2014-01-16-Freedom to Choose

Session

Opening

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, thank you--thank you for us. And I deliberately mean that “us.” I feel each one of us can very genuinely and heartfelt say: thank you for me--thank you for this life of mine. But also: thank you for all of “us.” Thank you for these dear friends, these other people with whom I’ve shared my life. Now I have them and all our events, all that experience in my soul. I have them in my soul as they have me in theirs.

Thank you for all of us all around us--those ones we meet on the sidewalk in a busy city, or passing us on the road—on and on, out from city to state, to county, to this whole world, because I’m a part of it. I’m a part of the operation of this whole world and all the people in it. There is a family here.

Thank you for all the marvelous beings I’m destined to meet—the angels, the Melchizedeks, the Life Carriers; all these other sons and daughters of yours I get to meet, and know, and appropriate their reality. They too will come into a greater understanding and wealth of what my human reality has been. Thank you…thank you… thank you. Amen.

Michael: Good evening, this is Michael. Mother Spirit and I accept with a gracious humility your thanks, from all of you. We feel your prayers. We feel your worship, your appreciation for your lives. This is our glory of being your spiritual parents, and being so near you and a part of you. We do so love it when you acknowledge us, just to say hello: “Hello Michael.” “Hello Mother Spirit--Nebadonia.”

It’s the same as when you parents are so delighted when your children turn their beaming faces up towards you and give you that big smile. It’s the love in their faces, and their regard, their respect, their dependence upon you for all the goodness that you are capable of giving them. And there they are. They’re your children. They literally came right out of you. And their delight is your delight. Their trials are yours, their pains are yours. Their experiences, the ones you have together, are yours.

So you know how Mother Spirit and I feel about all of our children. This is our reason for being, just as we ourselves are our Father’s reason for being. This is all free choice. Our Father chooses to share himself with all of us, every personality, every unique being of the trillions of trillions of trillions of trillions. There’s no number you can put on it: it’s a spiritual thing--God’s creation of all these unique personalities that we know and experience as their very essence. But you are especially our children, Mother Spirit’s and mine.

Think of this very freedom that we feel from our Father, the way he cuts us loose, and the degree to which he does this. True, no one escapes God’s parameters of their particular order of being, whether you are a Creator Son of God, a Creator Daughter of the Infinite Spirit, a Life Carrier, an angel, a human being. Every order of being exists within his parameters. But within those, you are truly free. So much of your future of what you will continue to experience: this is your choice.

It’s a little bit scary, isn’t it, for a human being, to take upon themselves this responsibility for their own lives. And then further, through their connection of love, and respect, and honoring, to have their children’s lives, and their friend’s lives, also in their hands. Then they have the response from their children, and from their friends; and they can encourage that very ability so it’s genuine, so it’s honest, so it’s true. It’s the freedom that you give your children, and your dearest friends, so that you can truly have them: so what of them you put in your soul is truly them. It’s coming right out of their essence.

This is our Father’s delight, and why he gives us such freedom. He only asks of us--all of us--to be able to respond to each other; even, if we so choose, to respond to him too. Remember: you--as much as Mother Spirit and I--have him right within you as part of you. Though true enough, we are one with our Father in a way that you will spend some time growing into.

We are already “out here.” We have already crossed and connected with the whole of the time and space creation, this whole universe. Now it is yours to encounter and make it your own, and that depends upon your response-ability. Then what a delightful dance ensues, does it not, only because of freedom?--only because each of us, as a personal being, has that creative spark of his right in us. We can originate something all our own, and then share it. This is what we have to give to each other, something of our own. This is what we can get from each other, some freely-given something to have in our soul.

This is so fundamental. It’s so important that you understand this because it does answer the question: Why does God allow certain things to happen, shall we say, genuine evil--which I’ll define here as very intentionally and consciously knowingly, hurting another for the sake of some ego-glorification, some self-assurance, some sense of power. How can he allow that? How can God allow one personal being to deliberately and consciously hurt another? This is the puzzle for so many.

You’ve read your marvelous Urantia Book that goes into such enormous detail—more than the human race has never known before--about the Lucifer rebellion. He was the head of a whole System of six hundred-and-some planets who got an idea of rebellion in his mind, totally with his own creativity, his own creative spirit. He got the idea and he built upon that. Then he shared it with his lieutenant, and convinced a number of Planetary Heads to join in his rebellion, his deliberately going against all of God’s, and mine, and Mother Spirit’s way of doing things. He came up with a rebellion that has had such evil, it has no parallel in all of our Local Universe of millions of planets, of hundreds of billions of years of evolution and development.

So to understand, first of all: this was part of the Unqualified Absolute, the truly unqualified nature of Cosmic Possibility that this rebellion happened. It was possible. It was real. It happened. And it has been evil to an unparalleled extent over the last two hundred thousand years. You wonder: if God had the power, if I had the power just to squash the rebellion instantly, why didn’t we do so? Concerning many billions of otherwise innocent human beings on these rebel planets, even higher beings on the Local System headquarters, how could we allow this much suffering?

This is one indicator, and yet only a small indicator, of what we mean by free will, of our not stepping in and immediately squashing the rebellion, which even the Constellation Fathers—Lucifer’s immediate superiors—could have done. It didn’t require me. My Constellation’s Fathers had the power to do that. Why did they hold off until almost every one of the System’s celestial family had decided one way or another, with the rebellion or against it?

Only then after this maximum expression of free will choice was the rebellion, in a sense, squashed. Still, the evil created and established as a pattern has come right down into your modern day cultures of human beings killing each other, torturing each other, doing the most obscene things to each other in the name of God. This still exists on the poor unfortunate planets that joined the rebellion. This too is a facet of free will.

Evil is possible. People can conceive of it and then carry it out, again, as I defined it, as a very conscious, deliberate hurting of another person for whatever reason.

After your World War II, in which tens of millions perished in the most obscene ways, one finding of your Nuremberg trials was that evil requires no further definition than a lack of empathy, a breaking of the human bond of the most glorious things--of being able to share your lives and feel what each other feel. You can share that, all that love, all that delight, all that laughter and humor, all that joy. Yet to deliberately cut oneself off from that empathy in order to enable one to hurt another; and see that, and feel that power; and yet not feel the pain, not see the suffering, not know the fear: that is definition enough of evil. And it is a corollary of free will because it is undeniably happening.

And so when we use that expression “free will” it is to say you are a creature--because you were created--you are a creature of free will dignity. You are not just an impersonal aspect of physics and chemistry, nor even just the animal intelligence, the amazing intelligence of some of your highest animals. Consider the enormous intelligence behind the hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand responses that animals can give to their human trainers. Yet given the enormous intelligence that animals have, they are still not personal beings as a human being is. They do not have your creative spirit. They do not have your free will dignity because they literally cannot create, as you can right out of yourselves, something equally unique as your own personality. This, my children is the meaning of free will dignity.

This dignity gives you some choice, and so we’re coming full circle to: what do you want to do with this future stretching out before you into eternity? What do you want to have in your soul, to carry with you as part of you, forever? What is your possibility in this eternal now, because the possibility is real to the degree that you can realize it.

It sounds like a circular argument, but to feel it, to use it, to see that whole world out there, and the people in it, responding to you because you are responding to it and to them: that’s the joyous dance that is only possible with your free will, with your own creativity.

Then to feel that from another--to not only love, but to be loved--is worth the sometimes terrible price attendant to that free will, that creativity, that bringing something right out of yourself, and receiving something right out of another. This is hopefully how you will fill your eternity to come.

Will you/won’t you you join the dance, once you know the delight of freely sharing it? Won’t you learn how to tickle, and be tickled; to know joy and light-heartedness; learn how to let others be free in your presence? Yes, this all can be a little scary because you’re stepping off into sheer possibility. You’re acknowledging that full range of awesome possibility, but you’re reaching out unafraid to share your life with another.

So join the merry dance. Fill your souls with joy and laughter. Be genuine. Be one within yourself and, as you say, “right up front.” Have the courage to be yourself right on the surface.

Well, enough of our teasing. Mother Spirit and I do love to, if you will, dangle these possibilities out in front of you, for you to entertain and reflect upon, and even to live by--if you so choose.

Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, we can do that too. Part of our joy is the conversations we can have with you. So go ahead.

(To be continued with questions and answers.)