2005-06-27-You Are Living In A Renaissance Like No Other

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Topic: You Are Living In A Renaissance Like No Other

Group: Marin TeaM

Facilitators

Teacher: Nebadonia

TR: JL

Session

Opening

Dear Folks, Happy Forth of July weekend. Here's the latest message from Mother Spirit to cheer your souls. It's always great to feel Her from the inside-out, is it not? - reflected in your own recognition of what She's saying. Enjoy. Jerry (T/R)].

Prayer: Dear Mother Spirit and Michael, Tonight we would like You to know how we treasure Your gentle ways. You give us actual living examples of how beings with truly absolute power exercise it - gently and lovingly, inspiringly. You use Your power to inspire us to search out not only who we are in a conventional sense, but what we are, and the kind of open-ended future we are facing, never to be exhausted in an eternity of tomorrows. Amen.

Nebadonia: Good evening My children, this is your spiritual Mother, Nebadonia. I almost wish I could say, This is your sister - too, as Michael is your brother. But you can think of my affection for you as sisterly as well as motherly. I feel Myself to be so much a part of you and your lives. I feel Myself walking alongside you and enjoying your company. And so I am really delighted now that you are beginning to feel My presence. This is the way it is with not only fathers and mothers and their children, but with siblings, brothers and sisters. We just enjoy each others company.

Lesson

Identity

[There Is A Profound Sense Of Identity Between Us]

There is a profound feeling of identity between us, we who are of such different kinds of beings; we are both sons and daughters of our Eternal Father. So as we share in His creation, we are brothers and sisters. We can feel this delightful kinship, this deep-down realization that someone understands us, someone is sharing our life with us. And you are also blessed as children of God to have a fragment of His pure being right within you, informing your understanding, inspiring your decisions, then making a spiritual record of this partnership with you in the single life that is truly yours.

Existence

[You Are Existential In The Fact Of Your Existence]

How do we spend this time together? This is where your experiential being - being nodules of experience out here in time and space - most profoundly approaches being existential; self-defining your existence by what you do. For however you are just starting out on your eternal journey, you are fully existential in the simple fact of your existence. Though you may feel, at times, you are just some nebulous wisp of God’s imagination, this is just a passing, shaky self-reflection or perhaps a profound self-doubt that you feel the need to entertain. But this doubt will pass because you truly are. You are a fact of absolute existence and it is how you choose to manifest this reality of yourselves - what you choose to do, how you choose to behave, that is a constantly modulating fact of your existence, that your Father Fragment records as a shared journal - as your soul.

Reality

[Although Reality Is A Single Happening, Only God Himself Truly Experiences It As Such]

So you see a kind of constant transformation from experiential possibility - the potential for experience that you get to choose, which then becomes an existential fact as it happens. This is what is happening in this dimension of the present moment. A hundred and one possibilities are being rendered into a single reality happening. Once this has happened and has become the past, We have encouraged you to respect it and be self-aware as to how you interpret it because, generally speaking, this interpretation is necessary for your understanding.

Though you can intellectually think of reality as a single happening, which it is, only God himself fully experiences it as such. For we lesser beings it is a highly complex, I should say infinitely complex happening. This single reality includes millions of galaxies, trillions of inhabited worlds, each with their billions of human level type beings, and then a whole hierarchy of personal beings forming a unbroken chain between them and God, their Father. This is all actually happening right now. So to some degree your understanding of the present moment as it becomes the past necessarily involves some simplification. You pick out certain continuing threads of cause-and-effect, or other relationships, extending through time, and this forms your understanding of why things happened as they did.

Experience

[Attempt To Keep The Original Experience Separate From Its Interpretation]

So We have been counseling you to keep these two phases of your reality – your original experience and your interpretation of it - as distinct as you can. Cultivate the ability to relive moments of your past. Let them be present once again and once again experience all those hundred and one possibilities coming in from all the dimensions of your life. Feel again all that need for the decisions that you had to make to create the one thing that did happen out of all those possibilities.

This distinction becomes another addition to your understanding because it most truly comforts and forms a kind of companionship for your decisions now. You stay out of a realm of simple-mindedness which is a disrespect for all the decisions you had to make in the past. If you lose touch with how complex certain times past were for you, and what was involved in those decisions, they cannot help you now in the decisions you have to make today. Rather an illusion of how easy the past was, but only because it is past and settled, can mock you in all the effort required to decide right now.

This is a broad understanding you should be striving to accomplish. Fortunately, through your mass media, because you have so many channels of your television available, presenting so many different viewpoints, then too your computers and your enormously expanding abilities to handle such a volume of information; both are rapidly augmenting your understanding of history. This is not just your personal past but the past of your nation, your culture, even your entire race. Now you can look deeply into past events that once seemed so simple and obvious. You can approach your fellow human beings who had to live through those historic events and realize the courage, the determination, the loyalty, at times the desperation involved in their decisions. For they were facing what was impenetrable to them, as they made the decisions which formed the world you are living in today.

This is truly an appreciation, an increase in spiritual value. You find kinship with those who have gone before you and realize that, though they may have lived thousands of years ago, in cultures and human situations you can barely imagine, still they were as fully human as you, however incomprehensible to you may have been their encompassing reality.

Renaissance

[You Are Living In a Kind of Renaissance Like No Other]

For you living now: We hope you can also appreciate you are living in a kind of Renaissance like no other, even the one that goes by that name in European history. You are being offered the opportunity to expand so enormously into the past and get this greater understanding of what your forefathers went through - the conscious, knowing sacrifices made so you could have the fullness you enjoy today. What a blessing this is. You’ve often expressed how fortunate you are just to be living in this time of the Fifth Epochal Revelation to mankind, and now with the Adjudication of the Lucifer Rebellion, to be alive and aware of the end of a two-hundred-thousand-year spiritual quarantine of the entire planet.

Teaching Mission

[Our Delight In Inaugurating the Teaching Mission]

Can you imagine further, My children? Can you feel Our delight in being able to inaugurate the Teaching Mission? We can actually feel, Michael and I, this enormously expanding contact between Our sons and daughters on a human level, contacting their brother and sister Celestial Beings. What a joy Urantia is beginning to experience, so far beyond even what your delightful science fiction cares to imagine. For this is not just rocket ships cruising about the galaxy. This is the actual contact between beings who have just barely begun their journey into eternity, with older brothers and sisters –Celestial Beings - who have lived tens of thousands, in some cases, billions of years. Did you ever imagine this kind of contact across these eons of time, My children?

There are over three and a half million inhabited worlds just in our relatively young Local Universe; and this is all happening in the present moment. This is all real out there. Someday you will begin to approach Michael’s and My dimensions of being, but just now at this present moment We offer you this vista of what is in store for you. This is what We meant in our last lesson about there being no limits to your personality or soul.

You’ll keep growing and expand to encompass thousands of times what you do now. For there are thousands of worlds out there you will come to know – both evolutionary planets and the architectural spheres of Nebadon.

So be of great heart, My children. Whenever you feel a little faint at the day’s challenges, take a deep breath and heave a mighty sigh if you feel so moved, and step off. Take the next step. Michael and I and our Universal Father will always be with you to help you make that decision - where to go, what to do, as you transform all those swarming possibilities into the one, great, living fact of your life. You will always be in Our love.

If you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s wade right into them.

Dialogue

Interpretation

[Suspend Old Interpretations of the Past To Gain New Ones If Possible]

Student: Thank You, Mother. Once again You said just what I needed to hear. I do have one question, maybe several. I’ve been told I can change the interpretation that I made about a particular past event, to a different interpretation. I’m wondering how accurate that is, because my mind already knows the original interpretation that I put on it. Am I getting myself deeper into trouble trying to change an interpretation, or into any particular risk, with such a traumatic event, or even a pleasant one?

Nebadonia: What We are asking you to imagine, My son, even if you cannot yet fully do it: imagine setting aside the interpretation - however accurate or inaccurate, however appropriate or inappropriate - and take the time to start at the beginning. Feel for the pure memory of all that was involved that day or evening. Give yourself plenty of time. Don’t rush through things. Try to slow this past event down as much as you can so you can re-experience all those possibilities, all that impenetrability of not knowing what was going to come next. In other words, make this past event as much like your present as you can.

This is not easy because you have to suspend, of course, you already know how it will come out in terms of pure facts, physical facts of what happened. But also remember what you were thinking, what you were feeling then, moment by moment, not later but as things were happening. This is a special skill you will have to learn, but it is one that will stand you in good stead not only the rest of your life here on Urantia, but in all the days to come, beyond. We have pointed out that your present consciousness is not the same as your soul. True enough your present consciousness is super-ordinate. It is more than just you because it is shaped by your culture, by your schooling, by your training, as well as resting on the physiological basis of your health, your energy, your wakefulness or your tiredness, even the spiritual dimensions of your personality: all affect your consciousness.

But your soul is co-authored by a Fragment of God. Only by reliving as fully as you can the original experience can you most closely approach what your soul contains. To the degree you get a deeper spiritual awareness and can use the power of spirit - the originating, creative power of spirit - to bring that past event into the present, this very skill will enable you to transcend all the previous reactions and interpretations you had before. Now a present day (Student) who is older and wiser with a more enormous soul has the opportunity to see that past experience in a fresher, larger way.

Then by contrast see the previous judgments you made on that experience. Both of these will form a new understanding of who you were when you had this experience, and who you were sometime later to make the judgments you did - by reflection, now you are reflecting. These are two different things, and they are both there in your past. They are both part of your memories. Rather than complicating things in your life, this broader, more inclusive understanding of who you were at different times should help you trace the single thread of your personality as it became who you are now. Does this understanding help you, My son?

Student: Yes, it does Mother. One question that did come up: I originally made a decision about a certain event. If when reliving that event I change that decision, does that change the soul decision, the soul record I mean? Or are both decisions still recorded?

Nebadonia: Your last understanding is the correct one. Your soul is a spiritual transcript of everything happening to you, so it is both the events as you experienced them, and then whatever subsequent understandings and judgments - which are also experiences of yours. Your soul contains both, so if your present consciousness and understanding can see both, you begin to approach the content of your soul. Still and all, your soul also has this co-author of a Fragment of Absolute Wisdom.

Soul

[Sometimes The Soul Does Break Into Your Consciousness]

From time to time your soul does break through into your consciousness, particularly when you let it by being still of active, present concerns, and reflect. For most people this is somewhat shocking and they’re amazed that for a full four or five seconds it’s almost like science-fiction time traveling. Something self-complete just pops into your mind of how you felt maybe when you were, say, ten years old or so - just how the day felt, the air, the people you were around, the smells, the sensations. For a few seconds you are reliving some previous event of your life, and you get just the tiniest inkling of how enormous your soul is.

This is that part of you which is already in the Morontia realm, and will be so much more available to you when you awaken on the Mansion worlds. Do you have any more questions about this particular thing, My son?

Student: There will probably be several more that come up, but I will save them for another time, Mother.

Nebadonia: It is this profound relaxing We have suggested that allows these moments to spontaneously pop into your consciousness. And they can be so beautiful, so exquisite, you have to be careful not to be too greedy and try to capture them, for this closes off and ends the kind of relaxed peacefulness that allows them to pop up in the first place. This is also a facet of your self-forgiveness - both of the misadventures you’ve had in the past, and then too the overly-judgmental decisions you made about yourself afterwards.

When you truly respect and appreciate who you were at various times in your life, you may realize, in the same way you can forgive other people, that in a spiritual way you were doing the best you could. So open your arms with love to all these people you have been. And live in My love.

Student: Thank You, Mother.

Thought Adjusters, Communication

[Speaking To Your thought Adjuster]

Student: Dear Nebadonia, I would like your advice on asking my Thought Adjuster - more nearly a Thought Controller - ask for the creative maturity that makes it safe and reasonable - what we ask for. Please help me in that direction.

Nebadonia: Yes, My son, you can see this as a direct talking to your Thought Adjuster, and then a listening for an answer. We invite you to do this. It’s exactly what Michael suggested in terms of general prayer, either to Us or to God, your Father by way of your Thought Adjuster. Keep in mind your Thought Adjuster gets this name because He makes suggestions as your very thoughts, right along with your own, and these can be recognized from time to time by their startling appropriateness.

But another valid name for your Thought Adjuster is the Mystery Monitor, for this is a two-way communication. This is not only the wisdom and insight of God using this fragment of Himself as a means to suggest thoughts which you are at liberty to incorporate or refuse, it’s another way by which God experiences everything you do. Only, of course, His experience of you is so much more enormous than your experience of yourself - in other words, your self-consciousness.

You will recall from your studies that God creates and inhabits a kind of a personality circuit, which is a way of saying that God experiences everything you do. Any time you wish to talk with Him you simply direct your thoughts to Him. One of Michael’s gifts, as Jesus, was to encourage His brothers and sisters, and His disciples and followers, to talk to God; to set aside what folks at that time were told was a necessary, formal prayer, and just talk to God as the loving, wise Father He is. So this is what you asked, My son, about your prayers to your Thought Adjuster.

Then there is the listening, the profound relaxing of your own self-generated desires, even curiosity, in any specifically-directed sense, and just relax into a general openness. You can think: OK dear Companion of all my days, what is it You would have me realize now? - and just profoundly relax. Un-focus your attention and make room for what will come next.

Here, as I advised (Student), even though some startling ideas may come forth, just keep relaxing. Don’t stop the flow. Let it fill you to your heart’s content, My son. Feel the love involved and let it affect you. Let it further break down any resistance to this living truth. Let this Fragment of God heal you and reward your courage to open, by opening you further. And enjoy your surprise at what may come. Does this help you, My son?

Student: Yes, dear Nebadonia, it’s working already. I would also like to convey through You to my Thought Adjuster that I sincerely hope we experience this jubilee that is one of the hoped-for things by Thought Adjusters and Thought Controllers. So I try to state that openly to make it a formal petition and prayer for the pleasure of the jubilee of my Thought Adjuster and me.

Nebadonia: Well, My son, whenever you feel for the greatest truth among several contending notions, this is paying respect and welcoming with affection what your life-long Companion has to offer. Trust that the difficulty you have in understanding the part your Thought Adjuster plays in your life, is because He is so close you. He has been so much a part of the life you’ve known since you were self-conscious. Never doubt this Mystery Monitor, this pure fragment of God himself does experience everything you do, and He is making a journal of it. And then finally, remember too what you already know fully with your intellect, and are beginning to feel with your heart: someday you two will be one. So have confidence, My son, that you are being heard and you are sincerely striving to feel this contact. And be in My love.

Student: Thank You, Nebadonia, it seems to be helping my desire to be a better listener as well. Thanks for that extra gift very much.

Student: The thought flashed through my mind, as You said to (Student) and to (Student), that God experiences all the other things we experience, and writes everything down in a journal, so to speak. And if that is so, with no separateness between God and myself, then I am able to experience everything He experiences…at my level, the human level.

Nebadonia: Yes, My son, this is true with the provision you made there at the end. This is why I said that God actually experiences so much more of you than what you, at this stage - this very initial, beginning stage of your eternal life - are capable of experiencing, even about yourself. This is why We have been encouraging you to develop the skill and the technique for reliving even moments of your past. It is a matter of creative imagination for you now to wonder what your soul may contain. And We have teased you a bit with suggestions that the greatest content of your soul are all the other human beings you have known in your life, because each of them is a kind of infinity to you.

As you allow these past moments to pop up again in your consciousness - as you originally experienced them - so too you can once again marvel at this ungraspable quality of even those you have known so well, your mother and your father, your sisters and brothers, your closest friends. Once again realize the same living reality as they appeared to you in that present time, and marvel at how enormous God must be then to contain the living experiences of all the personal beings in existence, who have ever existed.

Student: The first thought that came to mind when You said how hard it would be for me to experience the infinity of God, as a human, the first thought was, I would cease to be human. I would like to spontaneously combust. I couldn’t be here, it would be so powerful, so enormous, so earth-shattering. In a sense, I couldn’t help but change and evolve. I couldn’t…this form couldn’t contain it for very long. Then when you talked about other human beings in my life, past and present, and seeing them as infinite potential, I see also the beliefs and perceptions that prevent them from experiencing that for themselves. And what comes of this experience of living in God, knowing that beyond that is that infinite potential?

So it’s interesting to see a human being, like my mother for instance, and seeing what limits her self-expression. But like You say, she’s only a thought away from being this potential. So it’s a lot of…

Nebadonia: Yes, My son, we are trying to express the almost inexpressible here. So Our words are fingers pointing at an infinity. You are quite right about your present human existence, which is why those human beings who fuse with their Thought Adjusters while still in human form are instantaneously combusted.

And too, this is a process of maturity. You start out as this little creature who can barely see or hear. You are not quite like puppies or kittens, your eyes are open, but it still takes you a while to focus and see things. So, of course, as a young child and then an early adolescent you see just the physical part of people. It takes a while to realize and accept amidst the need to feel secure in your own knowledge and control of reality, that every single one of these other people you meet is infinite. This is a long, long process of maturity, partly dependent upon realizing within yourself your own spiritual nature, before you can perceive it in others. And so, as you encounter people from the youngest children to the oldest adults, you can see this growth of self-awareness of a spiritual dimension. You can marvel that this dimension is there in a young child, it is simply not self-consciousness yet.

This is why a wise parent addresses their children respecting and granting them this full spiritual reality. It leads you to the fullest reality you can perceive in another, loving and respecting this infinity whether the person is aware of it or not.

Student: I think one does a great service to humanity, and the individual, by seeing them in this fashion, for it is how God sees us, how Jesus saw everyone. I’m sure on some level it enhances the spiritual growth and evolution…on some unconscious level, if I honor them such. Imagine if every human being saw another in that light.

Nebadonia: Yes, indeed. This is the one of the main purposes of Our Teaching Mission, to encourage this very perception. You realize within yourself your own Thought Adjuster, and then further you realize you can address this in another person. There is something in this other person which can recognize what you are saying, and reassure this other person from the inside-out of your good intentions. This communication is happening constantly so much more than most people realize. It comes across on the very border of consciousness, such as the phenomena as you walk down a busy city sidewalk, you tend to encounter your own expression.

This can be wholly unconscious on the part of both persons in the encounter. If you are feeling kind-of mean and grumpy and ill-at-ease, you tend to provoke that in others, and so encounter it. Whereas if you’re bright and sunny and self-confident and cheerful, others will just unconsciously tune in to you to catch some of your joy, and reflect it back to you. This is so misunderstood among so many folks. When they are feeling down it seems like the whole world is jumping in on top of them.

But you are right, My son, if you can see this unfathomable depth in another and realize you are addressing something infinite - both as their personality and also their Thought Adjuster, this Fragment of God within them, this is the loving respect that is transforming the world. More than anything else - all the thoughts and plans of societies and governments and their agencies, it is this person-to-person loving respect that will change the world. This is the bedrock on which everything else is based, and with this all else flows naturally. Without this nothing works. This is literally what ties people together.

(There was a long and peaceful pause here)

Nebadonia: Well, as Michael noted last week, it seems you are not only discovering this peace of His, but you are learning how to let [it] affect you. This is why it feels so free, so light and buoyant, so nourishing and playful. It should be popping up more and more as you go through your days.

Consciousness

[Some of The Eternal Questions about the "Why?" of Consciousness]

Student: I have noticed a lightness within my being. Something has shifted within my consciousness. But there are times - like before I came here - where I did feel a density, where I did feel my body was having a hard time. It felt really discomforted. I was going to ask about that, but this other idea came to mind.

Nebadonia: This is part of the eternal quest, My son. What leads to what? What causes what? Why am I the way I’m feeling right now? Because of the possibility of what you call denial, you unconsciously instigate a kind of vicious cycle where something is aversely affecting you, but for various reasons you may not wish to confront it or be aware of it at the present moment. Yet it takes energy to suppress the true cause, and so this leads to a further kind of depression. The only way to break this cycle is by allowing the true causes to come to the surface of your consciousness where they can be dealt with.

Even consciously putting off a decision until tomorrow is a vast improvement over not knowing what is causing your present discomfort or depression. Even a positive procrastination is a decision, and it has the chance of registering in your consciousness. Sometimes the discomfort has to grow to where you give it enough value to stop in your otherwise busy activities and search yourself for the cause.

Because there are a lot of little things that come and go that you wisely disregard, see this as a living process that is simply letting you know that there is something now that can no longer be disregarded. You slowly earn the self-confidence that, with the help of your spiritual companions, you can get to the bottom of things.

Student: Then You are saying I am in denial about something.

Nebadonia: Possibly. I’m just offering the suggestion that the way to find out is a matter of stillness, of allowing all the elements of this discontented feeling to arise. Don’t forget to use My love. Sometimes it’s a hard shell that needs cracking. You can review in the last lesson some of the reasons why folks get caught up in defensiveness or mistrust, with an inner feeling of breaking down, because it is confronting the unknown.

Student: A thought that came to my mind, that I’ve had to swallow a lot of myself with regard to the situation I’m presently in. And at times I wonder if that’s not healthy. Am I denying myself? It sure feels like it at times.

Nebadonia: Some of these things, My son, do await the passage of time, because what you describe as swallowing yourself is sometimes a necessary maturity and growth in self-control. Only the passage of time can tell whether or not it was required just to stay open and sensitive to those around you. In either case there is a necessity for forgiveness - the sense of doing your best and then trusting in the goodness of others; that you have done all you can and the situation awaits tomorrow.

So much of the future is impenetrable and, as We have reminded you, you are not infallible. There is no guarantee any being can offer you that you are doing the right thing. Some of this does await the developments of time so you can get the feedback, so you can take that next step to realizing whether you are doing the right thing or not.

This is the very nature of time itself, and the complexity you live in. The understanding of this is what gives you peace, moment to moment, and helps you avoid a kind of human anxiety that serves no purpose, but is possible to feel. Just do your best and leave the rest to God. We are all in good hands, My son. Student: I’ve been doing a lot of letting go and letting God lately, every moment I can.

Time

[Time Is A Singular Happening That Is Him]

Nebadonia: Well, this is teaching you an appreciation of the dimension of time. It is not some will ‘o the wisp type thing. Time is another dimension of God’s law. It is that singular happening that is Him, and we just open ourselves to as much of it as we can comprehend. And we go towards Him. As a human being you have within you a compass, a living compass that points directly at Him. The Fragment of God that lives within you proceeds from the very living heart of Paradise. And this Fragment of God knows the way home.

Closing

Just feel for it. Feel for what is the right thing to do. Even if you can’t do it, feel for it anyway. You have a Fragment of God himself pointing the way. You have His Son, Michael’s Spirit of Truth to help you in this. You have the dimensions of the Infinite Spirit pouring through Me as the very mind with which you experience your hard earned wisdom and express your thankfulness to God to be a part of this. Rest in My love. Good evening.

Students: Good evening, Mother…all of our love…