Prayer:  Father God, wake us up.  Help us get past the lethargy of springtime and listen to Your voice.  Send us Your voice through Your heavenly helpers who want to help us, who are eager to help us, who have something to say to us.  Open our ears that we might hear. Open our minds eye that we might see something new and invigorating, something we can pass on. Amen.”

TOMAS:  I am Tomas, your teacher, glad to be here with you today.  I have been called out of hibernation, as it were, and find myself enjoying once more the soiree of yesteryear, when we would get together and pursue the course of the spirit.  There are so many diversions and distractions along the way.  Of course, you have a saying about that, to the effect that it is not the destination that is important but the journey itself.  There is much to be said for that.  The experiential path is what it is.  If you were to be touched with a magic wand, immediately being made perfect, immortal and spirit, you would have no experiential contribution for the Supreme, which is in some ways the dues we pay, the price of a ticket for the journey home to the Father and beyond.

Perhaps in the lassitude of your atmosphere, this lazy warm early late spring day, lolling around in peace and comfort, solitude and sanctuary, as the construct where you go when you are at ease and at peace, is a good time to ponder the fruit of the spirit Enduring Peace.

Enduring Peace is not easy to come by, particularly for the querulous mortal who seems to love to quarrel and bicker as squirrels will do.  In many ways quarreling is a habit.  It is also a voice that breaks the silence, like chickens clucking in a barnyard, providing companionship and sociability to other hens and chicks.  These manifestations of lively communications need not be considered hostile or problematic. They are simply a part of your composition as mortals, but when this temperament is stirred up, when it is offended, when it is severe enough to make you rise up from your comfort zone and move out from your citadel of the spirit, it can be quite bothersome indeed.  It can broach hostilities and thus the peace is broken.  Enduring peace is lost.

You look around your planet at the world conditions in existence today, at the hostilities, at the wars and rumors of wars.  Not only are nations rising up against nations, but the very planet is in turmoil. Weather patterns are shifting. Radical action is coming forth from mother nature in terms of hurricanes and earthquakes, torrential rains and uncommon dry spells, or cold snaps. It’s very dramatic on your world.  It is particularly dynamic on your world at this time because of two things: one being

·        communications have allowed you to see into parts of the globe that you never could see before and the media is on the job, as it were, with high tech cameras and so forth to bring you right into the lap of misery.  And

·        you have become more sensitive.  You have been spending quality time in Stillness with the Master contemplating values and meanings, aspiring to a brave new world where harmony and brotherhood reign.  The violence and conflict of the evolving world is more distracting and more unnerving than ever before. For you.

There are times when, in the course of geologic evolution, there are ages that pass before any major change come to bring in a new age -- a new ice age, or something like the age of fishes.  You here are entering into a new age as well, and there is geologic turmoil to go with it, and it will be quite some time before it settles down into a way of life, a pattern of life that will endure for millennia.  It is an exciting time to live, but it is also exhausting.  Fine for the young folk, but more difficult for those of you who have begun to embrace your approach to Mansonia, where you are slowing down, so as to better connect with that train when it comes by.

Enduring peace comes from appreciating your place in the universe and the time in which you live it.  It was chosen for you. You were chosen for it.  The configuration is ideal for you. It is precisely what you came to do and what you started out to do.  You may rest in peace that things are coming to pass as “it is written.”  In that, you can enjoy enduring peace even in the face of the temporary tumult. You can maintain perspective and continue to have an appropriate degree of detachment, and appropriate degree of compassion, empathy and mercy.  You are able to extend these because deep within you, you have come to know enduring peace.  You are an extension of peace.  You are the offspring of the Prince of Peace.

You have known about war, war in heaven, war on earth, civil war in your nation and in your own soul.  And having a perspective on war, you are able to turn your full attention to the study of peace.  Relinquish yourself to peace.  Surrender to peace.  Succumb to peace.  Rest in peace.  The more you are able to reflect this quality of enduring peace, the more visible your presence becomes, the more influence you bring to bear on your environment, the more your very presence impacts those around you.  You will stop them in their tracks.  You will be an immediate reflector of the Prince of Peace and the value of enduring peace and their own hunger to know peace and to dwell therein when you remind others or each other of these qualities that are befitting our ever-peaceful Lord.  You bring a quality of life that is refreshing to behold, to explore, to experience.

Enduring peace comes only when you study war no more, when you no longer find battles appealing, romantic, or justifiable. And look at the indignities going on in your world.  Is it any wonder that people rise up against such maltreatment? Is it any wonder that peace seems so far away, so impossible to grasp?  What a challenge it is for you then, my students, to go into the world as an ambassador of the Prince of Peace and express your concerns about how humanity treats one another and how it stewards the earth.

Your character, your strong character will give your voice authority, even as you are able to maintain your enduring peace.  This is wisdom.  Demonstrate wisdom. Teach people what wisdom looks like, feels like.  You know it.  It is within you.  It is a fruit of the spirit.  Enduring peace is like papaya; ripe papaya is smooth, creamy, sweet, nutritious, without lumps, very palatable, very comforting, very exotic, and very easy.  Today looks like a papaya kind of day, feels like a papaya kind of day.

Have you enough energy and will to engage in conversation? Or would you rather just watch the clouds roll by?

Group:  No questions or concerns, only geological or environmental concerns.

TOMAS:  Well, yes, I can understand why you would have geological concerns.  The world is watching and it is going to be quite a learning experience for all of you.  Stewardship is a responsibility that ought not be taken advantage of.  The oil spill was not planned, of course.  It was not deliberately brought on. Indeed more precautions could have been taken.  They certainly manifest caution when it comes to curing certain diseases, but no matter.  Accidents happen in the finite world and although some accidents are quite serious, for the most part life goes on and something will have been learned from the distraction.  I cannot predict what that might be.

One would hope it would be a more profound reverence for mother earth, but even that must be cautiously approached because you have only recently come out of an era of nature worship; there are some of you who would say that you still worship oil and other minerals or goods that come from the sea, the air, or the fields, although it is really more an appreciation for what can be gotten than a fear of what should be worshipped.  For the most part, what men worship is still what they fear.  For the most part it has not occurred to people to worship what they love, in the divine sense.  They don’t know God well enough to worship him out of gratitude for the gifts of life that He gives.

Your classes that you take, the Jewish class, the first four chapters of Genesis have shown you how much you have not changed since Adam and Eve lived on your planet.  You still have commitments and betrayals, temptation and triumph, guilt and shame and so forth -- adultery, murder, and envy.  There are just so many more of you now than there were then; you cover more territory so it has simply multiplied manifold, sociologically speaking, but individually speaking you still are dealing with the same personal problems.

Amazing how so many people, knowing that they are only going to experience these same things, choose not to engage in experiential living anymore but choose to live in their intellect instead. This is a way of slowing down the progress of an evolving world.  Living in the mind crystallizes the energy.  It makes of your world a mausoleum or a museum more than an amusement park or a shopping mall or a place of social interaction.

They had some trouble in their day, too, though.  They had plagues, drought, famine, just as they did in Oklahoma in your lifetime have the dust bowl.  Ecological events occur, social events occur, each new age provides a new backdrop in which to learn the same fundamental lessons – all the while advancing the unseen, unknowable dimension of spirit that becomes the experiential God.  It is like each lifetime, each generation, tills the soil, plants the seeds, harvests the crop and stores the grain that goes into the sustenance of the next generation and even the next, and so as the years go by, you add on to this store of experiential wisdom, able to borrow upon your forefathers but never able to completely side-step the necessity of the experiences themselves.

Renault:  Every year I have to pull weeds.  They never go away.

TOMAS:  It just becomes a new configuration of how to deal with the challenge.  Well, it’s good to see that there is such enduring peace in this environment.

Renault:  And we certainly have beautiful flowers.

TOMAS:  Yes, you do have a beautiful world.  Even with its trouble spots, it is still a beautiful world.  Invite me back again sometime.

Renault:  Anytime.  Love to have you back, Tomas.