[tmtranscripts] Michael 5.2.05 - Feelings

JERRY LANE nytrayn at msn.com
Sat May 7 14:00:53 PDT 2005


Dear Folks, Here's the next message from Michael. Let me extend a
welcome to anyone living in or near the Bay Area, or only visiting, to come
join us on Monday night, 7:30 PM, here in Mill Valley - just ten miles or so
north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate. You could come early if you
want a private session - or even on some other evening, for this. Send me
an email @ Nytrayn at msn.com and we can set it up, directions and all. In the
case of the group meetings, your questions and Their answers go out on the
net only if you wish. Hope to see you sometime. Jerry.

Michael 5.2.05

Marin TM Group

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, What a pleasure and a relief it is to
remember to take a break during the day, just to relax and be still and feel
Your presence. Thank You for Your guidance as to how we can experience our
freedom through our own creativity, and choose ever more wisely what we
should do; and then, once we have made this choice, forget ourselves in the
full commitment to what we have chosen. Amen.

Michael: Good evening, My sons, this is your spiritual Father, Michael.
Now -that’s it. You all know well by now how to feel for Me within you - so
often My presence is just to encourage and help you to feel.

You go through many stages in your life with respect to your feelings. Just
recently We asked you to remember what it was to be a child and have the
world come down all around you, have your emotions sweep you away on a tidal
wave crashing through your soul. And so for however long, you were utterly
lost to yourself. Then slowly this terrible wave of emotion would subside
and with halting, desperate little attempts, you could slowly regain your
breath and find yourself sitting there tossed and tumbled in your life, but
ever so thankful the tsunami was slowly receding and giving you back to
yourself.

And so you learned to harden your heart, how to stay above this rising tide
of feeling and just ride it out. Your growing ego self-awareness was slowly
earning you a small measure of buoyancy on the surface of your emotions. As
you became more and more aware of yourself, more and more continuously you
sought to disengage yourself from your family, sometimes even your best
friends, in order to realize yourself as an individual, someone your own.
Your curiosity was peaked to wonder very specifically: Who am I? Here your
sense of yourself and your own inner freedom was so often dependant on a
cultivated indifference - to be somewhat detached from those around you.
Consider this was a measure of budding wisdom so you could have some choice
of whether or not to go along with your peers in whatever wild suggestions
were being made.

Then as your school ended and you were expected to leave home and go out
into the world, you braced yourself against feeling too much all the fear
and anxiety that was a part of this. Yet often about this time, if not
sooner, when the possibility of romance came your way, you might of noticed
that your cultivated indifference had become a blanket affair which was not
only suppressing fear and uncertainty, but your ability to love as well.

Also about this time many of you had experiences where your feelings, just
because they came from the total, affective part of your nature, were able
to catch your attention and bring to your consciousness very real dangers.
You realized this was not some sort of over-done paranoia, but a very
righteous caution about impending situations. Then too these global
perceptions, these intimations and feelings could be useful assessments of
your fellows, and the people around you began to be infused with an extra
dimension.

Now the temptation became one of being overly judgmental, being carried away
anew on these assessments of others which suggested you could judge an
entire person. For example, it was not that someone might be telling you
some small white lie or minor fib, but what you would pronounce: Liar!
Often without realizing it you would be playing God and pretending to
yourself, or actually telling others such things, as if somehow you could
assess a person’s soul.

But as you persisted in your spiritual growth and you grasped the general
principle of not being judgmental, you began to make a quantitative
distinction between necessary and self-honest assessments of, say, an
exchange with someone, and a condemning judgment. And so you took an
enormous step in being free. For as you let go these judgments, these
pretentious total evaluations of other persons, so you were able to stop
doing this to yourself. You could more directly discriminate both your own
strengths and weaknesses as you pulled away this blanket of alternately
feeling you, or others, were completely good or bad persons.

So now We encourage you to keep going along this same dimension of ever
finer and more delicate sensitivity. As you learn how to let go of
pre-judgments based on race, or cultural differences, differences of sex or
age, size or shape, and you make room in your heart and mind for all the
individuals who come your way, so too every little step like this frees your
own self perceptions and self evaluation. This leads to a greater intimacy
and honesty within you, and becomes another way in which you can grow.

You’ve probably encountered other individuals who were so incapable of
acknowledging even a simple mistake, and then got so caught up in defending
themselves, in retracing all the steps that led to the poor decision, they
were not capable of opening themselves to a better way of doing whatever it
was. This was probably unconscious on their part, but all the more limiting
for that reason. For them there was no power in “now,” because they kept
insisting on prolonging the past. In this context, think what a spiritual
triumph and relief it is to realize you are experimenting with your lives –
necessarily, wonderfully so. For from this perspective, finding out what
doesn’t work and being fully open as to why it didn’t work, can often
suggest what might work. And even leave you joyfully anticipating trying
the next step.

Here you are identifying with spirit, with a loving and welcoming attitude
that embraces whatever may come. This does not guarantee you will not be
swept away again, from time to time. Rather, We are encouraging you to
deliberately let go of yourselves to see not only the ultimate futility, but
the terrible limitation of hanging onto yourself fearfully and tightly.
Then give yourselves credit for the nerve it takes to forget yourselves and
join in some shared activities with your friends.

This is the glory of self-forgetfulness. This is being open to feelings.
This is remembering fondly all the stages you have come through with respect
to your emotions. Yet as many times as Your Mother and I have recommended
you relive moments of your life, you still may not be certain as to what We
mean. Essentially We’re saying that since each period of your life is
somewhat unique, if you can just stop and relax to let previous events pop
into your mind, it’s almost like time-traveling in a science fiction sense.
For some few moments you can really feel what it was like to be, say,
fifteen again – and realize so much about the time in between then and now.

You are probably most familiar with this encompassing of feeling as it is
associated with a particular piece of music. This is one fringe benefit of
your pop culture that changes from decade to decade. You can hear a song
that was popular maybe, thirty or forty years ago for some of you, and it
can bring back a pure feeling of what you were doing then, that can capture
the whole mood of your life at the time. This is what We mean. Now imagine
this enormously deeper and more total, persisting almost, as I said, like
time traveling, and you have some small inkling of what your soul is. This
can give you some appreciation for what your Father Fragment – the presence
of God within you - has to offer you when the two of you become one.

Never fear to be still. Never fear to relax all your self-conscious,
ongoing drive. The convergent, sharp focusing of your attention that is
necessary and so useful at times, is only one of many modes of
consciousness. Let your attention be divergent. Feel for a kind of global
perception coming in from all around you space-wise. This is your higher
consciousness, and beyond it you make contact with Us just by being open and
receptive.

The realm of spirit is one of spontaneous creativity, the very essence of
freedom. The personal beings who are truly free - experiencing and enjoying
this ultimate power? - who wouldn’t choose to love? Here there is no
limitation in connection. Here there is that magical mathematics We tease
you with, how one and one make three, because between you and I the
connection is our Father himself. This is His love that pervades all
reality, and becomes ours. It enables us to enjoy each other freely,
without constraints or conditions. This is what transforms us. Once you
taste this pure essence and thrill in its reality, who wouldn’t choose to be
a part of this? This is both the fulfillment of completeness and the
promise of eternity - more to come, forever.

Rest in this peace awhile, My sons. If you have any comments or questions
this evening, we can connect this way too.

Student: Father Michael, thank You for Your encouragement and
enlightenment. The question I have is: How does one “let go and let God?”

Michael: Ah yes, My son, this is the eternal question, is it not?

Student: Yes, ah…I can see a small part of…yes…this is the eternal
question, but mostly my focus is like, how do I let go and let God today, or
tomorrow or the next day?

Michael: I only meant that this is something you will be learning forever.
If you look back on your life with an open mind you can probably recognize
times when you had great success in knowing Gods’ will, and experiencing the
delight of triumph in being in accord with that will. I might suggest these
were the happiest and most spiritually fulfilling moments of your life.

So realize this is not something alien to you. You have known moments of
letting go and being aware of a spiritual encompassing all around you. The
easiest and most immediate way of - letting God - is by perceiving what He
is doing. Just as you know the wind is blowing when you see the trees
tossing about, it’s a perception and appreciation of His constant creativity
We have been pointing at now for many lessons. Since human perception is
largely a matter of contrast, We have been trying to help you isolate this
constant creativity so you can perceive what We mean.

I think you can understand this by asking yourself: Well then, if there is
this constant creativity going on and, as Michael has informed me, this is
half of the reality I am living in, why can’t I see it? We tried to point
this out as contrasted to the notion of reality just repeating itself over
and over, so you can realize God is within you and all around too making
each day different. This is one immediate way of - letting God - simply by
perceiving what He is doing.

You also let go and let God by joining Him in creating your life. In your
meditations you can ask: what does God want me to do next? For me to share
His loving and creative nature with His children, what loving and creative
thing can I do for those I live with, for those out in the world? I could
help, say, by contributing my time and resources to any number of good
causes or groups.

This is what I meant this evening by relaxing the tightly focused attention
that you need to accomplish a complex task involving many steps over a
period of time. Just stop this from time to time and relax your attention
to feel as delicately as you can: What does God want me to do now, today,
this very moment? And persist in this with determination. Open yourself to
the uncertainty that is implied. Be willing to feel this uncertainty rather
than glossing it over with just another habit, another way of killing time.
There might be a period of anxiety to go through as you let go, before you
can quite - let God. Does this answer your question, My son?

Student: Yes, it has cleared up a lot of things, and reminded me of a lot
of things. There have been those periods of triumph – usually in retrospect
– times when I was able to slow down and think of a better way of working
than I had in the first place.

Michael: Can you see that in the letting-go process there is bound to be a
gap there, a moment in which you are simply letting go without knowing what
will come next – because it will not be you, but can be something so much
greater than you? If you are not willing to experience this uncertainty
right in the middle of you, you’ve not yet let go. This is why it is not
the easiest thing to do, and why it requires faith.

Student: I’m not quite as fearful of that gap as I used to be. I sometimes
feel as if I’m welcoming it. Other times I don’t want to deal with it. The
great thing is that now I’m aware of it more and more.

Michael: Yes, this is the key – a quality of recognition. You asked about
letting go. When you do let go it helps to be consciously recognizing: Yes,
I am letting go so many ways I do know - how to fill up these next few hours
or days - and accepting that this feeling of uncertainty is a part of
spiritual life. This can contrast greatly to your usual orientation in
which, if you didn’t recognize what was happening, the suggestion would
sound absurd and you would wonder: Why should I let myself feel uncertain?
This is where recognition is so important: when you forget you’re trying to
“let go” – but are succeeding anyway. So when you start feeling this
uncertainty, give yourself credit and say: Here I am, Father, I’m open now.
What is Your will? This is why there is glory in the triumph. Keep
practicing, My son, and be in My peace.

Student: Yes, Father, I guess the idea of uncertainty is where the faith
kicks in with the understanding that God is the reality. I’ve been
contemplating the reality of what is God’s will, because if you look out it
seems as if the world is very authoritative and rigid and inflexible and
closed. We know better. What You were saying to (Previous student) – the
essence of love and being creative… How did it get to be…turned around from
that, to the point of being used as manipulation…and so destructive – the
basis for destruction? When the cosmos is love - pure and simple? If
someone asks me the question: What is God’s will, how can I answer them?

Michael: Well, My son, I would mention the parable about giving a man a
fish as contrasted to teaching him how to fish. If someone asks you what is
God’s will, the best answer is to give them a way of discovering it for
themselves. This is the only lasting answer to the question because God
speaks to each individual - individually. What you can teach through your
own understanding and practice, once you know them well, are these methods
you have been learning of stillness and meditation, of prayer, and what I
suggested to (Student) this evening - recognizing some of the ironic
consequences of letting go - in order to - let God.

The question earlier as to how the world came to be the way it is: with the
overview of planetary spiritual history the Urantia Book has given you of
the defaults of the Planetary Prince and your Material Son and Daughter more
or less thwarting the normal planned evolution, a lot can be explained on
both the largest and smallest scale – planetary and individual – as arrested
development. This was the overview I presented this evening about your
maturing with respect to your feelings. It is not that you have to go
through these different stages, but that you stop, you get arrested
somewhere along the way and you do not keep growing. If letting go in order
to - let God - involves setting aside certainties from the past in order to
experiment further with what you feel to be God’s will, this involves that
momentary uncertainty as you step off into the unknown. Yet if you are
arrested at a stage where you are trying to disallow any uncertainty at all
in your life, the suggestion will sound ridiculous, and in fact many
spiritual teachers have been ridiculed for suggesting such a thing. Why
open yourself to uncertainty when you can continue to cling to what you
already know - especially if you have a concept that completeness and the
need to grow are mutually exclusive? You can deny any need to grow further
– with all the risks involved – and simply insist you are complete as you
are – which you are. Or, since many people feel incomplete in themselves
without belonging to someone or something else, they can also question the
nerve it takes to keep growing. It takes a very strong and self-confident
awareness - from a great deal of experience of having unintentionally or
impulsively let go, and then discovering that you do survive and grow from
these unexpected adventures: this long process of maturation - to be able to
consciously open and experiment, not knowing what the outcome will be.

Student: It’s kind of like we’re constantly redefining ourselves, or, in a
sense, un-defining ourselves. When people ask me, I feel I’m everything and
I’m nothing. I’m not just American – I’m global. I’m not Christian, or
Buddhist, or Jewish – though I’ve been all of those – I’m letting go these
definitions…of certainty in a sense, to be classless, with no political
affiliation, and it’s quite freeing to experience this…nothingness.

Michael: Well, My son, I really enjoy your notion of un-defining yourself.
That is truly letting go.

Student: I feel sorry for people whose whole lives are based on thinking
only a certain way. It’s so limiting - unfortunately, even to the point of
killing another human being because he or she doesn’t believe the same way.

Michael: You see what I mean by: it is not that people have to go through
these stages of maturity, but that they stop - stop developing their
capacity to wonder - their inner curiosity and hunger for experience and
adventure; but also the marvelous reaction and reassurance they get when
they are perceiving what God is doing.

Student: When I spoke to You a couple weeks ago about experiencing the
kingdom of heaven – that it is here and now – and I read in the Urantia Book
about how You went out in Your public work and You spoke to the apostles – I
realized that was, and is, the “good news” – that the kingdom of heaven is
here and now…and how you find it full of potential and possibility…if you
let go and let God.

Michael: One way to resolve the seeming self-contradiction of why there is
still so much suffering on Urantia if it is the kingdom of heaven, is to
realize that the kingdom of God pertains above all to an individual’s
dignity of free will. The planetary situation as it exists this very moment
is the result of all the freewill choices made by a whole hierarchy of
beings – human and above. But again, every evolutionary planet goes through
similar stages. It is just that Urantia’s history – I should say, its
normal, possible evolution – was seriously set back by the decisions of some
of its celestial leaders, both on the System and planetary level. You are
still recovering from some of these terrible decisions. But this is the
true kingdom of God – the individual freedom, the will dignity of every
personal being, without which all of reality would not be as it has always
been: the creation of both God – personally – and all His children. This is
our Universal Father sharing His nature with us. This is why We invite you
to exercise your individual freedom and creativity and choice so you can
personally experience this kingdom of His. And yes, it does require that
you constantly let go of what you have known in order to take the next step.
But I assure you, My children, this journey has no end – ever. Recognize
the uncertainty and do your best to accept it with His grace and humor.
This is the true spiritual triumph of living life light-heartily - giving of
yourself one hundred percent, while not taking yourself too seriously. We
love you very much, and so We tease you with these possibilities. We are
certain they will be yours - as facts, in time. Be in My peace.

Student: Dear Michael, I have often wondered about emotions, and finally
learned about all the ways from apathy to exhilaration, and have had various
enlightenment experiences, and realized that there is even more to it than
mentioned in the Urantia Book. Is there any way for us to understand this a
little better?

Michael: Well, My son, I‘ve pointed out some general stages you go through
from the time you are a tiny baby with almost no self-consciousness at all,
to the point where, as a mature adult, you have not only learned how to
suppress or control your emotions in situations where this is absolutely
necessary, say around some accident scene where somebody is injured and
needs you, but also how to be at the other extreme and be totally open to
whatever emotion wants to call to you: Here I am. What do I mean? For
these most subtle feelings can be coming from your super-consciousness, your
global perception of the whole encompassing situation - impinging upon the
spiritual realm.

So there you have the whole gamut, and as you live in a very complex society
involving so many other people, not all of whose motivations are by any
means loving or helpful but sometimes possibly violent or criminal, and you
can never know for certain what is around the next corner with respect to
your fellows, so We have pointed out a spiritual quality of flexibility, of
not identifying with one whole set of chosen emotions to the exclusion of
all others. Rather, if you have a conscious and tenacious presence of mind,
exercising your power of now, you can trust yourself to be open to any
emotion, trust that you can recognize the more insidious ones – anger, or
jealousy, hatred, revenge – and let them go. You needn’t be overly
self-critical or worried that these popped into your mind, but give yourself
credit for being open-minded. You live in a society whose entertainment
media is saturated with every emotion imaginable. So you encounter these.
Your freedom is in the recognition and the ability to let them go without
being wounded or feeling the necessity to suppress all feelings. And so you
dance light-heartily along - in a Shakespearean sense: dodging all the
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - with a full and wonder-filled
emotional life. Does this help you, My son?

Student: Yes, Michael, it’s quite all-encompassing. But I would ask one
thing about…as we seem to be maturing - more of our emotions coming from our
mind and spirit rather than from our bodies, we seem to feel almost a
seamless transition from one to the other. I would like to know more about
where do emotions come from? Part of it I know is chemistry, but part of it
must be mindful from Mother Spirit, part of it spirit from our Thought
Adjuster, and part from our souls. It would be great to know more about
that.

Michael: Yes, I think you can recognize a hierarchy of emotions. Some are
on what you could think of as a physical/animal-mind level surrounding
issues of survival, or procreation. Here you have fear, anxiety, lust,
greed, envy – emotions which you might consider the higher animals, like
primates, are capable of feeling. Primitive man was associated with a great
refinement of these up to purely mental ones connected with learned
behaviors such as altruism, selflessness, love and honor, loyalty. Many of
these are closely associated with Mother Nebadonia’s adjutants of mind as
well as being emotions and attitudes you can self-generate. You can choose
to be loyal. You can understand the benefits, both individually and
collectively, of altruism, of generosity. So these emotions are generated
on this level – greatly influenced by all your family and societal
conditioning. When you get to the spiritual realm you are getting into
feelings which are almost beyond what you might call emotion because they
are not so re-active as they are thoroughly creative and spontaneous, coming
from that mysterious and unfathomable fountain of creativity of all the
levels of personal beings from the Universal Father clear down to yourself,
that you yourself can not only generate but can tune into and contact. I’m
afraid this is a rather unfathomable and inexhaustible subject, My son, but
does this give you some notion of the different origins of different
emotions?

Student: Yes, I know it’s rather endless, but I’ve always wanted to be able
to give away an understanding of emotions. It seems to be so limited in our
high school level type philosophy. The Urantia Book has been a great help
in actually having the hope of tuning in to feelingly-experience values that
You commented about…the creative part of the spiritual ones being less
reactive is very nice and a grateful-producing way of thinking about that.
So I thank You for that.

Michael: I was suggesting that in a fully mature human being with great
spiritual creativity and contact, just because of the nature of your society
and its mass media, as well as memories of your own youth and childhood; if
you can go through your days with an open mind, contacting all these levels
and origins of emotions with a quality of recognition, you need not be
injured by the more negative or violent ones, nor need to shut down an
awareness of their existence. For that could be not only limiting, but
dangerous. This is where you gain so much, My son, by being
non-prejudicial, by growing ever more flexible and resilient within yourself
- so on a critical level you don’t kid yourself about what you are
confronting. You gain an increasing ability to let in the full person in
front of you, and then relate to that full physical, mental, and spiritual
presence, for both your sakes. This is yet another dimension to grow in, is
it not? It is another facet of what you learn in your stillness, in your
conscious decisiveness to live your life openly.

I think this is a good note to close on. We’ve had a rather vast survey of
emotions this evening. As you do open yourself more and more to your own
past, and touch upon your soul, so too you will realize that all these
stages of relationship to your emotions are still there. And this is good,
for you find yourself surrounded by all these stages, both in the children
and adolescents around you, and in the adults as well. So accept it all
with as much love and light-heartedness as you can muster. Then you will
find out about, and enjoy - letting go - and seeing God all about you.

Be in My peace. Good evening.





More information about the tmtranscripts mailing list