[tmtranscripts] Michael 5.2.05 - Feelings

[JERRY LANE]

Dear Folks,    Here's the next message from Michael.  Let me extend a 
welcome to anyone living in or near the Bay Area, or only visiting, to come 
join us on Monday night, 7:30 PM, here in Mill Valley - just ten miles or so 
north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate.  You could come early if you 
want a private session - or even on some other evening, for this.  Send me 
an email @ Nytrayn at msn.com and we can set it up, directions and all.  In the 
case of the group meetings, your questions and Their answers go out on the 
net only if you wish.  Hope to see you sometime.  Jerry.

Michael 5.2.05

Marin TM Group

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    What a pleasure and a relief it is to 
remember to take a break during the day, just to relax and be still and feel 
Your presence.  Thank You for Your guidance as to how we can experience our 
freedom through our own creativity, and choose ever more wisely what we 
should do; and then, once we have made this choice, forget ourselves in the 
full commitment to what we have chosen.  Amen.

Michael:  Good evening, My sons, this is your spiritual Father, Michael.  
Now -that’s it.  You all know well by now how to feel for Me within you - so 
often My presence is just to encourage and help you to feel.

You go through many stages in your life with respect to your feelings.  Just 
recently We asked you to remember what it was to be a child and have the 
world come down all around you, have your emotions sweep you away on a tidal 
wave crashing through your soul.  And so for however long, you were utterly 
lost to yourself.  Then slowly this terrible wave of emotion would subside 
and with halting, desperate little attempts, you could slowly regain your 
breath and find yourself sitting there tossed and tumbled in your life, but 
ever so thankful the tsunami was slowly receding and giving you back to 
yourself.

And so you learned to harden your heart, how to stay above this rising tide 
of feeling and just ride it out.  Your growing ego self-awareness was slowly 
earning you a small measure of buoyancy on the surface of your emotions.  As 
you became more and more aware of yourself, more and more continuously you 
sought to disengage yourself from your family, sometimes even your best 
friends, in order to realize yourself as an individual, someone your own.  
Your curiosity was peaked to wonder very specifically: Who am I?  Here your 
sense of yourself and your own inner freedom was so often dependant on a 
cultivated indifference - to be somewhat detached from those around you.  
Consider this was a measure of budding wisdom so you could have some choice 
of whether or not to go along with your peers in whatever wild suggestions 
were being made.

Then as your school ended and you were expected to leave home and go out 
into the world, you braced yourself against feeling too much all the fear 
and anxiety that was a part of this. Yet often about this time, if not 
sooner, when the possibility of romance came your way, you might of noticed 
that your cultivated indifference had become a blanket affair which was not 
only suppressing fear and uncertainty, but your ability to love as well.

Also about this time many of you had experiences where your feelings, just 
because they came from the total, affective part of your nature, were able 
to catch your attention and bring to your consciousness very real dangers.  
You realized this was not some sort of over-done paranoia, but a very 
righteous caution about impending situations.  Then too these global 
perceptions, these intimations and feelings could be useful assessments of 
your fellows, and the people around you began to be infused with an extra 
dimension.

Now the temptation became one of being overly judgmental, being carried away 
anew on these assessments of others which suggested you could judge an 
entire person.  For example, it was not that someone might be telling you 
some small white lie or minor fib, but what you would pronounce: Liar!  
Often without realizing it you would be playing God and pretending to 
yourself, or actually telling others such things, as if somehow you could 
assess a person’s soul.

But as you persisted in your spiritual growth and you grasped the general 
principle of not being judgmental, you began to make a quantitative 
distinction between necessary and self-honest assessments of, say, an 
exchange with someone, and a condemning judgment.  And so you took an 
enormous step in being free.  For as you let go these judgments, these 
pretentious total evaluations of other persons, so you were able to stop 
doing this to yourself.  You could more directly discriminate both your own 
strengths and weaknesses as you pulled away this blanket of alternately 
feeling you, or others, were completely good or bad persons.

So now We encourage you to keep going along this same dimension of ever 
finer and more delicate sensitivity.  As you learn how to let go of 
pre-judgments based on race, or cultural differences, differences of sex or 
age, size or shape, and you make room in your heart and mind for all the 
individuals who come your way, so too every little step like this frees your 
own self perceptions and self evaluation.  This leads to a greater intimacy 
and honesty within you, and becomes another way in which you can grow.

You’ve probably encountered other individuals who were so incapable of 
acknowledging even a simple mistake, and then got so caught up in defending 
themselves, in retracing all the steps that led to the poor decision, they 
were not capable of opening themselves to a better way of doing whatever it 
was.  This was probably unconscious on their part, but all the more limiting 
for that reason.  For them there was no power in “now,” because they kept 
insisting on prolonging the past.  In this context, think what a spiritual 
triumph and relief it is to realize you are experimenting with your lives – 
necessarily, wonderfully so.  For from this perspective, finding out what 
doesn’t work and being fully open as to why it didn’t work, can often 
suggest what might work.  And even leave you joyfully anticipating trying 
the next step.

Here you are identifying with spirit, with a loving and welcoming attitude 
that embraces whatever may come.  This does not guarantee you will not be 
swept away again, from time to time.   Rather, We are encouraging you to 
deliberately let go of yourselves to see not only the ultimate futility, but 
the terrible limitation of hanging onto yourself fearfully and tightly.  
Then give yourselves credit for the nerve it takes to forget yourselves and 
join in some shared activities with your friends.

This is the glory of self-forgetfulness. This is being open to feelings. 
This is remembering fondly all the stages you have come through with respect 
to your emotions.  Yet as many times as Your Mother and I have recommended 
you relive moments of your life, you still may not be certain as to what We 
mean. Essentially We’re saying that since each period of your life is 
somewhat unique, if you can just stop and relax to let previous events pop 
into your mind, it’s almost like time-traveling in a science fiction sense.  
For some few moments you can really feel what it was like to be, say, 
fifteen again – and realize so much about the time in between then and now.

You are probably most familiar with this encompassing of feeling as it is 
associated with a particular piece of music. This is one fringe benefit of 
your pop culture that changes from decade to decade.  You can hear a song 
that was popular maybe, thirty or forty years ago for some of you, and it 
can bring back a pure feeling of what you were doing then, that can capture 
the whole mood of your life at the time.  This is what We mean.  Now imagine 
this enormously deeper and more total, persisting almost, as I said, like 
time traveling, and you have some small inkling of what your soul is.  This 
can give you some appreciation for what your Father Fragment – the presence 
of God within you -  has to offer you when the two of you become one.

Never fear to be still.  Never fear to relax all your self-conscious, 
ongoing drive.  The convergent, sharp focusing of your attention that is 
necessary and so useful at times, is only one of many modes of 
consciousness.  Let your attention be divergent.  Feel for a kind of global 
perception coming in from all around you space-wise.  This is your higher 
consciousness, and beyond it you make contact with Us just by being open and 
receptive.

The realm of spirit is one of spontaneous creativity, the very essence of 
freedom. The personal beings who are truly free - experiencing and enjoying 
this ultimate power? - who wouldn’t choose to love?  Here there is no 
limitation in connection.  Here there is that magical mathematics We tease 
you with, how one and one make three, because between you and I the 
connection is our Father himself.  This is His love that pervades all 
reality, and becomes ours.  It enables us to enjoy each other freely, 
without constraints or conditions.  This is what transforms us.  Once you 
taste this pure essence and thrill in its reality, who wouldn’t choose to be 
a part of this?  This is both the fulfillment of completeness and the 
promise of eternity - more to come, forever.

Rest in this peace awhile, My sons.  If you have any comments or questions 
this evening, we can connect this way too.

Student:  Father Michael, thank You for Your encouragement and 
enlightenment.  The question I have is: How does one “let go and let God?”

Michael:  Ah yes, My son, this is the eternal question, is it not?

Student:  Yes, ah…I can see a small part of…yes…this is the eternal 
question, but mostly my focus is like, how do I let go and let God today, or 
tomorrow or the next day?

Michael:  I only meant that this is something you will be learning forever.  
If you look back on your life with an open mind you can probably recognize 
times when you had great success in knowing Gods’ will, and experiencing the 
delight of triumph in being in accord with that will.  I might suggest these 
were the happiest and most spiritually fulfilling moments of your life.

So realize this is not something alien to you.  You have known moments of 
letting go and being aware of a spiritual encompassing all around you.  The 
easiest and most immediate way of - letting God - is by perceiving what He 
is doing.  Just as you know the wind is blowing when you see the trees 
tossing about, it’s a perception and appreciation of His constant creativity 
We have been pointing at now for many lessons.  Since human perception is 
largely a matter of contrast, We have been trying to help you isolate this 
constant creativity so you can perceive what We mean.

I think you can understand this by asking yourself: Well then, if there is 
this constant creativity going on and, as Michael has informed me, this is 
half of the reality I am living in, why can’t I see it?  We tried to point 
this out as contrasted to the notion of reality just repeating itself over 
and over, so you can realize God is within you and all around too making 
each day different.  This is one immediate way of - letting God - simply by 
perceiving what He is doing.

You also let go and let God by joining Him in creating your life.  In your 
meditations you can ask: what does God want me to do next?  For me to share 
His loving and creative nature with His children, what loving and creative 
thing can I do for those I live with, for those out in the world?  I could 
help, say, by contributing my time and resources to any number of good 
causes or groups.

This is what I meant this evening by relaxing the tightly focused attention 
that you need to accomplish a complex task involving many steps over a 
period of time.  Just stop this from time to time and relax your attention 
to feel as delicately as you can: What does God want me to do now, today, 
this very moment?  And persist in this with determination.  Open yourself to 
the uncertainty that is implied.  Be willing to feel this uncertainty rather 
than glossing it over with just another habit, another way of killing time.  
There might be a period of anxiety to go through as you let go, before you 
can quite - let God.  Does this answer your question, My son?

Student:  Yes, it has cleared up a lot of things, and reminded me of a lot 
of things.  There have been those periods of triumph – usually in retrospect 
– times when I was able to slow down and think of a better way of working 
than I had in the first place.

Michael:  Can you see that in the letting-go process there is bound to be a 
gap there, a moment in which you are simply letting go without knowing what 
will come next – because it will not be you, but can be something so much 
greater than you?  If you are not willing to experience this uncertainty 
right in the middle of you, you’ve not yet let go.  This is why it is not 
the easiest thing to do, and why it requires faith.

Student:  I’m not quite as fearful of that gap as I used to be.  I sometimes 
feel as if I’m welcoming it.  Other times I don’t want to deal with it.  The 
great thing is that now I’m aware of it more and more.

Michael:  Yes, this is the key – a quality of recognition.  You asked about 
letting go.  When you do let go it helps to be consciously recognizing: Yes, 
I am letting go so many ways I do know - how to fill up these next few hours 
or days - and accepting that this feeling of uncertainty is a part of 
spiritual life.  This can contrast greatly to your usual orientation in 
which, if you didn’t recognize what was happening, the suggestion would 
sound absurd and you would wonder: Why should I let myself feel uncertain?  
This is where recognition is so important: when you forget you’re trying to 
“let go” – but are succeeding anyway.  So when you start feeling this 
uncertainty, give yourself credit and say: Here I am, Father, I’m open now.  
What is Your will?  This is why there is glory in the triumph.  Keep 
practicing, My son, and be in My peace.

Student:  Yes, Father, I guess the idea of uncertainty is where the faith 
kicks in with the understanding that God is the reality.  I’ve been 
contemplating the reality of what is God’s will, because if you look out it 
seems as if the world is very authoritative and rigid and inflexible and 
closed.  We know better.  What You were saying to (Previous student) – the 
essence of love and being creative…  How did it get to be…turned around from 
that, to the point of being used as manipulation…and so destructive – the 
basis for destruction?  When the cosmos is love - pure and simple?  If 
someone asks me the question: What is God’s will, how can I answer them?

Michael:  Well, My son, I would mention the parable about giving a man a 
fish as contrasted to teaching him how to fish.  If someone asks you what is 
God’s will, the best answer is to give them a way of discovering it for 
themselves.  This is the only lasting answer to the question because God 
speaks to each individual - individually.  What you can teach through your 
own understanding and practice, once you know them well, are these methods 
you have been learning of stillness and meditation, of prayer, and what I 
suggested to (Student) this evening - recognizing some of the ironic 
consequences of letting go - in order to - let God.

The question earlier as to how the world came to be the way it is: with the 
overview of planetary spiritual history the Urantia Book has given you of 
the defaults of the Planetary Prince and your Material Son and Daughter more 
or less thwarting the normal planned evolution, a lot can be explained on 
both the largest and smallest scale – planetary and individual – as arrested 
development.  This was the overview I presented this evening about your 
maturing with respect to your feelings.  It is not that you have to go 
through these different stages, but that you stop, you get arrested 
somewhere along the way and you do not keep growing.  If letting go in order 
to - let God - involves setting aside certainties from the past in order to 
experiment further with what you feel to be God’s will, this involves that 
momentary uncertainty as you step off into the unknown.  Yet if you are 
arrested at a stage where you are trying to disallow any uncertainty at all 
in your life, the suggestion will sound ridiculous, and in fact many 
spiritual teachers have been ridiculed for suggesting such a thing.  Why 
open yourself to uncertainty when you can continue to cling to what you 
already know -  especially if you have a concept that completeness and the 
need to grow are mutually exclusive?  You can deny any need to grow further 
– with all the risks involved – and simply insist you are complete as you 
are – which you are.  Or, since many people feel incomplete in themselves 
without belonging to someone or something else, they can also question the 
nerve it takes to keep growing.  It takes a very strong and self-confident 
awareness - from a great deal of experience of having unintentionally or 
impulsively let go, and then discovering that you do survive and grow from 
these unexpected adventures: this long process of maturation - to be able to 
consciously open and experiment, not knowing what the outcome will be.

Student:  It’s kind of like we’re constantly redefining ourselves, or, in a 
sense, un-defining ourselves.  When people ask me, I feel I’m everything and 
I’m nothing.  I’m not just American – I’m global.  I’m not Christian, or 
Buddhist, or Jewish – though I’ve been all of those – I’m letting go these 
definitions…of certainty in a sense, to be classless, with no political 
affiliation, and it’s quite freeing to experience this…nothingness.

Michael:  Well, My son, I really enjoy your notion of un-defining yourself.  
That is truly letting go.

Student:  I feel sorry for people whose whole lives are based on thinking 
only a certain way.  It’s so limiting - unfortunately, even to the point of 
killing another human being because he or she doesn’t believe the same way.

Michael:  You see what I mean by: it is not that people have to go through 
these stages of maturity, but that they stop - stop developing their 
capacity to wonder - their inner curiosity and hunger for experience and 
adventure; but also the marvelous reaction and reassurance they get when 
they are perceiving what God is doing.

Student:  When I spoke to You a couple weeks ago about experiencing the 
kingdom of heaven – that it is here and now – and I read in the Urantia Book 
about how You went out in Your public work and You spoke to the apostles – I 
realized that was, and is, the “good news” – that the kingdom of heaven is 
here and now…and how you find it full of potential and possibility…if you 
let go and let  God.

Michael:  One way to resolve the seeming self-contradiction of why there is 
still so much suffering on Urantia if it is the kingdom of heaven, is to 
realize that the kingdom of God pertains above all to an individual’s 
dignity of free will.  The planetary situation as it exists this very moment 
is the result of all the freewill choices made by a whole hierarchy of 
beings – human and above.  But again, every evolutionary planet goes through 
similar stages.  It is just that Urantia’s history – I should say, its 
normal, possible evolution – was seriously set back by the decisions of some 
of its celestial leaders, both on the System and planetary level.  You are 
still recovering from some of these terrible decisions.  But this is the 
true kingdom of God – the individual freedom, the will dignity of every 
personal being, without which all of reality would not be as it has always 
been: the creation of both God – personally – and all His children.  This is 
our Universal Father sharing His nature with us.  This is why We invite you 
to exercise your individual freedom and creativity and choice so you can 
personally experience this kingdom of His.  And yes, it does require that 
you constantly let go of what you have known in order to take the next step. 
  But I assure you, My children, this journey has no end – ever.  Recognize 
the uncertainty and do your best to accept it with His grace and humor.  
This is the true spiritual triumph of living life light-heartily - giving of 
yourself one hundred percent, while not taking yourself too seriously.  We 
love you very much, and so We tease you with these possibilities.  We are 
certain they will be yours - as facts, in time.  Be in My peace.

Student:  Dear Michael, I have often wondered about emotions, and finally 
learned about all the ways from apathy to exhilaration, and have had various 
enlightenment experiences, and realized that there is even more to it than 
mentioned in the Urantia Book.  Is there any way for us to understand this a 
little better?

Michael:  Well, My son, I‘ve pointed out some general stages you go through 
from the time you are a tiny baby with almost no self-consciousness at all, 
to the point where, as a mature adult, you have not only learned how to 
suppress or control your emotions in situations where this is absolutely 
necessary, say around some accident scene where somebody is injured and 
needs you, but also how to be at the other extreme and be totally open to 
whatever emotion wants to call to you: Here I am.  What do I mean?  For 
these most subtle feelings can be coming from your super-consciousness, your 
global perception of the whole encompassing situation - impinging upon the 
spiritual realm.

So there you have the whole gamut, and as you live in a very complex society 
involving so many other people, not all of whose motivations are by any 
means loving or helpful but sometimes possibly violent or criminal, and you 
can never know for certain what is around the next corner with respect to 
your fellows, so We have pointed out a spiritual quality of flexibility, of 
not identifying with one whole set of chosen emotions to the exclusion of 
all others.  Rather, if you have a conscious and tenacious presence of mind, 
exercising your power of now, you can trust yourself to be open to any 
emotion, trust that you can recognize the more insidious ones – anger, or 
jealousy, hatred, revenge – and let them go.  You needn’t be overly 
self-critical or worried that these popped into your mind, but give yourself 
credit for being open-minded.  You live in a society whose entertainment 
media is saturated with every emotion imaginable.  So you encounter these.  
Your freedom is in the recognition and the ability to let them go without 
being wounded or feeling the necessity to suppress all feelings.  And so you 
dance light-heartily along - in a Shakespearean sense: dodging all the 
slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - with a full and wonder-filled 
emotional life.  Does this help you, My son?

Student:  Yes, Michael, it’s quite all-encompassing.  But I would ask one 
thing about…as we seem to be maturing - more of our emotions coming from our 
mind and spirit rather than from our bodies, we seem to feel almost a 
seamless transition from one to the other.   I would like to know more about 
where do emotions come from?  Part of it I know is chemistry, but part of it 
must be mindful from Mother Spirit, part of it spirit from our Thought 
Adjuster, and part from our souls.  It would be great to know more about 
that.

Michael:  Yes, I think you can recognize a hierarchy of emotions.  Some are 
on what you could think of as a physical/animal-mind level surrounding 
issues of survival, or procreation.  Here you have fear, anxiety, lust, 
greed, envy – emotions which you might consider the higher animals, like 
primates, are capable of feeling.  Primitive man was associated with a great 
refinement of these up to purely mental ones connected with learned 
behaviors such as altruism, selflessness, love and honor, loyalty.  Many of 
these are closely associated with Mother Nebadonia’s adjutants of mind as 
well as being emotions and attitudes you can self-generate.  You can choose 
to be loyal.  You can understand the benefits, both individually and 
collectively, of altruism, of generosity.  So these emotions are generated 
on this level – greatly influenced by all your family and societal 
conditioning.  When you get to the spiritual realm you are getting into 
feelings which are almost beyond what you might call emotion because they 
are not so re-active as they are thoroughly creative and spontaneous, coming 
from that mysterious and unfathomable fountain of creativity of all the 
levels of personal beings from the Universal Father clear down to yourself, 
that you yourself can not only generate but can tune into and contact.  I’m 
afraid this is a rather unfathomable and inexhaustible subject, My son, but 
does this give you some notion of the different origins of different 
emotions?

Student:  Yes, I know it’s rather endless, but I’ve always wanted to be able 
to give away an understanding of emotions.  It seems to be so limited in our 
high school level type philosophy.  The Urantia Book has been a great help 
in actually having the hope of tuning in to feelingly-experience values that 
You commented about…the creative  part of the spiritual ones being less 
reactive is very nice and a grateful-producing way of thinking about that.  
So I thank You for that.

Michael:  I was suggesting that in a fully mature human being with great 
spiritual creativity and contact, just because of the nature of your society 
and its mass media, as well as memories of your own youth and childhood; if 
you can go through your days with an open mind, contacting all these levels 
and origins of emotions with a quality of recognition, you need not be 
injured by the more negative or violent ones, nor need to shut down an 
awareness of their existence.  For that could be not only limiting, but 
dangerous.  This is where you gain so much, My son, by being 
non-prejudicial, by growing ever more flexible and resilient within yourself 
- so on a critical level you don’t kid yourself about what you are 
confronting.  You gain an increasing ability to let in the full person in 
front of you, and then relate to that full physical, mental, and spiritual 
presence, for both your sakes. This is yet another dimension to grow in, is 
it not?  It is another facet of what you learn in your stillness, in your 
conscious decisiveness to live your life openly.

I think this is a good note to close on.  We’ve had a rather vast survey of 
emotions this evening.  As you do open yourself more and more to your own 
past, and touch upon your soul, so too you will realize that all these 
stages of relationship to your emotions are still there.  And this is good, 
for you find yourself surrounded by all these stages, both in the children 
and adolescents around you, and in the adults as well.  So accept it all 
with as much love and light-heartedness as you can muster.  Then you will 
find out about, and enjoy - letting go - and seeing God all about you.

Be in My peace.  Good evening.