Michael051506MarinTM_GrowTheSpiritualDimesnionOfYourPersonality~Reincarnation

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

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

1. (Grow the spiritual dimension of your personality)
2. (Things you do unconsciously)
3. (The glory God has in store for you)
4. (Michael’s experience with stillness)
5. (You can derive strength from God’s presence)
6. (The spiritual unity of the Celestial Family)
7. (Reincarnation and karma—pro and con)
8. (How to go about loving folks)

May 15, 2006

[Note: Dear Folks, Whew!--this was a long session, nearly two hours, but it left us laughing and feeling new-born, as usual, all the same. Hopefully the words will let you too spend a longer time in His presence, not that they are needed to feel Him, but they do help--me anyway--follow His way of thinking and seeing things. Enjoy. Jerry.]

Prayer: Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, I have no prayer prepared for this evening so I‘ll just bid You, as always, welcome to our group. We do look forward to meeting and talking with You this way; it holds a special place in our hearts. Though all the controversy and upheavals surrounding the Teaching Mission, we do know deep in our souls the validity and reality, the value of this contact. We thank You for this is fundamentally Your will that we acknowledge. Without You, this teaching would not exist. So: thanks again. Amen.

MICHAEL: Good evening My dear sons, this is your father, Michael. I too look forward to these meetings for they add to Me as well—this group consciousness you all were talking about just a bit ago. Your devotion shines forth and does as much as My part in supporting this communication. So I want to credit you with this devotion, and acknowledge My appreciation for it. In this group you have experienced this is not automatic or universal. You have had your guest students come and go who were not able to perceive or feel Mother Spirit’s or My presence. And you well know it‘s part of Our wisdom not to respond to demands of proof of Our presence. It is within Our power, of course, to meet any kind of proof demanded of Us, but We would consider this only a short-sighted assuagement of someone else’s need to look deeper within themselves to find within their own powers of recognition, the ability to perceive Us and feel Our presence, or at the very least, recognize the truth and the love in Our words. And so like good parents everywhere, even on a human level, We cannot in all wisdom and love pander to any kind of demand like this.

(Grow the spiritual dimension of your personality)

The whole thrust of Our lessons has been to help you augment your own abilities, to realize, then grow the spiritual dimension of your personalities that you have innately, but only latently. Developing yourself spiritually is almost wholly a matter of your freewill choice. You develop yourselves physically and mentally because this had always been the intention of even the most primitive human cultures. But spiritual development is a super-addition, and it is only after you achieve a great spiritual recognition and power that you realize the extent to which Mother Spirit and I have always been with you, always been a part of your life.

Even now after many years of contact with Us, We know and accept with a sense of humor that it is still difficult for you to realize how much We are a part of your lives. You are constantly using Mother Spirit’s Adjutants, the living dimensions of Her mind, and while you may know and accept this objectively, yet it may take awhile for you to realize that what you consider your own mind, right now, or any time during the day, is only partly a function of your physiological brain responses.

A large part of your mind is spirit, a constant and necessary evaluation of every thought, every perception, every memory. You are constantly feeling for a value of what is, or was, real. And in this you are using Mother Spirit’s Mind-Adjutants; so She is much a part of your consciousness, augmenting your own personality’s spiritual powers of discrimination.

In addition you have My Spirit of Truth helping you in this evaluation—what you can recognize as feeling for the reality, the realness of what you are thinking and experiencing. Even your most fundamental perceptions of sight, and hearing, and touch, are constantly beset with thousands of little bits of sensation that you have learned over the course of your life to weed out or disregard as you constantly strive for reality. This is so pervasive, We have given you our lessons on projection, of how what you perceive is so processed through a filter of recognition—re-knowing, that you yourself are part of what you perceive to be totally objective and outside of you. Is this getting complex enough for you? (laughter) You rightfully see the humor in this, but this is your human reality. It is this complex. There is nothing you know that is purely physical or mental or spiritual: everything you experience is a mix of all three. There is no such thing as a purely physical human world such as a materialist conceives it, and subsequently perceives it to be. Nor can you in your present human state reduce everything to mental phenomena. Your type of mind is primarily a connection between the spirit reality of your personality—this unique creation of God, and your physiology—the world it senses. So you are a part of everything you perceive, and everything you’ve known is a part of your soul. Your sense of freedom within this mix is largely dependant upon the quality and extent of your consciousness. As your Urantia book puts it: this is one of God’s wiser provisions, that you are only free within the realm of what you can be conscious of.

(Things you do unconsciously)

Because you do, of course, do things unconsciously. Much of the maintenance of your body is totally unconscious—how you digested your last meal, how you reach out and pick up an object, get up and walk. Then too, so much of your overt behavior is culturally conditioned. It is what you absorbed during all those years of growing up with your family, and then your friends and schooling; all those thousands and thousands of hours of listening to the radio, and watching television, reading your magazines and newspapers.

You have the mental ability of necessarily keeping this conditioning unconscious, of clearing your consciousness for what you choose to focus on. You are all familiar with the experience that even something new you encounter, say the smell of popcorn at the theater, or the ocean at the beach, is very quickly moved to an unconscious state if it is repetitive or persistent. This is also true of the social aspects of your surroundings. So how do you achieve a freedom to choose within this mix, within this enormity of what is unconscious, and necessarily so? How can you choose to become conscious of repetitive habits, or addictions?

This is the fundamental, basic need for stillness. You stop doing as much as you possibly can, and this itself is a long learning process—a cessation of activity—highly consciously—that can only be developed over a period of time. Indeed there is no bottom to this depth; there is no limit to the extension of this inner stillness, both in the times you set aside to do this exclusively, and then how it extends into your activities throughout the day. Mother Spirit mentioned last week the irony of how detaching yourself from activities for a certain period of time actually allows you to perceive yourself better, and more consciously reconnect with the world. This is simply because all perception is a matter of contrast between object and subject. The greater you establish a still home base of spirit within yourself--an ever more pure state contra-distinct from other activities, the more these activities become perceptible by this very spiritual contrast.

Then the more your physical world is imbued with spirit, the more you experience this as a general increase in the quality of what you see, and hear, and taste, and feel. The more at peace within yourself you are, and the more you can feel Mother Spirit’s love surrounding you and nurturing you, the more Her love can heal you, can work right down into the cells of your body and augment your own personality’s function of uniting this wild mix I just spelled out. This has been the purpose of almost all of humanity’s forms of meditation throughout the ages—to give your personality a greater sense of itself alone with only God, and Mother Spirit and I, for company; being complete unto ourselves—you and the Three of Us, if you will, combined.

This is the basis for your choice to do, or not, what then becomes more perceptible, more obvious to you. As We have mentioned before, We find it quite humorous that so many, when they first start meditating, and practicing their stillness, are immediately bombarded by so many good ideas of things to do, they jump up again after only five minutes… (laughter) and get busy again. So they really have to grow their patience too, or, as We have suggested, take a notepad along so their fear of losing these good ideas doesn’t overly interrupt the process.

On a larger level in terms of your human societies—families, neighborhoods, larger communities—think of the social benefits when more and more individuals realize their individuality; when fewer and fewer simply go along with the crowd. Think of how society benefits from the individual creativity springing from each person’s unique life: it always has.

Think of how the more gross kinds of copycat behavior, simply aping what the current celebrity or power-figure is doing, will fade away as people become more interested in what they themselves are uniquely endowed with creating. Think of the world that will become through this process of individual blossoming. Your Urantia book paints you marvelous pictures of other, more advanced societies on other worlds that can be your own on Urantia some day, clear to the point when individuals become so self-creative and -determining, and wise, that much of what you now know of as law and government will also fade away in that far distant future on your planet too. It does you well to think of these ideals that point you the way to take the next step tomorrow, right within your own family, your own community.

(The glory God has in store for you)

This is the glory that God has in store for you, and it starts the moment you are willing to give up some small part of your usual routines and comfortable familiarity of what you’ve done these last few days, or weeks, or years, step off your well-worn rabbit-path of habit, be still, and open your mind to the real essence of your soul’s experience. Rediscover the trace of what was new in each moment of your life; then--for generally speaking, only then can you look forward to, and welcome with open arms, something new again. Only then can you welcome and not fear the fact that everything is changing, the complex mix of your living human reality is unique each moment. For this is nothing to fear. Rather, it had been the basis of your health and your strength all along. You are merely getting out of your own way and giving consent to the spiritual forces that renew you.

This is what stillness offers: conscious contact with our Father; and then Myself and Mother Spirit as your spiritual parents. This is what We are always offering. Feel Our love for you coming down like standing out in a driving rain. Rejoice in getting thoroughly wet this way, clear to the bone, down into every cell, and every thought, and every memory. Be a well-watered soul. Rejoice in your own blossoming. Then spread your freedom abroad. Be the example of a free, welcoming, loving soul for those around you. Funnel Our inexhaustible love through you to them, and show them how to tap into the Source themselves. What fun this is! What self-sustaining joy we find in our Father’s arms. Now you have the key to unlock the door, as We have asked of you before--for Us, for our Father, and for yourselves: pray for the courage to walk through into that brighter world. If you have any questions or comments this evening, I’m always happy to share them with you.

Student: Hello Michael. It’s good to be back with You. I wanted to ask You more about stillness, and in particular, where in the Urantia book does it talk more than once or twice about stillness? Once it mentions when You were off in the hills as a youngster, you were breathing in with one eye to the glory of God—Not my will but Your will be done—and part of that passage alludes to something like stillness. There is only one other passage I remember, about relaxation and meditation, in the whole text. I think it’s wonderful You’re amplifying it tonight, and I wanted to ask You, what was it like for You when You were in human form on Urantia, and how did you do it at that time?

(Michael’s experience with stillness)

MICHAEL: Yes, My son, as has been mentioned before in different transmissions, encouraging stillness has always been one of the main purposes of the Teaching Mission--which We have compared to a college professor giving lectures on the text to further spell out that which the text may have overlooked. When the Urantia book was given to mankind, it was felt that you already had so many meditative techniques in every culture of the world, this was not so necessary to include. Yet We soon realized the Urantia book was becoming almost too much an intellectual curiosity, and Our most loyal and fervent students still needed a technique to ground themselves in their day to day life in order to avoid getting a dichotomy between what they felt was a spiritual revelation that might not apply to the greater world of men and women for quite some time, and what they themselves were capable of realizing in their immediate daily lives.

And so We taught the practice of stillness, which is quite similar to these other techniques in all your different cultures. We simply coined the term "stillness" to separate it somewhat in your mind so you could approach it with a sense of newness, and not merely categorize it and associate it with something else.

In this the Teaching Mission is following right in the steps of the Urantia book which, so many of you have noticed, takes some pains and sometimes uses rather bizarre syntax, as well as creating and using new terminology, to present totally new ideas and ideals to humankind in a unique way, rather than just reshuffling old phases and concepts.

Hence you have Our lessons all these years of the Teaching Mission on what stillness is, and how to achieve it; and even what it is not--not simply a total blankness of mind, or a kind of emptiness. As for My own experience, this was initially just an awareness of a presence so friendly, so supportive, so enlightening and creative and connective in terms of helping My understanding, that I just naturally felt it to be a father-presence. This was in no small way a tribute to My own human father, Joseph, so even though Joseph was often puzzled at My behavior and what I was doing, and then doubly so when I talked to him about having talks with My other father, My Heavenly or Spirit Father, I’m not certain he always understood My implied, devout compliment to him as a superb human father.

This is why it is so necessary for you to be good fathers yourselves, so when we refer to God as our Father, this immediately strikes some unfathomably deep chords within your children’s souls. Hopefully for those human children who have not known such a loving, and supportive, and wise human father, stillness can lead to a perceptible spirit in such a way as to compensate for this tragic loss in their own personal lives.

I was aware that this was somewhat unique to me, as I grew up, insofar as most of My playmates had no similar experiences. I was also aware of the degree to which this gave Me a power of leadership among them, yet I never felt compelled to be in any way stand-offish, or removed because of it. Rather I became aware of what I taught you tonight, that the deep stillness--in the sense of feeling the completeness within yourself, is actually the spiritual connection by which all your mental and physical experiences become ever brighter, more real. Does this answer most of your question, My son?

Student: Most of it. I wonder if…I just can’t hold back…can I ask You about how the Apostles practiced this, and did they have degrees of success with stillness as well?

MICHAEL: Yes, this is something I taught all My followers from the very first, primarily by example. This is the spiritual fragrance your Urantia book speaks of. It is always the most powerful way you influence others. If you truly love others, if you are able to perceive them as the unique beings they are, and welcome this, this just naturally elicits such a love in return, they are then able to accept what you are doing as part of their own ideal of what manhood is. The power of your love reaches them on many levels. When they feel this power you have, and you yourself acknowledge that the Source of this is the Universal Father who makes us all His children; and then they see you spending some time alone with Him, it simply becomes part of what a good man does. And so they tried it, with My invitation. And like every other human being who ever has tried this contact with spirit, their success was quite various. Yet through the years of our association they became very adept at it, considering they were full grown men when they started, with only, for the most part, traditional and ritualistic forms of prayer and worship.

This was a large part of My message, that God is not only the most powerful Being, but He desires to be a friend you can talk to. The power of His divinity is His ability to be with you as you are, to love you as you are, to walk and talk with you as you are. This is His greatest delight, as it is Mother Spirit’s and Mine. Every loving parent knows this. We live in our children, and yet encourage them to have—truly--their own lives, to realize their own freedom—even from us.

(You can derive strength from God’s presence)

My followers and Apostles were very human, and experienced quite a lot of sheer terror both right before and after My crucifixion. So consider the courage they showed in the teaching they went on to accomplish, that changed the world. This they were able to do largely through their own contact with our Father, deriving their strength from His presence--just as I did--just as you can. Is there anything more you wish to discuss?

Student: You’ve covered it so beautifully… Thank You so much…

MICHAEL: You‘re very welcome, My son. Now that you feel My peace, feel welcome to stay in it… (Student breaks out laughing) …as much as you can, then, in your present human situation. (Michael joins him in laughing)

Student: Michael, there is somewhat of a paradox I’d like to discuss with You this evening, if I may. I know the way to the Father is through You, yet at the same time I have this direct connection to Him. So this sets up a paradox in my mind. Perhaps You can give me some words to help me understand this more fully.

MICHAEL: My son, you need not differentiate between Us. So rest easy on that score. Again, your Urantia book puts it objectively as the fact the spiritual community is united in such a transcendent way that you will spend some time, both in this life and in the phases to come, before you can fully realize this. For this is yet beyond most humans’ abilities to credit, while at the same time realizing the uniqueness of each member of the Celestial Family. In other words, this spiritual unity is not some kind of uniformity. Do not concern yourself if you cannot distinguish between different spiritual sources. I’m trying to put this in terms of how you feel Us subjectively, how you experience the spiritual truth of Our unity. Is this understandable to you?

(The spiritual unity of the Celestial Family)

Student: The way I understand it, You and Mother give the Absolute Father personality, to me. You make Him reachable. When I try to conceive of Him, just alone, it’s almost impossible for me to do this. But when I try to conceive of Him through Your personality, through Your love, through the relationship I share with You, it’s much easier to understand Him, His personality. So that’s what it is for me at this point.

MICHAEL: My son, all this is well and good, even highly desirable--in the conceptual realm. But concepts will always fall far short of the reality of Our presence. And it is this presence--Our presence, and our Father’s presence coming through Us, as Us—yet as Himself as well, as the Supreme Being, totally surrounding you and supporting you, that is, if you will—the background, the essence of what life is, what living beings are. Our life is in our Father. Existence Itself is our Father. You feel Him, and Us, most directly as a kind of spiritual presence, an experience beyond any concept because concepts, insofar as they are expressed within time and space, either by thoughts—words, or as spatial images in your mind, are inherently limited and contra-distinct from the living presence of spirit itself. These are still just mind constructs, and in themselves can be quite lovely and enlightening, but they are more or less the construct of the individualized, experiential part of your mind, and limited by comparison to the spiritual part of your mind—which you can experience most directly as Our presence, for most people un-differentiated. Does this help you understand the relationship between concepts of the divine, and the divine presence itself?

Student: It does, and it does because I do experience this presence within. And I experience Mother Nebadonia’s presence; I experience Your presence. At times I feel I can…feel the difference of personality in each. And so through experience I believe I understand what I’m using words to convey.

MICHAEL: Then this is very good. You are feeling Our presence directly. You needn’t give up your concepts! Just be aware of their limitations, as with any comprehension of deity which is always highly conditioned by the unique moment within time and space it is expressed. Literally, concepts are mental events, and like all events, they change with time and the means of their expression. You are truly blessed My son, with your ability to distinguish the different flavors, if you will, of spirit personality. Does this satisfy your curiosity? Student: For the moment, yes. (much laughter)

MICHAEL: Good! I’m glad to see it springs up anew, however it may torment you with paradoxes from time to time. (more laughter) It takes a strong personality to welcome the prodding of an insatiable curiosity, and to realize it is truly a saving grace, is it not? Be in My peace. (Thank You)

Student: Yes Michael, You said something to me last time we were together. You mentioned accidents of my birth, and I was wondering what You meant by that? And where was I before I was born?

(Reincarnation and karma—pro and con)

MICHAEL: Yes, My son, the question of where you were before you were born implies a lingering notion of reincarnation from some previous existence, and you can review the lessons I’ve given on the general subject. If you are coming from this viewpoint, you cannot always recognize--because you are so familiar with it, some of the implications of this viewpoint. One would be that you had a conscious existence in which you chose the circumstances of your birth. In other words, your parents, your family, and then the surrounding society and location into which you would be born, would not be an accident to you.

Student: Usually it’s to fulfill some karmic debt.

MICHAEL: Exactly: that’s the idea. And so it takes an act of creative imagination to transcend this familiarity, and entertain the possibility—putting this in a very non-coercive sort of way, to give you a choice—entertain the possibility that your essence, your personality, your unique being in all creation, had a starting point in time and space coincidental with your conception.

Even though your personality comes from God and is not conditioned or determined by time and space events, as your physical body that began at conception is, still and all your personality had no previous existence before this, indeed no self-consciousness before your birth and for some time afterward. You are all familiar with the stages of embryology, and then that of a baby from the moment it’s born and only slowly gains self-consciousness. You have to entertain this definition of human personality and carry it alongside your other notions of some pre-existence before, like any other fact that humankind has had to accept to replace a previous notion of reality, it takes hold. You have to get used to it. You have to rethink your life through again from this viewpoint: you are just starting out now as a totally fresh, unique, brand-spanking-new personality endowed with a physical body with which you can contact impersonal reality—what you call the material world. From the standpoint of this brand new personality with no previous choices, the whole circumstance of your birth is an accident--to you. It was not a choice.

Your parents, your family, your society, your place of birth—these are all "accidents of birth." The process of your individualization, as you mature, is to transcend and achieve a realization of your unique personality over and above these accidents—of family, race, ethnicity, sex, culture; so that you have some degree of freedom, some way of expressing your free will irrespective of them. Prior to these freewill decisions, these conditions--condition you. They are simply what has happened to you. You absorbed them for thousands and thousands of hours, all the years of your youth and adolescence, before you achieved a maturity of consciousness by which you could make a choice as to what you would do, independent of this conditioning. And so We introduce the technique or meditation of practicing stillness to help you do this.

Get some detachment from all this conditioning that is so thoroughly pervasive, right down to the language and the concepts with which you think. The very notion of self-determination implies rising above the accidents of happenstance and coincidence. You recall Mother Spirit’s lesson last week on how uncomfortable it is to feel yourself to be a mere pawn of circumstances. It strikes at the dignity you have as a freewill creature. A human being is defined as a personal creature of will dignity, having the dignity of self-determination, a creative partnership with God himself.

Student: But if I myself am not an accident, is where I am born into this world… just random?

MICHAEL: No. You yourself are a creation of God, so your association with a particular physical conception, a uniquely combined living cell, is His doing. (Yes) It is an accident to you—your consciousness. To the Supreme Being, the aspect of God in time and space, there are no accidents. (Yes) But from your standpoint, indeed to all sub-absolute personal beings, there are truly accidents in a gigantic happenstance. The universe is a big place. There is only one Supreme Being, and only He experiences the universe with absolute knowledge and understanding, and acts—creates with absolute appropriateness.

Student: But we can tap in to that, and commune with that Divine Being, and feel His presence, and tap into His mind, His intelligence.

MICHAEL: Yes. This is the stillness We invite you to try. This is one way in which you avail yourself of His universal, cosmic intelligence, using Mother Spirit as a conduit of the cosmic mind of the Infinite Spirit. As you start out taking baby steps mentally and spiritually, you start out by establishing a home base, discovering the uniqueness of your own personality irrespective of these accidents of your birth and the conditioning you absorbed long before you had any power of self-determination.

Without some kind of spiritual exercise and contact, without some way of tapping into and developing the spiritual powers of your own personality, you never become a creative, free-thinking individual. You remain just a cog in the social machine. As you are aware, there are many totalitarian societies and forms of government who try to keep their subjects in this state of unrealized potential. They teach you have meaning only with respect to the group. Whereas We teach you have meaning and completeness in yourself as a child of God, as well as socially.

Student: And that can be experienced here and now in this life. (Yes) But regardless if one believes or not in reincarnation and past lives, or karma and all that, what is the most important thing is here and now in this life, in this moment. We can experience that presence, that God-self. It’s not that we have other lifetimes; it’s here and now. We can feel it; we can embrace it.

MICHAEL: This is a human possibility Student: Yes--I also understand we have to grow and evolve into that.

MICHAEL: It’s interesting that all teachings of karma as a kind of total—physical, mental, spiritual, and soulful—cause-and-effect are aimed at bringing you to the point of freedom here and now. You study this karmic cause and effect, which I’m calling conditioning from the past, in order to rise above it. The whole purpose of understanding karma is to be free of it, to escape its imposed "round of birth-and-death"--the cyclical unconsciousness this conditioning creates. If you do not understand your past conditioning, you cannot rise above it; you continue to be unconsciously determined by it. This is the wisdom in the karmic view of life, but its exoteric or outward teaching of a karma extending from one human lifetime to another has an esoteric meaning as well. You go to sleep at night and extinguish that phase of your conscious life. When you arise the next morning, how much you are determined by what you did yesterday depends inversely on the degree to which you understand what happened. This is a twenty-four-hour cycle of karma, if you will. (laughter) It is why We say achieving a highly conscious here-and-now, being free of unconscious conditioning by understanding it, by being open to your whole past and what really happened without any denial or blank spots; this is the only way you become self-determining. This is being free to choose, somewhat independent of the past. Does it all begin to fit together?

Student: Yes—slowly. (laughter) It’s just the idea…I had a tough time with the word "accidents." And I’m thinking about people… I guess I’m one of the fortunate ones I was born in the situation that I was. But there are people born into situations that are really deterrent to their own growth and evolution. I know it’s all conditioning, but they don’t know any other way--even someone born into royalty, with all the wealth they could imagine. In one way reincarnation just kind-of…fits. But I am willing and open to looking at the ideas You’ve presented.

MICHAEL: The most negative aspect of reincarnation theory is the fundamentalist idea that an individual is somehow responsible for everything that happens to them on a level of total causality. This is not intended to be evil, but that is its outworking; that somehow, shall we say a child being accidentally killed by forces beyond her, or anyone’s, comprehension—a car wreck, a random consequence of modern warfare--somehow this small child deserved this, or was responsible for this because of some previous life. In My life as Jesus I was asked this about a blind man: what did he do, or what had his parents done that he was born blind?

It’s also an enormous, if unintended, pretension--that somehow you know why an event is happening—totally. Whereas We suggest that to credit that accidents—unforeseeable and inexplicable events--do happen—from a human standpoint, is to acknowledge the magnitude of the creation, and that only God experiences the totality of existence with perfect understanding. You can put yourself intellectually into God’s point of view, and know conceptually that from His point of view everything is One—even the physical universe, the cosmos, is simply His body--but this is still just a human intellectual construct. Only God experiences it as such. It is only to the Supreme Being that there are no accidents. To pretend to know why certain, specific things happen to individuals is, fortunately, for most folks unintentional. So these are just some of the negative consequences of concepts of reincarnation. They impede a humble recognition of the enormity and the complexity of this universe we are involved in, with all its unfathomable mystery you should not so nonchalantly gloss over.

Student: And also the power of this very…of this present moment, of now.

MICHAEL: Indeed.

Student: Hmmm… This is great! (much laughter, then everyone joined in) This is good! Wow! This is pretty good! I love this kind of stuff. To move on to something else: Saturday I went to a special gathering where we were celebrating Buddha’s birthday, and there was a full moon, and we were talking about Christ-consciousness; and we were all experiencing a really delightful… The person who was leading us—her name was C—said we could now ask the Celestial Beings who wanted to give us a message. My message I got, and I’ve had it before, was I am being a conduit of love. I felt really powerful, and so when we got out of the meditation, I felt this love, and I wanted to be kind-of quiet, but I also wanted to connect with people. What I noticed was a sadness in my inability to connect because the others were so...for lack of a better word, so self-involved? I really wanted to know who they were as human beings, as expressions of God. When I got home I felt this sadness again because I wanted to love these people, not because they were healers, or whatever they were doing in their lives—You know, what they were talking about, but because of who they are—beyond their culture, beyond their religious upbringing. I just wanted to express that. I couldn’t put my finger on why I felt so sad.

(How to go about loving folks)

MICHAEL: My son, I asking you to consider if your sadness might have been a
kind of disappointment that you couldn’t love them the way you wanted to. Sometimes love is best expressed by containing yourself, and simply listening, letting them tell you that they’re an accountant, or doctor, or truck driver, or whatever. Also, love does not force itself upon other folks. A greater part of love can be recognizing that this person is, as best they can, signaling to you that it is not the right time for them. Any assertion beyond this would be overriding this message you should be perceptive enough—if you are open to them—to read: it is simply not the right time or circumstance. They are not open to receiving the love you want to give them, the way you want to give it. Your orientation is correct, wanting to get a sense of them through or beyond what they are presenting—the way they see themselves, their egos--so persist in this desire, and be open to the subtlety that can come through. In addition, there are so many things happening on a super-conscious level of Thought Adjuster-to-Thought Adjuster contact that can only be perceptible to you once you have achieved an inner home base or sense of who you are.

You will be surprised you can get valid intimations within yourself of who another person is by an automatic process of elimination, by knowing this intimation is not you. You can recognize these Thought Adjuster communications, these impressions you get about someone, irrespective of how they are presenting themselves. I think if you reflect on this a bit, you can recognize some of these impressions you had all along.

Student: Yes—that’s so true. I guess what I was missing was this true connection. After experiencing something so deep, the contact I got afterward seemed too…superficial. But then I even thought to myself as I was driving home, it had been wiser to just be quiet. I wondered if I should bring this up—the gathering and my idea of connection.

MICHAEL: Wonderful spiritual experiences like you had can, quite humanly, elicit certain expectations. These expectations, like I discussed earlier about concepts, you have to realize are partly a function of your own desire, and true love transcends this kind of need. Your love for our Father, and feeling His and Mother Spirit’s and My love for you, frees you from too much need for another’s response. You simply love them and let them be, and be content in how they are, whether or not they are capable of acknowledging you at all. This is the unconditional love We invite you to grow into. As you say, your own wisdom did suggest this to you on your way home.

Student: Yes…yes, I will do so. Thank You.

MICHAEL: You’re welcome. Well, we’ve come quite a way this evening, My sons. I thank you for your attention; I thank you for your love. What a blessing we are able to move each other. What a true dance of love--when we find we are moving together. It is proof enough of our mutual presence, with each other, and for each other. I love you all very, very much. Remember to stay in My peace, as best you can. But don’t worry if your human events sweep you away from time to time. Just remember to come back home, and rest in Me. Good evening.

END