[tmtranscripts] Michael 7.10.06

[JERRY LANE]

Michael—July 10, 2006

Marin TM Group—Mill Valley, California—U.S.A.

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    Welcome.  We welcome You into our minds, 
into our hearts, into our lives.  We’ve come to appreciate this connection 
You offer us, and consider these lessons truly a blessing.  We pray You 
continue to give us these penetrating spiritual laws, seen from Your greater 
perspective of meaning and value.  Help us entertain and understand, then 
give them a try, so we can keep growing into what is possible.  Amen.

MICHAEL: Good evening, My loyal sons, this is your father, Michael, your 
once-upon-a-time human brother, and brother still.  As Mother invited you to 
realize in Her last lesson, We are your helpmates and playmates.  There is 
nothing that gives Us greater joy than the laughter and merriment of Our 
children, just as this is your greatest joy too, when your own children 
thoroughly enjoy themselves.

For all of human life is not always merry, or even pleasant, but it is good 
and fitting and proper to enjoy the blessings that our Father does lay 
before us, and not let our times of suffering and trial ruin the good times 
that come in their own season.  This is another facet of being open to the 
possibility presented to us every new day.  You call it, Taking things as 
they come--being open to the possibility and the changes that are such an 
intrinsic part of being in this enormous creation of God’s, deliberately 
created in an imperfect, yet evolutionary state so that each of us has our 
part to play.

Just think if God had created the whole universe in some kind of mechanistic 
perfection.  In fact He has created part of the universe this way, the 
impersonal part.  Pure energy and matter, the material part of the universe 
does obey His absolute physical laws.  But as soon as you think of the realm 
of physics and chemistry, mechanics, you can feel how this is so 
contra-distinct from the realm of personality.

When you perceive and understand the uniqueness of individual personalities, 
only then do you realize a full beauty and depth of meaning and value, even 
if it is only your human lives on Urantia.  It is somewhat an article of 
faith for you to accept what your Urantia book teaches you about worlds 
without end--the Morontia phases of your life to come on the Architectural 
Spheres; accepting there are literally trillions of evolutionary worlds with 
their human types of life at all stages of development.  And this is all in 
the realm of personality, unique, individual personalities beyond numbering 
that only God himself knows fully.  This is the personal universe, all 
stemming from the personality of God.

And for this very reason, My children--the existence of personality at all 
stages of perfection, you have what you call imperfection; or as it is 
sometimes experienced by yourselves: suffering, pain, loss.  These are all 
very real.  They are not some illusions you need feel guilty for 
experiencing.  They are consequences, if you will, of the ability of 
imperfect beings such as yourselves to experience a degree of choice, a 
freedom of will.  As your Urantia book puts it most succinctly: the endowing 
of immature, imperfect beings with a relative degree of freedom does lead 
inevitably to tragedy.

But without this dimension of personality, without this freewill choice, you 
would simply have a mechanistically perfect universe without individual 
participation.  You would not have a part to play, the meaningful existence 
that is possible for you now.  Further, once you see this is true not only 
for yourself, but even for all of your immediate spiritual 
seniors--including Mother Spirit and Myself; when you see that we are all 
striving for perfection, then the existence of suffering in the universe 
does not become such a metaphysical problem.

Choices between good and evil, right and wrong, are simply inherent in 
beings such as yourselves endowed with moral discrimination.  This is how 
your personality reaches towards perfect function. These are the sign posts, 
the guides, if you will, towards perfection.  You are imperfect, so you have 
to be prepared to experiment—knowingly.  Strive to know what you are doing, 
what is involved in your decisions.  Make your decisions with the continuing 
courage to be open to the results.

And in making your decisions, My children, never forget that Mother Spirit 
is right within your mind, adding a dimension of Her wisdom to augment your 
own, helping you find the courage to try these life experiments and 
understand what is happening to you.  I am ever beside you, and right within 
your feelings, offering you My peace--the profound spiritual relaxation that 
allows you to tune into Our presence and receive Our help.

Above Us in origin and literally taking on your personality, making a 
spiritual record of your experiences together, is a living fragment of God 
himself in your minds, co-creating with you, your souls.  This presence of 
God is also accessible to you, My children.  Those courageous individuals 
who, all through history, greatly led their fellows into the light, those 
persons you call saints who focussed their lives on giving themselves to 
others, these were, and still are the persons who are able to connect with 
their Father Fragments.  These are the soulful individuals of great 
character who transcend their own limitations by making full use of the 
spiritual help available to you all.  They have been, and are the living 
examples of what is possible to accomplish, to know, to experience, to love 
and to enjoy.

So We would have you, when you envision and feel for this transcendent 
reality, this God-created universe that surrounds and upholds you, We would 
have you realize what the reality of personality gives to you, and gives to 
us all.  We would hope you could accept with joyful hearts the difficulties 
that are inherent in your current  personal status.

Accept these difficulties as the true gifts they are, giving an added 
dimension of meaning and value to life.  Accept joyfully with faith that 
there is a spiritual record being created of all your experiences, far 
transcending what you know of as memories--which are mostly a function of 
your physical body, your brain and nervous system.  Have faith that whatever 
may befall you in terms of loss of memory, does not affect your soul in the 
slightest.

You can look forward with hope and joy to the next phases of your life on 
the Mansion Worlds when, with the much more subtle, quasi-spiritual/material 
body you will have, your Father Fragment, and your soul, will be so much 
more accessible to you.  The prompting and pure spirit offerings from the 
fragment of God within your mind will be so much closer and clearer.  
Indeed, in looking into the future, there is truly nothing to fear, for all 
pain and suffering and loss does come around.  The struggle of life does 
give meaning to existence.  Your faith becomes a trust in God’s creativity, 
in that what He has deliberately created with His infinite and absolute 
wisdom, can be trusted as being ultimately necessary for meaning and value.

So as you look towards the past, My children, realize that nothing that has 
ever happened was unnecessary.  Every past event from the largest to the 
most minute was a resolution of existing forces--physical, mental and 
spiritual/personal.  And yet all that!--all that only leads up to this 
present moment, this Eternal Now.  For to a degree, what of this will 
continue into the future is a matter of your choice.

True enough, there is an enormous universe happening out here, and we are 
all but tiny bits in a gigantic drama taking place.  But how each of us 
perceives that, and acts upon it, is to such a large degree dependent upon 
our own choices.  And this is God’s great gift—both the universe and our 
freedom.  He is truly our Father of infinite love and understanding.  How we 
open ourselves to accept ever more fully our experience of life, is how we 
offer Him our most sincere worship and appreciation.

So we thank You, Father, for this transcendent reality in which You have 
placed us.  We thank You for the encompassing wisdom of Yours that holds us 
securely, while at the same time enticing us, teasing us, at times demanding 
of us that we reach out, we stretch ourselves to understand even more.  What 
a gift, so much beyond our comprehension; but in our very need and desire to 
comprehend, we find the peace that passes understanding.  We can leave our 
adventures of the day and rest secure in Your arms.  You renew us and bring 
forth another day, both similar to all those which have gone before, yet 
always new.  For this we thank You, Father, and we feel very much one with 
You.  For it is our desire too, that life and reality be just as You have 
created them.  Amen.

If you have any questions or comments, My sons, bring them forth.

Student:  Father Michael, I had planned to ask a personal health question, 
but from the lesson tonight I’m beginning to see that it is something I need 
to take care of myself, in conjunction with medical doctors, and Yours and 
Mother’s help.

The real question, I think, is: how do I open myself more to You, and to my 
Father Fragment, and to Mother and the other beings in my life?  I have a… 
structure, for want of a better term, that I’m inside of.  It doesn’t let 
much out, or in.  It’s something I’ve built up since childhood.  Mother had 
a very good lesson on that, through Donna at the Center for Christ 
Consciousness.  It was me right down the line.  But how, how do I open up?  
How do I get out this box that I’m in, this structure?  It works well enough 
to get by, but not well enough to become closer to You and to Mother and to 
my Father Fragment.  I guess that’s the real question.

MICHAEL:  Yes, My son, to answer your question most directly: one small step 
at a time.  Here you are--right on the edge of the unknown--because you can 
feel it!  From My perspective I can feel it calling to you.  In opening 
yourself up to real possibility, you are feeling a kind of reflective 
discomfort with what you’ve known so far.  And so I congratulate you, My 
son, for being willing to experience this discomfort, what you feel is a box 
enclosing you, rather than seeking any number of ways to just dull the 
sensation.  You are feeling more and more the desire to open yourself and 
reach out.  So first of all, be not afraid of this discomfort.  Feel the 
wisdom in experiencing it.  Feel the desire in you for more life.  Credit 
your desire to become more awake, to arouse yourself from the slumber of the 
past and reach out, for you are beginning to wonder what more you are 
capable of, if only you knew how.  (Yes)

I want you to think, My son, about what I talked about this evening, the 
moral dimension of human life.  This is your desire to find a better way to 
contact Spirit.  When you think about change, not in general, abstract 
terms, but in a very immediate way—what will you do differently tomorrow, 
remember it’s just part of human nature, a truism if you will, that small 
steps hold better than grandiose, melodramatically sweeping changes in 
which, as you say, you throw out the baby with the bath water.

In terms of energy, so much of this is based on your physical health, and by 
this I mean the whole--holistic view of your entire physical being--your 
activities, your nutrition, your rest.  You have the full intellectual 
capacity to examine these.  But this implies a willingness to change, to try 
something new, to get beyond denial.  You can keep a journal to help 
yourself understand the causes and effects involved, and remember what you 
are trying that’s new, and whether it’s working or not.

This is a kind of curiosity and enlivening interest in experimenting.  This 
is what you and J were talking about before the lesson this evening, that 
you find yourself greatly fatigued and kind-of weighted down by your diet.  
So go to something lighter, something that gives you more energy than what 
it takes up.

You’ve probably noticed by now there are certain seeming paradoxes about 
your personal energy.  Sometimes, as Mother said, you have to separate being 
physically tired from being mentally sleepy.  For sometimes you do need your 
physical rest.  Yet at other times, when you are mentally sleepy or not as 
alert as you wish to be, you are faced with a seeming paradox: you can 
either take a nap, or the opposite—exercise, take a walk.  Either one would 
be equally efficacious in the short run, but as you know, it takes a little 
more gumption, good old-fashioned gumption--pure effort, to take the walk.  
And this is what you may need to exercise most of all.  (Yes)

This is the openness you’re seeking, My son, a sense of newness about this 
body of yours.  Feel and appreciate all these habitual patterns of how you 
see yourself, and then welcome the discomfort.  Welcome feeling the fatigue, 
and let it motivate you.  Realize that this fatigue is not inevitable, it’s 
not a part of growing older.  Even here your habitual notions of what 
different ages bring about, these notions need to be reexamined.

And this is a real challenge!  As soon as you go to give up, shall we say, 
certain regular daytime or evening habits, you’re immediately confronted 
with: How do you fill the time?  (Student chuckles)  I see you have a little 
chuckle of recognition there.

Student:  Yes, Father, I do.  You’re right: that’s the fear.

MICHAEL:  This means exploring your interests.  What do you want this 
greater spiritual contact for?  What are you going to do with it?  What 
entices you, what seems intrinsically interesting?  I think you can see now 
how single-knit, how tied together are all these different facets of mental 
and physical and spiritual life.  You can see how you settle into certain 
comfortable habits in the face of this challenge to fill your life with more 
meaningful, more spiritually valuable activities.

It boils down to: how much life do you want?  Can you accept from Me, if 
only by faith, you do have this choice?  You can choose to have more life.  
This choice is, first, finding those things that are enticing you and 
pulling you forward--finding interests to sustain you.  Then with this 
motivation comes a reexamining anew all your habits of rest and activity and 
nutrition.  I think you know this deep within you, My son, for you have read 
about, or seen on television, different ways in which other folks have 
turned their lives around and discovered just how malleable, how flexible, 
how adaptable is this life vehicle you’ve been given.  You are what you are 
by all these thousands of choices, or refusing to choose, you have known in 
the past.

Student: Yes, I’m beginning to see that.  That structure I was talking about 
is a kind of safe-house I constructed that kept me from looking at the 
outside world I didn’t want to deal with.  I know what You’ve been saying, 
that it’s a matter of exploration, and I know…I’m interested in exploration. 
  I’ve always been interested in exploring.  I’ve always been driven by a 
quest for spiritual growth.  I haven’t always achieved what I wanted to, but 
nevertheless, here I am.  I like being where I am, but I want more.  I want 
what You were talking about, the more life, the fuller life, the 
all-I-can-get life—the appropriately all-I-can-get life.  I don’t want 
anything that’s not appropriate.  But I don’t know how—except as You said, 
little step by little step—forward—in conjunction with You and Mother Spirit 
and my Father Fragment.

MICHAEL:  Exactly, My son.  You grasp My meaning immediately, and fully.  So 
think of these three general categories if you will: activities, nutrition, 
and rest.  Try some small step in each one.  In terms of nutrition, see if 
you can move towards living foods, lighter, more easily digested food that 
gives you energy—the fruits and vegetables, the complex carbohydrates.  Look 
at your body afresh and ask yourself what small activity is best to 
invigorate you and get you in shape.

Student:  I notice that a lot of…still what I eat is being called “comfort 
food,” as opposed to nutritious food.  But I see now I can also make better 
decisions that lead up to a big change in how I look at my food-stuffs.

The other thing is—rest and relaxation and all the other things?—I’ve always 
wanted to make a big change and get it over with; but that doesn’t work.  
Maybe I don’t have the foundation to build on, that I thought I had.

MICHAEL:  Yes, it’s a matter of changing this “comfort food,” for you are 
beginning to understand what a terrible toll these empty calories take on 
your body, and on your energy.  You need food that more profoundly comforts 
your intellect and your spirit.  As you just mentioned, your spiritual quest 
is the true comfort of your soul.  This is the nutrition that stays with 
you, that brings a quality of uniqueness to the events that add to your 
soul, rather than just doing the same old superficially comfortable things 
that, as you are discovering, take such a toll on you physically and 
mentally.  These “comfort things” are an enormous fraud.  Now you are 
getting the moral acuity to see that.  (Yes)

This is the difficult part too, My son--initially: accepting a moral 
dimension into your life--having all your little routines take on a moral 
dimension.  This can be most uncomfortable at first.  Which is why I advise 
you to start by taking small steps, so as not to be overwhelmed.  Keep in 
mind how far you have come, and what joy you do find in spiritual 
discoveries.  One at a time just trade these fraudulently appealing things 
for what truly comforts your soul, what truly gives you good, solid 
nutrition that refreshes you, and doesn’t just steal your energy away.

Student:  Yes!  The phrase keeps running through my mind, that I should 
tiptoe through life--in the sense of taking small steps instead of trying to 
get quietly through without doing anything.

MICHAEL:  Yes.  This is being truly scientific.  You make small changes and 
then stay open to note the effects.  Don’t forget or rule out success!  
These small discoveries are what sustain you.  At times you project yourself 
into the future and wonder how you can possibly do this or that you 
envision, but these small successes do sustain you.  These are the proofs 
you are doing the right thing.  Some of the things you’ve tried are not 
working.  So you simply trade them for something better.  This is your 
spiritual quest.  This is how you keep feeding your soul, you keep moving 
forward without all the guilt or recrimination.

As to precisely what these choices are, in order to evaluate even some 
minute question of diet or activity; take a moment of your stillness to get 
in touch with a broader context, and let all your Spiritual Family inform 
you, right along with your intellectual studies.  You are surrounded with 
such a wealth of information about nutrition, about activities, I do not 
feel, in your case My son, a lack of information is the choke-point; it’s 
not the bottle-neck.  You know what to try.  Now you need the spiritual 
gumption to do it.  (Yes)

So be unafraid.  Step out and experiment.  Let your successes sustain you to 
the next step.

Student: It sounds so simple when it comes out of Your mouth.  I think I’m 
seeing for the first time how small successes lead up to large ones, rather 
than I wasn’t large enough—I wasn’t big enough.

MICHAEL:  So all along, My son, you have to feel for the results of these 
good things you’re choosing.  The quest not some abstraction.  It’s what 
works—whatever that is.  (Yes)  The proof is in the energy you feel, the 
accomplishments you are able do.  At the end of the day you will have had a 
unique, living opportunity, not just what you’ve been doing the last few 
months, or years.  (Yes)  This is what your spirit tells you it wants.  So 
just realize, now, you are asking for a more conscious moral dimension in 
your life.  All these little day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour comfortable 
habits: you are going to welcome the reevaluation of them.  (Yes)  This is 
what it’s going to be.  So accept any discomfort that leads you to greater 
life.

Student:  Yes, I can see that.  I look forward to the reevaluation.  I’m not 
too sure about the discomfort yet, but I think it’s always been there.   I 
will welcome…needing to feel it.

MICHAEL:  Yes.  If your moral discrimination has been asleep for a while, it 
can be rather uncomfortable to feel when you go to do some very basic, 
familiar, killing-time kind of thing, and realize: My goodness!—what am I 
doing?  I’m killing time here!  And time is what I have.  All eternity is 
this Now that I’m in.  The discomfort you feel is just being able to see 
these habits for the frauds they’ve been…(Yes)…and the box they’ve put you 
in.

Student:  Yes—this box is becoming much more clear—not clear to see through, 
but clear that I can see it.  I can see what it’s cost me in life—in living. 
  The real benefit is that I don’t have to stay there.  I have a lot of help 
getting out of it.  Thank You, Father, for Your love and support and 
guidance.  I love and appreciate You.

MICHAEL:  You are very welcome, My son.  In the coming days you will, 
obviously, be coming and going with this realization. (student chuckles with 
recognition again)  You will have your clear moments, and then your kind-of 
sleepy, enervated moments; so during those moments when you are clear, as 
you are now, as to what you have to do, get hold of your courage and take a 
small step forward while you can.  Then enjoy the good results that let you 
take another step.  I know this is not something you can yet see, it’s still 
too abstract—this person you want to be.  But this person will be standing, 
one step at a time, on what works.

Student:  This person I want to be, envisioning this person, is someone 
going forward.  I also see I can make mistakes and it’s not fatal: just get 
up and keep going.

MICHAEL:  Above all right now, I feel you desperately need more 
energy--(Yes)—a more pure, healthier, stronger, more alert kind of life.  
Your spirit is strong, and your mind is keen enough to explore.  It’s just a 
mater of breaking out of these sleepy comforts…(student laughs)  But: 
enough!  (Yes—thank You)  You are very welcome.

And so let’s bring this evening to a close with a recapitulation of what it 
means to be conscious of your own personality’s sense of morality as it 
applies to the day to day choices you make in how you are living—this 
day—right now.  Think about this deeply, My children.  Ask yourselves: Do 
you want a greater sense of morality in your life?  Do you really want to 
question, more and more continuously, whether what you are choosing to do 
moment to moment is good?—good for you--good for the others in your life.  
In essence, is it God’s will?  Does it reflect the desires of this Supreme 
Being who truly loves you and wants the best, the fullest life for you?  Are 
you doing anything to deliberately, if only half-consciously, numb or dull 
your sense of right and wrong—sometimes simply what is better?  Or can you 
welcome this joyfully into your life with an abiding faith that your moral 
discrimination leads you to what is real—to discovering what really 
works—for you and your fellows?

Mother Spirit is right within you, Her love supports you.  She is ever 
welcoming your embrace, and your quest for a better way of life.  I am right 
beside you, and in your heart--in your feelings, as you feel your way along, 
sometimes through moments of pure black obscurity as to what is the right 
thing to do.  A pure fragment of God himself is here too, has always been 
here, tying these moments together, creating your soul—from this viewpoint, 
creating the story of all these choices you have made.

Oh My children!  If you could only see your souls as We do.  But then, you 
will some day.  Rest in My peace.  Good evening.


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