[tmtranscripts] Michael 8.3.09

[JERRY LANE]

Michael--August 3, 2009
 
Marin TM Group--Mill Valley, California--U.S.A.
 
MICHAEL--T/R-JL
 
(Illusion)
(The eternal now)  
(No pure objectivity)  
(Illusion and projection)  
(Human complexity--all real)
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
(A metaphor for the soul)
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit; dear spiritual parents,    As we approach the fifth anniversary of meeting with you in this particular group, we are reminded of all the really deep, heartfelt wonder and love we’ve shared together--all the laughter, all the tears of joy.  We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.  You yourself said, Michael, it was the really deep joy you shared with your followers--as Jesus--that enabled them to carry on after you had left.  And so it has been with us. 
 
Even greater than the insights and the understandings you’ve given us into our own human natures, it’s been our relationships with other people that you’ve helped us so profoundly transform.  It is for our newly discovered appreciation of them that we want to thank you for showing us the way.  It is for all the loving and lovely people in our lives--our ability to perceive this and appreciate them--we most want to thank you.  As you say, they are our true soul wealth--all these others we have known and shared our lives with.  Amen.
 
MICHAEL:  Good evening, my children, this is Michael.  Mother Spirit sends her love and her greetings.  Let me put all my emphasis behind hers that you are capable of receiving.  Yes, indeed, it has been fun.  It is filling your souls with real, honest-to-goodness thrilling fun that you will carry into eternity.  We see those bright and glowing lights in your souls of the people you have known.  You will carry with you as well your dear relationships with stuff--your homes, your work and tools----those things you have been most intimate with that have also become friends in a way.  These are the things that seem to have acquired a character of their own of all the times you’ve had together.  But it is the other human beings, the other walking infinities--as we call you--that in your souls, just as in your lives, you will find eternally unbounded.  We cannot remind you too many times just what kind of infinities you are, what pure potential you are just starting out with only a few years of life compared to that endless stretch before you without limit either in duration or how much your self-conscious self can continue to grow.  Also you are fortunate now in these modern times with your Hubble Telescope sitting up there as a doorway into the physical infinity of the universe that lies before you too.  
 
Your Urantia book puts it somewhat abstractly that the Supreme dimension of God, of which you are a part, foreshadows the Ultimate.  And so your human lives here, my children, all part of the Supreme Being, do foreshadow this endless life before you that you will ultimately achieve.  So congratulations back at you!  (Michael laughs)  It’s been wonderful visiting with you like this.  Ever keep in mind Mother Spirit and I are part of your lives.  Her spirit augments your own mental abilities; she is literally part of your perception and power.  My Spirit of Truth helps you sort out the complexity of your lives, helps you orient yourselves toward that unending adventure of discovery, and gives you some additional desire for it.  Our Universal Father’s pure presence indwells your minds weaving the timeless tapestry of your souls as well as helping spiritualize your thoughts.
 
(Illusion)
 
Tonight I would like to address the subject that has come up so often in our discussions here, and that is the question of illusion.  Since some of you are familiar with Oriental philosophy’s use of this term that ordinary life is an illusion, I would like to present Mother Spirit’s and my views and feelings about this whole notion of human illusion.  As with other psychological or philosophical terms, almost every school of thought has a slightly different interpretation of them.  So for tonight lets say that illusions are those things that appear genuinely real, as distinct from hallucinations which are either amusing or terrifying because they are immediately recognized as being unreal, or gross exaggerations of what is real--something totally weird.
 
Illusions appear real, are taken for real, affect you as real, and to which you respond--body, mind and spirit--as if they are real.  But then at some time later this reality is, as you say, seen through, or understood to be less than as what or how it presented itself.  In this, my children, I will include even how you perceive and understand yourself--your body, your mind, and your spirit as they register with you.  So to this degree and in this sense your assigning the assessment of illusion to a one time reality is a judgment you are making with your whole being; if you will, your perception of reality has changed.  What was once real is now seen as only an illusion.  It is diminished.  It no longer partakes of the full transcendent reality you are continuing to exist within right now.  It was only an illusion you had of yourself.  It does not reflect God’s pure creation which is ever transcendent to your present state.  
 
Although these assessments are usually the gradual results of considering some earlier and less mature understandings of reality, the term is often used by those men and women who have had enormous spiritual experiences and have felt themselves suddenly transformed, grown so greatly in spiritual insight, this is also a natural and wholly genuine response now their vision and understanding seem to be so expanded and deepened compared to how they previously saw life.  This immediate comparison can be so great as to render the whole of their previous lives, and those they associate with them, to seem illusory.  And so they say this very thing: they were once living as if asleep, but are now awakened; their previous reality was only a dream.  
 
This is often, then, extended or extrapolated to explain what they now call “ordinary life,” extended to all those other folks out there who have not yet had this great enlightenment of theirs.  Again, this is wholly natural, and honestly how life appears to them.  People in general seem to live under great illusions of how real their reality is until they have an equally great spiritual experience and can begin to see that life is not all mind and material, but is spiritual through and through, even to the degree that the physical-ness of the universe itself seems an illusion.  Suddenly being able to see with the eyes of faith this spiritual luminosity can, at first, make the material seem shadowy and incomplete, an illusion, whereas it is actually, and equally, God’s creation. 
 
Mother Spirit and I offer this understanding based upon how we see human life as essentially experiential, a matter of experience.  True, you do have an existential being, but you cannot as yet directly experience it, or come to valid conclusions based upon it.  You have human experiences that are quite distinct from those of other orders of beings like angels or Midwayers.  Reflect a bit on all the stages you yourself have come through starting with being a very small child and mostly outwardly oriented.  You felt hunger or fear or contentment, but your whole being, as well as that of very primitive peoples, was mostly oriented toward the enormous and incomprehensible world around you that was neither understood nor responsive to you--except perhaps for your loving parents.  That’s where you all started.  
 
After a while you began to acquire a sense of yourself--your ego--who and what you felt yourself to be and have been, and this grew.  You became aware of yourself as a physical being, and then that you had an inner reality of mind as well, both somewhat unique to you.  You may even have tried to submerge this uniqueness to be one of a group, as in early tribal society where the tribe forms most of everyone’s identity and safety.  Then you may have had a great enlightenment experience in which you saw through the limitations of your former immaturity so that, that previous reality now seemed to be only an illusion you had to outgrow.  And so your feelings changed about your fellows and the society around you, about government and the world situation, as you grew from simplicity and pure, adolescent principles by filling out those abstractions with your own experiences.  You saw that those simple forms now appeared as ghostly outlines only.
 
(The eternal now)  
 
But let’s consider this process in the light of the eternal now--right now.  Ask yourself: who or what in your life that is so real right now is only an illusion?  What is so real and meaningful to you now, that you are responding to, might you some day consider just an illusion?  You see the problem.  Too nonchalantly assigning this notion of illusion renders only relative what was absolutely real to you in each moment; literally: your life.  If this misconception is not thoroughly understood it can denigrate your respect for your own soul experience as a five-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old, or a twenty-five-year-old.  
 
Rather, we assure you, my children, your soul contains the full reality of every age you have come through, including how you experienced things.  From our standpoint these were no illusions: it was all real to you, just as your life is now, as you live it this moment, real and complete.  Without this understanding, without this deep assurance within you that you are--you are no illusion--what is happening to you is no illusion--there is no ground to stand on.  Nothing is real; it could all be an illusion.  And indeed, some folks do live for a greater part of their life in this kind of doubt, even believing that this is the way to greater truth.  Whether voluntarily in full consciousness, or not, they have accepted the teaching that life is an illusion, and the very power of creativity of their personalities can make it seem so.  In other words, for them one can never be certain about anything, even their own existence.  Some schools of philosophy or religion try to deliberately create this great doubt in their students so that the escape from it in a profound spiritual realization of actuality--their enlightenment--will be equally great.  
 
We would rather have you get in touch with your own soul, co-created by a pure presence of God, im-mediately--directly without any other mediation, in your own evolving meditation.  Feel--relive even a few moments of some previous time in your life in all fullness, for this is what your soul contains, this spiritual fullness and completeness--just as your spirit is capable of experiencing now.  This is what your soul offers: the story of your life that is all real.  Relive--feel for what reality felt like when Santa Claus was no illusion but thrilled your little soul, and see if this isn’t more truly who and what you were then.  Honor all your own experiences and see if this doesn’t expand your respect and wonder at the young, the immature, the so-called “ordinary folks” in your life who, from a truly spiritual viewpoint, are totally real, as are you.  
 
No one can stand outside themselves in the present moment and make the assessment that something is at once real and an illusion.  This takes the dimension of time--hindsight, in this case based upon a growing or sudden insight.  You are no longer who you once were: your soul has grown and, hopefully, your understanding along with it.  It is from outside human reality that Mother Spirit and I can observe the general tendency to take for real what is an illusion of separateness from the outside world.  This is the notion of pure objectivity--that there is some pure object you can perceive from which you are completely separate and in which you are playing no part.  This is dodging the fact of psychological projection, that you are part of that out there if in no other way than in your selection of what to perceive in an infinitely detailed field.  The term projection comes from the fact that physical recognition takes place in your mind and is “projected” outward where it more--or less--approximates the object perceived through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, grasped by intuition and correlated with understanding and wisdom. 
 
We have given many lessons now on how to take response-ability--how to be able to respond--to the fact that you are always somewhat encountering yourself, but usually on deep, unconscious levels.  This creates the illusion that all that out there is completely independent of your own inner moods, conditioning, understandings, and values.  For indeed this is a hallmark of maturity, first to understand, then be able to experience that in the instantaneous, largely unconscious relationship of meeting different people, you are to a degree meeting yourself.  What you are unconsciously projecting is both interpreting and affecting this other person coming toward you, as are their projections interpreting you.  In this lively meeting of two living people there can be an ability to respond that, if truly spiritually understood and engaged, leads to a conscious granting of freedom, even the invitation, for each to be fully there for the both of you.
 
(No pure objectivity)  
 
So this is one illusion I would have you, my children, contemplate and think about.  How much of your seemingly purely objective life is actually partly you, based on your own understandings and conditioning?  Your life can become an experience that, as your insight and your understanding grow, so too does that whole universe out there, and all the personal beings in it, come to respond to you a little more completely and joyfully.  This is the reward of spiritual growth.  Response-ability is how your will is capable of becoming more and more aligned with God’s will, gaining and granting ever more freedom within His total creation.  
 
These are many things to think about tonight, but I wanted to address this question of illusion and how one has to be so very careful to avoid an inherent or implicit condescension in assigning this term to anyone else’s life, or even your own past.  In this sense there are no “ordinary” folks living in illusion.  As Mother Spirit and I see you, my children, you are each uniquely extraordinary, living real lives.  
 
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s have a look at them. 
 
Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I grasp that you’re saying that when two people come together each one is projecting part of themselves out onto the other person?
 
(Illusion and projection)  
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, my daughter, this is an instantaneous interpretation.  Each one’s inner reality colors everything they perceive.
 
Student:  So if you are aware of this, it becomes part of the creative process with the other person?
 
MICHAEL:  As you become aware of your own inner reality, in maturity, and take responsibility for it, you are able to achieve what we’ve been calling openness.  Mother Spirit talked about a kind of tough inner balance--an equanimity--you can cultivate.  It’s being able to see how people present themselves, more and more irrespective of how you know yourself to be inside.  Conversely, the more opaque you are to yourself, the less you are aware of your inner moods, changes, and understanding, and how they are affecting your perception, the more you are giving objective reality to your own interpretations.  You could be in a foul mood and turn the most delightful and cheerful person into an enemy instantly.  If you are not aware of this, or refuse to take responsibility for it, you find yourself surrounded by enemies.  This is somewhat the state of your current worldly affairs.  
 
Student:  Is that an illusion?  
 
MICHAEL:  It’s real to the person at that moment, and acted upon as real.   It’s part of their experience.  Later they might see it was an illusion they were creating, and call it so: that was an illusion that I saw everyone as my enemy.  But you have to credit that it was a genuine experience at the time.  Illusion is an after-the-fact evaluation.  In the present moment you can only be as open-minded as you can be, to the best of your ability, by being aware of your inner self and the fact you are co-creating your world and everyone in it.  This calls for enormous courage to be open this way, to be vulnerable this way, coming out of the experience that you are surrounded by enemies.  It takes this kind of courage to realize, and accept, that you yourself are causing this situation.
 
Student:  So when two people encounter each other, and they each have their own inner life, they put this out on the other person.  This is worse when they don’t take responsibility for it by realizing that it comes from themselves.  But if both of them are open-minded to what they are doing, then it becomes a great adventure between them.
 
MICHAEL:  My daughter, some of these illusions are more commonly understood as “isms”--like racism, sexism, culture-ism, and your whole world history is the story of different peoples meeting this way and taking the strangeness they experienced as some kind of objective reality, as if the others were really inferior.  But by being aware you have this background--perhaps you were raised by racist or sexist parents--you can in sense withdraw this prejudice and not see others in stereotypes.  You can face your own inner need to put people in little boxes for your own self-gratification of feeling superior, or to control so much intrinsic human uniqueness.  Also there is so much arrogance and hubris involved in all of this, endless hierarchies of religious priest-craft and such looking down on the “common folks.”  
 
But again, these are real experiences to, say, a person who sees the opposite sex as some kind of inferior being.  That--to them--is a valid perception, and everything they encounter in the opposite sex only serves to reassure them of this prejudice because it does serve a psychological purpose.  This is the power of projection.  Your mind has the ability to pick and choose--quite unconsciously--to bulwark its own prejudice.  This is what your world is involved in, and this is precisely what it has to overcome, especially in terms of the major cultures which are still quite distinct.  
 
To a person who is not a racist, they can say that racism is an illusion; but it is not for those involved in it.  They give it objective reality, and it takes courage to realize and accept that this is their own doing.  It means, on the practical, personal level, facing the larger reality of this unique person, then that one, standing in front of them, bursting as raw individuals out of the comfortable boxes they’ve been put in.  As the world gets smaller, as the major cultures are being inextricably shoved together, this is a big problem.  Yet the actual contact and confrontation is also the way out, the way of real experience replacing naïve prejudice.
 
Student:  Yes, that’s…very clear.  Thank you.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  So, Michael, women are not necessarily less courteous drivers than men.  But my comment is, since we are looking at ourselves, and we’re self-aware beings, and are--obviously--projecting onto ourselves something which is not really there, we have illusions about who we are.  So you’re saying that the soul is the real self.  It would seem that to the degree we’re not being our souls, does that mean that we’re in an illusion about who we are?
 
(Human complexity--all real)
 
MICHAEL:  Not at all, my son.  It is rather the opposite.  The soul is just one part of your total self, and not the only real part.  You also have your own ego, your own sense of yourself, how you see and feel yourself, and even this is capable of enormous growth.  Your self-conscious self can be aware--if you’ve been reading our lessons--(Michael laughs)--that you are more than this.  You have a soul.  You have a spirit.  You have a personality.  You have a body and mind that encompass you.  But though this totality of you is transcendent to your consciousness at any one moment, we’re saying that your self-conscious self, and your experiences, do have a kind of absolute reality to you moment by moment.  
 
If you are growing then a larger, future you can look back on your more limited vision now and render the judgment that much of your life now was an illusion.  But it’s not--now.  And it’s always now for your type of being.  There are those philosophies that deny any final reality to your self-conscious self and say that your ego is pure illusion and the only real self is the universal one--God: there is no individualization in true reality, only the illusion of such.  But we say that there definitely are individualized personalities that God has created unique to each, and there are individual souls, and there are self-conscious selves that are fully real.  This is the complexity of human beings we’ve been talking about. 
 
Student:  So when you say that the soul is the real you, you meant that in a certain sense…
 
MICHAEL:  We’re not saying that.  It’s not the only “real you.”  All these parts of you that you’re trying to, and need to, unify--your personality has the function of trying to unify all of you--each one of these parts has its own distinct kind of reality.  Your soul, a Morontia reality co-authored by a fragment of God, is distinct from your present self-consciousness dependant upon your physical being.  Both are real.  
 
Student:  So we’re like a bag of these parts, and each has its own kind of reality.  A clear understanding of who we are has to include all of these, not just the soul, or just the ego, not just the higher faculties.  Right?
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly, my son.  Think of how much harder it would be to casually kill someone else if they were realized as not just a physical body.  If everyone knew themselves and all others to be transcendent beings, what we call little walking infinities of personalities and souls with the potential of eternal life within them--to feel that within themselves, and realize this is also the case with the person they’re about to kill…  That might be a different matter then, to kill another child of God’s.  
 
Student:  Back to the other part of my question: we’re not seeing that, and so there’s this illusion of who we are, and who this other person is.  That follows from what you’re saying.  That illusion about who and what we are is being projected onto others.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, but again, you are as if standing outside the situation, as was I in my example.  My lesson tonight was that the term illusion only applies from a larger point of view.  But: you are never in a larger point of view!  (Right! {and everyone breaks up laughing})  You are your point of view moment to moment.  (Right!--good…)  So human life--as you experience it--is not an illusion.  Your soul is the weaving of your human reality, this human life you know, with how it is experienced and taken on by a pure spirit of God’s in all its completeness from that point of view.
 
Student:  That being the larger point of view.
 
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  When you re-experience pure moments from your soul, you are astonished at the fullness of them--the way things looked and smelled and felt--everything, the whole encompassing.  There you were at five years old, and the doorknobs were way up there, and you walked around in a forest of legs, and your books were full of moo-cows and kitty-cats.  Certainly, now you can see that your whole feeling/reality of Santa Claus Christmas was a kind of sweet and loving cultural joke played on you with elaborate illusions, but at the time?--my goodness, how it all thrilled your soul.  That was your encompassing reality then, and it’s still there, here in your soul.  
 
Student:  So that is what is being recorded as your soul, that actual perception.  
 
MICHAEL:  Not just perception; the whole human experience.  Your soul is a fragment of God’s capturing your full human experience in all its completeness.  
 
Student:  Including what you’re not aware of.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  Your whole being’s experience is generally transcendent to your present consciousness.  As we’ve expressed it before, from the purely spiritual point of view you are whole and complete just as you are, whether or not you can yet realize this.  Your Thought Adjuster registers this completeness, which is why your soul is very distinct and so much larger than your memories.  It represents the totality of your life, but, again, it is not the only real part of you.  Your unique personality, with its unique experiences, is also real, as are the experiences themselves.  Are you not experiencing yourself?  
 
When you try to conceive of this on a universal scale of the entire cosmos and all the personal beings in existence growing this way, it gives you some appreciation of that aspect of God we call the Supreme Being.  This is why it is called Supreme.  And as the Supreme Being is the oversoul of the whole time-and-space creation, so your soul is similarly supreme to your self-conscious self, and why your consciousness has to grow to some day be at one with your soul and its co-author.  This is also why your stillness meditation can offer so much as a way of at least touching this transcendent realm--to be able to relax all the pressing needs of the moment and let some of this story of your life come out in real good reflection.  But even your memories, my son, are permeated by your soul, and so as you get more spiritual maturity--spiritual recognition, as you are more able to recognize the spiritual dimension in your life all along, this soul-quotient within your memories grows.  This is the character you grow.  You are literally earning this realm, and it can be yours forever.  
 
Student:  Michael, you’ve just put me in a psychedelic state.  (much laughter)
 
MICHAEL:  Well, insofar as the original meaning of that word was “mind-manifesting,” I’ll take that as a compliment.  (Yes--please)  Hopefully spirit-manifesting is what we’re doing here; spirit and soul.  
 
Let me pop out one little teaser than Mother Spirit and I want to give a lesson on, and that is how you can add to your soul, and how your soul can be starved.  There are ways that people discover about how to stop experiencing, and your human experience is what you offer this fragment of God’s within you.  Conversely, as you have the courage to keep experiencing the changing, ever new aspect of the creation, this is what you have to give to your soul.  But more on that later.
 
Student:  I remember a transmission saying that the apprehending by the Thought Adjuster of an experience is like a hologram of it.  Was that you or Mother Spirit?
 
MICHAEL:  It must have been someone else.  I would hesitate to put it that way.  Holograms are somewhat nebulous, often just images formed by the intersection of laser beams in a cloudy medium, whereas your soul is quite contra-distinct from any  such purely light-only form.  It’s so much more.  It’s your life as both you and a spirit of God’s see it.  It’s much more full and solid--in a sense--than many folks’ awareness of themselves, or even their finest memories.  As I just got through saying, that fullness in your memories is your soul’s input.
 
Student:  Can you think of a better metaphor than holograms?
 
MICHAEL:  I would just call the soul a transcendent reality, that, as you approach it, you will be transcending your present life’s limits, and your consciousness will be expanding enormously.  It’s a different class of reality, what we call Morontia reality.  It is a combination of an eternal, absolute, existential presence and a unique, personal, temporal experience--unique in all creation.  That’s what it is.  (much laughter…)  
 
Student:  Ooops!  (…and on and on…then, later…)  I was thinking the other day about our dream life and that if you actually tracked your dreams--as Carl Jung said--there is an unfolding story in them.  Is there a sense in which our souls are like a story?  It’s not just a bag of memories, right?--floating around.  Does it have a…direction?
 
MICHAEL:  Time itself, my son, ties it all together.  You’re a temporal being.  Your life is a story told along a dimension of time.  In that sense it is a story, only one that transcends any story you’ve yet encountered.  Time itself ties you together.  You’ve had a real past; you’ll have a real future.  Time is one of God’s laws tying things together sequentially.  Personality is uniquely conscious of time and sequence.
 
Student:  Oh.  Some people can sit down and write a memoir, but others may have more trouble because their life is just all over the map--so to speak.  Is it the case that that’s not how God sees your story.
 
(A metaphor for the soul)
 
MICHAEL:  God, and Mother Spirit and I exist outside of what you know of as time.  As we got into this once before, we not only have sequence, we are not bound by it in the same way as is a physically living, rigidly temporal being such as yourself.  We totally transcend your experience of time.  If you want a metaphor, it’s like you look at events through a living/changing telescope that can view only one little rock at a time, whereas we are seeing the whole entire mountain range.  Your life is like a long, linear, ever growing mountain range that we can see all-at-once, as well as moment-by-moment as you see it.  
 
Student:  So of course that would also apply to our Thought Adjusters and how they see our experience.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, that long mountain range is your soul.  It’s all there, just not yet for you.  Depending upon a living physical body for consciousness you’re still stuck in the moment-by-moment narrow-view telescope.  Even your hindsight and foresight, neither perfect, both exist only in your present moment.  But that’s just about as far as we can go with this metaphor.  (and so everyone breaks up again.)
 
Student:  Whew!--OK, I’ll pause here--at the foot of the mountain.  
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Excuse me--it’s too much--I need to step out for a minute and walk around.  (he leaves, but comes back in a bit)
 
MICHAEL, to a new student:  Do you have anything you wish to ask, or add, (name)?
 
Student:  No, not at this time.
 
MICHAEL:  Well, feel free to step in any time you want.  As you can see, we’re quite informal here.  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Yes, Michael.  Everything is so beautiful tonight--that you said, and so, for me, so moving.  You keep on mentioning that we are little walking infinities, then why do I feel so limited?  (much laughter)  Is that my subjective perception in the way of being open to that potential?
 
MICHAEL:  Yes!  This is true humility, my son, to be aware of all that other. 
 
Student:  I feel like I’m in this limbo place--sometimes--of discarding something because it no longer works for me, it’s illusionary, but I haven’t yet grasped anything concrete or real.  All I am is: here I am.  
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  
 
Student:  It’s like…  Oh.  OK.
 
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
 
MICHAEL:  Not to get a swelled head or anything like that, but that is quite an achievement.  The fear of this state is what causes people to cling to what they have, rather than opening to what they might grow to become--all that scary potential.
 
Student:  That’s why people run to fill that up with something--TV, sex, money, or whatever--instead of sitting still with it, resting with it--meditating, or just not doing anything.  Sometimes there is that compulsion to do something with whatever it is, but there really isn’t anything.  I mean: what do I do--there is that.  That is reality, without putting a name on it.
 
MICHAEL:  And here it comes--right?--because time is God’s law.  Everything is in motion.  You are living: you’re in motion.  You’ve a long ways to go before you achieve Paradise and actually get beyond time…  
 
Student:  Why do you keep saying that!  (more laughter)  I’m sorry.
 
MICHAEL:  No--that’s OK: because it’s true.  It gives you some appreciation of what you are going through, to know that yes, you have to fill it up.  There’s a whole eternity here to fill up.  This is an enormous requirement--you might say--that God puts upon you by creating you an experiential being capable of endless experience.  That very fact is a kind of demand that life puts upon you.
 
Student:  But I’m the one who gets to choose what I experience.
 
MICHAEL:  To the degree you can; to the degree you can realize your free will.
 
Student:  And be objective in my perceptions.  
 
MICHAEL:  Objectivity, my son, is something never quite captured.  It’s an orientation, like my Spirit of Truth.  Part of being objective is in having a full appreciation of your inescapable subjectivity.  I gave the example of getting beyond a prejudice by being aware of how you were raised that way, though that past is real and will always be with you.  Having conquered a prejudice puts you in a different position than with a person who never had the prejudice in the first place.  
 
Student:  Yes--I see that.  That’s why one goes into stillness instead of getting caught up in stories that only perpetuate the past.  In a sense, in that moment you relax these stories and don’t give them any more power.  You let go that point of view to allow a pure-er view--that is already there--to be experienced.
 
MICHAEL:  A pure-er point of view is only there in potential, until it’s realized consciously.  But yes, it’s opening for your soul; it’s opening for your Thought Adjuster; it’s opening for my spirit, and Mother’s.  Sometimes we tease you not to feel too crowded inside, but this is really why spirit influences have to be, need to be, want to be truly unobtrusive.  We value your unique personality and your free will too much to impose ourselves upon you.  It’s because you can ignore us, you literally have to give us reality inside you through a quality of spiritual recognition.  That’s why there is no objective or scientific proof of God, or of Mother Spirit, or me for that matter.  It is only within your own self we can be known.  
 
Student:  So right now you see all of us here as you say, as walking infinities, and that we can allow ourselves to experience that as well, and see each other that way.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, this is the true course of human evolution.
 
Student:  And so also, if I meet someone again I’ve had a relationship with before, even though that’s always there, there is a way I can set that aside in order to see her ever more truly for who she really is, and not get hung up in the past.
 
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  You can also have a deep feeling/reassurance within that both you and her are part of each others’ souls, that your former relationship is being held sacrosanct by a pure presence of God’s.  This helps in letting the past be the past, knowing it is part of your soul in all its original fullness.  And you can visit--if you will--those other times in the past more purely if you have this kind of courageous openness-attitude in the present.  
 
This is most easily achieved at first by a kind of stillness meditation, suspending any kind of heavy, determining issues in the present in order to get a more pure and complete experience of some relationship in the past.  Remember that your soul contains your Thought Adjuster’s point of view too, and it is available to you with its more complete vision of both you and the event.  This is the wealth of your soul.
 
With this attitude, this courageous openness to spiritual completeness, when you meet again you can perceive/experience each other as the new creations you both are because you are both changing and co-creating yourselves in the present.  
 
When we call you walking infinities we are giving due credit to the fact you are creatures of God’s.  God created your personalities, and there are no limits that can be put upon personality either in the present or in duration and extension.  True, each of you are moment by moment limited by your own being and a universe situation, conditioned and defined by your very reality.  But your reality within, and that reality without, are both capable of infinite expansion.  At each moment in time you are a very discrete being indeed and utterly complete, and then here is another moment and your soul has grown.  
 
Student:  When does intention come into play?  Because all of us here have in one way or another the intention to experience all of who we are.  Yet there are those who don’t even have a clue.  I’ve not degrading them because it’s sad.  But where does intention fit it--our commitment to wanting to experience our infinite potential more fully?
 
MICHAEL:  This, my son, is also a gift of God’s.  This is an intrinsic part of your personality.   Your personality has this innate desire to experience, and the power to real-alize--make real for you, the kind of being you are.  All personal beings have this need/innate desire to experience.  But as you correctly notice, mostly through the conditioning in which they were raised, folks can be thwarted in experiencing; and this is what I want to go into in more depth sometime, how…  
 
I’ll mention here what you call bad habits, any kind of unthinking repetitious behavior, shall we say someone who abuses drugs and gets drunk every evening for thirty years to watch the same TV programs.  You have the expression, “the same-old, same-old?”  That is what is starving their soul of what are potentially/possibly greater experiences of life in their evenings.  
 
True enough, the Thought Adjuster sees some uniqueness in each evening because everything is changing, even the person is getting older, but what the person could possibly be offering their Thought Adjuster is enormously dwarfed.  Being in a numbed-out condition evening after evening, year after year, there is so much wasted opportunity.  Every child born has an innate desire to experience, to live, to feel, yet this can be thwarted, terribly crippled.  
 
Student:  Well, thank you.   It was all perfect.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
My children--(Michael broke up laughing)--it has been another delightful evening.  It got a bit didactic there at the beginning because I wanted to run down the complexity surrounding that word illusion, and how different philosophies and religions you’ve encountered sometimes focus on just one part of the full personhood--the personality, the soul, the moment’s conscious self, without realizing and including the completeness of that person, however variously united or not, mature or not.  The temptation is great to see owns own life as having been an illusion, and then the lives of others as illusory.  But because all cosmic reality has its being in God there is a profound reality always here, to endlessly discover as God’s will--existential, supreme, ultimate, absolute, and infinite.  This is what you are living in.  These are the dimensions you will come to encounter.  But your life now as you know yourself moment to moment, this is real.  This is no illusion.  This is what you have to offer that presence of God within you.  You too are the co-creator of your soul.  
 
Be in my peace.  Good evening.         
 
  
 
     
Michael--August 3, 2009
 
Marin TM Group--Mill Valley, California--U.S.A.
 
MICHAEL--T/R-JL
 
(Illusion)
(The eternal now)  
(No pure objectivity)  
(Illusion and projection)  
(Human complexity--all real)
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
(A metaphor for the soul)
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit; dear spiritual parents,    As we approach the fifth anniversary of meeting with you in this particular group, we are reminded of all the really deep, heartfelt wonder and love we’ve shared together--all the laughter, all the tears of joy.  We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.  You yourself said, Michael, it was the really deep joy you shared with your followers--as Jesus--that enabled them to carry on after you had left.  And so it has been with us. 
 
Even greater than the insights and the understandings you’ve given us into our own human natures, it’s been our relationships with other people that you’ve helped us so profoundly transform.  It is for our newly discovered appreciation of them that we want to thank you for showing us the way.  It is for all the loving and lovely people in our lives--our ability to perceive this and appreciate them--we most want to thank you.  As you say, they are our true soul wealth--all these others we have known and shared our lives with.  Amen.
 
MICHAEL:  Good evening, my children, this is Michael.  Mother Spirit sends her love and her greetings.  Let me put all my emphasis behind hers that you are capable of receiving.  Yes, indeed, it has been fun.  It is filling your souls with real, honest-to-goodness thrilling fun that you will carry into eternity.  We see those bright and glowing lights in your souls of the people you have known.  You will carry with you as well your dear relationships with stuff--your homes, your work and tools----those things you have been most intimate with that have also become friends in a way.  These are the things that seem to have acquired a character of their own of all the times you’ve had together.  But it is the other human beings, the other walking infinities--as we call you--that in your souls, just as in your lives, you will find eternally unbounded.  We cannot remind you too many times just what kind of infinities you are, what pure potential you are just starting out with only a few years of life compared to that endless stretch before you without limit either in duration or how much your self-conscious self can continue to grow.  Also you are fortunate now in these modern times with your Hubble Telescope sitting up there as a doorway into the physical infinity of the universe that lies before you too.  
 
Your Urantia book puts it somewhat abstractly that the Supreme dimension of God, of which you are a part, foreshadows the Ultimate.  And so your human lives here, my children, all part of the Supreme Being, do foreshadow this endless life before you that you will ultimately achieve.  So congratulations back at you!  (Michael laughs)  It’s been wonderful visiting with you like this.  Ever keep in mind Mother Spirit and I are part of your lives.  Her spirit augments your own mental abilities; she is literally part of your perception and power.  My Spirit of Truth helps you sort out the complexity of your lives, helps you orient yourselves toward that unending adventure of discovery, and gives you some additional desire for it.  Our Universal Father’s pure presence indwells your minds weaving the timeless tapestry of your souls as well as helping spiritualize your thoughts.
 
(Illusion)
 
Tonight I would like to address the subject that has come up so often in our discussions here, and that is the question of illusion.  Since some of you are familiar with Oriental philosophy’s use of this term that ordinary life is an illusion, I would like to present Mother Spirit’s and my views and feelings about this whole notion of human illusion.  As with other psychological or philosophical terms, almost every school of thought has a slightly different interpretation of them.  So for tonight lets say that illusions are those things that appear genuinely real, as distinct from hallucinations which are either amusing or terrifying because they are immediately recognized as being unreal, or gross exaggerations of what is real--something totally weird.
 
Illusions appear real, are taken for real, affect you as real, and to which you respond--body, mind and spirit--as if they are real.  But then at some time later this reality is, as you say, seen through, or understood to be less than as what or how it presented itself.  In this, my children, I will include even how you perceive and understand yourself--your body, your mind, and your spirit as they register with you.  So to this degree and in this sense your assigning the assessment of illusion to a one time reality is a judgment you are making with your whole being; if you will, your perception of reality has changed.  What was once real is now seen as only an illusion.  It is diminished.  It no longer partakes of the full transcendent reality you are continuing to exist within right now.  It was only an illusion you had of yourself.  It does not reflect God’s pure creation which is ever transcendent to your present state.  
 
Although these assessments are usually the gradual results of considering some earlier and less mature understandings of reality, the term is often used by those men and women who have had enormous spiritual experiences and have felt themselves suddenly transformed, grown so greatly in spiritual insight, this is also a natural and wholly genuine response now their vision and understanding seem to be so expanded and deepened compared to how they previously saw life.  This immediate comparison can be so great as to render the whole of their previous lives, and those they associate with them, to seem illusory.  And so they say this very thing: they were once living as if asleep, but are now awakened; their previous reality was only a dream.  
 
This is often, then, extended or extrapolated to explain what they now call “ordinary life,” extended to all those other folks out there who have not yet had this great enlightenment of theirs.  Again, this is wholly natural, and honestly how life appears to them.  People in general seem to live under great illusions of how real their reality is until they have an equally great spiritual experience and can begin to see that life is not all mind and material, but is spiritual through and through, even to the degree that the physical-ness of the universe itself seems an illusion.  Suddenly being able to see with the eyes of faith this spiritual luminosity can, at first, make the material seem shadowy and incomplete, an illusion, whereas it is actually, and equally, God’s creation. 
 
Mother Spirit and I offer this understanding based upon how we see human life as essentially experiential, a matter of experience.  True, you do have an existential being, but you cannot as yet directly experience it, or come to valid conclusions based upon it.  You have human experiences that are quite distinct from those of other orders of beings like angels or Midwayers.  Reflect a bit on all the stages you yourself have come through starting with being a very small child and mostly outwardly oriented.  You felt hunger or fear or contentment, but your whole being, as well as that of very primitive peoples, was mostly oriented toward the enormous and incomprehensible world around you that was neither understood nor responsive to you--except perhaps for your loving parents.  That’s where you all started.  
 
After a while you began to acquire a sense of yourself--your ego--who and what you felt yourself to be and have been, and this grew.  You became aware of yourself as a physical being, and then that you had an inner reality of mind as well, both somewhat unique to you.  You may even have tried to submerge this uniqueness to be one of a group, as in early tribal society where the tribe forms most of everyone’s identity and safety.  Then you may have had a great enlightenment experience in which you saw through the limitations of your former immaturity so that, that previous reality now seemed to be only an illusion you had to outgrow.  And so your feelings changed about your fellows and the society around you, about government and the world situation, as you grew from simplicity and pure, adolescent principles by filling out those abstractions with your own experiences.  You saw that those simple forms now appeared as ghostly outlines only.
 
(The eternal now)  
 
But let’s consider this process in the light of the eternal now--right now.  Ask yourself: who or what in your life that is so real right now is only an illusion?  What is so real and meaningful to you now, that you are responding to, might you some day consider just an illusion?  You see the problem.  Too nonchalantly assigning this notion of illusion renders only relative what was absolutely real to you in each moment; literally: your life.  If this misconception is not thoroughly understood it can denigrate your respect for your own soul experience as a five-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old, or a twenty-five-year-old.  
 
Rather, we assure you, my children, your soul contains the full reality of every age you have come through, including how you experienced things.  From our standpoint these were no illusions: it was all real to you, just as your life is now, as you live it this moment, real and complete.  Without this understanding, without this deep assurance within you that you are--you are no illusion--what is happening to you is no illusion--there is no ground to stand on.  Nothing is real; it could all be an illusion.  And indeed, some folks do live for a greater part of their life in this kind of doubt, even believing that this is the way to greater truth.  Whether voluntarily in full consciousness, or not, they have accepted the teaching that life is an illusion, and the very power of creativity of their personalities can make it seem so.  In other words, for them one can never be certain about anything, even their own existence.  Some schools of philosophy or religion try to deliberately create this great doubt in their students so that the escape from it in a profound spiritual realization of actuality--their enlightenment--will be equally great.  
 
We would rather have you get in touch with your own soul, co-created by a pure presence of God, im-mediately--directly without any other mediation, in your own evolving meditation.  Feel--relive even a few moments of some previous time in your life in all fullness, for this is what your soul contains, this spiritual fullness and completeness--just as your spirit is capable of experiencing now.  This is what your soul offers: the story of your life that is all real.  Relive--feel for what reality felt like when Santa Claus was no illusion but thrilled your little soul, and see if this isn’t more truly who and what you were then.  Honor all your own experiences and see if this doesn’t expand your respect and wonder at the young, the immature, the so-called “ordinary folks” in your life who, from a truly spiritual viewpoint, are totally real, as are you.  
 
No one can stand outside themselves in the present moment and make the assessment that something is at once real and an illusion.  This takes the dimension of time--hindsight, in this case based upon a growing or sudden insight.  You are no longer who you once were: your soul has grown and, hopefully, your understanding along with it.  It is from outside human reality that Mother Spirit and I can observe the general tendency to take for real what is an illusion of separateness from the outside world.  This is the notion of pure objectivity--that there is some pure object you can perceive from which you are completely separate and in which you are playing no part.  This is dodging the fact of psychological projection, that you are part of that out there if in no other way than in your selection of what to perceive in an infinitely detailed field.  The term projection comes from the fact that physical recognition takes place in your mind and is “projected” outward where it more--or less--approximates the object perceived through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, grasped by intuition and correlated with understanding and wisdom. 
 
We have given many lessons now on how to take response-ability--how to be able to respond--to the fact that you are always somewhat encountering yourself, but usually on deep, unconscious levels.  This creates the illusion that all that out there is completely independent of your own inner moods, conditioning, understandings, and values.  For indeed this is a hallmark of maturity, first to understand, then be able to experience that in the instantaneous, largely unconscious relationship of meeting different people, you are to a degree meeting yourself.  What you are unconsciously projecting is both interpreting and affecting this other person coming toward you, as are their projections interpreting you.  In this lively meeting of two living people there can be an ability to respond that, if truly spiritually understood and engaged, leads to a conscious granting of freedom, even the invitation, for each to be fully there for the both of you.
 
(No pure objectivity)  
 
So this is one illusion I would have you, my children, contemplate and think about.  How much of your seemingly purely objective life is actually partly you, based on your own understandings and conditioning?  Your life can become an experience that, as your insight and your understanding grow, so too does that whole universe out there, and all the personal beings in it, come to respond to you a little more completely and joyfully.  This is the reward of spiritual growth.  Response-ability is how your will is capable of becoming more and more aligned with God’s will, gaining and granting ever more freedom within His total creation.  
 
These are many things to think about tonight, but I wanted to address this question of illusion and how one has to be so very careful to avoid an inherent or implicit condescension in assigning this term to anyone else’s life, or even your own past.  In this sense there are no “ordinary” folks living in illusion.  As Mother Spirit and I see you, my children, you are each uniquely extraordinary, living real lives.  
 
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s have a look at them. 
 
Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I grasp that you’re saying that when two people come together each one is projecting part of themselves out onto the other person?
 
(Illusion and projection)  
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, my daughter, this is an instantaneous interpretation.  Each one’s inner reality colors everything they perceive.
 
Student:  So if you are aware of this, it becomes part of the creative process with the other person?
 
MICHAEL:  As you become aware of your own inner reality, in maturity, and take responsibility for it, you are able to achieve what we’ve been calling openness.  Mother Spirit talked about a kind of tough inner balance--an equanimity--you can cultivate.  It’s being able to see how people present themselves, more and more irrespective of how you know yourself to be inside.  Conversely, the more opaque you are to yourself, the less you are aware of your inner moods, changes, and understanding, and how they are affecting your perception, the more you are giving objective reality to your own interpretations.  You could be in a foul mood and turn the most delightful and cheerful person into an enemy instantly.  If you are not aware of this, or refuse to take responsibility for it, you find yourself surrounded by enemies.  This is somewhat the state of your current worldly affairs.  
 
Student:  Is that an illusion?  
 
MICHAEL:  It’s real to the person at that moment, and acted upon as real.   It’s part of their experience.  Later they might see it was an illusion they were creating, and call it so: that was an illusion that I saw everyone as my enemy.  But you have to credit that it was a genuine experience at the time.  Illusion is an after-the-fact evaluation.  In the present moment you can only be as open-minded as you can be, to the best of your ability, by being aware of your inner self and the fact you are co-creating your world and everyone in it.  This calls for enormous courage to be open this way, to be vulnerable this way, coming out of the experience that you are surrounded by enemies.  It takes this kind of courage to realize, and accept, that you yourself are causing this situation.
 
Student:  So when two people encounter each other, and they each have their own inner life, they put this out on the other person.  This is worse when they don’t take responsibility for it by realizing that it comes from themselves.  But if both of them are open-minded to what they are doing, then it becomes a great adventure between them.
 
MICHAEL:  My daughter, some of these illusions are more commonly understood as “isms”--like racism, sexism, culture-ism, and your whole world history is the story of different peoples meeting this way and taking the strangeness they experienced as some kind of objective reality, as if the others were really inferior.  But by being aware you have this background--perhaps you were raised by racist or sexist parents--you can in sense withdraw this prejudice and not see others in stereotypes.  You can face your own inner need to put people in little boxes for your own self-gratification of feeling superior, or to control so much intrinsic human uniqueness.  Also there is so much arrogance and hubris involved in all of this, endless hierarchies of religious priest-craft and such looking down on the “common folks.”  
 
But again, these are real experiences to, say, a person who sees the opposite sex as some kind of inferior being.  That--to them--is a valid perception, and everything they encounter in the opposite sex only serves to reassure them of this prejudice because it does serve a psychological purpose.  This is the power of projection.  Your mind has the ability to pick and choose--quite unconsciously--to bulwark its own prejudice.  This is what your world is involved in, and this is precisely what it has to overcome, especially in terms of the major cultures which are still quite distinct.  
 
To a person who is not a racist, they can say that racism is an illusion; but it is not for those involved in it.  They give it objective reality, and it takes courage to realize and accept that this is their own doing.  It means, on the practical, personal level, facing the larger reality of this unique person, then that one, standing in front of them, bursting as raw individuals out of the comfortable boxes they’ve been put in.  As the world gets smaller, as the major cultures are being inextricably shoved together, this is a big problem.  Yet the actual contact and confrontation is also the way out, the way of real experience replacing naïve prejudice.
 
Student:  Yes, that’s…very clear.  Thank you.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  So, Michael, women are not necessarily less courteous drivers than men.  But my comment is, since we are looking at ourselves, and we’re self-aware beings, and are--obviously--projecting onto ourselves something which is not really there, we have illusions about who we are.  So you’re saying that the soul is the real self.  It would seem that to the degree we’re not being our souls, does that mean that we’re in an illusion about who we are?
 
(Human complexity--all real)
 
MICHAEL:  Not at all, my son.  It is rather the opposite.  The soul is just one part of your total self, and not the only real part.  You also have your own ego, your own sense of yourself, how you see and feel yourself, and even this is capable of enormous growth.  Your self-conscious self can be aware--if you’ve been reading our lessons--(Michael laughs)--that you are more than this.  You have a soul.  You have a spirit.  You have a personality.  You have a body and mind that encompass you.  But though this totality of you is transcendent to your consciousness at any one moment, we’re saying that your self-conscious self, and your experiences, do have a kind of absolute reality to you moment by moment.  
 
If you are growing then a larger, future you can look back on your more limited vision now and render the judgment that much of your life now was an illusion.  But it’s not--now.  And it’s always now for your type of being.  There are those philosophies that deny any final reality to your self-conscious self and say that your ego is pure illusion and the only real self is the universal one--God: there is no individualization in true reality, only the illusion of such.  But we say that there definitely are individualized personalities that God has created unique to each, and there are individual souls, and there are self-conscious selves that are fully real.  This is the complexity of human beings we’ve been talking about. 
 
Student:  So when you say that the soul is the real you, you meant that in a certain sense…
 
MICHAEL:  We’re not saying that.  It’s not the only “real you.”  All these parts of you that you’re trying to, and need to, unify--your personality has the function of trying to unify all of you--each one of these parts has its own distinct kind of reality.  Your soul, a Morontia reality co-authored by a fragment of God, is distinct from your present self-consciousness dependant upon your physical being.  Both are real.  
 
Student:  So we’re like a bag of these parts, and each has its own kind of reality.  A clear understanding of who we are has to include all of these, not just the soul, or just the ego, not just the higher faculties.  Right?
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly, my son.  Think of how much harder it would be to casually kill someone else if they were realized as not just a physical body.  If everyone knew themselves and all others to be transcendent beings, what we call little walking infinities of personalities and souls with the potential of eternal life within them--to feel that within themselves, and realize this is also the case with the person they’re about to kill…  That might be a different matter then, to kill another child of God’s.  
 
Student:  Back to the other part of my question: we’re not seeing that, and so there’s this illusion of who we are, and who this other person is.  That follows from what you’re saying.  That illusion about who and what we are is being projected onto others.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, but again, you are as if standing outside the situation, as was I in my example.  My lesson tonight was that the term illusion only applies from a larger point of view.  But: you are never in a larger point of view!  (Right! {and everyone breaks up laughing})  You are your point of view moment to moment.  (Right!--good…)  So human life--as you experience it--is not an illusion.  Your soul is the weaving of your human reality, this human life you know, with how it is experienced and taken on by a pure spirit of God’s in all its completeness from that point of view.
 
Student:  That being the larger point of view.
 
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  When you re-experience pure moments from your soul, you are astonished at the fullness of them--the way things looked and smelled and felt--everything, the whole encompassing.  There you were at five years old, and the doorknobs were way up there, and you walked around in a forest of legs, and your books were full of moo-cows and kitty-cats.  Certainly, now you can see that your whole feeling/reality of Santa Claus Christmas was a kind of sweet and loving cultural joke played on you with elaborate illusions, but at the time?--my goodness, how it all thrilled your soul.  That was your encompassing reality then, and it’s still there, here in your soul.  
 
Student:  So that is what is being recorded as your soul, that actual perception.  
 
MICHAEL:  Not just perception; the whole human experience.  Your soul is a fragment of God’s capturing your full human experience in all its completeness.  
 
Student:  Including what you’re not aware of.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  Your whole being’s experience is generally transcendent to your present consciousness.  As we’ve expressed it before, from the purely spiritual point of view you are whole and complete just as you are, whether or not you can yet realize this.  Your Thought Adjuster registers this completeness, which is why your soul is very distinct and so much larger than your memories.  It represents the totality of your life, but, again, it is not the only real part of you.  Your unique personality, with its unique experiences, is also real, as are the experiences themselves.  Are you not experiencing yourself?  
 
When you try to conceive of this on a universal scale of the entire cosmos and all the personal beings in existence growing this way, it gives you some appreciation of that aspect of God we call the Supreme Being.  This is why it is called Supreme.  And as the Supreme Being is the oversoul of the whole time-and-space creation, so your soul is similarly supreme to your self-conscious self, and why your consciousness has to grow to some day be at one with your soul and its co-author.  This is also why your stillness meditation can offer so much as a way of at least touching this transcendent realm--to be able to relax all the pressing needs of the moment and let some of this story of your life come out in real good reflection.  But even your memories, my son, are permeated by your soul, and so as you get more spiritual maturity--spiritual recognition, as you are more able to recognize the spiritual dimension in your life all along, this soul-quotient within your memories grows.  This is the character you grow.  You are literally earning this realm, and it can be yours forever.  
 
Student:  Michael, you’ve just put me in a psychedelic state.  (much laughter)
 
MICHAEL:  Well, insofar as the original meaning of that word was “mind-manifesting,” I’ll take that as a compliment.  (Yes--please)  Hopefully spirit-manifesting is what we’re doing here; spirit and soul.  
 
Let me pop out one little teaser than Mother Spirit and I want to give a lesson on, and that is how you can add to your soul, and how your soul can be starved.  There are ways that people discover about how to stop experiencing, and your human experience is what you offer this fragment of God’s within you.  Conversely, as you have the courage to keep experiencing the changing, ever new aspect of the creation, this is what you have to give to your soul.  But more on that later.
 
Student:  I remember a transmission saying that the apprehending by the Thought Adjuster of an experience is like a hologram of it.  Was that you or Mother Spirit?
 
MICHAEL:  It must have been someone else.  I would hesitate to put it that way.  Holograms are somewhat nebulous, often just images formed by the intersection of laser beams in a cloudy medium, whereas your soul is quite contra-distinct from any  such purely light-only form.  It’s so much more.  It’s your life as both you and a spirit of God’s see it.  It’s much more full and solid--in a sense--than many folks’ awareness of themselves, or even their finest memories.  As I just got through saying, that fullness in your memories is your soul’s input.
 
Student:  Can you think of a better metaphor than holograms?
 
MICHAEL:  I would just call the soul a transcendent reality, that, as you approach it, you will be transcending your present life’s limits, and your consciousness will be expanding enormously.  It’s a different class of reality, what we call Morontia reality.  It is a combination of an eternal, absolute, existential presence and a unique, personal, temporal experience--unique in all creation.  That’s what it is.  (much laughter…)  
 
Student:  Ooops!  (…and on and on…then, later…)  I was thinking the other day about our dream life and that if you actually tracked your dreams--as Carl Jung said--there is an unfolding story in them.  Is there a sense in which our souls are like a story?  It’s not just a bag of memories, right?--floating around.  Does it have a…direction?
 
MICHAEL:  Time itself, my son, ties it all together.  You’re a temporal being.  Your life is a story told along a dimension of time.  In that sense it is a story, only one that transcends any story you’ve yet encountered.  Time itself ties you together.  You’ve had a real past; you’ll have a real future.  Time is one of God’s laws tying things together sequentially.  Personality is uniquely conscious of time and sequence.
 
Student:  Oh.  Some people can sit down and write a memoir, but others may have more trouble because their life is just all over the map--so to speak.  Is it the case that that’s not how God sees your story.
 
(A metaphor for the soul)
 
MICHAEL:  God, and Mother Spirit and I exist outside of what you know of as time.  As we got into this once before, we not only have sequence, we are not bound by it in the same way as is a physically living, rigidly temporal being such as yourself.  We totally transcend your experience of time.  If you want a metaphor, it’s like you look at events through a living/changing telescope that can view only one little rock at a time, whereas we are seeing the whole entire mountain range.  Your life is like a long, linear, ever growing mountain range that we can see all-at-once, as well as moment-by-moment as you see it.  
 
Student:  So of course that would also apply to our Thought Adjusters and how they see our experience.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, that long mountain range is your soul.  It’s all there, just not yet for you.  Depending upon a living physical body for consciousness you’re still stuck in the moment-by-moment narrow-view telescope.  Even your hindsight and foresight, neither perfect, both exist only in your present moment.  But that’s just about as far as we can go with this metaphor.  (and so everyone breaks up again.)
 
Student:  Whew!--OK, I’ll pause here--at the foot of the mountain.  
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Excuse me--it’s too much--I need to step out for a minute and walk around.  (he leaves, but comes back in a bit)
 
MICHAEL, to a new student:  Do you have anything you wish to ask, or add, (name)?
 
Student:  No, not at this time.
 
MICHAEL:  Well, feel free to step in any time you want.  As you can see, we’re quite informal here.  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Yes, Michael.  Everything is so beautiful tonight--that you said, and so, for me, so moving.  You keep on mentioning that we are little walking infinities, then why do I feel so limited?  (much laughter)  Is that my subjective perception in the way of being open to that potential?
 
MICHAEL:  Yes!  This is true humility, my son, to be aware of all that other. 
 
Student:  I feel like I’m in this limbo place--sometimes--of discarding something because it no longer works for me, it’s illusionary, but I haven’t yet grasped anything concrete or real.  All I am is: here I am.  
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  
 
Student:  It’s like…  Oh.  OK.
 
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
 
MICHAEL:  Not to get a swelled head or anything like that, but that is quite an achievement.  The fear of this state is what causes people to cling to what they have, rather than opening to what they might grow to become--all that scary potential.
 
Student:  That’s why people run to fill that up with something--TV, sex, money, or whatever--instead of sitting still with it, resting with it--meditating, or just not doing anything.  Sometimes there is that compulsion to do something with whatever it is, but there really isn’t anything.  I mean: what do I do--there is that.  That is reality, without putting a name on it.
 
MICHAEL:  And here it comes--right?--because time is God’s law.  Everything is in motion.  You are living: you’re in motion.  You’ve a long ways to go before you achieve Paradise and actually get beyond time…  
 
Student:  Why do you keep saying that!  (more laughter)  I’m sorry.
 
MICHAEL:  No--that’s OK: because it’s true.  It gives you some appreciation of what you are going through, to know that yes, you have to fill it up.  There’s a whole eternity here to fill up.  This is an enormous requirement--you might say--that God puts upon you by creating you an experiential being capable of endless experience.  That very fact is a kind of demand that life puts upon you.
 
Student:  But I’m the one who gets to choose what I experience.
 
MICHAEL:  To the degree you can; to the degree you can realize your free will.
 
Student:  And be objective in my perceptions.  
 
MICHAEL:  Objectivity, my son, is something never quite captured.  It’s an orientation, like my Spirit of Truth.  Part of being objective is in having a full appreciation of your inescapable subjectivity.  I gave the example of getting beyond a prejudice by being aware of how you were raised that way, though that past is real and will always be with you.  Having conquered a prejudice puts you in a different position than with a person who never had the prejudice in the first place.  
 
Student:  Yes--I see that.  That’s why one goes into stillness instead of getting caught up in stories that only perpetuate the past.  In a sense, in that moment you relax these stories and don’t give them any more power.  You let go that point of view to allow a pure-er view--that is already there--to be experienced.
 
MICHAEL:  A pure-er point of view is only there in potential, until it’s realized consciously.  But yes, it’s opening for your soul; it’s opening for your Thought Adjuster; it’s opening for my spirit, and Mother’s.  Sometimes we tease you not to feel too crowded inside, but this is really why spirit influences have to be, need to be, want to be truly unobtrusive.  We value your unique personality and your free will too much to impose ourselves upon you.  It’s because you can ignore us, you literally have to give us reality inside you through a quality of spiritual recognition.  That’s why there is no objective or scientific proof of God, or of Mother Spirit, or me for that matter.  It is only within your own self we can be known.  
 
Student:  So right now you see all of us here as you say, as walking infinities, and that we can allow ourselves to experience that as well, and see each other that way.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, this is the true course of human evolution.
 
Student:  And so also, if I meet someone again I’ve had a relationship with before, even though that’s always there, there is a way I can set that aside in order to see her ever more truly for who she really is, and not get hung up in the past.
 
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  You can also have a deep feeling/reassurance within that both you and her are part of each others’ souls, that your former relationship is being held sacrosanct by a pure presence of God’s.  This helps in letting the past be the past, knowing it is part of your soul in all its original fullness.  And you can visit--if you will--those other times in the past more purely if you have this kind of courageous openness-attitude in the present.  
 
This is most easily achieved at first by a kind of stillness meditation, suspending any kind of heavy, determining issues in the present in order to get a more pure and complete experience of some relationship in the past.  Remember that your soul contains your Thought Adjuster’s point of view too, and it is available to you with its more complete vision of both you and the event.  This is the wealth of your soul.
 
With this attitude, this courageous openness to spiritual completeness, when you meet again you can perceive/experience each other as the new creations you both are because you are both changing and co-creating yourselves in the present.  
 
When we call you walking infinities we are giving due credit to the fact you are creatures of God’s.  God created your personalities, and there are no limits that can be put upon personality either in the present or in duration and extension.  True, each of you are moment by moment limited by your own being and a universe situation, conditioned and defined by your very reality.  But your reality within, and that reality without, are both capable of infinite expansion.  At each moment in time you are a very discrete being indeed and utterly complete, and then here is another moment and your soul has grown.  
 
Student:  When does intention come into play?  Because all of us here have in one way or another the intention to experience all of who we are.  Yet there are those who don’t even have a clue.  I’ve not degrading them because it’s sad.  But where does intention fit it--our commitment to wanting to experience our infinite potential more fully?
 
MICHAEL:  This, my son, is also a gift of God’s.  This is an intrinsic part of your personality.   Your personality has this innate desire to experience, and the power to real-alize--make real for you, the kind of being you are.  All personal beings have this need/innate desire to experience.  But as you correctly notice, mostly through the conditioning in which they were raised, folks can be thwarted in experiencing; and this is what I want to go into in more depth sometime, how…  
 
I’ll mention here what you call bad habits, any kind of unthinking repetitious behavior, shall we say someone who abuses drugs and gets drunk every evening for thirty years to watch the same TV programs.  You have the expression, “the same-old, same-old?”  That is what is starving their soul of what are potentially/possibly greater experiences of life in their evenings.  
 
True enough, the Thought Adjuster sees some uniqueness in each evening because everything is changing, even the person is getting older, but what the person could possibly be offering their Thought Adjuster is enormously dwarfed.  Being in a numbed-out condition evening after evening, year after year, there is so much wasted opportunity.  Every child born has an innate desire to experience, to live, to feel, yet this can be thwarted, terribly crippled.  
 
Student:  Well, thank you.   It was all perfect.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
My children--(Michael broke up laughing)--it has been another delightful evening.  It got a bit didactic there at the beginning because I wanted to run down the complexity surrounding that word illusion, and how different philosophies and religions you’ve encountered sometimes focus on just one part of the full personhood--the personality, the soul, the moment’s conscious self, without realizing and including the completeness of that person, however variously united or not, mature or not.  The temptation is great to see owns own life as having been an illusion, and then the lives of others as illusory.  But because all cosmic reality has its being in God there is a profound reality always here, to endlessly discover as God’s will--existential, supreme, ultimate, absolute, and infinite.  This is what you are living in.  These are the dimensions you will come to encounter.  But your life now as you know yourself moment to moment, this is real.  This is no illusion.  This is what you have to offer that presence of God within you.  You too are the co-creator of your soul.  
 
Be in my peace.  Good evening.         
 
  
 
                                          
 
Michael--August 3, 2009
 
Marin TM Group--Mill Valley, California--U.S.A.
 
MICHAEL--T/R-JL
 
(Illusion)
(The eternal now)  
(No pure objectivity)  
(Illusion and projection)  
(Human complexity--all real)
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
(A metaphor for the soul)
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit; dear spiritual parents,    As we approach the fifth anniversary of meeting with you in this particular group, we are reminded of all the really deep, heartfelt wonder and love we’ve shared together--all the laughter, all the tears of joy.  We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.  You yourself said, Michael, it was the really deep joy you shared with your followers--as Jesus--that enabled them to carry on after you had left.  And so it has been with us. 
 
Even greater than the insights and the understandings you’ve given us into our own human natures, it’s been our relationships with other people that you’ve helped us so profoundly transform.  It is for our newly discovered appreciation of them that we want to thank you for showing us the way.  It is for all the loving and lovely people in our lives--our ability to perceive this and appreciate them--we most want to thank you.  As you say, they are our true soul wealth--all these others we have known and shared our lives with.  Amen.
 
MICHAEL:  Good evening, my children, this is Michael.  Mother Spirit sends her love and her greetings.  Let me put all my emphasis behind hers that you are capable of receiving.  Yes, indeed, it has been fun.  It is filling your souls with real, honest-to-goodness thrilling fun that you will carry into eternity.  We see those bright and glowing lights in your souls of the people you have known.  You will carry with you as well your dear relationships with stuff--your homes, your work and tools----those things you have been most intimate with that have also become friends in a way.  These are the things that seem to have acquired a character of their own of all the times you’ve had together.  But it is the other human beings, the other walking infinities--as we call you--that in your souls, just as in your lives, you will find eternally unbounded.  We cannot remind you too many times just what kind of infinities you are, what pure potential you are just starting out with only a few years of life compared to that endless stretch before you without limit either in duration or how much your self-conscious self can continue to grow.  Also you are fortunate now in these modern times with your Hubble Telescope sitting up there as a doorway into the physical infinity of the universe that lies before you too.  
 
Your Urantia book puts it somewhat abstractly that the Supreme dimension of God, of which you are a part, foreshadows the Ultimate.  And so your human lives here, my children, all part of the Supreme Being, do foreshadow this endless life before you that you will ultimately achieve.  So congratulations back at you!  (Michael laughs)  It’s been wonderful visiting with you like this.  Ever keep in mind Mother Spirit and I are part of your lives.  Her spirit augments your own mental abilities; she is literally part of your perception and power.  My Spirit of Truth helps you sort out the complexity of your lives, helps you orient yourselves toward that unending adventure of discovery, and gives you some additional desire for it.  Our Universal Father’s pure presence indwells your minds weaving the timeless tapestry of your souls as well as helping spiritualize your thoughts.
 
(Illusion)
 
Tonight I would like to address the subject that has come up so often in our discussions here, and that is the question of illusion.  Since some of you are familiar with Oriental philosophy’s use of this term that ordinary life is an illusion, I would like to present Mother Spirit’s and my views and feelings about this whole notion of human illusion.  As with other psychological or philosophical terms, almost every school of thought has a slightly different interpretation of them.  So for tonight lets say that illusions are those things that appear genuinely real, as distinct from hallucinations which are either amusing or terrifying because they are immediately recognized as being unreal, or gross exaggerations of what is real--something totally weird.
 
Illusions appear real, are taken for real, affect you as real, and to which you respond--body, mind and spirit--as if they are real.  But then at some time later this reality is, as you say, seen through, or understood to be less than as what or how it presented itself.  In this, my children, I will include even how you perceive and understand yourself--your body, your mind, and your spirit as they register with you.  So to this degree and in this sense your assigning the assessment of illusion to a one time reality is a judgment you are making with your whole being; if you will, your perception of reality has changed.  What was once real is now seen as only an illusion.  It is diminished.  It no longer partakes of the full transcendent reality you are continuing to exist within right now.  It was only an illusion you had of yourself.  It does not reflect God’s pure creation which is ever transcendent to your present state.  
 
Although these assessments are usually the gradual results of considering some earlier and less mature understandings of reality, the term is often used by those men and women who have had enormous spiritual experiences and have felt themselves suddenly transformed, grown so greatly in spiritual insight, this is also a natural and wholly genuine response now their vision and understanding seem to be so expanded and deepened compared to how they previously saw life.  This immediate comparison can be so great as to render the whole of their previous lives, and those they associate with them, to seem illusory.  And so they say this very thing: they were once living as if asleep, but are now awakened; their previous reality was only a dream.  
 
This is often, then, extended or extrapolated to explain what they now call “ordinary life,” extended to all those other folks out there who have not yet had this great enlightenment of theirs.  Again, this is wholly natural, and honestly how life appears to them.  People in general seem to live under great illusions of how real their reality is until they have an equally great spiritual experience and can begin to see that life is not all mind and material, but is spiritual through and through, even to the degree that the physical-ness of the universe itself seems an illusion.  Suddenly being able to see with the eyes of faith this spiritual luminosity can, at first, make the material seem shadowy and incomplete, an illusion, whereas it is actually, and equally, God’s creation. 
 
Mother Spirit and I offer this understanding based upon how we see human life as essentially experiential, a matter of experience.  True, you do have an existential being, but you cannot as yet directly experience it, or come to valid conclusions based upon it.  You have human experiences that are quite distinct from those of other orders of beings like angels or Midwayers.  Reflect a bit on all the stages you yourself have come through starting with being a very small child and mostly outwardly oriented.  You felt hunger or fear or contentment, but your whole being, as well as that of very primitive peoples, was mostly oriented toward the enormous and incomprehensible world around you that was neither understood nor responsive to you--except perhaps for your loving parents.  That’s where you all started.  
 
After a while you began to acquire a sense of yourself--your ego--who and what you felt yourself to be and have been, and this grew.  You became aware of yourself as a physical being, and then that you had an inner reality of mind as well, both somewhat unique to you.  You may even have tried to submerge this uniqueness to be one of a group, as in early tribal society where the tribe forms most of everyone’s identity and safety.  Then you may have had a great enlightenment experience in which you saw through the limitations of your former immaturity so that, that previous reality now seemed to be only an illusion you had to outgrow.  And so your feelings changed about your fellows and the society around you, about government and the world situation, as you grew from simplicity and pure, adolescent principles by filling out those abstractions with your own experiences.  You saw that those simple forms now appeared as ghostly outlines only.
 
(The eternal now)  
 
But let’s consider this process in the light of the eternal now--right now.  Ask yourself: who or what in your life that is so real right now is only an illusion?  What is so real and meaningful to you now, that you are responding to, might you some day consider just an illusion?  You see the problem.  Too nonchalantly assigning this notion of illusion renders only relative what was absolutely real to you in each moment; literally: your life.  If this misconception is not thoroughly understood it can denigrate your respect for your own soul experience as a five-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old, or a twenty-five-year-old.  
 
Rather, we assure you, my children, your soul contains the full reality of every age you have come through, including how you experienced things.  From our standpoint these were no illusions: it was all real to you, just as your life is now, as you live it this moment, real and complete.  Without this understanding, without this deep assurance within you that you are--you are no illusion--what is happening to you is no illusion--there is no ground to stand on.  Nothing is real; it could all be an illusion.  And indeed, some folks do live for a greater part of their life in this kind of doubt, even believing that this is the way to greater truth.  Whether voluntarily in full consciousness, or not, they have accepted the teaching that life is an illusion, and the very power of creativity of their personalities can make it seem so.  In other words, for them one can never be certain about anything, even their own existence.  Some schools of philosophy or religion try to deliberately create this great doubt in their students so that the escape from it in a profound spiritual realization of actuality--their enlightenment--will be equally great.  
 
We would rather have you get in touch with your own soul, co-created by a pure presence of God, im-mediately--directly without any other mediation, in your own evolving meditation.  Feel--relive even a few moments of some previous time in your life in all fullness, for this is what your soul contains, this spiritual fullness and completeness--just as your spirit is capable of experiencing now.  This is what your soul offers: the story of your life that is all real.  Relive--feel for what reality felt like when Santa Claus was no illusion but thrilled your little soul, and see if this isn’t more truly who and what you were then.  Honor all your own experiences and see if this doesn’t expand your respect and wonder at the young, the immature, the so-called “ordinary folks” in your life who, from a truly spiritual viewpoint, are totally real, as are you.  
 
No one can stand outside themselves in the present moment and make the assessment that something is at once real and an illusion.  This takes the dimension of time--hindsight, in this case based upon a growing or sudden insight.  You are no longer who you once were: your soul has grown and, hopefully, your understanding along with it.  It is from outside human reality that Mother Spirit and I can observe the general tendency to take for real what is an illusion of separateness from the outside world.  This is the notion of pure objectivity--that there is some pure object you can perceive from which you are completely separate and in which you are playing no part.  This is dodging the fact of psychological projection, that you are part of that out there if in no other way than in your selection of what to perceive in an infinitely detailed field.  The term projection comes from the fact that physical recognition takes place in your mind and is “projected” outward where it more--or less--approximates the object perceived through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, grasped by intuition and correlated with understanding and wisdom. 
 
We have given many lessons now on how to take response-ability--how to be able to respond--to the fact that you are always somewhat encountering yourself, but usually on deep, unconscious levels.  This creates the illusion that all that out there is completely independent of your own inner moods, conditioning, understandings, and values.  For indeed this is a hallmark of maturity, first to understand, then be able to experience that in the instantaneous, largely unconscious relationship of meeting different people, you are to a degree meeting yourself.  What you are unconsciously projecting is both interpreting and affecting this other person coming toward you, as are their projections interpreting you.  In this lively meeting of two living people there can be an ability to respond that, if truly spiritually understood and engaged, leads to a conscious granting of freedom, even the invitation, for each to be fully there for the both of you.
 
(No pure objectivity)  
 
So this is one illusion I would have you, my children, contemplate and think about.  How much of your seemingly purely objective life is actually partly you, based on your own understandings and conditioning?  Your life can become an experience that, as your insight and your understanding grow, so too does that whole universe out there, and all the personal beings in it, come to respond to you a little more completely and joyfully.  This is the reward of spiritual growth.  Response-ability is how your will is capable of becoming more and more aligned with God’s will, gaining and granting ever more freedom within His total creation.  
 
These are many things to think about tonight, but I wanted to address this question of illusion and how one has to be so very careful to avoid an inherent or implicit condescension in assigning this term to anyone else’s life, or even your own past.  In this sense there are no “ordinary” folks living in illusion.  As Mother Spirit and I see you, my children, you are each uniquely extraordinary, living real lives.  
 
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s have a look at them. 
 
Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I grasp that you’re saying that when two people come together each one is projecting part of themselves out onto the other person?
 
(Illusion and projection)  
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, my daughter, this is an instantaneous interpretation.  Each one’s inner reality colors everything they perceive.
 
Student:  So if you are aware of this, it becomes part of the creative process with the other person?
 
MICHAEL:  As you become aware of your own inner reality, in maturity, and take responsibility for it, you are able to achieve what we’ve been calling openness.  Mother Spirit talked about a kind of tough inner balance--an equanimity--you can cultivate.  It’s being able to see how people present themselves, more and more irrespective of how you know yourself to be inside.  Conversely, the more opaque you are to yourself, the less you are aware of your inner moods, changes, and understanding, and how they are affecting your perception, the more you are giving objective reality to your own interpretations.  You could be in a foul mood and turn the most delightful and cheerful person into an enemy instantly.  If you are not aware of this, or refuse to take responsibility for it, you find yourself surrounded by enemies.  This is somewhat the state of your current worldly affairs.  
 
Student:  Is that an illusion?  
 
MICHAEL:  It’s real to the person at that moment, and acted upon as real.   It’s part of their experience.  Later they might see it was an illusion they were creating, and call it so: that was an illusion that I saw everyone as my enemy.  But you have to credit that it was a genuine experience at the time.  Illusion is an after-the-fact evaluation.  In the present moment you can only be as open-minded as you can be, to the best of your ability, by being aware of your inner self and the fact you are co-creating your world and everyone in it.  This calls for enormous courage to be open this way, to be vulnerable this way, coming out of the experience that you are surrounded by enemies.  It takes this kind of courage to realize, and accept, that you yourself are causing this situation.
 
Student:  So when two people encounter each other, and they each have their own inner life, they put this out on the other person.  This is worse when they don’t take responsibility for it by realizing that it comes from themselves.  But if both of them are open-minded to what they are doing, then it becomes a great adventure between them.
 
MICHAEL:  My daughter, some of these illusions are more commonly understood as “isms”--like racism, sexism, culture-ism, and your whole world history is the story of different peoples meeting this way and taking the strangeness they experienced as some kind of objective reality, as if the others were really inferior.  But by being aware you have this background--perhaps you were raised by racist or sexist parents--you can in sense withdraw this prejudice and not see others in stereotypes.  You can face your own inner need to put people in little boxes for your own self-gratification of feeling superior, or to control so much intrinsic human uniqueness.  Also there is so much arrogance and hubris involved in all of this, endless hierarchies of religious priest-craft and such looking down on the “common folks.”  
 
But again, these are real experiences to, say, a person who sees the opposite sex as some kind of inferior being.  That--to them--is a valid perception, and everything they encounter in the opposite sex only serves to reassure them of this prejudice because it does serve a psychological purpose.  This is the power of projection.  Your mind has the ability to pick and choose--quite unconsciously--to bulwark its own prejudice.  This is what your world is involved in, and this is precisely what it has to overcome, especially in terms of the major cultures which are still quite distinct.  
 
To a person who is not a racist, they can say that racism is an illusion; but it is not for those involved in it.  They give it objective reality, and it takes courage to realize and accept that this is their own doing.  It means, on the practical, personal level, facing the larger reality of this unique person, then that one, standing in front of them, bursting as raw individuals out of the comfortable boxes they’ve been put in.  As the world gets smaller, as the major cultures are being inextricably shoved together, this is a big problem.  Yet the actual contact and confrontation is also the way out, the way of real experience replacing naïve prejudice.
 
Student:  Yes, that’s…very clear.  Thank you.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  So, Michael, women are not necessarily less courteous drivers than men.  But my comment is, since we are looking at ourselves, and we’re self-aware beings, and are--obviously--projecting onto ourselves something which is not really there, we have illusions about who we are.  So you’re saying that the soul is the real self.  It would seem that to the degree we’re not being our souls, does that mean that we’re in an illusion about who we are?
 
(Human complexity--all real)
 
MICHAEL:  Not at all, my son.  It is rather the opposite.  The soul is just one part of your total self, and not the only real part.  You also have your own ego, your own sense of yourself, how you see and feel yourself, and even this is capable of enormous growth.  Your self-conscious self can be aware--if you’ve been reading our lessons--(Michael laughs)--that you are more than this.  You have a soul.  You have a spirit.  You have a personality.  You have a body and mind that encompass you.  But though this totality of you is transcendent to your consciousness at any one moment, we’re saying that your self-conscious self, and your experiences, do have a kind of absolute reality to you moment by moment.  
 
If you are growing then a larger, future you can look back on your more limited vision now and render the judgment that much of your life now was an illusion.  But it’s not--now.  And it’s always now for your type of being.  There are those philosophies that deny any final reality to your self-conscious self and say that your ego is pure illusion and the only real self is the universal one--God: there is no individualization in true reality, only the illusion of such.  But we say that there definitely are individualized personalities that God has created unique to each, and there are individual souls, and there are self-conscious selves that are fully real.  This is the complexity of human beings we’ve been talking about. 
 
Student:  So when you say that the soul is the real you, you meant that in a certain sense…
 
MICHAEL:  We’re not saying that.  It’s not the only “real you.”  All these parts of you that you’re trying to, and need to, unify--your personality has the function of trying to unify all of you--each one of these parts has its own distinct kind of reality.  Your soul, a Morontia reality co-authored by a fragment of God, is distinct from your present self-consciousness dependant upon your physical being.  Both are real.  
 
Student:  So we’re like a bag of these parts, and each has its own kind of reality.  A clear understanding of who we are has to include all of these, not just the soul, or just the ego, not just the higher faculties.  Right?
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly, my son.  Think of how much harder it would be to casually kill someone else if they were realized as not just a physical body.  If everyone knew themselves and all others to be transcendent beings, what we call little walking infinities of personalities and souls with the potential of eternal life within them--to feel that within themselves, and realize this is also the case with the person they’re about to kill…  That might be a different matter then, to kill another child of God’s.  
 
Student:  Back to the other part of my question: we’re not seeing that, and so there’s this illusion of who we are, and who this other person is.  That follows from what you’re saying.  That illusion about who and what we are is being projected onto others.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, but again, you are as if standing outside the situation, as was I in my example.  My lesson tonight was that the term illusion only applies from a larger point of view.  But: you are never in a larger point of view!  (Right! {and everyone breaks up laughing})  You are your point of view moment to moment.  (Right!--good…)  So human life--as you experience it--is not an illusion.  Your soul is the weaving of your human reality, this human life you know, with how it is experienced and taken on by a pure spirit of God’s in all its completeness from that point of view.
 
Student:  That being the larger point of view.
 
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  When you re-experience pure moments from your soul, you are astonished at the fullness of them--the way things looked and smelled and felt--everything, the whole encompassing.  There you were at five years old, and the doorknobs were way up there, and you walked around in a forest of legs, and your books were full of moo-cows and kitty-cats.  Certainly, now you can see that your whole feeling/reality of Santa Claus Christmas was a kind of sweet and loving cultural joke played on you with elaborate illusions, but at the time?--my goodness, how it all thrilled your soul.  That was your encompassing reality then, and it’s still there, here in your soul.  
 
Student:  So that is what is being recorded as your soul, that actual perception.  
 
MICHAEL:  Not just perception; the whole human experience.  Your soul is a fragment of God’s capturing your full human experience in all its completeness.  
 
Student:  Including what you’re not aware of.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  Your whole being’s experience is generally transcendent to your present consciousness.  As we’ve expressed it before, from the purely spiritual point of view you are whole and complete just as you are, whether or not you can yet realize this.  Your Thought Adjuster registers this completeness, which is why your soul is very distinct and so much larger than your memories.  It represents the totality of your life, but, again, it is not the only real part of you.  Your unique personality, with its unique experiences, is also real, as are the experiences themselves.  Are you not experiencing yourself?  
 
When you try to conceive of this on a universal scale of the entire cosmos and all the personal beings in existence growing this way, it gives you some appreciation of that aspect of God we call the Supreme Being.  This is why it is called Supreme.  And as the Supreme Being is the oversoul of the whole time-and-space creation, so your soul is similarly supreme to your self-conscious self, and why your consciousness has to grow to some day be at one with your soul and its co-author.  This is also why your stillness meditation can offer so much as a way of at least touching this transcendent realm--to be able to relax all the pressing needs of the moment and let some of this story of your life come out in real good reflection.  But even your memories, my son, are permeated by your soul, and so as you get more spiritual maturity--spiritual recognition, as you are more able to recognize the spiritual dimension in your life all along, this soul-quotient within your memories grows.  This is the character you grow.  You are literally earning this realm, and it can be yours forever.  
 
Student:  Michael, you’ve just put me in a psychedelic state.  (much laughter)
 
MICHAEL:  Well, insofar as the original meaning of that word was “mind-manifesting,” I’ll take that as a compliment.  (Yes--please)  Hopefully spirit-manifesting is what we’re doing here; spirit and soul.  
 
Let me pop out one little teaser than Mother Spirit and I want to give a lesson on, and that is how you can add to your soul, and how your soul can be starved.  There are ways that people discover about how to stop experiencing, and your human experience is what you offer this fragment of God’s within you.  Conversely, as you have the courage to keep experiencing the changing, ever new aspect of the creation, this is what you have to give to your soul.  But more on that later.
 
Student:  I remember a transmission saying that the apprehending by the Thought Adjuster of an experience is like a hologram of it.  Was that you or Mother Spirit?
 
MICHAEL:  It must have been someone else.  I would hesitate to put it that way.  Holograms are somewhat nebulous, often just images formed by the intersection of laser beams in a cloudy medium, whereas your soul is quite contra-distinct from any  such purely light-only form.  It’s so much more.  It’s your life as both you and a spirit of God’s see it.  It’s much more full and solid--in a sense--than many folks’ awareness of themselves, or even their finest memories.  As I just got through saying, that fullness in your memories is your soul’s input.
 
Student:  Can you think of a better metaphor than holograms?
 
MICHAEL:  I would just call the soul a transcendent reality, that, as you approach it, you will be transcending your present life’s limits, and your consciousness will be expanding enormously.  It’s a different class of reality, what we call Morontia reality.  It is a combination of an eternal, absolute, existential presence and a unique, personal, temporal experience--unique in all creation.  That’s what it is.  (much laughter…)  
 
Student:  Ooops!  (…and on and on…then, later…)  I was thinking the other day about our dream life and that if you actually tracked your dreams--as Carl Jung said--there is an unfolding story in them.  Is there a sense in which our souls are like a story?  It’s not just a bag of memories, right?--floating around.  Does it have a…direction?
 
MICHAEL:  Time itself, my son, ties it all together.  You’re a temporal being.  Your life is a story told along a dimension of time.  In that sense it is a story, only one that transcends any story you’ve yet encountered.  Time itself ties you together.  You’ve had a real past; you’ll have a real future.  Time is one of God’s laws tying things together sequentially.  Personality is uniquely conscious of time and sequence.
 
Student:  Oh.  Some people can sit down and write a memoir, but others may have more trouble because their life is just all over the map--so to speak.  Is it the case that that’s not how God sees your story.
 
(A metaphor for the soul)
 
MICHAEL:  God, and Mother Spirit and I exist outside of what you know of as time.  As we got into this once before, we not only have sequence, we are not bound by it in the same way as is a physically living, rigidly temporal being such as yourself.  We totally transcend your experience of time.  If you want a metaphor, it’s like you look at events through a living/changing telescope that can view only one little rock at a time, whereas we are seeing the whole entire mountain range.  Your life is like a long, linear, ever growing mountain range that we can see all-at-once, as well as moment-by-moment as you see it.  
 
Student:  So of course that would also apply to our Thought Adjusters and how they see our experience.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, that long mountain range is your soul.  It’s all there, just not yet for you.  Depending upon a living physical body for consciousness you’re still stuck in the moment-by-moment narrow-view telescope.  Even your hindsight and foresight, neither perfect, both exist only in your present moment.  But that’s just about as far as we can go with this metaphor.  (and so everyone breaks up again.)
 
Student:  Whew!--OK, I’ll pause here--at the foot of the mountain.  
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Excuse me--it’s too much--I need to step out for a minute and walk around.  (he leaves, but comes back in a bit)
 
MICHAEL, to a new student:  Do you have anything you wish to ask, or add, (name)?
 
Student:  No, not at this time.
 
MICHAEL:  Well, feel free to step in any time you want.  As you can see, we’re quite informal here.  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Yes, Michael.  Everything is so beautiful tonight--that you said, and so, for me, so moving.  You keep on mentioning that we are little walking infinities, then why do I feel so limited?  (much laughter)  Is that my subjective perception in the way of being open to that potential?
 
MICHAEL:  Yes!  This is true humility, my son, to be aware of all that other. 
 
Student:  I feel like I’m in this limbo place--sometimes--of discarding something because it no longer works for me, it’s illusionary, but I haven’t yet grasped anything concrete or real.  All I am is: here I am.  
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  
 
Student:  It’s like…  Oh.  OK.
 
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
 
MICHAEL:  Not to get a swelled head or anything like that, but that is quite an achievement.  The fear of this state is what causes people to cling to what they have, rather than opening to what they might grow to become--all that scary potential.
 
Student:  That’s why people run to fill that up with something--TV, sex, money, or whatever--instead of sitting still with it, resting with it--meditating, or just not doing anything.  Sometimes there is that compulsion to do something with whatever it is, but there really isn’t anything.  I mean: what do I do--there is that.  That is reality, without putting a name on it.
 
MICHAEL:  And here it comes--right?--because time is God’s law.  Everything is in motion.  You are living: you’re in motion.  You’ve a long ways to go before you achieve Paradise and actually get beyond time…  
 
Student:  Why do you keep saying that!  (more laughter)  I’m sorry.
 
MICHAEL:  No--that’s OK: because it’s true.  It gives you some appreciation of what you are going through, to know that yes, you have to fill it up.  There’s a whole eternity here to fill up.  This is an enormous requirement--you might say--that God puts upon you by creating you an experiential being capable of endless experience.  That very fact is a kind of demand that life puts upon you.
 
Student:  But I’m the one who gets to choose what I experience.
 
MICHAEL:  To the degree you can; to the degree you can realize your free will.
 
Student:  And be objective in my perceptions.  
 
MICHAEL:  Objectivity, my son, is something never quite captured.  It’s an orientation, like my Spirit of Truth.  Part of being objective is in having a full appreciation of your inescapable subjectivity.  I gave the example of getting beyond a prejudice by being aware of how you were raised that way, though that past is real and will always be with you.  Having conquered a prejudice puts you in a different position than with a person who never had the prejudice in the first place.  
 
Student:  Yes--I see that.  That’s why one goes into stillness instead of getting caught up in stories that only perpetuate the past.  In a sense, in that moment you relax these stories and don’t give them any more power.  You let go that point of view to allow a pure-er view--that is already there--to be experienced.
 
MICHAEL:  A pure-er point of view is only there in potential, until it’s realized consciously.  But yes, it’s opening for your soul; it’s opening for your Thought Adjuster; it’s opening for my spirit, and Mother’s.  Sometimes we tease you not to feel too crowded inside, but this is really why spirit influences have to be, need to be, want to be truly unobtrusive.  We value your unique personality and your free will too much to impose ourselves upon you.  It’s because you can ignore us, you literally have to give us reality inside you through a quality of spiritual recognition.  That’s why there is no objective or scientific proof of God, or of Mother Spirit, or me for that matter.  It is only within your own self we can be known.  
 
Student:  So right now you see all of us here as you say, as walking infinities, and that we can allow ourselves to experience that as well, and see each other that way.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, this is the true course of human evolution.
 
Student:  And so also, if I meet someone again I’ve had a relationship with before, even though that’s always there, there is a way I can set that aside in order to see her ever more truly for who she really is, and not get hung up in the past.
 
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  You can also have a deep feeling/reassurance within that both you and her are part of each others’ souls, that your former relationship is being held sacrosanct by a pure presence of God’s.  This helps in letting the past be the past, knowing it is part of your soul in all its original fullness.  And you can visit--if you will--those other times in the past more purely if you have this kind of courageous openness-attitude in the present.  
 
This is most easily achieved at first by a kind of stillness meditation, suspending any kind of heavy, determining issues in the present in order to get a more pure and complete experience of some relationship in the past.  Remember that your soul contains your Thought Adjuster’s point of view too, and it is available to you with its more complete vision of both you and the event.  This is the wealth of your soul.
 
With this attitude, this courageous openness to spiritual completeness, when you meet again you can perceive/experience each other as the new creations you both are because you are both changing and co-creating yourselves in the present.  
 
When we call you walking infinities we are giving due credit to the fact you are creatures of God’s.  God created your personalities, and there are no limits that can be put upon personality either in the present or in duration and extension.  True, each of you are moment by moment limited by your own being and a universe situation, conditioned and defined by your very reality.  But your reality within, and that reality without, are both capable of infinite expansion.  At each moment in time you are a very discrete being indeed and utterly complete, and then here is another moment and your soul has grown.  
 
Student:  When does intention come into play?  Because all of us here have in one way or another the intention to experience all of who we are.  Yet there are those who don’t even have a clue.  I’ve not degrading them because it’s sad.  But where does intention fit it--our commitment to wanting to experience our infinite potential more fully?
 
MICHAEL:  This, my son, is also a gift of God’s.  This is an intrinsic part of your personality.   Your personality has this innate desire to experience, and the power to real-alize--make real for you, the kind of being you are.  All personal beings have this need/innate desire to experience.  But as you correctly notice, mostly through the conditioning in which they were raised, folks can be thwarted in experiencing; and this is what I want to go into in more depth sometime, how…  
 
I’ll mention here what you call bad habits, any kind of unthinking repetitious behavior, shall we say someone who abuses drugs and gets drunk every evening for thirty years to watch the same TV programs.  You have the expression, “the same-old, same-old?”  That is what is starving their soul of what are potentially/possibly greater experiences of life in their evenings.  
 
True enough, the Thought Adjuster sees some uniqueness in each evening because everything is changing, even the person is getting older, but what the person could possibly be offering their Thought Adjuster is enormously dwarfed.  Being in a numbed-out condition evening after evening, year after year, there is so much wasted opportunity.  Every child born has an innate desire to experience, to live, to feel, yet this can be thwarted, terribly crippled.  
 
Student:  Well, thank you.   It was all perfect.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
My children--(Michael broke up laughing)--it has been another delightful evening.  It got a bit didactic there at the beginning because I wanted to run down the complexity surrounding that word illusion, and how different philosophies and religions you’ve encountered sometimes focus on just one part of the full personhood--the personality, the soul, the moment’s conscious self, without realizing and including the completeness of that person, however variously united or not, mature or not.  The temptation is great to see owns own life as having been an illusion, and then the lives of others as illusory.  But because all cosmic reality has its being in God there is a profound reality always here, to endlessly discover as God’s will--existential, supreme, ultimate, absolute, and infinite.  This is what you are living in.  These are the dimensions you will come to encounter.  But your life now as you know yourself moment to moment, this is real.  This is no illusion.  This is what you have to offer that presence of God within you.  You too are the co-creator of your soul.  
 
Be in my peace.  Good evening.         
 
  
 
                                          
 
      
Michael--August 3, 2009
 
Marin TM Group--Mill Valley, California--U.S.A.
 
MICHAEL--T/R-JL
 
(Illusion)
(The eternal now)  
(No pure objectivity)  
(Illusion and projection)  
(Human complexity--all real)
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
(A metaphor for the soul)
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
Dear Michael and Mother Spirit; dear spiritual parents,    As we approach the fifth anniversary of meeting with you in this particular group, we are reminded of all the really deep, heartfelt wonder and love we’ve shared together--all the laughter, all the tears of joy.  We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts.  You yourself said, Michael, it was the really deep joy you shared with your followers--as Jesus--that enabled them to carry on after you had left.  And so it has been with us. 
 
Even greater than the insights and the understandings you’ve given us into our own human natures, it’s been our relationships with other people that you’ve helped us so profoundly transform.  It is for our newly discovered appreciation of them that we want to thank you for showing us the way.  It is for all the loving and lovely people in our lives--our ability to perceive this and appreciate them--we most want to thank you.  As you say, they are our true soul wealth--all these others we have known and shared our lives with.  Amen.
 
MICHAEL:  Good evening, my children, this is Michael.  Mother Spirit sends her love and her greetings.  Let me put all my emphasis behind hers that you are capable of receiving.  Yes, indeed, it has been fun.  It is filling your souls with real, honest-to-goodness thrilling fun that you will carry into eternity.  We see those bright and glowing lights in your souls of the people you have known.  You will carry with you as well your dear relationships with stuff--your homes, your work and tools----those things you have been most intimate with that have also become friends in a way.  These are the things that seem to have acquired a character of their own of all the times you’ve had together.  But it is the other human beings, the other walking infinities--as we call you--that in your souls, just as in your lives, you will find eternally unbounded.  We cannot remind you too many times just what kind of infinities you are, what pure potential you are just starting out with only a few years of life compared to that endless stretch before you without limit either in duration or how much your self-conscious self can continue to grow.  Also you are fortunate now in these modern times with your Hubble Telescope sitting up there as a doorway into the physical infinity of the universe that lies before you too.  
 
Your Urantia book puts it somewhat abstractly that the Supreme dimension of God, of which you are a part, foreshadows the Ultimate.  And so your human lives here, my children, all part of the Supreme Being, do foreshadow this endless life before you that you will ultimately achieve.  So congratulations back at you!  (Michael laughs)  It’s been wonderful visiting with you like this.  Ever keep in mind Mother Spirit and I are part of your lives.  Her spirit augments your own mental abilities; she is literally part of your perception and power.  My Spirit of Truth helps you sort out the complexity of your lives, helps you orient yourselves toward that unending adventure of discovery, and gives you some additional desire for it.  Our Universal Father’s pure presence indwells your minds weaving the timeless tapestry of your souls as well as helping spiritualize your thoughts.
 
(Illusion)
 
Tonight I would like to address the subject that has come up so often in our discussions here, and that is the question of illusion.  Since some of you are familiar with Oriental philosophy’s use of this term that ordinary life is an illusion, I would like to present Mother Spirit’s and my views and feelings about this whole notion of human illusion.  As with other psychological or philosophical terms, almost every school of thought has a slightly different interpretation of them.  So for tonight lets say that illusions are those things that appear genuinely real, as distinct from hallucinations which are either amusing or terrifying because they are immediately recognized as being unreal, or gross exaggerations of what is real--something totally weird.
 
Illusions appear real, are taken for real, affect you as real, and to which you respond--body, mind and spirit--as if they are real.  But then at some time later this reality is, as you say, seen through, or understood to be less than as what or how it presented itself.  In this, my children, I will include even how you perceive and understand yourself--your body, your mind, and your spirit as they register with you.  So to this degree and in this sense your assigning the assessment of illusion to a one time reality is a judgment you are making with your whole being; if you will, your perception of reality has changed.  What was once real is now seen as only an illusion.  It is diminished.  It no longer partakes of the full transcendent reality you are continuing to exist within right now.  It was only an illusion you had of yourself.  It does not reflect God’s pure creation which is ever transcendent to your present state.  
 
Although these assessments are usually the gradual results of considering some earlier and less mature understandings of reality, the term is often used by those men and women who have had enormous spiritual experiences and have felt themselves suddenly transformed, grown so greatly in spiritual insight, this is also a natural and wholly genuine response now their vision and understanding seem to be so expanded and deepened compared to how they previously saw life.  This immediate comparison can be so great as to render the whole of their previous lives, and those they associate with them, to seem illusory.  And so they say this very thing: they were once living as if asleep, but are now awakened; their previous reality was only a dream.  
 
This is often, then, extended or extrapolated to explain what they now call “ordinary life,” extended to all those other folks out there who have not yet had this great enlightenment of theirs.  Again, this is wholly natural, and honestly how life appears to them.  People in general seem to live under great illusions of how real their reality is until they have an equally great spiritual experience and can begin to see that life is not all mind and material, but is spiritual through and through, even to the degree that the physical-ness of the universe itself seems an illusion.  Suddenly being able to see with the eyes of faith this spiritual luminosity can, at first, make the material seem shadowy and incomplete, an illusion, whereas it is actually, and equally, God’s creation. 
 
Mother Spirit and I offer this understanding based upon how we see human life as essentially experiential, a matter of experience.  True, you do have an existential being, but you cannot as yet directly experience it, or come to valid conclusions based upon it.  You have human experiences that are quite distinct from those of other orders of beings like angels or Midwayers.  Reflect a bit on all the stages you yourself have come through starting with being a very small child and mostly outwardly oriented.  You felt hunger or fear or contentment, but your whole being, as well as that of very primitive peoples, was mostly oriented toward the enormous and incomprehensible world around you that was neither understood nor responsive to you--except perhaps for your loving parents.  That’s where you all started.  
 
After a while you began to acquire a sense of yourself--your ego--who and what you felt yourself to be and have been, and this grew.  You became aware of yourself as a physical being, and then that you had an inner reality of mind as well, both somewhat unique to you.  You may even have tried to submerge this uniqueness to be one of a group, as in early tribal society where the tribe forms most of everyone’s identity and safety.  Then you may have had a great enlightenment experience in which you saw through the limitations of your former immaturity so that, that previous reality now seemed to be only an illusion you had to outgrow.  And so your feelings changed about your fellows and the society around you, about government and the world situation, as you grew from simplicity and pure, adolescent principles by filling out those abstractions with your own experiences.  You saw that those simple forms now appeared as ghostly outlines only.
 
(The eternal now)  
 
But let’s consider this process in the light of the eternal now--right now.  Ask yourself: who or what in your life that is so real right now is only an illusion?  What is so real and meaningful to you now, that you are responding to, might you some day consider just an illusion?  You see the problem.  Too nonchalantly assigning this notion of illusion renders only relative what was absolutely real to you in each moment; literally: your life.  If this misconception is not thoroughly understood it can denigrate your respect for your own soul experience as a five-year-old, or a fifteen-year-old, or a twenty-five-year-old.  
 
Rather, we assure you, my children, your soul contains the full reality of every age you have come through, including how you experienced things.  From our standpoint these were no illusions: it was all real to you, just as your life is now, as you live it this moment, real and complete.  Without this understanding, without this deep assurance within you that you are--you are no illusion--what is happening to you is no illusion--there is no ground to stand on.  Nothing is real; it could all be an illusion.  And indeed, some folks do live for a greater part of their life in this kind of doubt, even believing that this is the way to greater truth.  Whether voluntarily in full consciousness, or not, they have accepted the teaching that life is an illusion, and the very power of creativity of their personalities can make it seem so.  In other words, for them one can never be certain about anything, even their own existence.  Some schools of philosophy or religion try to deliberately create this great doubt in their students so that the escape from it in a profound spiritual realization of actuality--their enlightenment--will be equally great.  
 
We would rather have you get in touch with your own soul, co-created by a pure presence of God, im-mediately--directly without any other mediation, in your own evolving meditation.  Feel--relive even a few moments of some previous time in your life in all fullness, for this is what your soul contains, this spiritual fullness and completeness--just as your spirit is capable of experiencing now.  This is what your soul offers: the story of your life that is all real.  Relive--feel for what reality felt like when Santa Claus was no illusion but thrilled your little soul, and see if this isn’t more truly who and what you were then.  Honor all your own experiences and see if this doesn’t expand your respect and wonder at the young, the immature, the so-called “ordinary folks” in your life who, from a truly spiritual viewpoint, are totally real, as are you.  
 
No one can stand outside themselves in the present moment and make the assessment that something is at once real and an illusion.  This takes the dimension of time--hindsight, in this case based upon a growing or sudden insight.  You are no longer who you once were: your soul has grown and, hopefully, your understanding along with it.  It is from outside human reality that Mother Spirit and I can observe the general tendency to take for real what is an illusion of separateness from the outside world.  This is the notion of pure objectivity--that there is some pure object you can perceive from which you are completely separate and in which you are playing no part.  This is dodging the fact of psychological projection, that you are part of that out there if in no other way than in your selection of what to perceive in an infinitely detailed field.  The term projection comes from the fact that physical recognition takes place in your mind and is “projected” outward where it more--or less--approximates the object perceived through sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, grasped by intuition and correlated with understanding and wisdom. 
 
We have given many lessons now on how to take response-ability--how to be able to respond--to the fact that you are always somewhat encountering yourself, but usually on deep, unconscious levels.  This creates the illusion that all that out there is completely independent of your own inner moods, conditioning, understandings, and values.  For indeed this is a hallmark of maturity, first to understand, then be able to experience that in the instantaneous, largely unconscious relationship of meeting different people, you are to a degree meeting yourself.  What you are unconsciously projecting is both interpreting and affecting this other person coming toward you, as are their projections interpreting you.  In this lively meeting of two living people there can be an ability to respond that, if truly spiritually understood and engaged, leads to a conscious granting of freedom, even the invitation, for each to be fully there for the both of you.
 
(No pure objectivity)  
 
So this is one illusion I would have you, my children, contemplate and think about.  How much of your seemingly purely objective life is actually partly you, based on your own understandings and conditioning?  Your life can become an experience that, as your insight and your understanding grow, so too does that whole universe out there, and all the personal beings in it, come to respond to you a little more completely and joyfully.  This is the reward of spiritual growth.  Response-ability is how your will is capable of becoming more and more aligned with God’s will, gaining and granting ever more freedom within His total creation.  
 
These are many things to think about tonight, but I wanted to address this question of illusion and how one has to be so very careful to avoid an inherent or implicit condescension in assigning this term to anyone else’s life, or even your own past.  In this sense there are no “ordinary” folks living in illusion.  As Mother Spirit and I see you, my children, you are each uniquely extraordinary, living real lives.  
 
Now if you have any questions or comments this evening, let’s have a look at them. 
 
Student:  Good evening, Michael.  I grasp that you’re saying that when two people come together each one is projecting part of themselves out onto the other person?
 
(Illusion and projection)  
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, my daughter, this is an instantaneous interpretation.  Each one’s inner reality colors everything they perceive.
 
Student:  So if you are aware of this, it becomes part of the creative process with the other person?
 
MICHAEL:  As you become aware of your own inner reality, in maturity, and take responsibility for it, you are able to achieve what we’ve been calling openness.  Mother Spirit talked about a kind of tough inner balance--an equanimity--you can cultivate.  It’s being able to see how people present themselves, more and more irrespective of how you know yourself to be inside.  Conversely, the more opaque you are to yourself, the less you are aware of your inner moods, changes, and understanding, and how they are affecting your perception, the more you are giving objective reality to your own interpretations.  You could be in a foul mood and turn the most delightful and cheerful person into an enemy instantly.  If you are not aware of this, or refuse to take responsibility for it, you find yourself surrounded by enemies.  This is somewhat the state of your current worldly affairs.  
 
Student:  Is that an illusion?  
 
MICHAEL:  It’s real to the person at that moment, and acted upon as real.   It’s part of their experience.  Later they might see it was an illusion they were creating, and call it so: that was an illusion that I saw everyone as my enemy.  But you have to credit that it was a genuine experience at the time.  Illusion is an after-the-fact evaluation.  In the present moment you can only be as open-minded as you can be, to the best of your ability, by being aware of your inner self and the fact you are co-creating your world and everyone in it.  This calls for enormous courage to be open this way, to be vulnerable this way, coming out of the experience that you are surrounded by enemies.  It takes this kind of courage to realize, and accept, that you yourself are causing this situation.
 
Student:  So when two people encounter each other, and they each have their own inner life, they put this out on the other person.  This is worse when they don’t take responsibility for it by realizing that it comes from themselves.  But if both of them are open-minded to what they are doing, then it becomes a great adventure between them.
 
MICHAEL:  My daughter, some of these illusions are more commonly understood as “isms”--like racism, sexism, culture-ism, and your whole world history is the story of different peoples meeting this way and taking the strangeness they experienced as some kind of objective reality, as if the others were really inferior.  But by being aware you have this background--perhaps you were raised by racist or sexist parents--you can in sense withdraw this prejudice and not see others in stereotypes.  You can face your own inner need to put people in little boxes for your own self-gratification of feeling superior, or to control so much intrinsic human uniqueness.  Also there is so much arrogance and hubris involved in all of this, endless hierarchies of religious priest-craft and such looking down on the “common folks.”  
 
But again, these are real experiences to, say, a person who sees the opposite sex as some kind of inferior being.  That--to them--is a valid perception, and everything they encounter in the opposite sex only serves to reassure them of this prejudice because it does serve a psychological purpose.  This is the power of projection.  Your mind has the ability to pick and choose--quite unconsciously--to bulwark its own prejudice.  This is what your world is involved in, and this is precisely what it has to overcome, especially in terms of the major cultures which are still quite distinct.  
 
To a person who is not a racist, they can say that racism is an illusion; but it is not for those involved in it.  They give it objective reality, and it takes courage to realize and accept that this is their own doing.  It means, on the practical, personal level, facing the larger reality of this unique person, then that one, standing in front of them, bursting as raw individuals out of the comfortable boxes they’ve been put in.  As the world gets smaller, as the major cultures are being inextricably shoved together, this is a big problem.  Yet the actual contact and confrontation is also the way out, the way of real experience replacing naïve prejudice.
 
Student:  Yes, that’s…very clear.  Thank you.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  So, Michael, women are not necessarily less courteous drivers than men.  But my comment is, since we are looking at ourselves, and we’re self-aware beings, and are--obviously--projecting onto ourselves something which is not really there, we have illusions about who we are.  So you’re saying that the soul is the real self.  It would seem that to the degree we’re not being our souls, does that mean that we’re in an illusion about who we are?
 
(Human complexity--all real)
 
MICHAEL:  Not at all, my son.  It is rather the opposite.  The soul is just one part of your total self, and not the only real part.  You also have your own ego, your own sense of yourself, how you see and feel yourself, and even this is capable of enormous growth.  Your self-conscious self can be aware--if you’ve been reading our lessons--(Michael laughs)--that you are more than this.  You have a soul.  You have a spirit.  You have a personality.  You have a body and mind that encompass you.  But though this totality of you is transcendent to your consciousness at any one moment, we’re saying that your self-conscious self, and your experiences, do have a kind of absolute reality to you moment by moment.  
 
If you are growing then a larger, future you can look back on your more limited vision now and render the judgment that much of your life now was an illusion.  But it’s not--now.  And it’s always now for your type of being.  There are those philosophies that deny any final reality to your self-conscious self and say that your ego is pure illusion and the only real self is the universal one--God: there is no individualization in true reality, only the illusion of such.  But we say that there definitely are individualized personalities that God has created unique to each, and there are individual souls, and there are self-conscious selves that are fully real.  This is the complexity of human beings we’ve been talking about. 
 
Student:  So when you say that the soul is the real you, you meant that in a certain sense…
 
MICHAEL:  We’re not saying that.  It’s not the only “real you.”  All these parts of you that you’re trying to, and need to, unify--your personality has the function of trying to unify all of you--each one of these parts has its own distinct kind of reality.  Your soul, a Morontia reality co-authored by a fragment of God, is distinct from your present self-consciousness dependant upon your physical being.  Both are real.  
 
Student:  So we’re like a bag of these parts, and each has its own kind of reality.  A clear understanding of who we are has to include all of these, not just the soul, or just the ego, not just the higher faculties.  Right?
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly, my son.  Think of how much harder it would be to casually kill someone else if they were realized as not just a physical body.  If everyone knew themselves and all others to be transcendent beings, what we call little walking infinities of personalities and souls with the potential of eternal life within them--to feel that within themselves, and realize this is also the case with the person they’re about to kill…  That might be a different matter then, to kill another child of God’s.  
 
Student:  Back to the other part of my question: we’re not seeing that, and so there’s this illusion of who we are, and who this other person is.  That follows from what you’re saying.  That illusion about who and what we are is being projected onto others.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, but again, you are as if standing outside the situation, as was I in my example.  My lesson tonight was that the term illusion only applies from a larger point of view.  But: you are never in a larger point of view!  (Right! {and everyone breaks up laughing})  You are your point of view moment to moment.  (Right!--good…)  So human life--as you experience it--is not an illusion.  Your soul is the weaving of your human reality, this human life you know, with how it is experienced and taken on by a pure spirit of God’s in all its completeness from that point of view.
 
Student:  That being the larger point of view.
 
(The fullness of Morontia/soul reality)
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  When you re-experience pure moments from your soul, you are astonished at the fullness of them--the way things looked and smelled and felt--everything, the whole encompassing.  There you were at five years old, and the doorknobs were way up there, and you walked around in a forest of legs, and your books were full of moo-cows and kitty-cats.  Certainly, now you can see that your whole feeling/reality of Santa Claus Christmas was a kind of sweet and loving cultural joke played on you with elaborate illusions, but at the time?--my goodness, how it all thrilled your soul.  That was your encompassing reality then, and it’s still there, here in your soul.  
 
Student:  So that is what is being recorded as your soul, that actual perception.  
 
MICHAEL:  Not just perception; the whole human experience.  Your soul is a fragment of God’s capturing your full human experience in all its completeness.  
 
Student:  Including what you’re not aware of.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  Your whole being’s experience is generally transcendent to your present consciousness.  As we’ve expressed it before, from the purely spiritual point of view you are whole and complete just as you are, whether or not you can yet realize this.  Your Thought Adjuster registers this completeness, which is why your soul is very distinct and so much larger than your memories.  It represents the totality of your life, but, again, it is not the only real part of you.  Your unique personality, with its unique experiences, is also real, as are the experiences themselves.  Are you not experiencing yourself?  
 
When you try to conceive of this on a universal scale of the entire cosmos and all the personal beings in existence growing this way, it gives you some appreciation of that aspect of God we call the Supreme Being.  This is why it is called Supreme.  And as the Supreme Being is the oversoul of the whole time-and-space creation, so your soul is similarly supreme to your self-conscious self, and why your consciousness has to grow to some day be at one with your soul and its co-author.  This is also why your stillness meditation can offer so much as a way of at least touching this transcendent realm--to be able to relax all the pressing needs of the moment and let some of this story of your life come out in real good reflection.  But even your memories, my son, are permeated by your soul, and so as you get more spiritual maturity--spiritual recognition, as you are more able to recognize the spiritual dimension in your life all along, this soul-quotient within your memories grows.  This is the character you grow.  You are literally earning this realm, and it can be yours forever.  
 
Student:  Michael, you’ve just put me in a psychedelic state.  (much laughter)
 
MICHAEL:  Well, insofar as the original meaning of that word was “mind-manifesting,” I’ll take that as a compliment.  (Yes--please)  Hopefully spirit-manifesting is what we’re doing here; spirit and soul.  
 
Let me pop out one little teaser than Mother Spirit and I want to give a lesson on, and that is how you can add to your soul, and how your soul can be starved.  There are ways that people discover about how to stop experiencing, and your human experience is what you offer this fragment of God’s within you.  Conversely, as you have the courage to keep experiencing the changing, ever new aspect of the creation, this is what you have to give to your soul.  But more on that later.
 
Student:  I remember a transmission saying that the apprehending by the Thought Adjuster of an experience is like a hologram of it.  Was that you or Mother Spirit?
 
MICHAEL:  It must have been someone else.  I would hesitate to put it that way.  Holograms are somewhat nebulous, often just images formed by the intersection of laser beams in a cloudy medium, whereas your soul is quite contra-distinct from any  such purely light-only form.  It’s so much more.  It’s your life as both you and a spirit of God’s see it.  It’s much more full and solid--in a sense--than many folks’ awareness of themselves, or even their finest memories.  As I just got through saying, that fullness in your memories is your soul’s input.
 
Student:  Can you think of a better metaphor than holograms?
 
MICHAEL:  I would just call the soul a transcendent reality, that, as you approach it, you will be transcending your present life’s limits, and your consciousness will be expanding enormously.  It’s a different class of reality, what we call Morontia reality.  It is a combination of an eternal, absolute, existential presence and a unique, personal, temporal experience--unique in all creation.  That’s what it is.  (much laughter…)  
 
Student:  Ooops!  (…and on and on…then, later…)  I was thinking the other day about our dream life and that if you actually tracked your dreams--as Carl Jung said--there is an unfolding story in them.  Is there a sense in which our souls are like a story?  It’s not just a bag of memories, right?--floating around.  Does it have a…direction?
 
MICHAEL:  Time itself, my son, ties it all together.  You’re a temporal being.  Your life is a story told along a dimension of time.  In that sense it is a story, only one that transcends any story you’ve yet encountered.  Time itself ties you together.  You’ve had a real past; you’ll have a real future.  Time is one of God’s laws tying things together sequentially.  Personality is uniquely conscious of time and sequence.
 
Student:  Oh.  Some people can sit down and write a memoir, but others may have more trouble because their life is just all over the map--so to speak.  Is it the case that that’s not how God sees your story.
 
(A metaphor for the soul)
 
MICHAEL:  God, and Mother Spirit and I exist outside of what you know of as time.  As we got into this once before, we not only have sequence, we are not bound by it in the same way as is a physically living, rigidly temporal being such as yourself.  We totally transcend your experience of time.  If you want a metaphor, it’s like you look at events through a living/changing telescope that can view only one little rock at a time, whereas we are seeing the whole entire mountain range.  Your life is like a long, linear, ever growing mountain range that we can see all-at-once, as well as moment-by-moment as you see it.  
 
Student:  So of course that would also apply to our Thought Adjusters and how they see our experience.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, that long mountain range is your soul.  It’s all there, just not yet for you.  Depending upon a living physical body for consciousness you’re still stuck in the moment-by-moment narrow-view telescope.  Even your hindsight and foresight, neither perfect, both exist only in your present moment.  But that’s just about as far as we can go with this metaphor.  (and so everyone breaks up again.)
 
Student:  Whew!--OK, I’ll pause here--at the foot of the mountain.  
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Excuse me--it’s too much--I need to step out for a minute and walk around.  (he leaves, but comes back in a bit)
 
MICHAEL, to a new student:  Do you have anything you wish to ask, or add, (name)?
 
Student:  No, not at this time.
 
MICHAEL:  Well, feel free to step in any time you want.  As you can see, we’re quite informal here.  Be in my peace.
 
Student:  Yes, Michael.  Everything is so beautiful tonight--that you said, and so, for me, so moving.  You keep on mentioning that we are little walking infinities, then why do I feel so limited?  (much laughter)  Is that my subjective perception in the way of being open to that potential?
 
MICHAEL:  Yes!  This is true humility, my son, to be aware of all that other. 
 
Student:  I feel like I’m in this limbo place--sometimes--of discarding something because it no longer works for me, it’s illusionary, but I haven’t yet grasped anything concrete or real.  All I am is: here I am.  
 
MICHAEL:  Exactly.  
 
Student:  It’s like…  Oh.  OK.
 
(When limbo is a positive achievement)  
 
MICHAEL:  Not to get a swelled head or anything like that, but that is quite an achievement.  The fear of this state is what causes people to cling to what they have, rather than opening to what they might grow to become--all that scary potential.
 
Student:  That’s why people run to fill that up with something--TV, sex, money, or whatever--instead of sitting still with it, resting with it--meditating, or just not doing anything.  Sometimes there is that compulsion to do something with whatever it is, but there really isn’t anything.  I mean: what do I do--there is that.  That is reality, without putting a name on it.
 
MICHAEL:  And here it comes--right?--because time is God’s law.  Everything is in motion.  You are living: you’re in motion.  You’ve a long ways to go before you achieve Paradise and actually get beyond time…  
 
Student:  Why do you keep saying that!  (more laughter)  I’m sorry.
 
MICHAEL:  No--that’s OK: because it’s true.  It gives you some appreciation of what you are going through, to know that yes, you have to fill it up.  There’s a whole eternity here to fill up.  This is an enormous requirement--you might say--that God puts upon you by creating you an experiential being capable of endless experience.  That very fact is a kind of demand that life puts upon you.
 
Student:  But I’m the one who gets to choose what I experience.
 
MICHAEL:  To the degree you can; to the degree you can realize your free will.
 
Student:  And be objective in my perceptions.  
 
MICHAEL:  Objectivity, my son, is something never quite captured.  It’s an orientation, like my Spirit of Truth.  Part of being objective is in having a full appreciation of your inescapable subjectivity.  I gave the example of getting beyond a prejudice by being aware of how you were raised that way, though that past is real and will always be with you.  Having conquered a prejudice puts you in a different position than with a person who never had the prejudice in the first place.  
 
Student:  Yes--I see that.  That’s why one goes into stillness instead of getting caught up in stories that only perpetuate the past.  In a sense, in that moment you relax these stories and don’t give them any more power.  You let go that point of view to allow a pure-er view--that is already there--to be experienced.
 
MICHAEL:  A pure-er point of view is only there in potential, until it’s realized consciously.  But yes, it’s opening for your soul; it’s opening for your Thought Adjuster; it’s opening for my spirit, and Mother’s.  Sometimes we tease you not to feel too crowded inside, but this is really why spirit influences have to be, need to be, want to be truly unobtrusive.  We value your unique personality and your free will too much to impose ourselves upon you.  It’s because you can ignore us, you literally have to give us reality inside you through a quality of spiritual recognition.  That’s why there is no objective or scientific proof of God, or of Mother Spirit, or me for that matter.  It is only within your own self we can be known.  
 
Student:  So right now you see all of us here as you say, as walking infinities, and that we can allow ourselves to experience that as well, and see each other that way.
 
MICHAEL:  Yes, this is the true course of human evolution.
 
Student:  And so also, if I meet someone again I’ve had a relationship with before, even though that’s always there, there is a way I can set that aside in order to see her ever more truly for who she really is, and not get hung up in the past.
 
(You and your friends are in each others’ souls)
 
MICHAEL:  Yes.  You can also have a deep feeling/reassurance within that both you and her are part of each others’ souls, that your former relationship is being held sacrosanct by a pure presence of God’s.  This helps in letting the past be the past, knowing it is part of your soul in all its original fullness.  And you can visit--if you will--those other times in the past more purely if you have this kind of courageous openness-attitude in the present.  
 
This is most easily achieved at first by a kind of stillness meditation, suspending any kind of heavy, determining issues in the present in order to get a more pure and complete experience of some relationship in the past.  Remember that your soul contains your Thought Adjuster’s point of view too, and it is available to you with its more complete vision of both you and the event.  This is the wealth of your soul.
 
With this attitude, this courageous openness to spiritual completeness, when you meet again you can perceive/experience each other as the new creations you both are because you are both changing and co-creating yourselves in the present.  
 
When we call you walking infinities we are giving due credit to the fact you are creatures of God’s.  God created your personalities, and there are no limits that can be put upon personality either in the present or in duration and extension.  True, each of you are moment by moment limited by your own being and a universe situation, conditioned and defined by your very reality.  But your reality within, and that reality without, are both capable of infinite expansion.  At each moment in time you are a very discrete being indeed and utterly complete, and then here is another moment and your soul has grown.  
 
Student:  When does intention come into play?  Because all of us here have in one way or another the intention to experience all of who we are.  Yet there are those who don’t even have a clue.  I’ve not degrading them because it’s sad.  But where does intention fit it--our commitment to wanting to experience our infinite potential more fully?
 
MICHAEL:  This, my son, is also a gift of God’s.  This is an intrinsic part of your personality.   Your personality has this innate desire to experience, and the power to real-alize--make real for you, the kind of being you are.  All personal beings have this need/innate desire to experience.  But as you correctly notice, mostly through the conditioning in which they were raised, folks can be thwarted in experiencing; and this is what I want to go into in more depth sometime, how…  
 
I’ll mention here what you call bad habits, any kind of unthinking repetitious behavior, shall we say someone who abuses drugs and gets drunk every evening for thirty years to watch the same TV programs.  You have the expression, “the same-old, same-old?”  That is what is starving their soul of what are potentially/possibly greater experiences of life in their evenings.  
 
True enough, the Thought Adjuster sees some uniqueness in each evening because everything is changing, even the person is getting older, but what the person could possibly be offering their Thought Adjuster is enormously dwarfed.  Being in a numbed-out condition evening after evening, year after year, there is so much wasted opportunity.  Every child born has an innate desire to experience, to live, to feel, yet this can be thwarted, terribly crippled.  
 
Student:  Well, thank you.   It was all perfect.
 
MICHAEL:  Be in my peace.
 
(Dimensions we will come to encounter)  
 
My children--(Michael broke up laughing)--it has been another delightful evening.  It got a bit didactic there at the beginning because I wanted to run down the complexity surrounding that word illusion, and how different philosophies and religions you’ve encountered sometimes focus on just one part of the full personhood--the personality, the soul, the moment’s conscious self, without realizing and including the completeness of that person, however variously united or not, mature or not.  The temptation is great to see owns own life as having been an illusion, and then the lives of others as illusory.  But because all cosmic reality has its being in God there is a profound reality always here, to endlessly discover as God’s will--existential, supreme, ultimate, absolute, and infinite.  This is what you are living in.  These are the dimensions you will come to encounter.  But your life now as you know yourself moment to moment, this is real.  This is no illusion.  This is what you have to offer that presence of God within you.  You too are the co-creator of your soul.  
 
Be in my peace.  Good evening.         
 
  
 
                                          
 
      
 
                   
 
                  
 
                
 
                                                       

 
                   
 
                  
 
                
 
                                                       

      
 
                   
 
                  
 
                
 
                                                       
                                     
 
      
 
                   
 
                  
 
                
 
                                                       
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