[tmtranscripts] Serenia 011305 on Scarcity

[Thea Hardy]

Serenia 011305-Scarcity
Corvallis LinEL Group
Corvallis, Oregon
 

Teacher:  Serenia (TR, Thea)

 

Topics:           Urantian culture operation on scarcity model
			Roots of Scarcity Model as response to Rebellion/Default
			Early teaching concepts of mission
			Difficulty truly possessing abundance
			Diversity - unity/uniformity - and selfhood difficulties
			Defensiveness requires compassion and self-compassion
			Planetary development and loss of celestial administration
			Understanding self and other in forward growth
			Scarcity model as reactions to abundance
			Partial restatements of Michael's gospel
			Learning the triune functioning of love
			That lesson as our universe adventure
			The truth that we are loved and secure
			
 Q&A:  To come

Greetings dear friends, this is Serenia - I am happy to be with you 
again as always. We enjoy being in your presence and relating to you 
with heartfelt tenderness and pride in your willingness to continue 
week after week on this journey towards reclaiming yourselves and your 
world.

Tonight I wish to pull together some of our recent lessons into a more 
unified expression. I wish to talk about an over-riding model of 
planetary culture that is a result of the rebellion and default and a 
great impediment to your forward movement. Naturally, in our language, 
we have a single word for this that reveals in its very being the 
multi-faceted nature of the problem. But in your language, we will have 
to pull together various terms to weave into a whole. The single word 
most critical to this discussion, however, is scarcity. Your planet as 
a whole tends to operate on a model of scarcity and deprivation. This 
is an utterly natural response to a world that lost its celestial 
administration, first that of your Planetary Prince and then of your 
Garden of Eden and your celestial parent models, Adam and Eve. For you 
have been literally deprived, like orphaned children left to roam the 
streets grabbing scraps wherever you can and in order to survive, 
dashing with the meager bits to hide in the corners in the dark. The 
loss of the steadying influence of that cultural legacy is 
unfathomable. So much so, that you cannot grasp what you have lost 
without viewing it by understanding the echoes of the planetary 
dysfunction that reveals it to you as a response to those terrible 
circumstances. One of the scarcity responses is fundamentalism. 
Fundamentalism is always a scarcity model. Within the fundamentalist 
mind set, there is never enough to go around, and only if you obey 
certain strict rules will you survive. Always there is the threat of 
disaster and the often grim hope of a miraculous salvation. This 
constitutes a natural response of any child thrust into the orphanhood 
and forced to survive without being helped to grow up into the adult 
status that was your natural birthright. Harshness, or its 
concommitent, victim mentality, are expected responses to such 
situations. So in order to address the loss of the teachings of these 
administrations, you must understand what it is that you have lost. And 
in order to understand that loss, you must see the ways in which your 
distorted unfoldment of culture reveals that which you lack. You are so 
close to it, that it is often times difficult of assessment with any 
degree of realism.

One of the most clear-cut manifestations of this scarcity is your 
poverty of spirit, your difficulty in attaining any true and lasting 
sense of self-worth. And this must be addressed. The degree of guilt 
that many of you experience, the degree of self-flagellation for 
largely understandable errors and missteps, is profound, and to us, 
tragic and heart-rending. For you to stand tall as beloved children of 
a loving father and mother is still very difficult for most on your 
world, even many of you who have worked with us now for so many years. 
All too often, you seek to gain self-esteem by inappropriate sacrifice 
of self - not the sacrifices of service, but the literal sacrifices of 
your own wants and needs that as healthy children would propel you to 
self-respect, and thus to far more capacity for true service than you 
can now manage. Without permitting love to fill you, serve as you like, 
effectiveness will often escape you.

When we came to this group, our first words to you were instructions to 
seek the father in stillness, to learn to allow him to love you, and to 
embrace abundance. You sought to understand our words and concepts, yet 
you remained baffled and confused by them. So much of your cultural 
history was not in support of these concepts. You understood them 
intellectually, at least in part, but you could not put them into true 
and lasting practice. You could not allow real experience with these 
concepts to truly take hold and transform you in the spirit. You have 
made progress, certainly in intellectual understanding, and in baby 
steps of experiential understanding. But you are only beginners yet. 
Still, your grasp of these problems is now at a place where we can 
begin teaching you on these essential topics more in earnest, so that 
you may understand the vast planetary problem this poses, and can begin 
the personal transformations that will enlarge your hearts enough that 
you may be filled with what is to come.

Your Urantia Book says that a pint cannot hold a quart. Without this 
enlargement, try as you may, comprehend intellectually as you may, the 
joy and abundance of a full spiritual life as a true son or daughter of 
the Father's universe simply cannot be yours. You have often put this 
in terms of your inability to "have" the good things of life, the 
difficulty in "having" love and joy and all manner of truth, beauty and 
goodness. You have felt keenly the sense of unworthiness, 
undeservingness attached to this inability to "have". You can see it, 
sometimes want and yearn for it, but it seems to remain beyond your 
actual grasp. For evolving beings, conceptual knowledge is only had 
upon the experientialization of that knowledge - it is in the moments 
of experiencing that it is truly becomes yours to keep. This is a 
primary utility in experience. And a personality cannot have full 
experience alone. Sharing is essential to full experientiality - 
whether with spirit sources or human companions. And as knowledge is 
only truly possessed by sharing, not merely in comprehension, so also 
truth, beauty and goodness - special coordinating forms of knowledge - 
cannot be possessed without sharing.

But without a sense of your true personality selfhood, you cannot 
actually share experientially. Many of you have noted that however much 
you talk and seem to understand one another in mind, it is difficult to 
put things into action together. You can take your understandings to 
your spiritual sources, but without a true sense of self, it is 
difficult to reach a point of genuine contact. In addition, part of 
your difficulty with diversity is that without a well-developed sense 
of personality-selfhood, the diversity is perceived as a threat to your 
developing self. And this is not even inaccurate. In the developmental 
sense of the human race, the self-hood of the tribe is itself hard-won, 
and then hard-defended for protection of that still fragile self-hood. 
A distorted sense of selflessness leads to a need to defend ones 
viewpoints in a way that a clearer self-respect through personality 
development does not require. In order to share well with one another, 
you must have self-respect - healthy self-love - and you must have a 
grasp of true diversity.

Sadly although understandably for young evolutionary beings, there is 
much finger-pointing by those whose senses of selfhood are slightly 
superior, towards those whose defensiveness is more noticeable. Instead 
of enlarging the picture on your brothers and sisters when they are 
defensive, you judge them as inferior, as engaged in wrong-doing, and 
sometimes make such judgments all too plain. You do not stop to think 
of your advantage, and their disadvantage. You do not first seek to 
understand them. And so all of the various reactions of distortion - 
for you are all yet more or less distorted on this topic - mill about 
and cause disunity where you most need and seek unity. But unity 
without uniformity is still very difficult for you to grasp and live.

In the normally developing tribe, uniformity is highly prized, and in a 
developmental sense, necessary. Without the guidance of celestial 
oversight in full planetary administrative function, this tribalism 
finds its way into the narrowing streams of nationalism and 
fundamentalism lacking in upliftment capacity. Had you retained the 
administrations of  celestial oversight, you would have been able to 
experience a degree of refreshing diversity and originality the likes 
of which you have little ability to perceive as you are and as you have 
developed. And those witnessing such diversity would have gone back 
inspired to teach others with compelling examples of truth, beauty and 
goodness that such an administration lastingly represents on a 
developing world. By the loss of your celestial administration, you are 
still far more largely in a tribal state - struggling as you do to move 
through more advanced social development yet dragging the unresolved 
evolutionary struggles along with you - than would even begin to be 
ideal. This is a terrible devolutionary momentum in the midst of your 
true desires to move forward.

It will be necessary for you to manifest ever increasing compassion 
with one another as you tease apart what happened to you as a world, as 
a culture, as families, and as individuals. At this point in time, that 
compassion is hard won, and not yet operant to the degree necessary for 
a truly forward-looking world. We would ask you to ever remain mindful 
of this need to understand your planetary siblings and equally to 
understand yourselves, yet also to cease in castigating yourselves when 
you find that your behavior has not been what you would prefer, either 
in lack of compassion, or failures of defensiveness. It is asked of you 
simply that you note that you have erred, resolve to try harder, then 
do try harder, and forgive yourselves when you fail again, moving 
forward step by step through recognition of the problem and 
determination towards progress, but not being deterred, or distorted by 
overmuch self-blame. Your world is not an easy one on which to exhibit 
any degree of perfection of behavior, nor is your developmental stage 
likely to produce such results readily. Self-respect in this stage of 
your existence does not consist in perfected behavior, but 
ever-perfecting motivation. Your sincerity is all that is needed to 
move you forward. Sincere mistakes are merely your learning experiences 
as you move through your unfolding lives. Self-deprecation readily 
turns into false humility.

Scarcity still runs planetary affairs. And you have often seen how the 
outbursts of abundance are greeted with all manner of negative 
responses from suspicion to downright disdain. Your world, for all the 
lip-service given, still does not at large welcome notions of 
abundance. They seem to many to range from laughable and childish 
reactions to delusions to dangerous decadence. It is a sad world where 
abundance is perceived as decadence, but then this is indeed a sad 
planet. Those who refuse to recognize this difficulty and who believe, 
understandably, that full joy for the world (which would equate to life 
and light) is just around the corner are impeded in their effectiveness 
by their unwillingness to see the seriousness of the problem for 
exactly what it is, not what they would wish it to be. To live with the 
frustration of the reality of the situation while putting out endless 
energies on behalf of the positive is not an easy task. And by and 
large, most of you make this attempt valiantly and we are impressed and 
heartened by your courageous dedication. But there is much yet for you 
to know and understand to make you more effective in the work that lies 
ahead.

Over the coming weeks, we will seek to address in more detail this 
problem and what you can do to more effectively deal with it.

For the moment, I will say that the critical day to day things we 
recommend are as they have always been - Seeking the Father in 
stillness - knowing that the kingdom of heaven is within - not merely 
in the adjuster's magnificent indwelling but in your increasing 
personal relationship with that indwelling spirit. Remember that the 
Spirit of Truth uplifts you through the agencies of our beloved Michael 
and Mother Spirit, and in the middle of challenge, if you cry out to 
them, you will always be heard and help will ever be yours. Knowing 
that you are beloved, and worthy of that love - this is still a great 
challenge for most of you. Letting the love in is essential in order 
for it to ever go on through you to others. But in order to truly 
perform that service, you must be willing to take that love purely for 
yourselves as well. There is no escaping this requirement. Without it, 
your service can never attain the levels of genuineness necessary to 
truly inspire. And you must recognize that the Father's will for you 
and all of his children will ever and always be abundance of every good 
thing possible. All truth, and beauty, and goodness is yours and 
surrounds you and fills you and entices you to the Source and Center of 
all things. Your unworthiness prevents this, but when told this, most 
of you jump to self-judgment for your unworthiness, instantly 
performing the act of disrespect of self that causes the problems in 
the first place.

You simply must begin to love and forgive yourselves. As you forgive 
others you will know forgiveness, but as you forgive yourselves, you 
will better understand others to forgive them. These things - loving 
self and other, with the ever surrounding and uplifting love from the 
father and you to the father form a trinity web, a set of thought, 
feeling and action that cannot ever be fully separated. No one aspect 
is the most important one, even as the Trinity Deity of all is truly 
three in one. You will find many such associative functional 
combinations on your journey to Paradise - and for some time yet you 
will misunderstand, trying to make one aspect more important than the 
others. Our beloved Michael said to Love the Father with all your heart 
and your neighbors as yourselves. You cannot love your neighbors, nor 
God, if you do not love yourself. The key to self love is permitting 
God's love for you, and specifically you, to be had within yourself. 
Not to immediately give it away because the touch of joy is so 
frightening and painful, so out of tune with the notions of scarcity 
which have become false values to you. No. To receive it and glory in 
it and be transformed by the joy of it. And to respond back with the 
joyous gratitude - not humble as a small, worthless being, but boldly 
grateful and encouraged to stand tall and strong as the beloved child 
you are - this is something that will spring forth from your permitting 
God's love to truly be yours. Likewise, loving and seeing your brothers 
and sisters and taking the joy of the awareness of their individual 
personalities and true selfhood - knowing them, understanding them, 
loving them - this is a Supreme love, and your natural development 
towards that evolving Supreme. In the moments of loving others, you 
will find God the Supreme and be satisfied and spurred on in the same 
moment. Through this trinity of beingness, you can find the entire 
experiential purposes of the evolutionary journey in your hearts. These 
are the simple truths to hold fast to as you journey to understand more 
thoroughly your work of this world. But their simplicity holds the 
whole of the evolving universe, and your experience with the truth, 
beauty and goodness of this will never end.

Hold fast, dear ones. For each of you, the true hour of your 
deliverance is in your own hands. Nothing that has happened to your 
world or to you can separate you forever from this fount of love. 
Discouragement is understandable, but build your faith in the ultimate 
outcomes, not the momentary ebbs and flows of time. You are safe in the 
hands of loving Parents. Your world has been orphaned, yes, but no 
longer, and you as personalities have never been orphaned, despite 
appearances. It is harder as agondonters to know this truth, but you 
have bravely continued - and we ask you to continue yet further down 
this road. Trust the truth of your existence, that you are beloved 
children of a loving father and brothers and sisters together in the 
Journey of all Time. We love you beyond our ability to express it in 
your language, and yet, that is itself contained within the vastly 
greater love that the Father has for you in every smallest second of 
your existence. In love, we are all together, diversity in unity.

Know that you are loved and abundance is truly there for you. Farewell 
until our next meeting.

--Serenia
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