[tmtranscripts] NEC #47, May 26, 2015

[Roxanne Andrews]

PR

New Era Conversations #47 - Distributive Leadership; Personal lessons; The Correcting Time - May 26, 2015 
 

Machiventa Melchizedek
 

Topics:

Distributive leadership

A personal history

Lessons instructive to everyone

Need for additional mental health professionals

Homelessness and prison populations

Revenge, a cultural and ethnic issue

The personal intimacy of the Correcting Time

The complexity of amending this planet

 

TR:  Daniel Raphael

Team members present:  Roxanne Andrews, Michael McCray and a Student

 

May 26, 2015
 

Invocation

 

Distributive leadership
 

MACHIVENTA:  Good morning, this is Machiventa Melchizedek.  It is a pleasure to be here in your company once again.  Today, I wish to speak to you about "Leadership," leadership that is distributed, leadership that originates individually and the responsibility that follows that authority in that leadership.  I would like to reference a book that This One is reading, that was given to him by a friend who is an eminent business consultant with his wife, and the title of the book is:  Leaders Make the Future.  It is written by Bob Johansen and copyrighted in 2012.  We have spoken before about the military term that was coined in the 90's of "Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous," and has become known by the acronym of "VUCA."  This is the situation that you live in today; it has become more extreme in the last 10 years, and will become even radicalized in the next 10 years.  This book points to the necessity of seeing the larger picture around you.  

 

You who have read The Urantia Book and have followed the transcripts for the Teaching Mission and Magisterial Mission, and now these New Era Conversations have been given a grand macro perspective of your world and the universe, and your place in this world-and particularly in these times.  The Correcting Time is a program by Christ Michael to bring your world back into a state of harmony, balance, equilibrium, centeredness, groundedness and peace, and then onto social sustainability and the Days of Light and Life.

 

When you see the events immediately around you, in your neighborhood, your community and your city, county, state, province or parish become more radically unstable, it is necessary for you to remain centered in the presence of God within you, that source of ultimate eternal stability for the whole universe.  With that centeredness and your knowledge of the place of Urantia in the universe, and the plan of our Creator for the ascension of life, you will have an opportunity to provide a sense of stability, which can be interpreted by those around you as being of leadership.  Even though you do not direct people to do this or that, your sense of centeredness and composure and balance will provide the elements of leadership when there is chaos all around you.

 

Many of you are peaceful, loving and passive individuals in the larger perspective of your society, and this is quite normal for those of you who are not politically engaged in those activities, or who have chosen not to rise to the top of academia, or corporate America, or in some social organization.  You will be viewed as a sea of calm when all around you are tossing seas of chaos and change, uncertainty and ambiguity.  What we are speaking of generally is that you will have passive leadership; you will be a leader without being active in the acts of leadership.  You will provide that source of stability to those around you because you will have a sense of perspective about what is occurring.  You may feel uncertain about your own life in the immediate day, week or month, or how you will get by, but you will have a fundamental understanding of peace within you that will exude itself and be shared with others around you.

 

Yes, and there will be those individuals around you-very few in number-who will understand what is going on in the larger perspective immediately and generally, nationally and globally, to give direction to others about how to proceed, what goals to work towards and how to do that.  We have been providing you with a course in spiritual and planetary leadership through these conversations from Monjoronson, myself and others.  You, who have been reading these transcripts, have participated in a leadership program unknowing that you may be called upon to be leaders.  When you think of leadership in your culture, you tend to think of "the chief," "el jefe," "the boss," "the man in charge," the "President," "Chairman," and so on, but that leadership that will also be in trouble, as will be most people around you because they do not understand, or do not have the perspective that will endure.  People will ask you, "How do you remain so calm, so balanced at this time when there is so much chaos around you?" and of course you will share with them what you have learned from us in how to live your life.  Almost all of you have been practicing these elements of peace and stewardship and leadership in your lives from the very beginning of your lives, although some of you have had chaotic years and have found the peace through reading the transcripts and The Urantia Book, and other spiritual documents and books.

 

You will be quite surprised when your leaders act in ways that make little sense, and do not have the foggiest idea of what is occurring around them, and how to move forward, because forward will be almost like a thousand arrows pointing outward in a thousand different directions.  The way of leadership then becomes necessary to be distributed among all of you.  Your nation is not used to "distributive leadership" in times of peace or chaos, but this is necessary for every democratic nation to survive.  Distributive leadership comes from knowing how to live in a complex society in simple terms.  We have shared many of those principles with you.  The social sustainability design team, and the social sustainability moral validation teams are the mechanism for distributive leadership, where it is not thousands of individual leaders going about in thousands of different directions, but to teams of 5-11 people coming together to create leadership in their own community.  This is truly the best advantage of distributive leadership in team situations.  You have the combined intelligence and rational thought of a team, where individuals have assigned roles to help facilitate the accomplishment and fulfillment of some goal that you have chosen as a team.  The necessity of you initiating design teams within your community in the times of great changes will have a calming effect and provide hope to others who feel hopeless and directionless and leaderless.  You will not call yourselves leaders, but you will be a team of designers who are working toward some goal that you have chosen.

 

Through these conversations that we have had with you, we have exposed you to the calamities and cataclysms and chaos and crises that you are seeing around the world now.  And yes, you will suffer the same problems in this nation as others have and are and will.  It may be of a different nature, they may not be political, they may be climatic, they may be tectonic, or they may be volcanic.  Nonetheless you will have occasions where there will be no hope outside your own house, but you have been given these leadership tools to provide the basis to others to find hope in the union and commonality of your spirit, which you all share universally, and in your intelligence, and your experience, the lessons you have learned and the wisdom that you have gathered.  Yes, you will need times of reflection, even individual contemplation and withdraw from the team to find your center when all else around you seems so disruptive and chaotic.

 

What I speak of is not eminent; it is already here!  You are now leaders; you have been baptized with these difficult words that we have shared with you for the last "umpteen" years.  We have taught you how to be spiritually emotive; how to be spiritually centered; how to become students of your Thought Adjuster; how to live with others in peace and harmony; how to work socially with others to accomplish great goals that you couldn't individually.  We have taught you that the understanding of your life and living is to give God, your First Source and Center, experience that God does not have.  Your decisions to choose rightly are an indication of your intimate relationship with your Thought Adjuster, and growing into your personality, which is your gift from God.

 

Many of you have not wondered why you are reading these materials, why they hold your interest and at times you now wonder why they no longer hold your interest and that you find some of them distasteful, repugnant and unsettling because of what we share with you that has occurred, is occurring and will occur in your world.  Leadership:  You who have been reading these transcripts and have studied The Urantia Book will understand this leadership almost immediately.  There will be some of you, however, who will see this in political terms, and you will have divisive opinions and cause separation from others who have another idea.  This is the purpose of the design teams and that is for you to come together to share your ideas and opinions in a peaceful environment.  It is very necessary that you expose your beliefs, and particularly your assumptions that underlie those beliefs.  You will discover assumptions within yourself that you probably have never discussed, that are not even in your awareness, let alone having discussed them openly with others.  In fact, as has occurred so often when your assumptions were challenged, you became affronted by that question and became argumentative.  Now in the design team process, you will have that opportunity to examine your assumptions in a peaceful, inquisitive environment.

 

I am open to questions if you have any.

 

MMc:  Student, do you have any questions?

 

Student:  Not at this time.  I'm still absorbing all that Machiventa has been talking about.

 

MMc:  Very good.  Early in our discussion about mental health, you said that I could participate in the discussion very well if I could be transparent with our readers.  I read that as "if I was willing to share my story, or the problems I have had with my mental health issues."  Is that correct?

 

A personal history

 

MACHIVENTA:  That is correct.  You do not have to reveal yourself as a source, however.  Just simply refer circumspectly that you are intimately aware of, and that would be sufficient.  We are not asking you to expose yourself and undress yourself mentally in front of everybody; simply use some of your own personal experiences as a means of understanding mental health issues.

 

MMc:  I don't really have a problem in relating pretty much my life story to other people.  People that know me intimately have heard it, so I think I can tell the story fairly adequately.  It doesn't open up all the closets, perhaps, but enough so that people can see where I came from, and what I've had to go through in order to become who I am today.

 

MACHIVENTA:  The interest for the group is that this is instructive, rather than revealing.  What you tell the group must assist them to understand, and present it to myself in a way in which you can lead others into understanding.  Do you understand?

 

MMc:  Yes, I can share that.  I'm not sure if what I have prepared is what you would expect.

 

MACHIVENTA:  Try it then.

 

MMc:  Let me try what I've prepared.

 

My parents were born in 1918, both of them suffered from being battered children.  They were abused by their society, by their church, and by the times in which they lived.  In my own case, I was a trans-generational battered child-not because they necessarily wanted to make me battered, or they had any animosity towards me, in fact, I was loved a great deal.  It is just that my mother, who did the battering, was instructed when she was a child that certain things were proper and certain things were not proper, and she found that a very young child doesn't necessarily understand what a church feels is proper, or what she grew up with.  And so, I would be involved in doing something and she would become very angry and strike me.  

 

I never questioned what was happening in the world, or why this was going on, because she never related her religion or related any religion to me; it was one of those situations where she was working with a script and I didn't have any access to the script.  I grew up on a dead end street, and I had a few friends on that street, but I found that it was very difficult to make new friends.  My elementary school was right across the street, and in my elementary school, I started using the Dick and Jane Readers, and they didn't use phonetics, and I couldn't catch onto how to identify the words, so I was not able to read until I was in 6th and 7th grade, for the most part.  This set me back considerably from most people around me, and it was contributory to low self-esteem and depression-I didn't want to be a school.

 

When I started Junior High School in 7th grade, It was the first time I was off the block, basically.  I had to walk a mile to the bus pickup and it bussed me 30 minutes to the Jr. High School.  I was going through some tough times-physically, I grew 6 inches in 6 months, I had two kidney infections that basically put me in the hospital twice during that period.  I could almost see myself sitting out on the bleachers, away from everybody else; I could almost see myself dying there, killing myself, not wishing to go on.

 

For my 2nd semester in Jr. High School, they built a new Jr. High School that was about three quarters of a mile from my house and I could walk to that.  That relieved some of the feeling I had of being totally isolated, and my childhood started to become more normal at that point.  I could read a little bit, although I was still way behind everybody else.  I didn't get more that a C+ average all the time I was in elementary school and up through college, because I just couldn't perform; to read one page was an effort, to read 50 pages was a monumental task and took me days.  That's not the case today-certainly not the case today.

 

In High School, I met a girl that was more disturbed than I was.  We eventually got married and had a child; then very quickly divorced.  I was always angry; I couldn't get over the anger and feeling that I had failed and I realized that when I started taking out my anger on my young son, who was less than 2 at that time.  I realized that it wasn't his fault, it was my own, and that I should find some help.  I must have given a lot of information to a lot of people along the way that I was in trouble, but no one did anything to really help me until I volunteered for therapy and I ended up in a group of people that were very much like myself, people  who, through no fault of their own, just were not doing as well as they might because of their situation.  I say, "through no fault of their own," these people were not crazy; they didn't need medications, or heavy-duty psychotherapy.  Their problems were environmental, for the most part.  We spent about 5 years together, and during the last year, I was in a convenience store and the clerk picked up The Urantia Book from underneath his register and said, "You should read this book!"  So, I read the book.

 

MACHIVENTA:  (Chuckling.)  So you began to recognize that your Thought Adjuster had been of influence to you.  Perhaps you did not recognize it immediately, but now in retrospect, you can see how your Thought Adjuster was active in your life, and active through the clerk's life.  There are no accidents such as those, my friend.  Those happenstance coincidences are purpose driven by the mutual concerns of Thought Adjusters who relate to each other concerning their subjects, without the subjects ever knowing about it.  This continues and has continued and always will continue in all the worlds where Father Fragments are indigenous to individuals.  Please continue.

 

MMc:  During this last year of my being with that group, there were a couple of things that happened that were poignant:  The first was a vision:  I was standing on a beach with a large bag that was filled with my past.  I realized that I would take things out of the bag and examine them and play with the things in the bag quite often.  In doing so, I renewed that feeling of being helpless, being unable to cope with my past.  I picked the bag up and there was no weight to the bag.  It wasn't as if it was empty, but there was no weight to it.  The realization was that the past is the past; you must make your present into tomorrow for yourself.  

 

There was another one, a dream I had, and these are all my Adjuster talking to me.  Anyway, in the dream, I was in a village-it looked like the type of village I see in World War II, being bombed out.  There was fighting all around by individuals, artillery shells going off, bombs bursting, buildings falling down-I was scared and I left the village.  I found my way up the hill and under a large pine tree, and as I moved under this pine tree, I found a small spiny anteater, an echidna.  The echidna said to me, "Things are better with a hug."  The fear, and the worry of what I had just been through left me and it hasn't really returned.  The love of the Father is manifest all around me.  I try to tune into that as much as possible.

 

I left the group; I made a great deal of progress in the last year, since I started reading The Urantia Book, my progress was exponential after that and I left the group and went to Mexico to medical school.  I didn't have a problem in medical school in Mexico as far as grades were concerned; not only could I keep up with the rest of the people there, I was at the head of the class.  So, there has been a very big change.

 

MACHIVENTA:  And your relationship with other people?

 

MMc:  Much better.  I'm still very much a loner, but I do have relationships with other people that are close.  I have a few good friends, people that have known me for a while; I value their friendship.  When I was working as a doctor, a friendship with me was a double-edged sword and I could never quite figure out who were the people that wanted me solely for the friendship, or those people who wanted to take advantage of me as a doctor.  So, I didn't pursue making many friends while I was practicing medicine-at least among the general public.  I made friends among the doctors, quite a few of them.

 

MACHIVENTA:  Through the understanding of yourself, have you come to understand other people?

 

MMc:  Oh, yeah.  The practice of being a physician-I was in Family Practice, so people would come to me with all kinds of problems.  I think I have a fairly good understanding of people.  I don't tend to judge people very much, and so I sometimes get taken advantage of, because there are people in this world that are much more willing to take advantage of others.

 

MACHIVENTA:  But that only reveals so much about them, does it not?  (MMc:  Yes.)  In the Christ-like perspective is not to generalize that negative effect of those who take advantage of you, not to generalize that upon all people, but to see that this makes a specific statement about that individual, and that you remain with an open heart to accept others until they reveal who they are, and then to accept them as they are, in that state.  It doesn't mean you have to be mean to them; it implies that they just are there, and they are doing what is important to them, and you protect yourself or share yourself with them as you feel safe to do.  You are still in the state of growing, as all of you are, and almost no one is able to discern an individual walking upon the path, and to know whether their heart is closed or open.  Some day, you will come to that same state of Christ-like awareness, and it will be quite an "ah-ha" moment for you in your morontial life at that time.  To see others as instructive for yourself, rather than as objects of your disdain, but as objects of your affection-it is quite a differentiation to make, and that is the change, or the difference between an aspiring soul and a soul that is not aspiring.

 

So, in your life as you examine it, Michael, what lessons have you learned, and what is the wisdom of those lessons?  You should perhaps, only end up with a handful of lessons.

 

MMc:  The earliest lesson was on battered children.  During my parents generation, it was quite normal, I think.  The thought was "spare the rod and spoil the child."  And there was a feeling in the household that my mother grew up in that her father was the head of household and would dictate what he felt was correct to the rest of the household.  I think that my mother's generation would be really affected by those situations.  Our relationship began with her coming out of that, and then my brother was born 4 ½ years after me, and he was not battered as much.  I had a 3rd brother that was 5 years after that, and he wasn't battered at all.  My father didn't batter any of us.  So, there was a learning curve that went on with them that I think that learning curve has to go along with everybody-we have to understand that it's not kosher to beat up kids, because you only traumatize them.  So, the takeaway from that, there are a lot of ways you can end up with disturbances in your mental health.  One of the ways is to be a battered child, to be abused early, to be sexually abused early, or another is to be bullied.  These are all ways, and there are very many more ways that the child can be branded with fear, stigmatized and have that effect the rest of his life.  I think the takeaway is that we need to look at that very well as we go through life here; we need to make a change there.  We need to evaluate children and their home life early and correct these situations even before they happen, if possible. 

 

The 2nd one is my situation with school, that I hope doesn't happen today; that is my Dick and Jane situation, somebody should have seen that "this guy is not responding to the Dick and Jane books, we've got to find a different way for him to go."  If they had taught me phonics, I wouldn't have had any problem, but they were unwilling to teach me phonics, and so I couldn't read.  I persisted in that situation until I got to the point where I collected enough words that I could identify that I could read.  There are so many words in the English language that it does not seem possible to memorize them all without some way to differentiate them.  I find the premise of the Dick and Jane books doesn't make any sense to me, so the Dick and Jane books are still around in some of the cartoons, but they now teach by phonetics, so, kids shouldn't have that problem.  Reading has become a large part of the educational system.  I think as the educational system, you have to look at the kids at. it is not enough to grade a child to get a grade as pass/fail or ABCD.  You have to figure out, "Well, why did they get that grade?"  And what can we do to improve the situation.  I didn't see any of that in my school; I suspect that people are not seeing that today.