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==Heading==
===Topic: ''Being a TR for Yourself''===
===Group: [[Lightline TeaM]]===
==Facilitators==
===Teacher: [[Michael]]===
===TR: [[JL]]===
==Session==
===Opening===
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, it is such a deep and profound joy to tune into you like
this and be the conduit for your messages and advice--your lessons. Tonight I would
like to mention to all the folks who will come to hear or read this session that, even
after many, many years, the process still remains a mystery to me. So it’s something I
appreciate when, just before I’m scheduled to start, Michael or Mother Spirit will tell
me, “My son, just step off. We’ll be here.”
It’s why I encourage, and invite, and tease everybody to try this for themselves. You
can ask Michael and Mother Spirit to come through you. At least for me, it is different
than during my meditations or my prayers by either recording it or, as I did for a while,
writing it down. Just invite them to speak through you and start writing. For me the
thought was, “Well, Jerry, here I am. Just start writing and we will slowly teach you
how to set yourself aside and let some other spiritual being come through you.”
Like I say, it still remains a bit of a mystery, but I take what they have said and taught
so many times, that they are a part of us. They are part of our mentality. They are part
of our spiritual being right along with our Father, and by giving them voice, their
spirit a physical existence either in a recording or writing, this is how they do it. So
again, like I said, I invite everybody to give it a try. It is a wonderful mystery. Amen.
===Lesson===
Michael: Good evening, this is Michael and I wish to second what this t/r--this
transmitter/receiver--has just offered you. It is such a delight for Mother Spirit and me
to be able to come directly through one of our children, and we can vouch the same for
our mutual Father who has a presence right within you at the core of your being--that
he too can speak right through you, to you. And as was stated, this is true not only by
hearing us and him right within in your mind, it does give us an extra dimension of
expression when you either record what is coming through you, or write it down with a
kind of automatic writing, if you will.
This is such a help for your kind of being--your human kind of being--to give the
spiritual presences that are within you this kind of physical reality. It is not something
that you are automatically perfect at right off the bat but, like any other kind of art
form or creative activity, it will start as a combination including your own personality,
your own unique self. Yet you can soon learn to let another personal self come through
you more purely. Let some other autonomous separate entity come through you and
use your mind, use your soul to communicate with you.
As this transmitter mentioned, this process always remains a bit mysterious because
to such a physical being as yourself, a human being, spirit is this immaterial realm in
which you are involved. It surrounds you, and you yourself are a spiritual, creative
being. There is no ultimate separation between your spiritual personality and other
spirit beings who have their influence on you, and can even speak through you--which
is what I am doing right now. If you will, there is no true escape to Total Objectivity
just because you yourself are involved in everything you do, everything you experience.
This is why there is no pretense among this whole Teaching Mission, of all the dozens if
not hundreds of folks, of any kind of absolute objectivity. For this is something that you
as a listener or a reader are also involved in, even as you hear my voice or later read a
transcript of what is happening here now. Yes, those are ink symbols on a piece of
paper that have their own objectivity that I have been encouraging you to get involved
with. Yet every person who hears or reads that objective reality of a sound or writing is
involved in reacting to what they are experiencing.
This is so profoundly true that all of you have experienced yourselves, in getting in
discussions with your friends, the joy in that is in acknowledging and experiencing how
each one of you does take things uniquely because you are all unique personalities right
from God. All that you experience has at least some touch of yourself involved. And
because of this, because of some kind of Absolute Objectivity--you might say God’s
point of view--is beyond all of us, it is wonderful when all of us realize and acknowledge
that.
For one of the worse aspects of an overblown ego mania is the notion—a kind of
naiveté--that your own experience of reality is somehow totally objective and the only
way things can be seen, heard, or experienced. This is the cause of so much strife and
warfare, right from the individual level all the way up what you have now between
different cultures, different ways of looking at things. People are so vulnerable when
they first encounter this fact that they themselves are personally responsible for what
to them appears to be simple facts and objective reality. They have never yet
encountered a kind of testing ground of how much they themselves are involved in
everything they do. As soon as they encounter other philosophies, other cultures, other
ways of seeing things, whole different systems of value and meaning, they feel so
threatened by that, war breaks out.
Hopefully, wonderfully, over the centuries now, first with writing and now with all your
electronic media, so many folks can encounter other cultures and ways of looking at
things--other religions and whole value-systems. In this way they are moving from a
pure kind of ego-centric reality of only their own way of seeing things, to become aware
of the community around them, and their nation--their country, to different countries
and then the major different cultures--the Western, the Eastern, and so forth. They get
to more of a world-wide outlook. Then of course with your wonderful Urantia Book you
can even move to a cosmological sophistication and understand how different worlds
see things simply because they have had such a different spiritual history than Urantia.
You can wonder what it is to live on a world where for half a million years a Planetary
Prince has been loyal to Mother Spirit and myself, and to God, and they’ve evolved a
whole world culture that is so peaceful and creative, right down to every single
individual. As the Urantia Book mentions, if you were suddenly able to visit one of these
worlds also about a million years downstream in time from its first human beings--as
you are from your first, Andon and Fonta--it would be an unbelievable paradise
where people live to be three, or four, or five hundred years old because even the
physical bodies of these human beings have evolved so much without any warfare.
Everybody is so much in tune and in touch with not only with their own planetary
affairs, but because they never suffered the isolation of a world in rebellion like yours,
they’re almost nonchalantly in tune with the affairs of the whole Local Universe.
Each one of these individuals knows almost from birth--because that is the
nature of that world culture--the celebration of each person’s uniqueness. It’s the--as
you say--right up front acknowledgement how this very uniqueness of each single
individual becomes the wealth of all--when everyone is open to it! Then you have
whole world-wide cultures where each person’s uniqueness is not lost in some kind of
homogenized uniformity. Imagine your own world where all its different cultures and
religions are welcomed and freely exchanged. There would be no warfare of literally
killing people, or torturing them--setting them on fire or the most obscene things
imaginable--just to terrorize them: which is what your world is still undergoing today.
I say all this to give each one of you the determination to be open-minded. Fill your
soul with the greatest variety you can encompass because now, when you can go out in
the woods and with your modern communications carry on a conversation with
someone half a world away; or with all the competition of your television stations
competing with each other to present different viewpoints; a kind of world view is
available to you like never before. You can achieve a true inner sophistication
through being open-minded and curious. Through being humble enough to
acknowledge other points of view, your own point of view and soul just blossoms and
grows. You can have so much greater wealth within you of all your world cultures.
The very fact that Urantia is not so united but is so divided among nation/states and
belief systems, there is so much it has to offer you. You can become so soul wealthy in
this sense. So this is what I tease and invite you to enjoy by opening yourself to it.
Seek out those means whereby you get the greatest variety of viewpoints--in your
social and political life especially. It is how you become a citizen of the world and help
your own local community, your own friends and acquaintances. There is such a wealth
your world has to offer because it is so unique, because Urantia has been so wild and
bereft for half a million years of a Planetary Prince; and for forty thousand years now
there has been no physical Adam and Eve on the planet that you can go and visit, or
could address a true planetary United Nations.
By that very token, the very uniqueness of your world, there’s the fact that you have
the whole gamut of civilization still here, from the most primitive, isolated tribes still on
earth, to people living up there in the sky, living on a man-made artificial world circling
out there in space. And now through your wonderful space telescopes you have a big
eye on the whole universe.
This is all there to enjoy, my dear ones, so excuse me if I tease you with this notion of
being a creative, spiritual being. Realize your own creativity and use it to be open-
minded and fearless. Take in as many viewpoints as you can, trusting that you yourself,
with your own unique personality, can unite all of them right within yourself. So explore
unafraid. This is the adventure of being human, especially with such a variety of folks
on your world.
Now if you have any questions or comments, this is what Mother Spirit and I delight in.
We try to follow our own advice that way, for our great joy is the variety in our Local
Universe with all its different peoples in so many different stages of civilization, from
the most primitive to the most advanced, now--these several hundred billion years of
evolution which you too will come to know someday. So: go ahead.
===Dialogue===
Student: Yes, Michael, I have a question about Karma. It seems that on our world there
is a saying, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and Karma seems to be a
relative of that phrase. I was curious: how does the spirit world view our term Karma? I
know that our text, the Urantia Book, states that--I believe I’m paraphrasing--that all
error or sin must adjudicated at some point, and since this is a world of imperfection,
our curriculum--if you will--is born out of the mistakes we make. So that would seem to
be a good aspect of this word Karma. But still there is… Could you flesh that concept
out a little bit, please?
Michael: Well yes, my son. As Mother Spirit and I have taught, the concept of Karma
is a way in which people try to arrive not only at a physical cause-and-effect, but
also spiritual and psychological cause-and-effects that encompass both meaning and
value. It is often expressed as a succession of lifetimes, so you might say the
exoteric meaning of it is: from one lifetime to another there is a kind of universal
spiritual value operating. It’s a kind of justice, a profound justice in which what good
deeds you do enable you to have a better future--good Karma, yet what evil deeds
you do--say in the way you harmed others or yourself--have their consequences also.
Karma means that kind of Total cause-and-effect, a causality of not only physical
things—known through science—but both mental and spiritual things, in the dimensions
of meaning and value. It is how value persists. Underneath it all is a profound sense of
a cosmic, God-like Justice that obviously encourages people to live a good life so in
their very next life they can have a better go of it.
Now, very recently shall we say, with the advent of special disciplines like psychology
trying to get a grasp on the mental/spiritual continuity of individuals, Karma has an
esoteric meaning in which it goes not only from one lifetime to another, but from one
day to the next. Because at some point you lose consciousness and awaken a slightly
different person, and not only older in a physical sense, but with a greater soul of
experience, from day to day you reap what you sowed the day before. So Karma has an
esoteric meaning that if you live a good life, if you are kind, creative and productive,
this is what you will reap tomorrow.
What you mentioned before was, “An eye for an eye; and a tooth for a tooth.” This was
a very primitive kind of tribal justice that for a long time held sway. Because from a
tribal point of view, surrounded always by other tribes, there was a constant fighting
for resources, and perhaps for land itself--territory. Mother Spirit and I have teased you
with the notion that even little fish in the ocean are territorial, let alone intelligent
mammals, let alone people.
If a tribe did not immediately avenge some wrong against it, they would very simply be
enslaved by a superior tribe. It was a very hard and fast rule that whatever was done to
your tribe had to be avenged. Of course this also existed right down to a personal
level. If you did not stand up for yourself, if you did not avenge anything wrong done
against you, you yourself would be enslaved. So “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth” was a kind of justice.
You run into this in modern times in terms of one country against another, as I
mentioned earlier, and sometimes one culture or religion fighting another, all the way
down into what you call terrorism. People with certain belief systems, with certain
values, say it is moral to get some political effect by terrorizing other people, by doing
the most obscene things imaginable to them. Then comes the defensive reaction, so
this “Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is still in existence. This is where Karma, in
a sense, explains and resolves a continuity of cause-and-effect that ties right in with the
saying. Does that make sense to you. my son?
Student: Yes. I was thinking there is that phrase, “You are what you think,” and if you
harbor dark thoughts they seem to manifest somehow in health--a depletion of your
health. Would that be an example of Karma?
Michael: Well, very much so. The fact is you are a physical, mental, and spiritual
being, all tied together. Your modern psychology of the last few hundred years has
tried to approach this. You have a very popular book from a few years ago” “The Power
of Positive Thinking.”
I pointed out tonight you are a creative being, a creative spiritual being, and how you
conceive of things can either hinder you or, as you say, with enlightenment—with
light—can light your way into your own personal future. So very definitely how you
think about things, how you consider things, how open-minded or closed-minded you
are, definitely limits or extends your freedom and health. See how they are all tied
together?
Student: Yes, I do. That is very enlightening. That paints the concept of Karma with a
different coating. I appreciate your counsel on that. Thank You.
Michael: Well, as I say, Karma is a way people can see how, even in their own life from
day to day, how their behavior this day either opens up tomorrow for them, or not. As
for health, are they increasingly open and interested in nutrition, and not only the food
they were raised with in their family. For if you are open-minded to explore and
experiment and try different kinds of things, this can lead to more and better nutrition.
I’m thinking now of how we tease you with what you simply call “diet and exercise,” yet
so profoundly affects everybody’s life either for the better or the worse. This has to be
a continuous personal evolution. This is what your own Karma is. You can be open-
minded to try different things, experiment and have a truly scientific sense about how
you live your life in terms of diet and exercise.
On the negative side you can see how folks who are not open to this, but are just
following the culture of their poor unhealthy parents, have the same difficulties and
diseases that their parents have. Because they are not open-minded to something
different, this also is Karma.
Student: Well, thank you again.
Michael: This is where Mother Spirit and I tease you with the adventure you are
inexplicably involved in. So have a good sense of humor about it all. If you will
realize that God has a wonderful sense of humor, and you can enjoy it and share this
with him, it is one of the greatest gifts he can give you.
Because it gives you a little measure of objectivity, a little way of evaluating what you
are doing from an ever new and evolving viewpoint. The Urantia Book puts it: that
between your personality and your soul; between the part of you that is unchanging—
you will always be you—and your soul, the repository of your life experience: if
this relationship is not growing you are already dying, even though you are still
breathing and walking around.
This is why we encourage you to experiment, try new things, be open to new
viewpoints. Keep growing! This is one way you escape the bad Karma of the past
that you might simply have been born into. Keep in mind—always!--that all the
teachings of Karma are pointing to a way of escaping it, to get beyond the “wheel of
birth and death.” It’s what your Urantia Book simply calls using your personality’s
creativity to “get beyond the fetters of antecedent causality”--what came before.
It is how to get beyond the negative, terrible things that might have happened in your
past. They are always there, a part of your soul, yet they become a smaller and smaller
part compared to all the other growing good things you are encountering and doing and
choosing.
This is the challenge before you, and we tease you with the notion that this is going to
be an eternal challenge for your own good. You need not be forever stuck in some bad
situation between you and all the rest of reality. Exercise this creativity of yours in your
meditations and your prayers, and ask for help. Ask for a new way of looking at things,
a new way of handling things, because the whole teaching of Karma was on how to get
beyond it.
But where they could only see getting around birth and death, we can say from day to
day when you wake up in the morning, go into your meditation and reflect on what is
happening to you. This is what we call the “two-hundred-percent-ness” of life, of not
only having your original experience but reflecting on it. You can keep growing. New
things can occur, to try, to experiment. In your meditations, in your review of your life,
is where you get the sense of the Karma you have enjoyed up until now. You have to
know it to not be determined simply by what happened yesterday. This is another name
for eternity, an eternity that is worth living, worth looking forward to.
===Closing===
My dear ones, keep heart. Stay close to yourself. Be unafraid to reflect on your whole
past. Be open to everything that has ever happened to you, especially now that you are
older and wiser and can learn from it. Then see yourself opening out into the future, to
learn more and keep growing. This is what makes your future eternity a true heaven
and not just a hell of repetition. But enough teasing for one lesson.
Mother Spirit sends her love and I bid you be in my peace. Good evening.
[[Category: The Teaching Mission: Dialogues]]
[[Category: Lightline TeaM]]
[[Category: Michael]]
[[Category: JL]]
[[Category: 2017]]
[[File:Teaching_buddha_small.jpg|right|frame]]
==Heading==
===Topic: ''Being a TR for Yourself''===
===Group: [[Lightline TeaM]]===
==Facilitators==
===Teacher: [[Michael]]===
===TR: [[JL]]===
==Session==
===Opening===
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, it is such a deep and profound joy to tune into you like
this and be the conduit for your messages and advice--your lessons. Tonight I would
like to mention to all the folks who will come to hear or read this session that, even
after many, many years, the process still remains a mystery to me. So it’s something I
appreciate when, just before I’m scheduled to start, Michael or Mother Spirit will tell
me, “My son, just step off. We’ll be here.”
It’s why I encourage, and invite, and tease everybody to try this for themselves. You
can ask Michael and Mother Spirit to come through you. At least for me, it is different
than during my meditations or my prayers by either recording it or, as I did for a while,
writing it down. Just invite them to speak through you and start writing. For me the
thought was, “Well, Jerry, here I am. Just start writing and we will slowly teach you
how to set yourself aside and let some other spiritual being come through you.”
Like I say, it still remains a bit of a mystery, but I take what they have said and taught
so many times, that they are a part of us. They are part of our mentality. They are part
of our spiritual being right along with our Father, and by giving them voice, their
spirit a physical existence either in a recording or writing, this is how they do it. So
again, like I said, I invite everybody to give it a try. It is a wonderful mystery. Amen.
===Lesson===
Michael: Good evening, this is Michael and I wish to second what this t/r--this
transmitter/receiver--has just offered you. It is such a delight for Mother Spirit and me
to be able to come directly through one of our children, and we can vouch the same for
our mutual Father who has a presence right within you at the core of your being--that
he too can speak right through you, to you. And as was stated, this is true not only by
hearing us and him right within in your mind, it does give us an extra dimension of
expression when you either record what is coming through you, or write it down with a
kind of automatic writing, if you will.
This is such a help for your kind of being--your human kind of being--to give the
spiritual presences that are within you this kind of physical reality. It is not something
that you are automatically perfect at right off the bat but, like any other kind of art
form or creative activity, it will start as a combination including your own personality,
your own unique self. Yet you can soon learn to let another personal self come through
you more purely. Let some other autonomous separate entity come through you and
use your mind, use your soul to communicate with you.
As this transmitter mentioned, this process always remains a bit mysterious because
to such a physical being as yourself, a human being, spirit is this immaterial realm in
which you are involved. It surrounds you, and you yourself are a spiritual, creative
being. There is no ultimate separation between your spiritual personality and other
spirit beings who have their influence on you, and can even speak through you--which
is what I am doing right now. If you will, there is no true escape to Total Objectivity
just because you yourself are involved in everything you do, everything you experience.
This is why there is no pretense among this whole Teaching Mission, of all the dozens if
not hundreds of folks, of any kind of absolute objectivity. For this is something that you
as a listener or a reader are also involved in, even as you hear my voice or later read a
transcript of what is happening here now. Yes, those are ink symbols on a piece of
paper that have their own objectivity that I have been encouraging you to get involved
with. Yet every person who hears or reads that objective reality of a sound or writing is
involved in reacting to what they are experiencing.
This is so profoundly true that all of you have experienced yourselves, in getting in
discussions with your friends, the joy in that is in acknowledging and experiencing how
each one of you does take things uniquely because you are all unique personalities right
from God. All that you experience has at least some touch of yourself involved. And
because of this, because of some kind of Absolute Objectivity--you might say God’s
point of view--is beyond all of us, it is wonderful when all of us realize and acknowledge
that.
For one of the worse aspects of an overblown ego mania is the notion—a kind of
naiveté--that your own experience of reality is somehow totally objective and the only
way things can be seen, heard, or experienced. This is the cause of so much strife and
warfare, right from the individual level all the way up what you have now between
different cultures, different ways of looking at things. People are so vulnerable when
they first encounter this fact that they themselves are personally responsible for what
to them appears to be simple facts and objective reality. They have never yet
encountered a kind of testing ground of how much they themselves are involved in
everything they do. As soon as they encounter other philosophies, other cultures, other
ways of seeing things, whole different systems of value and meaning, they feel so
threatened by that, war breaks out.
Hopefully, wonderfully, over the centuries now, first with writing and now with all your
electronic media, so many folks can encounter other cultures and ways of looking at
things--other religions and whole value-systems. In this way they are moving from a
pure kind of ego-centric reality of only their own way of seeing things, to become aware
of the community around them, and their nation--their country, to different countries
and then the major different cultures--the Western, the Eastern, and so forth. They get
to more of a world-wide outlook. Then of course with your wonderful Urantia Book you
can even move to a cosmological sophistication and understand how different worlds
see things simply because they have had such a different spiritual history than Urantia.
You can wonder what it is to live on a world where for half a million years a Planetary
Prince has been loyal to Mother Spirit and myself, and to God, and they’ve evolved a
whole world culture that is so peaceful and creative, right down to every single
individual. As the Urantia Book mentions, if you were suddenly able to visit one of these
worlds also about a million years downstream in time from its first human beings--as
you are from your first, Andon and Fonta--it would be an unbelievable paradise
where people live to be three, or four, or five hundred years old because even the
physical bodies of these human beings have evolved so much without any warfare.
Everybody is so much in tune and in touch with not only with their own planetary
affairs, but because they never suffered the isolation of a world in rebellion like yours,
they’re almost nonchalantly in tune with the affairs of the whole Local Universe.
Each one of these individuals knows almost from birth--because that is the
nature of that world culture--the celebration of each person’s uniqueness. It’s the--as
you say--right up front acknowledgement how this very uniqueness of each single
individual becomes the wealth of all--when everyone is open to it! Then you have
whole world-wide cultures where each person’s uniqueness is not lost in some kind of
homogenized uniformity. Imagine your own world where all its different cultures and
religions are welcomed and freely exchanged. There would be no warfare of literally
killing people, or torturing them--setting them on fire or the most obscene things
imaginable--just to terrorize them: which is what your world is still undergoing today.
I say all this to give each one of you the determination to be open-minded. Fill your
soul with the greatest variety you can encompass because now, when you can go out in
the woods and with your modern communications carry on a conversation with
someone half a world away; or with all the competition of your television stations
competing with each other to present different viewpoints; a kind of world view is
available to you like never before. You can achieve a true inner sophistication
through being open-minded and curious. Through being humble enough to
acknowledge other points of view, your own point of view and soul just blossoms and
grows. You can have so much greater wealth within you of all your world cultures.
The very fact that Urantia is not so united but is so divided among nation/states and
belief systems, there is so much it has to offer you. You can become so soul wealthy in
this sense. So this is what I tease and invite you to enjoy by opening yourself to it.
Seek out those means whereby you get the greatest variety of viewpoints--in your
social and political life especially. It is how you become a citizen of the world and help
your own local community, your own friends and acquaintances. There is such a wealth
your world has to offer because it is so unique, because Urantia has been so wild and
bereft for half a million years of a Planetary Prince; and for forty thousand years now
there has been no physical Adam and Eve on the planet that you can go and visit, or
could address a true planetary United Nations.
By that very token, the very uniqueness of your world, there’s the fact that you have
the whole gamut of civilization still here, from the most primitive, isolated tribes still on
earth, to people living up there in the sky, living on a man-made artificial world circling
out there in space. And now through your wonderful space telescopes you have a big
eye on the whole universe.
This is all there to enjoy, my dear ones, so excuse me if I tease you with this notion of
being a creative, spiritual being. Realize your own creativity and use it to be open-
minded and fearless. Take in as many viewpoints as you can, trusting that you yourself,
with your own unique personality, can unite all of them right within yourself. So explore
unafraid. This is the adventure of being human, especially with such a variety of folks
on your world.
Now if you have any questions or comments, this is what Mother Spirit and I delight in.
We try to follow our own advice that way, for our great joy is the variety in our Local
Universe with all its different peoples in so many different stages of civilization, from
the most primitive to the most advanced, now--these several hundred billion years of
evolution which you too will come to know someday. So: go ahead.
===Dialogue===
Student: Yes, Michael, I have a question about Karma. It seems that on our world there
is a saying, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and Karma seems to be a
relative of that phrase. I was curious: how does the spirit world view our term Karma? I
know that our text, the Urantia Book, states that--I believe I’m paraphrasing--that all
error or sin must adjudicated at some point, and since this is a world of imperfection,
our curriculum--if you will--is born out of the mistakes we make. So that would seem to
be a good aspect of this word Karma. But still there is… Could you flesh that concept
out a little bit, please?
Michael: Well yes, my son. As Mother Spirit and I have taught, the concept of Karma
is a way in which people try to arrive not only at a physical cause-and-effect, but
also spiritual and psychological cause-and-effects that encompass both meaning and
value. It is often expressed as a succession of lifetimes, so you might say the
exoteric meaning of it is: from one lifetime to another there is a kind of universal
spiritual value operating. It’s a kind of justice, a profound justice in which what good
deeds you do enable you to have a better future--good Karma, yet what evil deeds
you do--say in the way you harmed others or yourself--have their consequences also.
Karma means that kind of Total cause-and-effect, a causality of not only physical
things—known through science—but both mental and spiritual things, in the dimensions
of meaning and value. It is how value persists. Underneath it all is a profound sense of
a cosmic, God-like Justice that obviously encourages people to live a good life so in
their very next life they can have a better go of it.
Now, very recently shall we say, with the advent of special disciplines like psychology
trying to get a grasp on the mental/spiritual continuity of individuals, Karma has an
esoteric meaning in which it goes not only from one lifetime to another, but from one
day to the next. Because at some point you lose consciousness and awaken a slightly
different person, and not only older in a physical sense, but with a greater soul of
experience, from day to day you reap what you sowed the day before. So Karma has an
esoteric meaning that if you live a good life, if you are kind, creative and productive,
this is what you will reap tomorrow.
What you mentioned before was, “An eye for an eye; and a tooth for a tooth.” This was
a very primitive kind of tribal justice that for a long time held sway. Because from a
tribal point of view, surrounded always by other tribes, there was a constant fighting
for resources, and perhaps for land itself--territory. Mother Spirit and I have teased you
with the notion that even little fish in the ocean are territorial, let alone intelligent
mammals, let alone people.
If a tribe did not immediately avenge some wrong against it, they would very simply be
enslaved by a superior tribe. It was a very hard and fast rule that whatever was done to
your tribe had to be avenged. Of course this also existed right down to a personal
level. If you did not stand up for yourself, if you did not avenge anything wrong done
against you, you yourself would be enslaved. So “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a
tooth” was a kind of justice.
You run into this in modern times in terms of one country against another, as I
mentioned earlier, and sometimes one culture or religion fighting another, all the way
down into what you call terrorism. People with certain belief systems, with certain
values, say it is moral to get some political effect by terrorizing other people, by doing
the most obscene things imaginable to them. Then comes the defensive reaction, so
this “Eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is still in existence. This is where Karma, in
a sense, explains and resolves a continuity of cause-and-effect that ties right in with the
saying. Does that make sense to you. my son?
Student: Yes. I was thinking there is that phrase, “You are what you think,” and if you
harbor dark thoughts they seem to manifest somehow in health--a depletion of your
health. Would that be an example of Karma?
Michael: Well, very much so. The fact is you are a physical, mental, and spiritual
being, all tied together. Your modern psychology of the last few hundred years has
tried to approach this. You have a very popular book from a few years ago” “The Power
of Positive Thinking.”
I pointed out tonight you are a creative being, a creative spiritual being, and how you
conceive of things can either hinder you or, as you say, with enlightenment—with
light—can light your way into your own personal future. So very definitely how you
think about things, how you consider things, how open-minded or closed-minded you
are, definitely limits or extends your freedom and health. See how they are all tied
together?
Student: Yes, I do. That is very enlightening. That paints the concept of Karma with a
different coating. I appreciate your counsel on that. Thank You.
Michael: Well, as I say, Karma is a way people can see how, even in their own life from
day to day, how their behavior this day either opens up tomorrow for them, or not. As
for health, are they increasingly open and interested in nutrition, and not only the food
they were raised with in their family. For if you are open-minded to explore and
experiment and try different kinds of things, this can lead to more and better nutrition.
I’m thinking now of how we tease you with what you simply call “diet and exercise,” yet
so profoundly affects everybody’s life either for the better or the worse. This has to be
a continuous personal evolution. This is what your own Karma is. You can be open-
minded to try different things, experiment and have a truly scientific sense about how
you live your life in terms of diet and exercise.
On the negative side you can see how folks who are not open to this, but are just
following the culture of their poor unhealthy parents, have the same difficulties and
diseases that their parents have. Because they are not open-minded to something
different, this also is Karma.
Student: Well, thank you again.
Michael: This is where Mother Spirit and I tease you with the adventure you are
inexplicably involved in. So have a good sense of humor about it all. If you will
realize that God has a wonderful sense of humor, and you can enjoy it and share this
with him, it is one of the greatest gifts he can give you.
Because it gives you a little measure of objectivity, a little way of evaluating what you
are doing from an ever new and evolving viewpoint. The Urantia Book puts it: that
between your personality and your soul; between the part of you that is unchanging—
you will always be you—and your soul, the repository of your life experience: if
this relationship is not growing you are already dying, even though you are still
breathing and walking around.
This is why we encourage you to experiment, try new things, be open to new
viewpoints. Keep growing! This is one way you escape the bad Karma of the past
that you might simply have been born into. Keep in mind—always!--that all the
teachings of Karma are pointing to a way of escaping it, to get beyond the “wheel of
birth and death.” It’s what your Urantia Book simply calls using your personality’s
creativity to “get beyond the fetters of antecedent causality”--what came before.
It is how to get beyond the negative, terrible things that might have happened in your
past. They are always there, a part of your soul, yet they become a smaller and smaller
part compared to all the other growing good things you are encountering and doing and
choosing.
This is the challenge before you, and we tease you with the notion that this is going to
be an eternal challenge for your own good. You need not be forever stuck in some bad
situation between you and all the rest of reality. Exercise this creativity of yours in your
meditations and your prayers, and ask for help. Ask for a new way of looking at things,
a new way of handling things, because the whole teaching of Karma was on how to get
beyond it.
But where they could only see getting around birth and death, we can say from day to
day when you wake up in the morning, go into your meditation and reflect on what is
happening to you. This is what we call the “two-hundred-percent-ness” of life, of not
only having your original experience but reflecting on it. You can keep growing. New
things can occur, to try, to experiment. In your meditations, in your review of your life,
is where you get the sense of the Karma you have enjoyed up until now. You have to
know it to not be determined simply by what happened yesterday. This is another name
for eternity, an eternity that is worth living, worth looking forward to.
===Closing===
My dear ones, keep heart. Stay close to yourself. Be unafraid to reflect on your whole
past. Be open to everything that has ever happened to you, especially now that you are
older and wiser and can learn from it. Then see yourself opening out into the future, to
learn more and keep growing. This is what makes your future eternity a true heaven
and not just a hell of repetition. But enough teasing for one lesson.
Mother Spirit sends her love and I bid you be in my peace. Good evening.
[[Category: The Teaching Mission: Dialogues]]
[[Category: Lightline TeaM]]
[[Category: Michael]]
[[Category: JL]]
[[Category: 2017]]
