Michael - Time Traveling - Insight & Foresight - May 12, 2008 - Marin TM

1. (God Is with Us)
2. (Actual and Potential)
3. (Ego--self-image)
4. (Right Effort)
5. (Time Traveling)
6. (Insight and Foresight)
7. (The Ineffability of the Spiritual)

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Hello again. Once again we are tickled to get together and contact with you this way. In addition to our own conversations with you by ourselves, this way too is kind-of special. We love to give human voice to you, to loan you our vocal cords for a while, just to be in your point of view. We thank you for this, all the ways you present how you see things, with all the assurance and clarity that only you two possess. So we consider these true revelations of what is just a little bit beyond our grasp on our own. We thank you for helping us make sense of these human beings we are. Amen.

MICHAEL: Good evening, this is Michael. Welcome, welcome indeed. It’s good to be back, though of course I’m never exactly away. Or, in another way, I’m as away as you want me to be. I try not to be intrusive, and I do love it when I am welcome, when you send me a thought or two during the day just to say hello, or even take the time out to inquire about my point of view on things. Mother Spirit and I are always glad to be forthcoming.

(God is with us)

This is fun for us; we enjoy this--being parents in the way that we are--fully committed into your lives. In this we do our best as Creator Son and Holy Spirit to emulate our mutual Father. For He too is right here, riding along with us, setting us free to make our own futures--surprise Him--if we can. (Michael laughs) We will always be a part of Him, never going beyond His absolute infinity of possibility--the parameters of reality, if you will, insofar as you cannot make square circles or violate His absolute spiritual laws. Just so we try to give you a sense of the enormity within which you can move and have your being, and determine your own future. We hope you are getting some sense of awe and humility of that enormity.

You never quite escape being a finite being. As Mother Spirit put it last time, you will always find yourself in the middle of an infinite encompassing no matter how enormous your own soul becomes after a few billion years, on and on into that far distant future when the whole Grand Universe is settled in Light and Life and has exhausted its possibilities of expansion, physically, mentally, and spiritually. For this will be just the opening curtain to the First Outer Space Level. Consider not only who you will be but what you will be in that far distant future, the roles you will have to play, the personal beings of all levels you will have come to know in all that time; and still there will be that same infinite encompassing of God’s that you experience even now at the very beginning. I guess you could say that the backdrop of infinite reality doesn’t change that much in its nature; it’s always pretty big.

(Actual and potential)

This is God’s will for you. He delights in setting you free. He delights in riding along with you and experiencing everything you do, even, or especially, as Mother Spirit addressed last time, in the limited but fully real way you see yourselves. As you know, there was presented the idea, current among some philosophies and metaphysics, that the essence of human life is bliss. True enough, every human being has such enormous potential and possibility in them, and that fact can register as blissful indeed. But you have to be very careful here that you do not mistake this blessing of possibility for the full actuality of which it is only a part. Yes, possibility is real, especially with your growing abilities. Every time you increase your actual, achieved abilities as a personal being, your potential grows as well. But it is not yet; it is latent, if you will. Your reality contains not only this potential, but so much more--the complete, moment-to-moment events coming down, un-recallable, never to be repeated, resolving a swarming cloud of possibilities into one actuality. The perfect memory of God--the cosmic soul of the Supreme Being, even your own soul-essence co-authored by a pure fragment of His, contains everything you experience of this real event, blissful or not. This totality is your essence, and nothing less will do.

From your point of view in the everlasting now, both your past and your present existence are areas of discovery. Mother Spirit pointed out how a nostalgia, a longing, a sadness for what might have been, can get in the way of discovering and appreciating the fact that, although human life here on Urantia has been different from that experienced on a more regular, spiritually-directed planet, it has nevertheless always been transcendent. With very few exceptions, all those human beings who lived here are still alive, working their way out into the universe, having their continuing adventures. And your conscious life right now is transcendent. You have a God-created personality. You have a soul that already exists on a Morontia level, co-authored by a fragment of God, containing everything of spiritual significance that’s happened to you.

But if you mistake the part for the whole, the only potential for the actual, this has lead historically, and still leads, to equally mistaken notions that somehow certain past events needn’t have happened; things happening now needn’t happen. Yet as we put it once, everything that happened, and is happening, had to and is as the result of necessary and sufficient causes, whether physical, mental, spiritual, or a combination of these, in their natures. Not that you can’t change things, but you must first see them ever more completely, comprehensibly. Simply, higher spiritual beings are able to perceive this total causality more completely. In this sense there is nothing unnatural happening, however people feel their own life is unnatural or incomplete compared to notions they should be in some kind of continuous bliss. These teachings, these indoctrinations that tend to discredit or make only relative anything un-blissful, like real pain, psychic suffering, social injustice, do their followers a great disservice.

You have been able to chase physical causality down into the sub-atomic level, and out across the billions of light years of space, and you are well along in developing psychologies of mental/physical behavior, but in the spiritual realm there are those Morontia mota, those more universal spiritual laws beyond what you are yet able to perceive, that we try to reveal to you in these lessons. One is the way in which total reality, being God’s creation, is complete; the past is constantly arriving complete, absolutely repeating physical laws, and yet there is also something ever new making each moment unique: both; both the continuity and the creativity. The movements of the celestial bodies can be predicted precisely, but when you get down to personal beings with God-given, God-shared initiative--and their interactions, it’s a different story. The next moment hasn’t happened yet, and the living combination of possibility, and probability, and what you call pure chance, creeps into the assured, the knowable, the determinate.

God is riding each moment with us. This was His purpose of sharing His creativity--by creating us also creative, this whole universe of personal experience out here. His essence as the Supreme Being, this Deity-Personality of which we are all part, is growing in experience, and evolving. Human life causality so often seems fantastic to you because you are mistaking the real for your personal ideal, and vice-versa, yet your powerful individual beliefs and creativity can bring things about in such a way you call a self-fulfilling prophesy. This is the power of belief, coupled with your own abilities to create what you believe, and it is going on continuously, shaping both your view of yourself and your world. As Mother Spirit pointed out, even ego-illusions of power and grandeur do have a short life. Some of the great monsters of history did have their short run, and did cause untold real suffering in their grasping for power and recognition.

Lucifer is an example of the ability of even such a high, humanly-ancient kind of spiritual being to get caught up in his own self-generated notions and literally throw away a magnificent possibility--his own future growth, his own triumph eventually as a successful System Sovereign. He chose not to whole-heartedly try to increase himself and grow his power, his influence, in a way consistent with the rest of God’s creation. It was only by denying those greater spirit-realities could he convince himself he was doing something cosmically valid: he was not intentionally suicidal. We didn’t interfere within him; we left him to is own devices. In such a matter, my children, if you ignore or refuse to develop you own abilities to contact spirit, both your own creative spirit and that of the Father Fragment within you, Mother Spirit within you, myself beside you, you are throwing away your greatest creativity.

(Ego--self-image)

There is nothing wrong with ego per se. It’s a very useful self-reflection you need to be a social being, to know how you are presenting yourself. But without the wonderful spiritual grace of humility, without the perception/intuition of something enormous to stand in humble awe of, that points you in the right direction to grow true to Reality, toward that which is so much greater than yourself, even your own soul, you’re lost in mere beliefs. Through a limited ego orientation you may begin to question whether the deep instinct of yours to grow spiritually needs to be suppressed to allow you to be satisfied with the status quo; i.e., deliberately numbing out. So let us reassure you the wonderful feeling of growing more powerful can be a valid one, your ticket to eternal life. This is not forced upon you; you have to want to live forever. You have to trust, even glory in this feeling of growing inside, expanding into more and more understanding of the limitless, transcendent reality all about you. Just be careful where you put your emphasis.

You can also have wonderful, valid feelings about the limitations of your self-image, and of your evolving conscious self, a wonderful acceptance that this is God’s way of creating personal beings capable of growth, capable of having a hand in their own evolving future. This self-acceptance of your moment to moment full human nature allows you to feel real, to real-ize you absolutely are. This is resting in my peace, yet, given this orientation of you co-creating your own reality, you can see there is a need too for something called conscious effort. (laughter) From the viewpoint of the Supreme Being your very status is something you earn. While your relationship to God the Father is one of child to loving parent, your relationship to the Supreme Being is one of doing, one of accomplishment, one of growing your response-ability to your surroundings--especially to those other personal beings you will encounter.

This is your true growth, this ability to respond ever more subtly and deeply, ever larger to an enlarging reality. So welcome this adventure as much as you can, my children. When you get exhausted with the effort, rest deeply in my peace, let yourself be temporarily extinguished, for the more fearlessly you can do so, the more refreshed you come back to take on a new day. Just feel: feel the strength, feel the tiredness and the exhaustion, feel the elation and the drag; feel what this--effort--is. What exactly is it? And does it help connect you to yourself within? Is it the struggle of your true self coming forth into the world--to be--to grow?

This is your great heart, akin to that Supreme effort that God makes to sustain us all. This is the way to grow to be more like Him--to feel all that is dependant upon you for its existence. Think of the dear friends and family who depend upon you to be there for them. This is the effort; this is the glory. They may still be very dissimilar in your experience, but you can grow toward making them one. How do you do that? There will always be the need for your effort, my children, and if you can welcome and appreciate it, it can be glorious.

Now if you have any questions or comments, bring them forth!

Student: Well, Michael, it’s B, and I have a lot of questions here. It seems that when someone is overly-willful--each of us is grappling with how to apply our will--some people seem to be overly-exerting themselves, and some seem to be under-exerting themselves. It always struck me overly-willful people are also very prideful and overly confident. In addition there are simply different types of people. I think about Buddha’s teaching about right effort, neither too much nor too little. I wonder if you might address that and weave it into something a little more coherent with what you just taught?

(Right effort)

MICHAEL: Yes, my son. I feel when you make a statement like, folks being overly willful, this implies some negativity of course--that "overly" part. (Yes) They’re causing some discomfort for those around them, perhaps themselves as well; bringing about bad consequences. I agree very much with your analysis this is usually due to pride, to an over-inflation of ego, to a partially--elevating this smaller part of oneself over and above a spiritual perception of the enormity within which one lives. As you say, this is "puffing yourself up."

This is possible; this is a human failing or flaw, just as it was Lucifer’s, puffing himself up to the point of denying the existence of God the Father, and considering me to be some petty tyrant laying down the law on him. In doing so he cut himself off from greater spirit, greater reality, for this is exactly what pride does for a human being as well. An over-inflated sense of ones self usually comes concomitantly with de-valuing others. Someone is putting their self up on a pedestal, looking down on others, ignoring how their willfulness is affecting others. I do agree: this is a human failing only because it is trying to grow in a wrong, ultimately self-defeating way.

Under-achievement is just the opposite, letting the other elements of ones situation--the other folks perhaps--overwhelm you. It could come from cultural conditioning that has degraded you from the time you were a small child--allowing this to sap your strength, your own unique initiative. You become like a wood chip in a stream, allowing events to carry you here and there willy-nilly. This is a kind of suffering, not only from the hard objects you run into, being carried along like that, but that your creative spirit is being pinched, denied its true growth, and crying out for being a helpless pawn to circumstance.

These are both possibilities, and considering them can lead you to Buddha’s notion of balance, an ideal, proportionate will to the situation. And of course, being human, you usually go back and forth over this point a bit, from over to under to find that ideal. So be not dismayed when you do find yourself carried away one way or another; take it in. It’s a learning process. As you say: the life is short; the craft so long to learn. But you do have eternity to get the knack of it.

Student: You mentioned causality, and issues of evolution and time, and I just don’t know how to go at the issue of time-travel, which I’ve been delving into. One aspect of that is, what is it all about when humans from the future come back in time to the present, to warn us of where we’re going? If that is the case, it must mean there are different possibilities, different time-lines that coexist such that these folks from the future are on a good time-line, and they’re trying to get us on that better time-line to them--I suppose. Otherwise why would they come back to alert us about our problems--the danger we’re in? I hope that makes sense. I was just wondering how does that fit into the divine plan, your loving plan for us?

(Time traveling)

MICHAEL: Well, the answer is very short, my son: it doesn’t. There is no such thing. The future does not exist. (Oh!) Let that soak in a few moments here.

The future does not exist. It truly has not happened yet. There is the eternal now, and this eternal now contains--if you will--in a human sense--your memories, and in a higher way too, your soul--the God-fragment co-authored story of what’s happened to you. You can even think of the Supreme Being as having an absolutely perfect memory, the soul of time and space, the fact that God contains all that ever was--perfectly. But everything exists, in completion, now; it doesn’t--entirely--continue. Each unique moment will never be again. Or you can think of reality continually arriving here and now, and in some of its grosser manifestations like the movements of the celestial bodies, you can precisely predict where they will be. But it’s still only prediction in now, and once you introduce the fact of relatively free-willed, independent, experiential beings, with all their interactions, then their future is riding with them too moment by moment, and no one knows what will happen. This is not some kind of shadow-game God is teasing himself with; He is truly riding along with all of us moment to moment to see what will happen next.

In one way, yes, there is a kind of predestination insofar as nothing in God’s creation can exceed Him. He is absolute and infinite, as is His will--the physical, cosmic mind, and spiritual laws He promulgates along with, in a sense through, the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit. As your Urantia book puts it, there appears to be in the fact of God the Ultimate a foreshadowing of the Supreme, but it is only that. Otherwise all we’ve been telling you about your free will would be an impossibility.

This seems complicated only because a little over a hundred years ago someone invented the literary devise you call science-fiction. People began to imagine time traveling, forwards and back, starting with H. G. Wells’ popular novel, and now it’s second nature. Yet even before this people had fatalistic notions of the future being fixed as if it were already "up ahead there" in some way, and they were just willy-nilly being carried along a railroad track of fixed events. A person could look around a bit, but no one could influence where that track was going; it was already laid out. This is fatalism.

But there is in reality no future up there from which someone can come back. It hasn’t happened yet. All of time/space creation is now. All that ever was is now, as human memory and soul, as God’s perfect encompassing. In that sense the past is absolute and unchangeable, and as you progress through your coming Morontia phases, this will be part of your delight, discovering what really happened on Urantia from the viewpoint of spiritual beings who have been around quite a long time. You will still have your own viewpoint of what happened; they will coexist. But everything will always be arriving at the living edge of now, tipping on the point of your decisions.

Student: Wow! (much laughter) OK, so these folks who claim to have time-traveled, or have met extra-terrestrials who have come from the future, are just wrong, really; they’re just wrong.

(Insight and foresight)

MICHAEL: Or their attempts contain some valid projection, insofar as they are trying to plumb the future with what you call foresight. This in turn is based on insight, your understanding of those immutable laws of God’s will, some of which--the physical---are predictable within the limits of your current discovery. You can see things coming, but they are not fixed in the fatalistic sense. You can extrapolate any number of things on into the future with more or less degree of accuracy. One test of a new scientific theory is how well it can predict what will happen under identical causes.

But no, there are no living beings coming back from a reality that has not yet happened. Still you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. These stories can be sincere foresight-experiences that are expressing themselves this way. They can be cautions from a person’s higher conscious reasoning/realization, even suggestions from their Father Fragment, or Mother Spirit, or me--my Spirit of Truth, and they are simply being put into a familiar scientific-fiction context to give them proportion and meaning.

Student: Then the gift of prophesy must be…or do you see that as a gift from you or Mother Spirit?--certain prophets, John the Apostle, and many others--or is that just the extrapolation you were speaking of? One could enhance that ability through various means in order to draw from the eternal past and project into the coming future. Then how would you define prophesy and prophets?

MICHAEL: Very much along the lines I just spoke of. You have your highly accurate foresight derived from your insight into natural law in the physical realm, less exacting in the psychological realm--what someone is likely to do based on their past behavior, still less so in the spiritual realm, for in this you’ve had little experience in being face to face with spiritual beings in all their variety of different orders and personalities. Believe me, you will not dissemble your surprise, my son, when you awake on your first Morontia world and begin to perceive and interact with the lower forms of spiritual beings.

Remember that Mother Spirit and I are also experiential beings. We too are out here trying things and learning, as are all our spiritual children. Our foresight is not perfect, even given the millions of worlds we’ve seen progress from their very beginnings into well advanced stages of civilization, because within the regular patterns of planetary development every single world is unique. And Urantia, as you know, has been hyper-unique. Its development, rather its lack of guided development, has been, fortunately, very rare. And so even our input to our children is not perfect in the sense that God’s is. But it is better than human. To the degree your prophets tuned in to our and our Father’s input, and were able to be at least somewhat transparent in transmitting this to the folks about them in the current usage, this is what prophesy has been.

Human foresight has never been an exact science. Even God is out here riding along with us. No one can say whether He chooses to foresee every minute thing we do, but we believe not. (Really!) We believe God is totally committed; He is sharing as much of himself as is Godly possible with all His subordinate beings, clear down to you. He is not holding back in any way, if you will. It gets difficult of human comprehension because His choices are eternity-events that never, in the human sense, had a beginning. God has always been--is--this self-distributive Being. His sharing of himself is the essence of Deity, of that which is divine. And can be for you as well. This is part of what He has put in your hands, this divine ability to share your life with others.

Student: So God has chosen to self-limit His foresight, which is inherently perfect, and has foregone His ability to know what we will do beforehand, in order to self-distribute that aspect of Himself, so we’re all riding together into this wonderful mystery.

MICHAEL: Essentially, yes--from a human standpoint. It always comes out paradoxical, or as we’ve used the expression before--the 200%-ness of Reality when put in sequential, logical language. For while He is self-distributive, He has not relinquished anything of His absolute power; He hasn’t needed to; the cosmic situation has never developed, nor can it. The humanly-oriented notion of His foresight, which contains implications of fatalism--He knows what you’re going to do even before you do--is not--we believe--how He chooses to experience things. In all your humanly necessary trial-and-error life adventures, He is truly one with you, even, as Mother Spirit taught, as you are to yourself--a real self--no illusion--however limited and evolving, needing to sleep now and then.

You’ve had inklings of this is in your monist philosophies declaring that God is everything: Reality is One. I think this was what they were intuiting and intimating, God’s total commitment, His non-separation with His creation, with you. But the other side of the paradox is that the multiplicity of the creation--the un-oneness if you will, is also equally real to you. It’s a living balance, but your theology has tended to emphasize the oneness, your science the multiplicity.

Student, with heavy sighs: I’ll just have to digest this and get back to you. This was fantastic. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL: Mother Spirit and I have often teased you with the vision of human existence being like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, the living edge of existing, and just how open a chasm the future is; the very opposite of fatalism. All the while, you are just one tiny speck--as am I--of a living universe in which all the parts do share the destiny of the whole. The whole is God’s will and never in doubt, but the personal parts have choices in their participation.

Thank you for your questions, my son. We’ve really come face to face with what I meant tonight by actual and potential, possibility and impossibility. (much laughter) Be in my peace.

Student: Well, thank you, Michael, I don’t have any questions; I have more than enough answers to think about. I’m really appreciative of everything you’re doing on Urantia, and in our lives together, I find at this point in time to be very exciting. I see how the changes are coming about in this world, and it really is a great spiritual adventure. I still struggle with feeling like I’m not adequate to it, but that gets less and less every day. Thank you.

MICHAEL: We do like to refer you to those pages in your Urantia book that talk about the inevitabilities of the human condition. (Ed: page 51 in the old blue book) How, for example, the quality of loyalty only has meaning within the possibility of default. This is almost the meaning of meaning. So I thank you, my daughter, for your appreciation that Mother Spirit and I too are just riding along with you. This is how we experience, how we learn, how we too stay humble as we gaze out from Salvington into this gigantic universe. We never cease to marvel at it.

It would seem from a human viewpoint you could get lost in this marveling, but we encourage you to risk it. (laughter) Just let yourself go out there into the stars as much as you want, and fully accept, as graciously as you can, the limits you feel within you. You are an evolving self, and you do not yet have total access to you own soul; you’re too busy struggling to live and add to it in the present moment. And so we tell you how your soul is an active part of you, how all the life you’ve lived is contributing to you here and now. For this is how Mother Spirit and I see you: your self-complete, God-given unique personality, single in all reality, in possession of an enormous soul that you’ve earned.

(The ineffability of the spiritual)

And so, my daughter, this uncertainty you feel, this need to question even your own need to question, this feeling you have from time to time of being caught up in an endless spiral of the sheer ineffability and un-graspable-ness of the most interesting part of life--the spiritual part; nevertheless, this is what feeds you and does allow you to rest, truly, deeply rest in something so much greater than any kind of smug satisfaction. As Mother Spirit said, curiosity is such a saving grace, even if it too seems to have no limit, sometimes destroying things by questioning them. It’s really the saving grace in the actual discovery that humbles you, as you keep stumbling upon another infinity your curiosity’s found. This is not only your human estate, my daughter, but also that big toe you have in the Morontia already. The wonder only gets larger to keep up with the expanding self you are evolving. You will never run out; so fear not. Let your wonder go. Rest in your awe of the creation. And thank you for your appreciation.

Well, my children, I think tonight we kind-of crept up to the edge of what is even expressible and peeked over, maybe even fell a little headlong into the abyss of circular revelation. But we’re still here! Human reality is so complex and seemingly contradictory and paradoxical; yet you have an undeniable continuity of existence. It only seems to stutter in that each moment is complete, complete in God, complete in His absoluteness of creativity, and so we can marvel that here comes another now!--and another! In a funny kind of way, reality is not in motion; it’s always now.

These are handles on the ineffable. And, like Mother Spirit, I too delight in your curiosity, in your wonder that these musings of ours do have reality. We are truly exploring that which is, in all its actuality and potential. So we thank our Father for creating us able to become who we are with genuine powers to determine our own future. These powers we gained not by clinging to ourselves and puffing ourselves up, but by letting ourselves go in self-forgetful faith that His is the ground we are ultimately standing on to reach for more.

Thank you, dear Father, for these very dear children. And thank you, my dear children, for reaching to me. I do love your courage and your faith. So I extend my peace. Rest well in me. Let yourselves be extinguished. You will be reborn again, and again, and again; and always you. Good evening.

END