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Dear Michael and Mother Spirit,    As always--Welcome!--welcome indeed.  Since our wonderful Urantia Book tells us a lot about our human reality from the outside-in, in an objective way, we do appreciate and thank you for your portraying these same truths from the inside-out, as we experience them.  In doing so you help reassure us of the reality of our inner selves, our subjective selves, for perhaps this is even more needed in our particular empirical-scientifically oriented culture that treasures objectivity so greatly.  While that means of observation, analysis, and proof has gotten us into outer space, and replacing living organs in living bodies, it also has lead to a shared illusion that there is some ultimate dividing line between inner and outer human reality, and, at it’s worst, totally negating and devaluing something that’s “only subjective.”  In any case we thank you for your reassurance that this inner reality of ours is, or at least can become, for each one of us, a necessary counterpoise to the whole universe out there; that achieving a living, open-minded balance between inner and outer, between “self” and “other” is a worthy goal.  So thank you for your help.  Amen.

MICHAEL:  Good evening, my faithful sons, this is Michael.  As J just mentioned, tonight I would like very much to get deeper into what your introduction suggested, and what I did discuss on a Lightline conference call last Thursday.

(Ones entire personhood)

When considering the entire personhood, the totality of an individual human being as a living, dynamic system, the question becomes: where do we start?  So many different schools of religion, or philosophy, or psychology, say you are this or you are that, but they don’t particularly define what part of you they are addressing.  We’ve given many lessons on what a complex being you are compared to, shall we say, a seraphim who doesn’t have to contend with a physical body.  Yet while a seraphim does not have your continuity of a living, vulnerable material body to deal with, neither does she have the same appreciation for it that you can acquire.  So let’s start by considering “you” as the being you experience consciously right now; subjectively, the totality of your conscious experience in an eternal now.  This is what Mother Spirit and I mean by the “you” of experience, what you have experienced directly or even vicariously in your life.

Obviously this “you” exists within a broader field of your consciousness, and you are sometimes self-aware, and sometimes not.  When you are self-aware within your consciousness, let’s call this your ego although, again, almost every school of psychology has a slightly different definition.  Let’s just say your ego is who you know yourself to be moment to moment, including all you feel you have been.  This is not your consciousness itself because you can be totally consciousness of something or someone else and enjoy that other great mode of awareness--self-forgetfulness.  You don’t disappear in terms of being an experiential being--you are still experiencing--sometimes even more when you’re not, as you say, standing in your own light.

Your Urantia book makes a great distinction between your ego and your personality, and we’ve agreed with that Oriental philosophy’s expression that the personality is like an eye that sees but cannot see itself.  More specifically, your unchanging personality is like a living point of departure into ever changing time and space.  In this sense your ego is a kind of self-constructed mirror you hold up to get some conscious awareness of being who you are.  It’s not your fundamental, God-created reality--your personality--because it is self-created, created, if you will, by a very young, immature, and imperfect being.  Your ego as such is a psychological structure of self-awareness that, hopefully, grows and modulates towards wholeness throughout your life.

There are some psychologies and religious viewpoints that see the ego as nothing but negative, something to be gotten rid of.  But unless you are living totally by yourself off in the woods somewhere, you might fail to realize the ego is also a social construct as well.  You learned it as a tiny child from your parents--how they saw themselves, and how they related to themselves.  Then when you got out with your playmates, you found a necessity to project yourself, to present yourself to others as who you were, both for yourself and them.  I’m sure you can all think back to kindergarten and first grade and remember those whom you felt were pretentious, those kids who thought they were far above everyone else.  On the other extreme were those poor, unfortunate, highly sensitive youngsters who hung out in the corners of the room and were too shy to come out and present themselves much at all.

And so to get by day to day, just to walk down a city sidewalk, you have this necessity to be there, to present something for others.  Yet it’s also good for you to keep in mind this ego you have, this sense of yourself, is highly provisional and, also hopefully, varies enormously from what you call ego-mania, someone whose sense of themselves fills their consciousness to where they are totally self-centered and selfish with themselves.  On the other extreme there are individuals who have so little sense of themselves they have to be institutionalized for their own good.

It takes a strong, secure ego that is able then to forget itself in its work, in its associations with other people.  You’re most familiar with this in the ability to really listen to another, rather than being wholly concerned with what you are going to say next.  Self-secure, you can let yourself go and listen completely, self confident enough that you’ll be able to respond spontaneously to what you’ve just heard.  Then a lively, wonderfully creative conversation can come about.  You’ll actually be relating and engaging with someone, not just expressing yourself at someone.  

So this is you in your consciousness, the you that comes into being when you wake up from sleep.  But what comprises this consciousness?  Obviously it depends, at least in part, upon your human body and its physically-based mentality, what your Urantia book calls material mind, and what you generally think of in scientific terms.  It’s what can be measured with your delicate instruments right down to the little millionths of a volt jumping between brain cells.  This is the purely material mind, the animal mind of even the highest primates.

(Being super-minded with creative evaluation))

Yet your Urantia book notes that all normal human beings are super-minded.  This is because your personality, your essence, this unique reality that is who you are and no one else, this persisting God-creation, is endowed with spirit.  For spirit is not bound by strictly material, cause-and-effect reality.  Spirit is relatively creative.  It’s how God, who is the essence of personality and the creator of yours, shares His creative power of spirit with you.  Your personal spirit is literally this creativity within and part of your consciousness.  It’s why a human being is not necessarily bound, as is animal, simply to what came the moment before.  Your spiritual creativity is the essential basis for your freedom from mere circumstance and material-mind habits and conditioning.

Tonight, above all, I would like you to get a sense of how your spiritual creativity is always functioning as part of your whole field of consciousness.  The easiest way to get a feeling for this is through that distinction we offer of human reality being experienced as, roughly, physical facts, mental meanings and relationships, and then too spiritual values--something no animal can have.  True enough, highly intelligent animals can amaze you with the amount of material they can associate.  People have trained the great apes and chimpanzees to understand hundreds of sound and various arm and body signals.  But when you put two such well trained primates together, alone by themselves, they don’t start carrying on a conversation.  Their behavior is still purely reactive to what their instincts, environment, and their trainers are initiating.  So you see the difference from human behavior here, how no animal is able to creatively evaluate what it’s doing.  Even on the most subtle level it’s still reaction, while a human being can evaluate a proposed action even before it’s attempted.

In this sense, my children, you are constantly evaluating your human reality with the power of your spirit.  This is the personal spiritual component within your consciousness, everything from the time you swing your legs out of bed in the morning and sit there for a moment to e-valuate--(Michael chuckles)--how you feel.  It’s evaluating how good your breakfast tastes, how your car is operating, how your partner or your friends are behaving.  This is your living spirit.  This is the way you are constantly and minutely evaluating everything happening to you.  So think about this for a minute, how you are constantly creating this evaluating part of your consciousness, even with what I’m saying this moment--or as you read this later.  This is more than a matter of material mind, of simply relating what I’m saying with everything else you’ve known.  Evaluation is not just this pure mental association; it’s living, creative spirit.  This is your inner world, and in this inner world, you are not alone.

A personal being’s type of mentality is of a very specific nature according to what order of being they are.  As a human being you have Mother Spirit’s Mind/Spirit Adjutant kind of mentality in this first phase of your eternal life.  This mind of yours, my children, includes intuition--direct perception, your ability to amass knowledge and correlate it in understanding, the courage to seek out and handle new situations, your yearning for companionship and the counsel you can get and give to and from each other, worship--your thankfulness for being alive, and then wisdom--your ability to bring all your past experience to bear on the present moment.  These abilities are innately yours as a human being, but they are also augmented every moment by Mother Spirit herself.  Mother Spirit’s consciousness is literately part of your consciousness, as is my Spirit of Truth.

Think of my spirit as your orientation towards truth, towards wholeness, towards completeness, for this is how truth differs from mere knowledge, or understanding, or even experiential, earned wisdom.  Truth pertains to the encompassing, ever transcendent total, always.  My Spirit of Truth is this orientation as well as an augmentation, a help, a boost, a nudge towards open-mindedness, towards an eternal adventure of discovery of more truth.  So you keep discovering greater, broader truths of other dimensions, other orders of personal beings, forever, as you cross the universe and Havona to approach God himself.  Then there is your Father Fragment, the presence of God in your mind as another kind and way of being, spiritualizing your thoughts, spiritualizing your perceptions and understanding.

We even tease you with the idea your consciousness might seem pretty crowded with all of us in here with you.   But it’s only teasing; we are pure spirit and spirit is never intrusive.  You are quite capable of ignoring us.  Yet as you grow older, as you amass greater and greater volumes of life experience, there’s a partnership with your Father Fragment to preserve this indispensable and irreplaceable experience of yours.  This partnership, this sharing of unique essences creates that new cosmic reality we call your soul.  And this soul-content, this soulfulness is, again, not only a record of your life you are earning.  It is very much a part of your living, day to day reality, giving its own value and meaning to your consciousness.  It’s a large part of what you call character.

So you see, my children, your total personhood as a living being is all of this.  It’s very critical that you realize that, from the viewpoint of your conscious self as you’re sitting here listening to me or reading these words later, the attitude we suggest you have to your total self is one of humility.  Because your total self is always transcendent, always greater than your momentary, ever changing consciousness, let alone your ego awareness that comes and goes.

(Your surrounding field of consciousness)

You are literally surrounding you, coloring everything.  You move in a bubble of you.  This bubble is not only your five senses, your sight and hearing and so forth, it’s also your memories, it’s your soul, and it’s your constant spiritual evaluation.  All this is in your field of consciousness, and this consciousness is unique to you.  No other personal being has exactly this same makeup.  All these parts are shared in kind, but the experience is unique to each one of you, even if you are identical twins with nearly identical DNA.  From the moment you are born you will start to have a different experience.

This is the blessing of humility, my children, that you can feel confident and secure with your inner reality because it contains these greater spiritual realities I’ve just mentioned.  You can, if still imperfectly, counterbalance all of that out there, and all of those out there, with how it and they are capable of influencing you.  This is that inner strength that gives you the freedom and the ability to decide, to choose, to develop your potential free will, for without this inner reality you would be little more than an animal, just purely reacting to what circumstances and past experience cause.

I go into this in such detail tonight to give you a feeling of all that you are.  The fact is, your creative evaluation is not only incessant but necessary for you to move around alone, let alone exist in your extremely complex, highly mechanical society.  In terms of something highly complex, consider what it takes to maneuver your car at high speed through heavy traffic when just the slightest impairment of your mental agility and spiritual evaluation of the use of such speed can bring disastrous results so quickly.

When you consider your inner reality alone, say in deciding what to do with your free time, the greatest contributing factor to your free will is how large is your habitual, unconscious and unexamined conditioning.  How were you raised--all those thousands of hours with your parents and how they related to themselves and to each other, that imprinted upon you.  Then, of course, in ever widening circles, there were your playmates, your neighborhood, your city or town, the whole culture in which you were raised.  Think of all the different hundreds of thousands of little mini-cultures all over the world.  This is what so greatly determines everyone’s choices going forward, day by day.

Sad to state, there are no major cultures yet on earth that universally inform their children that they have this creativity I talked about tonight, and that their sense of themselves, that they picked up from their folks and their society, is just their own construct and highly provisional, however necessary.  So you have so many folks living their entire lives with almost no sense of freedom whatsoever.  They feel they are just being driven along, pushed this way and that, blown about by circumstances, ignorant of the fact that their unexamined inner conditioning is such a large part of their lives.

Which brings us to the necessity for some kind of inner reflection or meditation in order to break with ones purely reactionary ways--living by way of past events--in an eternal, open-ended now.  Yet how strange this must seem to one who is lost in outward things.  What is this strange activity of seemingly doing nothing, of just being still, in order to let ones conditioning, ones busyness, ones habitual thinking, open up a bit and let some cracks appear in ones drive, ones desperate clinging to oneself, ones self-centeredness and spiritual selfishness--when that very opening is considered to be weakness and vulnerability?  Can such a person see that there must be, and is, some way to be still to let something new, yet intrinsically their own, emerge, if only by feeling their breath moment by moment?  Can they discover a newfound respect and humility toward a living body they’ve neglected and discounted for a self-created and over-inflated ego?  Could they begin to feel then their genuine creativity, their inner reality, and how they are forming--literally transforming--all that comes to them?

In some of your cultures you call this prayer.  But here again it becomes a matter of: what are you praying for?  What kind of help do you feel you need? We suggest and invite you to pray for guidance, pray for open-mindedness, pray for more awareness of and responsibility for your creativity.  You may have some choice then of becoming more a creature of free will dignity.  For it is from a sense of super-abundance, an awareness of being creative, my children, that you can then be of the most service--both to yourselves and to others.  It takes a strong ego, enlightened by reflection, to let itself go.  It takes an inner confidence for you to forget about yourself and not be anxious, but open your mind and really listen to what others are saying.  Trust you can spontaneously respond, rather than clinging so desperately to yourself.  It takes practice, but you can really open yourself to others that you truly may have more of them in your soul.

And so we come full circle.  We come to a way in which this personality that you are can choose to orient you to all that you are, with humility, and confidence, and trust, and faith, willingly taking your next step into the adventure of life.  If you have any comments or questions, my sons, go ahead.

Student:  Father Michael, some of that I can understand, and some I need to read over again.  Thank you for your love and support and all the guidance you give us anyway.

(Evaluation, choices, and free will)

MICHAEL:  You’re very welcome, my son.  Sometimes Mother Spirit and I do go into such detail because we know you can study the transcript later.  Also we’re fully aware that about every sentence I spoke could be blown up into several pages of agreement, or refutation, according to what school of philosophy or psychology or religion interpreted my words.  But mainly I wanted to give you a sense of how you are incessantly using your spirit to feel yourself and navigate through your life day by day with all that you do.  When we’ve said that spirit is related to value, still that didn’t always register with so many folks.  What does that mean?  What exactly is value in this context?  It means you are evaluating your life.  And you need to.  These are your constant choices that lead to your sense of free will, or lack of it.  It’s in this meaning that you surround yourself with your own feeling-evaluations of reality, and a failure to realize their true origin can lead to projecting them outward onto the situation itself, or other folks.

Look around a familiar room and wonder: what if you brought in a total stranger from a different culture and the other side of the earth; how would they see it?  What would they experience inside?  This is that inner reality that so many folks dismiss as, well, that’s just subjectivity; the room is the same.  Yet that “mere subjectivity” contains everyone’s soul and their experiences giving meaning and value to their lives.  And while the room has its own independent reality, it’s more or less different for everyone in it.  That’s human reality, all you will ever know.  So yes, study the transcripts, my son.  I’ll always be open to any questions that may arise.

Student:  When you say spirit, is that the Father Fragment, or is it…what?

MICHAEL:  Yes, it’s partly your Father Fragment, as well as my Spirit of Truth and Mother Spirit’s Mind/Spirit Adjutants of intuition, courage, understanding, and so forth.  But mainly, tonight, I wanted to point up your own personal spirit’s power to create a large preponderance of your particularly human, super-material-minded consciousness.  Creation is of the realm of spirit--in God’s case, the cosmos and all the personal beings within it; in your case, your personality, endowed with creative spirit as a gift of His.  Your ability to create alternatives--unique to your life--is the basis for your freedom, your ability to choose.  No matter how subtle you think their abilities, and they are amazing, an animal is still just a part of its surroundings if you include its bodily hungers and instincts and learned responses.  They are purely reactive with no true personality and initiative.  When there is no demand upon them they simply rest and sleep.  A human being is of a different order of creature--that is, a deliberately created being--because of your unique, true personality, endowed with spirit as an intrinsic part of it.  For while personality and spirit are not interchangeable terms referring to identical realities, all spirit comes from, and is, an intrinsic part of personal beings.  There is no impersonal spirit abroad in the universe coming from impersonal reality--pure energy and material.

Student:  I think I’ve been stuck with a different meaning of spirit so long that I have to give it up to understand something else.

MICHAEL:  Yes.  What we’re calling spiritual creativity is what most psychologies and so many people consider to be just a function of material mind--physical brain activity.  In other words, when the human brain reached a certain size in evolution, then creativity came about purely spontaneously.  But we’re saying it’s something different.  No matter the size or subtlety of the brain’s cellular interactions, they are still bound by cause and effect, and the consequent consciousness would still not be able to initiate something truly super-material, a unique human personality and its creative spirit.  Yet this is how Mother Spirit and I have been defining the term.  Creativity, a result of personal spirit activity, is something new emerging in time and space, not bound by antecedent causality.  Yet causality is what your empirical science limits itself to considering because spirit cannot be demonstrated.

It’s your personality and your spirit, my son, that is evaluating what I’m saying right now.  You are co-creating your reality as you’re sitting here.  If you look in your Urantia book under the chapter titled Personality Survival, this co-creativity is given as one of the intrinsic aspects of personality.  Yet neither can this personality of yours, that makes you a human being, be proven either.

Student:  Thank you, Father Michael, that’s beginning to make a lot of sense.  But where does this spirit come from in the first place?--from you, or Mother Spirit, or God?

(Putting an end to war and crime)

MICHAEL:  Yes, initially from God, who is absolute and infinite spirit; and who created your personality with its own intrinsic creative spirit.  Mother Spirit and I, and so many other teachers being transmitted through other T/Rs, have often emphasized how you can get in touch with the extra-personal spiritual presences in your mind, like your Father Fragment, through prayer and stillness.  Tonight I wanted to remind you--(Michael laughs)--what amazing creatures you are, and what powers of creativity you are using all the time, if so often unnoticed.  In social terms, it will only be when more people can have this sense of their own creativity--and take responsibility for it--that they will choose to go to greater pains to avoid doing such terrible things to each other.  Most folks truly want to put an end to war and crime, but it’s--how--do you do this?  How can you avoid the cynical preying of one person, or one group of people, upon another?  How can you enlighten those persons who have so little inner self-worth there is no limit to their appetite for more power, which can never be satisfied outwardly?  A study of mass-murders and dictators shows what pathetic, hollow individuals these people were; but were all the more dangerous for that.

But to be aware of what constitutes the full personhood of a human being, and then to grant that totality to every other person on earth…  This is what we look forward to, for each of you and, eventually, all of you.  It’s what you have to go towards.   Meanwhile, be in my peace.

Next student:  It’s kind of an awesome responsibility, the spirit-power given to human beings.

MICHAEL:  Yes, it’s definitely there to perceive and accept.  The inability or refusal to do so does lead to warfare and criminality on so many different levels.

Student:  We seem to glorify suffering so much.  How can we release our creativity so we’re not bound by this notion of an ego, as you presented it?  In some philosophies and psychologies it’s just a set of belief systems that we identify with, so much so we neglect what you say is the totality of who we are.  I have a hard time using the term ego because it has so many negative connotations to it.  Yet I don’t think it’s independent from who we are.  It’s not a self-generated something we pull out of space.  It’s something we create from our experiences.  It’s like an onion, and when we pull away the layers of what we identify with, then we end up with our pure essence.  But then what?--(student laughs)

But about creativity: sometimes I feel so limited by what I believe in--the constraints of society.  But if I allow myself to be still, then those constraints are    loosened and fresh ideas can happen.  Like for us right now: are we creating this room and these chairs, and so forth?  And the next moment, like you’ve taught us, is brand new.  But how do we experience it?--through our past identifications?  Or do we experience it with fresh and open eyes and minds?  I think that’s part of what you’re trying to explore with us.

(How conditioning both limits and gives meaning)

MICHAEL:  Yes, you’ve caught the essence of it.  That’s exactly it, especially when you consider how your beliefs and conditioning limit your creativity.  At the same time--ironically--these also give each moment its meaning.  So it’s good to have a feeling of personal evolution, that your ego, your sense of yourself, can evolve and become more free and spontaneous.  It has to be there to serve its social function, but you can identify inwardly more and more with your spirit and soul--the living and growing encompassing of meaning and value which surrounds you.

Student:  Part of Buddhist philosophy of self-liberation is to not react by holding onto your life by labeling it with concepts that only create additional karma, but just hold on to freshness.  When I was working yesterday I realized that each little twig I cut, I’d never cut before.  Each breath I take is also like that.  And since each experience is new, why cloud it over with a preoccupation with I want to do later, or what I did five minutes ago?  Why not just enjoy the experience of what’s right here and now without worrying about my identity?

MICHAEL:  Well, my son, it is possible to grow your ability to do both, so that considerations of yesterday or tomorrow do not interrupt your sense of now.  We once referred to this as the two-hundred-percent-ness of life--an amazing thing to experience.  You have not only the continuity of life--past, present, and future--that your science concerns itself with--for you do have to think about tomorrow and provide for it, and you do have to reflect on yesterday in order to learn from it; but it’s being able to simultaneously perceive that constant creativity of God’s whereby reality is--not--repeating itself.  It’s both.  There is the whole continuity of Natural Law--which is boundless to a finite creature, and yet each moment also contains that which never happened before in all its glorious concreteness and particularity.  What an awesome sense of appreciation and worship these two facets of God’s reality can give you.

Student:  Yes.  In my head I’ve thought that I will never be human again--so appreciate that!--I mean this one lifetime, that kind of thing.  And also, things do happen, like my granddaughter who’s now three years old.  That happened.  Or I may decide not to go to work tomorrow, even though that’s on my schedule.  Or I may write all night.  Nothing’s written in stone.  That, I think, is where we negate the open awareness of other possibilities.  I know that when I allow myself to be still I can increase my intention to be open to a greater dimension of what it is to be human.  It’s not allowing fear to distract or inhibit the fruition of that creativity.

MICHAEL:  We call this feeling your way along.  Tonight I tried to point up that often felt but only seeming-paradox that it takes a strong and confident inner self to let yourself go.  It’s only by having faith in your own abilities to spontaneously respond that enables you to let go of your own thoughts and really listen.  You’ve noticed in yourself, my son, how in your stillness what can emerge is a sense of soul that is very distinct from your ego.  This is the part that your Thought Adjuster plays in your meditation.  Your Thought Adjuster, the co-author of your soul, can give you this spiritual sense of your life.  The ongoing, truly growing evolution of your life can emerge into consciousness.  Something transcendent in your life did get you to here.  Those times in your life of which you are the most regretful are likely those times when your spiritual creativity was thwarted, or set aside, or ignored, or just not discovered yet.  You might feel you’ve wasted part of your life, and so tonight I tried to point out that personal creativity that has always been with you and has made you what you are today.  That’s your spirit and soul.   That’s also what your Thought Adjuster, the presence of God, has been doing.  You can feel the completeness of it in your stillness.

Student:  Where I have for myself in my own evolution, my own awareness…  Where I have conflict is where I perceive my soul, or my creativity, wanting to, say, write more, or take time to do other things; but my responsibility to earn a living, or to work--that I’ve been programmed to do since I was born--kind-of overrides that desire to be creative, or just be open to other things.  I do enjoy my work, but in our last meeting when D was here, I was told to follow that impulse more.

But there is that conflict I feel, and I don’t want to feel I’m letting myself down and not honoring my soul’s desire, my true intention.  I don’t want my true intention to be overridden by this societal imposition that I’ve been brought up in.

MICHAEL:  And yet, my son, that societal imposition--as you see it--is your responsibility to yourself and others.  I sure you also hope that those others you run into throughout the day have some sense of that responsibility, of taking care of themselves.  One of the best things you can do for those around you is to take care of yourself.  I don’t think there is any way out of this conflict except to see it from our point of view--Mother Spirit’s and mine--that this is the way you are striving to keep yourself honest.

(The price you pay for inner freedom)

This conflict, this going back and forth in weighing one thing against another, is how a living human being keeps aware of all these different determinisms and possibilities.  The stress is the price you are paying to keep open-minded.  If at heart you don’t want to fool yourself, and you do want to keep your options open and be aware of them, you pay a price for that too.  But the price you pay is akin to the stretch we talked about once of having one foot on the solid dock of the real and your other foot out in a bobbing boat of the ideal: it’s good for you.  It’s necessary in order to be both open and responsible.

Student:  Right: I know that.  I see the wisdom of going into stillness with all this so I don’t feel I’m being less than I am.  The thing is, being gentle with myself, about it.  I know I’m not going to discard all my responsibilities just to follow what I perceive as my, you know, creative leanings.  Within my circumstances, my granddaughter and so forth, is the opportunity to evolve and grow, and be of benefit to others.  So I don’t want to cut myself off from that either.

I think one of the things you or Mother Spirit closed one of your lessons with was: how does God see me?  And the other thing that came up this morning was: if I wasn’t doing the kind of work I’m doing now, what would I do?  And how would I like my life to be?  It’s good to think those kinds of questions.  It’s an exploration of possibilities.  If anything happens: it happens.  I just want to experience the fullness of who I am--my potential.  I don’t want to lie on my deathbed thinking I missed it all.

MICHAEL, laughing:  Well, that’s a good orientation.  My Spirit of Truth is working in you.  At times you might feel it’s nagging you, but its purpose is to keep you open to the endless adventure before you.  As we mentioned once, folks do find ways of thwarting this adventure.  They do find ways of stunting their soul growth by getting stuck in ruts or rabbit-paths of the same-old, same-old thing.  It takes enormous nerve, then, great inner courage to break out of that and try some fearsome new thing.

Your Urantia book has that great statement that modern folks don’t lack ideas so much as they lack ideals.  Yet ideals can be very uncomfortable.  They can be demanding, or enticing and intriguing--all those good if rather compelling kinds of motivation.  As the book also puts it: it’s not the purpose of your guardian angel to comfort you and smooth your ruffled feathers and make everything  easy.  On the contrary, she might be inclined to make things difficult to bring about more soul-growth.  So it’s good to have a great sense of irony about the whole process.  Definitely our Father has a sense of humor, or we’d all be lost.  (And everyone laughs)

(Welcoming the adventure)

I think I’ll close on that note.  It’s interesting how, with a little reflection, a little standing back, you see how it is you need to go through these uncomfortable periods of questioning everything.  If you can be still you can let that spiritual reassurance, that deep sense of the continuity of your life, emerge again.  It’s the real sense of your soul--co-authored by a presence of God--reminding you that you still are!--and something far beyond you got you to here.  When you are trapped in a cynical, disgruntled notion that nothing in life is free, your soul reminds you that your life itself is a free gift, stretching out into eternity.  You might as well welcome the adventure, because here it comes; and it is your home.  It was made for you, and you were deliberately made for it.

Good evening, my loyal sons.  It’s been fun.  (Good evening, Father)  Be in my peace.