[tmtranscripts] Michael 10.6.08

[JERRY LANE]

Michael--October 6, 2008

 

Marin T/M Group--Mill Valley, California--U.S.A.

 

MICHAEL--T/R-JL

 

(Open your hearts to each other)

(Stimulants and debt) 

(The irony of one of God's greatest gifts) 

(Suddenly shifting efforts) 

(Ones total health)

(The need to commune with God)

(The mystery of fear)  

(Benediction)

 

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    Since our last meeting two weeks ago our society has come face to face with some rather scary financial troubles, and so we are especially thankful in times like this for your reassurance that we are spiritual beings.  We are endowed with a creativity with which, if we choose, we can create our way forward.  While paying due respect to what has gone before now and brought us to this moment, we need not be utterly dependent upon, nor bound by that.  You remind us that all throughout human history people have faced crises like this and have come together with a generosity of spirit, a triumph of creative spirit in the face of adversity, that fills our souls.  We thank you for these insights.  We are reassured with your presence within us, with the way in which you respond most readily to our prayers for guidance.  Amen. 

 

MICHAEL:  Good evening, my children, this is Michael.  With my whole heart I back up your appeal.  I will never forsake you.  I am here and I will always be here.  You are my children.  You have only to be still and open your hearts and your minds to feel me, to rest in my peace, to seek guidance from your Father Fragment, that presence of God in your minds that is ever true.

 

(Open your hearts to each other)

 

It is unfortunately ironic that it sometimes takes a crisis for our children to open their minds and hearts to us and to each other.  This is the critical thing here and now: you open yourselves to each other as never before.  Those of you with even the most humble means need to reach out and embrace your less fortunate fellows, and this can be in the emotional and the spiritual realms everywhere as important as in the financial.  To those who need an excuse to be good: this is the time.  This is the opportunity to set aside self-interest for the general social good, and the more concrete and direct you can offer help, the better.

 

In trying times it is within families and between friends where a generosity of spirit is so welcome and needed.  This is literally the glue that has always held societies together.  This is the spiritual currency in the realm of personal spiritual beings.  You are members of a vast cosmic family and never alone by the very kinds of beings that you are.  You are one of us.  You are surrounded by a spiritual family that is fully aware of what you are going through.  You have our Father's assurance--His presence right within you, as well as that of Mother Spirit and myself: no good effort is ever lost or comes to nothing.  Everything is always in the mix, so to speak, and becomes part of your soul.  Everything that happens is the result of pre-existent forces plus--always plus--what you yourselves can contribute, what you yourselves can create.  Your creativity is always your greatest strength, for in that you are most like your Father.  In this you can try to be even more like Him.

As Mother Spirit said last time, it often takes great effort to keep abreast of your own dynamic and sometimes scary lives.  Let's take that a notch deeper and wonder what this word effort really means.  I'll define it simply tonight as your awareness of the expenditure of energy.  For a human being of limited amounts of energy, whether physical or mental or spiritual, your feeling of effort lets you know that energy is being expended.  There is a distinct difference though, between how much this expenditure is conscious or unconscious.  For many thousands of years now mankind has discovered that with the use of certain substances he can avoid feeling effort while still accomplishing certain tasks, both mental and physical.  You call these stimulants, a way of getting something done without feeling the effort involved.

(Stimulants and debt) 

Tonight in your current circumstances I want you to consider these stimulants very much like credit cards, the hopefully-only-temporary debt you use to purchase things.  In a way you are buying something today and postponing the payment until tomorrow.  For stimulants are not nutrition.  They do not directly provide the strength you use, the energy you burn.  They are like chemical catalysts.  If they had no negative consequences, all well and good--or should I say not so bad, as there is a certain glory just in feeling the effort it takes to accomplish things.  As Mother Spirit and I have been saying, it's feeling the physical effort in your body that lets you know what you're moving; feeling mental difficulties that gives you some appraisal of a problem; feeling a sense of loss sometimes which lets you know you're exhausting your spiritual energy. 

And so we encourage you to feel.  Feel the full extent of what you are doing.  To those to whom this seems absurd--why feel the work you are doing if you can avoid it--we must point out that experience is what truly fills your soul.  It's why we reassure you over and over again about the meaning, the value of your conscious life, what you feel highly consciously.  We've tried to debunk those notions that true joy is somehow effortless, that the effort you feel is somehow unnecessary, or a mistake. 

Your Urantia book draws a distinction between self-gratification, self-maintenance and, in the racial sense of providing for your children in the coming generations, self-perpetuation.  The refusal to feel the effort involved in living is a prime example of self-gratification at the expense of self-maintenance, the very definition of a bad habit: trading today's pleasure for tomorrow's bad health and lack of will-power.  So this evaluation is not from some abstract moral sense, but from taking into consideration the totality of your being.  It's like running up financial debt by living beyond your means, selling your tomorrows of maintaining yourself healthy and free for the moment's gratification.  All these are examples of refusing to feel and denying the conscious experience of effort that lets you know the value of things.  We would ask you to consider these truths in your meditation, my children. 

Open your hearts and open your minds to a deep moral re-evaluation of your lives and how you are--in a total sense--paying for your daily bread and joy.  This guidance is available to you, my children, if you be still enough.  This is where your creativity comes in if you but have the nerve, the courage to open yourself to your soul, your whole life's experience.  This is the value of character, that persisting growth of soul that enables you to stand not only right within the moment, but to transcend it.  One definition of character is that of someone who is not just blown away, tossed here and there in the moment. 

Character comes from a center deep in the middle of your whole life's experience.  The creative abilities this provides are so essential in trying times, not only for yourself but for all those who depend upon you to be there for them, especially in a creative, spiritual capacity.  This is how you turn trying times into triumph, for this is the very meaning of rising above adversity.  If you can creatively handle present situations and learn from them, feel them, freely admit to yourself all your successes and mistakes, this truly becomes that soul credit of what you have already earned, not the selling out your tomorrows to deny feeling the ups and downs of today.

(The irony of one of God's greatest gifts) 

This is the spiritual challenge before you.  As Mother Spirit said last time, this is the challenge in seeking and finding genuine emotion--whatever it is--and the enlightenment that brings to your day to day living.  This is how you progress as individuals and societies.  So again we say, my children, be of good cheer.  There is nothing you cannot accomplish working together.  Stay open.  Stay loose--be flexible.  Take each moment as it comes with that acceptance we've been speaking of.  Let facts come in and register deeply.  Welcome them however they challenge your preconceptions.  Times of great challenge are times of great spiritual opportunities.  So be unafraid to feel the effort it takes.  Though it may be literally dripping with irony, this is your saving grace.  The enormous effort it takes to progress is God's greatest gift to you.  Claim it.  Make it your own.  Be unafraid of it. 

You have our blessings; we are always with you, pulling for you.  We are always here with our guidance, our love and our peace.  Feel that effort.  Expend it willingly; and then rest totally, extinguished in me so you can rise again, and again. 

If you have any questions or comments this evening, I'm always happy to receive them and engage you so.

Student:  Thank you Father Michael for your words of reassurance, and support, and the ideas of acceptance and feeling--which I've spent most of my life avoiding.  Now I can't avoid them anymore, I thank you for reminding me once more that I'm a human being and that things are going to be OK no matter what happens.

(Suddenly shifting efforts) 

MICHAEL:  I thank you, my son, for accepting what I had to offer.  For so many this can be a great turn-about within their orientation to reality.  Your consciously felt effort is what finally and most fundamentally gives you the measure--the value and the worth--of things to you.  You can see this clearly in fields of entertainment where, sometimes after a few short years of intense effort, people can be rewarded so fantastically, and then woefully find themselves in a kind of meaningless life, so contrasted is it to what they've know before.  This is why so many seem to self-destruct with success.  

You see the same effect in those who, after a whole lifetime of working hard, are financially able to retire.  They've always enjoyed the relaxation of their weekends, yet suddenly find themselves terribly adrift in a foggy miasma of so much endless time to kill.  

So I thank you for your thanks, my son.  We wish you well in your newfound feeling.  Be in my peace.

Student:  Yes, Michael, I was pondering the Beatle song called The Fool On The Hill.  I think I live on that hill.  I see what is going on in the community, in the lives of the people I work for; then in the media, what is going on in the country and the world.  It's like, either I can get all caught up in fear and the panic of being homeless, and go that way, or I can understand what is truly going on and not get caught up in all of that, all the drama of crises; but just kind-of pay attention to spirit, to truth, to compassion, and be myself--available; and to love, being really focused in this moment.  I can honor each moment and the freshness of each moment.  I know a coupe of my customers who are experiencing a lot of discomfort, a lot of fear in what's going on--their stocks and things.  So it seems like the time for a lot of reevaluation and asking questions like, is there another way to live?  

To me there's a really false economy going on.  It's not based in spirit, in truth.  I was listening to a tape by Alan Watts and he was pointing out that man created money, not God.  How we measure life gets too abstract, and there's a deeper way to live.  So that's what I'm allowing myself to tap into, to live for meaning.

I'm not denying I feel a bit anxious that everything seems like a house of cards--you take out one and everything falls apart.  Then what are you left with?--just yourself; your true economy.  So I think people need to find another way to be in this world.

(Ones total health)  

MICHAEL:  I want to thank you too, my son.  You express the spiritual opportunity very well.  You can see the distinction we've pointed out between the more superficial and limited sense of yourself which you call ego, as contrasted to that really deep and soulful awareness of your whole life.  It's become too much a cliché that when you have your health you have everything, and so, so many folks dismiss this truth out of hand for its very familiarity.  They need to have their whole physical and psychic health--their feelings of panic, running unchecked, brought back to the bedrock of truth that constitutes spiritual health.  

As I said, it seems a shame that people have to be brought to this, but that is a function of life, a function of confronting all that Other, that not-you, that is God's creation; and humbly accepting there is such a thing as God's law, God's ways of doing things.  You do have the capacity, if you choose, to learn these, even to embrace these with a glad heart and an ever deepening sense of spiritual security amidst the uncertainty.  So I'm glad for you, my son, that you have these spiritual dimensions in your consciousness.  You are sincerely asking yourself, what is this better way?  May you continue to be that steadfast presence for your friends--and your employers too.

Student:  Yes, I feel compassion for them because they don't have that understanding that I've become acquainted with.  I see their struggle and frustration and their fear, and so I just honor them for what they're going through, and I support them in their soul-growth, because that's what it's all about--really.  It's about what's real and what is only illusion and will fall away; what is not really of God.  It is so beautiful--as I've mentioned--having my granddaughter.  I mean, she's oblivious to any of this.  She doesn't know a bank failure from anything; she's not Republican or Democrat.  It's so beautiful seeing her, and reminding me of what life's all about--the trust she has in life.  So thank you.

MICHAEL:  You're very welcome, my son.  You have a little glimpse into what Mother Spirit and I feel about all of you.  You are our children, and we marvel at your courage as you too open with curiosity to look around and wonder at it all.  Be in my peace.

Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I'm learning how--better--to take in spiritual energy, and feel your spiritual presence--to be able to make the effort and feel the spiritual connection that is really gratifying.  It helps me replace the need to find energy in other things like coffee--or just go through the day without a lot of energy.  I'm really gratified by the discovery of the reward of that effort--to make that connection.  But I still find that when I get to the place of taking an action I get a really deep, uncomfortable fear.  It's really hard to stay with the fear, to get through it.  I get into panic.  I sort-of like touch on it, but it's really uncomfortable to stay with it and move forward with it.  So I find myself still backing away from that; and I also find it hard to--even though I may have the energy--to find the focus on where I need to take the next step.  I kind-of have an idea it may have something to do with being so afraid and not knowing what to do.  So I was wondering if you help me.

(The need to commune with God) 

MICHAEL:  Yes, my daughter, let me remind you, because you've already read in your Urantia book the details of my life here with you--as Jesus--let me gently remind you of how I myself, even after my baptism and spending some time alone making my big decisions about what to do with the rest of my human life--being fully aware I was this dual-being of a hundreds-of-billions-of-years-old Creator Son of God, and yet still a human being walking along--how often I found not only the wonder and the glory, but even the need to commune with my Father.  This was, if you will, the fully human side of my dual nature then, that two-hundred-percent-ness of living that I've invited all of you, as spiritual beings too, to share with me.  

There is no such thing as returning to the Father too many times--a dozen times a day, if necessary; any time you hit a blank wall of no response from your own mind, no answer where to go, what to do.  Be unafraid to sit down and humbly, lovingly open yourself to the Father within you and ask: Dear God, What do I do next?  Though you may not fully credit it yet, my daughter, you're really feeling more and more what is involved in being a living creature.  I feel you are doing your best to stay in touch with this.  And this is good.  You just need to remind yourself from time to time that the answer is there; the initiative, the nudge, does come from your spirit, and your spirit is both able and perhaps needs to call for help.

(The mystery of fear)  

That's why we're here.  This is what we are as your spiritual parents.  We too feel your fear and your uncertainty, and reassure you they are no illusions.  It is the full awareness of what you're doing and the fact you have not only your own life but others too in your hands.  But there is that critical difference, my daughter, between feeling fear and being afraid, between an emotion and a rather fixed state of being.  So be not afraid to ask for help.  Sit down in the middle of your fear and ride it out; even, as I advised C once, approach it with curiosity.  Sometimes like a snowball in the middle of a raging fire, the answer of what to do next is right in the middle of what you fear.  Your fear is a mistaken self-preservation that keeps you from a deeper truth.  And so, ironically, my daughter, your fear means well--(much laughter).  Treat it with compassion and good humor.  Your spiritual self knows you can be overly-cautious.  It's good you remember from time to time that no one gets out of life--as you know it--alive.  

So my advice is to return to your stillness as often as need be.  I'm so happy you are finding strength there; you are finding me there--you are beginning to feel me more and more.  This is such a glory for Mother Spirit and me for it is true that the more you can feel our presence, the more you are there for us.  This is your freewill gift to us, of your very soul.  So thank you, my daughter.  Keep finding my peace.

(Benediction)

Dear children, I love you very much.  It is not easy for me to say, be not afraid.  I do so thankful for my own life as Jesus; even for the fear I knew--even as Michael--the fear for my disciples and those I treasured so deeply.  In these trying times our hearts go out to you.  So we ask you open your hearts to each other.  By all means wonder deep within you: what is this potential I've been blessed with?  What is my own better way forward?  What is this evolution that is so much a part of God's will?  You find it day to day; sometime hour by hour; sometimes one breath at a time.  So right now feel the life in this, my children.  Feel the power in this.  This is God's and our gift of life to our children.  Mother Spirit sends you her love, and I bid you be in my peace.  Good evening.                             
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