1999-10-03-Blessed Are The Shepherds

From Nordan Symposia
Jump to navigationJump to search

Lighterstill.jpg

Teaching buddha small.jpg

Heading

Topic: Blessed Are The Shepherds

Group: N. Idaho TeaM

Facilitators

Teacher: Rantarason, Elyon, Andrew

TR: Sheila, Ginny, Jonathan

Session

Opening

Rantarason (Sheila TR): Greetings. I am your brother, your friend, Rantarason.

Blessed are the shepherds who assist the flock in the direction of the Lord. In your willingness to serve, in your willingness to be an example, you are fulfilling the prayers of many who are losing hope, who have lost hope, who have lost direction, who are afraid to take another step forward. Your universal career asks of you to allow each moment to be given value, not just for assistance here to others, but for your personal career. Every single step that you take in the action of service has been gifted back to you, but more so your actions gift all of the universe and are indeed a proclamation of your own truth, beauty, and goodness, your acknowledgment of your relationship with your own personal God Fragment, your oneness with the Supreme.

As we observe with great privilege your desires, your actions, your love and encouragement, they, too, make a beautiful song with just as much effect on us as your song this morning made upon you. To watch you all together makes harmony and encourages us to, as well, desire the oneness, the silence. We are in much gratitude for your beautiful song this morning. I thank you.

Lesson

Wisdom

Elyon (Jonathan): Greetings, this is Elyon, your friend. I would like to present to you a few thoughts that address your discussion on disappointment and will use comments made by Machiventa last week. He expressed to you the perspective that your experience, your experience in general, for that matter, is the intervening zone between ignorance and wisdom, that ignorance is not negative in the sense of being bad but rather simply the absence of wisdom. As ignorance passes through experience, wisdom results, and that wisdom is a cumulative; you do not lose what is gained. This brings me to my point. Free will is the central, critical aspect of the entire mechanism.

I'm sure each of you recognizes events in your life when you gained wisdom, you have grown. Your insight expands. You even feel greater capability at addressing a recurring event with skill due to your wisdom, and yet you have noticed times when you have reacted, you have behaved, as though that wisdom were never yours. So it appears that you have lost that wisdom. I assert that the wisdom is yet present; it is the volitional center of the personality that has failed to apply itself.

Imagine being the young child you once were, just able to peer over the edge of a table to see objects near that edge that are within reach and to view objects beyond reach, yet visible. Let us call this table filled with objects that potential realm that has been dubbed "ignorance". You reach, you can grasp some, you experience, you gain wisdom. Others you reach for, they topple over and roll out of range. Here enters disappointment. Some of those objects are so beyond reach, and yet your desire to accumulate them is as strong as for those nearer to your experiential band, your zone of capable acquirement of wisdom. Applying free will such that you progress toward mastery of choice means that you learn to select between potentials near to you in attainment and potentials that are so off in the future that you must let them be until you have worked your way up to them, until you, like the child, have grown tall enough to reach further across the table.

I observe in each of you enough maturity and spiritual vision to realize that your disappointments contribute to your growth. They are not roadblocks to progress. You all understand that disappointments, like many other factors, are the tools that strengthen your spiritual muscles. You can avoid many disappointments by recognizing their proximity to your experience-ability.

To a young child eyes and ears that see and hear consume much of the attention. In the course of becoming acquainted with these senses, likes and dislikes develop. Feelings, values, are established, and as the child grows into adulthood, will develops. Selectivity, preference, and adaptability are acquired. This is the secret of happiness through all difficulty. You may see, you may hear, you may feel, you may think, but the will-center of the personality is the activator, and I mean activation not only in the positive sense of expression, but in its retiring sense of choosing no, choosing to abstain. This power of choice that resides within you all becomes your filter, the screen, whereby you can avoid recurring disappointment, having already acquired wisdom in the previous lessons, and permit those disappointments that will enrich your growth.

Your future is not only long in its eternity, but it is wide in its infinity. This eternity and infinity are receptive to but one thing and that is choice. Like the table of the young one who can barely reach across it, the universe is not graspable in one simple reach. You must choose your method. Do you stand on your toes? Do you pull up a chair? Do you fold down a leaf that you can reach better? These are your choices.

You are amply assisted. The Father Himself is present within, and a host of brothers and sisters stand ready to be of assistance to pass you some of those objects you crave that are not only your will but the Father's that you receive.

Sharing

I will also repeat another point from last week, and that is that it falls on your shoulders that you choose to grow. It is your responsibility, but we are a family on a universe scale that works in harmony. Be not hesitant to intermingle, to fellowship, to draw from one another's experiences, as you do in your weekly sharing at these meetings. You have witnessed how one person may have difficulty lifting another, but with ten people around one person, simply the fingers alone are enough to lift an individual. This is how the children of God function together.

I thank you today for hearing me. I can address your questions or comments. I do have many of my kind here who came likewise to speak to you.

Dialogue

Expectation

John: We have choices, yet we give our will over to the Father. This is confusing. We had a car that was within reach but the timing wasn't. We have been given gifts, surprises. I feel like a puppet, like you guys are putting stuff in front of us to help us grow. Maybe the key is to not have expectations in order to not have disappointment. We don't know what will happen with so many other forces directing things.

Elyon: You have well expressed the mechanism involved. You display your wise insight in recognizing the inner workings of not only your will but the wills of many around you. That ultimately is the will of the Father, that all things be considered in harmony. It is good to affirm and to pursue your desires, but to carry them to the extreme, as you say, expectation, is to interject the element of demand and to disallow the possibility for variance. Hope is not expectation. Hope relies in faith. Expectation borders on requirement.

Adjustment

John: I've worked on my book for five years now. 55,000 books try to get published each year; there's a lot of energy in that. There's hope but there's some expectation that we're not just spinning our wheels. Sometimes the joy and compassion leave; you get burned out.

Elyon: I will call your attention to a game you have developed on this world where you have little plastic squares in a frame, each one numbered and scrambled. These numbers, the goal of the game is to line them up. At first it appears easy; excitement is great; success is advancing quite well until you have set all these possible configurations into order, and the difficulty increases until at the end of your task you must, in order to accomplish the goal, shuffle around the previously established correct order to make the whole fall in line. In the case of your publishing efforts it may appear at times that what order you have progressed through to reach your current state must seem to crumble in order to shuffle the factors involved and attain the completed course. This I say to you, my friend, is where you are now. Even the title of your book is going through this shuffle, appearing to step back, appearing to go to square one in finding a title, but it is part of the repositioning of potentials in order to bring the entire result. Like this game of yours, it starts out easy and does increase in difficulty. So, when feeling at a loss as to the next course of action, observe in your near field of potential action what you can do today. Never lose sight of your future goal but know that the future goal is but yet another day, and this will help you shuffle these little plastic squares and carry you towards the finish.

Expression

Andrew (Ginnie): Greetings, this is Andrew. (Ginnie: This is a strange teacher for me, so I am having a little difficulty.) I am one who is working with the mechanics of inspiration. I assist those who try to share their insight with others in the form of writing, music, art, dance. I address you, John, as one who wishes to share what you have so assiduously pursued and are so eager to release. I address your statement about losing joy, that your enthusiasm is diminishing. Am I correct?

John: That is correct.

Andrew: The very nature of the arts is expression is some form, and this is what you desire. It is a form of action; your desire is a form of action, and to have that thwarted is very frustrating. But there are other avenues for you to share what you have written. Do you need a publisher's permission to share?

John: No. I've shared without a publisher, one on one.

Andrew: Very good. There are ways to share what you have written, maybe in smaller segments. I'm sure this group would love to hear some of it. You can release some of the enthusiasm, some of your eagerness, in this manner. Some of your frustration may be dissipated in this manner.

Everyone's thoughts and ideas and inspirations are valuable. You do not need permission to share them. I urge you to think of ways that you can make your efforts available in your own way, for you have put a lot of time and effort into this enterprise, and it is, indeed, worthy of an audience. You can share through your computers. There is no need to keep information secret. We urge all worthy efforts to be expressed in some form. I congratulate you on your dedication and urge you to seek ways of sharing.

Free will

I also have a word to the group about the power of your will. When you face a situation even as practical as choosing a car or choosing a book or choosing a house, that your will is supreme. Even the Father and all His assistants are subject to your will. The forces that you perceive outside of you are subject to your will. The one universal mandate that all of the teachers have is that they not interfere with your will. They act when you are ready and when you choose. The result, unfortunately, is incidental, even though you humans seem to place a lot of weight on the result. The gift is in your will. The gift is in the opportunity for you to choose that which you think is best for you. Even when the result is disappointing, your free choice is supreme.

I am touched by all of you today in your efforts to share your inspirations and your knowledge and your efforts to express yourself, because in the expression of yourself you are expressing the Father who dwells in you. Do not degrade self expression as selfish. You are expressing the gift of the Father; you are expressing the Father each time you express your deepest insights and feelings, for the Father participates in everything that is worthwhile and enhances the growth of truth, beauty, and goodness. I applaud each of you in your particular ways of expression, for you are each unique and very individual.

Closing

It has been a pleasure being with you this morning. I take my leave.

Tom: Elyon, I have a question. Last week Machiventa mentioned that, "Ignorance can be properly perceived as future experience." Can you expand on that please?

Elyon (Jonathan): I realize, Tom, that you were engaged with some physical disruptions at the beginning of my presentation today and would ask you to be patient and read the following transcript, for I have addressed this some already. But I would repeat a little for your sake, that your future holds great potential, and these potentials are not in your range of vision. As you ascend in the universe your vision enlarges, and more potentials come into view. But experience turns that potential into an actuality, and in the field of wisdom, ignorance is transformed. I use ignorance not with the connotation it often has of being dull or dim, uneducated. I use it in its positive aspect of potentials to be experienced and acquired. This all pivots around freewill choice for this . ...[tape flipped], that is, lack of experience into wisdom. There is the potential danger that, when you encounter the near edge of your realm of ignorance, when ignorance is beginning its transformation into experience, that you, like the word implies, ignore these potentials, that you can do yourself damage in delay in acquiring the lessons presented to you.

I hope this helps.

Tom: Thank you.