2002-12-06-Love in Action Simplify Christmas

Session

Opening

Daniel (Bob S): This is Daniel. Join my, friends, in prayer.

To those that created all that is, or will be, we, your children, with grateful hearts, open our minds, our whole being, to the words, the ideas, the concepts which the Correcting Time portrays. With these, my children, I ask a special blessing at this time in their lives, at this season of the celebration of the birth of Christ Michael, that these words may be truly indicative of the place to which they belong in their heart of hearts. May all of us here gathered realize the true blessing of this season in our heart of hearts. Amen.

Aaron (Bill): Let us be comfortable, friends. This is Aaron, but I am not the whole show this evening. I am here to greet you all, and wish you the season’s blessing, which is love in action.

Lesson

Christmas

Too often the birth of our Lord Jesus, as he is known in your culture, is a sentimental memory, and an ineffectual worship of an event so overladen with myth, ceremony and materialism as to be almost a desecration of Christ Michael’s bestowal. So my wish for you of "love in action" is the opposite of wishing you a sentimental and mushy experience of cultural comfort and religious sanction.

No, LaReen, I am not here to pick on you, or any of you. Of course, I am not here to pick on any of you. I am here to bask in your warmth, and assure you of my love and concern. I am still a part of the SE Idaho teacher base, and although I have not spoken recently, and am not a frequent speaker without my usual mouthpiece being present, this does not mean that I am not present nor interested in your wonderful family gatherings.

In a sense, there is no love that is not love in action. Love in action is mercy, and mercy has been the topic of your meditations, although we have called it self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others, as well as greater understanding which leads to that larger and more merciful love. The quality of mercy is a patient understanding, an expansive portrayal of truth, rather than a limited and stingy portrayal of truth. It is the difference between seeing the primitive man with his club and angry face and nothing more, and seeing the picture of the same individual facing a saber tooth tiger who is defending his family, his wife and children behind him. [1] A merciful understanding of the first picture of the man necessitates the expansion of the framework so that the larger perspective creates understanding of his true motivation.

Thank you for your guided healing prayer session and for the investiture of your love for this child, one of your own, a younger sister, who is indeed faced with great and challenging struggles, as well as her family. Your understanding and compassion for them is communicated and will be felt, and you will hear reports of their sense of your presence and your loving healing prayers. These things, these experiences of spiritual reality, are always greater than you can imagine in your limited and sometimes doubting frames of mind. Your text tells you that when the desire to express affection and love wells up within your soul, not to stifle it. And in contrast when the spirit poisons well up in your minds and attempt to poison your souls, that you need take heed immediately and stifle, or better, hand those over to One Who can take them and disperse them. Exchange the assaulted mind with the peaceful mind of Christ Michael, Who also dwells within you in His Spirit of Truth.

But back to the idea of not stifling affection and love. At the time these urgings come forth open the filters, the fearful filters of your mind, and let those feelings, which are not emotions but spiritual feelings, express themselves spontaneously by allowing the Spirit within you to flow. As the captain of the ship you are taking the advice of the Pilot and avoiding the rocks and shoals, yes, but setting your ship in the deepest channel. You will be sometimes amazed with the consequences of allowing this love that comes forth to be expressed! Sometimes the love that is expressed is tough love. It is the courage to ask the question that can open the mind of your hearer to their indwelling Spirit-presence. It isn’t manipulation or coercion. It is like applying oil in a rusty lock so that the key can turn all the way and open the door, whereas before the key was jammed and frozen due to the rust in the lock. Sometimes looking back on it you may say "I don’t know where those words came from" or wonder how you had that courage, or how you knew to say the right thing. True, you don’t know how, and you don’t need to know how, expect to understand that you allowed the love to manifest in your actions, in your words, in the look on your face and in your eyes, in the posture in your body, in the actual acts that you did of service for another. True love is always in action. It is always moving. Love is not just feeling, though it has a feeling component, of course, but love is allowing the movement through you, from God through you, to another one.

And so I wish you love in action in this season, for the love of God was "manifest in the flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth". Love reveals itself to another, and so the Father revealed Himself to mortals; and the Father continues to reveal Himself to mortals on all the planets in His vast universe of universes in the Bestowal Sons who come to every mortal planet. You know how highly honored Urantia is that its Bestowal Son was none other that its Creator Son! One in ten million was the chance of such an occurrence. The other Bestowal Sons do just as well, but it is somehow a great pleasure to have the One who not only bestowed Himself, but was also the maker and creator of His bestowal world.

I would counsel that this nation in which you dwell and are citizens of turn around in its practice of Christmas by simplifying rather than enlarging the element of materialism. I would recommend that, instead of useless or near useless and unnecessary, trivial gifts, although they are given with sincere motivation, that instead of these kind of gifts, your giving be more of love in action. Perhaps it is time to go back to the pleasure that people used to experience when they made presents for the loved ones and friends, when they did loving acts of services as a present rather than a package with ribbons and bows and paper. Perhaps the worry over the materialistic shock which this nation incurred will lead to the recognition of the true meaning of Christmas, and that relationships among people, peace on earth among men and women of good will, will be more greatly manifested. You all truly know what love in action means. Go out and give it away even as you have freely received, and so therefor, freely give.

Well, that’s my little Advent sermonette as you prepare for Christmas. I am open to interaction.

Dialogue

Learning

LaReen: Aaron, I need to go on the record. I don’t think of you as picking on me. You remind me of my task-master teachers, that at the time I didn’t appreciate but in later years came to appreciate and love, because they made me think and they gave me homework. That’s what you remind me of; and I love you dearly, and I miss you dearly. You don’t pick on me.

Aaron (Bill): Thank you, LaReen. Although I already knew that, I said that in jest to some extent because there is the fear that Aaron is going to "pull an Aaron on you," and have you guys do difficult exercises. (Laughter) You will observe, if you look back in my recent meetings, that I have been less aggressive in that regard.

However, I do accept your compliments with gratitude; and yes, some of the best teaching is difficult. Jesus was the Master Teacher, yet he struggled and struggled and gave difficult assignments. He re-taught and re-taught the same things because some things are hard to learn, and take a lot of effort in repeating, relearning, over learning, (beyond criterion learning as we think of it), so that when you are anxious and you lose 50% of what you used to know, you still have 100% left. Have no worries that I believe you think I am picking on you, because that’s too harsh a word. However, all of us teachers are learning to walk the middle ground between being too soft and being too demanding, since if we are too soft then we are not pushing you enough, and you do not realize your potential as quickly as you might; and if we too demanding we can cause you to withdraw, faint, throwing up your hands and saying that its too much; its too difficult. So we try to hold to that middle ground. Thank you for your comments. Do you wish to say anything further?

LaReen: Just thank you for sticking with us through thick and thin.

Aaron (Bill): It is my great pleasure. It is, for all of us in the teaching corps, our great pleasure. Comments on love in action, or other concerns?

LaReen: When you said forget 50%, but remember 100%, did that mean our Thought Adjuster picks it up, or what did you mean by that comment?

Aaron (Bill): I was accessing Isaac’s mental store room and referring to a psychological concept called "over-learning," which means you appear to learn beyond what is necessary. I say, "appear to learn what is beyond necessary", because most people when they are anxious have a drop in their recall ability. When you over-learn it’s like you learned 150%, and if you lose 50% you still can do it all.

LaReen: OK, thank you.

Aaron (Bill): Yes, you can research that, if you wish, in the literature called learning theory. It’s interesting. It isn’t a phenomenon with exists beyond mortality because anxiety is, for the largest part, a mortal experience.

Virginia: When you were talking about repeating the lessons, I thought of my teaching experience. When a child has learned something incorrectly you have to repeat it a hundred times, they say. My thought was that I have learned so much incorrectly in my lifetime that it will take at least a hundred lessons to make it sink in. (Laughter.) So thank you for your patience. I know that the teachers do a great job of encouraging us Thank you.

Aaron (Bill): I would comment on the apparently more effective learning that takes place from negative learning experiences than from positive ones, as it requires so many more positive ones to overcome the negative learning and relearn the lesson properly. It is an electro-chemical phenomenon that occurs when you experience a strong negative emotion: fear and to some extent anger and guilt, associated with learning something this is basically avoidance learning. In the case of punishment, you try and avoid the punishment, or you feel all the punishing effects. These negative learning experiences seem to lay down deeper neural pathways in the brain than the gentle, loving and encouraging kind of positive reinforcements so that to undo that learning with relearning takes a lot more repetitions. There is an evolutionary justification for this, of course, which is that negative experiences could be life-threatening. So the brain is designed to learn from "one trial learning", as its termed, a severe punishment. An example would be a child who burns their hands on a stove once may never touch it again in order to preserve them from being destroyed by fire or some other dangerous situation. Does that make sense?

Virginia: Yes, in fact I have often told my classes that they ought to be very grateful that they have pain sensors, because it is a protection, and yes, the reptilian part of the brain is "fight or flight". Of course learning negative behavior or negative punishers are one-trial teachers often, so the student can learn much quicker. The picture of a gentle teacher repeating the pattern to get any kind of a group learning was very interesting to me.

Yes, your text talks about the difficulty of the Thought Adjusters connecting with a mind that is so electro-chemically-based. The book is not blaming the individual for lack of motivation to love God and do His will. It is saying there is this inherent difficulty in the electro-chemical mechanism, in other words, the brain structure. Now you people are two-brained. If you were three-brained it would be much easier, but you’re not, so there is really no sense in thinking about that.

Virginia: Well, Aaron, when you said that I see this picture of the brain, and I see two hemispheres and I see the reptilian brain below. That is not what is meant by three-brained people?

Aaron (Bill): No, the three-brained mortals have another cortex on top of the two-brains, not underneath, as this is still the primitive reptilian brain, but another structure above. My planet of origin was three-brained, but that is unusual. It is a minority. It does give us an advantage in the mortal life of better spiritual connection. But have no fears, my friends, for once you leave this mortal sphere everything is equalized on the morontia worlds. It doesn’t matter whether you come from a one-brained, two-brained or three-brained mortal species; from an air-breather, from a water-breather, from a non-breather, all of us are spiritually the same. We all progress, but we all have different experiences which adds to the Supreme in its complexity and beauty. We are almost off the track with this sort of thing, but I know it helps you sometimes to realize that it isn’t simply your motivation that is faulty. You have a life mechanism which is designed for the reasons that I mentioned earlier, and yet, it does in fact present you with quite a challenge. Wouldn’t you all agree with that? (Group agrees.)

However, remember this. Jesus incarnated as a Urantia mortal, two-brained, and He achieved the perfect balance of His personality in just a few years, While you are not Creator Sons, now that He has gone before you, and not just you but before His whole universe, all mortals now have been given an up-lift, a supercharge on this mortal journey toward God and toward Paradise. Are there other individuals in this group who would like to ask a question or comment at this point. (Pause.) Very well, then I conclude that we are finished, and I will hand the microphone over to your teacher, Daniel. One moment.

Closing

Daniel (Bill): My friends, I am Daniel once again. Let us stand and join hands for our concluding prayer.

Let us bow down our hearts and our minds in worship and join the angels, the super angels of Paradise, as we face the great Central Shining where is the residence of the Trinity.

Eternal, infinite, unfathomable, loving, just, perfect Deity: we your creation, your children. We are in awe of You, and we are overwhelmed with thankful hearts for our existence and for your mighty and wondrous plan of love in action, creating the universes and allowing us to co-create with you. This season we are mindful of the great love of Michael of Nebadon, that He chose to incarnate here on Urantia to demonstrate Your love and to bring light into the abject, pitiful darkness then present.

Strengthen my friends that their hearts may not be dragged down by the continued darkness which seems to be so pervasive in their minds. May they, instead, clear away the cobwebs of doubt, confusion, sadness, guilt, fear, revenge, whatever blocks the light of truth, so that they may rejoice, like the birds in springtime, with that light coming down from heaven to be birthed in a manger and given to this world.

To you Christ Michael, we give our full allegiance, our love, our service. Be with us, as You always are, and make us more conscious of Your presence. In Your name, we, Your apostles and your children, ask these things. Amen.