last month--sometimes on and on for 
years.  These are all ways of avoiding experience.

Can you see from the point of view of spirit why this other lesson we 
offered is not the contradiction it seems?  For right along with this 
commitment to more experience, we’ve also suggested detachment, a kind of 
mental and spiritual remove from what you are involved in.  So how can this 
be?  How can you be committed on the one hand and yet detached on the other? 
  Let me show you how they are one in spirit, how cultivating a state of 
wonder, of detachment is actually a more thoroughgoing commitment to 
whatever is happening.

(Continuity and uniqueness in time)

Here we revisit the fact that the present moment consists not only of a 
continuing reality, but something new that has never happened before--simply 
because our Father has set up reality this way with his continuous creation. 
  If this is true, if this task--shall we say some job you are doing, seems 
repetitious--you’re seemingly doing the same thing for the one hundredth, or 
even the one thousandth time--it is only through your detachment, your 
curiosity, your wonder--What am I doing here?—that you notice this onion you 
are slicing is not quite like any other one.  This road you are driving on 
for the thousandth time at about the same hour every morning is still not 
the same each time.

With this detachment of noticing how God’s reality is constantly changing 
and new, you are actually getting closer to forgetting yourself, to being 
filled with this greater dimension of reality.  As Mother mentioned, by 
questioning and wondering about your own abilities, truly just for the fun 
of it--How else can I do this work, or, How could I play in some different 
way?--you open the door for increasing your abilities.  You lose your fear 
of trying something different, and so you can grow, you can get better at 
whatever it is.  This too is a deeper commitment.

So is thinking of yourself as a little glowing sun of radiant spiritual 
energy, exercising, using your own spiritual power of creativity, becoming 
more God-like in initiating something that has never been before.  Having 
this feeling inside, of curiosity and wonder, gives you a deeper respect for 
God’s creativity and his gift of life itself.

This is a profound focus right on the cusp where you and what you are doing 
are one: you are not elsewhere or other-when.  However paradoxical it might 
seem, this is the effortlessness of being one with the effort itself, and 
more deeply feeling towards the work or the play.  This is the spiritual 
triumph of accomplishment, now.  It relegates the past to its proper place 
as the past, and all this you can know right in the midst of the event 
itself.  This is where, eventually, ultimately, you experience a tough 
oneness connecting both your stillness and your most frantic activities.

For here’s where you touch upon and begin to feel that steel cable of your 
soul tying everything together.  It’s where your soul--the spiritual 
summation of your life--begins to take on an active role.  This is why we 
call it accomplishing here-and-now, because to live this way is an 
accomplishment.  It is that doing, that ability to accept even more 
experience, that fulfills your relationship to the Supreme Being, even as 
your love, and prayer, and worship, directly relates you to God the Father.  
God the Father and the Supreme Being are one in spirit.  So can your doing, 
your accepting this necessity for experience, be your most sincere 
expression of love for God and his wisdom.

So enjoy your curiosity, my children.  What a transforming power it is, this 
ability to wonder.  We’ve teased you with the notion this hunger to be more 
like the Father in creating and initiating, this is not given you merely to 
torment or plague you, but to show you the way home.

If you have any comments or questions this evening, bring them forth.

Student:  Hi, Michael.  Thank you very much for your topic.  I really hear a 
lot of fun in the statement, commitment to now.  That really rang a bell 
with me.  I think of being lost and detached in an art because I’m beginning 
to experience what you talked about, loosing myself so much in that moment 
of creating something.  I love stained glass so I think my really fun times 
are just sitting there and kind-of losing myself in music, and creating 
something.  I’m really understanding that commitment to now.

The other thing you talked about, detachment, is one thing I think about 
maturing, and growing, and understanding.  I can have innate love and 
compassion, absolute mothering- and caring-energy for people, all people, 
and pull the reactive emotion out of it.  There was a neighbor who used to 
really get under my skin, and would make me angry.  I see myself now pulling 
the emotion out of that, and I’m not rattled like I used to get.  I can look 
at that person as an equal, and I think that is because I’ve been learning 
detachment to all that unnecessary emotion.  I’m just kind-of growing my 
commitment to now, and joy, and detachment from guilt.  It’s really been a 
good time to be learning.  It’s really all I wanted to say.  I don’t have a 
question, I just wanted to say, Thank you.

MICHAEL:  Thank you, my daughter, for proving my point, that this detachment 
can actually deepen your commitment to someone or some thing.  It can 
heighten your perceptions.

Student:  I used to be such a reactive type, such a hothead.  As I get older 
I’m really appreciating the beauty of how, like you said, God set up reality 
to be every moment is new, and the now-ness is always new.  That in itself 
is so exciting, I never experience boredom anymore, in my life, ever.  I 
know that I get this now.  My joy has been growing, expanding.  I’m OK.  I 
don’t stop myself and start to worry, Oh, I’m having too much fun now.  So I 
find that balance now of paying the bills, and everything--taking care of 
money, but I’m also experiencing a great now.

(The time-units of maturity)

MICHAEL:  Your Urantia book has a wonderful notion of how the time-units of 
maturity are more expansive than those of youth and immaturity.  You realize 
more and more of the past and the future contained in the present.  And so 
we call this living in the here-and-now with the past, rather than away from 
it in denial, and with the future with ever more useful foresight.  This is 
a genuine accomplishment.  And I might add, it is, as are these other human 
dimensions you are discovering, infinitely expansible.  It is something you 
can treasure more and more as it grows more and more.  This gives you a 
feeling of the dimensions you will continue to encounter, hopefully, 
forever—if you so choose.  So congratulations are in order, and I know you 
are already reaping the rewards.  Your now is becoming self-sustaining, 
self-fulfilling.  Your ability to beam out your love, to radiate it all 
about, is increasing as well.  So enjoy my peace you’ve found, my daughter.

Student:  Thank you.

Student:  Good evening, Michael.  It is such a pleasure to speak with you 
this way.  I’m thinking about what you talked about tonight, about fully 
living each moment.  I find a great help in doing this when I bring the 
Father into each moment, bring spirit into each moment.  I commune with the 
Father as I’m doing things, as I’m experiencing life in each moment.  It 
seems to keep me right there and helps me experience it more than I would 
normally.  And so I  find this to be a great assistance, whether it be the 
Father within, whether it be you or Mother Nebadonia, or any of the teachers 
who are so available to us now.  I just wanted to add this to what you were 
saying tonight.

MICHAEL:  Thank you, my son.  This is where Mother Spirit last week 
delighted in seeing you like those suns out there in space which are 
fortunate to be on the great streams of power, and shine not only with their 
own internal fires--just as you have your own personal spirit--but can also 
enjoy an enormous influx of energy—in your case, your ability now to feel 
these spiritual sources of love and good cheer.  You just expressed the 
inner experience of what we mean by a state of wonder, this feeling of your 
whole spiritual presence and family that actually helps you connect with an 
event, especially with the other people you meet.  You are feeling the 
spiritual triumph of genuine accomplishment.

Student:  Thank you, Michael.  I would like to share my concerns with you 
this evening, my concerns for this planet.  It seems the more I learn—I just 
read “Government On A Neighboring Planet” (Ed: in the Urantia book) and how 
they made incredible advances in a short period of time; and I see how far 
distant we are from that on this planet.  Then when I read the transcripts 
from Monjoronson about the fact that we aren’t quite ready for his full 
mission—what we need to do before this can happen…

I know you have said that when you request something from the Father, and it 
is also his will, it will be.  I know you have requested that this planet 
move into the early stages of light and life, and so I know it will be.  Yet 
my concern seems to be growing more and more—the difficulty in turning 
around the events that have taken this planet down.  And so I would like 
some encouraging words from you to give me hope once again.

(Planetary progress is still individual)

MICHAEL:  Yes; it might be of help to see and acknowledge deep within 
yourself the human race from our point of view of spirit, and the respect we 
intrinsically have for everyone’s free will.  This is hard, we know, for the 
very term or concept—human race—is such an abstraction.  Even in a small 
tribe or community of a few dozen people who know each other by sight, no 
single individual can begin to comprehend all those other lives, let alone 
the billions on earth.  But for we who are able to encompass not only the 
planet’s humanity but each individual—individually, this is the reality we 
see: each individual’s free will, both as an unlimited potential and then in 
the smaller specific amount each one has so far achieved.

This is what is at play here.  This is the great evolution of spiritual 
value--each individual growing their freedom by aligning their will with 
God’s; in other words, their acquirement of genuine character.  And in this 
we see enormous acceleration in recent times due to all the factors we’ve 
already talked about so many times.  Here is where you must keep in mind, my 
son, the true historical perspective.  This is one of the main purposes of 
the Urantia book, to give you the history of your planet from a spiritual 
point of view, to explain why things are as they are.

If you wish to think of it another way, think of the task before each one of 
you as a growth in experience, a growth in meaning.  In this context we’ve 
talked about how the ongoing conflicts, or, if you’re concerned about global 
warming because of the developing economic/industrial structures: how both 
give meaning to peoples’ lives.  So reflect on how Mother Spirit and I, in 
addressing you all, and how I as Jesus had to address my contemporaries, we 
are ever offering a greater meaning to augment that which was or is already 
known.  For even warfare and conflict give meaning to peoples’ lives.

For you personally, my son, what I spoke of this evening, of how to find 
ways to take on even more experience, day after day, partly by being aware 
of all the ways in which you may be avoiding new experience; this is what 
the whole planet is involved in.  This is the measure of progress.  This is 
why light and life status can only come about when most individuals 
accomplish this, for that is the only meaning of an Era of Light and Life as 
it applies to a particular world.

You know from your study how unique a history Urantia has, why it is as it 
is.  Now I hope I’ve helped you see how true progress is being measured on 
the planet, and how more and more individuals, in every country and culture, 
are having impressed upon them the need to take a greater, creative 
responsibility for their own lives.  Does this help?

Student:  Yes, Michael, yes.  It does help.  Thank you for being patient.

MICHAEL:  Well, again, my son, it doesn’t require patience, just love.  As 
we have said before, so much of the terrible things that folks are doing to 
each other is mostly from fear and immaturity, the cultural conditioning in 
every country of the world of unquestioned, inherited assumptions--a lack of 
wonder and curiosity--fundamentalism and blind belief all too devoid of 
detachment and creative reflection.  But there are real and genuine means at 
hand now, and increasing, that have never been here before.  There has 
always been a world soul on a spiritual level, but now there is a technology 
of planetary communication bringing about a meeting of heretofore isolated 
cultures—by pressure--by this growing-smaller world, in that sense—as never 
before.

(The pseudo-wisdom of procrastination)

Also, as we’ve taught, everyone lives day to day within an economic 
framework, and there is a short-sighted, provisional pseudo-wisdom in not 
doing something until you have to--as you’ve all known.  (Michael chuckled a 
bit at this)  So the world is necessarily becoming more unified through 
pressure as well.  The best way out from that, as our last few lessons have 
taught, is by willingly, joyfully, taking the initiative, choosing to create 
something new.  And it is happening.  So rest in my peace, my son.  I thank 
you for your genuine concern.

Student:  Hello, Michael.  I wanted to ask you to amplify about how it is, 
again, that you were saying, the Father and the Supreme Being are one, in a 
certain sense.  I think you said that it’s analogous to us being one with 
our experiences, or one with an acceptance of the necessity for experience?  
Then I think you equated that with expanding love?  It was all beautiful, 
and I may have gotten some of the terms wrong, but if you could amplify any 
part of that, I would enjoy it greatly.

(The Supreme Being)

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son, the human race in its approach to understanding our 
Father often was torn by an either/or type of reasoning that God had to be 
either this way or that—mostly anthropomorphic projections of certain human 
limitations; or going to the other extreme and seeing God as some thing so 
absolute and total that nothing whatsoever could be said about his—or 
its—nature: any attempt to understand and express the nature of God, or 
Reality, was some kind of terrible hubris to be avoided.

We’ve said that God, or Primal Creator Personality, when approached with 
your language and current level of understanding, does manifest absolute and 
infinite selfhood to his creatures in ways that can only be even partially 
expressed sequentially—in a linear fashion across time as I’m doing right 
now—and as several separate Persons.  So we have God the Father, God the 
Eternal Son, God the Infinite Spirit, God the Supreme, God the Ultimate, and 
so forth.  As your Urantia book has put it, the face that God shows most 
understandable to his more finite creatures of time and space—yourselves—we 
call the Supreme Being.  This is still God, that part or aspect of God, if 
you will, that is his living and growing summation—his ongoing totaling—of 
all the experiences of all the personal beings out here in time and space 
who have ever been, or continue to be—and no less!

The Supreme Being is the true spiritual story, if you will--God’s over-soul, 
of time and space, to which your own soul is analogous.  It is that 
evolving, experiential Person of God to whom your relationship is one of 
doing, one of action, just as he is acting and creating incessantly.  So you 
yourself, in being part of the personal, spiritual part of creation, you too 
share in this spiritual power to initiate something new in the stream of 
time and space that has never been before.  This is that doing, and it is at 
one with, and yet also distinct within, your connection to God the Father as 
a child to a loving father, irrespective of understanding, or doing.

There is still only one God, and only one unique you.  In accepting what 
sometimes comes across to human beings as a hard necessity—to act, to keep 
experiencing and not, as you say, space out or give up in any number of ways 
of avoiding experience—accepting this necessity as part of God’s love and 
wisdom for you--accepting this and joyfully entering the fray of life’s 
vicissitudes, and creating within your own life: this is your most sincere 
expression of love to the Supreme Being, to that Person of God who loves 
what you add to him.  Does that further explain the relationship?  (much 
laughter)

Student:  It just left me a total puddle on the floor here.  That was great. 
  Thank you so much, Michael.  That was terrific.

MICHAEL:  We recently offered the conceptual aid of thinking of God as this 
single, pure crystal with many facets, but this is very limiting because 
you’d have to think of a living, glowing crystal, creating, manifesting, 
having these different facets; and still--Personal, just as the Second 
Person of Deity is Personality—as--the Eternal Son; or the Infinite Spirit 
is Personality—as—the Universal Mind to the creation; and still, individual 
Persons: both.  Paradise is God’s creation of the absolute pattern for all 
impersonal reality, all this stuff and energy that obeys his absolute and 
infinite laws and intention.

These were stumbling blocks for most of the history of humanity.  They 
wondered how could an absolute and perfect God have any relationship with 
the finite, with dusty, imperfect material things.  They could not yet 
conceive he created the finite, and created it the way it is—if I might 
tease you a bit, again—still quite infinite to humans, both out into 
infinity, and down into the infinitesimal.

As a further note, for most of human history they could not yet conceive how 
he created you with a free will, their own being still so little actualized. 
  And so you had enormous paradoxes arising as to the origin of evil, some 
theologies even positing that of course God had to create evil, since he 
creates everything.

Student (#1 again):  Evil is a choice.  I don’t think any of us would like 
to be told what to think and how to react.  It is amazing when you think 
about, truly, the concept of free will.

MICHAEL:  Which is again another great purpose of the Urantia book to 
explain.  It’s more or less: all of the above--as humans think about it.  Is 
there anything further, my son?

Student:  The result of this realization is that by accepting we are 
experiential beings and expanding inside of that, we are loving…we are—I’m 
lost again about the love—as the result of that?  Or we experience love 
through that?  Or we are loving God for giving us the gift of free-will 
experience?  Could you add just one more coda on that?

MICHAEL:  All of the above.  (much laughter)  All of those, my son.  
Accepting the necessity for effort, for doing, for accomplishment, for more 
experience, and even doing so with joy, and understanding, and appreciation 
for what a hell life would be otherwise: to God this acceptance is an 
expression of love.  It’s a kind of worship, a thankfulness that his wisdom 
is such he could conceive of all this in the first place.  And you can feel 
that love.  It’s partly his, and partly your own: it’s connecting.

Student:  That is the flow, being immersed in your own doing—that love is 
present: love for what you’re doing, love for the moment, love for the whole 
shebang.  Thank you very much, Michael.

Student (#1 again):  It’s like you said, we don’t need patience; we just 
love.

MICHAEL:  By that, my daughter, I was meaning myself.  Patience is still 
quite a good human virtue.  It’s like discipline.  So be in my peace.

Student:  Father Michael, it’s amazing how now can be so good and healthy.  
My mind tells me, and my body tells me, to let go some of the past as I 
become aware of it.  Let the past be back in the past somewhere, and not 
attach any guilt to it.  The freedom that comes from letting go of it…  I 
thought I was free from it, but I’m beginning to see I’m even more free from 
it than I was last week…  And even last  month.  And it’s very good.  I 
don’t understand it all, but it seems each step I take is a step forward and 
not a step backward like it used to be in my life.  I just thank you, and 
Mother, and everybody else involved in my life.  I really appreciate it.

(The courage to feel)

MICHAEL:  You are very welcome, my son.  We do wish to express the enormous 
credit you can give yourself for this courage to feel, because along with 
feeling you may re-experience some of the pain of what you knew as mistakes 
and failures of the past.  But this courage also gives you the ability to 
feel your living presence now, feel the desire of your body to be healthy as 
a kind of natural trend it delights in; feel your mind getting more and more 
clear as you face some of those terrible bugaboos of the past which were 
causing such fear and darkness.  You’re feeling you own intrinsic spiritual 
self-power starting to glow and illuminate.  Just as there are vicious 
circles, so there are also beautiful ones where these become reciprocals of 
each other—your mind and your body kind-of leapfrogging over each other, 
using each other to forge ahead.  So keep feeling for my peace, my son, you 
are well on your way to accomplishing it.

Student:  Yes, Michael.  I really don’t have anything pressing, and the hour 
is getting late.  I was just focussing on the idea of happiness and feeling 
joyful, and how we seem to feel embarrassed when we are happy.  The way the 
world is at this time—how can one be happy?  But I feel that this world 
needs more joy and happiness to uplift it from the darkness of the 
suffering.  So that’s what I’ve been looking at and allowing in my life.

I been understanding that along with happiness comes vulnerability—openness  
to greater self-expression--open to now and what is here.  So…

(Temporal flowers)

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son, very well put.  Laughter and joy can be another 
stretch in terms of accepting more experience, accepting more happiness when 
a cynical attitude tells you it is only going to end sometime, it’s not 
going to last, or it’s not going to change anything.  But to feel the 
intrinsic goodness of happiness, here and now, without any need for it to 
vindicate what happened in the past, or any need to feel happy now to deny 
what is coming in the future.  In other words, no escapism: fulfillment now. 
  It does take nerve to allow yourself to feel this fulfillment and let it 
suffice for now.  Let it be, now.  Let it have its own unique meaning.  So 
what if each happy time is a temporal flower that blossoms and fades; you 
don’t stop planting flowers, or enjoying them.

This is expressed in the Bible as, Sufficient unto the day in the evil 
thereof.  Tomorrow will have its problems.  They’re OK for tomorrow.  You 
don’t let them ruin today.  They are enough for tomorrow: you will take them 
when they come.  But you will be better able to take them on when your 
laughter today heals your tired body, and your stressed-out mind, and your 
worried soul.

But…Ooops!—now I’m giving a purpose to laughter and joy!  That’s there, but 
just enjoy them for what they are.  And be in my peace.

Student:  Thank you.

MICHAEL:  And so!--another now is upon us!  (laughter…)  We’ve never been 
here before. (and more…)

Student:  How are you doing?

MICHAEL:  Oh, I’m glowing—myself.  (and still more…)  Mother Spirit and I 
have enjoyed being suns for--that’s s-u-n-s, as well as s-o-n-s--for quite 
an eternity--in human terms.  Yet too, we’re just getting started.  We’ve 
got another six million or so planets to go.  (now everyone was breaking up, 
including Michael)

Student:  I hope you’re up to the task…

(Come join us)

MICHAEL:  So do we!  We’re growing, constantly growing.  We have our work 
cut out for us.  But we’re doing a lot of the cutting, a lot of the 
initiating, a lot of the creating.  We invite you to join us.  Become in 
your own sphere, your own way, as unlimited as you can stretch to be.  You 
can create your way out of your difficulties and your problems, your daily 
tasks.  You can initiate something with the power of your own souls, your 
own spirits.  This is your seeking for perfection.  This is daring to feel 
that hunger put in you for this purpose.  For this too is another way in 
which, as you try to be more like our Father, and more consciously create 
your own life, this too is another way of finding your way back home to 
him—the point of your origin.

Mother Spirit and I want you to know: you do have not only our love for you, 
you have our faith in you as well.  Be in my peace.


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