[tmtranscripts] Michael 7.21.08

[JERRY LANE]

Michael--July 21, 2008

 

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

 

MICHAEL--T/R-JL

 

(The spirit/energy field of personal beings)

(Discovery and creativity; object and subject))  

(Beaming love and well-wishes) 

(Penetrating your own projections: how you know it's working)

(The spirit/energy field of the planet) 

(Can souls fracture?)   

(Michael's thanks)

(Challenging social situations)

(Challenging family situations)

(The personal dimensions of time)

 

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    Well, we have a whole group here tonight to greet you--and we do.  Welcome aboard.  It is always a good evening indeed when we can carry on these conversations with you.  Thank you for your gentle and sometimes teasing reminders of the nature of the adventure we find ourselves on.  For we, like people all through history, do stumble into error from time to time thinking we have Reality all wrapped up and tied in a neat bow.  Then you, as well as our beloved Urantia book, remind us there is a cosmos-wide evolution taking place and it has both the wonderful aspect of being endless on into infinite eternity, yet at the same time--from a human angle--the daunting aspect of being inexorable.  There is no stopping or containing it all, no wrapping it up, for long, anywhere along the line, personally or collectively.  

 

We thank you for these reminders for they help us understand the fleeting anxieties we get when we realize what a yawning chasm the future can be, not only in our own personal lives, but what it seems the major cultures on our planet are facing as well.  But you also reassure us that God himself is the way forward, is the next positive step to take into the future.  His very existence is the way; He contains it and offers it to us.  And so we give final thanks tonight for your pointing out so often how we can find Him, and the way, right within us.  Amen.

 

MICHAEL:  Good evening, this is Michael.   I would like to pause for a few moments just to feel your energy.  (long pause)  Some of you call this spiritual energy field a Merkaba--what we create together.  You'll notice how it does change ever so subtly with the different members who compose it.  The more finely you can tune in to your own energy field and the field of Mother Spirit and myself, and of our Father all around us, the more precisely you can detect the presence of that other human spirit who's accompanying you.  This is very subtle indeed and not like your science-fiction notions of telepathy; but it is there.  Spirit does speak and relate to spirit directly.  So the more familiar you are with your own, the more you can trust your intuition as to where another person is and, as you put it, where they are coming from.

 

(The spirit/energy field of personal beings)

 

This spirit/energy field does modulate with all the different people and celestial personalities who make it up.  Mother Spirit and I are blessed to feel the energy field of Urantia.  We only wish you could feel it with us.  You could know how, in spite of all the seemingly terrible things happening--especially those things people do to each other--still and all the human radiation of the planet is enormously positive.  It is progressive; it is growing--and often not only in spite of, but because of, the conflict, the disparities, the differences between people.  This is your very first step, my children, into confronting the Other, and we love to tease you with the fact that every other human being you meet is a little walking infinity, is some bottomless uniqueness, just as you are to yourselves.  I heartily agree with your opening prayer tonight that this can be both a source of delight--in meeting other unique beings without end, and also a great challenge to your open-mindedness, your ability to grow and encompass that which is not you.  You have a whole universe in front of you, and you literally have eternity to fill with meeting it.  

 

Let's look at this meeting.  So many of your philosophers have struggled for thousands of years trying to get the perfect balance between the inside of experience and the outside, between the subjective and the objective.  You'll

notice how Mother Spirit and I have gone about it from a slightly different angle.  We've put before you the challenge of determining as you go through life what you yourself are encountering as a discovery, for there really is an objective world surrounding you, a whole universe surrounding you.  Yet because you yourself are an intrinsically creative, spiritual being, you are also encountering your own creativity.  What you experience is this living balance between discovery and invention, basic perception and interpretation, and we can only encourage you to be as conscious as possible of this generally unconscious process.

 

(Discovery and creativity; object and subject))  

 

This is especially true when you encounter another person.  Obviously there is someone there, yet what do you make of them through any number of personal and general/cultural conditionings?  Think of how this divides along the lines of race and ethnicity, sex, age, body type, background and education, language, vocation; all these aspects of being human.  They are all somewhat independent of you--that is the discovery part.  But you never experience them in a purely independent way.  You are more or less conditioned within your own creativity/interpretation of what you make of them.  Indeed, the great personal fallacies that you label racism, or sexism, or ethnic/cultural prejudice, is the very refusal or inability to acknowledge and realize ones own part in what one makes of what one is encountering.  The prejudice appears objectively real--out there, even to the extreme point of denying another's humanity.  Psychologically, projections are so limiting, so detrimental, precisely because they are unconscious and perceived as fact.  

 

This is stating the situation objectively, and from this point of view it is obvious the only way out of the dilemma and all the enormous human suffering it causes and perpetuates is for people to own up to their own projections.  But how does a person do this?  How can you escape your own false objectivity, even if you accept the principle and are willing to break the lockstep of going along with all those who share the prejudice?  Think of the moral and social courage this takes to stand alone within and without.

 

(Beaming love and well-wishes) 

 

One method we have suggested is with an indiscriminate, wholehearted projection of love irrespective of who this person is coming toward you.  Feel the source of energy that is God's spirit of life within you--the potential for wellbeing--the very glory of existence, and just beam this out toward another--totally indiscriminately, without exception.  If you see another person coming toward you?--that's enough.  Discover how beaming love and wellbeing for this person is in itself strengthening, irrespective of the discovery part, irrespective of who they are.  Letting love flow through you strengthens you and makes you strong.  

 

          Still the major benefit from this, apart from the inner strengthening, is the discovery part.  So many of you who have tried this began to notice an emergence of individuality.  This is the right track.  This is how you know it's working.  Every face you encounter begins to bear the full expression of his or her human uniqueness.  As paradoxical as it might seem, your very uniqueness each from any other, is what you all have in common: a deeper reality.  This too is a soulful/spiritual growth within you to, first of all, be able to perceive it, and then to acknowledge it within you.  You have to grow inside to freely admit into yourself all these individuals irrespective of race, age, sex, ethnic grouping--so forth.  The person is no longer some male/female, black/white, European/Asian: it's that particular personality.  There is no other personality like him or her.  Obviously they have all the human characteristics, but these are in perfect balance with the wonderful feeling/realization you can get inside you of their spirit, of their God-created personality.  

 

You might even be able to acknowledge within you, my children, that here comes another human being with a whole lifetime of experience you can't begin to fathom; yet not be daunted by this--that there is so much within each of you, you can never share but with God.  As Mother Spirit said last time, this is the way out, this is the way to recognize and embrace your uniqueness without feeling so terribly lonely, so terribly socially isolated with having so much inexpressible, ineffable inner reality you can never share, even with your loved ones: so much uniqueness of being.  But it's there.  It's there to discover--God's creation of who you are.  Like all the rest of His creation: it's what you make of it and do with it.  That, if you will, is the you part of you.  (group chuckles)  This is the conscious self.  This is the deciding self.

 

So this is the nature of the adventure you find yourselves in, this living meeting of the Other.  This is that never-ending opening with which not only God but you yourselves, my children, will fill eternity.  As we've said before, you can discover and perceive that aspect of reality that is not repeating itself, but each moment is also unique in time and eternity, and can be just as distinct as every person you meet.  

 

We understand there is little more psychically painful than intense boredom, nothing more anxious than getting caught in some reality that seems to drag on and on moment by moment, threatening an eternity of the same thing over and over again.  Your creative nature screams out against such a reality, and you can only, truly pity those individuals so caught up and imprisoned by their inability to recognize and accept the response-ability that is their human potential.  They are drowning in a kind of boring self-absorption like clutching an anchor that is dragging them down.  Ironically, the only escape is love, is the willingness to let go of oneself and just beam your good wishes out there indiscriminately.  No petty trading here of: I'll give so much to get so much back.  Just beam your love out there.  As God's love literally supports the creation, this could be your opportunity to be just a little more like Him.  It takes this initiative; it takes this courage; it takes this willingness and desire to see that uniqueness, that individuality, not only in every personal being, but in every moment too, even when you're alone.  

 

True enough, it can be a little scary at first, a little overwhelming at first.  This is the courage part.  This is the willingness part--to risk taking in another.  Who knows, you might be made a fool of from time to time.  You can cast your pearls of noticing and caring before indifferent swine---as I cautioned my disciples.  But I say the risk is worth it.  It is what I felt called upon to demonstrate myself, once upon a time.  In spite of my trials I now have my human lifetime glowing brightly in my soul.  Just as you will too, my children.  This is how you make the most of your life.  This is how you exercise your God-given potential.  This is how you glory in His creation of a near infinity of personal beings and an eternity of unique moments.  As Mother Spirit said, welcome to our vision of who you are, and what you may choose to become.  We have no fear for you whatsoever.  

 

If you have any questions or comments, bring them on.  This is part of my joy.

 

Student:  Thank you, Michael, for the fantastic lesson.  It's interesting because I've been reading a book about projection and dealing with the so-called shadow of our personality we project onto others whom we don't like or appreciate--racially or ethnically.  We're literally not seeing this other person.  If I understand it right, you're saying that the solution is to beam our love out there, even erring on the side of just doing it.  This book suggested identifying those negative things we have in our shadow part and bringing them out and healing them in order to let them go.  So there's a self-analysis implied in their approach I don't think you're asking for at all.  You're suggesting a total solution of just blasting away your own shadow by loving others--loving their uniqueness.  So do you have any comment on my interpretation of your message?

 

(Penetrating your own projections: how you know it's working)

 

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son, you're very astute in your understanding what I said.  I was addressing primarily--how--you do this.  The self-analysis is, to my mind, a secondary effect, for I began by asking, how do you know what your unconscious projections are?--except that you start by beaming your love--your well-wishes--toward every person you meet.  In the course of a day, in everything from a small town on up to a city, you'll meet dozens upon dozens of different individuals to try this on, and you'll be enabling their individuality to come through your projections.  Then you can begin to notice that in spite of this person being male or female, rich or poor, black or white, fat or thin, young or old, they are of a type you've been excluding or pre-judging all along.  

 

This only stands out by being contra-distinct from this particular individual's personality you can now perceive.  That perception is the basic process that makes the prejudice stand out.  So I consider the beaming of love--without exception--and the perception it allows, to be the primary or initiating event; the analysis is a secondary yet very beneficial self-knowledge.  (Yes--beautiful!)

 

With respect to boredom, it's by noticing the uniqueness within each person and moment that you realize the creation was not just wound up and set in motion once upon a big bang, but is being created by God ever anew, and expanding--both in quantity and quality/experiential soul.  Each moment is singular and will never happen again.  And this perception can be overwhelming and quite scary at first.  But I agree with your analysis and this book you're reading, about the benefit and the power of understanding yourself.  

 

Student:  It's almost like you really can't get to the bottom of self-knowledge unless you're able to project love and see the contrast that will come out in a more accurate way, I guess, against the backdrop of that love.  It seems like a better way to do your shadow-work than to just stop and delve into your own unconscious memories. 

 

MICHAEL:  Yes.  That could be just another never-ending ego trip of self-absorption.  Plus there are powerful reasons within your mental economy of psychic energy why your projections are unconscious and resist being examined directly.  They're being used to prop up a shaky, insecure ego/self image, when the real solution is one of self-forgetfulness: get interested in someone, something else!  This is why I suggest you embrace each person, each moment without exception, rather than continuing concentrating on yourself.  

 

Student:  One other thing.  You started out talking about the spirit-energy field of the whole planet you and Mother Spirit can feel, and that it's a lot healthier than I thought it was.  How is this related to the newly revealed feature of the Planetary Supreme Being we've been hearing about in some of the transmissions?  You know, who is known as Urantia herself.  Is she this field, or is she something else, but maybe inclusive of this?

 

(The spirit/energy field of the planet) 

 

MICHAEL:  It's the latter; she's inclusive of this spiritual field.  She is the living soul of the planet, just as the Supreme Being is the living soul of the whole time/space creation.  From our point of view, being able to see the full personality and soul of all the individuals, as well as the physical and mental and spiritual aspects you perceive, plus the fact it's so rare for an individual not to survive physical death in spite of what you see as their most egregious, even obscene acts of violence; once you see the roots of this behavior in the historical record of the planet--how Urantia went so wildly astray from potentially beneficial spiritual leadership, to the point of these leaders' deliberate attempts to thwart normal divine plans: once you take this into consideration, the spirit of humanity, the soul of humanity is so great, so positive and thrilling, and so humbling when you can feel the enormity of God's creation of personality on just one planet of billions of unique individuals, and all they are experiencing.  

 

As you know, even in the most intense warfare there is so much brotherly love, risk-taking, caring, and sacrifice among the combatants.  Stepping back a few degrees from that, try to realize the amount of cooperation, the amount of sharing and agreement entailed in the most primitive, let alone the most highly developed and interdependent societies--in their people's daily lives.  Even the individual who considers himself or herself to be a greatly self-sufficient and independent person, still has to begrudgingly acknowledge how dependant he or she is on others for so much.  Planetary-wise, it all adds up to such an enormous, overwhelming, positive life-force that, just as your Urantia book states, it is the hallmark of wisdom to get this sense of proportion that you slowly but ultimately grow to have.  But it calls for faith on the part of a human being, to perceive this proportion in ones youth and immaturity.  

 

Student:  So the Supreme of the planet is the summation of all of the souls of all of the individuals who have lived on the planet.  And the soul is the summation of all of the positive experiences of any given person.  So I can imagine what it would be like to sense all of the positive soul-creating energy of the planet.  Must be amazing.

 

MICHAEL:  Yes, it is.  I would only correct that, my son, to include both what you call positive and negative experiences.  I was pointing at a proportion here, an enormous preponderance of the positive.  But both are real.  Suffering, pain, anxiety, uncertainty, these are real.  The individual soul contains everything that was spiritually significant in the personal life.  And so the world soul is the true history of all the experiences of the human race.  

 

Student:  Then that constitutes--for me anyway--a new revelation of what the soul is.  I've always thought of it as the repository of all those moral decisions that brought forth new divine invasions of the mind.  I think you're giving it what I would call a more. soulful definition. (everyone breaks up laughing.)  to include the poignancy of our lives, the things that deepen and make bigger containers of our souls.                  

 

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son.  Your soul is co-authored by the presence of God within you--your Father Fragment.  In this sense your soul is how God sees your life--as a whole, and complete of every spiritually significant event from its beginning to the present.  Yet as we've given in many lessons, your conscious self is also real, and it too is evolving.  What it experiences is no illusion.  The pain, the separation, the fear you experience as an experiential being, these are real and have spiritual significance so often as genuine obstacles you have to overcome as best you can; or, at times, not.  There are those individual who do succumb to the fear and the very real violence which surrounds them.  This is part of their life and their soul, and what they will carry into eternity as true experiences.  

 

So we've given many lessons on the reality of your life as you see yourself.  As your Urantia book points out, this is the you that makes those critical, life-directing decisions.  It is just not the whole you that we, your spiritual parents, see.  To us your soul is far larger beyond your ability, yet and for quite some time to come, to fully encompass.  Your conscious self has a long ways to grow before it can fully appreciate this Father Fragment co-authored part of you.  (much laughter)  This too is a matter of faith, that you have such a soul.  

 

(Can souls fracture?)   

 

Student:  Michael, just one more question if I may--tangential but related.  I have a group of friends who are departing for Poland to go to Auschwitz and Treblinka to do Semitic (Ed: right word?) healing there.  They believe they will be able to gather up the fragments of the souls that were left on these killing fields--that somehow these souls, which met with such violence, fragmented and left behind parts, or even the entire soul, on these  sites.  We have transmissions from one of the Midwayers which clarified that as being somehow real--to my great surprise.  I wonder if you have any comment on this idea of retrieving these soul parts and allowing them to.I don't know what--wherever they go.

 

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son.  There is no human experience in what I just defined as your conscious life that has the ability to fracture the soul--apart from your free will choices.  No one can do this to you.  The soul is truly co-authored by a Fragment of God--the purest and most powerful spirit/essence known in the universe.  The other co-author is your conscious life as determined by your relatively free will bound about by a thousand and one determinisms--conscious and otherwise--physical, mental, and spiritual--personal and collective.  So even "your life" is not only as you see yourself, but as God sees and understands you, as Mother Spirit and I see and understand you.  You are complete to us moment by moment.  You are imperfect insofar as you have the potential for endless growth toward being more perfect, yourself--as God is and always has been.  Still!--every moment you are complete, whether you can yet realize it or not.  

 

The soul cannot be fragmented that way.  Again, as your Urantia book delineates very precisely, upon death your soul reposes in the bosom of your Guardian Angel, and on the first Morontia World meets up with your Father Fragment, once again, to reconstitute you a living, conscious being with memory and awareness of who you've always been.  There is nothing missing in this reconstitution that makes you fully aware of who and what you then are at that moment of regaining consciousness.  The Sleeping Survivors who do not go directly over but await a planetary dispensation/adjudication are also complete; there is nothing missing.  You can trust your soul, no matter what happens here.  I repeat: no matter what happens here, your soul is in the safe-keeping of a Guardian Angel and a pure fragment of God.

 

We salute the efforts of individuals so engaged in these activities because it does stand for a concern and a love, and an acknowledgement of what happened on those terrible mass-killing grounds.  As I just said, those events are part of the planetary soul.  From a human point of view they are truly barely comprehensible--no person can pretend to encompass the suffering that happened there.  So we salute the love that motivates these individuals to try to heal that historical event.  They do help by calling attention to it in the sense of: Least We Forget--like the Holocaust Museum.  

 

Sad to say, that was not the unique instance of such genocide in the history of Urantia; perhaps in scale and time-compression due to modern mechanization; but there have been other enormous events like this where nearly entire peoples were wiped out in relatively short time.  There have been large mounds of human skulls piled up just for the sheer spectacle of it.  This is the world soul of Urantia, my son, its true history; but each individual soul is always in safe-keeping: none was ever lost.  

 

Student:  Thank you, Michael.  Thank you very much. 

 

Student:  Thank you, Michael, for everything you talked about.   When you mentioned boredom, I was laughing because I could remember times when I was, maybe just stopped at a red light and so bored, when all of a sudden I noticed something--like a lady walking her dog--and like a blast of energy, realized the moment would never be repeated.  So it was such joy as I sat there at that red light, wondering: What was it I was thinking!  And it was such a fun thing tonight hearing you talking about times like that, and how we get out of them.  It's also how I get out of times of fear, how I calm my fear with fascination, with noticing reality.  And so I just wanted to kind-of add that--that I deeply appreciate your talking about that.

 

I'll be brief, but I wanted to share something that happened a few weeks ago.  I was coming out of a.a pity-party really, about myself--a little heartache, and I wasn't about to be walked on any more; I was going to stand up for myself.  I was standing in line at the bagel shop when a young lady with a six-month old baby bounced right in ahead of me.  I might have let it go but I was in that horrible state and so I though she was probably some rich little snob and I wasn't going to stand for it.  So I got right in her face and said, "Excuse me!  I was in line here!"  And she was really startled and jumped back away; and I was really proud of myself.  

 

But it took a while to get waited on, and I'm looking at her and the baby.  And Michael, all of a sudden the baby started looking like one of my nephews, and started wiggling his fingers at me, and he was so beautiful, and he just locked his eyes on me.  So I said, "Hello, baby!"  But then the mother--and I was getting over being all steamed up and self-righteous--she said, "Oh!  He can't hear you--he's deaf.  I'm deaf too.  We can't hear you."  And I couldn't even look her in the face, I was so ashamed.  I could only keep wiggling my fingers at the baby, and looking in his eyes.  

 

But Michael, the more I did this, the more I realized I was looking into your face.  I was looking into the purity of creation, that moment.  I just went out to my car and wept, I was so appreciative of my life and everything again because here was this little deaf baby.  Anyway: I cry every time I tell this story, but I wanted to share this with you because I was so humbled right back to beaming my love out at everyone.  All the judgments.  It's so hard not to project my self onto others.  But I know you were there, and I know there was a reason that happened.

 

So thank you, and thank Mother Spirit, for just every time I get down and I remember to beam that love out.  I just thank you for that, very much.

 

(Michael's thanks)

 

MICHAEL:  Well, my daughter, I thank you--for that discovery you made--that you were open to make it.  But I especially thank you for what you made of it.  Be in my peace.  I should say: continue to be in my peace.  (laughing {Yes!--most definitely!})

 

Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I was really moved by what you said about how only God, our father, can take in the whole of a person.  It makes me realize how vast, what a great gift our personalities are--each and every one of us.  How infinite this very personal creation is that we can all partake in.  It's really mind-boggling.  I think I finally understand the difference between being finite and infinite that's explained in the forward of the (Ed: Urantia) book.  So I really appreciate that.  I've never really gotten it until now.

 

On a more personal level, I have this one person in my life that I encounter almost every day, and I've attempted to make friends with her.  But she has a difficult time being open or comfortable with me; actually with everyone.  I once said something trying to make contact--a joke--but she took offence at it.  I tried a really sincere apology, but she wouldn't accept it.  Since that time I've had to struggle with the reality of this person and what goes on inside of her, and what she brings up in me--issues of women and rejection that go clear back to my mother and my family.  I have all this inner dialogue that comes up, and a lot of anger and pride.  It's gotten to the point where I don't know how to deal with her, besides avoiding her.  I'd hoped to find in her some part I could love, and not be taken in by her attitude.  But it really gets me, her excluding people--the kind of female thing she does.  I keep trying to push the love out, but I have to keep making the decision to do so; and not feeling better than her--which I'm not.  So I found your lesson very helpful tonight.

 

Is there anything I should be mindful of, in trying to get the love out?  It keeps wanting to close down, and I just want to retreat, which is what I do.  Michael?

 

(Challenging social situations)

 

MICHAEL:  Yes.  First of all, my daughter, we enjoy boggling your minds.  (much laughter)  Thank you for seeing through our teasing to feel our love.  We do try to impress upon you the creative superiority of spirit as contra-distinct from reactive mind and body.   Spirit may be the most subtle of dimensions to humans, but it is the true origin of the others.

 

Here, my daughter, you are face to face, almost nose to nose, with what I meant by beaming your love indiscriminately, whether or not you are judging the response--which you are very correct in catching yourself doing.  That self-awareness of being judgmental is good.  You're kind-of playing leapfrog with yourself, being judgmental, but then catching yourself doing it and regretting it.  That's good--so long as you keep doing it--the catching yourself part, that is.  Hopefully the judgmental part will fade away in time with determination.

 

To be truly loving to some folks is to leave them alone.  This is to recognize they may be almost waving a flag to signal they don't want contact.  For so many, they simply are not capable of it.  You can casually say hello to someone, and they glare at you in response, yet you have to realize how you've just startled them and they're incapable of anything else.  Who can know what they might have to overcome inside themselves?   To continue to push yourself on them is, in one way, to refuse to acknowledge their particular individuality.  This is who and what they are at that moment.  They may be utterly incapable of something seemingly so simple as saying hello, they're hanging onto themselves so tightly.  

 

Here is also where understanding comes in, my daughter, for it may not be any kind of conscious, manipulative, one-ups-man-ship female game she is playing at all.  You might be face to face, nose to nose, with a psychically crippled person.  So generously grant her the right to be who and what she is.  You offered a pure motive of contact; she let you know she didn't want it; and so it's good you recognized the degree to which the situation took on aspects from your own past, which were not necessarily inherent in her at all--not of her doing.  I think you recognized this more or less after the fact.  The situation brings things up, but you do recognize their true origin, and there is liberation in that recognition this is just your own projection of your past experiences.  You may not be able to shut off these inner reactions immediately.  But if you just observe them, they will fade in time.  Understanding will take the upper hand.  

 

So I congratulate you on your willingness to understand the situation.  I can only advise that you continue to recognize the principle involved.  When you offer yourself to another, do so with equanimity.  This is an ability you can grow.  Let your smile come from a generosity of spirit that does not require response.  You've done your part.  The next instant is to recognize them for who and what they are--still, only to you at that moment, and not necessarily to themselves or anyone else.  And let them be.  In doing so you will be freeing yourself--(Michael chuckles)--as much as not overburdening them with a presence they don't want.  Does this make sense?

 

Student:  Yes, it does.  I can leave the relationship as it is and accept whatever limitations she puts on it.  I'll try to make the most of the opportunity to deal with that part of myself that comes from the past.  It's a challenge in that she's a person within a larger group of people, who puts out a negative energy, and I have to learn how to let that go by without its attaching itself to me--without taking it on--identifying with it.

 

MICHAEL:  It's true there are people who go around like energy-vacuums, who will suck the life right out of you, and the group, by being so overtly stand-offish.  They appear ridiculous, putting on such an aggressive I-want-to-be-alone attitude among everyone else, but they get genuinely lonely too, and seek company.  So it's not usually conscious on their part, that they are energy-sucks, and, in this sense, socially parasitical.  (now everyone did break up)  Just let them be--don't get sucked in, but feel a little pity for them in your heart, and pray that in time they too will learn how to love and give of themselves.  There's quite a variety out there, my daughter, and this is only one small kind.  Just keep growing in your understanding.  You are doing well.  It doesn't mean that you're not, that you can't immediately shut down the feelings that are aroused.  In time they will loose their ability to affect you.  (many heavy sighs)  So be in my peace.

 

(Challenging family situations)

 

Student:  Yes, Michael.  Along that line of people being a vacuum: don't we have some responsibility in letting that happen?  What if it's in my own home and I'm constantly not being heard by a person living with me?  I'm like deliberately being ignored, and the only way I can to relate to him is if I initiate it.  And this person had been with me for two years.  I understand that, to a point, he is as he is.  But that doesn't take away the hurt and the pain of not being acknowledged.  All I get is the most abrupt few words, while he's going on and on to someone next to him.  I'm really being treated differently.

 

Maybe it's because I'm the father of his girlfriend, and they have to live with me right now, but I think it's something deeper than that.  Yet if I get caught up in the story of it all, in my mind, you know--judgmental, or a conversation in my head that doesn't go anywhere, then I feel myself being sucked dry of energy.  So instead of running away and avoiding it, I just sit with it--to the best of my ability, and be still.  And just be myself around him, as best I can.  

 

MICHAEL:  My son, I cannot more heartedly agree with your conclusion here.  And that is to take responsibility within yourself for your own reactions, and, as you say, just sit with yourself and be true to yourself in the face of this severe challenge.  Because as you might notice, there may be from day to day a great flux in how conscious or unconscious this attitude of his is.  He may be very conscious of it at times and be deliberately slighting you, yet at other times he may be falling into an old defensive habit with more senior males.  

 

But to take responsibility for your own reactions is the only way to handle this creatively.  And this is what you're discovering, and staying open-minded to be able to relate when the possibility is there.  This is the way to grow, the most constructive way of handling a tough situation.  

 

Student:  Yeah, because I am enjoying my daughter, and my granddaughter.  But it kind-of puts a damper on the whole situation, to have this negative energy there.  Yet if it's not conscious, or he's not aware or discerning enough to be responsible for it, then I could talk myself blue in the face and nothing would change.  So obviously I'm the one who has to be still, and go from there.

 

MICHAEL:  Yes, to keep from abrading yourself from within.

 

Student:  Because I do, do that.

 

MICHAEL:  So this is like some indigestible, hard, gritty bit you can't get rid of.(much laughter).  But to follow the analogy of a clam: how can you make a pearl out of it?  Sometimes the only way in these situations is to be rather formal and encase the relationship that way.  You'll be acknowledging him and meeting him somewhat on his own grounds with a like-minded feedback.  You'll still be yourself, but you'll avoid being constantly disappointed.

 

Student:  Yeah.  But what I have noticed though, because I know he's had trouble with his own father and stepfather, is that he has opened up lately to his father.  And he does talk to his daughter--my granddaughter--a lot like I talk to her.  I notice that.  So I realize that I am modeling for him about how to be a good dad.  And I also realize there is a lot of difference between us.  I don't expect to have any heart-to-heart talk as buddies, our interests are so different.  

 

MICHAEL:  So you are perceiving some growth here, some maturity.  (Yes)  And so you do keep possibilities open.

 

Student:  Yeah.  And I do have to keep away from thoughts of wishing he wasn't around.  Because he is the father of my granddaughter, and I really don't know about the relationship between him and my daughter.  I know I have to let that go as well.  Who am I to dictate how they live their lives?  I'm just worried that my granddaughter is the only thing holding them together.  Do you understand what I'm saying?

 

MICAHEL:  Yes.  You see the dead-ended-ness of parents who live together only for the children.  It's not actually good for the children.  It's better when the parents have their own, growing relationship between themselves.  

 

Student:  One last thing: I've been waking up after only three hours of sleep, and so it's like a God-wants-to-talk-to-me kind of thing.  I am allowing myself to experience my own unique understanding of God and what's true.  So I've been just lying there in stillness and letting all these possibilities go.  Because it doesn't do me any good to fester in bad possibilities when the actuality is here and now. 

 

MICHAEL:  Well, good!  You've been taking my lessons to heart about the need for a constant orientation to the here and now, to what is, by disregarding what, in a sense, might have been--those enervating, wasting kinds of regret that are only poorly thought-out judgments on what is here and now, like: it's not what it should be.  Sometimes you use the expression of worrying about what God intended you to be, when actually what God intends is for you to be free and progressively realize your own self's creativity.  

 

Student:  Yeah!--when you said that I just realized if I allow myself to get caught up in his lack thereof, I don't feel free.  I feel confined and in prison.  And I don't want to feel that way.

 

MICAHEL:  This is how understanding gives you some detachment from these reactions.  As we've been encouraging all along: keep feeling: don't shut down.  Trust that there is in you something that will grow through this process.  The worst thing that can happen is to numb out, which is a kind of death right in life, a trap that so many folks fall into.  It's almost an animal reaction to pain; they just go to sleep.  It takes real courage to keep feeling, and trust that the feeling will refine itself.  There is that extra-animal human spirit in you that can rise to the occasion.

 

Student:  And what I've found is that when I am in that reactive state, it affects the people around me in one way or another.  If I start harping on how things aren't the way they should be, then nothing happens.  They get their backs up and nothing works.

 

MICHAEL:  And you notice just how subtle and instantaneous this interplay is.  It's that energy field that is largely unconscious, but spirit is in contact with spirit.  In the final analysis, you can't fake it for long.  True generosity of spirit has to be there.  Trust and faith do have their own sphere of activity wherein nothing else will do.  And that is their genuine power.  It's good you notice these things, and just how subtle and quickly-changing they are.  It's a good perception.

 

Student:  Yes, thank you.  Like you said to B and C that one time: there is no future.

 

MICHAEL:  ..yet.

 

Student:.yet.  (and everyone broke up laughing again; Michael too: it continued on pretty much to the end of the session)

 

(The personal dimensions of time)

 

MICHEL:  .and yet there is no end to it either.  Here it comes.  Mother Spirit and I are tickled that your science-fiction is such a mainstay of your entertainment industry--dozens and dozens of movies and TV series and everything else--people are taking time-traveling as second nature.  They forget it's fiction, it's so well done.  But it can be another bugaboo of wishful thinking that keeps you out of here-and-now.  

 

You can live too much of your life in the past, not in the sense we've recommended of consciously reliving moments, but being unconsciously conditioned by what happened to you.  In fact one way of getting out of this unconscious conditioning is by consciously reliving past events in deep stillness, in the light of your here-and-now greater wisdom; an understanding/catharsis that is possible.  On the other hand, with respect to the future, people can keep putting off doing things today until tomorrow, not just procrastinating some particular task, but putting off living.  A person can put so many conditions on what constitutes "really living" they miss the real thing coming down like a driving rain all around and within them.  Meanwhile.

 

There is genuine insight as to why things are happening, and that insight becomes the basis for genuine foresight, which has some degree of validity in predicting the future.  Your whole scientific/empirical realm of reality--the impersonal realm of matter/energy--can be very precisely predicted/demonstrated.  Consider another ironic bugaboo we mentioned of folks who can only perceive the continuity of human life and are dying of boredom, totally missing the fact each moment is also equally new, singular, and cannot be subjected to empirical demonstration in its complexity of not only the uniform impersonal, but also the uniquely personal, and all the living combinations thereof, in every cosmic instance.  

 

This is why we call you a complex being.  Truly, one of the purposes of your life is to take it all in.  Be open to it all.   Be conscious of it all.  Trust that that wonderful spirit of yours, that personality of yours, is growing in its ability to unite it all, to make it all make sense.  To give it all value.  Because this is truly how God and Mother Spirit and I see you.  It is a way in which you are growing in your ability to see yourselves and each other: in your totality.  You will some day.  So carry on!  The adventure is always just beginning.  Good evening, and be in my peace.

 

(much thanks and laughter)                                        

 

                                                                                                                                       
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