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Michael - Freedom of Choice - Fear & Disease - Oct 01, 2007 - Marin TM

Michael—October 1, 2007

Marin T/M Group—Mill Valley, California—U.S.A.

MICHAEL—T/R-JL

  1. (Honoring Your Full Humanity’s Health)
  2. (Your Freedom of Choice)
  3. (Fully Accepting Moments of Trial, and Later)
  4. (Opening to Reality)
  5. (Differences Between Hope and Expectations)
  6. (Remembering to Use Your Free Will)
  7. (Fear and Disease)
  8. (Seeming Contradictions—different Viewpoints)
  9. (The Uniqueness of Urantia’s Situations)
  10. (Jesus’ Question and God’s Answer)

Dear Michael and Mother Spirit, Once again we gather in to feel your presence and to hear your words of encouragement and inspiration--and wonder. You speak to us of a vast confluence of life expanding with the universe itself for hundreds of billions of years, far beyond the ability of our telescopes to see or of our minds even to imagine. And you reassure us of our own lives continuing beyond our ability to penetrate the certain opacity of death. Yet beyond these facts you present us with, it is your help in our feeling and appreciating our day to day lives and how to share these with those we love, and others--so we can multiply our happy moments together: it is for this we are truly and immediately so appreciative. Amen.

MICHAEL: Good evening, my children, this is your Spirit Father, Michael. I am very happy to be with you this way. I would like to express these feelings of mine even more, but I fear it would be a bit beyond the capacity of this person to handle. So let’s just take a few minutes and see if you can feel my love in your hearts. (there ensued a very long pause) Remember, dear children, I am beside you always. Mother Spirit is right within you as part of you, part of your realization of this life you are living.

We talked by way of discussing all that goes into forgiveness about the fact you so often get carried away into just a portion of yourselves. You become in that sense very literally partial, partial to your own self-generated notions of who and what you are, and who and what others are. By doing so you lose the spiritual blessing of humility, that marvelous ability to see the larger picture, the greater situation, the full physical and mental and spiritual encompassing in which you live, and of which you are all composed.

(Honoring your full humanity’s health)

The human species has struggled for many hundreds of thousands of years just to get some small toe-hold, if you will, of mental and spiritual freedom from sheer physical necessity, and made possible only recently by the full blossoming of the Industrial Revolution in the more advanced societies, but which--as an aside--the whole world has yet to achieve. But for so many of you who will read these words, who are able to easily take care of the necessities of life, you tend to disregard your physical being and so the so long, longed-for and greatly anticipated utopia of physical health all your distant and even not-so-distant relatives wanted for you, has failed to materialize.

I cannot give you an exact figure in terms of some amount, but certainly in the more advanced societies of the world by far the greatest percentage of your physical difficulties are due to what you have come to call lifestyle choices. By far the greatest numbers of things plaguing you in terms of bad physical health are the very direct result of your free will choices.

The good side of this is that they are your choices. There are no super-paternalistic governmental or religious bodies standing over you telling you how to live, although they certainly try. (group chuckles) And your generally free-wheeling capitalist societies have long become accustomed to the need for advertisement, with an attendant unconscious acceptance of it. You’ve only to look back a few decades at your early TV ads which were about ninety per cent information, whereas today you nonchalantly expect your advertisements to be about ninety per cent entertainment: and that, of course, is the subtle hook.

People have grown so accustomed to being pandered to; to those who spend a great deal of their time in front of that glowing tube life becomes purely relative and abstract. What comes across as real or not is no longer being compared in great measure to something happening outside where life is going on all around them, but just compared to what was on last season, or the sentimental memories of several seasons ago. Yet again I’ll repeat: These are all their free will choices. Neither Mother nor I, nor any true spiritual teacher, would have that part of the equation be any other way.

Indeed you can evaluate us, or any so-called spiritual teacher—and we challenge you to do so--by the degree we or they encourage you to realize—make real for yourselves--your free will. This part of the equation has to hold. It is the hallmark of all true spirit-intended beings--the degree to which they limit themselves to persuasion alone by appealing as graciously as they can to your sense of values. We remind you that these choices are yours, and are being made either consciously or willy-nilly by habit. From our point of view you are inextricably co-creating your own day to day life, even if only by refusing to expend the effort necessary to consciously create your own unique personal alternatives, right down to what to do next, five minutes from now.

(Your freedom of choice)

I put it this bluntly, my children, so you don’t feel embarrassed within yourself if and whenever it gets down to this: Dear Father, what do I do next? Rather, I ask you to embrace these moments. Let your realization expand to accept where you are, and let it change you as needs be toward growth, toward flexibility, toward decisiveness, and above all, toward remembering this was where you once were--especially in the very success this decisiveness can lead you to. For ironically enough, it is not in these moments of trial--so-called, that the greatest test comes. It is two weeks, or two months later, in the very success of your marvelous human adaptability that the real test comes: do you continue going forward?

This is where your more advanced and seemingly successful societies are failing in the context of general physical health I set up at the beginning of this lesson. This is where some historical perspective can be of enormous value in appreciating all the choices of lifestyle you do have, hopefully only occasionally needing to be backed up by your profound advances in medicine or, at times, the surgical skills to sew you back together--that your ancestors did not have, but dreamed and hoped you would.

For those of you who have studied my human life in detail, I welcome your heartfelt appreciation and the honor you do me when you realize what I was able to put into one relatively short human life. To keep going forward spiritually, day by day, week by week, month by month, even year after year, is not generally humanly possible. The world would be other than what it is, were that so. So again, my children, don’t compare yourselves to me in my human life as an example. I’m a very unique creature of our Father in that respect, and for two thousand years it has been an understandable puzzle as to just how much was I a human being and how much was I a Creator Son of God--simultaneously. I can only tell you that as a human being I had everywhere as much a need as yourselves to constantly tune in to my Father’s presence, and open myself to His leading.

This was both the value and the necessity for me as a Creator Son to have a human life. And so I can validly offer you this advice, offer to share with you the necessity to get in touch with the Father within you. Then by a human process of mostly trial and error, have the courage to try what this inner voice suggests, and then the further courage to honestly evaluate the results. This is how you continue moving forward spiritually, one alternate step of trial and evaluation at a time. First you come to feel the most right course of action, and then you try it, staying open to what happens--keeping in mind a large part of what happens depends upon the whole physical, mental, and spiritual encompassing in which you live with all your others: and all the past, and all the unfathomable next moment, focused into now.

(Fully accepting moments of trial, and later)

So don’t be embarrassed within yourselves, my dear children, if you find yourselves just hanging on and living moment to moment at times. Take a deep breath and welcome the chance to feel yourself living--even so, even if it seems to have come down to this. Seize that moment: use it well: and then remember it well. The real test will come sometime later as part of your success.

If you have any questions or comments, let’s go forward to them.

Student: Thank you for this lesson, Father Michael. It’s very practical. If I understand it correctly, it’s what’s actually happening in my life right at the moment. It’s what I’m realizing that really works. After all the mistakes there is a…something there. I always known it in theory, but now it’s happening in real life, and me practicing my life. It’s very nice. Thank you.

(Opening to reality)

MICHAEL: You are very welcome, my son. It’s my intention to assuage that embarrassment you feel inside at times by an overwhelming sense of failure or the loss of some imaginary position. Getting down to acknowledging not knowing what to do next is often what is necessary to open you up to embrace the reality there are some large things happening all around you, or right within you, you need to take into account. So congratulations on doing so, my son. Bit by bit, day by day, you are finding a touch my peace.

Student: Yes, and it’s very nice too. Thank you, Father Michael.

Student: Hi, Michael. I also feel like you were speaking directly to me this evening. I find myself very busy in the days, and I tell myself, get to your determination, get to your work. And so in the last few months I feel I’m getting closer to that determination to finish the story I’m working on, not for it’s entertainment value but for what help it could be for parents and their children—their parenting skills. So hearing you tonight gives me great determination to create something that speaks to the next generation. I know I have it in me to do this.

I also want to mention, dear Michael, I think I’m learning in looking back at emotional moments that, Wow!—that little tyrant was a great teacher, or that horrible incident was just awesome to get me to this point. I’m understanding the difference between hope and expectations. I had two days of depression, that I never get. When I felt that I thought, Wow!—other people go through this all the time. I really felt for them. Then I made myself get out of it because the feeling of hopelessness is the worst thing in the world. So if you could speak about how we need hope, and how to build that, and it’s good for everyone; and how it’s the expectations that we’re waiting for, and don’t happen; and then we crash and burn. I want to deal with hope instead. So if you could say anything. Thanks for listening to my rambling.

MICHAEL: Not at all, my daughter—you were very clear and right to the point. I’m embarrassed to say more about it, you have such a good grasp on the distinction between hope and expectations. Yes, there is a quantitative one of simple specificity. Your expectations can be very overly detailed: you expect exactly this or that. So in this sense hope is simply more general and open-minded toward outcomes.

(Differences between hope and expectations)

But the qualitative difference is one of spiritual value, and directly proportional to your acknowledging the enormity of all the influences affecting you—especially for you, my daughter, realizing all the social realm you are involved in, all the other people you interact with. Hope springs from faith, not only in yourself but in other people and what you’ve wisely thought of as the human condition. You realize how that general condition is susceptible to large swings of enthusiasm, and the lack of it. (Yeah) To take this in stride without any outside chemical assistance to get over your moments of depression is by far the best way. I’m not speaking here of clinical depression that does require a trained physician who can truly help by prescribing an appropriate medicine. I mean the more common ways of avoiding any downtime whatsoever through using various powerful stimulants or recreational drugs.

Just have the nerve to feel what is happening inside you very purely and without any equivocation. Usually the best thing to do is to ride out these temporary storms or, in your case, a dead-feeling lull that leaves you stranded for a few days, deeply appreciating the plight of those who get stuck there. Just to take your own inner weather—your tempests and your lulls--as they come, and be genuinely curious about their causes, this is another aspect of faith--faith in your ability to understand, faith that understanding does change things.

Exercising your faith in these times gives rise to hope. When all your specific expectations have fallen away and their particular force no longer fills your sails, and you are definitely adrift without them, now comes the lesson that it is hope that sustains you. It is your faith in your very humanness, with all its ups and downs, that can give you the patience to stay with yourself and reap the reward of feeling a force that is truly, finally--just you, regaining strength all by yourself. You’ve paid the price of getting down to who and what you are, and that very discovery strengthens you. All you need is good nutrition, and exercise, and rest—all those basic, wonderful things.

Student: I felt you very strongly about a month ago, and it was a major shift instantly as I was sad and crying. All of a sudden a line from one of your lessons was so powerful I felt you, Michael, closer than I’ve ever felt you before. You said, You can choose to believe you can be perfect in this. You can choose to believe you can be re-trained inside—and that’s what you’ll teach. If you want to teach love you have to feel spiritual and vulnerable. It just lifted me off the ground. I felt so grateful for you. Thank you.

MICHAEL: Thank you, my daughter, for your faith. That’s what it really takes to hear me, because I am always here; and Mother Spirit as well—right inside you. But it takes a lot, sometimes, to get you to remember to listen.

Student: And knock the barriers down that I’ve built against your love. I know this now.

(Remembering to use your free will)

MICHAEL: Mother Spirit and I are so appreciative when you do. As you say, it was by way of remembering your own free will, to choose to listen to us, that enabled us to get through.

Student: I love you so much. Thank you. (many tears and much laughter)

MICHAEL: You are very welcome. Keep remembering to choose my peace.

Student: The fear just falls away, and then everything is possible.

MICHAEL: You loose yourself, and then you suddenly pop back up. So let go!—and then hang on tight.

Student: If I could ask one more question? I was wondering why it is people can feel so much protective love for their own family and yet find it difficult to extend that to all of humanity? I don’t get that.

MICHAEL: Well, my dear, you have to have some appreciation of the hundreds of thousands of years of incessant tribal warfare and what was for them the stark and absolute necessity to curtail their responses of loving and caring to only those they were familiar with, just to survive as a group. Every insult or injury to the extended family or tribe had to be avenged, otherwise they would shortly have been enslaved or wiped out as a distinct unit. I’m talking about times when even slavery itself was an enormous advance forward from simply killing everyone—putting to the sword everyone above the age of small children, who would be adopted. The two World Wars of only the last century, fueled by nationalism and racism, were the end results of this expanding principle. It takes a while to get over this long ingrained historical/cultural habit of exclusiveness and embrace all of humanity as the children of a single Father, all of one family.

Student: So I’ll exercise my hope that people will evolve. Thank you again.

MICHAEL: We can only assure you, my daughter, that they are by fantastic leaps and bounds. But you do have to realize where you are coming from, and how far you have to go.

Student: If I could ask one more question about fear and how it affects our bodies? If someone comes down with a pancreas problem, can stress or fear affect the body so drastically, and can it be healed when that person really does understand that the fear has to be broken down before they can be healed?

(Fear and disease)

MICHAEL: Very directly--yes, most assuredly. There is no separating the mental and the physical components of fear. They are one and the same in effect. The genesis of fear can be deeply unconscious, a reaction caused by years of conditioning as a baby and youngster--something absorbed from the parents and surrounding society. You could even say it is the persistence of this very deep and shared cultural conditioning that so largely determines human behavior today, and can be traced back two hundred thousand years ago to the Lucifer Rebellion and the Caligastia betrayal on Urantia that thwarted the hundreds of thousands of years of progress, with both instinctual and conditioned fear, which had gone before this.

The world is still suffering this conditional fear and it takes enormous spiritual faith to confront it and realize it personally, creative spirit to suggest some alternative, and then courage to entertain these notions of a better way of living, and hope these better ways can make a difference. This is the only way out of this deeply conditioned/cultural fear. For yes indeed, this is a major cause of disease. What you term stress is a kind of fighting within the organism against itself, a discontinuity, a straining against itself. These deep fears are unconsciously triggered both mentally and physically and form part of your total encompassing. And then your organism tries to deal with them unconsciously as well. You have to meditate and let them come to the surface of consciousness to be realized.

This is how so many kinds of assumed incurable diseases can be suddenly and seemingly miraculously cured by a spiritual triumph. The personality is able to realize a great spiritual hope and faith that is the only solution. For the logic of the mind can only correlate causes and effects. An appreciation of all the warfare the human race has come through can show you ample cause for the fearful attitudes/conditions in the world today, but only your hope and your faith can show the way forward personally, and lead to that inner transformation that can heal disease. So yes, most assuredly, my daughter, the ending of fear, like the ending of some great pain, is paradise enough.

Student: Yes. Thank you…beautiful. I find it sad so many people have the need of suffering their own punishment; but they have their own path.

MICHAEL: And these are just their ways of articulating their inner feelings. Heaven and hell are right here and now. (Yes) (there followed a very long pause, several minutes, of everyone resting in Michael’s presence)

Student: Yes, Michael, it’s good feeling being still, here, with you. I feel your presence within me, this moment, real strongly. I have no formal questions, just a kind of musing. So many of the lives I see around me are distorted by fear, by belief systems based on erroneous ideologies, and assumptions, and theories: about the universe, and God, and you: so much distortion; so much misunderstanding and misconception.

Yet: completeness and wholeness still exist. Just because one cannot see it, or feel it, or believe it, wholeness and completeness always exist. God always exists, even in the heart of an atheist. Truth and love always exist. Wholeness always exists, even in the most diseased body. That’s the hope. That’s the benefit of stillness. Even while we are sleeping we are awake.

I was thinking of our conversation two weeks ago--rereading the transcripts--about your free-will choice to go through the torture of being nailed to the cross, and I thought, how courageous of you, how strong in your convictions and your understanding of our Father, and of what human life is all about. If I had on ounce, a thumbnail grasp of that conviction… I can’t even fathom. Because I do see around me a lot of grieving and despair. Some kind of shift has to happen, some perception that truth and love still exist.

(Seeming contradictions—different viewpoints)

MICHAEL: Yes, my son, but to so many what you just expressed is a whole litany of contradictions. Yet it does express well the difference of viewpoint of the spiritual community, who can very blessedly perceive the living truth and the goodness in all of God’s way, and even in His errant children, contrasted with the very real suffering of people, never to be nonchalantly disregarded from the human viewpoint. These are the very real experiences of men and woman, the real suffering and unbelievable, unfathomable pain they do endure. They both exist; they are both real. So the realization of both viewpoints is a movement from the solely mental and physical one to that of the spiritual. Spirit is always inclusive.

Very few of Urantia’s historical religions have introduced their followers to the notion, let alone the means of accessing, the presence of God within them. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite has been the general rule, instilling fear in order to insure compliance with what we’ve correctly designated the authority of power-hungry politicians of the tribe, or city-state, or larger community, posing as spiritual leaders.

(The uniqueness of Urantia’s situations)

But be of good cheer, my children. The awareness of these facts is happening. This is why Mother Spirit and I do mention, from time to time, the extraordinary rarity of Urantia’s world situation as contrasted to those worlds which have been under the direction of a loyal, faithful Planetary Prince and his whole corporal staff, being in control of human events for hundreds of thousands of years and more or less bringing everyone along together. The situation on Urantia is very unique insofar as you have nearly the whole spectrum of human social and technological evolution still coexisting at the same time. It is only in the last few decades that some tribes have come up out of the stone age to embrace simple metal tools, while others were getting to the moon by drawing out complex alloys to withstand the heat and velocity of rocket engine parts. Think of that contrast and all this simple example implies, coexisting on the same planet. That too is real. You still have extraordinarily primitive tribal organizations, and ever so recently your more advanced nation-states managed to kill tens of millions of their citizens in world war.

The truth is always there in spirit; but the mind and the body truly suffer: these are not illusions. And so our task, our good work is always near at hand. I thank you for your observations, my son, however seemingly contradictory. Again: you have to distinguish between levels of personality manifestation and their different viewpoints and abilities of realization; and when you presume to speak from which. For human beings, still evolving, mind and spirit are not yet on the same plane and perfectly consistent with each other.

Student: I’ve just been moved by all the things I’ve been reading about. It seems there is so much suffering going on in the Sudan, in Burma. Other places there are still people being captured for slaves. I can’t conceive of the suffering these people and their families are going through. I can’t even conceive of the mindset of the perpetrators of such acts. Then there’s the free will. Yet you had that conviction as you were being led toward torture and death. You knew. It’s just hard to fathom.

(Jesus’ question and God’s answer)

MICHAEL: But I too, my son, had my low point there in the garden of Gethsemane. Indeed, the whole spiritual community of Nebadon experienced it with me when I asked my Father if I could let this bitter cup of suffering pass. And He came back: The choice was mine. And so I truly thank my Father for that choice.

Previous Student: Michael, remembering what you went through—that is, several months ago; I thought, nothing I have ever gone through, or will ever go through, or face on this planet in my life, will ever come close to what you went through. You have taught me that, to be absolutely grateful and enjoy my life. The older I get the more I enjoy it, so I will always thank you for that.

MICHAEL: And so we make real our consecration of will. It only exists in the very exercise of it. But then we have it. It becomes part of our soul. It changes everything. More potential becomes real and possible. The possible future has just changed.

My children, it grows late, and it has been a very full visit…

Student: I love you, Michael. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL: You are welcome, dear one. I really enjoyed our long moments of stillness together. It is not always possible for you to achieve such a marvelous rest, so consciously, but it is unmistakable when it happens, is it not? Thank you for sharing it with me. Be in my peace. Good evening.

END