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[[Image:lighterstill.jpg]] [[File:Teaching_buddha_small.jpg|right|frame]] ==Heading== ===Topic: ''Wonders & Adventures In God's Creation''=== ===Group: [[Marin TeaM]]=== ==Facilitators== ===Teacher: [[Michael]]=== ===TR: [[JL]]=== ==Session== ===Opening=== Dear Michael and Nebadonia, How wonderful it is to be starting a new year with this added confidence You have helped us to achieve - to be able to detect and feel Your presence in our lives day by day. So we thank You for the peace and love You have given us in experiencing deep rest and healing. We ask You to help us find the service we are now ready and able to do, to guide us to and help us take that next step in sharing our lives. Amen. Michael: Good evening, My faithful sons. This is Michael. I bid you a hearty welcome as we start a new year on Urantia together. Yes, it is wonderful, your starting out again like this, in that root sense of full-of-wonder. For what is wonder? What is it that this word expresses in human experience? Certainly surprise is a part of this - suddenly coming upon something, or having something come upon you unexpectedly; something beyond your expectations and anticipations; something beyond your own imagination; something that reminds you, you are in a universe of God’s creation in your day to day lives - something so much larger than yourself. So wonder is very closely allied with feelings of humility, of feeling yourself to be tiny in the face of something enormous. ===Lesson=== Tonight I would like to offer the insight that this is a continuing situation, designed by God himself, as the proper way in which to raise His children - to deliberately put them in a situation where they are surrounded by such an enormity of creation that they are stretched and teased and loved onto the spirit of adventure that can feed their souls. So it helps to keep in mind that this situation was deliberately created for you. What is your part to play? What can you do? Here, My children, is where you can allow yourself, and indeed, must allow yourself to be overwhelmed with wonder. I use the word overwhelmed because it suggests a certain reluctance you may have in holding this state of mind, this openness. As children all of you have had the experience of being overwhelmed by fear, or anxiety, or loss - any number of painful situations that temporarily swept you away. But here I am suggesting being swept away by allowing a perception that truly adds to your soul experience and understanding. Just as your wonderful Hubble Telescope is now presenting you with marvelous views deep into the universe of gigantic cataclysmic events - whole galaxies colliding, stars being born in huge conflagrations of energy - so too there are spiritual counterparts to these physical phenomena. There is as much in the realm of spirit to awe and thrill your souls. But, as spirit never forcibly intrudes into your life, this is something you have to allow, something you have to welcome, something you have to realize that there is nothing here to fear. In the realm of spirit you can go over a Niagara Falls laughing and crying at the same time with joy. It is these experiences I offer to share with you. I invite you to feel Me in your heart. And talking about feeling, both your Mother and I know full well - for We share the experience with you - of how, as you go through your social lives, interacting with others, you do well to contain yourselves. You do the right thing by not forcing yourself on others but really looking to see and be open as to how much each person wants to share their life with you. This means curtailing your feelings, controlling your feelings, limiting your feelings out of your respect for others. But when you come to your Mother and I, there is no need for this self-limitation. We welcome you to feel Our embrace as fully, as deeply, and as completely as you can. Allow yourself to be swept away in tears of joy, My children. Let everything go and just be with Us. Let yourself be swept away. Take no thought or fear of where you are being carried. Feel Us in your heart and in your mind. Feel Our presence as a kind of gentle pressure reminding and reassuring you that We are with you. Even beyond feelings or thoughts as separate realms, We invite you to make this experience of Us something substantial that you can carry within you as a calm and radiantly loving center, a little glowing sun within you that can be a gift, not only to yourself, but to others in the way this can change you. This can be a self-sufficiency of spirit between Us that allows you to give of yourself to your brothers and sisters. Paradoxically seeming, but real, the less you need your fellow human beings, the more free and creative you can be with them, the more you can move onto a realm of fulfilled desires of an ever more subtle and rewarding spiritual nature. You are complete beings, moment by moment, and We invite you to experience this and then share this most precious, wonder-filled assurance with those you meet. Once you begin to distinguish the realm of spirit and its associated values in human life, you undergo a transformation in perception such that the physical and mental aspects of your life are seen ever more clearly as deriving their existence from this preeminent, primary realm of creativity. Spirit becomes the center from which your body and your mind derive their existence. Your personality - your unique essence - lives in this realm of spirit and enjoys many dimensions of physical and mental reality. Once you feel and experience yourself coming from this center, then realms of limitation or finiteness - the realms of physical fact and mental meanings - once imbued with spirit, become infinite themselves, and you realize you are in some real way suspended between the infinite and the infinitesimal. Absolutely everything has meaning, even your childhood and adolescent fears of meaninglessness. This is the completeness We invite you to realize, and We assure you that in no way does it interfere with your need and your ability to continue to grow in perfection. This is a bit of a paradox to human comprehension, just as God Himself is at one and the same time absolutely One with everything, and yet also infinitely Diverse in manifestation. So you too are complete, yet capable of growing. Let Me suggest that this too is fully worthy of your wonder. Are you ready for this transformation, My sons? Group: Yes. Michael: It is inherent within you and your human situation. Just allow it to happen. Fear not when your world starts to change to renew itself before your eyes. This is God’s will. This is His power This is His existence in you. This is the child of God embracing his or her oneness with their Father, knowing they, like Him, are whole, and complete, and growing. Rest awhile in My Peace, My sons. If you have any questions or comments, this bright new year full of hope and joyful anticipation, I am here for you. ===Dialogue=== Student: Father Michael, thank You for Your support and understanding, and for Your guidance. The question I have is: How can we get more people into this group? What can we do - just how to do it? Michael: Yes, C, I was aware of your discussions earlier this evening. And I share some of the concerns, the very practical concerns, you all have about the nature of this contact being misunderstood by those who are not familiar with the concepts of Creator Sons of the Father and the Eternal Son, and Mother Spirits, Daughters of the Infinite Spirit. Think of and remember your own initiation and growth in receptivity to celestial personalities. I think your ideas of an intermediate step of introduction - to subordinate celestial personalities, is a wise one, and this can be affected through almost any way you care to try - your personal circles of friends and acquaintances, any number of ways of advertising through so many media that are open to you. I encourage your efforts to contact your own personal celestial teacher, and then share these experiences also with those friends and acquaintances you feel may be open to this dimension of reality. As I once advised My dear Apostles, not to worry about what they would say when the time came - just proceed from a generous heart wanting to share what you yourself have come to love. This is the spiritual fragrance the text mentions, and it is part of the transformation I spoke of this evening. And it is indeed a very delicate balance - to be able to realize which of those about you are ready for what will be a big step in their lives, but will be all that much more joyful for this very reason. This is yet another way of being open and not categorizing or judging those around you, not needing to see them as desperately needful people for your own self-aggrandizement. Being secure and confident in yourself, just delicately offer to share what was at first something curious and interesting to you. Remember all the little steps you took to get to here with Me? Use the spiritual power of your imagination to suggest the next step in concrete terms. Does this help point the way, My son? Student: Yes, it does. Your statement of a new openness, a new way of being open is very interesting and exciting. It takes it out of the realm of "have to" or "need to" and puts it in the realm of growth. So thank You. Michael: Yes, you truly grasp My meaning here. Sharing your awareness of spirit is something light-hearted and joyful, with a little teasing - that works. This is something genuine you feel and freely express, not in any way just a marketing technique. See the wholeness and completeness of those around you and offer this perception as a little something extra that will grow in them on its own. As you yourself have experienced, this is often at first just a tiny window through which you get the barest little glimpse. Then, like Alice down the rabbit hole, you fall through and find Spirit has surrounded you all your life. And be in My peace. Student: Yes, Michael, there so many things I would like to talk to you about, including what C brought up this evening. It’s unfortunate that there are so many people out there who are skeptical about what is going on here. Even the church I used to go to denounces it saying we are too dependent upon whatever You are. But I can only respond by saying that in the three years I’ve been part of this process, this experience, my life has changed dramatically spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Even if I don’t fully understand what is going on - my lack of understanding of the concepts in the Urantia Book - and I do not understand in a sense who even You are and who Mother is, I still feel, I still have the experience that something is changing within me - the energy - and I do feel Your peace. And for those people who denounce or debunk and say that this is not good for us: read the transcripts. All the transcripts are about love and peace and truth and honoring each other, not about separatism, or one church being better than another. It’s just about love and growing and evolving and treating each other with respect; and the pursuit of perfection. And as I say, I do not totally understand - and it does bother me to say I don’t understand - the nature of Yourself, or Mother: who and what You are; and all the celestials. These are foreign concepts to me, foreign ideas to me, even the idea of a personal teacher; but I’m willing, I’m willing to go in that direction because it’s been a positive experience for me and my life has changed dramatically. That’s what I wish to say about that. But I have been feeling that as You ask us to go into and rest in Your peace, I have been noticing when I allow myself to do that - I go home, I close the door to the world - especially if there are a lot of things going on in my life - I allow myself to let it all go and let God…feel His peace, and there are no thoughts, there’s no fear, there’s no anxiety, and I feel this current running through my being. And it’s like…it’s like home. I feel alive in this current. I know it’s there, and I feel this is my essence, my creative force. I’m so at peace in this place. And indeed I’ve been coming from this place more and more. If You have any response to what I just said, please say so. Michael: Yes, D. It warms My heart on this cool winter’s evening to hear one of My sons express the joy he has found. I believe it will help your understanding of yourself, and your brothers and sisters, to realize what your textbook means when it says you are all Experiential Beings. As your Mother and I have expressed it, you are nodules of God out here in time and space experiencing unique lives. This may seem to contradict what We encourage you to feel as completeness, because this is not the same as what you have read and been taught to consider as Existential Beings - Paradise origin beings - who exist in a way that you will not for a long, long time. I emphasize that this experience - that you are - that God Himself writes as your soul - is what your lives are based upon. Some of the difficulties you have in communicating your spiritual experiences to your fellows are because they do not have the same experience behind the words you both have in common. So, often when you are trying to share with them the experiences you have known here in the Teaching Mission - these evenings of heightened experience of Mother’s and My presence, they do not realize they are just filling in the blanks, so to speak, with their own imagination, and then reacting to their own creation. The fault is not so much that people use their imagination in this way, for to a degree, this is creative, this is an attempt to fill in the blanks of existence with their own spiritual power. The error is in not realizing they are doing so, and therefore rejecting something they truly do not know yet. This is what I meant when I once said, "Forgive them for they know not what they are doing." Realize that this is a basic part of being human. All your thoughts, all your language is based on experience, and today your world is so full of so many different media, people are virtually stuffed with vicarious experience. In your society this is based so enormously on expectations of entertainment, it is hard for people to distinguish without a lot of self-reflection and stillness, how much of what they take for real is only some media-provided entertainment based on competition with other entertainment. This is what you are confronted with, so it helps to realize the basis on which you are being accepted or rejected. But this is also their problem, if you will. It helps you to be as concrete and original as you can be in your descriptions of your own experience. Simply let them know, as you did with Me tonight, that this is not just ideas, or concepts, or notions you got from entertainment or a book - it is not vicarious with you - but real, unique, and valid experience. Ask them to share with this distinction in mind. Ask them to share with you what is their own unique personal experience of a spiritual nature. This way you can both find some solid ground, as it were, for experience is the only ground there is for humans. Thank you for sharing with Me your experience of what these last few years have been for you. This, My son, is touching on your soul. Your Mother and I encourage all Our children to not be daunted by the fact you are not able to fully realize or live up to your ideals of accepting where you are, or where you should be heading. Don’t throw out one for the other, but cherish them both - both where you are and where you feel God wants you to go next. I will grant you it is like having one foot on a dock and the other in a boat, but this stretch is also in the plan. Our Father has a very loving sense of humor or we would all be lost if He didn’t. This is where I suggest a light-hearted teasing and playful attitude is truly part of the joy of living. First find it for yourself, and appreciate this connection, and then it let affect others - as it will. Student: Well, I’ve come to relish and really wish to accentuate and perpetuate that this is my life, and that the force I feel within me is my creative force with God. I wish and desire to experience and make decisions from this life-affirming, God-knowing being. I no longer wish to be limited by beliefs or the perceptions around me, but I want this life-force to be expressed to its fullest, to create to its fullest, unencumbered, unlimited, with God’s textures and colors and ideals and visions. I also have a sense of this inner wisdom within me, this inner process. You know I’m always questioning, questioning what I believe, and how I got to where I am now, and how I can change that. Michael: Yes, D, you are learning to accept more and more of yourself. I caution you that this should be a process of letting go and allowing the realization: you are just beginning. This is the wonder, this is the humility in the perception of something enormous still to come. If, by comparison, you are just a tiny speck getting started, still this tiny speck is capable of that perception. Student: The thought of…I don’t feel myself…I know in the grand scheme of things, I’m almost nothing. But I don’t feel like I’m a little speck. I feel, despite my station in life, that I am alive and vibrant and rich and I matter, that there is meaning to my existence, that I do exist…to… There is another question, another thought, because of what has been going on in this world, and You know very well what has been happening over in Asia with all the strife, the earthquakes and tsunami: how can these people, how can we find meaning in what has happened? What’s the possibility of five million people being homeless and hundreds of thousands perishing? How can one find meaning or even God in that, with someone asking that question of me? With someone that has lost everything in their lives, their family, their way of life? They don’t feel like existing. How could I counsel someone who just experienced that, or even say to them that God loves them? It would fall on deaf ears. What would you say to them, Michael? Michael: In these cases, My son, you can only offer all you have to give - as fully as you can - and only you can decide what this is. But I and our Father offer them eternal life itself, they and their loved ones. As I tried to explain when I lived among you, there are, from the human viewpoint you will have so long as you live this life, there are truly accidents of time and space. The tectonic plates of the earth shifted as they have for billions of years, and will continue to do, and an impersonal wave of water hit the beaches and cities. To God there are no accidents, everything is His will. But no subordinate being can pretend to know fully why it was this person and not that one. So one thing you can do for yourself, and for those you wish to help, is to realize that you do not know. This is another facet of humility, My son, in realizing the enormity of what only God knows. Then this becomes something you can share. This way those who have lost so much can know that it was not their fault, or anything they did or did not do in their life, that brought this upon them. The tectonic plates of the earth shifted and an impersonal wave of water went towards land. Do you understand? Student: Yes, I do. ===Closing=== Michael: It is not a platitude, but the truth: those who perished are in His hands now, and you cannot pretend to know the fear and the terror and the pain that they experienced. But I thank you for your question, for this touches on the most difficult aspects of life as it has been lived and will continue to be lived on the evolutionary planets that are God’s creation. So we have seen much this evening of wonder, and to wonder about. As I invited you to once before, do not hesitate to ask a question of spirit. Spirit is that which contains all else and unites all else. This is how you grow - by letting the wonder overwhelm you at times and give you a real appreciation of the blessings right within your own life. Good evening, My children. Be in My peace. [[Category: The Teaching Mission: Dialogues]] [[Category: Marin TeaM]] [[Category: Michael]] [[Category: JL]] [[Category: Wonder]] [[Category: Adventure]] [[Category: 2005]]

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