1999-12-28-Philosophical Indigestion

Session

Opening

TOMAS: Good evening, children. I am Tomas, your Teacher. How wonderful it is to be here with you this evening, this delightful configuration of attendees to your soul matters and to the matters which fall upon you to address in your attempts to bring about reflections of His will through your decisions and actions in your very lives.

You have presented yourselves this evening much as children who have been at play and have worked up a good appetite. You have come now hungry to the table and are stuffing mouthfuls of philosophy into yourselves at such a pace as to bring on indigestion, and so it pleases me to be here in such a timely fashion as to be able to be with you, sit and chew a spell, so that some of these morsels of ambition and stimuli have an opportunity to find their rightful place in your busy, productive lives.

Lesson

Your efforts and concerns of late as reflected in your discourse this evening among each other is bearing upon yielding a fruitful planetary government for your siblings on Urantia, your fellow mortals. Yet in the framework of relative degrees of perfection, you can readily see how your appetite for a culmination of those plans, wishes, dreams will be in the formulating stages for some time, although it is never too early to look at what would present better images for civilization than those which present themselves for you in your world today.

We have said we have come to assist you all in the correcting of your many systems, even societies, and that these changes will transpire as a result by and large of the efforts of individuals comprising those institutions and facilities. It is therefore always appropriate to begin in the one on one configuration. It is a common phrase "let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me". Your season has recently sung of the nature of peace but it has a long way to go before it is realized in its populace. And so we continue in the vein that we began with, we in the Teacher Corps, and that is to bring about an awareness of your spiritual development and degree of devotion to the end that it will bring about the necessary ethics and values and policies that will enable your world to begin to develop along more enlightened lines.

One of the difficulties inherent in the mood that you present, that is, coming in as children who have played hard and are hungry and want food wherewith to fuel yourselves for further rambunctiousness, is that you forget there are other things in life besides rambunctious play, that in order to develop yourselves, discipline yourselves, it is also required that you be able to study and therefore understand what is involved in a civilization enhanced by a relationship with divinity for all.

The Master spoke of the foolishness of putting new wine in old vessels and you will find that in the formulation of the new order of things, there will be little upon which to build the foundation of the new government, but the values that have proven to be useful will be interwoven into the fabric of the new vessel of administration. Your discourses about community, your group ambitions to build effective community, your thrust forward in civil government and social mores in this new millennia have been on the forefront of your concerns, and so it is wise to remember that you are not the only ones who have come to the table searching for food to fuel your play, for this play of building a new world is a joyous work, a grand undertaking indeed.

I know you can all reflect upon when you were truly children in the flesh and you built a tree house or a tent house or a raft or some application which pursued your energies for the greater proportion of the day and even the season. The season upcoming will find many of you engaged in your investigations of building a tree house, a clubhouse if you will; or community-based situations that will try out your ideals of brotherly love and family values.

All of these things are in movement, in operation already, and we have been here such a short time, but when the spirit is activated and when the individual has been touched by that spark which gives them good orderly direction in life and faith in their purpose, their ability to act and convince and convert and apply and construct and bridge and produce and project are incredible, and as they are of the spirit and not of any personal motivation, they will be eternal structures upon which light and life can be built.

All of these wonderful outreach matters and constructing of a new way of life are dependent upon your spiritual condition. Always is the spirit the primal Source. The hunger of the people is ravenous, but lest they and you gorge yourself and stumble and fall upon your own desire to be of service, be mindful of the mota that "action achieves strength; moderation eventuates in charm" and it is the charming personality that will be able to prevail with men in such a way as to bring about the more lasting effects.

Are you open to discussion, gentlemen?

Dialogue

THOROAH: I was going to ask -- if I took what you said correctly -- I basically got the impression that those of us that are in this process right now are basically responsible for establishing the Kingdom of God within, for our planet, and as soon as the Kingdom of God within becomes reality for the people on the planet, then we will begin our planetary governmental stage and move into light and life, and basically we are here to be as much as we can from within and then live the Kingdom of God, and that's the way it's going to spread, and no matter how many people you tell about that, you can only influence those people on a one to one basis, so we all have to individually live the Kingdom of God from within in order for that to happen. Is that correct?

TOMAS: Essentially this is correct, yes. Your life is an extension of the divine life. When you ask for guidance, "Thy will be done," then you are able to act upon the light of truth and, yes, effectively live the kingdom ideals in your own life, and as this is reflected outward, you reinforce the spirit in others and thus you have aerated the soil in which you can plant seeds, and as that plant is raised up by the Thought Adjuster, by God, it will come to know the Kingdom and you will have come to know another brother, another extension of light and life.

When you can work together in respect of this spirit understanding of each other, it is then possible to work your miracles in the material realm because you have gotten guidance and you act according to that guidance. It requires a degree of individual self-mastery in order to effectively bring about self-government, but when you are individually self governing, and that is the theorum upon which to base your societal ideals, you will be able to discourse with others regarding this belief system in such a way as to be effective, and thus the Father will reign in the lives of his children and the government shall be upon his shoulders.

God and man need each other, and so you can work together, but God is the Father, the Employer, the Creator, the King, and in joyousness we serve.

SIVAD: Tomas, I had a couple thoughts, questions that I wanted to ask you. One of them that's been on my mind recently has to do with mitigating or alleviating the tendency to mistake, as it were, the teacher or the teaching or, in the case of our text, make a symbol of a book such that it usurps the value that the content that the book may offer to our lives, and I know that this tension is one that is always with us as material creatures and perhaps others as well inasmuch as balancing the experience of value with the form of its expression, and I have no doubt that you may point us towards a deeper embrace with the Father within us, but I was wondering if you could comment in any way that would assist in avoiding the dilemma which I described at the outset of this question, mistaking the -- as it's referred to in the Urantia Papers, anyway -- river bed for the river.

TOMAS: The propensity is for you to create God in your image, and to revere those expressions of God which are impressive as is the Urantia Book and the Holy Bible and the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous and any number of other potent forces that represent a supreme value to its devotees, and of course it is error to elevate a book to such a worshipful position, as it is error to elevate a teacher or a personality to a high plateau underserving of such unwarranted accolades. But as you say, it is a part of the human condition and I am in fact reminded of your human phrase "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" for although it is not necessary for you of enlightenment to promote these lesser values, it is in part appreciated how it is a lesser part of the problem than the thinking of the individual which would elevate such things to such high levels.

It is the thinking that needs corrected and it needs to be corrected at the source, and the Source, of course, transcends the books and figures. In this way many of your cultural errors have become mere form and will readily fall away when a more advanced approach hails a new arrival of a new way of life. There are many remnants of your evolution -- an example is the Catholic saints and the statues in representation of such saints. The Catholic devotees want their saints. They want these statuaries, and they want their beads to hold in their hands to help them realize the truths of their belief system, much like Gerdean utilizes the candles and your many peers place the Urantia text on a high pedestal, unable in many ways to be reached by the living experience of its message.

It thus is a facet of the human condition that is likely not going to go away, inasmuch as it allows you a physical reflection of that which you put stock in. The essential factor to bear in mind is that this is a simple representation of …. [Tape ran out. Turned over.]

I don't assume you are overmuch worried about this propensity to give adulation to the matter, so why do you ask?

SIVAD: Thank you for asking. The reason for my asking is my own need to appreciate the circumstances of those who may feel otherwise and bear more gracious tolerance toward them and cultivate a greater understanding of the breadth of methods that my siblings may utilize to draw near Our Father, without, at the same time, being distracted by some of these means.

TOMAS: If it is a mere distraction, it will not create a permanent problem, and if a person is truly seeking a relationship with Our Father, it will come to pass that the child will be brought back into focus on what is real. In many ways these children who find representations and symbols worthy of their adulation and worship present themselves as magpies and macaws, making a great deal of noise, creating a ruckus about what they have assumed as an acceptable belief system, which in fact may accommodate a few of their needs and hungers, but the Divine puts in you such a hunger for perfection that your lesser attitudes are revoked in favor of those superior attitudes which will enable you to grasp the greater reality and thus become more at one with your Indwelling Adjuster; indeed, that you and God may act more in tune.

And so, if you encounter a very vocal child touting the merits of his point, his belief system, let him toot his horn and don't attempt to hush him up or argue, because it will only stimulate the reality he has taken upon himself and is now charged, self-appointed, with convincing you of its rightness so that he can be assured of his intelligence and these are not your realm, this is not your job, to call him up short, or to attempt to lambaste his belief system, even though it may be to you flagrantly faulty, because the immature will hold onto their representations of reality with vigor, since it is a physical manifestation/representation of that which is on-going in their heart and mind, even though it may be imperfect.

And this, of course, is why you are encouraged to add to someone's belief system rather than try to take away from what they have established for themselves as a belief system, and if they are happy with their belief system, then let them pass by you en route to your next service adventure. But you do well to seek for ways to make wise contact with your fellow man. You do well to seek ways to engage him in meaningful conversation and value judgments, for these can stimulate the God fragment into making inroads into the consciousness and superconsciousness of the mortal of its indwelling, thus you have served God and your fellow man in one tidy and creative interlude of conversation.

Ah, the art of conversation, a most effective tool, indeed.