Mother, we thank you for your lesson on how, if we face our fears and our mistakes and all the things that abrade our souls, if we have the courage and the nerve to face these in full consciousness and look at them once again in a more mature, soulful completeness, we do re-discover the single, unbroken cord that is literally who and what we are.  And so we are once again consciously re-invigorated and reassured by this life-force we have always been.

Thank you for your lessons.  We look forward to innumerable others and are happy to share them with whomever is interested.  Thank you, dear parents.  Amen.

MICHAEL:  Good evening, my loyal sons.  This is Michael.  Yes indeed, here we are again!--and in a way, if you truly have faith, if you credit what you can feel and know deep down inside, you can very validly believe that: here we will always be.  In this special sense of just between you and me--we’re not going anywhere.  We’re there.  This is what Mother Spirit tried to convey, that each of us, you and I, we’re very much alike in the fact we’re both sitting in the middle of our own, yet shared universe, and all Mother Spirit and I can do is to introduce parts of it--tease you into entertaining notions, and ideas, and concepts.  So see if you can find some resonance within you, perhaps something that’s been--at least in potential--there all along.

(Creative spirit)

There is a special movement of creative spirit that is so hard to express in space and time terminology, of how potentials evolve into actuals and are in turn affected by them: i.e. the more you learn, and do--actualize, the greater your potential.  The eternal/present situation goes to God’s primal creation as well as to how time and space events will never, literally cannot, exhaust His creativity.  He is spirit, ultimate and absolute and infinite creativity.  It’s His potential that you, as a discrete human being, experience one successive moment after another.  If you will, the unlimited potential of His awaits each moment of your life to be actual, as you.  From this standpoint, this way of looking at things, your life is that continuity; you are that continuing realization for it’s your God-created personality that literally realizes reality for you.  As you are a unique creation of God’s, so this whole universe of yours, my children, is somewhat unique to you.

(Michael’s New Year’s message--appreciation)

Looking at primitive human history from this angle, there are a lot of somewhat unique personal beings running around intrinsically--as all animals are--ferocious, just to survive.  Think of a mother rabbit facing off and even attacking a fox that is after her kits.  Even fish are territorial.  By the time you get up to human beings that ferocity and territoriality has always been, and still is, a cause for almost endless warfare and strife.  See if you can appreciate the evolution of civilization.  It’s how all these unique personalities, running around inter-relating, had to slowly find ways of being civil with each other.  That is the basis of civilization, this--hopefully--increasing civility.  As you look around the world today, you still have a ways to go to perfect this.

By having an appreciation for the uniqueness of each individual--that fundamental reality, you can get an enhanced appreciation for all the stages that people have had come through to get to where they are now.  Your modern explorers have captured in media some of the still existing primitive tribes on earth.  If you’ve watched some of these shows on National Geographic or so forth, you’ve noticed that when the explorers with their camera crews approached some of these final holdouts, the first thing they saw was the tips of the natives’ spears, and fully-drawn arrows, pointing at them, not only with a ferocious aggressiveness but also with sheer terror at these strange alien beings with all their fantastic technology, coming into their territory.

So consider all these stages from the most primitive all the way up to the present day and see if you can appreciate and marvel at the enormous civility that has been evolved just to enable you to live your fantastically complex lives.  Think of all the intricate inter-relationships in your modern societies.  There are those of you who have never planted a seed, never watched a carrot come out of the ground, or ever butchered an animal.  At the same time, how many farmers have made their own tractors, right down to the spark plugs?  How many of you have worked on the roads that are tying you all together, or strung the telephone lines, or now--fiber optic cables?

This is one essence of appreciation, just looking around and marveling at this enormous, world-wide, complex interaction.  Think too of the specialization.  It wasn’t too many centuries ago where wealthy individuals who could read and write and have a library of even two hundred books--maybe one tenth of one percent of the population then--were considered to be well-rounded in their studies.  Can you feel some sense of acceleration here?  A few decades ago you had an expression--future shock, where, with various social revolutions taking place, there were those folks who quite honestly said, “Slow down!--I’m not ready for this yet!”  Yet there’s another apropos saying: the cat’s out of the bag.  No matter how nostalgically you may want to bring back some previous, less complex time, you can’t.  There’s a fundamental difference between such nostalgia that simply blurs over in pure sentimentality some previous time, and the fullness and completeness of true soulful reminiscence.  One small example: how many of you want to go back a century to the dentistry of that time?

(Inexorable evolution)

So yes, my children, we hope you can get the feeling for what we call the inexorable evolution of a planet, because some of this is, from the human standpoint, truly scary stuff.  Think of how not long ago the inventions of high explosives and machine guns were thought to, hopefully, put an end to warfare.  War would be so terrible the human race would be horrified with what carnage could be wrought, and all would sue each other for peace.  And now you can bring the surface of the sun onto the earth.

Now with the modern media you have tying everyone together, can you feel a not-so-subtle pressure to become ever more civilized on the fundamental level of individuals--i.e.--you?  Can you get an appreciation of the fact you still have somewhat isolated major cultures on the planet, now being squeezed by modern media into a smaller world where ever increasing intimate relationships are unavoidable?

And so you may wonder: is this in the Big Plan?  Was It All set up this way?  Was this evolving need for world wide civilization always potential?  Yes.

From the time our children the Life Carriers arrived on the planet and, with Mother Spirit’s and the Super Universe’s agents, created the first living cells, all this potential was there for this particular planet.  Predating this event: your Urantia book talks about the evolution of a whole Local Universe and how we are all learning, Mother Spirit and myself, along with our Life Carrier Sons.  They, on the Constellation level, compare notes in a kind of medium we can’t begin to describe to you, of what they’ve all learned on neigh onto four million evolutionary planets so far.  So your world, in spite of its checkered history, was a recipient of all our Local Universe evolution too.  As on the Cosmos level, as on the Local Universe level, there is a kind of perfection-pressure, let’s call it, which drives the evolution on every planet as well towards evermore civil, evermore connected, worldwide civilization, eventually the status of Light and Life.

(Universal evolution)

This universal evolution is truly beyond the scope of any one group, any one nation state, or any one religion.  For all that collective authority, whether social or political or religious, there are still those individuals, those living, breathing men and women who are the leaders of those societies, economic systems, and religions.  Who’s in charge of it all? Think about that.  Think about how this seemingly extra-human pressure towards social, political, economic and religious evolution brings about an equally inexorable need for more individual freedom, responsibility, realization and expression.

This is that special, evolutionary movement of spiritual creativity from an overall view of the cosmos.  It actualizes the potential of all individuals.  On Urantia it manifests through living people and again, as your Urantia book reminds you, every child born must recapitulate this whole evolution.  You have that delightful story about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn where the boys weren’t at all certain they wanted to be “sivilized” yet.  Every child has to be tamed.  Thank goodness your little three-year-old, in the midst of one of his or her tantrums, doesn’t have the power to annihilate you.  No parents would survive.

This is incidentally why Mother Spirit and I always--even when I lived among you as Jesus--this is why we self-limit ourselves to working with and through individuals to try to bring about all the good works we see in prospect for your world.  We do not violate the basic spiritual laws which God has established for the whole time/space realms, and that is to create individuals--unique personalities--unique personal beings who can have a hand, first in their own evolution and then, in combination, the evolution of the whole--the whole family, the whole town or city, the whole nation, the whole planet, the whole Local Universe.

(The Big Plan)    

Yes, this is the Big Plan, and yes it is inexorable--unstoppable.  It will happen in the whole because God’s will always obtains in the whole.  It is nevertheless dependent upon each individual personal being doing his or her best.  The potential lies within living personal beings and the actuality coming down moment by moment is their activity.  God has set the whole thing in motion initially, but then He has shared His creative power out to truly relatively autonomous personal beings--all His children.  This is one more example of how He is not separate from us but is living within and riding along in these adventures, of each of ours, with us.  

So let yourselves stretch, my dear ones.  Try to be aware of both the forest and the trees, the community and the individuals.  See the shared reality of being human in everyone and see in each pair of eyes you meet another unique soul of experience, that wealth of difference you have to offer each other: if you will, infinity piled upon infinity.  It’s all in The Plan.  God is that infinite potential; you are the actuality.  As Mother Spirit said, you are the living cord tying your kind of unique universe together.  This is the fun of it all, and that deep insight into the playfulness of it all.  From the standpoint of pure potential, none of the creation had to be.  So we glory that it is.  Thank you, dear Father, for me.  And thank You for all of us, that we can have each other.

If you have any questions or comments this evening, you can make them actual too.

Student:  Father Michael, I have a couple of questions.  You and Mother have said many times that we don’t even keep our own hearts beating.  Is that literal or is that figurative?  Second, how can we get more people to come to these meetings?

(Keeping your own hearts beating)

MICHAEL, chuckling:  Well, I’ll take them one at a time, my son.  It is quite literally true you are not keeping your own heart beating.  Just feel it.  (long pause)  From the standpoint of your personality--the most fundamental essence of who and what you are, you are given a living body insofar as you transcend this body.  When this body returns to dust you will be reborn into a wholly different kind of world with a wholly different kind of plant and animal life, and celestial beings that we tease you, you will be encountering.  You will once again have a very distinct, but highly advanced body and perceptions with which to contact and experience impersonal reality--material and energy--as well continuing, as now, to experience other spiritual beings with your own spirit, only much more directly.

Your body is a gift, and one that we are truly sorrowful to see so many folks misusing and disrespecting.  Within your more developed countries so much of your disease and suffering, and your failure to develop further, is due to life-style choices that are within each individual’s free will to change.  We sorrow that you spend so much time arguing and posturing about this current health-care debate and fail to realize that unless you all, individually and collectively, simply get more healthy, right within your available choices, it is in part a misdirected effort.  No amount of after-the-fact care with however amazing technology and heroic efforts can make up for years of neglect and unhealthy indulgence in your knowingly bad habits, and your lack of good, available nutrition and exercise.

Rather, my son, we would have you expand your wonder that the heart beating in your chest is a pure gift of life from God, from Mother Spirit and me, and it is susceptible to your choices about health and well-being in which love and respect play a great part.  Love and respect this beating heart of yours, this gift of a body that is, for all extents and purposes, and in spite of your hundreds of thousands of books on human physiology in all your libraries, is still a living   infinity to each of you personally moment to moment.  Tune in to your heart center as often as it occurs to you, and pay some respect to this living, beating organ that ties you in to life itself.  This is not some figurative symbolism but an actual spiritual connection you can feel, through your heart, that can give your life more meaning and value.  It’s not the these word symbols pointing at an experience but the actual experience itself you have to go for, and know for yourself.  Pause now and tune in to your heart.  (long pause)

As for how you get more folks to come to these meetings, you have to do your best to share with others why you yourselves have been so loyally coming for so many years.  Open your hearts and let others feel what this means and has meant for you.  Isn’t it this experience what you want to share?  Isn’t it out of some generosity of spirit that you wish more folks could be here and know the deep joy we’ve known?

Student, laughing:  Yes.

MICHAEL, laughing along:  Then be not shy.  Be unafraid to stand naked in what you’ve experienced so soulfully, and let your wonder show.  If you want to think of it as extending the kingdom, that’s good.  But to begin, get down to the wonder and joy we’ve shared so abundantly.  That’s what really does it.

Student:  Yes, I can see that.  I have a habit of intellectualizing what goes on here instead of the feeling of it.  But thank you, Father Michael.

MICHAEL:  Remember the lesson I gave one time on how thought is only finely articulated feeling?  Your intellect is only a further development of that.  These ideas of yours are all the better expressed when they stay close to their feeling origins.  You can’t be too shy about expressing your feelings directly, but it does take thought and intellect too.  So be open and accepting of the response you’re receiving.  Real communication involves two, so listen well to their spiritual experiences too.  And be in that other feeling/reality I offer you: be in my peace.

Student:  Thank you, Father Michael.

Student:  Yes, Michael, thinking about our meetings here: people have come and gone simply because they’ve moved away.  Others have come once or twice and then that was it; it just didn’t seem to resonate with them.  They didn’t get the same feeling that C and I experience.  Maybe they have another place to go to, and so we have to honor that as well.

On a selfish level (student laughs) I do enjoy these more intimate meetings.  But I also like it when there is a full house of seven or eight people here.  There’s more variety of personal perspectives, and ideas.

About your lesson tonight on how each individual is unique, and how we can benefit in one another’s lives; I was listening to a program yesterday and the moderator was saying that while we may need to know all the bad news of the day, we should balance it with the good news too.  And so the program was about people sharing the good things that have happened to them.  There are a lot of grass-roots programs of people doing a lot of good things in this world that we don’t hear about because it’s not considered “news-worthy.”  One example was of a lady who started picking up fallen fruit from trees that was going to waste, and how that led, after a few years of giving this food to needy people, into them starting urban gardens on their own.

This instilled in me a hope that even though there are still wars going on in the world, there is something underneath all that--that some good is happening too, even if it doesn’t get reported.

MICHAEL:  Thank you, my son, I enjoyed that.  This is what Mother Spirit and I mean when we say that the spiritual glow of the world--the sacrifices and the helping, the fun and the joy that people share, so totally, enormously outshines the strife and contention.  This is a fact for us, a direct perception.

(News and entertainment)

It’s been the case ever since the first story-tellers, then as your media grew from hand-written to printed books, on to movies and television and so forth; what you call news has always had a large quotient of entertainment value attached to its appeal.  Modern electronic news, aside from providing needed information, runs into the psychological challenges of saturation and jaded-ness when different news companies compete against each other on the entertainment level, which in turn leads to further efforts of melodrama and sensationalism to satisfy the news-junkies and bad-news addicts.  It’s simply easier to, as you say, push peoples’ buttons of shock and horror when you concentrate on those events which produce irreversible damage, like personal injury or conflict, or major property loss by war or natural disaster.  The real drama of one’s own life is drowned out by this flood of melodrama if that is all you’re watching.   

This is what you’re pointing at, my son, an entertainment-value contest between irreversible loss like a car accident or someone’s house burning down, and the cynical or resigned attitude that the good things in life are all too fleeting and not--as you say--news worthy.  This viewpoint seems especially true to a person who is getting most of their opinions of life through the level of news you’ve mentioned.  The joy of life can seem so conditional and provisional while the sorrow and pain can seem so final.  This fatalism is further magnified by the person’s poor health brought on by such an attitude.  As a person looses their sensitivity and any inner life of their own, it takes ever rougher sandpaper--so to speak--to register on their jaded nerves.

This is why we invite our children to strive toward greater physical and mental health and sensitivity, spiritual liveliness and generosity, so they can begin to see what Mother Spirit and I see--the overwhelming true drama of human life: all the love, all the sharing, all the sacrifice, all these noble qualities by the hundreds that are derived from truth and beauty and goodness.

So thank you, my son, for bringing up this spiritual challenge to see the real goodness of life so often hidden behind the melodrama of the evening news.

Student:  There are a couple of newspapers and websites that just focus on positive things.  So there are some forces that do emphasize that.  I’d like to do more myself, but I can only live and be in the present moment, and be with who I am with--this moment, without getting caught up in grandiose desires to save the world and be recognized for that--you know.  

A few years ago I heard about an African tribe where they don’t punish people when they do something wrong.  Say if someone stole something from someone else, and they knew who it was, all the people would go up to the guilty party and stand in a circle around him, then one by one go up to him and tell him about all the good things they know about him--all the positive things he’s done.  And you know?--there’s never been a murder or a rape or anything really serious like that in this village.  So that’s one small, little antidote or positive feedback in this whole world, one other way of living.  We need to see what you talked about, the infinity of each person.

Every now and then I just stand under this oak tree where I work and look around, and listen to the sounds of nature, and feel the earth beneath my feet.  So last week I was doing this and started thinking about the earth spinning around, and I’m spinning with it--though I can’t actually feel that.  And it’s billions of years old, and the universe is even older; and the intelligence or wisdom that created all this also created me; and at that moment I had access to that wisdom that has been here all that time.  So why not access that?---what all the great teachers have been pointing at?  Why not let this divine intelligence be the ruler of my life?  It seems like history keeps repeating itself, so isn’t it time to stop that treadmill and let the intelligence that created all this take root and hold?  So anyway…  I didn’t mean to express so much tonight, but I guess I did, you know, trying to put things in perspective.

(A hallmark of wisdom)

MICHAEL:  Yes, my son.  It brings to mind that single sentence in your Urantia book we’ve mentioned several times before: a hallmark of wisdom is a sense of proportion.  For wisdom is more than mere knowledge, it’s what you’ve experienced for yourself and made your own by way of understanding and soul value.  Wisdom is what Mother Spirit herself augments by way of one of her Mind/Spirit Adjutants--wisdom being one of the dimensions of her extra-spatial consciousness infusing meaning and value right within your mind.

Think about your sense of proportion, not just principles or essences, but the amount and ratio of each to another.  We’ve mentioned how, as a youngster, you form your intellectual understanding by abstracting principles and generalities from all the multiplicity of things.  You hunger to see and understand pure connections and causes and effects to give you at least some small power over events, some feeling of security in knowing what’s happening and why.  So much of your modern schooling is aimed right at this, and is good in and of itself; good but not sufficient.  You don’t want to get stuck on this level of adolescent abstraction and become a social demagogue, or a political ideologue, or a religious fundamentalist, trying to bend any and all persons and events to your preconceived opinions and pure principles.  You need to open your mind and get out in the real--if seemingly messy and complex--world and experience all that is not-you and your limited vision.

And so, my son, as this applies to what you mentioned, if a person is raised too much in some melodramatic, one-sided and prejudiced news outlet, it takes courage to seek out and welcome those other, opposing points of view in order to come to a good, well-rounded sense of proportion on a particular issue.  In the case you noticed, think of what it takes to not just sit back smug in that you’re so much better or better off than the melodrama you’re seeing on TV, but get out and have a more challenging life of your own--create some of that goodness you so long to see.

So…  Keep going!  (Michael laughs)  And be in my peace.  Good evening.