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, 01:24, 28 February 2009New page: Image:lighterstill.jpg From a presentation at the Heart of the Message gathering, Loveland, Ohio, in 1997. For a complete file of the human and celestial presentations, email Jim Clev...
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From a presentation at the Heart of the Message gathering, Loveland, Ohio, in 1997. For a
complete file of the human and celestial presentations, email Jim Cleveland,
jcleveland@erinet.com.
by MICHAEL PAINTER,
President, the Stillness Foundation
==Opening==
First of all, I bow to the spirit within each of you.
It’s always difficult when I get these speaking assignments. Sometimes you prepare a topic
and you go in and the idea is that the other people don’t know that much, so you’re the
person who’s supposed to know something, and you’re supposed to convey those ideas of
understanding.
It’s a whole lot more difficult with a group like this because none of us are really teachers,
as such, for each other. We’re all just fellow travelers on the spiritual path. So all I can really
do for you is sort of relate my own experience and share it with you.
===Personal Narrative===
====Background====
I’m going to tell a story. It’s a story about a little bit of my understanding of things I’ve
learned from the Urantia Book and also from the Teachers. One of the things that’s helped
over the years is to look at other things, that it grows, it evolves, and everything goes
through different kinds of stages as it grows. And I look back at when all of us started this
spiritual search, and I sort of laugh sometimes and I wonder how it all got started.
I was always a person who wanted to know why. You know, why was life? Why did it
start? Where did it all come from? And so I was pretty much that real left brain and I got
involved in some religions, Protestantism, Catholicism were part of my experience growing
up.
But then as I got older and began to question, I began to read and devour books. There was
a sort of concept microcosm-macrocosm, the idea that each of us as an individual goes
through the same stages that even the society at large will go through in this process of
spiritual evolution.
So what happens is that some of us have been a little more spiritually pioneering, you
might say, than others.
And so we grew up in our traditions and there came a point perhaps, where you said,
“Well, there ought to be more. Is that all there is?” And so we went through that difficult
process of, sometimes of, shedding some of that theology, some of those doctrines, some of
those things that didn’t feel particularly comfortable, and we set ourselves out on this vast
sea of searching.
====Urantia Book====
The Urantia Book calls it that great philosophic maze of the 20th century. And we began to
look at all those alternative things out there. Those crystals and astrology and Eastern
religions and all the things that opened up to us that, perhaps, we had not really explored
before, and as we begin to pursue that little venture out on the sea, it creates a lot of difficulties
and adjustments.
There are those that our families and those that grew up and knew us, and there is a tendency
for them to want to pull us back. “Well, why are you doing that? Come back and
stay with us. We’re very comfortable here. We have these ideas, and stay with us here,” but
yet there is something that propels us, something that makes us want to keep searching for
that answer, searching for something more, and so all of us here searching through all this
philosophic maze finally came across this wonderful blue book, the Urantia Book, and my
heavens! it’s overwhelming! 2100 pages of this!
And we start reading and it has got all of these great answers in it, and it helps us understand
so many things that we could not put together before, and then
all of a sudden we start thinking, “Wow! This is great. This is all I need,” and we sort of
arrive at that point.
And sometimes in our enthusiasm we run out and we take it to all our friends and we say,
“Look here! This is it! We’ve got the answer here,” but then we’re kind of shocked because
all of our friends say, “Well, that’s nice, but I don’t know. It’s not for me.”
Why isn’t that enough? It certainly makes sense to my mind and it
certainly straightened out a lot of things for me, but I think what we have to realize is that
everybody walks this path; everybody walks their spiritual path, but we may not all walk it
at the same pace. We may walk it in different ways and at different times, and so one of the
things that we have to learn is to learn to respect each other and to learn to respect each of
our paths and allow each the time that that particular person needs to walk their path.
Sometimes I think of it as a young child. When they are starting to do something
dangerous, and they’re starting to reach over and put their fingers in the light socket? You
sort of walk over and you have a tendency to give them a swat on the behind and your
purpose is to sort of put the fear of God in them, isn’t it? Because they aren’t quite old
enough to understand what they’re doing. And so until they get to that point where they
can understand, you want to say, “Don’t do that!” and, as I view it, that is really the major
purpose our evolutionary religions have served for us.
What they’ve allowed us to do is give us some moral backbone, some moral framework,
some way of saying, “Don’t do these things until you get older and you can understand.”
The difficulty was, you get to the junior high and young teenagers, they get to a certain
point where they begin to say, “Why?” and unfortunately sometimes you fall back into that
old parental thing of, “Well, because I said so,” and that may work for a little while, but it
doesn’t work for a real long time, and unfortunately I think that’s what some of our
churches have done, isn’t it?
When we wanted to break away and we wanted to start asking “Why?” they
didn’t really have the answers for us. They just sort of said, “Well, do it, because I said so,
because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” And so that wasn’t enough and so we began
again going out and continuing our search.
Well for me, the Urantia Book was just a tremendous, tremendous find, and to this day —
and I’ve been reading it 24, 25 — almost 25 years now — still when I read it, it sometimes
almost brings me to tears for sometimes the new experiences of my life and the new deepening
awarenesses that I’ve had, things that I’ve read many times still bring great joy and I
see more deeply.
That’s what I meant and I understand it even more deeply. But then, and I’ve looked and
some of you know that I worked for the Urantia organization for awhile. I saw us with this
wonderful book and this great thing, but it didn’t seem to grow. It’s like what do we do
with it?
And so we kind of got internally focused and we had great fun coming and talking together
among ourselves and enjoying the fellowship and enjoying that sort of thing, but it’s
like we didn’t know quite what to do with it all.
====Teaching Mission====
And then about four years ago I got a chance to be exposed to Teachers, and that was kind
of an adjustment for me. I tend to be a little more the so-called left brain type, and I love
the books and the understanding of the “Why?” but I had done meditation when I was
younger, and it sort of brought me back to that, because we had a teacher named Welmek
and he said, you know, “There’s really two tracks that you develop upon on your spiritual
growth, and one of them is this understanding about who God is and about God.”
And I thought about that, “Well, yeah. That’s where I’d spent the greater part of my life,
searching through the books like the Urantia Book searching for this wonderful explanation
of who God is and what our destiny is and all of these kinds of things,” but yet I began to
think about it because he said there was yet another track.
There is another track which you must go inside and you must find the reality of God
within yourself. You must find the love of God within yourself, because in order to serve,
in order to go out and help others, you won’t do it unless you have that love, and if you do
it without that love, you’re doing it — remember how your church told you? the right thing
to do, do good works and you will get to heaven? You were doing it because you were told
that was the right thing to do. You weren’t necessarily doing it because you genuinely felt
within your heart you were actually serving God and doing His work.
And so as I began to think about that, he began to talk about this track, and he began to talk
— as all the teachers talk about this concept — of what they called Stillness, and in addition
he would talk about doing Stillness every day and he would also talk about learning to see
the presence of God in others, praying for others, and learning to serve others. All of these
things are important concepts that he began to talk about.
So it was difficult because he kept talking about Stillness and he said, “Every day I and all
the other Teachers we spend time in communion with God,” so as I began to think about
that, I thought, “Well, what does the Urantia Book say about all of that?” and I began to
think back to some of the things that sort of came up in my mind about that, and one of the
great lines we use on our little pamphlet here, it says, “the relaxation of worship, of spiritual
communion, as practiced by the Master, relieves tension, removes conflicts, and mightily
augments the total resources of the personality.”
And then there was this other great line from the Jesus papers and it said: “Of all human
knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he
lived it.”
Now, I can’t tell you how many times I probably read that statement in the Urantia Book in
different study groups and so forth over the years. But I finally began to actually think
about what that actually meant. First of all, you remember how all your English teachers
said, “Beware of those superlatives.” ‘All’ and those kind of things. Absolutes. Those are
very strong statements.
So I thought, well, for the teachers to say “of ALL human knowledge,” that’s a pretty powerful
statement, and I thought, well, what is the religious life of Jesus? And it came quite
clear. What did he do whenever he had problems? Whenever he had difficulties facing
him? He went to commune with the Father. That’s,what he did.
That’s what gave him that inner strength; that’s what gave him the courage, that’s what
gave him the understanding, the wisdom to go through all that he did; that’s what gave
him the faith to endure what he did. I mean, to go through spitting, humiliation, to have a
crown of thorns put on your head, and whippings, and all of those things. I mean, if any of
us felt ... we’ve had hard lives, sure, but nobody’s gone through that, and then to hang
there on a cross and look out upon the people and simply say, “Forgive them, Father, for
they know not what they do.”
That compassion, that love, that wisdom has to be derived from that inner relationship. It
won’t come just from reading a book. You have to go within and find that Source and that
love and that wisdom within yourself.
That, to me, was what a lot of the teachers were trying to do. It’s like, we had this wonderful
book that gave us that intellectual approach to understanding God, and while not all
truth can be contained in that book, at the same time, I felt that it was probably about the
most advanced book on the planet as far as trying to explain those kinds of things.
But now the Teachers were coming and saying, “Okay, you’ve got that. Now, do you want
to grow more? Do you want to move on? Then let’s begin that inner journey. Let’s begin
that process of going inside and finding that love of God because, again, that’s where you
will find the love that will motivate you to serve and to want to truly develop those fruits
of the spirit that you’re after.
A couple of other things from the book jumped out at me, and I remember the
people, endless discussions upon what is the will of God, and you know we always have
this process of taking a revelation and bringing it down to our human level. We take principles
that operate on a spiritual level and we bring them down to interpret them at the
material level. And so people would sit in endless discussions and say, “Well, I don’t know
if I should take this job or that job. I don’t know if I should move here or move there.” So
they’re trying to take that will of God and interpret it in terms of what they should do in
some material, physical way. And what dawned on me was this great summary sentence
from the Book. It says:
:“Doing the will of God is nothing more or nothing less than your willingness to share your
inner life with God.” And that was exactly what the teachers have been trying to tell us
through the practice of Stillness.
So I began to think, “Okay, the main message of the Urantia Book, if I were to summarize it,
is about personal religion. It’s about developing faith, that living trust in God so that you
can get by and learn to trust God for the guidance in life and not have to look to these
outside sources of authority. So it’s a movement from these outside sources of authority to
the inward source of authority.
====Synthesis====
And I think that is really the bottom line and the basic message of the Urantia Book. And as
I look at it, that’s the bottom line and the basic message of the Teacher Mission.
And so I thought, “Well, let’s practice and let’s do this Stillness thing,” and with the handholding
of the teachers and asking questions and then helping us through, we continued
this process for awhile, and then I got to thinking about it. “Wow, if that’s really the basic
message of the Book and the basic message of the teachers, that they’ve come to tell us that
to really grow we’ve got to find that inner guidance, to learn to trust God within us, why
aren’t the religions doing it? Did I miss something growing up as a Protestant? and then
Catholic? I mean, where are we going wrong here?”
And so what I began to see is that I remembered back — and I’m no scholar or no expert by
any means — but when I looked back at that list of what I had learned from that Eastern
meditative approach, well, they taught the relaxation and they taught the mental stillness,
and they taught the silence, and having done some of that, that produced great serenity
and even a feeling of blissfulness and some times even that sense of just being a part of that
cosmic consciousness feeling, but what it didn’t have was that personal feeling, that personal
relationship with God.
And then I looked at what we call Western contemplation, and they taught dialogue with
God, and they taught prayer and they taught worship, but they didn’t teach you how to
listen to God. They said, “Come to us, we have the answers. Say your prayers; we’ll give
you the prayers. Here’s how you worship with us in the congregation, and we have these
ceremonies and these rituals to take you through.”
So they wanted to give you that pre-packaged religious situation, and at a certain point that
worked, and it helped us all, and it’s part of our evolutionary religious perspective and
heritage, but why not blend those? Why not take the best of both worlds? Why not learn
to listen to God, but also why not learn to develop that relationship with God? And as I
thought about it, I said “That’s really what Stillness is.”
So my wife, Jim, Sussi, and another friend in Indianapolis, we sort of got together and
said, “You know, wouldn’t it be great if we could go out and begin to tell people about
finding God within? Because that’s what we felt was the basic message that we had been
given, and that was what would be more helpful to people than anything else.
You know the old story: give a person a fish and they’ll have fish for the day; teach them
how to fish and they have fish for the rest of their life. Okay?
Didn’t want to be the priest; didn’t want to be the minister; don’t want to be the person
who everybody runs to every time they have a problem and you have to give them an
answer. That’s a terrible situation to be in, but a good situation to be in is to try to help
people find those answers within themselves, and that’s what people really need. They
need to understand what that process is and begin to look within.
So we thought, “Well, let’s try that out!” and as we began to talk with people, we began to
see that some people liked that idea and they were interested in doing that, but they said,
“I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to begin.”
And so we began to think about that and we thought, “Well, what is it that Stillness really
is?” and we found out that most people’s interpretation was that stillness was that quiet
moment that you get into when there is dead silence and nothing is going on.
Well, that’s not the way I came to understand Stillness from the teachers. The way I came
to understand it is that’s just one phase of stillness. What Still-ness really is, is developing
a personal relationship with God, taking time to develop a personal relationship with
God, and that is what it is really all about.
So we began to say, “Okay, well, you don’t like to do steps because then people think
there’s only one way to do something,” which is obviously not the case, but then people
say, “Well, I need some structure, some way to begin.” So we said, okay, let’s blend this
east and west, let’s blend what we’ve learned from the teachers and The Urantia Book,
and we said, Okay, where does it begin? The first step is, you need to have some physical
relaxation. But even before that, what you really have to do is you have to decide you
want to build your personal relationship with God.
How can you build a relationship with anybody? Let’s say you meet somebody and you
want to have a relationship with them. What do you do? You invite them over to talk,
right? And when they come over, do you have the TV on? Do you have the radio blaring?
Do you have the kids tugging at your apron strings? No! You get a babysitter, you
turn everything off, you have them come in and you sit down and you say, “Hi, I’m Mike.
This is me.” and you ask them questions and they ask you questions and you begin this
dialogue. You begin this communication process. And what we try to say to people is
that there really is no difference.
First, you must decide that you want to try and build that relationship. That is most important.
Then, how do you begin? You need a quiet place; you need a quiet time. And you
have to make that decision that you need that. You have to tell your spouse; you have to
tell your children that “I need a half hour. I need a few minutes every day to myself for a
little quiet time with the Father.”
And so you set it aside and what do you do? The exercises that Peri took us through, learn
to relax, find your favorite easy chair. There are many, many traditions that teach breathing
exercises and sitting, and if all those things work for you and they help you, that’s great;
but if they don’t, just find a good old comfortable chair and sit down and relax. Okay?
And when you do, go through a little relaxation process. Try to get rid of all that tension.
Then the next thing you need to do is still your mind. What does it mean to still your
mind? It simply means tune out all the distractions.
When you invited this person in, you turned the TV off, you turned the radio off, you quit
thinking about what I have to wear to work tomorrow, where I have to get the car fixed,
how am I going to pay this bill. You put this aside for a moment, didn’t you, and you
began to focus your attention on this particular person, and it’s the same thing.
All you’re saying, when all of these thoughts — as the Urantia Book says, our minds are
naturally active — when all these thoughts rush through your mind, you’re simply saying,
“Hold on. I’ll get to you later. I’ve got someone here. I want to spend some time with
them, so kind of go away.”
Put your “Do Not Disturb” sign out and say, “Go away. I’ll get back to you later. I’ll figure
that out later.” And so then what you’ve done is, you have sort of quieted your mind.
Why? So that you can focus. So that you can put your attention on this person.
And at that point, you just sort of visually, mentally, in any way you can imagine, you just
say, “God, come join me.” And what happens when you begin to build this relationship
with this person is you begin talking. So we say at this point, “Well, start talking to God.”
And at this point we diverge a little bit, because for example in the Eastern forms of meditation
at that point where you quiet your mind the idea is to lose that ego, to dissolve into
the universe, to become one with it. Okay? We’re sort of saying, “No,” at that point —
after you have stilled that mind a little bit — now you focus your attention on God.
It’s not a passive process; it’s actually an active process. You are really focusing upon God,
and you need to see God in some personal way. He who created the ear, can he not hear?
God is not some nebulous energy, not some abstract. God is personal. He has personality;
we have personality. Personalities love and can be loved.
So you must think of God in some personal way, and even if it is the kind old man with the
gray beard, so what? It doesn’t matter. Picture it in any way you want, it doesn’t really
matter, but feel as if there is someone here, and talk to them.
What went on that day? How was your day? What problems did you have? What problems
did you see in other people? What difficulties did they have for today? Just begin
talking to God.
Then we feel that this naturally leads to the next step that we call prayer, and what is
prayer? Prayer is simply asking. There is this wonderful father, this person who loves you,
and so you say, “Boy, I think I really need some more patience in this situation. Maybe I
need some more courage.”
What do you need from a spiritual point of view? We all struggle materially, and my answer
to that is, if you think God cares about money just look at who he gives it to. (Group
laughter)
So I’m not into all the prosperity and all those things. So let’s forget all that and move on,
and let’s look at where our real spiritual treasures are that we build up in the kingdom. All
right?
What do you need for your treasure to grow? What do you need to build your treasure of
those fruits of the spirit? And your loved ones, what do they need? And the people we
meet in the workplace and in our families and in our friends?
Every day, we meet someone who needs some kind of help. Think about them and say,
“You know that person? I think they really are not feeling very well. Is there any way you
can give them an invisible hug? Is there any way you could show them some kind of a
better way to look at that situation so they won’t feel that anger and that frustration?” Pray
for them. And after you’ve sort of got that out, then you want to move out and into that place that
the Book calls worship. And what’s the difference between worship and prayer? Worship is pure thanksgiving. It
doesn’t ask for anything in return. And here again, you have to move above that material
level.
A lot of us sit there and say, “Oh, well, I’m not so lucky; I mean, I don’t have money; I don’t
have this; I don’t have that. Well, so what? I mean, we all struggle with those kinds of
things. I wish I could’ve been 6’8" and played forward for the Boston Celtics, but it didn’t
work out that way, so ... so be it. That’s the way it is sometimes, so look beyond that.
Have you never met anyone in your life that loved you, that cared for you? Have you
never felt the joy of helping someone? Giving to someone? There are good things in life,
and so what you do is, you begin to thank God for that.
And now you have that wonderful treasure of The Urantia Book that says not only are you
a beloved child of God but you’re going to live eternally. And you’re going to find more
joy and more goodness and more beauty than you can even imagine now. That’s something
to be thankful for. So you move into that point in which you thank God for what you have
been given. And then we suggest that you move into what we call the silent listening. And
the silent listening — maybe God wants to talk to you!
Have you ever met somebody and you sit down in a conversation and they do all the
talking? And what is it you say to yourself after awhile? Boy, I wish you’d kind of shut up
and let me say something here. Okay?
Well, remember that unfortunately you’re not going to hear God in this big booming voice,
but the point is The Urantia Book talks about mind and layers of consciousness, and the
more you open yourself up — picture God sort of way over there and he’s trying to talk to
you, but it’s very faint. And listen and see what you hear.
Maybe sometimes you hear nothing, but maybe two days later a thought comes into your
mind, and that’s his answer, or maybe you meet someone who says something to you and
their words are his answer, or maybe you find a book or somebody points out a phrase on a
page; you go, “Oh! yeah. That’s what I was thinking about. That’s what I was looking for.”
So God does talk to us, but not always in that big booming voice.
On the other hand, in that silence, you may sense words, you may sense inspirational
thoughts coming through, and if you do, enjoy it, because it may be some very inspirational
thoughts. It may be some guidance for you.
But whether you hear or don’t hear at that point, don’t worry about it, but just try to listen,
and if you find yourself distracted during that time, we urge people to say a simple phrase,
“Be still.”
Think of that as a command from your Thought Adjuster to your mind that says, “Whoops!
You’re kind of drifting away from me. Get back on track.” Or if you like the breathing
techniques, take another breath, focus on your breath, allow that to bring you back to your
centeredness and back to your focus. If you have a mantra, use it ... it doesn’t matter about
the technique. What matters is that you get back to that focus with God.
And then finally we call the last stage the embrace. And the embrace is the way to imagine
yourself as that love child of God. Imagine that God is actually reaching out and giving
you a big hug.
There’s a place in The Urantia Book that talks about, if your physical energies are stabilized
and if your mind is clear, there are moments when the Adjuster can do what they call the
“downgrasp of the Adjuster” and if you experience that, and you can experience it, it will
lift you to a state of bliss and love, no sense of time or place. It is what all the great mystics
of the East, of the West have tried to describe and say to people: “There is this ultimate,
wonderful, wonderful experience where you can realize that love of God”.
And it may not happen and it’s not going to happen every time, but then in most relationships,
you don’t have that peak experience every time.
Sometimes you have the average day, and then sometimes you have those really exciting
moments that happen in a day, and that’s the way this is.
====Spiritual Pracitice====
Welmek described it as learning to play an instrument. We all want to master the guitar, so
we pick up our guitars and we start strumming and someone tries to teach us the techniques,
and after a while, what happens? Within two or three weeks most of us go, “Yah!,
that’s too hard for me”
But if you stay with it, and you develop, what happens? Many days you go, “Well, I didn’t
feel anything changed within me” but some of those days you have breakthroughs, and all
of a sudden you play your first song, and then other times a new breakthrough comes and
you play something even more complex, and after a while, then after a while you can play
that instrument for pure enjoyment. And I say to everyone, that if you develop the relationship
with God, if you do as the teachers have said, take that time every day, in time it’s
no longer a chore, it no longer takes any discipline, it’s actually one of the very true highlights,
one of the true pleasures of the day, to spend time with God. To spend time in that
relaxation and in that enjoyment.
And my own experience is that if you do that, I read in The Urantia Book that God loved
me and I understood that, but I did not necessarily know that within my soul. This is that
other way of knowing; it is the sensing of the soul that the Book talks about.
We have that innate way of knowing what is true. And that sensing of the soul, that inner
feeling of the love of God — and believe me, if you stay with it you will begin to feel that
love of God — you’ll feel it with you all the time, if you stay with it and you keep developing
it.
And isn’t that what Jesus had? Isn’t that what gave him the courage and the ability to face
all that he did? He had that ultimate faith and felt that love.
That’s what the Stillness is; you have time to get refocused, a time to get recentered on that
love of God, to feel that love of God, and that balances you out. That restores, it gets you
back on the focus of what is important and what is real, and that helps you get through all
the difficulties which you find each day.
So we developed those steps. There’s no magic to it. We developed it in order to be able to
help people.
It doesn’t matter if you follow those steps; there’s nothing special about it. Although if
you’re looking for a way to start, it’s a nice way. It’s a good way, because it incorporates a
lot of the essential elements.
What is important is that you develop that personal relationship with God, because that is
the only place that you will be able to move from just knowing about the love of God to
feeling the love of God, and when you feel it, then you also begin to see it in other people.
And all these things begin to sort of fall into place.
The teachers do it every day. The Urantia Book says, “As you go through your ascension
career, you worship.” They enjoy worship.
Sometimes they get so carried away in worship they have to sound, what is it? the great
“foghorn” or something? from Paradise and say, “Whoa! That’s enough, guys. Slow
down! All right?”
So they do it everyday, so why shouldn’t we begin? That that’s the most important thing
you can really do.
So what we’ve tried to do here is say, “Here’s a little method. Let’s take what we’ve
learned from the book, let’s take what we’ve learned from the teachers, and let’s go out and
let’s just try to share it with other people. Because there’s a zillion books out there, there’s a
zillion gurus, there’s a zillion ministers and rabbis and everybody saying “we have the
truth.”
But we’re saying, “we don’t want to discuss the theologies with you” — although if somebody
is out there and they seem really interested, sure, we introduce the Urantia Book to
them, if we think they’re going to be interested in it.
But the real point that we’re trying to say is the thing that’s going to help you the most is
finding that God within, to learn to trust that guidance within.
When you have a problem, when you have a question, take it to God in your Stillness time
and ask God what the answer is. Ask God why there’s blocks. Ask God how you can
release those blocks. Ask how you can learn to love God even more, and believe me, there
is no greater therapy than that Stillness time because you are talking to The Great Counselor
of all time.
And all of those fears and all of those apprehensions — bring them up in the Stillness,
when you feel that love and when you feel secure, and allow them to surface, and ask God
to look at them, and you’ll see — Wow! That wasn’t so terrible! and it begins to dissolve
and it begins to fade, and so in that way God is helping us grow, God is helping us get rid
of those conflicts and so on that we’ve had, and the more conflicts we get rid of, the more
we become that free channel to let that love of God flow through us to other people.
Very quickly, we produced a few books and we produced a little tape, and they’re just to
help people get started. If anybody else is interested, this is nothing that is exclusive to us.
We simply said, “Everybody’s looking for a way to serve” and we felt this was one way to
do it.
If you like that idea and you want to practice it more yourself or if you want to take it to
other people, maybe these tools can help you.
We encourage you to come and be with us and we’ll be happy to share with you
anything we know, but if this is the type of thing that you find interesting and you want to
help other people, come and join us.
If you find other ways, for we all know that Jesus ministered as he passed by, so be it. It
doesn’t matter how you do it. This is one way. If you find this appealing, come join us,
and if you don’t, find your own way.
====Conclusion====
My conclusion would be simply this: if you were a parent — and most of you have been a
parent or at least a child at one time — I think that’s a safe conclusion — what is the most
devastating thing that you can imagine as a parent? Aside from, of course, the death of a
child. Would it not be, of course, that your child would never want to communicate with you?
That you would not any longer have a relationship with that child?
Can you imagine how hurtful that would feel? You love your children and you want that
relationship with them. Well, our Father loves us, and he wants that relationship with us.
And yet we go through each day too busy to take 15 minutes or 20 minutes or a half hour
out to commune, to talk with Father.
You don’t have to do it just at this time; in time you’ll learn to talk to him spontaneously
throughout the day, when situations come up and arise, and so in your Stillness you may
not feel a need to dialogue because you’ve already taken care of that little talk and you’ve
already put down some of that prayer for others, but always we say, include the art of
Stillness: the worship, silent listening, and a little time to feel that embrace.
And if you do that, you’ll strengthen yourself, you’ll feel that love and energy flow through
you and that’ll get you through those difficult trying times and that’ll keep you going
through those difficult things.
I thank you for your listening.
==Note==
FOR YOUR INFORMATION:
THE STILLNESS FOUNDATION is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to helping the
individual develop a personal relationship with God. Contributions are tax-deductible.
Address: 7840 Harcourt Springs Place, Indianapolis, Indiana 46260
President-Michael Painter
Directors: Marty Risacher, Donna Painter, Jim Cleveland, Sussi Rowland
[[Category: Religion]]
[[Category: Stillness Foundation]]
From a presentation at the Heart of the Message gathering, Loveland, Ohio, in 1997. For a
complete file of the human and celestial presentations, email Jim Cleveland,
jcleveland@erinet.com.
by MICHAEL PAINTER,
President, the Stillness Foundation
==Opening==
First of all, I bow to the spirit within each of you.
It’s always difficult when I get these speaking assignments. Sometimes you prepare a topic
and you go in and the idea is that the other people don’t know that much, so you’re the
person who’s supposed to know something, and you’re supposed to convey those ideas of
understanding.
It’s a whole lot more difficult with a group like this because none of us are really teachers,
as such, for each other. We’re all just fellow travelers on the spiritual path. So all I can really
do for you is sort of relate my own experience and share it with you.
===Personal Narrative===
====Background====
I’m going to tell a story. It’s a story about a little bit of my understanding of things I’ve
learned from the Urantia Book and also from the Teachers. One of the things that’s helped
over the years is to look at other things, that it grows, it evolves, and everything goes
through different kinds of stages as it grows. And I look back at when all of us started this
spiritual search, and I sort of laugh sometimes and I wonder how it all got started.
I was always a person who wanted to know why. You know, why was life? Why did it
start? Where did it all come from? And so I was pretty much that real left brain and I got
involved in some religions, Protestantism, Catholicism were part of my experience growing
up.
But then as I got older and began to question, I began to read and devour books. There was
a sort of concept microcosm-macrocosm, the idea that each of us as an individual goes
through the same stages that even the society at large will go through in this process of
spiritual evolution.
So what happens is that some of us have been a little more spiritually pioneering, you
might say, than others.
And so we grew up in our traditions and there came a point perhaps, where you said,
“Well, there ought to be more. Is that all there is?” And so we went through that difficult
process of, sometimes of, shedding some of that theology, some of those doctrines, some of
those things that didn’t feel particularly comfortable, and we set ourselves out on this vast
sea of searching.
====Urantia Book====
The Urantia Book calls it that great philosophic maze of the 20th century. And we began to
look at all those alternative things out there. Those crystals and astrology and Eastern
religions and all the things that opened up to us that, perhaps, we had not really explored
before, and as we begin to pursue that little venture out on the sea, it creates a lot of difficulties
and adjustments.
There are those that our families and those that grew up and knew us, and there is a tendency
for them to want to pull us back. “Well, why are you doing that? Come back and
stay with us. We’re very comfortable here. We have these ideas, and stay with us here,” but
yet there is something that propels us, something that makes us want to keep searching for
that answer, searching for something more, and so all of us here searching through all this
philosophic maze finally came across this wonderful blue book, the Urantia Book, and my
heavens! it’s overwhelming! 2100 pages of this!
And we start reading and it has got all of these great answers in it, and it helps us understand
so many things that we could not put together before, and then
all of a sudden we start thinking, “Wow! This is great. This is all I need,” and we sort of
arrive at that point.
And sometimes in our enthusiasm we run out and we take it to all our friends and we say,
“Look here! This is it! We’ve got the answer here,” but then we’re kind of shocked because
all of our friends say, “Well, that’s nice, but I don’t know. It’s not for me.”
Why isn’t that enough? It certainly makes sense to my mind and it
certainly straightened out a lot of things for me, but I think what we have to realize is that
everybody walks this path; everybody walks their spiritual path, but we may not all walk it
at the same pace. We may walk it in different ways and at different times, and so one of the
things that we have to learn is to learn to respect each other and to learn to respect each of
our paths and allow each the time that that particular person needs to walk their path.
Sometimes I think of it as a young child. When they are starting to do something
dangerous, and they’re starting to reach over and put their fingers in the light socket? You
sort of walk over and you have a tendency to give them a swat on the behind and your
purpose is to sort of put the fear of God in them, isn’t it? Because they aren’t quite old
enough to understand what they’re doing. And so until they get to that point where they
can understand, you want to say, “Don’t do that!” and, as I view it, that is really the major
purpose our evolutionary religions have served for us.
What they’ve allowed us to do is give us some moral backbone, some moral framework,
some way of saying, “Don’t do these things until you get older and you can understand.”
The difficulty was, you get to the junior high and young teenagers, they get to a certain
point where they begin to say, “Why?” and unfortunately sometimes you fall back into that
old parental thing of, “Well, because I said so,” and that may work for a little while, but it
doesn’t work for a real long time, and unfortunately I think that’s what some of our
churches have done, isn’t it?
When we wanted to break away and we wanted to start asking “Why?” they
didn’t really have the answers for us. They just sort of said, “Well, do it, because I said so,
because that’s the way it’s supposed to be.” And so that wasn’t enough and so we began
again going out and continuing our search.
Well for me, the Urantia Book was just a tremendous, tremendous find, and to this day —
and I’ve been reading it 24, 25 — almost 25 years now — still when I read it, it sometimes
almost brings me to tears for sometimes the new experiences of my life and the new deepening
awarenesses that I’ve had, things that I’ve read many times still bring great joy and I
see more deeply.
That’s what I meant and I understand it even more deeply. But then, and I’ve looked and
some of you know that I worked for the Urantia organization for awhile. I saw us with this
wonderful book and this great thing, but it didn’t seem to grow. It’s like what do we do
with it?
And so we kind of got internally focused and we had great fun coming and talking together
among ourselves and enjoying the fellowship and enjoying that sort of thing, but it’s
like we didn’t know quite what to do with it all.
====Teaching Mission====
And then about four years ago I got a chance to be exposed to Teachers, and that was kind
of an adjustment for me. I tend to be a little more the so-called left brain type, and I love
the books and the understanding of the “Why?” but I had done meditation when I was
younger, and it sort of brought me back to that, because we had a teacher named Welmek
and he said, you know, “There’s really two tracks that you develop upon on your spiritual
growth, and one of them is this understanding about who God is and about God.”
And I thought about that, “Well, yeah. That’s where I’d spent the greater part of my life,
searching through the books like the Urantia Book searching for this wonderful explanation
of who God is and what our destiny is and all of these kinds of things,” but yet I began to
think about it because he said there was yet another track.
There is another track which you must go inside and you must find the reality of God
within yourself. You must find the love of God within yourself, because in order to serve,
in order to go out and help others, you won’t do it unless you have that love, and if you do
it without that love, you’re doing it — remember how your church told you? the right thing
to do, do good works and you will get to heaven? You were doing it because you were told
that was the right thing to do. You weren’t necessarily doing it because you genuinely felt
within your heart you were actually serving God and doing His work.
And so as I began to think about that, he began to talk about this track, and he began to talk
— as all the teachers talk about this concept — of what they called Stillness, and in addition
he would talk about doing Stillness every day and he would also talk about learning to see
the presence of God in others, praying for others, and learning to serve others. All of these
things are important concepts that he began to talk about.
So it was difficult because he kept talking about Stillness and he said, “Every day I and all
the other Teachers we spend time in communion with God,” so as I began to think about
that, I thought, “Well, what does the Urantia Book say about all of that?” and I began to
think back to some of the things that sort of came up in my mind about that, and one of the
great lines we use on our little pamphlet here, it says, “the relaxation of worship, of spiritual
communion, as practiced by the Master, relieves tension, removes conflicts, and mightily
augments the total resources of the personality.”
And then there was this other great line from the Jesus papers and it said: “Of all human
knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he
lived it.”
Now, I can’t tell you how many times I probably read that statement in the Urantia Book in
different study groups and so forth over the years. But I finally began to actually think
about what that actually meant. First of all, you remember how all your English teachers
said, “Beware of those superlatives.” ‘All’ and those kind of things. Absolutes. Those are
very strong statements.
So I thought, well, for the teachers to say “of ALL human knowledge,” that’s a pretty powerful
statement, and I thought, well, what is the religious life of Jesus? And it came quite
clear. What did he do whenever he had problems? Whenever he had difficulties facing
him? He went to commune with the Father. That’s,what he did.
That’s what gave him that inner strength; that’s what gave him the courage, that’s what
gave him the understanding, the wisdom to go through all that he did; that’s what gave
him the faith to endure what he did. I mean, to go through spitting, humiliation, to have a
crown of thorns put on your head, and whippings, and all of those things. I mean, if any of
us felt ... we’ve had hard lives, sure, but nobody’s gone through that, and then to hang
there on a cross and look out upon the people and simply say, “Forgive them, Father, for
they know not what they do.”
That compassion, that love, that wisdom has to be derived from that inner relationship. It
won’t come just from reading a book. You have to go within and find that Source and that
love and that wisdom within yourself.
That, to me, was what a lot of the teachers were trying to do. It’s like, we had this wonderful
book that gave us that intellectual approach to understanding God, and while not all
truth can be contained in that book, at the same time, I felt that it was probably about the
most advanced book on the planet as far as trying to explain those kinds of things.
But now the Teachers were coming and saying, “Okay, you’ve got that. Now, do you want
to grow more? Do you want to move on? Then let’s begin that inner journey. Let’s begin
that process of going inside and finding that love of God because, again, that’s where you
will find the love that will motivate you to serve and to want to truly develop those fruits
of the spirit that you’re after.
A couple of other things from the book jumped out at me, and I remember the
people, endless discussions upon what is the will of God, and you know we always have
this process of taking a revelation and bringing it down to our human level. We take principles
that operate on a spiritual level and we bring them down to interpret them at the
material level. And so people would sit in endless discussions and say, “Well, I don’t know
if I should take this job or that job. I don’t know if I should move here or move there.” So
they’re trying to take that will of God and interpret it in terms of what they should do in
some material, physical way. And what dawned on me was this great summary sentence
from the Book. It says:
:“Doing the will of God is nothing more or nothing less than your willingness to share your
inner life with God.” And that was exactly what the teachers have been trying to tell us
through the practice of Stillness.
So I began to think, “Okay, the main message of the Urantia Book, if I were to summarize it,
is about personal religion. It’s about developing faith, that living trust in God so that you
can get by and learn to trust God for the guidance in life and not have to look to these
outside sources of authority. So it’s a movement from these outside sources of authority to
the inward source of authority.
====Synthesis====
And I think that is really the bottom line and the basic message of the Urantia Book. And as
I look at it, that’s the bottom line and the basic message of the Teacher Mission.
And so I thought, “Well, let’s practice and let’s do this Stillness thing,” and with the handholding
of the teachers and asking questions and then helping us through, we continued
this process for awhile, and then I got to thinking about it. “Wow, if that’s really the basic
message of the Book and the basic message of the teachers, that they’ve come to tell us that
to really grow we’ve got to find that inner guidance, to learn to trust God within us, why
aren’t the religions doing it? Did I miss something growing up as a Protestant? and then
Catholic? I mean, where are we going wrong here?”
And so what I began to see is that I remembered back — and I’m no scholar or no expert by
any means — but when I looked back at that list of what I had learned from that Eastern
meditative approach, well, they taught the relaxation and they taught the mental stillness,
and they taught the silence, and having done some of that, that produced great serenity
and even a feeling of blissfulness and some times even that sense of just being a part of that
cosmic consciousness feeling, but what it didn’t have was that personal feeling, that personal
relationship with God.
And then I looked at what we call Western contemplation, and they taught dialogue with
God, and they taught prayer and they taught worship, but they didn’t teach you how to
listen to God. They said, “Come to us, we have the answers. Say your prayers; we’ll give
you the prayers. Here’s how you worship with us in the congregation, and we have these
ceremonies and these rituals to take you through.”
So they wanted to give you that pre-packaged religious situation, and at a certain point that
worked, and it helped us all, and it’s part of our evolutionary religious perspective and
heritage, but why not blend those? Why not take the best of both worlds? Why not learn
to listen to God, but also why not learn to develop that relationship with God? And as I
thought about it, I said “That’s really what Stillness is.”
So my wife, Jim, Sussi, and another friend in Indianapolis, we sort of got together and
said, “You know, wouldn’t it be great if we could go out and begin to tell people about
finding God within? Because that’s what we felt was the basic message that we had been
given, and that was what would be more helpful to people than anything else.
You know the old story: give a person a fish and they’ll have fish for the day; teach them
how to fish and they have fish for the rest of their life. Okay?
Didn’t want to be the priest; didn’t want to be the minister; don’t want to be the person
who everybody runs to every time they have a problem and you have to give them an
answer. That’s a terrible situation to be in, but a good situation to be in is to try to help
people find those answers within themselves, and that’s what people really need. They
need to understand what that process is and begin to look within.
So we thought, “Well, let’s try that out!” and as we began to talk with people, we began to
see that some people liked that idea and they were interested in doing that, but they said,
“I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to begin.”
And so we began to think about that and we thought, “Well, what is it that Stillness really
is?” and we found out that most people’s interpretation was that stillness was that quiet
moment that you get into when there is dead silence and nothing is going on.
Well, that’s not the way I came to understand Stillness from the teachers. The way I came
to understand it is that’s just one phase of stillness. What Still-ness really is, is developing
a personal relationship with God, taking time to develop a personal relationship with
God, and that is what it is really all about.
So we began to say, “Okay, well, you don’t like to do steps because then people think
there’s only one way to do something,” which is obviously not the case, but then people
say, “Well, I need some structure, some way to begin.” So we said, okay, let’s blend this
east and west, let’s blend what we’ve learned from the teachers and The Urantia Book,
and we said, Okay, where does it begin? The first step is, you need to have some physical
relaxation. But even before that, what you really have to do is you have to decide you
want to build your personal relationship with God.
How can you build a relationship with anybody? Let’s say you meet somebody and you
want to have a relationship with them. What do you do? You invite them over to talk,
right? And when they come over, do you have the TV on? Do you have the radio blaring?
Do you have the kids tugging at your apron strings? No! You get a babysitter, you
turn everything off, you have them come in and you sit down and you say, “Hi, I’m Mike.
This is me.” and you ask them questions and they ask you questions and you begin this
dialogue. You begin this communication process. And what we try to say to people is
that there really is no difference.
First, you must decide that you want to try and build that relationship. That is most important.
Then, how do you begin? You need a quiet place; you need a quiet time. And you
have to make that decision that you need that. You have to tell your spouse; you have to
tell your children that “I need a half hour. I need a few minutes every day to myself for a
little quiet time with the Father.”
And so you set it aside and what do you do? The exercises that Peri took us through, learn
to relax, find your favorite easy chair. There are many, many traditions that teach breathing
exercises and sitting, and if all those things work for you and they help you, that’s great;
but if they don’t, just find a good old comfortable chair and sit down and relax. Okay?
And when you do, go through a little relaxation process. Try to get rid of all that tension.
Then the next thing you need to do is still your mind. What does it mean to still your
mind? It simply means tune out all the distractions.
When you invited this person in, you turned the TV off, you turned the radio off, you quit
thinking about what I have to wear to work tomorrow, where I have to get the car fixed,
how am I going to pay this bill. You put this aside for a moment, didn’t you, and you
began to focus your attention on this particular person, and it’s the same thing.
All you’re saying, when all of these thoughts — as the Urantia Book says, our minds are
naturally active — when all these thoughts rush through your mind, you’re simply saying,
“Hold on. I’ll get to you later. I’ve got someone here. I want to spend some time with
them, so kind of go away.”
Put your “Do Not Disturb” sign out and say, “Go away. I’ll get back to you later. I’ll figure
that out later.” And so then what you’ve done is, you have sort of quieted your mind.
Why? So that you can focus. So that you can put your attention on this person.
And at that point, you just sort of visually, mentally, in any way you can imagine, you just
say, “God, come join me.” And what happens when you begin to build this relationship
with this person is you begin talking. So we say at this point, “Well, start talking to God.”
And at this point we diverge a little bit, because for example in the Eastern forms of meditation
at that point where you quiet your mind the idea is to lose that ego, to dissolve into
the universe, to become one with it. Okay? We’re sort of saying, “No,” at that point —
after you have stilled that mind a little bit — now you focus your attention on God.
It’s not a passive process; it’s actually an active process. You are really focusing upon God,
and you need to see God in some personal way. He who created the ear, can he not hear?
God is not some nebulous energy, not some abstract. God is personal. He has personality;
we have personality. Personalities love and can be loved.
So you must think of God in some personal way, and even if it is the kind old man with the
gray beard, so what? It doesn’t matter. Picture it in any way you want, it doesn’t really
matter, but feel as if there is someone here, and talk to them.
What went on that day? How was your day? What problems did you have? What problems
did you see in other people? What difficulties did they have for today? Just begin
talking to God.
Then we feel that this naturally leads to the next step that we call prayer, and what is
prayer? Prayer is simply asking. There is this wonderful father, this person who loves you,
and so you say, “Boy, I think I really need some more patience in this situation. Maybe I
need some more courage.”
What do you need from a spiritual point of view? We all struggle materially, and my answer
to that is, if you think God cares about money just look at who he gives it to. (Group
laughter)
So I’m not into all the prosperity and all those things. So let’s forget all that and move on,
and let’s look at where our real spiritual treasures are that we build up in the kingdom. All
right?
What do you need for your treasure to grow? What do you need to build your treasure of
those fruits of the spirit? And your loved ones, what do they need? And the people we
meet in the workplace and in our families and in our friends?
Every day, we meet someone who needs some kind of help. Think about them and say,
“You know that person? I think they really are not feeling very well. Is there any way you
can give them an invisible hug? Is there any way you could show them some kind of a
better way to look at that situation so they won’t feel that anger and that frustration?” Pray
for them. And after you’ve sort of got that out, then you want to move out and into that place that
the Book calls worship. And what’s the difference between worship and prayer? Worship is pure thanksgiving. It
doesn’t ask for anything in return. And here again, you have to move above that material
level.
A lot of us sit there and say, “Oh, well, I’m not so lucky; I mean, I don’t have money; I don’t
have this; I don’t have that. Well, so what? I mean, we all struggle with those kinds of
things. I wish I could’ve been 6’8" and played forward for the Boston Celtics, but it didn’t
work out that way, so ... so be it. That’s the way it is sometimes, so look beyond that.
Have you never met anyone in your life that loved you, that cared for you? Have you
never felt the joy of helping someone? Giving to someone? There are good things in life,
and so what you do is, you begin to thank God for that.
And now you have that wonderful treasure of The Urantia Book that says not only are you
a beloved child of God but you’re going to live eternally. And you’re going to find more
joy and more goodness and more beauty than you can even imagine now. That’s something
to be thankful for. So you move into that point in which you thank God for what you have
been given. And then we suggest that you move into what we call the silent listening. And
the silent listening — maybe God wants to talk to you!
Have you ever met somebody and you sit down in a conversation and they do all the
talking? And what is it you say to yourself after awhile? Boy, I wish you’d kind of shut up
and let me say something here. Okay?
Well, remember that unfortunately you’re not going to hear God in this big booming voice,
but the point is The Urantia Book talks about mind and layers of consciousness, and the
more you open yourself up — picture God sort of way over there and he’s trying to talk to
you, but it’s very faint. And listen and see what you hear.
Maybe sometimes you hear nothing, but maybe two days later a thought comes into your
mind, and that’s his answer, or maybe you meet someone who says something to you and
their words are his answer, or maybe you find a book or somebody points out a phrase on a
page; you go, “Oh! yeah. That’s what I was thinking about. That’s what I was looking for.”
So God does talk to us, but not always in that big booming voice.
On the other hand, in that silence, you may sense words, you may sense inspirational
thoughts coming through, and if you do, enjoy it, because it may be some very inspirational
thoughts. It may be some guidance for you.
But whether you hear or don’t hear at that point, don’t worry about it, but just try to listen,
and if you find yourself distracted during that time, we urge people to say a simple phrase,
“Be still.”
Think of that as a command from your Thought Adjuster to your mind that says, “Whoops!
You’re kind of drifting away from me. Get back on track.” Or if you like the breathing
techniques, take another breath, focus on your breath, allow that to bring you back to your
centeredness and back to your focus. If you have a mantra, use it ... it doesn’t matter about
the technique. What matters is that you get back to that focus with God.
And then finally we call the last stage the embrace. And the embrace is the way to imagine
yourself as that love child of God. Imagine that God is actually reaching out and giving
you a big hug.
There’s a place in The Urantia Book that talks about, if your physical energies are stabilized
and if your mind is clear, there are moments when the Adjuster can do what they call the
“downgrasp of the Adjuster” and if you experience that, and you can experience it, it will
lift you to a state of bliss and love, no sense of time or place. It is what all the great mystics
of the East, of the West have tried to describe and say to people: “There is this ultimate,
wonderful, wonderful experience where you can realize that love of God”.
And it may not happen and it’s not going to happen every time, but then in most relationships,
you don’t have that peak experience every time.
Sometimes you have the average day, and then sometimes you have those really exciting
moments that happen in a day, and that’s the way this is.
====Spiritual Pracitice====
Welmek described it as learning to play an instrument. We all want to master the guitar, so
we pick up our guitars and we start strumming and someone tries to teach us the techniques,
and after a while, what happens? Within two or three weeks most of us go, “Yah!,
that’s too hard for me”
But if you stay with it, and you develop, what happens? Many days you go, “Well, I didn’t
feel anything changed within me” but some of those days you have breakthroughs, and all
of a sudden you play your first song, and then other times a new breakthrough comes and
you play something even more complex, and after a while, then after a while you can play
that instrument for pure enjoyment. And I say to everyone, that if you develop the relationship
with God, if you do as the teachers have said, take that time every day, in time it’s
no longer a chore, it no longer takes any discipline, it’s actually one of the very true highlights,
one of the true pleasures of the day, to spend time with God. To spend time in that
relaxation and in that enjoyment.
And my own experience is that if you do that, I read in The Urantia Book that God loved
me and I understood that, but I did not necessarily know that within my soul. This is that
other way of knowing; it is the sensing of the soul that the Book talks about.
We have that innate way of knowing what is true. And that sensing of the soul, that inner
feeling of the love of God — and believe me, if you stay with it you will begin to feel that
love of God — you’ll feel it with you all the time, if you stay with it and you keep developing
it.
And isn’t that what Jesus had? Isn’t that what gave him the courage and the ability to face
all that he did? He had that ultimate faith and felt that love.
That’s what the Stillness is; you have time to get refocused, a time to get recentered on that
love of God, to feel that love of God, and that balances you out. That restores, it gets you
back on the focus of what is important and what is real, and that helps you get through all
the difficulties which you find each day.
So we developed those steps. There’s no magic to it. We developed it in order to be able to
help people.
It doesn’t matter if you follow those steps; there’s nothing special about it. Although if
you’re looking for a way to start, it’s a nice way. It’s a good way, because it incorporates a
lot of the essential elements.
What is important is that you develop that personal relationship with God, because that is
the only place that you will be able to move from just knowing about the love of God to
feeling the love of God, and when you feel it, then you also begin to see it in other people.
And all these things begin to sort of fall into place.
The teachers do it every day. The Urantia Book says, “As you go through your ascension
career, you worship.” They enjoy worship.
Sometimes they get so carried away in worship they have to sound, what is it? the great
“foghorn” or something? from Paradise and say, “Whoa! That’s enough, guys. Slow
down! All right?”
So they do it everyday, so why shouldn’t we begin? That that’s the most important thing
you can really do.
So what we’ve tried to do here is say, “Here’s a little method. Let’s take what we’ve
learned from the book, let’s take what we’ve learned from the teachers, and let’s go out and
let’s just try to share it with other people. Because there’s a zillion books out there, there’s a
zillion gurus, there’s a zillion ministers and rabbis and everybody saying “we have the
truth.”
But we’re saying, “we don’t want to discuss the theologies with you” — although if somebody
is out there and they seem really interested, sure, we introduce the Urantia Book to
them, if we think they’re going to be interested in it.
But the real point that we’re trying to say is the thing that’s going to help you the most is
finding that God within, to learn to trust that guidance within.
When you have a problem, when you have a question, take it to God in your Stillness time
and ask God what the answer is. Ask God why there’s blocks. Ask God how you can
release those blocks. Ask how you can learn to love God even more, and believe me, there
is no greater therapy than that Stillness time because you are talking to The Great Counselor
of all time.
And all of those fears and all of those apprehensions — bring them up in the Stillness,
when you feel that love and when you feel secure, and allow them to surface, and ask God
to look at them, and you’ll see — Wow! That wasn’t so terrible! and it begins to dissolve
and it begins to fade, and so in that way God is helping us grow, God is helping us get rid
of those conflicts and so on that we’ve had, and the more conflicts we get rid of, the more
we become that free channel to let that love of God flow through us to other people.
Very quickly, we produced a few books and we produced a little tape, and they’re just to
help people get started. If anybody else is interested, this is nothing that is exclusive to us.
We simply said, “Everybody’s looking for a way to serve” and we felt this was one way to
do it.
If you like that idea and you want to practice it more yourself or if you want to take it to
other people, maybe these tools can help you.
We encourage you to come and be with us and we’ll be happy to share with you
anything we know, but if this is the type of thing that you find interesting and you want to
help other people, come and join us.
If you find other ways, for we all know that Jesus ministered as he passed by, so be it. It
doesn’t matter how you do it. This is one way. If you find this appealing, come join us,
and if you don’t, find your own way.
====Conclusion====
My conclusion would be simply this: if you were a parent — and most of you have been a
parent or at least a child at one time — I think that’s a safe conclusion — what is the most
devastating thing that you can imagine as a parent? Aside from, of course, the death of a
child. Would it not be, of course, that your child would never want to communicate with you?
That you would not any longer have a relationship with that child?
Can you imagine how hurtful that would feel? You love your children and you want that
relationship with them. Well, our Father loves us, and he wants that relationship with us.
And yet we go through each day too busy to take 15 minutes or 20 minutes or a half hour
out to commune, to talk with Father.
You don’t have to do it just at this time; in time you’ll learn to talk to him spontaneously
throughout the day, when situations come up and arise, and so in your Stillness you may
not feel a need to dialogue because you’ve already taken care of that little talk and you’ve
already put down some of that prayer for others, but always we say, include the art of
Stillness: the worship, silent listening, and a little time to feel that embrace.
And if you do that, you’ll strengthen yourself, you’ll feel that love and energy flow through
you and that’ll get you through those difficult trying times and that’ll keep you going
through those difficult things.
I thank you for your listening.
==Note==
FOR YOUR INFORMATION:
THE STILLNESS FOUNDATION is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to helping the
individual develop a personal relationship with God. Contributions are tax-deductible.
Address: 7840 Harcourt Springs Place, Indianapolis, Indiana 46260
President-Michael Painter
Directors: Marty Risacher, Donna Painter, Jim Cleveland, Sussi Rowland
[[Category: Religion]]
[[Category: Stillness Foundation]]
