Michael100206MarinTM_ABigPicture_MercyLagOfJustice
Michael—October 2, 2006Marin TM Group—Mill Valley, California—U.S.A.MICHAEL—T/R-JLDear Michael and Mother Spirit, Thank You for visiting with us this way, and for your words of hope, and insight, and understanding. We thank You for the Teaching Mission You have inaugurated, and we wish to thank all Your Sons and Daughters for Their contributions to it. And finally, we wish to thank our initial teacher, our beloved elder brother, Welmek, for setting our feet on this path. Amen.
MICHAEL: Good evening, My worshipful sons, this is Michael, your father—your Dad, and your brother, and your close friend, your very informal buddy. If I were here in person, we could go fishing together. I did have a bit of experience with that once upon a time. This is always how I would like you to think of Me, because this is definitely how I think of us, Myself.
(A big picture)
Though Mother and I are parents to literally millions of worlds at all stages of development, some just now coming on line, so to speak, with their evolving, primitive type human beings, others on the other end of the spectrum having been settled in Light and Life for endless millennia; still to all My sons and daughters, both Mother and I feel very close. And We derive such pleasure, such enjoyment when each of you feels this same closeness.
Your knowledge of Us, your ability to receive Us this way, marks the entrance upon a definite stage of planetary evolution that has happened on every evolved planet. When every world’s population reaches a certain stage of maturity in understanding, We are able to communicate this way through its members.
And while there is a general pattern of planetary development, it is really most general. Your own world has departed from this pattern in many ways, and it has been the purpose of the Urantia book to explain some of these differences. Now you can have some sense of reference, some understanding of the more common or usual ways of planetary development. All these explanations serve to help your faith in God’s ultimate justice.
No matter how severe life seems to have treated you, or those you know of, about the world, you can understand that there is no other way to give your kind of being the freedom you do have without allowing for some temporal disruptions. If all human actions were instantaneously adjudicated and corrected, there would be no freedom as you know it. There would be no possibility for any deviation from God’s will. So it is true that much of what you know as human-created suffering is the price you pay for this ability you have to choose. The evolution of your civilization and your culture depends upon a thorough understanding of this principle, and a thoroughgoing appreciation of this price you pay for your freedom.
There is still a great percentage of the world’s children who are not taught they have this freedom, nor made aware they have a responsibility, not only to others, but even to themselves. In fact, much of the institutionalized teaching of either church or state is in the opposite direction, its purpose, more or less, to mentally and spiritually enslave each younger generation coming along, to not question, nor to realize they have individual choices to make.
In a more ideal world each individual, though raised by authority, would be thoroughly prepared so that, at a certain stage of maturity, he or she would realize the necessity to make inner choices--for themselves--as to what is real--no less. Just think of the trust in your children that this would require. Think of the faith involved when each parent and teacher would welcome their children’s or their students’ surpassing them--voluntarily being guided in the wise use of power as it’s passed on from generation to generation--smoothly, lovingly, progressively.
(Principles of transparency and democracy)
Make no mistake: the human races on Urantia are evolving. Civilization and culture are maturing, and the worldwide communications coming into play are fantastically accelerating the process. Great principles of transparency in all institutions of government, and religion, and learning, are transforming concepts of where responsibility ultimately rests, ever so surely transferring it on to its origin, the people themselves.
As one of your wise statesman put it: there is no safe repository for the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves. But obviously the people themselves must want this. They must be willing to devote the life energies and time necessary to make their representatives responsible to them. The general principle of representative democracy is sound. It is only in the final stages of Light and Life, the final maturation of civilization and culture on a world, that the state has pretty much faded away and men and women no longer require these institutions of law and authority to behave wonderfully.
So have faith in these principles, My sons and daughters. Have faith in yourselves and your children. Appreciate these freedoms that are yours for the very terrible price your particular world has paid for them. When you consider the evolution of your societies, you can feel again a wondrous wellspring of hope for the movement towards a recognition of individual liberties. Though hardly constant over the years, with all its many setbacks, it’s still been on the whole: unstoppable.
Remember that all the individual freedoms with respect to government that you have, all have come about one small step at a time. Some, concerning the franchising of all races, both sexes, and all economic classes, have only come about very recently indeed, and are still not by a long shot universal. But this is the way to go. This is the orientation of true progress. You help bring about this ideal future by thoroughly exploring, and understanding, and respecting the process as it has developed over the past.
(A necessary monumental forgiveness)
The monumental forgiveness that is necessary now is perfectly consistent with forgetting nothing, neither in your own individual past, nor as you look out on your society and world. As I have said before, everything that has ever happened is deserving of respect for its sheer actuality. Ask only: was it real, did it really happen? Only then, once you have accepted all the facts of any matter, can you turn to understanding why, based upon this acceptance.
There you will find the grounds for hope, for the supreme optimism that Mother Spirit and I only wish We could transfer to you directly from our viewpoint overlooking the evolution of millions of worlds, and our understanding of God’s will and ways. For you this is largely a matter of faith. Yet it is this faith We see burning in your souls like a laser of pure light that gives Us the greatest hope of all.
Oh, My children, if you could only see yourselves as We do. So keep your faith burning strong. Keep your hope from faltering. Keep stretching to appreciate all your forbearers have done to pass their life and their hopes on to you. Then smile as you meet the eyes of your children and send them out into the world, trusting they will move things along one small step further. This is the passing of the lamp we are all involved in; and it is good. It is eternal.
If you have any questions or comments this evening, it is My great pleasure to do My best to meet your expectations.
Student: Thank You, Michael, for taking time out from Your life to be with us tonight. Thank You for putting a positive outlook on the way life evolves, and the events in this world. I don’t have any questions tonight, just those two comments.
(Michael’s life)
MICHAEL: Thank you, C, for your heartfelt appreciation. This is not really taking any kind of time out for, you see, this is what I do. This is My life. And I certainly don’t call it work. As Mother has so often told you, being a Creator Son is mostly being a father to Our creations. And as I mentioned this evening, it’s wonderful when the human races of an evolving planet reach the stage where they can consider Us and our Universal Father, not as some tyrannical, cranky rulers, but as the closest, wisest, and most loving of friends. So I am pleased to say, thank you for your appreciation. You are very welcome. Be in My peace.
Student: Thank You, Father Michael.
Student: Yes, Michael, I’m pondering upon what we discussed in our previous meeting about the phenomenon of evil, and I guess what I was getting caught up in was, was the idea of duality--that there is love and then there’s evil. But then as I thought more about that: in a sense, love and evil are of the same coin--two sides of the same coin, a gold coin if you may, in that even with the expression of evil there is love. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this clear, but I still do not believe that God knows of evil, because all He knows is love, absolute love.
So the evil we see in the world is just a perverted expression of love. When one chooses to live God’s will, then there is no capacity to commit evil, or even think of it, or conceive of it. This leads me into the next thing of God’s will and free will, for I think and perceive that God’s will for all of us is absolute harmony, and goodness, and love, and wealth, and so on. So how can there be evil if there is absolute love, if that’s His intention? With the idea of free will, I perceive that free will, possibly as God intended it to be expressed, was to… You can’t separate yourself from God’s will: there is no separation: we are God’s will. Free will is a further expression of God’s will, but in our own unique fashion, and experience, and flavor. So that’s how I perceive of free will, and God’s will.
MICHAEL: Yes, My son, I understand your quandary…
Student: I’m not denying there’s evil things out there in the world. I mean I realize…I feel it. I see the suffering. I know what is going on in the world.
MICHAEL: There you just anticipated what I was about to say, because in your first discourse you more or less denied the existence of evil…
Student: I think I was meaning, I didn’t deny the existence of evil, but that God created evil. He cannot even experience evil, or even know of evil—if He is absolute love, and absolute joy. Evil is only our sense of separation from this absolute love. But in reality there is no separation.
(God’s will, and His creatures’ free will)
MICHAEL: The only way out of this circular reasoning is to more thoroughly understand these terms. This is why the Urantia book goes to some lengths, and needs to, in defining the meaning to be put on certain word symbols such as sin or evil. The creation of a finite universe full of, as I put it, immature and imperfect beings, allows for deviation from God’s will and ways—which you are correct in seeing are perfect, or absolute and infinite. But His creatures are not. They are immature and imperfect. They are given a free will to make it possible to deviate from His ways. That is the meaning of free will.
On the simplest level, they can make mistakes. Every parent is aware of the mistakes their child must make in order to learn hot things burn, sharp things cut. Many of these mistakes are made unconsciously and unintentionally as a young being learns about reality. A sin is your consciously going against God’s will, doing something that your own inner knowledge tells you is not right, say, persisting in an unhealthy habit, since God wants you healthy and strong. Yet the very existence of, say, cigarettes, means there is this possibility for sin, for choosing something you know is not His will. The same is true of evil—willfully, knowingly harming another. As you came to admit, there is no denying the reality of this. We go one step further and define iniquity as the whole-hearted identification with, or devotion to evil, which some men have chosen to do.
When God created the universes of time and space and peopled them with beings such as yourselves, He created this possibility. This possibility is the very definition of free will, free to deviate from His will. The creature’s free will is not synonymous with His.
Student: But how can He do so? We may be getting beyond what I can comprehend, but how can He conceive of that?
MICHAEL: Because He is God. You cannot put limits upon His creativity. Nor can you say that He does not know every tiny aspect of everything that is happening. He is cognizant of every act throughout all of time and space. This is what is meant by omniscience. You’ve expressed some notions that God cannot know evil, whereas He knows every evil act that has ever taken place, and He definitely allows it, for He is also omnipotent. There can be no limits put upon His power to change anything, in that His power is also consistent and one with His absolute and infinite wisdom.
On this absolute and infinite scale, He is truly a divine parent who allows His children to make their mistakes, allows them to be responsible for what they do so that their experiences are truly their own; their souls are truly their own. Seen from this scale, all sin, evil, and iniquity—all are definitely time-limited. Every evil act has a definite beginning and end, whereas God’s goodness does not. The goodness of the total is never in doubt. God’s will prevails by the very definition of who and what we mean by God, what we mean by omnipotence and omniscience. He is ubiquitous within time and space, and omnipresent in a time-and-space transcended way.
So read the transcripts, My son, and re-think some of your notions of what God can or cannot create. You yourself are the proof of His ability to create an imperfect and immature being. As We keep reassuring you: you are absolutely real.
Student: You also keep saying, if only I could see myself as You see me—which is as God sees me—full of love and full of joy, and wholeness. And more.
MICHAEL: Yet with the potential, the ability for anything conceivable. Also, My son, look at your understanding of what an enlightened person—as you think of one—experiences as he goes through a normal day in your society. He is constantly confronted with a thousand and one choices along a whole spectrum of good and evil. It is not that he would no longer conceive of, or have any contact or cognizance of evil when he is surrounded by all these relatively good and evil acts impinging upon his consciousness. Consider the violence in your mass entertainment, the real warfare on your world. So don’t think there is some state of mind you should achieve where you do not have to consider or conceive of these things. They are part of the stream of life you are living in, full of all these contrastive elements of good and evil.
Getting into the meaning of meaning once again, both the concept and the real virtue of loyalty only exists within the possibility of default and betrayal. And so it is with all the virtues. But I must admit I do not know what you mean by good and evil are the same thing, or the same coin.
Student: Two sides of the same coin.
(Good and evil are not abstract dualities)
MICHAEL: Two sides of the same coin. Good is definitely what affirms life, and is consistent with God’s will. Evil is a deviation from this that causes pain and suffering. A man who stoops to help a child with food and shelter, love and companionship, is in no way analogous to another who may obscenely harm a small child. They both exist on your world. These are not abstract dualities. They are specific acts that either nurture or harm. The consequences are real. Love and evil are not in any way related. Love is a connecting, bonding, empathizing kind of emotion. Evil is a destructive desire in its essence, fueled by the self indulgence of hatred. One connects; the other severs and harms. So keep your philosophy down to earth, My son. Look at the results of specific acts, for all your abstractions, your general terms "good" and "evil" do stem from these. (a very long pause, several minutes)
Let Me ask if you can feel the concrete-ness of My proposals.
Student: I kind-of don’t feel anything. Because… Hmmm… It seems like my… I’m trying to take in what You’ve said. Because some of what You’ve said seems contrary to what I’ve come to understand, and what I’ve read in certain materials that have come my way. But I do feel I am grounded in living upon this earth, and seeing the God-potential within each human being—to the best of my abilities. Beneath the surface of good and evil, of duality, is God’s will, and it’s always there. You can never be separated from it. It’s what sustains us.
(The mercy-lag of justice)
MICHAEL: But you can be separated—for a while, due to what We call the mercy-lag of justice. There have been living beings of high estate and intelligence who went astray. Consider Lucifer, the one-time sovereign of your Local System of over six hundred inhabited worlds, a being who got His name for the brilliance of His intellect, a Primary Lanonandek Son given this position of extraordinary responsibility and authority. At some point, out of His own creative abilities, He began to conceive of a reality that ultimately denied even the existence of God the Father, and considered Myself and the other Creator Sons of the Local Universes as some kind of petty tyrants. He declared that all subordinate beings were free in a way of no responsibility whatsoever to God’s will. Often He cited as proof of God’s non-existence and We Creator Sons’ impotence, the fact He was not instantaneously annihilated. As your Urantia book informs you, several dozen planetary administrations, including that of Urantia, joined in His rebellion. This rebellion was allowed to go on for a number of years until every single being caught up in it had time to make their choice as to which side they were on. At the end of that time He was summarily shorn of all His powers and put away.
That was about two hundred thousand years ago, and even though He was offered this mercy-lag of justice, He refused in any way to acknowledge a greater authority, and mercy, and justice, and was only recently annihilated. He no longer exists. So think about your statement that no one deviates from God’s will, for indeed this is an ultimate possibility.
This is what Mother Spirit referred to last week when She said, eternal life is forced upon no one. But it does have its requirements. You have to choose to be in accord with God’s will, which is reality, which is continuing life, evolving life, growing life. For if you totally identify with what is contrary to God’s will--which is your ability to do--you are simply taking yourself out of reality. You’ve identified with what is only temporal. So you can choose to cease to exist. And this is the ultimate proof and demonstration of free will.
So think about these things, My son. I know deep in your heart you certainly will.
Student: All I know is that without God I am nothing, and with Him I am everything—whoever God is. I know I’m limited in my understanding of the scope, the immensity of His being, but I am a part of Him. And my intention is to live as You see me—to the best of my ability.
MICHAEL: As Mother Spirit encouraged you last week, keep going. Keep exercising this innate curiosity you have about the true reality of things, of God’s ways. Since time immemorial people have wondered how God could let evil exist, yet the answer is possible to understand, and seeking it leads you to Him. But you do not achieve God, and a thorough understanding of His will, overnight.
Student: Yes, I do understand that. Thank You.
MICHAEL: You are welcome. You see how being open-minded can lead to real quandaries, (much laughter) but that only fuels your determination to stay with the game, and keep seeking Him. You can always find My peace deep within yourself.
So good evening, My stalwart sons. I’ve enjoyed another evening visiting with you. I’ll definitely relay your affection to Welmek. Be in My peace.
END