<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica><BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"><FONT SIZE=2>July 7, 2001
<BR>Keynote Address
<BR>TeaM 10th Anniversary
<BR>Snowbird, Utah
<BR>
<BR>Embracing Spiritual Reality
<BR>With Practical Arms
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>Introduction by Mark Greer:
<BR> ... and all sit down. Did you want to sit, stand up or ...?
<BR>
<BR>GERDEAN: Stand up. Teachers should stand up, I've been told. And I need to
<BR>learn how to use this (the microphone), so, okay, I hear what it sounds like,
<BR>so if I can hear it then that means that you can hear it, right?
<BR>
<BR>Good morning. I'm Gerdean. Nice to see you all here. It's more than nice.
<BR>It makes my life worthwhile. I'm not alone and you're proof.
<BR>
<BR>I'm not ready for this. I'm ready, but my words aren't ready, so I'm just
<BR>going to have fun here. I'm going to start by assuring you that this is not
<BR>just a speech. (To the flipchart.) I got this last night. We had a late
<BR>night transmitting session and this is a clue as to what I'm going to talk
<BR>about:
<BR> "1. I AM, 2. In us, 3. We are, 4. In them, 5. All"
<BR>Okay, this will be clear later on. Okay. (Back to the podium)
<BR>
<BR>Okay. Last year in Oklahoma, where I wasn't, Michael talked about what we're
<BR>going to talk about this year. (Isn't it wonderful how good he is at knowing
<BR>what's coming?) He said, "I would have you know I am among you whether you
<BR>are together or not. I would oversee that the foundation that we make today
<BR>is strong enough for future generations. We must embrace spiritual reality
<BR>with practical arms."
<BR>
<BR>Now, since I wasn't there and I didn't have this piece of paper til recently,
<BR>I said, "Oh, yeah, I'll give the speech. Okay. That's great! That's really
<BR>an honor," and somehow in my mind I had – (I'll get my breath here in a
<BR>minute. It's the altitude, not because I'm nervous. No.) Where was I? Oh,
<BR>yeah. Okay, yeah, I got the theme. It's "embracing the kingdom with
<BR>practical arms," so I've been approaching this in my mind as the kingdom, and
<BR>last week Calvin said, "that's spiritual reality with practical arms" and I
<BR>said, "Oh, my God! I've been preparing the wrong speech!"
<BR>
<BR>So it's like Mark (Turnbull) was singing in his song last night, "I got
<BR>baggage"? Man, have I got baggage! I got so much baggage here. I got more
<BR>Urantia Book excerpts and teacher excerpts. I got way too much, and this is
<BR>why I'm not ready. You know, it reminds me of when I was taking a class in
<BR>some kind of history and I had been recently introduced to the Urantia Book,
<BR>so that history was more important than world history or whatever it was, so
<BR>I was going to really ace this exam, I was going to bring in all that Urantia
<BR>history. HaHaHaHaHa. Man, did I confuse myself!
<BR>
<BR>I enjoyed Rob Crickett - but he's not here at the moment, I don't think, -
<BR>but I really enjoyed his presentations in our area and he said ‘just throw
<BR>away the papers', so I'm going to do that eventually, but I'm going to tell
<BR>as story first. We get it started with a story; I'm going to learn how to do
<BR>this speech stuff.
<BR>
<BR>When I was a little girl I lived - at one point - in Hillville, Pennsylvania.
<BR> I was about 6 in this really provincial little town and the Jehovah's
<BR>Witnesses came to the door and my mother answered and I was hanging on her
<BR>apron strings, because nobody ever came "calling" and the Jehovah's Witnesses
<BR>were smart, in this case, because they saw that I was a predominant influence
<BR>in that family, so they chose a scripture that would sucker my mother based
<BR>on my mentality, and so they read this beautiful scripture out of Isaiah,
<BR>[Ed: Isaiah 11: 6-10] and it talks about the lion shall lie down with the
<BR>lamb, and something about the ox, and the little child shall lead them, and I
<BR>was going, "Oh, yeah, that sounds really cool", and so my mother looks down
<BR>at my face and she says, "Well, if it's good enough for her, it's good enough
<BR>for me", so she became a Witness, and still is as a matter of fact, though I
<BR>lost favor with them at some point along the way. But this idea of the
<BR>Kingdom goes way, way, way back in my mind and part of my point this morning
<BR>is that we are so deeply conditioned.
<BR>
<BR>And I'll get back to that later, but I need to say – if someone would please
<BR>check your watch. I don't have a clock. I can't see where I'm at. I don't
<BR>want to short-change myself. This is such an opportunity to address people,
<BR>to practice my public speaking skills, and share, but I don't want to talk
<BR>all day and ruin the schedule for the rest of the day, so somebody let me
<BR>know. You know, start getting antsy or something, if I'm not finished?
<BR>(When?) An hour from now. I have an hour. And I've got so much baggage!
<BR>Okay. I really do, I have so many papers here. And I did a really diligent
<BR>study on the kingdom of heaven paper which is Paper 170. So anyway, I was
<BR>talking about embracing spiritual reality and why that is like embracing the
<BR>kingdom. I think they are interchangeable so I'm more or less on track. But
<BR>Jesus always made reference to his apostles, he always taught the kingdom as
<BR>embracing man's personal experience in relation to his fellows on earth and
<BR>to the father in heaven. So he made it clear that spiritual reality (the
<BR>kingdom of heaven) be centered in the dual concepts of the truth of the
<BR>fatherhood of god and the co-related fact of the brotherhood of man, and that
<BR>if we learn how to do this, we would have new courage, augmented spiritual
<BR>power. We would have new confidence. It would provide true consolation for
<BR>all men. It would bring in a new standard of moral values, a new ethical
<BR>yardstick wherewith to measure human conduct. It would even bring about a
<BR>whole new order of human society. It taught the preeminence of spiritual
<BR>compared to the material, glorified spiritual reality, it exalted superhuman
<BR>ideals, and it talked about spiritual attainment as the true goal of living.
<BR>This being what the kingdom was supposed to be about.
<BR>
<BR>He taught eternal realities were the result of righteous earthly striving,
<BR>like in the prayer, it says "on earth as it is in heaven", so this kingdom
<BR>idea - of course he had a hard time with that. People kept thinking it was
<BR>going to be a material kingdom – (attempting and discarding the stationary
<BR>microphone) ...
<BR>
<BR>This I found interesting. ( This is the only way I know how to do this is to
<BR>just flip through my notes and jabber.) They didn't get it. The apostles
<BR>didn't get it because they kept thinking about the material kingdom, because
<BR>we are so material minded. We are constantly taking what the Teachers say,
<BR>what the Urantia Book says, what God says, and dragging it down to the dead
<BR>level of us, you know, crystallizing it and if we can "fix" it, then we can
<BR>think we have control over it, because the world can be very overwhelming and
<BR>some of these truths are too exciting, and if we can "get a fix on it", if we
<BR>can control it, then we somehow feel that we've got "self-mastery". Isn't
<BR>that a joke!
<BR>
<BR>So what does it mean to embrace the kingdom with practical arms? Well, here.
<BR> This is why I went to this particular Paper, because ... (I don't know what
<BR>all these notes are about.) ... Alright. Here we are. This is why I put it
<BR>on the bulletin board. One. Okay, these are my points. These are the big
<BR>points here. This is where I'm getting my theme from. Number one. Here.
<BR>These are five phases or epochs of the kingdom, so is it not true that there
<BR>are possibly five phases of spiritual reality!
<BR>One, being the personal and inward experience of the spiritual life of the
<BR>fellowship of the individual with God the father. And that's how I see these
<BR>last ten years since the Teaching Mission started, is a wonderful opportunity
<BR>for us to be reborn of the spirit, born as a little child (and a little child
<BR>shall lead them, remember), so here we are - children - and developing this
<BR>relationship with our parents, our infinite parents, and realizing we are not
<BR>alone. There is a connection. There's relationship. We have – We're loved!
<BR> We've been learning about love. We've been learning how to receive love, in
<BR>the spiritual sense, that there aren't really strings attached. A whole new
<BR>understanding of what love is and very liberating! It actually does all
<BR>those things. It's empowering and it's personal and it's rewarding and we can
<BR>rejoice in it and we can see, and this is, to me, what these last ten years
<BR>have been, is a personal development of a relationship with divinity. So
<BR>that is "I AM". I AM. Not a figment of somebody's imagination. Not an
<BR>extension of somebody else. I AM a daughter of the Most High.
<BR>
<BR>Okay, so, these teachers have been talking about phase two and I'm not really
<BR>sure of what they mean by phase two, but here – "Jesus noted no less than
<BR>five phases" – so maybe this is it. Number two: "The enlarging brotherhood
<BR>of gospel believers, the social aspects of the enhanced morals and quickened
<BR>ethics resulting from the reign of God's spirit in the hearts of individual
<BR>believers." Okay.
<BR>
<BR>It's like (forgive my little plug here, but) this is what I was writing about
<BR>in "The Zooid Mission". I figured eventually (I figured this back in 1970,
<BR>by the way) that eventually people were going to know who they were and they
<BR>were going to want to learn how to get along with each other. And I
<BR>concluded that is what phase two is, we're going to have to learn to get
<BR>along with each other. It's the natural outgrowth of having this personal
<BR>religious experience. It's going to need to be socialized. That's one of
<BR>those universal laws. We don't just do this by and for ourselves. So that's
<BR>where we're going to encounter our initial challenges. That's where some of
<BR>us have already been encountering some of them, and I'm going to get back to
<BR>them, but I also want to point out the other three things here. That Jesus
<BR>noted. The five phases.
<BR>
<BR>The supermortal brotherhood. "Number 3, the supermortal brotherhood of
<BR>invisible spirit beings which prevails on earth and in heaven, the superhuman
<BR>kingdom of God," and off the top of my head I interpret that as the Teachers,
<BR>the Melchizedeks, the midwayers, the celestials hosts and all those great
<BR>friends I've got. They're – Well, I'll just tell another story. I'll just
<BR>take the opportunity. I'm not out of time yet, am I?
<BR>
<BR>When I was little, even before I moved to Hillville, we were living at
<BR>Grandma's house down in the hollow, and out behind the house was a natural
<BR>spring ...
<BR>
<BR>[distraction on the patio outdoors] We got some adventure here? Oh! A
<BR>fallen bird! [a respectful moment of silence] Show stealer. [Laughter]
<BR>
<BR>... okay so I'm down in the woods behind the house in the hollow. This is
<BR>where my Thought Adjuster came to me, by the way, so it's my secret place, my
<BR>quiet place in nature. When I do the construct, I go down there by the
<BR>spring. I was down there with my invisible friends. I had invisible friends
<BR>and that was the beginning of my spiritual reality. Shoe and Sock was their
<BR>name at the time. They subsequently elevated themselves to Trieste and
<BR>Adrian, my personal mentors, but they are very real to me, these entities. I
<BR>had no trouble embracing the Teaching Mission because I know all about
<BR>invisible friends. They were at one time more real to me than my own
<BR>parents. They're real good at unconditional love and earthly parents aren't.
<BR> You know? They really are controlling.
<BR>
<BR>So the fourth phase of this kingdom, as I'm looking at it practically
<BR>speaking, is the prospect, "Number 4. The prospect of the more perfect
<BR>fulfillment of the will of God, the advance toward the dawn of a new social
<BR>order in connection with improved spiritual living the next age of man." So
<BR>I extend this, I call this – (uh, the "We are" is the teachers. All
<BR>together. The Interspecies Alliance. All of us together are the we are.)
<BR>And number four "in them" – who's "them"? Who's them, you know? "Them" is
<BR>everybody else. And it's not just – and I'm going beyond the little picture
<BR>of our society, our movement, and our social paradigm that's growing here,
<BR>our little kingdom here, to include the kingdoms of the Pleaideans and the
<BR>Galactic Federation, and the Assembly of God, and lots of other movements
<BR>that are grasping the personal relationship with divinity and running with
<BR>it, however it is that they understand it. Those are our neighbors.
<BR>
<BR>And not only that, but what about .. What about life on other planets?
<BR>That's coming into the picture. Jesus himself said, "I have ..." what was
<BR>the phrase? " ... not of this flock?" I have children not of this flock?
<BR>Other sheep? Right? "And the lion shall lie down with the sheep." Well then
<BR>that might mean that we in all our dynamic might have to lay down with those
<BR>neighbors on another planet and learn how to get along! We have a tendency
<BR>to be very ... egoistic. Egocentric? Myopic! Myopic is perhaps the word
<BR>I'm looking for, and it's probably because we've been isolated for so long;
<BR>it's just part of our conditioning.
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